Greg Goldberg in his studio with works destined for his solo show at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Artist

There is a welcoming demeanor to Greg Goldberg’s bright, airy Manhattan studio that compliments his own as he places canvas after canvas on the wall and explains his process.  He observes how color changes with different light throughout the day.  The linen texture of his square oil paintings gives each piece a natural grid structure as he slowly builds the compositional architecture of each work.  Combining loose, geometric blocks with sweeping, gestural brush strokes, the dynamic and free form shapes are applied with a veiled precision.  This apparent ease actually emerges from intense deliberation about what colors should be placed next to another, and how the moods of different parings harmonize or develop tension.

His influences range across art history: Brice Marden, Emil Nolde, Peter Paul Rubens.  He doesn’t necessarily seek out these particular artists.  Rather, their work has become a part of his visual consciousness simply out of years of random exposure: he found himself in the depths of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in front of Peter Paul Rubens’s Wolf and Fox Hunt (c. 1616) one day, for instance, because his four-year-old son loves the enormous hunting scene.

His father, an architect, is another formative family member. “His buildings are rigorous yet sensual, where there’s order but love of materials at the same time. That philosophy infuses my own thinking about painting.”

The discovery of artists have proven to be turning points in his development.

Spending a semester in Italy, I discovered the paintings of Pontormo. I had a very powerful, visceral reaction to the color and composition of his works. The color was really carrying the emotional experience of the painting. Later on, I saw a Rothko retrospective at the Whitney, with some late violet paintings. There was a feeling of being immersed in the color space of the paintings. Then there was a Donald Judd show of plywood wall pieces with a few Plexiglas inserts at Pace. It was a perfect marriage of material and design. They were so simple and straightforward yet everything was so exquisitely done. Plywood never looked so good. At that point, I realized I was more interested in the experience that non-narrative abstract work was giving me.

Elements from these predecessors combine in work devoid of overt subject matter.  NYC 6/28-12/24 (2012) is an example that evokes the colors of Die Brücke, the smooth surfaces of Old Masters, and the luminosity of Mark Rothko; while Goldberg exclusively focuses on capturing natural light through color.

This intense, pared-down focus is relatively new.  After graduating from Skidmore College in 1996, he worked with the figure for years before deciding to start from scratch about 10 years ago. This shift toward abstraction did not come easily.  It took years for him to find comfort within this new practice.  One reason for the difficulty was that he received very positive feedback from his Surfer series.  The Museum of Modern Art purchased eight of these early paintings during a group exhibition at Rivington Arms in 2003.

I was thrilled, but it was also a little strange because I had already decided to stop making representational work and had began making abstract paintings. I was starting the process of reinventing myself and trying to find what I felt was a more authentic identity as a painter. So to get such a positive response but to be doing something entirely different was difficult.

The link between the two bodies of work is the attention to light. In Surfers, a white-hot sun reflecting off the beach shines on men’s faces, and we see the sun’s effects upon extremely tanned skin.  Each surfer squints, smiles, or stares out beyond the paper. The time of day is evident in each.

Another activity that Goldberg depicted was motocross. The sports imagery attracted him for a few reasons:

With the motocross imagery I was interested in turning tiny cutouts from magazines into very-large and iconic paintings. The color, composition and paint-handling were the means to achieve this. I’ve never surfed, but in high school Point Break was one of my favorite movies. I think the whole fantasy of surfing (as well as mountain biking) and trying to capture some of the idealism interested me. With the surfers, the light in the drawings and color limits (only pure acrylic color diluted with water, no actual mixing, only optical mixing) were important.

Greg Goldberg, NYC 7/30-12/3, 2012. Oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

In his current work, drawing allows Goldberg to quickly experiment with his optical interests outside of the studio.  He was encouraged to draw by his friend Michael Toenges, a German painter.  After spending six weeks in New York, Toenges gave Goldberg some leftover gouaches. “One afternoon, when my son was napping, I made a drawing. It was a great experience. It allowed me to work through ideas quickly. My paintings are done over several months while a drawing takes about two hours. I could see new color combinations quicker.” He keeps a set of gouache paints packed in a box, with the right paper and brushes alongside to easily bring his work to a new location.

Location and the time of year are two primary factors in Goldberg’s color choices.  Once you notice the titles—which typically include location and date when the painting was made—the subtle shifts in mood become apparent.  Some are made in his parent’s Connecticut backyard, others were completed in the Dominican Republic.  You can feel the difference.

The largest paintings are worked inside his North-facing studio. Fortunately a parking lot—not a skyscraper—is adjacent to his studio building, allowing for abundant light to stream through one wall of glass.  His workspace is impressively tidy, and not just because of my visit.  Glancing around, you’ll notice that every jar is labeled and dated, the brushes are arranged by size and drawings are stacked by date.  This organization outside of the paintings is necessary to complete the organization within.  Goldberg’s work is an accumulation of thin glazes, and each layer contributes to the painting’s final effect.  The first layers that ultimately get buried still hold a bearing on the final tonal relationships, so Goldberg keeps a guide to track each work’s progress.  He neatly brushes each color to a corresponding paper guide. It’s fascinating to compare final images with these accompanying swatches. They keep a strict, chronological log of each painting as Goldberg builds on the history of his daily experience with light.

Greg Goldberg: Northern Light, on view April 17 through May 31 at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, 29 Orchard Street, New York, NY, 10002, 212-343-4240 

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Tim Kent, Chatsworth ~ The Mistress, 2012. Oil on linen, 16 x 17 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

“I do my nighttime reading with this book,” says Tim Kent, on my arrival at his orderly studio home in a former factory on Brooklyn’s Moore Street.   He is referring to Ralph Mayer’s The Artist’s Handbook.  “This is the artist’s bible,” he continues, handing me a mug of tea and a ginger cookie – which marks the end of pleasantries.  Kent is all about painting.  “Naples Yellow… here we are.  Made since at least the 15^th Century.  Thought to be first made from volcanic earth found near Vesuvius.”  He looks up.  “I’m trying to work out how to make an egg-oil emulsion that Dutch artists used that is almost like a transparent pigment, it adds luster. It’s usually done with white.  Van Dyke used it.  It was a Dutch painting trick, you see it in the eyeballs, that oily watery look.  Oh, they had so many tricks!’

It begs the question: Is painting a trick?  “Yes,” Kent replies, unhesitatingly.  “I like the Degas saying: ‘you do anything in your power to make it work’.  Unfortunately,” he laughs, “some of my tricks don’t work.  But I have some that do.  So I don’t open up my studio to many other artists, only to close friends.  That story about Pontormo, about how he’d keep his assistant in his studio, which was on stilts, you know it? The competition was cutthroat, they were all prima donnas.”

Known for his bold, light-filled architectural interiors, Kent is now also exploring robust, often darkly moody, portrait painting and drawing.  He was born in Vancouver of a Turkish father and English mother, and by age 15 was living in New York.  He studied at Hunter College and at West Dean College in the UK.  Having helped organize TAG projects while working in an artists’ collective, his career took off in 2005 when a residency with Moncrief-Bray gallery in the UK was followed by solo shows there.  Back in the US, Kent has done public pieces for Miles Redd, Diesel, Levi’s, and Lacoste, and his work is in the collections of The Duke of Buccleuch, The National Trust, Sir Cameron MacIntosh, The Edward James Foundation, The City University of New York, and Oscar de la Renta.

Kent talks easily and eloquently, roaming over the broad subjects of painters through history and describing the glorious and luxurious act of painting.  “I love painting” he exclaims with passion several times during my morning visit.  Yet, despite being given a set of oil paints by his mother he chose to study drawing – and continues to draw as much as he paints today.  Having majored in art history at New York’s Hunter College, he did his masters at West Dean in England where “a teacher from the Slade in London showed me a trick on how to mix color so I could develop my painting.  I began painting the fantastical buildings at West Dean as backgrounds, then saw that they were the best part: they said more when there was nothing else.”

Being a realist artist is simply not an issue for Kent.  “It’s what I can do.  It’s important.  We are so far removed from tactile experiences now, so much is in cyberspace.  Transforming something from reality into the fake zone – that is, onto canvas – is important.  You add something.”

His studio has one wall hung with a dozen or so small oils of interiors.  Each depicts a room so suffused in light and color that it blurs the physical with the abstract.  They are mostly rooms in British country houses.  He’s worked at Uppark and Petworth houses, and is now making paintings at Holkham Hall, Burghley House and Boughton House.  “I love this one of Burghley because it is loose and colorful,” he reasons.  “That one on the left is the old dowager duchess’s dressing room at Bowhill in Scotland.  I’m leaning toward a more expressionist type of work for my interiors – Turner was the epitome of this, so is late Whistler, Degas, Vuillard.  They are looking at texture.  There is no line, it’s all color and volume and pattern.”

Bowhill and Boughton are owned by the Duke of Buccleuch.  He bought a couple of Kent’s paintings, and so began their patron-artist relationship.  “I visited him three months ago.  I don’t work on site – they don’t want dirty painters hanging around their priceless collections.  I take photos, do sketches.”  He fetches a photo of a room at Boughton.  He has started to do a painting to capture its light but is just as excited by its contents.  “See those pictures, they are all Van Dyke studies – not studio work, his very own studies!”

Tim Kent, Dress Makers Muse, 2012. Oil on Linen, 84 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Kent prefers to work directly for patrons, rather than with a gallery.  “I’ve learned I have to maintain as much control as possible,” he explains.  “The patron has an idea.  So, no matter what you do, he or she will be disappointed.  It’s kind of cool to work with such a constraint.  But I like having time so I make a long deadline of six months.”    He will do paintings on spec, then gift one in the hopes that the recipient will commission others.  “My system models are the artists of three hundred years ago.  I go out there and find people.  I enjoy being a salesman.”   He’s quite hard on gallerists – perhaps because the right one has not come along yet.  “I have a love-hate-distain relation with galleries because on the one hand I’d love to work with a gallery and have a career develop through one.   On the other, I’ve seen so much crap out there, and I find the whole thing contrived.  It’s too much of a filter, it’s too much fanfare and hype – those openings!”  That said, Kent has showed in England with Elspeth Moncrieff, and at Factory Fresh, one of the first galleries in his neighborhood of Brooklyn.

In the US, Kent wins commissions for portraits as well as interiors.  ‘One was for three boys.  Children are so difficult, it took me ages.  There are lots of children’s portrait painters but it’s skilful factory painting.  Look at Pompeo Batoni” – he grabs a postcard of Batoni’s 1770s painting of Thomas Coke, hanging in Holkham Hall – “look at the quality!  And dressed up in those swagger clothes.  Great.”  His own portraits have plenty of swagger about them.  “It’s about fantasy and fun.  We have the worst possible portrait painting in America now.  Look at Boldini, Rubens, Van Dyke, you have that fluidity, those sensuous alive people.”

What really consumes him as a painter, however, is color.  “My paintings don’t sing with color – yet.  But I am trying to be a good colorist.  Look at Hockney’s landscapes.  How does he look and then choose that particular color?”  Now 38 years old, Ken has a new determination to conquer color.  “I’ve canceled my Facebook account, and my chess account, and taken up physical training. I need to stand up and work all day.“  He’s paying his trainer with a painting: “that will take care of one year.”

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Hearne Pardee studio, Davis, California, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist

Hearne Pardee, who has been showing regularly at the Bowery Gallery since 1983, opens a show of new work there November 28.  I visited his studio near the University of California Davis campus earlier this month.

Davis is a relatively unremarkable suburban college town. Hot and dry, the temperatures in the Sacramento Valley hover around 100 in the summer months.

Pardee discovered painting and his first and most enduring master, Cézanne, while an undergraduate at Yale in the 1960s. Pardee is an artist for whom masters and mentors play a profound, enduring role in the way he describes and pursues his project.  He constantly invokes the example of artists he most admires, including the greats as well as teachers from Yale, the New York Studio School and elsewhere. But already at Yale he had studied in the Albers pedagogical tradition while pursuing parallel interests in natural history, anthropology and literature (Proust and Dante were high on his list).

By the age of 30 the groundwork for the issues he is still pursuing in the new body of work had already been established. Since 1972, he has worked directly outside, like his hero Cézanne. And like Cézanne, he paints more than simple appearances.  Hearne is most attracted to urban scenes, what he describes as “everyday working class landscape,” merging his interest in plein air observation with his interest in what he calls the “psychological neighborhood,” the anthropology and natural history of a place, with his Proustian connections of memory and place.

Pardee has now worked in Davis for longer than 10 years, prior to which are many more years working in similarly unremarkable suburban environments. He worked first in Maine, then in Virginia, and finally in Connecticut (along with sojourns in New Mexico and California) as he and his wife, painter Gina Werfel, moved from one teaching post to another. In each place he managed to indentify an artist that place reminded him of, and from whom he felt he could learn something specific to that place. Maine equaled Marsden Hartley, for instance, New Mexico Georgia O’Keefe. Wherever he was, Hearne seemed to be in dialogue with this elected artist as well as the place.

Hearne Pardee, Visual Resources Facility, 2012. Acrylic on paper, 19 x 25 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

When Pardee arrived at Davis he seemed ready to move his work to another level.  He recognized that he was surrounded by a motif ideally suited to his needs and taste. Davis is a town of mostly middle class families on tree-lined streets where mature trees cast shadows across well-maintained lawns and California-style houses. One-story ranch homes populate winding streets and cul-de-sacs and offer a respite from the sharp and hot light of the Sacramento Valley. The artist speaks of wandering these neighborhoods until something strikes him – anything from a combination of colors and forms to a deep personal resonance, a psychological ambiance of what he calls “everyday light.”

But a new aspect emerging in Pardee’s most recent work work adds a new layer, beyond plein air, in the artistic process. After his open-air observations he returns to the studio to add a different sort of color, color made from pieces of paper in generic shapes. He hand paints and then collages pieces of paper onto the surface of his established image. He likes to emphasize that this is a matter of “construction with color,” unlike the “impressionist sensation.” And this is true. The additions of cut paper do look like Cézanne’s brushstrokes and are the placement of “one color next to another” in a purely abstract sense. “One color influences another,” Hearne says. In the process he moves away from observation and works with the materials and the surface. In this way he is returning to his roots, both to Albers’ teaching as well as his love of Cézanne. What he seeks is the distinctiveness of motif as each painting – no longer a “hodgepodge of colors” but a painting made into something more personal – approaches memories of things past.

Literally drawing from earlier work, the new work is also an amalgam of old and new as  he now actually paints over pictures started many years ago as well as scans of objects personally important to him such as the interior of his studio or urban scenes he has now worked with for years.

Hearne Pardee’s work is about color, about place, about his reverence for his predecessors, as well as about his desire to continue, expand, and move forward the traditions of painting and of the art he so admires.

Hearne Pardee: Visual Resources runs from November 27 to December 22 at the Bowery Gallery, 530 West 25^th Street, Suite #404.

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Denise Green will lecture on her book at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, Thursday, June 28 at 6.30pm (book launch from 6pm)

Installation shot of Denise Green’s paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York’s 1979 exhibition, “New Image Painting” discussed in this interview. Courtesy of the Artist

How did living in Australia contribute to your decision to become an artist? At what point as a child or adolescent did you know you were bound to be an artist?

When I was young, my initiatives in art came from myself. My family did not take an interest in either art or creativity; as a result, my feelings for art arose spontaneously. I followed my own lights in becoming an artist since there was no one in the family to mentor me.

I found my first studio at the age of eight or nine; it was the space underneath my home in Brisbane.  Local homes were built on tall pilings in response to the hot, regional climate; the pilings enabled the air to circulate beneath the houses. Our own home had the additional advantage of privacy, in the form of a picket fence. Safely enclosed behind the fence, I drew for hours on end—I was alone but very happy.

In 1959, when I was a young adolescent, my father enrolled me in weekend morning drawing and painting classes, run by the town’s Youth Welfare Association. This was a transforming experience that led to further development. It happened because my father in fact recognized my increased interest in art and resulted in my increased confidence as an artist: I could indeed draw and paint.

Who made a difference in your first paintings?

Although I saw, as an adolescent, such painters of western landscapes as Roland Wakelin and Sidney Nolan at the Queensland National Art Gallery, I was not inspired by them. Instead, I liked the indigenous paintings I came across, especially the Groote Eylandt bark paintings from the Queensland Museum. These works had a directness and simplicity that have remained with me; the paintings referred to local marine life: a shell, an island, or a fish against a dark background.

Even though I did not yet understand the incorporation of ancestral stories into these artworks, or how the space manifested the sacred, these works resonated powerfully with me. Even now, many years after my emigration from Brisbane, I still seek the paintings out when I return. I am moved by them still.

With whom did you study in Paris? What were the reasons causing you to move to New York in 1969?

I worked with an American painter there, Millie Lachman, whose ideas formed an important basis for my art.  I then completed three years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. But I decided to move to New York because my work couldn’t grow within the rigid conventions of French academic art.

New York has been your home for more than forty years. How have New York artists—or any artist—influenced you?

As happens with most artists, my influences change over time. Some, but not all, I experienced in New York City. My current museum show in Germany, Denise Green: After Ju Chao, Ju Lian, Richter, Wiebke, LeWitt, Albers, Manet, names those artists who have had an impact on the development of new work.  Not all the artists are Western; the two Chinese painters I refer to in the title, Ju Chao and Ju Lian, are 19^th-century Chinese artists whose work I saw at the Hong Kong Museum of Art a year ago. At present, I want to mention Dan Flavin, whose works on paper have influenced my way of making process drawings.

The late 1970s “New Image Painting” show, mounted at the Whitney Museum, played a major role in your recognition as an artist. How was the show important to you?

The Whitney mounted the New Image show in 1978. This was an era when the formalist control of art writing was breaking up, and post-Minimalist art, including Conceptual and Process art, dominated the scene. The New Image exhibition broke new ground in several ways. Until this point, the Whitney Museum had shown established artists—their exhibitions were retrospectives, mostly. By way of contrast, the New Image exhibition presented ten painters who were young and as yet unrecognized; they were allowed to show a good amount of work, from six to eight paintings. Also, previously, the major retrospectives at the Whitney had showcased only recent developments in abstraction; in the case of the New Image show, figurative art made its way into the exhibition.

Thus, New Image show documented recognizable, personalized imagery. The exhibition’s group of artists looked to everyday themes: people, landscape, animals, plants, birds, houses and boats – the stuff of mundane experience. My own paintings contained images that fluctuated between the abstract and real; this interest has persisted up to the present.

What were your further stylistic developments as you proceeded as an artist?

The mainstream commercial galleries at the time did not support explorations in style.  My own manner of working was turning toward exploration and experimentation. Indeed, I wanted to probe the unknown, rather than repeating motifs and imagery.  During these years I was represented by Max Protetch Gallery, then a cutting-edge gallery, who supported my approach.   In the beginning of the 1980s, largely through my association with Semiotext(e), the influential cultural journal, my work came to reflect French critical theory. This meant that I was supporting a new style of painting, one that turned away from the forms of representation in art. So my style changed significantly. My versions of houses, chairs, and vessels were flattened and reduced to their essence, without sharp detail. I set the imagery into a background of single color.

Critics understood my style as an innovative approach because it combined abstraction and representation on equal terms. Yet even before these paintings were shown, I felt myself drawn in another direction.  I had been reading the French theorists Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, the consequence of which was that figuration was gradually abandoned in my painting. Instead, I favored abstract markings, dots, lines and grids. Shadowy outlines of figures and furniture gave way to ciphers and linear markings whose meanings were multivalent and indefinite.

Since the 1990s you have been teaching graduate students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Is there a conflict between teaching and painting?

I teach one day a month, so it really isn’t heavily influential, but I really enjoy working with the students. It’s very gratifying to be engaged in a dialogue with young artists and sharing your experience and perhaps taking them a little further in what they are doing.

You worked as an editor for Semiotext(e), an intellectual journal of a leftist bent. You have also written on contemporary art. How has editorial work influenced your painting?

Although I made the decision to move from France to America, my engagement with French culture was ongoing—I continued to travel each year to Paris. Additionally, I became an editor for the postmodern journal Semiotext(e), whose politics were radical and whose influence was strong.

I had met the journal’s publisher, Sylvere Lotringer, at a party in downtown Manhattan in 1978. Lotringer wanted to expand the publication beyond academic concerns and invited me to join the editorial board. Lotringer’s contributors included such major figures as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Antonio Negri. Interested in the politics of art, Lotringer asked me and another artist, Pat Steir, to join the editorial board in 1978. We introduced him to prominent figures in the New York downtown art scene and collaborated on several editions of this quarterly journal, including “Schizo Culture,” ‘”Autonomia” and “Polysexuality.”

Being an editor for Semiotext(e) meant interacting with the other members of the journal. I was introduced to Barthes, whose argument against figuration fascinated me. In response, I called my New Image paintings “configurations” rather than representations. My defense turned on the argument that I did not expect the paint to build a believable image; instead, I was thinning the paint to create one—this position was gratuitous and even Jesuitical. I remember doing translations of texts by Lacan for Semiotext(e).  I also experimented with Deleuzian ideas, which influenced me to the point of making rhizomatic paintings for a few months; the experiment was not a success. Deleuzian aesthetics, with its ideas of multiplicities, intensities and “becoming,” had implications for media, network and cultural theory, but could not be applied to painting. During this time I also published a book, Metonymy in Contemporary Art, which considered the implications of substituting an attribute of an object for the object itself.

Denise Green, Evanescence (Red), 2007. Wax crayon, pencil, marble dust and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 144 inches. Collection of Robin Bade and Michael Parkin. Image courtesy of the artist and the Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Over the years, you have changed your painting style extensively. Can you explain how and why?

My painting style has changed continually, thank God! It means that fresh ideas are coming into the work.

How does serial repetition function in your art? Did you turn to repetition as a strategy that was influential among the Minimalists in the late 1960s, when you first came to New York?

I think it is a result of being in New York City in the late 1960s.  I have always felt that my paintings had a conceptual bent to them.  This was because I moved to New York during a time of intellectual ferment and exploration and was exposed to Minimalism and theory.  My process drawings are an example of serial repetition carrying into my current work.

What would like to do in the future? What’s next? 

How can any artist state with any certainty what she is going to do?  I respond to events both private and public: the attack of the World Trade Center, the divorce from my first husband, my mother’s death, and the threat of being evicted from studio. My art continues to change; at this point in time, I use scale and color to convey my sense of wonder.

I anticipate surprises. One unusual experience in 2008 was attending the opening of my show in Perth and seeing for the first time a group of black fella (Aboriginal) artists attend my show.  Since early on I was influenced by at their work, their interest in my art was like a circle being completed. I continue to hope that painting can communicate beyond race, class, and place.

Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey, by Denise Green. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)  224 pp, 200 black and white illustrations, ISBN 978-0-8166-7907-2.  $29.95

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Installation shot, Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self at the William Paterson University Galleries, 2012, with work by Suzanne Anker in the foreground.

Suzanne Anker recently organized, and showed her own work in Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self at the William Paterson University Galleries in Paterson, New Jersey (January 30 through March 9, 2012).  The exhibition explored ways in which research concepts in neuroscience have been incorporated into visual art practice and contemporary culture.  The other seven artists in the show were Phil Buehler, Richard Dupont, Thomas Eller, Frank Gillette, Michael Rees, Katy Schimert, and Jeanne Silverthorne, and featured sculptures, installation, photographs and video, all taking the brain as their subject.

Hallucination, memory, and the nervous system were some of the themes that emerged in a show brought up questions such as: What makes us fundamentally human? Can the “self” be identified? What mechanisms are in place to frame our concepts of the “self”? The artists addressed these questions concerning neuroscience and art, referencing advances in understanding the nervous system, measuring brainwaves, somatic responses, technological imaging, and studies of consciousness.

Anker’s own installation featured tiny parachutes, silver-leafed figures and “rapid prototype” sculptures referencing the brain. She also showed a video and photographs featuring a cross-section of a human brain together with a butterfly.

Phil Buehler showed two video loops that compare the eyes and faces of inmates of a long-term mental institution, taken from old black-and-white mug-shot photographs.  Frank Gillette’s large-scale digital prints pictured hallucinatory sensations of the interiority of psychic life.

In works that reference the body’s nervous system, Michael Rees isolated the hearing mechanism in a sculpture cast in “stereo-lithography” resin.   In a similar work, he presents a sculpture of a spine made through “selective laser sintering.”

Richard Dupont’s large sculptural heads were made out of amber-colored resin filled with personal ephemera, books, and photographs. Jeanne Silverthorne’s installation featured tiny yellow cast sculptures of family members sitting beneath clouds or on the edge of pedestals.  And Thomas Eller exhibited large cutout photographic self-portraits on laser cut aluminum that referenced a swimming accident.
Suzanne, can you tell us briefly about the genesis of this show?

“Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self” is the third exhibition I have curated on the theme of neuroscience and art.  Advances in imaging techniques have been at the forefront of much of the research in the neurosciences which is altering perceptions of identity and personhood. Although the 1990′s were granted the title of “decade of the brain” it is much more recently that the neurosciences have become part of the public dialogue. For example, it is now possible to move a cursor on a computer screen by employing the subject’s own eye movements. The Brain Computer Interface allows a person with “locked-in” syndrome to communicate with the external world. This technology, on the other hand, is also being marketed by computer gaming enthusiasts who create entertainment scenarios of characters engaged in battle.

Suzanne Anker, MRI Butterfly (3), 2008.? Inkjet print on watercolor paper, 13 x 19 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

You recently curated a similar show in Istanbul; you got a great space for the show at Paterson. How has the switch of location and slight change of artists changed this show, or do you see the shows as unrelated?

The exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, “Fundamentally Human: Contemporary Art and Neuroscience” focused more on the anatomical and physical structures of the nervous system. Images of neurons and their metaphorical associations with trees, a mechanical robot drawing images perceived as similar to Andreas Vesalius’ early anatomical representations, and Michael Joaquin Grey’s computational video were all technologically-based. That exhibition also showcased several European artists such as Andrew Carnie from the UK and Leonel Moura from Portugal. “Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self” although still involved with anatomical associations had more of a focus on psychic states and the emotions. The work was more figurative as well, focusing on ideas of portraiture. Jeanne Silverthorne, Richard Dupont, Phil Bueuler, Katy Schimert and Thomas Eller exhibited work in this genre.

Can you talk a little about how science has developed as a theme in your own work?

My work has always been about the natural world. However, it was in 1989 in an exhibition at the Greenberg/Wilson Gallery in NYC did my work take a “scientific turn.” Besides several bronze sculptures fabricated from tree limbs and 100-year-old ash-covered eggs, I used kaleidoscopes as “altering viewing” devices. By looking through a small vase with a lens on it, the spectator experienced an image of repetition and multiplicity, an image somewhat related to looking through a microscope. The periphery of the image appeared as circular. The name of the piece was “Fixed Gaze” and later went on to be exhibited at the Philips Collection Washington, D.C.  Influenced by this optical experience, I researched microscopic images from biology’s vast data bank. I was not interested in portraying disease in ways that limited my palette. I then came across an image of a chromosome that I immediately perceived as a sign of the body’s writing itself. The rest is history.

As you reflect on these two shows now, any thoughts?”

Science has spilled out of the laboratory and into our lives…from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the pharmaceuticals we are prescribed. It is no wonder that many visual artists are interfacing with concepts in science both conceptually and even in science labs.  Most recently, I have created a Nature and Technology Lab at SVA, where students work with living matter, engage in field work and employ the metaphors inherent in nature and science to their own work.  Our lab houses plants, fish, frogs, sets of microscopic slides, three microscopes (with camera and video equipment) as well as an autoclave, incubator and fume hood. Visiting lecturers have included artists, scientists and theorists.

And where do you see connections between art and science progressing from here?

Many artists have integrated scientific notions in their work, which is not particular to our current time frame. However, the molecular genetics revolution, advances in neuroscience, and sophisticated  visualizing technologies as well as concerns over bio-terrorism place the artist in a fertile mind-set for the 21st century. Science has become a framing device for artists, much like popular culture in the last century. As new technologies continue to open up recombinatory practices and as visualizing technologies reframe garnered biological data, we are all in for a bit of a spin.

A final question: 1980s art school education was typically focused on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory. Now we’ve moved on. As head of the program in Fine Arts that includes New Media and Bio Art at SVA in 2012, what new theorists and fields of ideas are shaping thought and progress in this area now, and how?

Whereas theory was a hallmark in the 1980′s, I think its role in the visual arts has become greatly reduced. Although Ranciere, Bourriand, Groys and Zizek have added much to the lexicon, other central issues have emerged in this time of uncertainty. Social media, film and science fiction have had a crucial role in expanding the ideology of the present. The TED series, YouTube, Facebook et al have all contributed to a multi-dimensional network of thought. War, rogue governments and propaganda machines have also been relevant in regard to the ways in which we theorize the here and now. In a sense, deep thought has merged with fantasy. Margaret Atwood, Bruce Sterling, Werner Herzog to name a few, have opened up contentious territories with regard to environmental, technological and philosophical propositions. Media has trumped many other forms of knowledge production and terror has become a buzzword. Jürgen Habermas’ insights continue dissect the current moment, while art criticism, per se, has become merely descriptive. Re-formatting platforms of investigation into what issues are at stake in a transglobal world are being incorporated into art practice, at least at the School of Visual Arts. We have recently built out a state of the art facility in which digital sculpture, media art and the bio arts figure prominently, alongside traditional forms of painting and drawing.

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Rupert Goldsworthy in his studio and Damien Skull in the Daily Mail, 2011. acrylic and Flasche on wood, 23 x 36 inches.Courtesy of Rupert Goldsworthy

SHARON MA What is your methodology for making an artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I like to highlight incongruity, juxtapose ideas that seem mutually exclusive. I think a lot about medium and scale and display and audience. Usually I start off with an object or a design that I find unique, it just turns me on, and I want to understand it more, so I reproduce it or I hybridize it in some way. That unlocks its mystery for me.

SHARON MA What drives you to make the work that you do?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I can never paint something that doesn’t hypnotize me. My heart isn’t in it. When I make films or perform, it’s usually similar. A fascinating object or document starts me off. Maybe just a scrap in the street on a lamp-post or a line from a song, something ephemeral, something that has a beauty, a history, a poetry, a sadness to it– something elusive that I want to spotlight and commemorate.

SHARON MA You are always doing something or going somewhere. How do you manage multiple projects in different countries?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I come from London, and have lived between NYC and Berlin since the late 1980s. All three cities have thriving art scenes. So I have slowly done a lot of projects between those places. I have family and work and friends there and I can earn a living in all three.

I only ever do one project at a time and I don’t juggle things. Patience is key.

SHARON MA Who are the contemporary artists you identify with, either through their personalities or artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I admire the mavericks and the succinct. I identify with the grassroots East Village artist-run galleries or early Soho artists more than this current moment.

Félix González-Torres was a brilliant, funny person to be around and studying with him remains inspiring. Warhol I never met but the work is great, plus he built a circle of people around him, he nurtured a scene, and created an open system, not a hierarchy. He didn’t seem a snob.

I find it hard to separate the personality from the work. The handling of the career is often as interesting to me as the work itself.  I’m interested in the idea of retaining one’s integrity both socially and artistically.

I like the subject matter of Bruce LaBruce and Johan Grimonprez and I know them personally a bit. I admire painters like Inka Essenhigh and Marilyn Minter.

I always think about the work of Hans Haacke and Art & Language because what they did remains better than what most people later have achieved in that field.

SHARON MA I read that you are also a curator, how do you come up with a theme for an exhibition?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY You have to find a topic that’s hot, a bit edgy, but also that you personally love and know a huge amount about. You have to extend the dialog.

SHARON MA What do you look for when choosing works to show?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Because I began as an artist myself, I only like to show artists who can do something that I can’t do, usually technically or conceptually. That’s part of the exchange for me. I show their work because I am a fan. If I know I could make the work easily myself, I don’t want to show it.

SHARON MA What do you put out that is related to the exhibition, and how do you show it?

Rupert Goldsworthy, Nice One Bakery, 2011.acrylic and Flasche on paper, 54 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Rupert Goldsworthy

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY These days I list in magazines and on facebook and make online PDF catalogs. I also write press releases and sometimes make printed catalogs.

SHARON MA I remember how you said that we should keep an eye on galleries that show works similar to our own, how does one approach a gallery, if at all?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I would never suggest approaching a dealer cold, it’s better to dialog with an artist you meet who shows at the gallery and whose work you like.  Then follow up and ask them if they think their dealer or a curator might like it. I think if you are doing something good, people will find you. Artists define things: they are always the first to see a new good artist. Your peers create a critical mass.

SHARON MA As a working artist, what do you stress as key elements to being successful in the art world?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Being generous and open to dialog and making yourself aware of what a lot of other emerging artists are doing. Also understanding marketing clearly.

Success in the art world is really about being a success on your own terms– being a compassionate person and acting with great personal integrity. Some of the best artists are great teachers, great community activists and/or doing amazing stuff that is not centered on any commercial/institutional-success paradigm. Being in the Whitney Biennial is clearly not the central thing, because that fame can be very fleeting. It’s more important that you make great work and really parent it into the world in a cool and ethical way.

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Will Barnet, The Blue Robe, 1962. Oil on canvas, 50 x 54 inches. Private Collection, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York

Will Barnet married the artist Mary Sinclair in 1934. They had three sons, Peter, Richard, and Todd. The boys spent a great deal of time with their father, creating art on the living room rug or the studio floor. “Will was there to set an excellent example for us three boys growing up,” says his son Todd, now a lawyer and a law professor at Pace University. At the age of eight at Robert Blackburn printmaking workshop, Todd recalls creating an original art print of his own, with his father providing guidance and direction in the joint project. One of Todd’s fondest childhood memories is of his dad pushing him around in a wheel barrow.

His brother Peter, a painter and professor of fine arts at Montclair State, has vivid memories of their earliest home, a two-bedroom apartment at 106th Street and Manhattan Avenue, near the top of Central Park. It was a cramped place with one bedroom for the three boys and the second bedroom used as Will’s studio. Their parents slept on a pullout bed in the living room.  The big rug in the living room was where we played. Peter, the oldest at 72, Richard (head of the art department at the College of Mount Saint Vincent and a teacher at The Art Students League) who is 70, and Todd, now 68, would watch Will create his art. “Will painted in front of us,” Peter explains. “He got right down on the floor. In the 1980s, many of Will’s paintings were done from a child’s eyes point-of-view.

Will and Todd Barnet. Photo by Alfred Gescheidt

Since Will did not have a tenured teaching job, he pasted together different jobs. In the late 1940s, he worked at Cooper Union and he always worked at the Art Students League where he moved from assistant printer to printer. He learned printing because it was a way to make a living, Peter says. Printing meant stability.

Will was quiet but very social. Peter remembers visits from Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Stuart Davis (who had been Will’s teacher), Romare Bearden, and Bob Blackburn, a good friend. We often would go to Bob Blackburn’s studio or the Art Students League and watch Will. We would go to the Thalia Theater on 95th Street and Broadway where Will’s favorite movie was Children of Paradise. We loved Jacques Tati and we saw Alexander Nevsky and other Eisenstein movies. This, of course, was before television so movies were magical to us.” Will also took the boys to the American Museum of Natural History because he was very interested in Indians of the Northwest. Many of his late 1940s and ‘50s Indian Space paintings reflected this passion.

When the boys were older, in 1950s  Provincetown, Will was friendly with the Abstract Expressionists. “There was lots of womanizing in those days but,” says Peter, “Will would be listening to Vivaldi and keeping his own counsel.”

It was a very close family with the boys calling their parents Will and Mary and only occasionally Mom and Dad. Will worked all the time, whether at teaching or at his art work and his work ethic was apparent to his sons. “While talking on the phone, he would always be drawing,” says Peter, who has a whole envelope full of these signed drawings.

Peter attributes his father’s work ethic to what Will observed as a child since his father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, worked for 55 years from 6 AM in the morning till the evening at the United Shoe Factory in Beverly, Mass. Although Will definitely did not want that way of life, he clearly imbibed the work ethic. “He believed in working and working hard,” Peter says.

After his divorce in the mid-1950s, Will married his second wife Elena, a dancer from Lithuania. They have one daughter, Ona Barnet. “We are friendly,” Peter says of the two families.

Peter is particularly passionate when he talks of his father’s philosophy of life. “Will never talked about investments, the stock market, or his mortgage. Even now, in his old age, he talks about the interactions of pigeons and squirrels and the light on buildings. He had a great capacity of being in the moment. Maybe that is the secret to his longevity,” Peter says. “Even today, the first thing he will talk about is the weather.”

“I once asked him if he believed in God,” Peter said, and Will replied that he only believed in nature. He told me that had he not become an artist, he would have become a gardener.

These days, Peter takes Will out every Sunday, in his wheelchair, because Will’s knees are bad. They often go to the Met where the teacher in Will comes out. “We keep meeting people there who say, ‘Oh Will, I studied with you 40 years ago.” Two years ago, at the Vermeer exhibit, we ran into Chuck Close. It was a moment,” Peter smiles, the two of them in their wheelchairs. “Chuck said Will and Will said Chuck!”

“His mind is good. He is totally articulate. His eyes are good. His hands have no tremors and he still draws beautifully and paints every day.”

Will Barnet at 100. National Academy Museum, 1089 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. September 16 – December 31, 2011

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Alain Kirili in his studio, New York, 2011. Photo: Ariane Lopez-Huici

ADA ACKERMAN:  With Résistance, which will be inaugurated in Grenoble on May 14, you pay homage to the resistance efforts of men and women of the Grenoble-area during World War II.  Résistance is a monumental abstract sculpture composed of fourteen blocks weighing about thirty tons each. What is your approach to the question of monumentality, which you have been exploring for several years at this point?

ALAIN KIRILI: Monumentality seems to me the noblest destiny a sculptor can aspire to. It allows the sculptor to confront political and urban considerations whose scope extends far beyond the protection of privileged spaces such as museums, or even sculpture gardens. In today’s world, a monumental sculpture is no longer obliged to be narrative or commemorative. A monumental sculpture may be abstract—the direction of my work—and what I call an incarnate, or embodied abstraction. I see monumental art as, essentially, a vertical erection that extends beyond the dimensions of the body and the gaze. In this sense it belongs to the art of statuary, which derives from the Latin “stare,” meaning that which stands or supports, and around which we may turn or move.  Thus, in an urban milieu, I very forcefully reintroduce people to an ancient, ritual, archaic dimension of experience, which consists in circumambulating an object, looking at it, and touching it. I translate this into my work as a simplicity—as (and I insist on this point) an “organic simplicity” that is resolutely post-minimalist, that re-introduces tactility and pleasure, that is first of all a tactile and sensual experience

In a striking and original way, your sculpture acts as a human, warm, accessible monument that does not crush the viewer. In this manner, you avoid the kinds of pitfalls that have littered the history of monumentality, whether in the form of the industrial statue-mania of the 19th Century, or the statuary of totalitarian regimes.

To my way of thinking, the figurative sculpture of Fascism was not incarnate. “Incarnate” means a living flesh. In its return to the body, Fascist sculpture in a sense emptied the body of its blood, emptied it of its trembling and its frisson, and therefore emptied it of life. And thus it produced a deathly, morbid body, so to speak. For me, “incarnation” is a very beautiful word, a word of great importance, connected with what is alive, with flesh and blood.

Another new aspect of your work, of considerable significance: with this approach to monumentality, your sculpture accords an important role to improvisation—which might initially seem paradoxical.

I think that what you witnessed, during the installation of Résistance, is what I would refer to as the power of the moment. This is a very particular and singular state that is not explicable and not part of the rational, an incredible splitting and a disposition that I can characterize as genuinely ecstatic. This is what leads to this monumental gushing [jaillissement] or “dripping” of several hundred tons, because the arm of the crane prolongs my own arm and allows me, even in a monumental sculpture on this scale, to be in the fa presto, in this privileged moment that I have always sought in my work and that pleases me in the work of others. What I find surprising is that I can accomplish it in public. I’m not a performance artist! I have observed these moments of fa presto in contemporary music, and especially in free jazz and among dancers; moments that, let’s say, approach ecstasy. My sculpture for Grenoble is truly a sculpted ecstasy, a body in jouissance, opposed to the negativity that surrounds us and to the dominant ideology of disenchantment.

On this subject, I must insist on a coincidence that is highly significant for me: I find it deeply moving that the inauguration of my largest monumental sculpture, which employs this gushing, should coincide with the centennial of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which was published in 1911. This is the text in which Kandinsky formulates, for the first time in the West, the relation between a work and what he refers to as “an inner necessity,” and this relation occurs through improvisation. This is exactly what I have honored in this sculpture that Michel Destot, the mayor, commissioned me to create for the city of Grenoble. Moreover, I must also say that I am delighted and very proud to have this opportunity to relate my work to that of Calder, whose sculpture greets us at the Gare de Grenoble as we leave the station. Alexander Calder is one of the greatest sculptors of abstract and exultant monumentality, so I consider it an enormous privilege to be able to respond to him, in the same city.

Résistance is not your first monumental work. How does it relate to your previous monumental sculptures, Hommage à Charlie Parker (2007) and Improvisation Tellem (2000).

As we can see in the exhibition of my drawings in the Musée de Grenoble, thanks to the very judicious selection made by Guy Tosatto, Résistance refers back to a project undertaken thirty years ago with Commandement I (1980), which is at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. That work proceeds in terms of a multiplication of signs. With the Commandements that I created for the Tuileries Garden (1986), a group that was initially conceived for an interior now turns toward the exterior, the city. Tellem (1999) and Hommage à Charlie Parker (2007) subsequently represent the monumental equivalents of this principle of a series intended for public space. Relative to these two sculptures, Résistance moves toward greater expansiveness, toward a greater deployment in horizontality. In this sense, it represents the culmination of this serial and urban logic, in a resolutely monumental dimension.

Beyond the material that they all share, these three works also express my interest in a three-dimensional, incarnate, and affirmative calligraphy. With them I have created a singular sculptural alphabet, an ensemble of signs that translates the beat of primordial and fundamental human drives. In this manner one can embody an originary rhythm.  The origins of writing, in fact, were in carved stone, and I like to develop references to this sculptural scripturality. And lest we forget, initially, the sculpture for Grenoble was to be entitled Alphabet.

You evoke the birth of writing, you evoke flesh-signs giving voice to our primordial rhythms. What I find striking about Résistance is, in fact, a certain dimension of the archaic. On the one hand, your sculpture represents “memorial stones” that celebrate an episode that is quite well defined in time and history, the Resistance. But on the other, their scope is far vaster, far more immemorial. Your sculpture radiates an energy of life, an energy I would call millenarian, that in a certain sense evokes Stonehenge. It seems to me that your sculpture has an element of Dionysian ritual about it, of ancient ritual.

Absolutely; in fact I can only thank you for bringing this up. I would simply add that this mystery is related to a particular and indeed profoundly sculptural gesture that I carry out, and that is piling-up [empilement].  This is an archaic gesture; a primordial gesture which is very ancient, like stone itself. In truth, and I’ll risk a paradox here, what really interests me is the timeless aspect of modernity.  Not letting oneself be seduced by modernist tics, discovering and rediscovering the modernity hidden in millenary traditions: this is a challenge that I embrace. Carving stone, forging metal, and modeling in clay are entirely up-to-date, modern, contemporary activities and I think it is imperative to affirm and perpetuate them in the 21st century.

Résistance by Alain Kirili, Grenoble, France. Photo by Lucile Genoulaz

You emphasize that your monumental works share a common feature, in that they have all been created with the same material: the pink limestone known as Rose de Bourgogne. You are particularly fond of this stone because you find that it is a very empathic material. Can you tell us more about this?

Because of its famous honey-golden and flesh-like pink coloring, this stone is especially well-suited to arouse empathy in the viewer.  And this is an effect that I strive for: I am not aiming for a relation of defiance or confrontation with the public—quite the contrary. This stone reassures, it wants to be touched and to touch.  Something that I have learned, and that has surprised me very agreeably, is this:  neither of the previous monumental sculptures, neither the one in Paris nor the one in Dijon, has ever been vandalized.  Which means that a material can be both monumental and a source of empathy, just so long as it is embodied and incarnate.

With this stone, I propose a dialectic between the smooth and the rough, a relation that belongs to life itself, that will relate unconsciously to essential dimensions such as sexuality, voluptuousness, or sensuality. During my encounter with your students, with mayor Michel Destot, and with two celebrated figures of the Resistance—Mimi Mingat (whose nom de guerre was “Juste de l’Isère” [Righteous in Isère]) and Gabrielle Giffard (nom de guerre “Ariel”)—I was very moved when Giffard, without being any sort of art historian, perceived that the installation of my work involves a sort of gushing [jaillissement]—she actually used this magic word. This was absolutely astonishing, quite marvelous. What more beautiful word could one use? That says it all. This is what such a woman, with her unshakeable optimism, said to your students, who are between 19 and 22 years old, or in other words the same age she was when she took part in the Resistance. She completely understood the spontaneous, living, improvised, unpremeditated nature of the sculpture’s installation [pose].

Another point that is very important for me: I have only recently realized, and this touches me powerfully, how much the Rose de Bourgogne stones used in Résistance remind me of Cézanne’s late-period paintings, from the time when he set up an easel and worked in the Bibémus Quarries. His extended period of contact with the reddish stones there encouraged him in his path toward a radical abstraction. Those monumental blocks with their smooth and rough ridges had a direct influence on cubism. Those works very probably played an unconscious role for me—and here I’m thinking particularly of the painting, “Le Rocher Rouge” [The Red Rock], from 1897, at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Almost twenty years ago, when I found myself for the first time in a quarry at Prémeaux, near Nuits Saint George, the quarry’s proprietor Pascal Loichet said to me: “Alain, this quarry is your studio.”

What an equation! A painter of blocks of stone in Provence—a sculptor of blocks of stone in Burgundy. I have replied to Cézanne’s serial paintings, with all their warmth and sensuality, with my sculptures in Rose de Bourgogne, which are filled with my desire for intense sensual pleasure [volupté] thanks to the gorgeous vibrations of this Burgundy stone and the flavor of its mineral specificity, which is the “climate” for the wine. These stones give my work a monumental lightness and inebriation.

And in fact, speaking of this “climate for the wine,” the particular flesh-like coloration of the Rose de Bourgogne, which is so specific to this stone, results from a meeting of the mineral and the vegetable. I think this is an essential point for you.

First of all, I wanted to recall the final passage of Roland Barthes’ inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. I don’t recall the exact formulation, but basically he says: “You know, I’m now at a stage in my life where what really interests me is unlearning, in order to taste sapienza, a form of knowledge that we experience above all in terms of flavor.” * Thus Barthes’ final word links sensibility and intelligence to flavor, understood as something he wants to pursue. I find this an astonishing conclusion, and it’s something I felt a kinship with and that has stuck with me all through my life. This is because I cannot conceive of culture without flavor and without accepting what I would call the war of taste. Creativity doesn’t occur in the midst of pleasantness and consensus, but in a relation that, we have to admit, is full of collisions and conflict. The war of taste is, especially, the war against the simulacrum, cheapness, against what we call kitsch. One of the struggles that occupies me today is against puritanism, or in other words against the dominant, Anglo-Saxon vision which consists in conceptualizing everything, in crowding out sensations, jouissance, pleasure, the pleasure in excess, since only in excess is there real pleasure, and only in excess does intelligence begin, much like creation itself. Excess is therefore the most basic referent. My vision is a vision of excess. Living in an Anglo-Saxon country, in a country marked by the Reformation and puritanism, I have perhaps been in a good position to understand that what we, in France, take to be simply natural, is in fact completely cultural. I take pride in being extremely lucid about what is specific to French culture, and therefore I realize my good fortune [bonheur]—and I use this word intentionally—in having had the privilege of working in Burgundy. For Burgundy is an essential region in the history of sculpture. This is the region of the “Pleurants” or Mourners—I’m referring to that masterpiece in the world history of sculpture, The Mourners by Sluter—and this is the region of the tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy, the sculpture of Auxerre, of Vézelay, etc.; as well as a work that I truly love, Rude’s Napoléon qui s’éveille à l’immortalité (Napoléon Awaking to Immortality); this is the region of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s music, with its surprisingly modern dissonances. With all this, we’re in set of very incarnate conjunctions. And the experience that accompanies this is that of the flavors and tastes related to religion and spirituality, which the monks of Citeaux developed with their cheeses and in creating Clos-Vougeot, one of the world’s greatest wines. What moves me, and what I adopt with pride, is this relationship of the mineral and stone with the wine. For me, Bacchus, Dionysus, wine, is a vehicle towards greater intelligence, greater sensibility. When this element of nature, the vine, is compelled and constrained by both the stone and the humans who tend it, this engenders wines that are truly extraordinary, and which, moreover, often bear the names of stones. Le Corton is the name of a kind of stone.  So I take a certain pride in opposing myself to the country of tea ceremonies, since the tea ceremony represents puritanism in opposition to the inebriation of wine, which flows through our civilization and marks Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, in the ceremony of the mass, in which wine represents the blood of Christ. Thus there exists a culture and a millenary symbolism that makes a central space for wine, for taste, where intelligence mixes with creation, where Dionysus—I must insist and repeat—is an integral element of intelligence and creation. If I have to choose between a Zen garden and its tea ceremony and a vineyard like Romanée-Conti, I spontaneously opt for the earth and vineyards of Romanée-Conti. Additionally, I will also note that, with my sculpture for Grenoble, I became aware not only that Rose de Bourgogne is carnal or flesh-like, but also that it gives the taste of its minerals to the wine. This terroir, the special characteristics of this soil, which in Burgundy is called a “climate,” allow me to say that I drink the wine of the stone of my sculpture. This formula is obviously quite phenomenal and well worth defending, permanently and at any cost!

Résistance by Alain Kirili, Grenoble, France. Photo by Lucile Genoulaz

You propose an opposition between the inebriation of wine, which is tied to Résistance in a truly bodily manner, and the tea ceremony. In this light, I wonder whether your installation for Grenoble does not harbor a duality, or at least a tension, between your sculpture—which invites the spectator to relate to it directly, to walk around it—and the covered shelter created by Alexander Chémétoff, which, it seems to me, encourages a more contemplative relation, since one is supposed to sit and look at the sculpture. How do you see the relation between Alexander Chémétoff’s covered shelter and your sculpture, and how do you want the spectator’s body to be mobilized and invested in your sculpture?

Thank you for this question. One has to understand that in this case we’re dealing with opposite of the usual situation, and I think this is one of the secrets of the success of the entire situated ensemble. In this case we haven’t installed a sculpture to fit an architecture; it’s the reverse. First there was my sculpture and my proposition to an architect-landscape artist to create a setting for this sculpture. It was a matter of constructing a privileged space for a work of art, in the manner of the chapel specially conceived so that Matisse would create something inside it; of the circular space so dear to Monet; or of the polygonal chapel intended for Rothko’s paintings. My sculpture is therefore not conceived as an outside element being added to an architectural structure after the fact, but as the take-off point for a collaboration with an immensely talented architect-landscape designer, of whom I think very highly, Alexandre Chémétoff. I asked him if he would be willing to work around a sculptural multiplication of signs like Résistance, and he was. And with extraordinary modesty, he decided, on the basis of suggestions I made to him, to erect a covered shelter, a small shelter that would lend itself to meditation. Not a Shinto or Zen meditation, but a meditation that I would characterize as frankly oriented to pleasure [jouissive], a meditation that is incarnate and not metaphysical. So yes, Alexandre’s installation does indeed invite us to contemplation, but to an incarnate contemplation, totally grounded in the body, which in turn calls for an exceptional state of physical contact with the sculpture.

This place and this ensemble function as “an abstract sculpted meditation” directly descended from the Brancusi at Târgu Jiu in Romania: his Endless Column is an abstract commemorative work situated in a space entirely conceived by the artist.

This question of incarnation, it seems to me, allows us to perceive the continuity between your monumental projects and a far more private and intimate practice, your work in terra cotta. I see a truly carnal, fleshly link between this beautiful Rose de Bourgogne stone and terra cotta.

It seems to be that clay was invented to express flesh. And indeed this is why, in the 1970s, I called one of my sculptures Adam, which in Hebrew signifies “earth.” Earth and flesh are very closely related notions. Working with earth, one is engaged in tactility, in expenditure, in an impetuous and inebriated gesture that reveals the feminine, that strips it naked. This is quite extraordinary, and I discovered it in an entirely empirical manner. As paradoxical and unexpected as it may seem, it turns out that this is possible with stone as well. This is what I demonstrated before your eyes and the eyes of your students: that monumentality may be treated fa presto. It involves the urgency of a choice made in the instant, in a split second; it involves a veritable act of defiance, echoing that of the male and female members of the Resistance, who made their decisions suddenly, some as early as the autumn of 1940, to join the Resistance, making ultra-rapid, sharp and clear choices that completely upset the courses of their lives. I share this ethic in my creative work, completely and absolutely. It’s about taking risks.

* The English translation (by Richard Howard) of this passage in Barthes’ text reads: “Now perhaps comes the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable changes which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed. This experience has, I believe, an illustrious and outdated name, which I now simply venture to appropriate at the very crossroads of its etymology: Sapienta: no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavor as possible” (“Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France,” in Barthes: Selected Writings [1982], 478).

Translation from the French by Philip Barnard

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March 5 – April 16, 2011
521 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 629 6100

Inka Essenhigh, Centaur, 2010. Oil paint monotype printed from a steel matrix, 11-3/4 x 13-3/4 inches. Published by Pace Editions, Inc.?

Inka Essenhigh’s paintings flit between abstraction and representation. Populated by a cosmology of figures that appear surreal and distended, they draw from her own very particular if perverse psycho-architectural interior world.

Her work has been described as both “exotic and operatic.” Critics cite 19th-century caricatures, oriental art, Arabic miniatures, and contemporary comics as influences.  Other references that come to mind are the mad machines of 1920s British illustrator W. Heath Robinson, and the Rabelaisian folk scenes of another Brit, Sir Stanley Spencer.

Essenhigh’s images unfold her own internal mythologies and legends. They show figures caught frozen in dynamic moments of suspended animation. Abstracted hydras mutate into melting organic shapes, human figures are caught in exaggerated grotesque gestures, as they morph with mouths open, cavorting and yawning in the evening light.

Her earlier paintings in enamel were first celebrated for their flat surfaces, the detached perfection of virtual reality, and their sense of hyper-artificiality. But in her newer work, Essenhigh has progressed to deeper space, more eternal and more earthy themes. She switched from enamel to oil paint, and now she has added a new medium for her, monoprint. Her series of monoprints – along with new editions of intaglio prints – at Pace Prints Chelsea draw their  subjects from nature, the seasons, mythology, and theater.

Inka, can you tell us about the genesis of the work you are current showing at Pace Prints? How you did you come to make this body of work?

It’s an extension of what I’ve been working on with my paintings for the past couple of years. With the monotypes I would go in every day, sit down and make an image and it’s very fast. All these things just come out of my head: I don’t worry about their meaning.  What I’m going for is an inner vision. or at least the feeling of an inner vision.

Can you explain what you mean by “inner vision”? Is it an internal world?

Yes, it’s an internal world. But it’s an internal world where I feel I’m tapping into everybody else’s internal world.

The collective unconscious?

Exactly. When something feels sacred then I feel I’m on to something. I don’t know what that looks like but that’s the feeling I’m going for.

There are forty in the series, quite an expansive body of work.  So, they’re one-of-a-kind prints.

They are basically paintings on paper. I paint on a steel plate and then a sheet of paper gets pressed down on it picking up the image. The quickness and liquidness of painting on a smooth plate really works for me. I can make something small, substantial, and complete.

Right, it’s a fast medium for you. There seem to be two dominant motifs in the series: the natural environment, seas or forests, and then corridors and stages.

Theater stages.

Inka Essenhigh, Path to the Stage, 2011. Aquatint and line etching with drypoint, 13-1/8 x 10-1/4 inches, Edition of 30. Published by Pace Editions, Inc.?

Exactly, theater stages. I sense a connection to paganism, the outdoor world, with forest gods or sea gods, different mythologies, anthropomorphism and archetypes. But can you say something about these stages, these corridors with what appear to be arms reaching out holding lights.

The stage is a metaphor for having arrived somewhere, or I suppose it’s a place of consciousness in a public setting. And perhaps I’m not there yet but I’m on my way. I’m on a path to being able to articulate something or know something. And being backstage of something is like a metaphor for just that.

I think of Manhattan as being one big stage. It’s kind of a small, compacted stage, as opposed to other cities where you drive around and you don’t see it. You can actually walk around New York like a stage.  You run into characters. You perform.

And there’s a certain kind of lighting in the stage paintings that is reminiscent of the Bowery and that vaudevillian tradition, of Judy Garland or Ethel Merman. There’s a quality to the light where the subject is bathed in, well, a very different kind of light to the lighting at the Oscars which is this all-consuming, every-wrinkle-visible light. This is much more of a golden, bathing type of light. Is that referencing something particular for you?

No, I just like it. In twilight things can emerge and disappear and can be ambiguous, and I sort of use that. I don’t want to say as a crutch, because god, I feel that, for so long now, I’ve pursued taking art out of my art.

Taking out all of your tropes.

Right. I’m attracted to twilight in terms of making things appear and disappear and flatten things out and bring things to shape in an easy light.

… in a mythological sense, the magic of twilight.

It’s not like Manhattan where you get sunny days, you get rainy days, you get twilight, you get all sorts of things.  I just set it all to twilight.

You prefer twilight because there’s more of a blend going on?

Or more ambiguity.

Not so claustrophobic, not so oppressive?

Right. I was making one that had light in it and I thought, Oh god! (laughs) I hate making light and shadow. There’s something so oppressive about that formula.  You’ve got to have a light source but then the next thing you have to do is to make it somewhat logical. It’s so oppressive, I can’t stand it.

In your earlier work there were certain kinds of figures that make me think of institutional settings with uniforms – jackets with particular kinds of buttons being used. In these later works, the clothes are more like shrouds and rags, something more decaying…

When I was making the earlier work I think that I was very consciously trying to make something contemporary, taking a color sense and a design that is from today.  But these new ones are not attempting to be contemporary at all costs. These are inspired, if anything, by timelessness. So I just don’t have those ideas any more. I mean, they just don’t come to me. I don’t sit there and think “How can I make this contemporary?” which is what I would have done before and it’s very easy, you know, you can see something you just saw, like uniforms or things like hazardous waste, “Haz.Mat” suits and things like that. They just look like they don’t come from any other time, because those materials didn’t exist before.

Do you see the clothing now as shrouds sometimes?

Not so much. No, it’s just a feeling. No I don’t necessarily see them as shrouds. I see them as amorphous, unformed energy.

Contemporary references in that earlier series bring one right into the now. But these newer works are more eternal. I’m seeing Father Christmas in one of the works, for instance.

Yes. Often it’s about representation of energy forms on an elemental level.

And I was thinking in terms of the cycle of images that you have at Pace Prints right now, they seem to be seasonal, maybe we could talk about how that works in the show. Are they arranged in a particular sequence?

The Pace people arranged it, but what you see is Spring, Fall, and Winter. I wasn’t there during the summer so I don’t have any Summer prints but yes, when I was on my way there and I was wondering what am I going to do this morning images that come to mind are part of where I am at.

So there is a diarist quality to them?

Yes there is a diarist quality.

So there’s a seasonal flavor. The stage ones, are they more Fall/twilight?

Yeah, Fall and Winter.

I always feel that asking an artist like you to specify what you’re doing in your work spoils the elusiveness of your work. There’s a quality of “Does this mean this?” That said, do you feel like you’re heading more into abstraction or you’re coming more into figuration as you progress?

I think I’m probably heading more into figuration. But figuration isn’t necessarily that something means one thing or another. When I come out with an image of something, you could say that it’s a stage, and I want it to be a stage, but whether I put one person there or two people there is based on feeling, it’s basically that I’m still working on an abstract level. I mean there is abstraction in all figuration and figuration in abstraction. I have a rule that if you can name it, it’s not abstract.  ”What is it?” (laughs).

Inka Essenhigh, Sleeping Faun, 2010. Oil paint monotype printed from a steel matrix, 11-3/4 x 13-3/4 inches. Published by Pace Editions, Inc.?

I really think with painting you can tell what people are thinking and feeling for each thing. So if you are making work where you are totally not into it, you can see it. Maybe you can see that in sculpture too. I can’t read it as well because I’m not a sculptor. But with painting you need to be clear. “Oh, here I felt like I needed to do something. Here I needed to make this look more like this.” And any time you start to go and make art where you have a certain set of rules, like “I can’t be too much this way and I can’t be too much that way, and I’m only going to go here and not so far because it gets too cheesy or this way because that’s no good, too figurative, too literal,” all these criticisms, you’re not really making art. If all you’re doing is negotiating these rules, that’s not art, that’s sort of like you’re patching together various things. But when you’re onto something for real, all those rules fly out the window, when you want to do something.

And when you really have something to say. But how does that relate for example to your shift into a deeper, three-dimensional space?

Because I could feel more and more that in the flatter work, “You can’t be too much this way, you can’t be too much that way”, and I started to want to expand but I couldn’t figure out how. “You can’t put a face in, you can’t make it too illustrative. You can’t.”

It’s more limited, you’d be stuck with your facility to draw and paint, which is phenomenal but you’d be stuck in the role of “She’s the one who does these incredible line drawings” but whereas you needed to expand your range.

Right, to be a real human being, not just somebody who is afraid to be this, and afraid to be that.

You’re taking on a more canonical type of painting in some sense.

Well I think I always loved that kind of canonical painting, I always did. That is what I really love. I love older work more than I like most contemporary artwork, and I also understand that what the contemporary art world is actually trafficking in is contemporary art. It’s got to be current on some level. I don’t know what to say beyond saying that I want that and I feel happy and easy and right making these paintings. And I trust the ease of it. The inspiration of it. The rightness of it.

… in that it’s not a contrived position?

Yeah. I was a young person trying to be a part of things but that’s not my main focus any more.

Inka Essenhigh will appear in conversation with Alexi Worth at the New York Studio School on Tuesday, March 29 at 6.30 pm.  8 West 8 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, New York City, 212 673 6466

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Laurie Fendrich, Delicate Feeling, 2010. Oil on canvas, 36 x 34 inches. Gary Snyder Project Space.

A question for arcritical readers: Has a married couple ever had overlapping, solo exhibitions at separate galleries in Manhattan? Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens couldn’t think of one, and nor could I. If their case is indeed unique, then her exhibition at Gary Snyder Project Space and his at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which overlap for nine days, is an item for the record books. Adding a delicious romantic twists is the fact that the overlap includes Valentine’s Day.

The two were wed in 1981 and they share a painting studio in a barn in upstate New York. There is also discussion of renovating a room in their Tribeca apartment so that she can work on her drawings and he on his collages while they’re in the city. “Actually, ‘renovating’ is too strong a word,” says Plagens. ‘Ridding of junk’ would be more accurate.” Both of them have had storied independent careers. He was art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has shown with Hoffman since 1974. She is a professor at Hofstra University, writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was recently the subject of a two-decade career overview at Scripps College in Claremont, California that will travel to the University of Montana in March.

Peter Plagens, The Dim View: Ricebirds. Mixed media on canvas, 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery

They bring disparate sensibilities to their painting practices. Plagens’ work – with its gestural application and improvisatory attitude – has roots in Abstract Expressionism. The abrasions in his paint surfaces are signs of happy accident and copious correction.   He resolves his disorderly backgrounds by laying geometric elements on top of them. Multicolored polygons, dubbed “badges” by Nancy Hoffman, take on the role of Hans Hofmann’s structure-imposing rectangles.

Fendrich’s work, while no less improvised, builds more slowly, in a manner recalling Cubists like Juan Gris and California hard-edge painters like Frederick Hammersley. Using oils, she glazes her surfaces into a reproduction-defying shimmer, while enclosing her geometric shapes with a painted line that takes its soft, textured character from hard pastels. The day after viewing the 1993 Seurat exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum she went out and bought a box of Conté crayons. Her drawings, also on view at Gary Snyder,are constructed in the same careful manner, resulting in a smoldering intensity.

“Laurie is the optimist who keeps Jane Austen novels and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by her bedside,” explains Plagens. “I’m the card-carrying existentialist who thinks that the universe is held together with chewing gum and baling wire and could fall apart at any moment. My paintings reflect that sense of barely contained order. Hers assume more order from the beginning.”

But having worked alongside one another for many years, some inevitable exchange has occurred, suggesting a productive if subtle collaboration. Plagens’s works show increasing decision and clarity between 2007 and 2010, while Fendrich’s grow in contrast and whimsy. “Laurie’s paintings may have become a little more playful over the years as a consequence of my work having been around the studio,” says Plagens. Fendrich adds, “I may have prompted him to clean up his act a little bit.” But they don’t offer each other unsolicited critiques. Creative support takes the form instead of an occasional shoulder rub.

Are there any problems with sharing a studio?

“Only the music, sometimes,” says Plagens. “Laurie can listen to anything except rock ‘n roll. I can listen to anything except, well…”

“Regina Spektor, for instance,” she finishes. “I like girl music.”

“She’ll also put her iPod on the dock and set one song to play on repeat. She’ll start working, and I’ll come back into the studio a couple of hours later and the same song is still playing. I get myself out of there.”

They laugh, as they often do.

Peter Plagens: I Don’t Give a Damn/Every Moment Counts, at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
January 20 – February 19, 2011.  520 West 27 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 966-6676

Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings, at Gary Snyder Project Space.
February 10 – April 2, 2011. 250 West 26 Street, between 7th and 8th avenues.  New York City, (212) 929-1351

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