A Correspondence with Julie Lequin

Two years ago French-Canadian artist Julie Lequin found herself on the road, about to turn thirty, and looking back. The experience inspired Top 30, a multidisciplinary video project condensing each year of her life. Effervescent with humor, woe, error, and play, Top 30 paws the line between autobiography and fiction. A generous helping of selections from this work in progress along with stills, watercolors, and Julie’s thoughts appears below.—Elaine Bleakney

Top 30 (Chapter 28), 2010; work in progress

AL
How did Top 30 become a formal project for you? Did the traveling you were doing at the time inform the way you shaped this work?

JL
I started thinking about Top 30 while attending a two-month residency in Nebraska during the winter of 2009. Nebraska was drastically different from what I had romanticized. I was expecting fields of corn filled with snow, incredible finds at thrift stores, unexpected fun conversations at music concerts. Instead the streets were grey, I shopped at Walmart, and there was zero social stimulation. I was stuck with boredom. Every Sunday was a tragedy because everything was closed. I was mad at myself for going for a residency in Nebraska. I was twenty-nine at the time and I started thinking I would be thirty in the spring…I was curious about what had “happened” to me all these years. I tend to have ideas for projects awhile before working on them.

Traveling has shaped some parts of this work. Yet traveling has also uninspired me. For instance I spent three months at Les Récollets in Paris in the fall of  2010. I was having the hardest time working on Top 30 there. I was lonely in a gold castle. The apartment and studio space I was given for the residency were amazing but I was miserable and found it hard to connect with Parisians. So while I was in Paris I visited Les Puces, walking everywhere, looking at clothes and architecture. I felt more like an observer and than a maker of something. Since returning from Paris I’ve made the decision to work at home in Montreal, and it has been good since.

AL
Disconnections from people and places are so vital in your work. And difficulty in communication—would you write a bit about the story you chose to represent your twenty-eighth year? How did this story become the one that you wanted to tell?

JL
The choices I made in telling this story came very naturally. I received my MFA from the Art Center in Pasadena right before turning twenty-seven. I found graduate art school quite challenging, especially the social aspect of the program. The year after grad school was way more difficult and awkward (finding work, looking for the energy to work by myself in a studio, feeling a bit alone: no one looking at my work). Twenty-seven was a low point for me.

At twenty-eight, I moved in to a house in Highland Park with three roommates I didn’t know. The housemates were not artists. I felt safe, loved. They were interested in my projects and in me: they gave me back the energy and will to work.

Roommates, 2009;pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 28

At that time, it was very hard as a Canadian citizen to find work in the United States (unless I was an artist-assistant, something I was not interested in doing). I decided to try the residency path. I didn’t know anyone who had done that before, but I thought it could lead me in an interesting direction. I loved L.A. (still do) but I didn’t see myself there at thirty. And I wasn’t ready to move back to Montreal yet. I sent applications and everyday I would frantically wait for the mail man. He ended up bringing positive news (I got in to a few programs).

Disconnections from people and places was important (and still is), but I manipulate what you see by romanticizing, adding some fiction, editing. My reality is less dramatic.

Top 30 is autofiction, very different from my past projects Car Talk or True Stories. There are no goofy characters and less HA! HA! humor. There is still humor though, and that’s what keeps me working. I spend so much time with my projects and it’s important that I feel something like humor when I illustrate, write, and record my story. In a way, it’s pretty didactic, but that’s how I hope my work can relate to a diversity of viewers.

I understand how someone can feel and act, if they can’t fully express themselves. I am very interested in wordplay, mispronunciation, and translation. And even more now, as I live in Montreal (a fully bilingual city) where everybody speaks Franglish. Half of Top 30 will be in French (year zero to year fifteen), and the other half will be in English (sixteen to thirty), with subtitles.

AL
Speaking of wordplay, I love how “strike of mini-joys” ends the story in Chapter 28. The line has a way of feeling like confetti falling into the piece.

When you mention how it feels when someone can’t fully express herself—I would like to hear more of your thoughts about that. Do lines like “strike of mini-joys,” when they come to you in English, help smooth the difficulty of being understood in a way? Does having a different language to work within create a need to talk about your personal experience?

JL
When I write my narration, I first make a list of things I want to say. Then I think of the illustrations that will go with these things, making written notes about them on the printed list. Sometimes I just make up an expression based on an image (a drawing) I had envisioned. If I can understand the phrasing, even if it sounds weird, I assume that the viewers will be able to understand as well. (Or they won’t and they will imagine something else.) Like I said before Top 30 is bilingual and now I am writing in French. The process is similar but when I work in my native language, I feel like there is less play.

I Wanted to Become a Secretary, 2010; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 17

I moved to San Francisco in the fall of 2001 to do a post-bacc certificate at the Art Institute. I barely spoke English at the time. I remember arriving with one red suitcase, checking in at the hostel for a week, and looking for a place to live in the Mission.  I could barely make a phone call in English. I had to use of a lot of charm, pizzazz, and really I had to learn to repeat expressions the way I heard them. Also I had to work on my accent in order to be understood. So basically I had to perform in my everyday. I wanted to communicate (I enjoy people) and it was so hard without words. I had to rely on body language, facial expression, and making my eyes speak. The year I was in San Francisco I learned a lot of English but I also developed a lot of  “acting” skills without realizing it.

At the same time I became interested in storytelling. I did my undergraduate work in painting and I was growing bored of making abstract paintings. I lost the fun. In San Francisco I started observing people and there was always a spark happening. I would try to describe to my patient roommates what I had seen. In order to keep their attention, I had to be funny, quick, and I had to reenact what had happened. So that’s basically how ideas about storytelling and performance started.

AL
When working on Top 30, do you imagine an ideal viewer, a person or persons you are talking to?

JL
I don’t imagine my ideal viewer, I just have an idea of an audience.

AL
Making lists comes up a few times in your stories. Do you have any memory about when you first started making lists and/or why? How did list-making became part of your creative process, rather than something mundane or behind-the-scenes?

JL
I remember my mother making lists when I was a kid. She had her own business and there was always something for her to do: a grocery list, a list of people to call, a list of things to write in a contract. She was writing a list and then she would lose it. I would laugh at her but nowadays I lose my lists too, and it’s terrible when it happens. (I recently lost the list of songs for the kids starring in Top 30. I had worked so much on this piece of paper! I found it again in a flat box full of drawings after I had stopped searching for it.)

Anxieties (as a Nice List), 2008; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 28

Making lists became part of my life when I started learning English. I would look up the words of the things I needed to do or say in order to be more efficient in English. The process stayed when I attended graduate school. I was having a lot of flash ideas for projects and I was afraid to lose them. I would scribble each idea down and leave the list by my studio door.

To me lists have the potential to be incredibly narrative driven, insightful, and poetic—they can hold so much. Including lists in my art-making became more of an obvious choice for me after I made the book from my project The Ice Skating Tree Opera.

Top 30 (Chapter 29), 2010; work in progress

AL
Thinking about process, how did you go about choosing the girls and women who sing a song from each year of your life in Top 30?

JL
This is such a simple but complex question.

I was selective with the choice of singers. They had to look nice on camera and I had to see something about them that reminded me of myself at their age. (As you can imagine, it was very subjective.) I dressed them up with old clothes of mine or clothes I got at the thrift store—the clothing had to match the wallpaper background. Also—very important—I had to get along with the singer, we had to have a connection. I wanted to feel confident enough to give them directions and I wanted them to feel good on camera (even if they were nervous or shy.) I met with everybody once or twice before filming to get to know each other and rehearse. I kept repeating to them that mistakes were good.

Kelly, video still from Chapter 29

It was incredibly easy to recruit singers when I started the project in Los Angeles because everyone’s secret dream in L.A. is to be a star. Then I tried to search for singers in Paris (when I was in residency there) and it was an epic failure.

In Montreal the search went pretty smoothly. I noticed that the English-speaking schools were really into my project and forwarded my call to many of their students. I got a lot of help from people who had randomly heard of the project. (Strangers have such kind and generous hearts.)

Working with friends is very tricky. But I make exceptions in this project. For example, I’ve asked my friend Roxanne to be on camera with her daughter Colette to film the chapter for age one. At night Roxanne becomes Donzelle, a French-Canadian rapper. We are filming her segment soon. I cannot wait for that.

AL
Did you find that you were talking with your singers about the project at large? If so, did you find any new illumination about Top 30 during your collaborations with them?

JL
I started filming the people closer to my age and went gradually in descending order. I wasn’t sure how to talk to a twenty-year-old and a fifteen-year-old about the project. I figured that if I took it slow, gradually, the words would come. (They did.)

For the teenagers I said a tiny bit in order not to overwhelm them. They ended up going online and seeing clips of my work. For some of the kids, we would spend a few hours together because their parents were at work. It was really fun, something like a theme park. “A Day in the Studio with Julie.” We would rehearse, film, have popsicles, draw, go out and try on shoes, read graphic novels at the store.

Sometimes the singer would ask me why I picked this song or why I picked that outfit, and while explaining I would have to take notes because the question would make me remember an event from the past.

While organizing and collecting the clothes for each singer, I remembered being a preppie in my teen years. I had totally forgotten. I still like prep clothes and I LOVE the quest of searching for them at thrift stores. I would have never worn used clothes when I was a teen, I was way too proud. Also, now I cut my bangs myself—the opposite of prep.

Margo, video still from Chapter 12

One singer (Margo, twelve years old) asked me where I would usually listen to the song by Jean Leloup I had asked her to sing and I saw myself sitting in the middle row of the yellow school bus. This image reminded me of my cat (his name was Minou) who disappeared for a whole week when I was that age. Everyday after school my dad and I would go on walk around the perimeter of our property calling Minou, Minou. We thought we could hear cat meows but that was just crazy…there was no cat anywhere. We thought we might be going insane from sadness. A few days went by, Minou wasn’t back, and the meows persisted. My dad and I kept going out to find Minou, and we realized that the cat was actually stuck in a fifty-foot-tall tree by the river, one kilometer from our house. Someone with a big ladder truck came (either firemen or the person who cut trees) and Minou returned. He didn’t run away again.

Appeller Minou, Minou, Minou, 2011; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 11

AL
In working with autobiographical material, do you ever experience anxiety that you’re misremembering? You mentioned before how awful it felt to lose that list of songs/singers—does forgetting part of your life cause you anxiety or pain?

JL
I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with a ball of stress on fire in my belly from being scared not to complete Top 30 on time. Or not finding a four-year-old singer (the search is still on.) But I’m not scared of misremembering. Not at all. I hope I don’t sound light-headed.

I think this is the charm of autofiction: I can do whatever I want with my narrative. Sometimes I misremember on purpose an episode I would rather forget than go deeply into. Or I go into fiction because it’s more fun to tell than the everyday.

AL
Do you ever have anxiety about how you represent others in your projects? Have there been experiences when someone mentioned in one of your projects had objections to the way you portrayed them?

JL
Well I remember on a few occasions that people were not “satisfied” or “intrigued” with the way I portrayed them.

1. My Dad in my submission to This American Life. He didn’t like anything about his character. In the project, I tell how my dad would pressure me to apply for a job at Cirque du Soleil. He had all these big hopes for my future and when I ask him in the project what is he doing today, he replies: “Oh I am just waiting to die, Julie.” He didn’t see any resemblance in the portrait I made of him with a captain’s hat.  I personified him as more “pessimistic” than he is in real life. But still he said: “I never said such a thing, Julie.” I had to explain that some aspects of his character were exaggerated to make the story funny.

2. I sent an image of the mother character from True Stories, Almost to my mom. She was rather insulted about the look.  She said: “I don’t look like that. Where did you get your inspiration from?” Her unhappiness didn’t last long though. And now every time a picture of this character is printed in a magazine, she is ecstatic and says “my picture is going to be in a magazine.” Ha! ha!

Mom Character, 2010; video still from True Stories (Almost)

I am usually not nervous about representing others in my projects because there’s always a bit of fiction added to the character. Generally my friends want to have a part in my work—they like it. For my next project, I’m designing a character for my boyfriend. He’s very good at newscaster voices.

AL
I wonder if Joyce Maynard will watch your video of Chapter 29.

JL
Oh yeah funny you ask about Joyce because we have been emailing lately, so she’s been on my mind. (I never told her that I mention her in the video…) She has a very good sense of humor and she probably understands autofiction better than anyone else.

Top 30 (Chapter 30), 2010; work in progress

AL
I’m curious about your influences. You mention Ghost World—is Daniel Clowes someone you like to read?

JL
YES I used to love Ghost World. I was amazed with the resemblance between the characters in the book and the film.

I am inspired by the morning radio podcast I listen to everyday on Radio-Canada (but they talk so much that I can’t listen to it in the morning), by conversations I overhear in the Metro, by people I see at the grocery store or the public library. The Ethicist and Savage Love are blogs and podcasts I like. I just enjoy the question-answer dynamic.

A great place for me is the thrift store where I usually get conversations with people I don’t know and weird outfits that I can run in the sewing machine. I am also inspired by images I see online and fashion blogs. I keep a file on my desktop of curious-interesting stuff. I try to stay away from art magazines as I find them depressing and not impressive.

Specimen tissue (fabric) #1, 2011; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 3

All my books have been in boxes since June 2008—the time when I started doing residencies. A few weekends ago, I visited my storage (read: my parent’s apartment and garage), and got Matthew Brannon’s book out. I was happy to discover him again. His work is a mix of illustration and wordplay. I like his balance and structure.

This weekend I came upon this—Auerbach’s craft is so clever! It conveys a message. Her aesthetic is handmade yet calculated. I met her when I was living in L.A. and it is a pleasant surprise to see her work online.

I also love artist’s lectures. I really enjoy witnessing artists present themselves to a large audience. Tonight I go to see John Currin’s talk at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. I am curious to hear what he has to talk about for an hour. I wish there were most artists lectures in Montreal.

Generally, I like work that shows a skill, has a bit of humor and some narrative. I can’t say what artists I am really looking into right now but yesterday I stumbled on this site and I liked what I saw. It is fresh.

AL
I love you how you milk humor out of the question/answer dynamic (Car Talk makes me laugh especially.) Was there anything notable about John Currin’s talk last night? I’m curious about your take on his presentation.

JL
John Currin’s talk was light, honest, and generous. He kept referring to his wife—the whole time, she seems to be telling him what to paint a lot. I kind of liked that. He was dressed with a pastel-colored button down shirt, coat (with a little scarf in the front pocket), and a tie. (I am thinking of making his portrait.) It was terribly hot and humid in Montreal yesterday, I could not believe his outfit, though I enjoyed it. He looked like a business man. I liked that he talked about his personal life while showing his artwork. (Example: “I was in a terrible relationship at that time, so this is why the painting looks like that.” Or “my studio mate and I are butt naked in this painting.” The painting shows two men on a boat fishing.)

I enjoyed seeing his early paintings versus the pornographic work (which I didn’t know about). He showed the porn paintings very fast, like he was shy. Also, there was a set of plates that kept coming back in some paintings…he said: “oh I just put them down there, because there was room left at the bottom of the painting.” I loved that.

Fancy John Currin at the Musée Looking Like My Dad When He Was Young, 2011; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 2

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Julie Lequin’s Top 30 will be shown at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida from October 7 until November 24, 2011. She is the 2011 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. A book documenting her project The Ice Skating Tree Opera is available from 2nd Cannons. For more information about Julie and her projects, please visit julielequin.com.

“In what furnace is thy brain?” Zach Savich’s new book of prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand, takes Blake’s question to another interior, where one is in love with the world, beholding others there. This burning lyrical book, addressed to one who would be its intimate (and interspersed with photographs by Jeff Downey), is essential for those of us who care about art. And while not expressly about visual art, the double flame of art and writing (struck by Wang Wei, Twombly, Bishop, and others) catches here. —Elaine Bleakney

In a strange year in my life I found myself living in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the birthplace of volleyball flushed with defunct mills. Ladders lean out second-level windows, festive deflated inflatables serrate yards, a man shakes his hair dry. Tarp over a skylight. And so many fences I love that run along part of a house then simply stop, keeping nothing out. And fences made from boards merely leaning against wire.

A load of cabbage dumped in an alley on a torqued mattress.

My father said you can put canvas over barbed wire if you ever need to climb it but why would I and if I did would I have canvas or the time to think of it. But I love most his need to teach such. There was an elf in the raspberry bush with a time car.

I want to write you a beautiful book of prose, the kind you will love but find best for carrying, never reading. Yet can you please think of it as the book ever ripe for your bag or for sitting with as though this may be the time finally or you can use it to save a seat? Time and temperature the same on the bank clock. I watched John Wayne movies with the bartender, summer I went out at dusk to exercise my crutches.

We are bound by: wanting to assert, insist, continually prove that this world is enough, is everything we want, if we are willing to want it enough; and wanting to say we can transform it, incite ourselves, find the better ongoing or underlying momentarily hovering through. Yeast is a metaphor and also a fence’s paint that looks most like the color you want the instant it comes off the brush. But still how the boards absorb and absorb and the bucket.

I love of course the fences that to go over you may simply walk around.

As I love these lines around my eyes: I feel you could cut a key to match them and it would unlock a door I have been standing before unknowing, perhaps in a flash as a man “struck by lightning on the highway for an hour before somebody stopped to help.” In Holyoke I watched a man at the bar with a hand against his forehead I thought first holding his head up drunk but really he was holding a bandage on. The hardware man came in and the mailman. The guitar player asked everyone to move to the far end of the bar to hear.

I honestly once believed disaster was through all only sometimes unmanifest yet. You would be wrong to think I mean anything about substances. I named rock formations: this one is known as Leda of the Rocks. And sought to find them. What is the name of this forest? You know there is a river there by the trees there. You can just walk around each one to reach the river. The emergency exit is only painted on. And the room behind it full of old mattresses.

I spin a bit to find where I am.

What I have found across the country is commonalities of desire we have no name for. The professor asked me my thoughts about the free verse versus formalism debate so I stuttered, but then at dinner later I understood his actual curiosity and hope for everything under. I want you to read this but I want you to read this after you have read every other word I have written. The project is to project. A life projection. Such as insurance agents have been known to misplace and find they must rely instead on extant anecdotes or a very long “party sub.”

And while I know my friends will read me I have not fully considered the blunt audience of small children who older will find a shelf their parents collected and forgot for life. I remember when your only word was Degas, little Esme, like his reincarnation or one summoning it. We hunted dragonflies on the ebullient yard. Most of what your parents and I have said to each other we have forgotten or would now disagree with so please say. English is a second language. The man we met late the night before left three white fish on a post. Honey wine.

The way around may be through but the way through is then also around, I ventured, and that of course anything I say is actually an expression of a belief (desire) under it, so that when the professor said my work was too experimental and the professor said my work was too traditional each meant really something he or she loved that mine was not though they did not understand I too love what he or she loved—and of course would you trust an artist who did not think of herself as an experimenter  traditionalist or did not say art is the reconcilation innovation of the imagination and time which continually expires among our illiteracy? But everything was better in the kitchen much later.

Plastic bags over our shoes to walk to the school bus left in a field. Meant there was snow. Her druggie brother sharpened the Thanksgiving knife wildly.

Another problem is that we do not learn chronologically, we know of Modernism before knowing what it reacted to and also do not understand what we are reading because we learn to understand anything because of the reading, thus the most influential parts of author x to me were features now that do not seem features of author x but of my life in one year I lived for.

And not to mention those who mistake technical effect for historical meaning.

And those who confuse technical expression and the sensibility homesteading there.

And those who don’t understand what I mean when I say I have only ever written from not sleeping or a sense that it could save my life, honestly, that I understand is not exactly sensible or true but that I trust and desire and try to be accountable to withstanding.

And the altitudes at which air itself becomes hued.

More than the fallacies of populism when we know what real need, desire, empathy, oppression, and censorship breed (the Ardent).

And shiver at those who can afford to say lighten up or act as though none of it matters, nonchalance is a taxidermied pike in the single remaining eye of the world, or who eliminate one or even two thirds of what we have for heart-brains because they lighten up. Where is the verve and the ought? Where is the cinnamon in the snake? Among the small targets many smally hit. While Hopkins called music “faith-heat.”

We find ourselves outside the stories. The loss of honor is the loss of pride. I feel myself a threshold. You and I, persistent cockfucks, have gained something we love through unconventional means now to preserve it I find myself wanting to summon conventions which run counter to all I love, much as any avant-garde enters a university’s humanist brick. To never become one who from excess of love of one thing does not recognize how that love is present, how that thing exists, in other furnaces, and I would like to be surprised.

You may have known me during the time I studied chronic pain and numbness, having experience of them and believing hewing to such states could render a closer honesty. And then the month I kept a pain notebook and a month later looked back and found it never mentioned pain. But described snow. Your inseam in words. Posthumous, terminal hour I preferred certain crosswalks at. To be connoisseur of nothing you can see. I love the moment of stutter most: speaking in the mosaic room, how I felt obliged to say beyond the limit of what I can easily say, the world’s oldest teenager, how the many square tiles come to a curve, your posture better in a field or the dark.

No—the stutter that goes on, not merely sound of fingers ethereal on strings or the breathing of the singer haunting the tape, we are not so weary and broken that merely any present voice will do, nor silence,but want the stutter and the going on with the aid of eyebrow or you can touch my neck, as clapping can keep time for a breaking voice, behold now the mosaic from a distance up to one mile. This cut will not heal without staples.

She said a perfect radio could find Moses in air. Then, as a match loosed down a well achieves its most telling sense by going dark, she closed her eyes.

The point of studying landscape is you then realize everything is landscape as the point of staring into eyes was to then see anything as it was looking back, much as when you realize you have been quoting something you’ve never read or someone indicates there’s a bit of lemon in the stew. I saw the lichens then everything in relation to. Blossomed where paintballs primed the bigbox stores.

The moment still life painting shifted to accommodate pouring wine, a spun coin, candle flame, the entire snowy field at dusk. Do you have the time?

More and more, I appreciate the stone tower’s clock that strikes once for half past and doesn’t bother with the hours. Even what doesn’t repeat is a pattern. You can recognize the horizon because you are standing there. Remember when we lived at the sea?

A Holyoke fence, then, is anything you believe obstructs until you find you are examining it from every angle to figure out how to get through it and see you have already gone around. I have been trying not to quote but find myself thinking of Roethke, since I have never not been in love:

What lover keeps his song

I sigh before I sing

I love because I am

A rapt thing with a name

You know I rely too much on memory so cannot tell you how the punctuation goes or if I have ever read those lines before. How about a little more life in your life? Could you go for some right now? Also: there is no Hell, only your body, and the pre-emptive necrophilia that true love is. Think of a tin can phone and you are the string between them.

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Expedient, efficient—an airport constructs hope for our motion. To convey us to the sky. When airports fail (as they did so thoroughly this winter), stranding us in their gates, lines, and rules, we are where we want most not to be: anxious to be somewhere else. When art is there with us, how do we experience it? Writers and frequent travelers Tyler Meier and Joyelle McSweeney took up At Length’s call to look inside an airport—Port Columbus and Detroit Metro, respectively—and talk about the public art experiences they find there.—Elaine Bleakney

photo courtesy of the Lichtenstein Foundation

You Are Here and Not Here: On Manacles, Lichtenstein, Lightening Bolts, Ohio, Auden, Winter, and Detours
Tyler Meier

It’s winter in Ohio: twenty-five degrees, a pure tin sky, trees like paused tumbleweed. À la carte moodiness. Each car drags a small cloud around behind it, everywhere it goes, as if we’re all B-league Apollos. It’s a time when writing about anything, especially about art, feels false, a forced truth, whispers from a bitter tongue. And yet.

I travel for my job a handful of times a year, out of the breadbasket of Columbus, Ohio, to New York (LaGuardia) mostly; though periodically elsewhere. Port Columbus International Airport (can one not giggle saying that?), sweet CMH, is a wildly easy place to get through.  I have to imagine it’s as easy as airports come—open, big, Midwestern.  Nice.  Moderately trafficked. To get anywhere on B concourse you have to pass the shine of Honda assembly line offerings: an Accord radiating like a shooting star, a Valkyrie motorcycle with chrome so ample it seems like mirrors forged into the shape of motorcycle, past the competing smells from Ohio institutions Max and Erma’s and Bath and Body Works, and on toward security.  No representations of cornfields or soybeans, though both are farmed in large scale in central Ohio and would be appropriate.  One does have to deal with what decidedly does not feel Ohioesque just before entering the security swtichbacks—a twenty-five-foot tall sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstrokes in Flight.

The sculpture has some purchase on this place. Lichtenstein, born in Manhattan, studied art as both an undergrad and graduate at Ohio State, continuing on to work as an instructor. If you don’t hail from central Ohio, this is about as stout a central Ohio pedigree as one can get.  A finishing school of sorts for Midwestern undergraduate sensibilities, OSU is the four-year version of cultural submersion that listening to Prairie Home Companion for an hour is on Public Radio.  How Lichtenstein managed to be here for so long and yet maintain a significant place in twentieth century modern art is a testament to what I can only assume is a chameleon-like ability to participate in what seem like mutually exclusive cultural milieus.

Yet Columbus almost lost Brushstrokes in Flight. The story goes something like this: originally, the sculpture was placed outside the airport.  In the mid-eighties, Columbus’s then-mayor, Dana “Buck” Rinehart, supposedly tried to give the work away to Columbus’s sister city of Genoa, Italy.  Here’s an excerpt from a 1988 Columbus Monthly article by Emily Foster:

While the mayor was still on his travels to Genoa, Italy, and other stops in Europe, the Dispatch announced that he had given Roy Lichtenstein’s sculpture, “Brushstrokes in Flight,” to the people of Genoa.

Uh . . . what? He did what? Mouths all over town fell open as people read their morning papers or listened to the news on the way to work.

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said later. Boy, was it ever. Even his interpreter in Genoa, OSU romance languages professor Luciano Farina, was taken by surprise.“He said he was going to give them a representation,” Farina recalls of the mayor’s speech in Genoa. “But as he talked on, it became clear he was talking about the real statue.”

It was a very nice surprise to the Genovese. Farina talked later to the president of the university of Genoa and says, “I never saw such a sparkle in his eye. He practically had the site selected.”

But the surprise in Columbus was far different. When senior City Council member Maury Portman heard the news from Genoa, he responded, “He what?”

And hijinks ensued.  The art community in Columbus balked and then roared; this was suddenly a work of art invested with latent political capital (Rinehart was a Republican).  In 1998, the sculpture was moved indoors to its current location, guarding B concourse, like an inscription above a darkened way.  But rather than abandon all hope ye who enter here, the sculpture sings something warmer, more playful.  And it’s hard not to note this fact: Brushstrokes in Flight is what TSA stares at when they pat you down. It looms.

Maybe Ironize all hope, ye who enter here?

*

What to make of a representation representing a representation? Brushstrokes in Flight mimics painting, which represents something else in the first place. A twenty-five-foot-tall aluminum representation of yellow, red, blue, and white paint swipes, the sculpture forces you to think about the consequences of large-scale art.  When a physical event sparks an emotional response, our emotions are generally scaled to it.  A big dog is usually scarier than a small dog.  Finding a dollar and finding a thousand one dollar bills might do different things to your blood pressure.  A tiny Guernica has an entirely different politics.  Certainly Lichtenstein was interested in Pop Art’s inquisition (and periodic appropriation) of the culture, aesthetics, and physical scale of twentieth century American marketing culture.

In another sense, looking at Brushstrokes feels like you’re being forced to take the long way, a roundabout, a circumlocution for what might be more plainly or directly rendered.  The engineering part of your brain (the part that manages to assemble furniture and figure out new computer programs) might find Brushstrokes inefficient.  It is, perhaps, a hoodwinking—as in: Welcome to Port Columbus, fair traveler. Here’s your first detour.

But what if “inefficiency” is the point? This puts in mind another detour:  W.H. Auden’s “One Circumlocution,” a poem about language and intention and meaning (and so way-finding, and humor, and loss, and recognition)—one of my favorite lenses for thinking about art and art-making. It’s a poem I’ve memorized in the car while commuting an hour each way to work; a good one to have in the head because it fills out over time, becoming deeper, wider, more exciting. The poem starts like this:

Sometimes we see astonishingly clearly
The out-there-now we are already in;
But that is not what we are here-for really.

All it’s to-do is bound to re-occur,
Is nothing therefore that we need to say;
How then to make its compromise refer

To what could not be otherwise instead
And has for being as its own to be,
The once-for-all that is not seen, nor said?

Art’s compromise—the representing it is doing (and therefore, the bastardizing it is doing, inherent in the act of representation) is the problem, the riddle we as audience solve, and one through which we might get a fleeting glimpse of the possibilities of a particular art experience.  The compromise is an act of creation.  How to make the “compromise refer // to what could not be otherwise instead / and has for being as its own to be”?  How can an artwork be anything other than what it is?  Comprised of the starkest stuff, these opening lines of Auden’s poem pose the problem of any art experience that plays with our emotions. How does one talk about the experience?  How to use words, the right words to articulate?

And then how is it possible that art can be objectively exactly what it is, while being subjectively whatever I want it to be or think it is, or whatever Stephen Hawking thinks it is, or what my two-year-old son thinks it is?  What seems mutually exclusive isn’t; another circumlocution in our sense-making faculties.  This is Auden’s subtext—the inclusivity of both art-making and experiencing a finished work of art. Either act has plural possibilities within its restrictions. This is what the first part of Auden’s poem reminds me, and of course, it’s the paradox: How can an artwork be both specific and simultaneously recurring or in recurrence, limited only by audience and space and time (all things abundant in airports)?  Auden’s poem ends this way:

One circumlocution as used as any
Depends it seems upon the joke of rhyme
For the pure joy; else why should so many

Poems which make us cry direct us to
Ourselves at our least apt, least kind, least true,
Where a blank I loves blankly a blank You?

So art (insofar as a circumlocution is a metaphor for art) assumes the trickery of ritual and the burden of faith, transmitted through the emotion it generates. The artifice of representation is the reminder of ourselves at our least apt, least kind, least true. The poem suggests that an art experience can be like pressing a bruise on the imagination at the same time it makes imagination possible—it’s a reminder: don’t forget who you are, oh swashbuckling you.  It’s a brutal whisper in your ears: here are your tethers.  Way-finders, those who travel, those who are between places, those busy taking the long way around—here’s a way to locate.  For better or worse, YOU ARE HERE.

And yet, an update, per Lichtenstein, via Auden: You are not here.  For its rambunctious circumlocutions (that bold color!), Brushstrokes feels like an invitation to play, in spite of oneself.  Brushstrokes is the fiddle player practicing dance tunes for a wake.  It’s a township worker mowing the county’s ditches who imagines for a moment that the roadside tiger lilies are orange juice popping in a hot skillet. It’s a chance to pay attention, and imagine for a second, while we can.  It’s a blank I loving a blank You, anyway, regardless, in spite of it all.

As I pass in and out of B concourse—there it is, full of suspended kinetic energy, taunting gravity; a paint swipe without a canvas like an angel without sky; some tomfoolery before the seriousness of the metal detector, out of context. I like Brushstrokes in Flight for all that it could be: here’s what a cup full of paint looks like falling to the ground when the man next to you bumps it during an animated, Ohio-volumed, overly personal Blackberry conversation; here’s an abstraction of any beautiful Ohio summer sunset, weirdly most striking from the parking lots of Walmarts and Home Depots; here’s what color looks like when it gets the spirit; here’s the logo on the shirt of a middle school soccer player on a team called the Lightning Bolts, after running through a blackberry patch.  Brushstrokes could literally be anything, which means that everything is absolutely, beautifully germane, absolutely relevant. You are here and not here. How at this moment, it is an answer, the answer to all of these questions:  Why on earth are you looking for something beautiful outside a Walmart?  Why do balls always get lost in the blackberries?  Why is color spirit?  What are you doing standing in an airport holding a cup full of paint?

**

Tyler Meier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI (online), Bat City Review, Forklift, Ohio, Indiana Review, jubilat, Thermos, and Washington Square Review. He works as managing editor of The Kenyon Review and co-directs KR’s Young Writers Program, a summer writing workshop for high schools students.  He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

***

photo by Celeste Schulman

In Transit, Sic(k) Transit: In Light Trouble (Tunnel) at the Detroit Airport
Joyelle McSweeney

All language becomes an alphabet of sites, or it becomes what we will call the air terminal between Dallas and Fort Worth.
—Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” 1967

In the Light Tunnel at the Detroit Airport I am thinking of that great theoretician of the twentieth century space, Robert Smithson. From his “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967):

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.ⁱ

Catastrophe, eyewear, and the phrase “cloud computing”—this “twenty-first” century contains the gimcracks and jetsam of previous notions of the future. We are rising into the ruins of twenty centuries’ worth of fantasies of wellness, health, wealth, progress, equality, perfectibility, communication.

Reading Smithson by this century’s blacklight, it’s amazing how rhetorics and motifs of failure—phrased as “entropy”—surface in the prose of an artist whose vision was so monumental, so seemingly positivist. Of suburbia, he writes, “Every site glides away towards absence. An immense negative entity of formlessness displaces the center which is the city and swamps the country.”ⁱⁱ Of Passaic: “I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of the science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams.”ⁱⁱⁱ

What’s striking about this image is not just that it’s depressing—“the future is lost somewhere in the dumps”—but that it turns the literal and temporal landscape into an assemblage, a heap of false, jejune things; specifically, it is a heap or dump of dead media and genres (newspapers, advertisements, sci-fi movies). Smithson proposes that Art might provide a counter to this entropy, but the essay finally concludes otherwise, because “sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost or enter the state of irreversibility.”

Emerging from this rhetoric of failure, then, is a rhetoric of the hidden, the occult. The future may be lost “somewhere in the dumps,” but this makes the dumps themselves the sites of the future, the sites of Art. The role of artists is to act as media on these sites: “One does not impose, but rather exposes the site—be it interior or exterior. Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa. The unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists.”^iv Entropy only runs one way, but the deathlessness, falseness, jejune-ness of these sites remarks them as spaces of irrational, unstable occult possibility. Interiors may be treated as exteriors and artists are possessed by media; without the need for photographic equipment, light, or chemicals, they themselves make exposures.

That is why, along with his Earth Art, displacements and non-sites and drawings and diagrams and films and proposals were all forms of Art for Smithson. Art is not so easy to locate in a single site; it is an alphabet of sites, uncannily animated, copying and revising itself, a terminal (or constant) between. Art is undead, not immortal; Art is the motion among media, among genres, among materials, among sites. As Smithson writes of the filmmaker Roger Corman, “His actors […] simply move through a series of settings and places and define where they are by the artifice that surrounds them. This artifice is always signaled by a ‘tomb’ or another mise en scène of deathlessness.” The result is that “Corman brings the infinite into finite things.”^v

Art brings the infinite into finite things. A terminal that does not terminate. An interminable terminal. A termite terminal. Infested with Art.

The Light Tunnel running between terminal A and terminals B and C in the Detroit airport is meant to serve a utilitarian purpose—to move passengers among terminals while distracting them with a light show. Yet its entropic productions place it in excess of this functionality. The light, music, and motion in the tunnel means it is not static, yet cannot productively advance; it is between—permanently between. Like Smithson’s “terminal between Dallas and Fort Worth,” it is a terminal that does not terminate but is a medium (another paradox). It exposes this by making itself medial in every direction—by bringing body after body into its conveyance (and ejecting these), by throwing nervy lightstorms up its walls, by emitting screeching and smears of music which emanate no-place and fill up everyplace, welling and draining. The passenger (one wants to write “prisoner”) passes through the tunnel, but without agency; she is immobilized, a victim to Art, at first one of its materials (a body passively put in motion) and soon one of its media. That is, the Light Tunnel itself is antic and contagious (“stupid and contagious,” to quote the poet); the tunnel features a button which may be pressed by passengers prone to seizures to “turn off” the light effect for the five minutes it takes to move through it.^vi The pain thus leaps from the Art to the passenger (Art’s passenger), creating a spasming counter-movement to the would-be utilitarian linearity of passage through a tunnel. The non-seizure-prone passenger still experiences a transfer of nerve signals both continuous with and formally mimetic of the light and music breaking all around her, irritating the walls.

Here, then is a work of Art that does not transcend but merely transmits. It brings the infinite into finite things—but not vice versa. It is a surfeit, an oversaturation. Art is in transit, transmits, transfers, appears ill, transfers an illness to the humans who pass through it as material and become its medium. As in Smithson’s treatment of Corman, the Light Tunnel “shows us the peripheral shell of appearances in terms of some invisible set of rules, rather than by any ‘natural’ or ‘realistic’ inner motivation.” Nothing motivates the Light Tunnel; the passengers that pass through it might even be the irritants that set off this irritating spectacle in its tissue. And like Corman’s actors, these passengers “reflect the empty center.” They are themselves unmotivated, “appear vacant and transparent, more like robots than people—they simply move through a series of settings and places and define where they are by the artifice that surrounds them.”^vii The passengers, Art’s passengers, Art’s patients, Art’s prisoners, are Undead—but, like the Undead, they are irritated, as they rise like an army into the century’s ruinous light.

_____

ⁱ “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1996. 72.

ⁱⁱ “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” (1968), Collected, 91.

ⁱⁱⁱ “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” (1967). Collected, 74.

^iv “A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not.” (1968). Collected, 96.

^v 90.

^viOr so claims Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport); I’ve never seen this button despite the many, many times I’ve endured the tunnel, so I imagine seizures are rampant.

^vii “A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not.” 90.

**

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two hybrid novels—the baroque noir Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky) and the sci-fi Flet (Fence Books)—as well as two books of poetry from Fence. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame, co-edits the small press Action Books, and contributes to the multi-authored blog, montevidayo.com. Her next book, Percussion Grenade: Poems and Plays, is forthcoming from Fence in 2012.

Catedral vegetal, 1957; gouache/paper, 38 x 27 in. Banco Nacional de Mexico

The closest I’ve come to wading the phantasmagoric realm of a Remedios Varo painting may be the time I kept my eyes open too long after swallowing an Ambien. The print in the book I’d been reading began to blur from the sedative, so I switched off my bedside lamp. My light bulb’s fluorescent coil continued to glow, though, and soon the furzy shapes of light transformed into a phosphorescent lynx. The creature hunched its albino fur in the darkness, looking both ethereal and carnivorous. I could see the individual, radiant hairs spoking from each feline ear. Above the lynx, the summer dress I’d hung from my coat hook morphed into a grim reaper. I yelped, “Patrick!” until my boyfriend crept into the bedroom to cover every visible glow (the light bulb, the alarm clock) with T-shirts so the room’s objects would stop animating. When I recall that Ambien-tinged landscape—part dark fairy tale, part haunted psychological projection—I’m reminded of the magical worlds of my favorite painter, the Spanish-born Mexican Surrealist Remedios Varo.

*

As it happens, Varo titled two similar paintings Catedral vegetal. Both works portray a cathedral comprised of tree-trunks and a vaulted canopy of branches and leaves as well as two figures seated inside a carriage pulled by a chimeric bird. In one of the paintings, Varo uses a range of warm colors (mostly umbers, oranges, and yellows) and exudes a whimsical tone. The other piece appears decidedly foreboding because one of the figures looks more ghoulish than humanoid, and because Varo employs only a single hue: a spooky, tea-colored sepia. I’m especially drawn to the starker, monochromatic piece—that forest scene layered in vapory shades of umber gouache. A wraithlike female figure forms the painting’s focal point, and her narrow chin and long nose hint at Varo’s interest in sly self-portraiture. The figure sits like a witchy, Spanish countess inside a slender, three-wheeled carriage—a kind of Elysian Ur-tricycle pulled by a giant pheasant. The bird—a hybrid creature—glides forward on a single metal wheel instead of two feet; its wings have been replaced with the white sails of a ship; and its breast and neck bear the carved, angular planes of a ship’s prow.

For the longest time, I’d stared at Catedral vegetal without noticing the second figure in the painting. I’d sent my mother a photocopy of the piece, as I was thinking of reprinting the work on the cover of my second poetry collection, and I wanted her opinion. Over the telephone, I could hear the steam rising from the spinach she’d been wilting in olive oil, and she murmured, “It’s beautiful, dear, but the ghost is…disturbing.” I couldn’t believe I’d missed it! Varo’s pale, willowy maiden leans from the carriage’s left window, and from the right side peers a wide-eyed, black apparition whose form is almost entirely blurred among the deepest shadows.

*

Varo was raised a Catholic by a devout mother and an agnostic father, and she attended school at a convent run by nuns. The rigid routine of life at the convent, however (all those prayers, confessions, meals, classes, and sewing sessions), clashed with Varo’s rebellious spirit. She broke the rules and stayed up late reading Edgar Allan Poe, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and the literature of mysticism. Afraid of tattle-tales, Varo sprinkled a thin dusting of sugar outside of her bedroom door, hoping to catch the dark footprints of spies.

It’s no surprise, then, to find that Varo breaks all sorts of rules when painting a cathedral: her structure refuses to follow either the laws of science or architecture. Instead, she creates a land of myth and magic where a whole forest assembles into the telltale shapes of a cathedral. It’s as if the mere presence of the woman and her weird ensemble triggers the woods’ response.

Throughout the painting, tensions teem between wispy, natural phenomena and the hard, architectural realm: Varo’s pheasant is part bird, part ship, and part unicycle; her tree trunks’ parallel lines morph into hefty Romanesque columns; the trees’ high branches tease a Gothic cathedral’s ribbed vaults from the vegetation. In the slanting angles of the carriage windows I see the umber shapes of flying buttresses, and even the sharp points of the forest’s canopy curve into an ogival arch. In architecture, every arch delineates a void.

*

In the great Anglo-Saxon elegiac poem, Beowulf, the anonymous bard frequently uses a kenning to describe the human body in architectural terms: banhus (“bone-house”). This ancient metaphor makes concrete the division between the physical body and the intangible spirit. In Varo’s Catedral vegetal—those spiritual woods—the border between internal and external gets trickier to pin down. Here, animals combine with objects, and cathedrals rove like open-air carnivals.

*

Gaston Bachelard tells us in The Poetics of Space that the house is a shelter for imagining. Upon a first glance, Catedral vegetal seems to contain only a single, childlike image of a house. The white carriage has flat, rectangular walls and a simple, triangular roof. After a closer look, though, the dark woods around the carriage begin to refract, like a hall of mirrors, multiplying the number of architectural shapes in the painting as well as intensifying their spiritual significance. Just watch as the imposing trees in the painting’s foreground and the middleground flank the carriage—the elements unite to form the façade of a Gothic cathedral. Such façades mean to stun approaching worshipers with architectural magnificence and impress upon them the grandeur of God.

Furthermore, central to the façade is the cathedral’s main portal. In the arch of the portal’s doorway, one usually finds a richly carved statue of the Madonna and child. Varo’s Madonna figure in the portal, however, holds no infant deity. Instead, the secondary figure seems more of a representation of the woman’s own ego: a double, a shadow, a grotesque and fearful twin. The symmetry of the two figures within the carriage resembles the two sides of a mirror, although the images do not in fact reflect each other—they’re opposite in both color and tone (and species).

In 1914, Otto Rank writes at length of the concept of the double, and first applies it to psychoanalysis. Freud takes up Rank’s notion of the doubling of consciousness in his own concept of the uncanny: “that form of terror that leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” “The double,” Freud continues, referencing Heinrich Heine, “has become an image of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.”

*

The word “cathedral” originates from the Latin cathedra (“seat” or “chair”), and may be defined as a Christian church that contains the throne of a bishop. In such a place of worship, there’s a clear hierarchy reinforced by the vast and vertical architecture: God’s “up there” and we’re “down here.” In Catedral vegetal, however, the vaulted tree-dome is a porous sieve—not a stone—and instead of a single bishop’s seat, there’s a shared power dynamic between a woman and a shadowy apparition. Varo not only displaces the patriarchal structure of the Church of Spain through her central female character, she challenges and complicates the Christian iconography by making her forest-dwelling figure more of a pagan fertility goddess, a Demeter or Gaia. Her spiritually-charged woods also shake up Catholic conventions, this time through conjuring the sacred groves of historical Druidism as branches seep through the cathedral, defying and softening its boundaries.

Varo’s father, Don Rodrigo Varo y Zejalbo, was similarly skeptical toward the institution of the Catholic Church. According to Janet A. Kaplan in Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, one story the artist liked to repeat about her father involved his irreverence toward the church’s pomp and ceremony. “As she remembered it,” Kaplan writes:

Don Rodgrigo was riding one day in a carriage when he noticed a crowd gathered alongside the road. On being told that they were awaiting the arrival of a bishop, he promptly stopped the carriage and, impersonating the prelate, he solemnly blessed the pious crowd himself, then slowly rode away.

Although Varo wasn’t especially close with her father, his legendary shenanigans seem in keeping with the subversive narrative at work in Catedral vegetal. Also, Varo’s memories of Don Rodgrigo’s drawings—those meticulous visions of space and structure he created as an engineer—may well have provoked her vibrant imagination.

*

My earliest memory of the uncanny involves a woman named Dawa, the Tibetan ayaa who helped care for my sister, Rebecca, and me as we grew up in New Delhi, India in the mid-eighties. Although Dawa wasn’t fluent enough in English to read to us from our beloved British storybooks, she had an imaginative knack for twisting familiar fairy tales into grotesque and frightening hybrids. The fairy tale Dawa called “The Three Little Pigs,” for instance, was grafted onto portions of “Cinderella,” Frankenstein, “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Maiden Without Hands,” and possibly some gory Tibetan folktales meant for more mature ears than my four-year-old sister’s and my seven-year-old brain.

At bedtime, Dawa would let us sip from her salty butter tea as she improvised a tale. In her story, three little pig sisters live beneath a princess’s pink canopy bed. The princess treats the pigs poorly, making them scrub the floor and embroider her various ball gowns. (I’m not sure how a hoofed being embroiders anything, but that’s beside the point.) She also starves them, so each night the pigs gnaw on the haughty princess’s fingertips while she sleeps. Soon the princess wakes with white skeleton hands—her palms and fingers have been entirely picked clean of flesh. When she realizes she now looks monstrous, she runs through the castle yowling and tearing at the oil paintings, golden harps, and velvet cushions with her bone-talons. Needless to say, the mangled princess drives away all of her suitors, excepting three princes, who decide the three tenacious pigs are most certainly worth marrying. By the end of Bizarro Storytime with Dawa, my sister and I would hug each other, trembling beneath our bedposts’ gauzy mosquito netting.

*

Curiously, Varo’s given name—Maria de los Remedios Varo y Uranga—has magical and spiritual underpinnings. Her mother, Doña Ignacia, chose the name “Remedios” in honor of the Virgen de los Remedios as a “remedy” meant to ward off painful memories of a previous daughter who had died. Varo, like her mother, was deeply superstitious; and I can’t help but wonder if the faint image of Varo’s lost sister haunts the right side of the carriage in Catedral vegetal. That taboo figure slyly emerges from the dark, like the footprint of a spy showing up in a layer of sugar.

*

Varo’s vivid recapitulations of cathedral imagery emphasize verticality. In Gothic cathedrals, this dramatic vertical sweep encourages worshipers to crane their necks skyward and to aspire toward Heaven. Although Varo evokes verticality in Catedral vegetal (the many column-like trees, the sides of the carriage, the balcony’s posts, etc…), she subverts the other primary element in Gothic cathedrals: the emphasis on bright light. In typical Gothic cathedrals, we find openings everywhere: doorways, windows, arcades, and galleries—all of which let in an abundance of natural light. And let’s not forget those lavish stained glass windows! Varo omits any inkling of the rich jewel tones of stained glass, never deviating from her monochromatic color scheme’s tints and shades of earthy umbers. Thus, Varo’s Catedral vegetal embodies the vertical thrust of a cathedral, but not its quality of light. The light source in Varo’s forest is diffused or overcast: shadows and colors obscure in the wispy murk. Because the “ceiling” of her cathedral is a vegetable one, the branches and tendrils thwart widespread illumination. Here, light hits objects with an eerie pallor, a peculiar sepia mist.

*

In the German fairy tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” the king’s daughters sneak out of their bedrooms to dance in magical groves all night, puzzling their father with their inexplicably worn out shoes. The forests may be reached only by boat, and each one is a grove made strange and opulent through alchemy. The first forest in the tale has leaves of silver, the second one of gold, and the third one of diamonds. A prince, commissioned by the king to spy on the twelve princesses, discovers their secret groves by hiding in the bottom of one of the girl’s boats. He then makes off with a golden cup from the second forest to show the king, which wins him the hand of the princess of his choice. Varo’s magical forest seems a distant, darker cousin to the fairy tale’s golden forest. In the painting, Varo’s character undertakes a similarly fantastical journey, but instead of a prince, a ghastly specter peeps near the prow.

*

My ayaa Dawa fled Tibet and lived in India as an exile. As an adult, I’ve often wondered if Dawa’s stories so warped with mysterious horrors arose from her oppression by the Chinese government. What did she see that made her put carnivorous pigs under a princess’s bed? Who was the woman with the skeleton hands?

*

And what’s the deal with Varo’s incredible pheasant that pulls the carriage in Catedral vegetal —the one who has a single wheel growing from its body instead of two legs and cloth sails instead of feathered wings? I’m reminded of the carved prows of funerary boats from Old or Middle Kingdom Egyptian tombs, or the elaborate ship burials of ancient Norsemen. If this carriage-ship’s a funerary one, then instead of the Madonna from Christian mythology or a pagan fertility emblem, perhaps Varo’s wan lady is more of an underworld goddess, a Persephone headed toward Hades.

Because Persephone dies in the fall, descends to the underworld, and then returns to earth in the spring, her myth explains the change in the seasons. Is all this diffused, autumnal light in Catedral vegetal that “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” Keats describes so vibrantly in “To Autumn”—that time in which the flora and fauna hover tenuously on the edge of death? If we view Varo’s female figure as Persephone, the black apparition as death, and the pheasant a phoenix-like symbol of ascension, then the trio suggests the cycle of the life-death-rebirth deity.

*

Maybe Varo’s piecemeal pheasant embodies the zeitgeist of war, unrest, and exile that so permeated her life and her century. Maybe her bird is that “splendid derelict” the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam writes of in “The Age”:

My animal, my age, who will ever be able

to look into your eyes?

Who will ever glue back together the vertebrae

of two centuries with his blood?

Mandelstam, who died an exile in the Siberian gulag, also evokes a forest haunted with imaginative possibility—for refuge, for escape. In “He Who Finds a Horseshoe,” “We look at the forest and we say / here are many ships already in the trees, masts / the red pines.”

Such journeys require marvelous sorts of metamorphoses as well as extraordinary modes of transportation—and these aren’t merely physical travels, but radical moves through the psyche. Varo’s carriage is like Baba Yaga’s fantastical cabin in the realm of Slavic folklore—that witch’s house that gets up and walks around on its chicken feet. Varo gives us a similarly magical structure: no normal carriage, cathedral, ship, cycle, or bird will do.

*

Varo, like Dawa, lived most of her life as an exile. Although Varo was born in Angeles, Spain in 1908, the Spanish Civil War eventually sent her and the poet Benjamin Péret (later her husband) to Paris, where Varo became part of the Surrealist crowd. The rise of the Nazis, however, sent the couple to Marseilles for a year before they gained passage to Mexico City, where Varo lived until her death in 1963. Her paintings reflect her tumultuous travels, filled as they are with images of wheels, dark paths, eerie hybrids, and angular women who bear her own distinctive features. Central to Catedral vegetal, and to Varo’s work at large, is the metaphor of the journey.

*

Kaplan observes that characters in Varo’s work “set out on journeys of independence, but they always seem somehow constrained.” Constraints abound in Catedral vegetal. For one thing, that shadowy apparition in the right window of the carriage isn’t exactly a comforting companion for our pale lady. And her carriage looks as if it’s been built with scraps purloined from a junkyard run by Tom Waits! Also, the vertical weeds and scraggly branches don’t look at all windblown—there’s a deathlike stillness to the woods that poses a problem for the pheasant’s sails, unless the bird’s nerves extend directly into the fabric. The nebulous and unwavering umber murk, too, makes travel through a forest a dark and fearsome adventure.

*

During the sixteenth century, Raphael and Giovanni da Udine utilized the style of painting called grottesche (“grotesque”) in such holy spaces as the Vatican Logge, the Loggetta del Cardinal Bibbiena, and the Villa Farnesina. Grottesche draws from the capricious, wild arabesques of Pompeian Third Style wall-painting and blends together architectural, animal, vegetal, and human motifs. All those bizarre-looking chimeras and monsters affectively appalled Giorgio Vasari, who called the decorative patterns “works of pure debauchery.”

Varo’s hybridization of cathedrals and vegetation doesn’t evoke the grottesche’s tonal airiness, although there is a dark sense of play at work in Catedral vegetal, an irreverent and deeply psychic narrative that pushes her fantastical combinations beyond the flat surface decorations of arabesques. Her precise, academic style and interest in evoking psychological journeys take the shape of something darker and more deliberately sphinx-like than the debaucherous, sensual play of the grottesche.

*

William Blake uses an analogy of two suns to describe the creative powers of the imagination. There are people who are slaves to reason and restraint, Blake says, who look at the sun and see nothing but a guinea, a flat gold coin. Others look at that same sun and see a golden, angelic host pouring forth from the flames. One may attain such visionary possibility by trusting the imagination and releasing its creative powers—those aspects immeasurable by the five senses. “I Question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight,” Blake writes. “I look thro’ it & not with it.”

Sometimes I look through Varo’s Catedral vegetal and I travel a long way, maybe back to Dawa and those old, slippery realms of transformation and terror. I can almost see her butter tea steaming as she peels the flesh from a princess’s hands in her story, as my sister and I shudder from her fractured tales. A broken charm has more power than a saint’s remedy, the woman in Catedral vegetal might whisper, at any moment, as she glides by on her chimera. Sometimes I look through Varo’s woods and think they’ll keep on refracting until they’re infinite.

**

Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, Parnassus, and Plath Profiles. She holds both an undergraduate degree in art and an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. Journey’s currently completing her PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston and her second book of poetry, Whisper to the Hive.

Polo, 2008; oil on canvas, 22 x 27 in.

AL
I’m wondering if you would talk about some of the recurring objects in your recent work: the Brita water filter, the Kleenex box, the polo shirt. Why these objects?

RW
They’re in a blind spot. If you were asked to make an inventory of your possessions, you might simply forget you owned them. It’s no coincidence that they’re all bodily implements. There’s something fascinating about trying to represent the stratum of experience they evoke, the combination of familiarity and oblivion. It’s like trying to look at the back of your own head. Using them as the subjects for paintings puts the emphasis on how they’re painted, because there’s so little else to go on.

Brita, 2008; oil on canvas, 15 x 18 in.

With the Brita filters, there’s also an analogy to the role of the artist, who takes things in the world and distills them into a more refined state. I’m ambivalent about that.

The East, 2008; oil on canvas, 14 x 9 in.

AL
George Oppen has a line about his work in relation to clarity—”Not to reduce the thing to nothing—”—which your still life paintings trigger in me. I’m curious, too, about the role of branding as it operates in/on these objects and your selection of them; they have all slipped from their brand names, as their titles point out.

RW
I hadn’t thought in those terms about the titles: that there’s a substitution of a brand for a generic description of the object. There’s an interesting relationship to the trajectory of names within art: “a Jackson Pollock painting” becoming “a Pollock,” as if the object actually does take the place of the maker, who is then parceled out into his or her works.

In deciding how much or how little to describe in the paintings, I often drop the logos—Kleenex, Brita, Lacoste— because they’re redundant, so fused are brand and thing. But hopefully their branded-ness endures, so they don’t end up seeming too humble, or “honest,” Van Gogh’s boots, and so on.

Brita, 2008; watercolor on paper, 11 x 7.75 inches

AL
Would you say more about your ambivalence about the idea of an artist as someone who filters, selects, makes something “refined”? Is this an idea worn out, made trite by our culture?

RW
I thought of those ideas—filtering, ambivalence—specifically in terms of the way I work, which is repetitive and simplifying but not necessarily aimed at purifying or distilling. I do a lot of versions of the same thing, over and over, in drawings and watercolors and oils, until it approximates what I  want. So the paintings are more refined in some senses, but by the end they’ve also shed a lot of other qualities—in many ways, they describe their objects less adequately at the end than at the beginning, and much less adequately than a simple snapshot would. Ultimately, the painting has accumulated a lot of strange quirks, many of them unconscious.  And those minute adjustments are really the content of the painting, for me. They’re what I’ve added to the meaning of that object.

Untitled, 2009; watercolor on paper, 7 x 7.75 in.

AL
How you would talk about beauty in relation to your process? In beholding the thing do you already begin wanting to move into those “strange quirks” inherent in moving away (from drawing to watercolor to oil) from the object? The beauty in your work is immediate for me—as a viewer I’m wondering if it’s a goal, a destination, or something less articulate within the way you make art.

RW
I hope they’re beautiful. It’s hard to think about that head-on. There’s an unavoidable conflict between the way the subject of the painting can be beautiful and the way the painting itself can. They’re completely divergent.

It’s slightly easier to talk about preference, taste, desire, which are unavoidable issues in the paintings. With the shirts, I thought about the infinite variety of men’s striped polo shirts in the world, how small those variations are, how impossibly overdetermined my preference of one over another is by the complex mechanisms of consumer culture—and still, when I’m walking down the street, I’m always hoping to catch a glimpse of someone wearing the ultimate polo, the polo to end all polos.

Untitled, 2008; watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 in.

AL
Yes, I love how your polos redress (!) held notions of them as “prep,” signs of a certain class. By revisiting them I feel you wrest them away from a reified state assumptions about them put us in, turning them into canvas for play. Stripe, color, shirt-shadows, attention to fabric-as-field, do you feel close to Milton Avery in this? You’ve written about the “easy to miss” significance of his work…

RW
Avery’s work is easy to love, but he often gets relegated to the status of a transitional figure: Abstract Expressionism’s weird uncle. He didn’t want to iron the embarrassing, folksy, regional touches out of his work, the chickens and sunbathers and sailboats, so it seems like he didn’t quite make the leap into “pure” nonobjective painting, as his younger peers did. But I imagine that, for Avery, art was about playing at the outer limits of those pictorial conventions: seeing how far you could take a seascape without losing the connection between the image and its referent. That’s an entirely different idea about painting, not just a stage in the modern project. I’m similarly committed to thinking about painting in terms of pictures, even if sometimes the works are apparently abstract—it seems like a more promising way to proceed.

Clothes on the Floor, 2008; watercolor on paper, 6 x 11 in.

AL
What role does watercolor play in your process?

RW
I started making watercolors as a way to plan out oil paintings, and it quickly became an end in itself. There are some things I do in watercolor only, and others that originate in paintings and stay there. I don’t think of them as less or more finished or important than the larger paintings.

AL
Do you feel far afield from what’s happening in painting today? Does your writing about art help you contextualize what you’re doing within all that’s being done/has been done?

RW
It’s hard to find something that’s not happening in painting today: the field is huge and inclusive, there are plenty of great people doing anything and everything within it. I feel more detached from the discussion around painting than from the types of paintings being made. There’s a tendency when writing about painting to retreat into tentative, self-conscious formulations, like, “what would it mean to propose a concept of painting in which X is possible?” Operating at that level of remove is dizzying, and it now feels like a limitation, this endless deconstruction of the medium. There has to be something more pressing to talk about, in 2010, here on our troubled planet—even if it’s just the dull business of daily life.

So, writing: I hope, like a lot of people, to work my way out of a kind of static, depressed, internal analysis of painting, and find a way to talk about everything else painting does—without lapsing into an uncritical celebration of the medium.

AL
You must have hated my watercolor question, leading down the road to deconstruction! Though I wonder about what happens there for your work, still.

RW
Not at all. The watercolors are usually very small, and I often do five or six of the same image before it starts to go anywhere. At the same time, lots of unexpected things happen in them (the scale means that slight differences in mixing a color or handling the brush result in big variations), and that’s a useful feature. You can’t make two identical watercolors, no matter how hard you try. And once they’re done, they’re done; you can’t rework them, you have to start again. That’s the model for the paintings as well, which either work out or they don’t. I rarely go back into a painting and rework something, because they’re about being in a very focused place and doing something from start to finish with the same feeling.

Blue and White, 2009; watercolor on paper, 9.5 x 12 in.

AL
Do you often have an urge to rework/revise? Has error been useful, something agonizing, or something else?

RW
What is error, anyway, in the context of painting? I certainly believe in it, since I think some of things I make are successful and others aren’t. But that has little to do with fidelity, or being correct.

A while ago I made a bunch of paintings of dogs, in the manner of a fictitious pet portraitist, and I ended up thinking a lot about this issue. It’s very clear what success means when applied to a pet portrait. The animal in the painting is attractive, it resembles the subject, the fur is furry, the eyes sparkle. My attempts didn’t have those qualities. From that vantage point, they were unlovable. But within the broader field of painting qua contemporary art, a failed pet portrait can be a successful painting, and vice versa, and that’s the whole point. Those criteria are suspended. All criteria are suspended. That suspension is the purpose of continuing to paint.  But at the same time, I’m often bored by art that can’t fail.

Chloe, 2008; watercolor on paper, 9.75 x 7.75 in.

AL
Detachment sounds like a necessary vantage for both your painting and your writing about painting. Cultivating the space to find a vital language (or a place where language fails, falters) vs. picking up a ratty discourse. Dwelling in possibility… (Do you like Dickinson?)

RW
I hardly know Dickinson at all. I should. But on the subject of faltering language (or thought), I do think about Wallace Stevens’s formula that “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” The “almost” is essential: not that the work of art is entirely beyond analysis, but that it’s just slightly beyond. A very modest form of mysticism. And in terms of art and language, it comes down to trying to exhaust the work of art in thought or in description and encountering a remainder—which isn’t “beyond language” in any ontological way, but represents the furthest point of analysis at the moment.  Everything is explained eventually, but there are brief, wonderful periods of not knowing what’s going on.

AL
How do you feel about titling your paintings, as it relates to stepping out of making them, closer to their being viewed?

RW
I’m still deciding what these things should be called. It may take years… I think the titles should grate against the paintings slightly.

I’ve been working on a group of paintings that are all based on one sketch—a doodle, almost, that I made after waking up from a vivid dream. In the dream I was thumbing through a book of pictures of textiles, beautiful tapestries or weavings—a very postmodern dream, heavily mediated. When it came to titling these works, I felt like they should have people’s names, as if the titles indicated the makers of the nonexistent objects I was cribbing the paintings from. It’s easy on the internet to generate random names, and I selected a small group from a longer list and then tweaked them slightly. One was Walter Elevad, there was also Linda M. Sparks, Allan Hanway, Vera Lowering. Something about the rudimentary associations with the sounds of the words, below the level of reference or symbolism.

Walter Elevad, 2009; oil on canvas, 60 x 42 in.

AL
I was curious about Walter Elevad—I kept looking at this one wanting it to be Water Elevad, liking that it wasn’t that kind of precious title yet, still, zapping me with how many precious titles there are out there and the expectancy I have for them. I hope someone adopts “Walter Elevad” as a protagonist.

RW
It was originally Eleveld, and someone mistyped it for a show checklist. I decided this was an extension of the chance process that generated the name in the first place, so I went with it.

Mr. and Mrs., 2009; oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.

AL
What are you reading right now? Anything in particular informing your work?

RW
Georges Perec’s writing was an influence. It worked on so many levels, from formal game playing, to sociological analysis to deep, wrenching stuff about pain and memory. He was able to keep everything in motion at once, and the humor of the work was in a necessary relationship to its broader goals. I had an edition of Things and A Man Asleep in one volume: an account of a young Parisian couple told through their relationship to material culture, and a description of drifting in and out of consciousness during insomnia. I admire the way he could look through both ends of the telescope.

AL
How do you think about the colors you use?

RW
Usually, it’s about getting the maximum effect from the simplest means. Doing the watercolors made me think a lot about transparency, which is a lot harder to control in oil painting. Sometimes the color is keyed to something particular in the subject of the paintings, at other times it comes out of something observed in the process. Each painting works differently—unfortunately. It would save a lot of time, otherwise.

Small Baja, 2009; watercolor on paper, 3.75 x 5.75 in.

*

Roger White has exhibited his work in New York, Los Angeles, and Marfa, Texas. He is represented by the Rachel Uffner Gallery. Along with Dushko Petrovich, he founded the art journal Paper Monument in 2007.

Mona Lisa’s Aura, 2009. Hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 34 3/4″ x 25 3/4.” Courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery

This series was the first time I came at an idea through technique. In my previous series “Endings” I was painting dye onto fabric and slowly blending colors together to create scenes at dawn and dusk. I offhandedly commented how the way the dye bled together reminded me of aura photographs. As soon as I said that, the idea of “auras” clicked in my brain and wouldn’t go away. I wanted it to go away, because I thought the idea was absurd. But I couldn’t shake it.

La Gioconda Leonardo da Vinci

I chose paintings familiar to me from my undergraduate days in my first survey art history class, when you get to know artworks as projected slides in a dark auditorium. Because I was researching not only who the subject was in each painting but also the relationship between painter and sitter, I focused on portraits where that relationship was unique or intense.

Bacchus’s Aura, After Caravaggio, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 39 3/4″ x 33.” Courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery

I remember falling in love with Caravaggio in that dark auditorium. Seeing slide after boring slide, Caravaggio’s in-your-face painting style, breaking the plane of the painting, was such a dramatic contrast. The way he painted Bacchus offering the viewer that glass of wine was so seductive, and learning that Caravaggio was probably a homosexual, the invitation from this young god with a raised eyebrow seemed all the more provocative.

Bacchus, Caravaggio

I wanted to carry some of that tension and seduction in the aura representing Bacchus. I had more room to play with, considering Bacchus is the one fictional character included in this series. I started with a color that matched Bacchus’s traits—the God of wine and the debaucherous revelry that comes with such things: orange indicating pleasure, sexuality, vanity, enjoyment, and thrill as well as addictions and appetites.

I created this luminous glow of orange so intense it is hard not to look at, not to get sucked in. But in the shape of a mushroom cloud it becomes a warning sign. Both pulling you into the piece with its beauty, but finding trouble once you get there—the same push and pull I first discovered in Caravaggio’s work.

*

Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro’s Auras, After della Francesca, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 18″ x 13″ (each). Courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery

If anything surprised me about this project, I think it was how following the prescribed codes of color meaning from aura photography led to quite accurate representations of what I saw held in the original portraits.

Portraits of Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro, Piero della Francesca

In this famous diptych by Piero della Francesca (in part so famous because of the striking profile of Federico da Montefeltro missing part of his nose) Battista Sforza was thought to be painted posthumously or just before she died in childbirth. In aura photography, when someone is close to death and “angels are near” the aura is mostly white; when a woman is pregnant, white clouds bursts appear in the aura.

Sforza had eight children in her very short life, so I represented her as a maternal green, but largely bleached out because of the predominance of white in her aura. This effect matched the extremely pale countenance Francesca painted originally.

This contrasts with the deep red of Montefeltro’s aura representing his strong willpower and ability to achieve goals. I like that in Francesca’s diptych two very different faces stare at one another in profile, and that same contrast is reflected in my two auras: one presence very masculine, very assertive, the other representing hard years of motherhood in the fifteenth century.

*

Arrangement in Grey and Black’s Aura (Whistler’s Mother), After James Whistler, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 54 1/2″ x 63 1/2.” Courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery

In all of my portraits, I wanted to reference the original painting, so for the stitch patterns I projected the original painting onto the fabric and traced the silhouette and the sitter’s chakra centers. From this I created an auralike emanation of expanding energy that on close inspection reveals the figure and a reference to the original painting while also eluding to something else.

Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, James McNeill Whistler

The evolution of Whistler’s mother’s aura was unique, as I played more directly with the composition of the original painting.

There are two formats of aura photography: a Polaroid documenting the aura around the head that mirrors the standard head and shoulder portrait format. The second is a scan that shows a full-body aura along with the color and condition of each chakra (these auras are more technical—and I think strange).

While all of Whistler’s mother’s body is shown in the painting, the head and shoulder aura format felt like a better match. So I played with the composition—arranging the aura around Whistler’s mother’s head against a vast black space. Angles in the aura reference her stiff spine and hands folded in her lap, the gesture so well-known from the original.

I had thought of Whistler’s painting as stark and plain, but I was surprised by the ornate pattern detail in the draped curtains on the left side of the painting. So I gave the curtains their own “aura,” playing with shades of grey, acknowledging Whistler’s very specific conceptual stance with this painting, reflected in its title “Arrangement in Grey and Black.” He didn’t see his work as a portrait, but as a formal study, particularly accented in the black mass of his mother’s dress. In honor of his intent, I gave a compostional focus to this piece.

*

Marilyn Monroe (II.23) and (II.31), Andy Warhol, via guyhepner.com

Marilyn had so many different facets, her small town upbringing, her glamour, her legendary moods on set. But it wasn’t like these parts were hidden—they were all out in the open, common knowledge. So I tried to bring all of those elements to the surface, where you are uncertain which is the “good” portrait and which is the “bad.”

Same with Warhol’s screenprints—some of the color combinations were gorgeous, some felt off-kilter, but all felt on equal ground. I chose to do two aura portraits of Marilyn Monroe in honor of the Warhol series because in making a pair of portraits I could mirror what I found to be quite common in the presentation of aura portraits: there’s a “before” and “after.” Often aura portraits are taken before and after a workshop, or before and after crystal therapy, etc.

Marilyn Monroe’s Aura (II.23) and (II.31), After Warhol, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 35 1/2″ x 35 1/2.” Courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery

I like examining the difference between the two. On the one hand you can use the color definitions of aura interpretation to determine a benefit or shift between the two portraits or remove this kind of judgment in seeing good or bad. I like seeing what shifts and what stays the same.

*

One of my favorite comments from the exhibition of my work this winter was that one of the pieces looked like the Shroud of Turin. Which is fitting, as it reflects the technical process: these portraits slowly emerged from a blank, white sheet of cotton.

I was asked a lot of technical questions about how the color was applied, as it does have a strange visual effect that comes from the slow application of color. I applied seven or more layers to build up the color so that it blended seamlessly. The dye chemically bonds to the fabric’s fibers so that it is truly a part of the fabric.

While the steady progress (at times frustratingly slow!) to build the color did allow time to contemplate a core intention I was trying to channel from the original work, there was also the result that the aura felt like it was emerging from the fabric versus something I was laying on top of it.

The dye chemically reacts with the fabric, so the color gets stronger with time. The process is very technically challenging, in fact at first I didn’t think I’d be able to figure it out. There is a certain element of being out of control. It’s impossible to fully control the dye. I like thinking I’m in control, but then having to react to what is forming in front of me.

Detail of Marilyn Monroe’s Aura (II.31), After Warhol

I do all of my dyeing in our basement, a perfect use of extra space where all I really need is a sink and a large working surface.

For the stitching I use a quilting hoop, so the work is very portable. I pretty much set up where I can—studio, living room, wherever I go if I’m under deadline. There are hours and hours of stitching  ahead of me and I am very grateful all radio programs seem to have fantastic web archives.

Detail of Bacchus’s Aura, After Caravaggio

While it sounds cliché, stitching is therapeutic. I can get flooded with existential angst (not to be too dramatic) but stitching brings me back into the present.

The fact that I can do the sewing anywhere is a reflection of the medium’s utilitarian and quotidian roots. I think it gives the objects a kind of humility that makes the work more approachable.

I have always loved that their are different stages to my process—first the research, then the color, then the stitching. I look forward to each step (and then of course get tired of each step and eagerly await the next!) Each step invigorates the process anew.

*

Anna Von Mertens’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York City, Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, OR, Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, CA, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, and many others. She received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2007. A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program at California College of Arts and Crafts, she lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Untitled (Galactic Panorama), 2009, mixed media

Marcela Silva was in Chile when we started corresponding this October. “Trees are blossoming here,” she signed off one night. Water was kicked up by a landing satellite on the moon, new images of Saturn traveled back to us from the spacecraft Cassini, and Marcela returned to New York where fall drew the leaves earthward. She dove into a rushed editing project for her job, and carved out time in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio to hang her galactic objects (“celestial peculiarities”) into panoramas like the one above. As our correspondence wound down—its own space and time settling into the paragraphs below—I asked her for a biographical note about herself. She emailed back. “If I had my druthers my bio would be: earthling.”—Elaine Bleakney

AL
What drew you into this project?

MS
When the Kepler observatory was launched by NASA earlier in the year, I kept dreaming about the oddities that it may come across in its quest for “earth-like” planets.  That’s essentially what I’ve been compiling for the past few months.  The piece is an accumulation of galactic objects.  I sculpt an object (meteor, comet, black hole, galaxy, planet, etc.) which I then paint.  The individual components are diverse in size and the overall dimension has varied—I suppose it may never be “finished.”

I call them “celestial peculiarities” because that’s what the “amateur” astronomers of yester-year used to call any celestial object that they could not identify.  There were a lot of peculiarities.  ”Amateur” because most of the significant astronomers had other occupations (day-jobs) and studied space at night, obviously.  I think about the intellectual and creative acumen of these people.  They lived balanced lives.  In our “modern” world we’re all very specific.  Maybe this economy will provide various experiences rather than a single path.  Tangent…

AL
How does one of your “peculiarities” first take shape?

Untitled (Jupiter), 2009, mixed media

MS
Some emerge from the process while others are more deliberate.

Those that I belabor may result from my trying to visualize a specific type of celestial object: what would a black hole look like, either from afar or below the event horizon?  What about dark matter?  Couldn’t there be a silver meteor instead of iron?  What colors do we associate with certain elements?  Could a comet be pink?  Would the big bang, if viewed from afar, looked like a sphere?  Lumpy or smooth?  Would it have emitted light at that initial moment of compression?   Usually I’ll have a very specific shape that I’ll cut and then build upon.  I’ll even note on a slip of paper what pigments or paint process to consider.  (Ultimately though—each piece is subject to the whims of the day, especially if the piece has evolved away from the intended outcome during a previous stage.)

With Kepler, I started tinkering with our limited perception of space objects. And I started doodling.  My friend, Jim Hanson, saw the initial output and asked me to make a few for a project that he had for Architectural Digest.  I made a dozen for him. After I delivered them I had this feeling of absence so I decided to make more to repopulate the area in my studio.

They’ve also provided an outlet to color.  I’ve always considered myself a colorist but my output over the past decade has been limited by the subject matter.  (Color was “direct” and had associations.)  The peculiarities are all about invention, so I’m mixing strident and ridiculous color combinations.  There’s a greediness.  I have the satisfaction of seeing that I’m still pretty good at it—after all these years…

Untitled (Saturn), 2009, mixed media

AL
I like that your “limited perception” of these objects has opened up a whole field of discovery for you. In his observations about sea shells, Paul Valéry wrote about how shells are “privileged objects,” where he finds a kind of “intention and action that seem to have fashioned them as man might have done, but at the same time we find evidence of methods forbidden and inaccessible to us.” Does your limited perception of objects in space irk you at all or just fuel you further within the momentum of the project?

MS
As there are very few true visual definitions of what I’m attempting to paint, I’m postulating unknowns, while simultaneously satisfying my qualifications for painting.  In the story or continuity of painting—I’m making things that have not been seen before.  My paintings are as foreign as the space objects (or panoramas) they depict.  In addition, I’m painting in a manner or with a technique that I’ve invented.

Untitled (Galactic Panorama), 2009, mixed media

Mrs. Shapiro was my art teacher in elementary school.  I resisted “learning” skills or tools.  She perceived this and told me that no matter what I made it would be mine. It’s always going to be the result of “everything you bring to it.”

While in Chile recently, I saw a show of art created by the citizens of a tiny, rural hamlet in Peru.  The work was uniformly stunning. Each artist had evolved their skill set to the highest degree.  One farmer drew his crops and cattle.  He flattened them upon the page within a flattened corral. Everything appeared to have been pushed over—not necessarily in profile, but to avoid overlap, and to clearly identify details and outline.  There was no gray.  Only black and white.  The technique or skill was as important as the content in determining his art.

This era of painting is about differences. Individuals carve niches.  I’m a firm believer that the materials and craft inform and create the work.

AL
Do you feel a consciousness within your own work, when you are able to step back to see that your skills or technique have successfully matched or harmonized with the content?

MS
I don’t know.  Initially it’s bewilderment that what I’ve made are mine (particularly if I’ve been away from the studio for more than twenty-four hours).  It’s a bit like not recognizing yourself after a haircut.  Seamus Heaney gave a lecture in Seattle in the 90s, and I will butcher this, but he said something like: I write what I write— not what I want to write or it’s never as good as the marvelous poems that are in my head.  Insert “make” for “write.”  I don’t know if it’s humility or disassociation from disappointment…?  Does my Peruvian counterpart dream of Constable?  Does he wish he could depict volume in clouds?

Sometimes my “solution” and skills coalesce, but sometimes it’s a slog and every last mark is a titanic struggle—often ending with a storm of Saturn.  These peculiarities work.  If I may—all of my celestial panoramas get there.  They’re joyful/ecstatic—and they’re mine.

Exosphere Meniscus, 2008, mixed media on panel, 25 x 90 x 20"

AL
To go back to the beginning of this project for you, I’m interested in how it arrived as a tangent—almost like a comet itself.

MS
This may be redundant, but I kept wondering what the Kepler would see. It made me troll through recent images from JPL at NASA, particularly the stunning photographs taken by Cassini of Saturn. (Some of those images were used to create the space-scapes in the recent Star Trek movie.  Holy moly!)  And then, there was an extremely complicated shuttle mission in May that successfully revitalized Hubble and made its lens even more powerful.  (NASA recently released the first images from the upgrade.)  I’m no expert, but clearly we are living during a profoundly important era in astronomy and astrophysics.

A Multitude of Distant Galaxies, Image from the Hubble Space Telescope, www.hubblesite.org

AL
As each of your objects becomes itself, do you get closer to the “amateur” astronomers you admire?

MS
That era seems so remote.  There was a quiet in the world.  Imagine the night sky unpolluted with streetlights/electricity?  I’ve been reading a lovely book by Richard Holmes: The Age of Wonder; How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.  It has several chapters on various Romantic era personages and the realms of science that their discoveries impacted.  Herschel found Uranus, but only after “sweeping” the night sky for years and charting it—staying up all night, every night, regardless of weather and looking—teaching his eyes to see. He was the first one to show us that the sky was not a dome suspended over the earth, but a profoundly huge expanse, hence the terror.

In one respect these peculiarities have brought me closer: science and art are very similar.

AL
I read this take on Holmes’s book recently. To think of scientists discovering discovery in this way, as “amateurs,” greatly appeals. I wonder if we’re not hungry for the connection now because there’s so much media focus on technology and Silicon Valley as the discovery realm—a constant narration to this inter/marketspace. Discoverers have to become entrepreneurs for their discoveries so quickly there.

Is being an “amateur”—tending one’s activity within the love of discovery—and holding a day-job essential to your art-making? How do you find time to create this balance?

MS
First, I should clarify the use of “amateur astronomers” that I mentioned at the beginning of our correspondence.  Mr. Herschel (and his sister for that matter), who are well-represented in The Age of Wonder, do not qualify as “amateur.”  They were the real deal.  Their music informed their ability to “read the sky” but in no way made their astronomical interests secondary.  It was understood that “philosophical” research was not an acceptable source of income for eligibility.  I think Herschel was forty by the time he had perfected his seven-foot telescope and began manufacturing it.

(Our modern love of “Renaissance” men/women and this perverse need to apply the “genius” tag—what’s that all about?  Is it the result of our cultural/contemporary singularity?  What’s wrong with a liberal arts education?  Singularity makes for boring cocktail parties…)

The day-job gets me down.  No matter how intellectually fulfilling—there is no balance.  As I mentioned before, the strategic use of time constrains output.  Walking into the studio after a ten hour day in an office (or wherever) does not great art make.  I fake myself out by having a cappuccino at Gimme after getting off the train in the hopes it will “restart” the day.

Untitled (Dynamo), 2009, mixed media

AL
Let’s talk coffee. How does that loving cup enter into your process?

MS
The cappuccino is my afternoon land bridge.  I shake off the subway and defog/reorient the head back to its original priority.  “Restart.”  Usually I engage in mindless banter with the baristas and in fifteen minutes I’m on my way down the hill to 87 Richardson.  It does help squelch my perennial opponent (time) at least until its effects start to wear off.  I’m from the Philip Guston/Fred Rogers school.  I walk through the door, change my clothes, and get to work.  Funny thing—I never had a cappuccino before moving to NYC.  Even when I lived in Seattle I rarely had caffeine.  Repeat visits to Rome did me in.

AL
Do you have ideas about why this project moved from the side to centerstage?

MS
I “let go” when I’m working on something that’s “not important.”  I don’t worry about the investment of time or outcome—because generally I give it very little energy and have it around as something to think about and revisit.  Time is my enemy.  Having the day-job forces me to be very strategic with my studio time.  There’s probably too much discipline.  The initial scale of the peculiarities was smaller than my “regular” work and lacked preciousness.  The freedom allows me to experiment heavily.  I’m not anxious if I screw one up as there’s always another and they should evolve.

Economics is also a motivator and a practical reality in two respects. There’s the time commitment I mentioned but also the cost of materials. A big painting is an investment. These peculiarities are fiscally microscopic. I’m recycling remnants from paintings past so my expenses are low and that’s necessary right now since people aren’t buying paintings from unknown artists. My second economic motivator is affordable art. The peculiarities are not intended for one but should be disseminated like a big-bang dispersion.

Untitled (Galactic Panorama), 2009, mixed media

Marcela Silva emigrated with her immediate family from Chile. She grew up in many environments, urban and rural, and from a very early age was exposed to art and science (her parents are both scientists). She has taught history, art history, studio arts, and juggled a myriad of day-jobs from baker to editor.  More of her work can be found on her website, marcelasilva.com

James Kao was born and raised in Houston, Texas. After studying philosophy and focusing on the texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Chicago, he worked as a bakery buyer for a specialty foods retail chain in Southern California. In 2001, James forwent his corporate career and returned to Chicago to take classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received an MFA from the Painting and Drawing Department. Born in 1975, James works, teaches, and lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is currently preparing for two upcoming solo exhibitions: “Ways of Worldmaking” opens on September 12, 2009 at Lloyd Dobler Gallery in Chicago and “Possible Worlds” opens February 4, 2010 at Toomey Tourell Fine Art in San Francisco. More information is available on his website: jameskao.org.

Tillage, 2009, 12 x 15 inches, oil on linen.

AL
Looking at “Tillage,” I’m immediately drawn into the painting on the hinge of its title: “tillage” as both the cultivated land and the act of cultivation. I’m interested in how this title-as-hinge arrived. How does language enter into your process?

JK
I have been thinking much about the difference between simile and metaphor, e.g. a picture that looks like a world versus one that becomes a world, and I think art has the capacity to occupy a space in between simile and metaphor as well-looks like a bird, is a bird, looks like a shape, and now its cardinal red. This liminal space recalls Heidegger’s conception of earth and world where he offers a remarkable image of an ancient Greek temple, constructed of granite and seemingly crumbling with age. Heidegger counters that the temple is not deteriorating; rather, it is the earth that is jutting through the world of this temple. Yes, the earth is breaking through hallowed grounds! In this collision, in this in-between moment, Heidegger suggests that Truth is unconcealed.

Heidegger praises poetry as the highest art form because poets use language to reach beyond language’s grasp, I think wherever language fails, there arises a real opportunity for art to function.

AL
Do you find that it’s hard work to access or sustain this liminal, in-between space where art happens? You keep oranges in your studio. How does their presence, the observing you do as they decay relate to keeping a painting like “Tillage” out of some kind of frozen granite world and more within a momentum, the kind of activity Heidegger points us toward?

And speaking of liminal, active space: right now a group of very tired Bangladeshi men are chipping away at the side of our building. The other day, they removed twenty, thirty, fifty (?) years worth of ivy that had crawled up to cover the wall. It was slowly eating the brick. Our windows, stripped of coverage, now have what feels like too much.

JK
I wonder if your elderly building feels shame-shame from giving itself to the ivies, shame from being naked. The loss of ivy-covered walls seems like a traumatic experience, the kind that can interrupt the flow of one’s qi. Light entering a window never seems too abundant.

I recently learned that I am a passive meditator; I find time to reflect without scheduling time to do so. I might spend a few hours looking into a fish tank, a ceiling fan, or aging citrus fruit, and during these moments, time slows down and radio sounds fade away. Some sort of Truth is revealed here, something akin to art, I suspect. When I paint, when I work to create these liminal spaces in a picture, I must find deeper energies to concentrate, and this can be difficult.

AL
You live and work in Chicago. Do you find concentration difficult in a city (or more difficult than you imagine concentrating in a non-city would be?) Has the city influenced your work in specific ways?

(I miss the ivy’s shade. Now the front of the building-passerby, cars jockeying for spaces, endless trash can collection-feels less absorbed. However, the new available light in winter may save me.)

JK
I’ve lived in large cities my whole life-Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago — so I don’t really know what it would be like to live in a non-urban environment. Of course, each of these cities is very different from the other, and Chicago stands out because it transitions through the four seasons. Spring coming into Summer. Summer coming into Autumn. Autumn coming into Winter. Winter coming into Spring. In Chicago, I know, anticipate, and feel the seasons’ transitions. These shifts are markers of time, and in many ways, duration has become very important to my painting practice.

I live in a building built in 1909 and for several years grew to love the dusty and wooden window frames. They were turn-of-century examples of high craftsmanship. Alas, the windows were also terrible insulators, powerless against a Chicago winter, and the board voted to replace all the windows with new double-paned, vacuum-sealed, high-insulation windows. How much quieter the apartment became after their installation was unsettling.

AL
Would you talk a bit more about duration within your still-life paintings? When I look at “Tillage,” so much of my experience of the painting feels in opposition to “still life,” yet there is a sense of coherent boundaries, of abiding, discrete forms in-erosion. And yet “erosion” only seems to articulate one kind of moment within “Tillage.” I suppose my question is: how does painting your oranges differ to you from, say, filming their decomposition? What does painting do with watching them in time?

JK
I like things. Perhaps I should say I have a deep affinity for the world of objects, and here, I think, is a primary difference between painting and film. Where I may spend six hours watching Andy Warhol’s “Empire,” I may spend only a minute or two with my favorite Balthus painting at the museum. There is a more significant difference; after watching “Empire,” I am not compelled to see the film again. Balthus’s “Solitaire,” however, begs me to return. My close proximity to the museum allows me to comply, and each return visit with “Solitaire” yields new pictorial structures and previously undisclosed psychologies. Warhol’s film challenges me to endure, and Balthus’s painting demands perpetual return. Objecthood is bliss-this we know from Michael Fried.

Born of a long-term and unending engagement with fruit transformed into objects, I hope my paintings also beg their audience to return.

AL
I like things too. The poet Charles Simic wrote that “the mystery of the object is the mystery of a closed door.” Do you have favorite objects in Balthus’s “Solitaire”? Is there a sense you have, in his objects, of the kind of widening inaccessibility Simic notes?

JK
I like open doors, and I like opening doors even more. Norman Rush describes love as something similar to entering a new apartment, where you find the entry hall unimaginably wonderful. As you explore this vestibule, you come upon a door, open it, and find yourself in a room grander than the first. Another door, another room, and love becomes an endless corridor of captivating discoveries.

Similarly, “Solitaire” is full of doors waiting to be opened. Below the table, I enjoy the re-imagined furniture-a chair with four legs, or three, now five-a fresh clarity of space when both subtraction and addition appear, even as they cannot be distinguished. From the girl’s white-socked foot, clod in black shoe, Balthus casts a slender shadow; it points to a reflection on the heels of another chair’s support, and I sense an animal’s hoof . . . I am dreaming of Rush’s Botswana.

AL
The bulk of that “re-imagined furniture” sends me over to the girl’s arch, as well. Then back. A hoof! Yes. I also like the card in her hand as a tiny rudder to her mind’s work as she sails in the game. You’ve said in a conversation with your friend Aaron Walker, “I don’t know where the work in a painting takes place, but I do know that a painting can perform.” I’m reminded of it here.

Would you be willing to share an image of something new or newish you’re working on and talk a bit about it?

Photograph of "Untitled," 2009

JK
I’ve attached an image of a painting currently in progress. It is not yet titled. The painting measures 72 x 78 inches and is oil on stretched canvas.

I’ve been traveling around the country and trying to make sense of different foods, dress, transportation, etc. — the various vernaculars of our world. This privilege has informed my sense of artistic responsibility to take the world in, to re-process it, and to re-present it. Over time, my oranges and table have given way to the idea of these re-imagined worlds. The large-scale of this canvas moves it away from an object to be gazed at and towards a world one falls into. I hope that the stormy clouds and floating orbs do the same.

AL
I like how this movement can be traced in the paintings you find affinity in as well. The leap in looking at your oranges into a view of Mondrian’s expansive “Pier and Ocean” (a painting you photographed during your travels this summer) is particularly striking. Do you like looking out the window in an airplane? Larry Levis has these lines from the poem “In the City of Light” about the vantage from a plane: “Descending, I looked down at light lacquering fields / Of pale vines, & small towns, each / With a water tower; then the shadows of wings; / Then nothing.”

JK
Clouds lend atmosphere in my recent paintings, and I’ve spent much time with an upward gaze. The taxonomy of clouds suggest four categories: cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, and stratus. I describe clouds in terms of weight, temperature, color, and of course likeness to familiar objects.

I think clouds also carry moods. I like clouds that shift from pink to yellow to violet. These are clouds that portend storms, and these are the same clouds that sunlight beams through as raucous weather breaks up. I imagine these are the clouds Noah espied when he emerged from forty days of rain.

When I look out the window of a plane in mid-flight, clouds become flat landscapes or seascapes; they become redundant. Somehow, being above the clouds lifts their force. They no longer float in the sky and lose their magic. I am uneasy when flying through patches of clouds. Within a cloud, always denser than I imagine, the sky disappears, and I long for Texas, where the vast sky is simultaneously airy and heavy.

I do my best to claim a window seat when flying into LaGuardia Airport. The final descent is otherworldly — the city is a scaled-down model of itself, and then I am swallowed by its enormity.

View the gallery

Gallery images include:

• Still Life with Oranges, 2005, 42 x 40 inches, oil on canvas
• Aether, 2005, 22 x 22 inches, oil on canvas
• p. & o. ii, 2007, 12 x 15 inches, oil on canvas
• Mesa, 2008, 24 x 30 inches, oil on linen
• Seed, 2009, 10 x 11.5 inches, pencil on paper
• Seraphim, 2009, 34 x 36 inches, oil on canvas
• Tillage, 2009, 12 x 15 inches, oil on linen
• Untitled (Photograph of painting in progress, 72 x 78 inches, oil on canvas)