Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 3
Following is the conclusion of the conversation between Judy Pfaff and BOMB Magazine’s Betsy Sussler that took place on March 3, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
BS: I’m going to ask you two more questions, and one of them actually comes from Patricia Spears Jones, who’s a poet. I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s a contributing editor to BOMB. A.M. Homes, the writer, has this really great trick when she interviews people. She calls up all of her friends in a panic and says, “I don’t know what I’m going to say. What would you ask if you were interviewing this person?” and then she comes with a list of their questions combined with her questions. So I did that too. I thought, this will be fun. So, Patricia Spears Jones asks this: “I have been fascinated by the colors in your work? What do they mean and are there ones that you have never used and why?”
JP: I’m very involved with color. Initially, I was involved with Goethe’s idea of color, then Madame Blavatsky, and I worked for [Josef] Albers, believe it or not. So each piece actually is very coded. I don’t usually talk about that, but what I mean is that even just black and white mean this or that. When I sampled things in earlier pieces, they were always specifically about color and emotional and even visual sensations. But no, color is a huge deal to me.
BS: The earlier ones especially were so exuberant. It was never just instinctive? You really always had an idea of what the color….
JP: Yeah. The first show in New York that someone might have seen was called Deep Water. I had just come from a trip to the Yucatan as a response to doing a failed show about subatomic physics, and I thought, painters don’t use color? There was this equivocation that thinking is sort of gray and black and brown and sober and in Merida, which is this perfect colonial town in the Yucatan, and is also my favorite town of all time, there were just beautiful flowers. The sea is turquoise, and I just thought this really has the color of life. The way things look when they’re alive, like flowers and birds and fish and this and that. Also, I was probably at war with—do I say it again?—Richard Serra, who is about weight and mass, and I thought, throw it away. Get the air in there and make it circulate. You don’t own it. You don’t dominate anything. Don’t have the language that painting could have. That was a very south of the border show.
The next one I did at Albright-Knox, the whole palette was for all of the people. There was the Clyfford Still motif, there was the Jackson Pollock; it was the moment. So there was a kind of homage. It’s like, if I go to Japan, I think it’s totally Japanese, but they don’t think it’s Japanese at all. I think there is a difference between references to things and paying homage to things.
BS: That actually might answer my last question, which is, do all the installations have a back-story?
JP: Yes.
BS: They do. So can you tell us one, a really personal one that perhaps nobody knows yet?
JP: Yeah, one was called War In Italy. My grandmother worked for the RAF, the Women’s Royal Air Force, as a seamstress. And she sewed all these…she says she saved London. She said that she made all of these sorts of balloons. And it was the day that we arrived in Venice, and there were a couple of wars going on. And the whole thing, I thought, referenced this because we were also in Italy, and so I thought it would be about the Futurists, and I really realized that the Futurists were about noises. My grandmother used to say, “what was the most frightening thing? The noises above your head and the sound of things exploding.” So the whole piece, I thought, had this very Italian aspect to it as well as this back-story about my grandmother and what she thought was frightening. But all of them have that. I don’t usually tell anybody, but I’ll tell you now that it’s twenty years later.
BS: Oh, I should have gone through [every installation] one at a time. How did she think she saved London? What was she selling?
JP: Because these balloons were inflated and the German planes couldn’t tell the difference between the sky and the balloons. They were all around London. London was full of balloons, big balloons. These balloons, what are they called?
BS: Balloons… I don’t know.
JP: Blimps. And they were silver, which is a good look because it reflected the sky. So the planes, the Messerschmitt, is that right? The planes couldn’t locate them so instead of bombing them they just flew into this invisible protection. I hope I’m remembering this correctly.
BS: Even if you’re not, it’s really fabulous. I’m going to read how you answered Mimi’s question, which is actually exactly what you said ten years ago. Mimi asked how your installations are “psychologically dangerous,” and you said…“for me, because nothing is preset, I feel that it reveals a lot about what I’m going through at the moment.”
JP: I said exactly the same…
BS: You said exactly the same thing. If things are theoretically well thought-out then you’re in fairly safe territory. It’s like ,“I know my parameters and what the thing is going to look like.” So yeah, ten years doesn’t make any difference.
JP: She lies consistently…
BS: And with that….
JP: By the way, I don’t drink beer. I don’t know why I said that because I never ever drink beer.
BS: I was going to say, you don’t look like you drink beer.
JP: No, I never drink it. I think there are three lies in that thing, the first one, and then the cock crows, but no, the first one is that I don’t drink beer.
BS: But it was funny.
JP: It was funny. It was a joke, yeah.
END
Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 2
The following is the second part of the conversation between Judy Pfaff and BOMB Magazine’s Betsy Sussler that took place on March 3, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
BS: I wanted to ask you about the burning kits and drawing with fire. Given that fire is an all-consuming element that has connotations about being a life force and also leaving darkness in its wake while calling up images of hell, what is it like to draw with fire?
JP: It is the very coolest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ve always thought that artists are pyromaniacs and believed that they are orphans. I don’t know any artists who think of themselves as being the product of a mother and father. Fire is always major. I think the funniest thing about fire, and there’s a mischief in this, is that a gallery on 57th street—which is about as clean as you can get—the gallery owners just decided to leave until I was finished installing because they were having heart attacks because of the soot everywhere. They’ve got Hans Hoffmans in the back room and the soot was going through the ventilation system and it was fabulous because it’s carbon! Acetylene is very dirty stuff, but it’s the purest sort of soot. You know how Sumi ink is made by capturing the soot from candles? Well, like Sumi, acetylene has a velvety quality to it and if you touch it, it just falls.
BS: It’s like paint and graphite.
JP: Yeah, it’s like shadows. It’s beautiful, beautiful stuff. You can’t focus on it so you sink into it, like a lovely spacelessness or something. It’s nice.
Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 1
The following interview took place at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library on March 3, 2008, following a screening of the Art:21 episode Romance. Featured artist Judy Pfaff spoke with Betsy Sussler, Editor-in-Chief of BOMB magazine.
BETSY SUSSLER: Hi everyone, I’m really pleased to be here, not only with Judy, but also with Art21. Both Art21 and BOMB magazine are about presenting the artist’s voice and developing ideas through conversation. And at BOMB, we do in-depth interviews between artists about the creative process. BOMB interviewed Judy almost ten years ago in 1999, and actually the woman who interviewed her, Mimi Thompson, is here tonight. I thought I would start my series of questions by reading one of the questions that Mimi posed to Judy ten years ago and take it from there. It’s still certainly apropos…
JUDY PFAFF: Are you going to read the answer?
BS: I thought I would let you answer it and then at the end of our talk I would read the answer that you gave ten years ago. And really, you are not required to give the same answer. So in your interview with Mimi you described your installation work as “psychologically dangerous,” which is a very interesting question given the piece that we just saw. And what Mimi wanted to know then, I also want to know now, which is, what did you mean by “psychologically dangerous”?
JP: I’m trying to put myself back there. I have a feeling that what was happening then is that the works were so spontaneous and so of-the-moment because there was not a lot of censoring going on, and because I listened to everybody and saw how much self-awareness they have and how brilliant they are. I don’t have that going for me. It’s sort of like the clock is ticking and it’s really ticking the moment the work is being done. I can read the work sometimes, especially later, and think, oh my god, I was a mess or that this particular thing was happening or that the exhaustion is in the work. There’s stuff in the installation that I don’t really want to put in there, but I think it gets in there. Maybe I was speaking about that. Continue reading »
Josiah McElheny | “The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown”
EXCLUSIVE: Josiah McElheny discusses his installation The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown (2007) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the history of Modernism and the impact it has made on society, aesthetics, and contemporary thought.
Josiah McElheny is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: What drew you to the architect Bruno Taut and his secret society of architects? How did early modernist practice become a touchstone for your work The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown?
MCELHENY: This set of architects, this secret society called the Crystal Chain, they laid the foundations for the modern world as it’s been built today. They basically set up the structures for all the modern architecture that exists. The group’s whole portfolio of drawings was about an impossible architecture, of trying to push something that could be translated into practical things. Just to draw a picture of a different world. Continue reading »
The Confluence Project looks for volunteers
Season 1 artist Maya Lin’s Confluence Project is looking for volunteers during June and October 2008 to complete a trail at Sandy River Delta in Oregon, which leads to Lin’s Bird Blind installation. Lin’s Confluence Project was born in 2000, when she was asked to create a series of installations along the Columbia River basin to commemorate the bicentennial of the journey of the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, which ran from Chief Timothy Park to Cape Disappointment. Maya Lin was asked by local Native American tribes to rethink the meaning of the expedition by creating art pieces on the same trails that were minutely described by these travelers 200 years ago.
If you are interested in collaborating in this ongoing project or to see Maya Lin’s online video explaining the project herself, visit www.confluenceproject.org
Barry McGee video on ArtTalk
Watch this two-part conversation between artists Aaron Rose and Barry McGee(Season 1) on VBS’s ArtTalk. While the video features live shots of McGee’s artwork and installations, the interview subjects are recast as animated robotic talking heads, as though the dialogue was fed into a Speak & Spell. As elusive and reluctant to talk about his work as ever, here McGee lets his artwork literally speak for itself.
All About “Fundred” | Interview with Mel Chin part 2
The following conversation concludes Art21’s interview with Season 1 artist Mel Chin about his national collaborative artwork, Paydirt/The Fundred Dollar Bill Project. Read Part 1, published last Friday, here.
ART21: Take us to the next step. You’ve talked about the collection but talk about the next part—what happens after the collection? Once the truck leaves North Carolina, what happens?
MC: No, we’re going to start in New Orleans. We’re waiting till we have [$300,000,000 Fundred dollars, the amount equivalent to the cost of the landscape project]. The car will leave New Orleans and go through this 15,000-mile, maybe even 20,000-mile drive, slowly across the country, with a team of relay drivers and a chase car and a video camera that will be passed to the next team.
They’ll stop at schools [Collection Centers]; they’ll pick up the artwork and respectfully catalog it. So eventually [the armored truck] will work its way around this very strange route because, again, it’s based on the way people are scattered. Finally, it will roll up to D.C., where we will stop at the Federal Reserve and ask for even exchange first. I have it from inside sources the Federal Reserve will probably not give us even exchange. That’s inside sources only. But then we’ll take it to the steps of Congress. We’re there to ask for an even exchange, and not necessarily just cash, but for processes that we think will probably cost this much to transform a city in need. And if we transform that city in need, its gift back will be the cure for cities all over America that have this problem.
Billions have already been spent in New Orleans and trillions are spent on the war. The cost we’re talking about, if you want to go the negative way, is one day in Iraq. But it’s also the cost of that bridge over the Mississippi or five cloverleaf interchanges. So if you think about it as an engineering project, it’s trivial, really. It’s trivial. Offset is what’s important to Congress.
All About “Fundred” | Interview with Mel Chin part 1
The following interview with Season 1 artist Mel Chin took place in late February 2008 at Art21’s offices. Part 2 will be published on Monday. Stay tuned for further information on Mel Chin’s presentations at next week’s National Art Education Conference in New Orleans, LA.
ART21: Could you explain how the Fundred Dollar Bill project came about, what it is, and what “Fundred” means?
MEL CHIN: I was in Houston, and I ran into a good friend, Rick Lowe, who said, ‚Äúwe‚Äôre going to New Orleans to do something.” It was six months after Hurricane Katrina. He was talking about the New Orleans Biennial. And I remember telling him, “that‚Äôd be great.” But half the population was gone. I was thinking about art from a community point of view, as Rick does. We had an interesting conversation about it. I said to Rick, “let‚Äôs go.” Rick and I were part of discussions with Transforma Projects, arts people from all over the country that met in New Orleans to come up with a response to the tragedy. So we toured and we looked, but we mostly conceptualized about what we could do.
So the project really came about this way. I was in the Ninth Ward, and I was overwhelmed. There was no more water, but I was flooded with an emotional and psychological response that was uncommon for me as a creative person. I felt hopeless, because I felt there was nothing I could do.
Then, you had the debris and the evidence and the remains of who knows what? I don’t know. And no one else knew, either. And so I left. I remember going to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to receive an honorary degree. I didn’t want to go, because I felt compelled by the tragedy of this magnitude to move into really dramatic action, but I didn’t know what I could possibly accomplish. Whatever it was, it had to be meaningful.
Conversations | Ursula von Rydingsvard with Martin Friedman part 2
The second half of the conversation between Ursula von Rydingsvard and Martin Friedman that took place on February 3, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library. It concludes with questions from the audience.
Q: Before you start a piece, do you mathematically figure out how it would be stabilized when it was completed? Or does everything just come together and stabilize it as it goes along and you just hope it doesn’t topple when it’s finished?
UVR: Well I‚Äôd never made a model. I had to in a couple of situations where there were budgets involved, and there was this state that wanted to know exactly what was being done. I throw the models away. I‚Äôve only made them twice or three times in my life. I never make drawings for my pieces. But if I do make a drawing, I make [it] on the floor of the studio right before I start building. And the process of not knowing just where it‚Äôs going to go, just how high it‚Äôs going to be…you know, sometimes I have the form in my head, sometimes it‚Äôs vague, and sometimes it‚Äôs a little bit more clear that I go toward. But to have things in your head and to realize them are two completely different worlds. So the things you originally have in your head had to change as you build, because the material makes real demands. Then what it ends up looking like makes real demands in terms of what else you need to do; that‚Äôs different from what you originally thought. But your question is about the engineering end.
MF: Well, it’s intuitive.
UVR: Intuitive. Instinctively…Tom Carruthers, you‚Äôre here, right? Talk about how the engineering was figured out. In other words, my pieces never fell over, but neither were they ever engineered.
TOM CARRUTHERS: We did have that one piece that Cantor Seinuk did, the engineering one. You remember that?
UVR: Well how could I forget?
Conversations | Ursula von Rydingsvard with Martin Friedman part 1
The following interview took place at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library on February 4, 2008, following a screening of the Art:21 episode Ecology. Featured artist Ursula von Rydingsvard spoke with Martin Friedman, Director Emeritus of the Walker Art Center and lifelong curator, writer, and critic.
Martin Friedman: First of all, congratulations to Art21 on the most extraordinary choice of artists. They certainly managed to make the definition of “ecology” quite elastic. Which really brings me to the big question: Ursula, are you an ecologist?
Ursula von Rydingsvard: I’m not sure why I’m in this category. I’m the one who cuts the trees down. I do, however, work with a lumber company which does replant. I just do my artwork. I don’t think I’m an ecologist, no.
MF: Well, let’s see…in the simplest terms, “ecology” has to do with interrelated systems in nature that depend upon one another to change and evolve and so forth. And I think that Mark Dion’s work, as illustrated by that great sacred log, most approximates that definition. There are very few artists who I think would want to be described as ecology-minded; there’s something slightly pious about that.
UVR: Well, there are so many causes that are so good, but I have to make a decision as to what it is that I want to do with my life, and I made that 35 years ago. It’s just a commitment that can’t be partial. In a way, you go into some place where you can’t afford to worry about things that you have a very limited amount of control over. But beyond that, it’s having a need that seems to surpass other needs for me to make these objects.
