“There is only one thing that is worthwhile in art. It is that which cannot be explained.” - Georges Braque
Interviews, Essays and Reviews
As I writer I have been fortunate to interview artists Terry Winters and Ed Ruscha for PORT. I have also written reviews of many show including Richard Serra’s Forty Years at MoMA, Robert Irwin’s Primaries and Secondaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Brice Marden retrospective at SFMOMA and a recent James Turrell exhibtion at the Pomona College Museum of Art.
Recently, I have been very interested in reexamining some of the art shows that have made Portland what it is. I wrote about an Donald Judd exhibition at the Portland Center for Visual Arts in 1974 because I was interested in trying to understand if Judd’s experience in Portland had any influence on the trajectory of his work. I followed that up with a short exchange with Carl Andre and his experience in Portland.
Here are some of excerpts of the things that I have written for PORT. If you would like to see a complete list please click here.
Interviews:
Printmaking, Pollock and Poetics: A Conversation With Terry Winters
Terry Winters, Signal to Noise 2006
Since the 80’s the Brooklyn born Terry Winters has been at the forefront of painting and his works can be found in the collections of MOCA, MoMA, Reinia Sofia, The Whitney and The Walker Art Center. He is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery. Special thanks to Terry Winters and the Matthew Marks Gallery.
Arcy: I read that in the late seventies you helped Walter De Maria install the Lightning Field in New Mexico. What was that experience like?
Terry: It was great – I was part of the installation crew. The Field is extraordinary, it’s a total artwork. It was the first time I spent in the Southwest and also my first direct exposure to Native American art, to the landscape and the environment. All an inspiring revelation.
Arcy: Is that something you still carry with you now?
Terry: It really affected me both on a personal level and in terms of my own work.
Arcy:So when you say Native American art, are you more interested in Navajo rugs and Zuni fetishes or other objects?
Terry: All of that – the native architecture, the objects and their relationship to the culture and the landscape.
CA @ PCVA
“There is no true way except for that which is true for oneself. My way does not invalidate the way of anyone else.”
-Carl Andre in an interview with Paul Sutinen
Carl Andre
144 Blocks & Stones, 1973 (Detail)
In the early correspondence for the exhibition at the PCVA, the installation was described as a “scavenger” show. When did you decide to use river stones and concrete blocks for the installation?
When I arrived in Portland.
When you were looking for river stones, what qualities were you looking for? The found river stones were complemented by specific geological samples purchased from stores. How did you decide which samples to buy? Do you remember where you found the river stones?
I selected ones that interested me. I found them in the local river.
One of my friends that accompanied you for a week in 1970 said that you will always take beautiful side of a steel plate, or in this case a concrete block or river stone and place it face down. Why is that?
The purpose was to make the surfaces uniform.
I will see where it takes me from here: A conversation with Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha portrait by Dennis Hopper
Ed Ruscha is one of America’s greatest painters. During the last forty years of producing an amazing body of work, he is best known for his recontextualizations of words and environments. These often jarring juxtapositions have helped us to reexamine the world we live in. An exhibtion of Ed Ruscha’s work will be at the Portland Art Museum from June 14 to September 21, 2008.
I read that you studied with Robert Irwin at the Chouinard Art Institute. What was he like as a teacher?
That’s right. Well, he was very rigorous and interesting. He was a task master. He taught a watercolor class and he went through elaborate steps to teach every student how to prepare the paper for the watercolors. You would have to prepare this paper by wetting and stretching it and the paper would be taut like the head of a drum. Irwin was a committed abstract painter and he was a vital person in my estimation during my early years. It just went on from there. He was one of several people that I studied under. Although I got quite a bit, not just from the teachers, but also from the students themselves, just being in that atmosphere.
At one point you mentioned that in the sixties, you were the biggest collector of your own work. What was that like?
There is more than a shred of truth there. It was about 1961 when I really got swinging into my own art. I had it for a few years before I exhibited it, and I didn’t sell too much of my early work. Even during exhibits I would only sell one or two things. So I held on to quite a bit of my own work during the early years.
Reviews:
Walking the Path: Richard Serra Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art
Richard Serra, Sequence 2007
In Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Serra’s work provides a guide to the way that materials can be used to transform or define space. No sculptor has put more thought into the problems and pleasures of navigating and defining space. I was surprised to see how rigorous his approach to the language of materials and the experience of space has been over the last forty years even though his own language and budgets have grown considerably during that time. One thing that became immediately clear is that Serra has thought harder about space than any artist, ever. Most of the sculptures relate to the way that we navigate or move within a space. His work is famous for transforming the reference points that we use for orientating ourselves within a space to unlock the potential of a given environment. The best sculptures are the ones that are open ended and are meant to be completed by the experience of the viewer. In the show we get a little bit of everything from the Belts and Prop Pieces of the mid sixties, through Delineator and then Circuit II into the Torqued Ellipses and the larger sculptures of his current work. Serra’s best sculptures are not objects but are an interconnected set of relationships that are not complete until we interact and navigate in and around them. Although Serra’s work in steel is definitely the focus of the show, it is used to highlight the fact that the sculptures are the means, rather than the ends, of the way experience space.
The Wisdom of Light: The Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective at the De Young Museum
Hiroshi Sugimto, Union City Drive In 1993
Photography is, by definition, about the interaction between time and light. In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs we are able to engage in a conversation with light. In a very real way, he opens the light to us. He lets the light speak to us in a way that would be impossible in any other medium. Sometimes the light is fast like in the Seascapes and the dioramas where the exposure time is some small fraction of a second. In other work the light is slow, so slow that one photograph is exposed for the length of an entire movie. In most of his photographs the light is reflected, so that the light seems to be emanated from the subject that he is photographing. This gives the dioramas, the wax figures and even his Sea of Buddha series an uncanny, life-like feeling as if the figures only settled into position a split second before he clicked the shutter. We feel the life of the objects that he photographs and not the hand of the photographer. He heightens the interchangeability between time and light in a way that gives his photographs a remarkable presence. Whether he is looking at animals, the plaster cast of a mathematical formula or even on a cliff high above the ocean, you can sense that he begins to learn about an object by the way that it interacts with light. The Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective that is currently on display at the De Young Museum in San Francisco until September 23 is a record of the themes that he has explored for the last thirty years.
Beyond the Frame: Robert Irwin’s Primaries and Secondaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego
Robert Irwin examining Light and Space a few moments after it was turned on. Photograph by Jeff Jahn
Robert Irwin is walking to the left and then to the right, stepping forward and then back, until finally stopping at a spot where the work fills his entire field of vision. He is trying to understand what this new piece is about and he has always said that looking is as much about the body as the eyes. For the first time, his assistants have just turned on Light and Space, a work designed specifically for his retrospective, Primaries and Secondaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Light and Space, like the eponymous art movement is about a particular environment or set of conditions to experience. In this case it is a large empty room defined on a one long by a field of fluorescent light fixtures. The lights are installed in a non-repeating modified grid pattern that completely fills a giant wall. There is no focus and is non hierarchical, it is just the experience itself. The experience resonates between the field of light that is created by the fixtures and the way that the light redefines the space of the room. The transformation and reorientation of the space makes the new work a classic Irwin piece.
Your Art: Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time and Your Tempo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Olafur Eliasson
Room for one colour, 2007
The first thing that you notice when you get off of the elevator at Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is that you are entering a room that is saturated with a bright yellow light. The piece is called Room for One Colour and the room is saturated, or soaked if that is possible, with this bright yellow light. The light is so bright that the walls in the elevator lobby seem to dematerialize and the room seems much larger than it really is. It is a good introduction to the show because from now on nothing will be what it seems. Eliasson is the master of inverting your expectations. Anything that you think you know about a space or a material goes out the window. His strength as an artist is his ability to look at materials or phenomenonal effects with a fresh eye. He is able to isolate the raw potential of a material so that it can be used to transform the experience of the viewer.
Breathing in the Light: James Turrell at Pomona College
James Turrell
Entrance to End Around, 2006
It is the day after Christmas, and I am walking up a narrow corridor to enter James Turrell’s End Around at the Pomona College Museum of Art. There is a soft, blue lavender light that spills into the space of the corridor from an adjacent room. It is hard to describe the effect of the light, but it is a light that has its own identity, its own volume. It is man-made and not natural, so the environment feels slightly alien and unlike anything I have ever seen. I realize quickly that I am about to enter a space that I’m probably not prepared for and for which there is no natural equivalent. As I turn the corner, the blue light floods the space, as floors, walls and ceiling converge at a rectangle in the center of the room. There is nothing for my eye to focus on. This is one of Turrell’s ganzfeld pieces. Ganzfeld means “total (or entire) field” in German and comes from the experiments of Wolfgang Metzger in the 1930s. The premise is simple: if we spend all of our time using our eyes to focus on objects, what happens to our eyes (and our minds) when we do not have anything to focus on? So turning the corner and entering End Around, I felt a lot like Alice wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Essays:
On Form (or from Polykleitos to Janine Antoni)
Janine Antoni, Saddle 2000
When we look at art, are we only seduced by what we think is beautiful? Do we only respond to things that resonate with our sensibilities, our taste, or our history? As an artist is it our role to make beautiful things (paintings, sculptures, film, ideas etc…)?
Everyone has their own path, so everyone will have to choose for themselves but for me, I do not think that art has anything to do with the beautiful. In my own experience, my tastes are constantly evolving as I am interacting with the world and learning new things. How can I stand in judgment of what is beautiful and what is not? What I find ugly today, I might that I find that is urgently needed and beautiful tomorrow. At the least, I would have to conclude that my taste has to be fickle and arbitrary at best, because it is never absolute and it is always changing. Now this an example of my personal experience, but what if we apply these questions across to a group of people? A community? A whole profession? Am I the only one? Maybe, but probably not.
When Donald Judd Came to Portland
“It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.” -Donald Judd in his essay Specific Objects
Donald Judd. Untitled, installed at the PCVA in 1974
The Portland Center for Visual Arts (PCVA) was based on a very simple premise: artists talking to artists. The PCVA was founded in 1971 by three artists Jay Backstrand, Mel Katz, and Michele Russo. The exhibition space was located on the third floor of 117 NW Fifth Ave. Katz wanted to give something to the community as well as bring to Portland some of the things that he missed from New York. Usually, the PCVA sent a letter to an artist explaining that they wanted to have a exhibition of the artist’s work in the Northwest and could they follow up with a phone call the following week. This was a strategy that proved to be tremendously successful and they were soon able to attract some of the best artists in the country to come to Portland and have a show. The PVCA was unique in every sense of the word. The artists liked working with the PCVA because although there was a limited budget for each of the shows, there was never any limit to an artist’s ideas. After the first few New York artists had a good experience working in Portland, the PCVA had an excellent reputation and the original artists often recommended other artists who might be willing to come out here.
The founders set three objectives for the PCVA. First, they wanted to exhibit the best contemporary art that was being done in all regions of the United States. Second, they tried to stimulate commnuntiy awareness of the diversity and excellence of contemporary art through both exhibitions and others programs. Last, they wanted to bring the artist themselves to Portland to discuss their work. Over the 17 years they were able to put on an exhibition schedule that would have been successful and relevant even to MoMA. To give you some sense of the caliber of artists that have spent time in Portland because of the PCVA: Carl Andre, Yvonne Rainer, Lynda Benglis, Sol LeWitt, James Rosenquist, Daniel Buren, Ed Moses, Allan Kaprow, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Alice Neel, John Baldesari, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Chris Burden, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Lucinda Childs, Andy Warhol and Agnes Martin just to name a few. It is hard to think of an arts institution that would have been more dynamic and relevant during that time period. The PCVA put on ten to fifteen visual arts exhibits every year as well as equal number of dance, music, and theater performances. There were a lot of things that were different about the PCVA and a comparable institution would not be created on the East or West Coast until the Dia Center was created in the late seventies.
I enjoy being a writer. It is a way of a learning how to be as clear as possible about ideas that I am passionate about. I enjoy sharing these ideas with the internet community where everyone can learn from everybody. A lot of people have been extremely generous with their time and ideas that make these posts possbile.
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