INTERVIEWS

scroll scroll scroll for interviews with: Okwui Enwezor - Luc Tuymans - Deborah Kass - Jessica Jackson Hutchins - Kristan Kennedy - B. Wurtz - Jonathan Lasker - Matt Kirsch

INTERVIEW WITH OKWUI Enwezor

originally published with PORT, april 24, 2009

I had the lovely opportunity to speak with Okwui Enwezor this month as he was in town to speak at the annual FATE conference that took place the weekend of April 3rd. Enwezor is currently the Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute and has curated a variety of renowned exhibitions around the world. He took some time early one morning to discuss his views on subjects ranging from the notion of excellence in education to his take on the recent election of Barack Obama as president.

AB: Okwui, You are here to speak at the FATE conference being held here in Portland this weekend, So, in your mind what constitutes excellence in an arts education?

Enwezor: You know, that is a hard question to answer, and I think, as far as my own context is concerned, at the Art Institute of San Francisco, it is what we have also been grappling with, what constitutes excellence. I think institutions throw out these terms like excellence, creativity, innovation, and the question one has to ask is 'How do these notions bare on the relationship between the artistic outcome and its relationship to the world in which it is seen?' I would like to begin by thinking that excellence in arts education is not only about transmission, but that the arts academy is first and foremost the site of knowledge production. This means that it is not necessarily to produce artists who are market ready, so to speak, but artists who have the capacity to challenge conventions that have been the kind of instruments are being used to train emerging artists who become successful in the world. In my view, excellence in arts education has to involve a realm of research, forms of thinking counterintuitively, and the capacity to absorb failure as a potential for the transformation of one own critical perceptions. Because when an artist confronts failure and is able to make something out of that failure, that grants them the capacity for critical intervention in terms of work and therefore the ability to always begin from one's own limit. I think it is very difficult to teach students that. It is very difficult to teach them the fact that when they confront an audience with their work, it is in many ways not simply a dialectical relationship, but an ethical one as well. That work can always be received, so how do you respond to failure? How do you respond to the rejection of the generosity of art? Do you respond to it by making work people like, or do you respond by making work that challenges people to think differently? So I think it is a question of how to make students think differently about the counterintuitive nature of a work of art.

AB: The challenge is balancing the ability to think about and consider one's audience while coincidentally maintaining the integrity and honesty of one's own creative voice.

Enwezor: Yes, but one cannot only be introspective. One cannot only make work only for oneself. Ultimately, a work of art has an audience, even if the audience is one of which is you. This means there must be a critical boundary you must set up in order to objectively view one's own work; to not simply be an admirer of your own creations, but to be someone who thinks productively and critically in front of that work. It is important for artists to have confidence in their own notions and proposals but not to become overly invested in the opacity of art, based on, "These are MY thoughts; you take it or you leave it." I never accept as an absolute given that the work or set of ideas proposed by an artist can only be enabled by the agents of that artistic law.

AB: And that is something that one must constantly battle and consider. .

Enwezor: And negotiate. That is something that the artist gives up, gives away, something of their own power. Yet it also means that the greatest work is able to withstand the ways of testing its integrity.

AB: For much of your career, you've acted as curator to various institutions around the world. How do the day to day activities of a Dean of Academic Affairs differ from those of a curator? In terms of organizing the education of art students versus educating the public, so to speak, in a large exhibition? . .

Enwezor: Well for one, running a school is, in my view, no different than running a department in a museum. Obviously, there are different considerations that one brings to each task. To make an exhibition is also an educational project, yet rather than knowing who your audience is, it is an unknown. You have people who are deeply informed, and you have people who are amateurs. You have people who are mainly tourists, and you have people who are deeply purist. In an academic environment, the structure is guided by a number of principles, and the principles are really to make certain we have some fundamental competency that must be part of the learning environment. So my task, day to day, is to make sure that those competencies are utilized and tested, in terms of political innovation and in terms of new forms of teaching that address the multiplicity of the more political, social, and cultural experiences of our students. We want to kind of tap into the set of rigorous set of initiatives that makes learning, teaching, and producing art something that is fun but also challenging. So, while my work is administrative in that sense, it is also deeply intellectual. I think that beyond the administrative part of that work, what I value the most in being a dean is the intellectual work involved in making sure that we continue to attend to the notion of the institution as a place of higher education, as a place of thinking, and as a place of debate and analysis. My day to day is really involved in making sure that my colleagues, with whom I work very closely in various initiatives involving the curriculum around the classes and around new methodologies, have the tools necessary to make their job accessible to the students.

AB: Concerning the nature of the institution, Do you think museums and other various arts institutions are evolving at a comparable pace to the velocity of contemporary living?

Enwezor: I think they're evolving. I have always partaken of the notion that if there is anything such as utopia, that the academy is the last utopia. It is a place where one can dream. One of the things about education is that it gives you permission to question conventional wisdom, to come up with new and better proposals, to come up with new ideas, and to test those proposals amongst your peers, and so on, against historical precedents. One must first absorb and internalize this knowledge before being able to make use of it adequately. We try to organize our work with students as we do not only want them to read broadly, we want them to read deeply. We want them to learn deeply. We want them to embed their learning within the context of historical study, but with the point of view that what they are not going to be doing is addressing the past but addressing the future. Learning and institutions cannot move by the speed of light. In the context of an institution, evolution is a much slower process. One has assumptions, and these assumptions form the basis of the experiments one does, but then you have to test them against the reality that you are confronted with. One of the things that is very important for young students to learn is that they have a great deal of time to race ahead. The four years that an undergraduate student spends in school is a period of incubation, and hopefully what that will give birth to, if the student does the kind of work that requires an immersion in different kinds of ideas, the confidence to take on other complex questions that may confront them when they leave.

AB: How do you perceive the museum or gallery in this context? Do you believe they provide somewhat of a sanctuary and catalyst for critical thinking and learning for the public at large? There has been quite a lot of debate about the role of the museum in the breadth of contemporary society. Where does it exist? Admission prices, quite often for big shows and the like, often keep much of the public at bay, which seems counterintuitive.

Enwezor: Museums, first and foremost, have a cultural role to play. To go to an exhibition at a museum is to be within the context of the redistribution of cultural capital. This is what is literally before you. However, there are very specific things that one gets to understand about the nature of the artistic object and what artists do. This needs to be learned. The artwork, while being a very specific creative model, is also an epistemological model; it has so much information in it that we cannot always have access to it without the kind of careful work that curators do, that museums do, to make those works accessible to the general public. Hopefully, the audience, by going to museums, not once or just occasionally, but as part of their cultural education, do learn things about the world or the society in which they live. I wouldn't say that art is always a reflection of the society in which it is made, but it is in a certain sense a refraction of parts of that society. Collectively put together, one thing next to the other, you begin to piece together this complex mosaic of thoughts, of experiments, of proposals, of inventions, of innovation that all, cumulatively not only enlarge our understanding of the value of art, but also have the capacity for cultural, political, social, and dare I say, spiritual renewal. So museums have a very important and powerful role to play in this regard. What I disagree with is that there is a tendency to think that it's ok to give the movie theater ten dollars for a bucket of popcorn, but that the museum should be free. How many movies do people watch every single year? And then add it up to the number of times they go to museums. . . it's very different. What I generally do is take out a membership at the museum in the city where I live in order to support those institutions. For the price of membership where you can go to the museum as much as you want in a year, it is literally, pennies. If it's just going to be an occasional trip to the museum, then it becomes expensive, but if you are someone who is deeply interested in art, and you might not know anything about art, my recommendation is to take out a membership at the museum. You not only gain access to the museum itself, but you gain access to all of the varied programs they have to offer. It is also a way to make a civic commitment, to show that art and culture matter, in modern economic times.

AB: I wanted to touch on something that you said earlier about works of art perhaps not necessarily representing the entirety of society but being somewhat of a representative refraction of it. Do you believe that when we look back on this time period, the last thirty years, that we will be able to say that this period's art was, as the fields of archeology and art history would have us believe, an accurate record of our experience? Do you think that we will look back and believe that this art was the voice of the people, of this time?

Enwezor: I don't think that art is capable of being the voice of the people, and I don't think that art wants to be the voice of the people. The contradiction in this way of thinking is how can the present constitute a history? To think of contemporary art in historical terms is in itself a contradiction. To be contemporary is not to be on time; it is to be in time. It is to be current, 'in the moment', literally speaking. Of course, one can reflect on the artistic paradigms of the last thirty years and try to make sense of what has transpired. Something I have noticed is that contemporary art has indeed become more heterogeneous and more resistant to movements, even though there have been different movements which have emerged in the past half century: pop, minimalism, post-minimalism and so on. So you could look at the last thirty years and notice that what is very impressive about contemporary art is its capacity for regeneration, its capacity for historical citation while coincidentally re-engineering the ways in which the art object is constituted. So when we say the last thirty years, o.k., the spirit of the 1980's, in which there was a kind of return to this very grandiose, egoistic, conventional authority of the human subject, and, at the same time, there were these other forms of practice happening alongside those larger movements. You had appropriation going on and, concurrently, the vestiges of identity discourse emerging. All of this implies that in any given moment in the practice of art, there is never simply one specific paradigm, but multiple, competing sets of ideas within the artistic landscape. There is never just one particular dominating theology. One might have the greater visibility culturally and institutionally, but this doesn't mean that this is the only valuable system of engagement of a particular point in time. When I look back today, I think we are in a moment of rethinking of what the models of contemporary art should be. We've made it through the period of the great patrius of contemporary art, such as Damien Hirst, the sort of grandiose, rhetorical work which does not occupy a large mental space yet takes up a lot of physical space. I think the economic recession may yet bring about a rethinking of that artistic form, and what I would argue is that there are vestiges, at this moment, of what I would call the politics of form that are on the verge of emerging: younger artists using humble objects. I will also call this the politics of disaggregation. This politics of disaggregation is a model of unbuilding the grandiose, rhetorical work. This process of unbuilding is something I am currently interested in, in seeing how it manifests itself in various segments of the artistic scene.

AB: Where do the practices of art theory and criticism come into play in the midst of this, what some may call, pluralistic period in time? Is there an intellectual hierarchy somehow established amidst the theorizing and the practice? Is there a battle between them? Or do they never meet?

Enwezor: It depends. It is very interesting that over the last several years that it has been precisely thinkers that have not been art historians that have really been influential in helping us think about works of art: a philosopher like Jacques Rancière, for example. . . a philosopher like Giorgio Agamben, who may not necessarily be talking about art but the kinds of things he talks about, his philosophical terms, come very close to the things that artists are struggling to do. The current decade is a decade where theory was basically jettisoned. The late eighties and early nineties were at the height of the theoretical implications of post-modernism. Theory was given a great deal of license and was mobilized in various ways to help us understand the goals and the characteristics that artists were constituting for the reception of their work, for the understanding of what they were doing. You've seen, for example, artists like Lorna Simpson, and the ways in which the image becomes, not simply just an image, but a series of complex signs which have very deep social relationships to the ways in which the figure, the feminine figure, the black figure, has been deployed in a Eurocentric, Mediterranean culture. Theory gave a kind of buttress, if you will, to enabling us in thinking productively about those shapes in thinking, in art making. But, over the last few years, I would say that theory has not been first and foremost in the minds of artists. The return to beauty and beauty opposes theory, the return to painting and painting is aesthetically pleasing. . . So we are constantly engaged, especially over the last half century, in a process of constant historical return. And thus there is always a place for theory in art. There is always a place for philosophy. But to the larger question that you pose regarding where criticism and theory are today, I will say it is not very good. There are simply less and less places where criticism can actually be practiced. There are fewer publications devoted to serious thinking about art; most are not just simply academic. There are less academic journals where a certain type of art historical practice can occur. There are fewer popular magazines where a certain type of criticism can occur. Newspapers are laying off the art writers. . .. So, there is a crisis. There is a crisis of discourse. What we need to think about is where can the discursive dimension of contemporary art be located today? What happened in the nineties, with the emergence of the curator, is where this discourse has shifted to the catalog publication. This, for the curatorial field, seems to have absorbed part of this loss of critical debate. I don't know if this debate takes place in catalogs, because often catalogs become almost like advertisements for the art. They become almost like a press release rather than a critical examination. There is a tension there.

AB: What do you attribute this loss and decline of discourse to?

Enwezor: I think that while we may claim that art has become pluralistic and heterogeneous, the context within which that can be engaged has shrunken. Also the broadening of the media has changed that. I think that the context of artistic participation is bigger; there are more museums. There are more galleries. There are more things. More, more, more of everything. When the art world was smaller, you could read five different magazines and feel as if you were immersed in a very intense discussion, but today contemporary art is global. There is not a single publication that has the capacity to encompass the richness of the field. In a sense, one has to read as thoroughly as one can. Even if you have all of the time in the world, it's impossible to capture all of the different arenas in which this is happening. Yet, there is a lot of debate taking place in different parts of the world; there are publications in every corner of the world. To take a perspective in which the art world is the center at a time when global culture is completely off center is to miss the fact that there are multiple contexts that are really generating new positions.

PORT: As a curator with such a global resume, do you see a zeitgeist in the midst of contemporary art or does geography still grant us somewhat of an autonomous experience and identity?

Enwezor: I don't know if there is a zeitgeist, and I will be careful in even trying to identify one. But it seems to me, in the last several decades, that contemporary art has become part of the global reality. More art is made across the world, by many more people than ever before. I will give you an example, in 2008, there were eleven triennials and biennials in Asia in the months of September and October. In Korea alone there was Busan Biennial, there was Seoul Media Biennial, there was Guangju biennial, In China there was Shanghai biennial. There was the Guangzhou triennial. There was the Nanjing biennial. There was Taipei Biennial. . .You can go on and on. So, when you think that, in this region alone, in one month, there was such proliferation of art, and when you think of the size of these cities. . . Beijing: 12 or 14 million, Shanghai : 18 million, Singapore as a city-state, Sydney, Seoul, Busan, and so on. What we have is such a massive potential for enormous throngs of people seeing this art. I took a group of students on a trip last year to about five of these cities in Asia and also to the biennial I curated in Guangju. While Guangju is a city of about 1.4 million people, the audience for the exhibition was 425,000 people. Now that is more than the Whitney Biennial. Are all of these people really invested in contemporary art? I think not. But contemporary art, in some of these, what are called transitional societies, is a novelty. So, free exhibitions in those areas may not have the same level of sophistication but nevertheless, they inform people about what is going on. In Shanghai, on the day we arrived, they had a ticker of the number of visitors and there were already 670,000 people who had seen the exhibition. Now that is enormously important for contemporary art. How do we make sense of all of this? Some magazines in the United States try to do an overview of all of these exhibitions. That can only mean that there is no one singular form of criticism that can appropriately engender the intricacies of all of these, except to basically say the state of contemporary art has become a phenomenon of global scale. I imagine that, given this complete dispersion of artistic senses, the value of contemporary art will be different depending from the space in which you, as an audience, engage with the work.

AB: With such enormous audiences and numbers of artist participating in these exhibitions, they have been criticized as 'spectacle'. . .What do you make of this criticism? What do you believe is the true purpose of these biennials?

Enwezor: Well, first and foremost, a critique of biennials as spectacle is already, for me, not so interesting because I have not really read yet an intelligent encapsulation of what people mean by spectacle. It presupposes that art should remain in this exclusivist domain of privilege. The fact of the matter is, in the mid 19th century, more people went to the British Museum on weekends than you would normally find in museums today. People went because the museum was a novelty. It was a social gathering place. I would not criticize an exhibition because so many people showed up. Why would that be a bad thing? However, I do understand the worry, and the worry is that contemporary art has been sucked into the mode of entertainment. We do a great disservice to audiences by assuming that they learn nothing from going to these events. Biennials are event driven, and therefore they have the effect of seeming like spectacle. There is no doubt that they have the quality of spectacle. But the critique of spectacle in this sense, for me, seems not to take into consideration what I mentioned earlier, which is that these societies in transition are places in which we are only witnessing the first generation of the emergence of a middle class. So, let me simply speak about my experience in Asia, in China and so on. The cultural revolution in China destroyed the public sphere; it destroyed institutions. There was no place where artists could show. Today, the public in China are hungry for whatever. They go. That can only mean that they are interested in art. The difference is saying whether or not that exhibition is pandering to that spectacle. That is where there is a genuine argument to be made. Either within the curating or if the artwork produced becomes entertaining, populist, etcetera in order to generate curiosity. Now there is an argument to be had, in which the critique of 'spectacle' is valid. I know that popularize the notion of the bienniale form as spectacalism, which I suppose was intended to be a derisive term. I think there were many reasons why this emerged. It was not simply the fact that we had an exponential growth in the number of artists that were practicing, but that there were not that many more places where they could all be shown. A biennial is a temporary exhibition which then turns into a bridge in order to enlarge the context of artistic determination and presentation. And as temporary structures, they were responding to the context of contemporary art in ways that museums are not equipped to. I think that what it did was to create new, discursive spaces for the reception and the presentation of contemporary art. And it made sense, because biennials are literally global models. And it made sense that they emerged precisely at a time when globalization became so prominent. One other thing that I would like to argue is that, contrary to what many people think, most biennials are not large scale. Most biennials are not spectacular either. Look at where most of these biennials are and the budget that they work with. They don't have enough money to really be spectacular. Let's face it, it's very different to work in Documenta, with a five million dollar budget and the Whitney Biennial with a two million dollar budget. The scale is very different. Venice is also different, from say, SITE Santa Fe, which is a biennial too, but which could never be spectacular, even if it wishes to. Its context is smaller. Its means are smaller. There are so many other things that intervene in the workings of many of these biennials that mitigate against them being spectacles.

AB When you wrote about Lorna Simpson's work, you touched on the notion of politics and aesthetics as being inextricably linked within a work of art. I believe in your writing, you described these two facets as being formed like "Siamese twins", to quote you. Do you believe that this is true of all art, that its politics and its aesthetics develop simultaneously, concomitantly?

Enwezor: No, they are not inextricably linked. What I was going after in discussing Lorna's work was forms of what Toni Morrison would call 'American African Inference'. There is no way to divorce the aesthetics of race from the politics of race.

AB: What do you think the election of Barack Obama might do to this marriage of politics and aesthetic in regards to racial perception?

Enwezor: Nothing.

AB: You don't think the unbelievably prolific presence of his face everywhere in the global media might have even the smallest influence?

Enwezor: No. Absolutely not. It makes us feel very good. I hope it doesn't, but, I think there is a danger in the fact that Barack Obama is the president which may make us feel as if the job has already been done. Look at institutions in this country, museums in this country. Take a poll of all of the major museums in this country, and tell me how many have directors who are non Caucasian? How many have chief curators who are non Caucasian? It is much more feasible for Barack Obama to be the president of America than it is for Barack Obama to the director of MOMA in New York. It's amazing.

AB So you don't think the image of his face being as prolific as it is might have any influence on the image of the black male in America? Maybe as the catalyst to changing the notion of what Frantz Fanon would have described as the 'other'?

Enwezor: Well, Barack Obama is first and foremost a post-colonial phenomenon. So yes, this somewhat touches on the issues of race in the United States. However, it is very important to remember that there is a part of Barack Obama that is being obscured. He is part African. He is not African American. Think about this, in 1961, when Barack Obama was born, his father was not an immigrant, he was a foreign student. Kenya was not even independent. Segregation in the United States was still an issue. So there are many complex historical issues that are tied up in the personality of Barack Obama which we can use as a cipher, not for the normalization of race, but for the normalization of the complexity of race. I think that Barack Obama is really wonderful to watch. This young couple is of my generation. Obama is older than me by just two years, and he is the president. I see Obama and there is a constant shock of recognition. I know who Barack Obama is, not individually, but generationally. You can see that in the way he thinks about the world. It makes sense; there is a clear generational shift. This is why I feel he is a post-colonial president. It is interesting that you mention Fanon. Obama was born in the midst of the post-colonial transformation of the world, and that is in his D.N.A.

AB: Would these great thinkers, (such as Fanon) feel as if his being elected was a notable progress for what they believed in?

Enwezor: I think that Obama is a step in the right direction. It is hugely positive. At the same time we could ask ourselves, where else in the world could this have happened but in America? But yet it is important to say that well, America is not the first place that this has happened, after all, Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants was the president of Peru, but we don't see that as momentous because Peru is so small in comparison. And that in America, the politics of race has been fundamental to the identity of the American self. This is why the election of Barack Obama is such a big symbol and has made him a cipher of the aspirations of many people. He will perhaps make many people who feel imminently qualified to think that they can be candidates for important positions. We will have to wait and see, but, I think, the mold has been broken. We have to make a new mold.

AB: Who do you think of as your general audience when writing and curating?

Enwezor: Oh dear, that is a question I ask myself repeatedly. I begin from the point of view that there are three fundamental audiences I'm interested in. When I curate an exhibition, I am as much speaking to my peers as I am to historical precedents. I use those two relationships to develop an image of an unknown audience. At this point my focus can be based on a series of historical and intellectual attributes that then have to be unknotted for the public to really understand what the exhibition is trying to say. I am as much in conversation with the historical precedents, not to correct them, but to address them, as much as I am in conversation with my colleagues, with the field, as such. Finally these considerations allow me to say well there is something new I want to say to the public. Otherwise it becomes narcissistic, as in, 'this is my great voice, and it is a gift'. This is not for the public at all. It is a complex melange of conversations that leads to these multiply connected audiences.

AB: What do you think is the role of the curator within an exhibition?

Enwezor: Well, first and foremost, for me, a curator is not merely an organizer of exhibitions, even though that is a part of what they do. A curator, in my view, creates the platform that advocates and enables ideas that he or she supports and endeavors to create the most hospitable environment in which those ideas will be understood. It is enabling and working with materials that are challenging, provocative, and that have the capacity to influence the way in which we think about the human condition. All of those things are bound up in what I do. I feel that my role as a curator is fundamentally intellectual, but that doesn't mean that it is intellectual in the sense that there isn't any possibility of communication across historical, economic, and cultural experiences and differences. I organize my shows with all of these things in mind which is why maybe sometimes people think of my exhibitions as political, but they are not. It's just that the representation of art and its institutionalization is deeply political, and I do not curate an exhibition with the kind of naivete that art trumps politics. There are so many different political social factors mediating who gets to be in the canon, who gets to be collected in the museums, and having worked in museums a number of times, I understand what the internal conversations are. I know what the anxieties about certain forms of art are.

AB: To not think about all of these factors is to run the risk of isolating art for its own sake, and make the claim of denying its socio political importance, relevance, and implications.

Enwezor: That is why for me, to present an artwork in public has deeply ethical implications. Because why should we look at your art, no matter how great it is?

AB: In view of the recent economic recession, we witness the collapse of a lot of our capitalist economic architecture. Much of the ideals of our motivation in terms of an economic society have imploded, soufflé style unto itself. Will the art market mirror the financial market in its implosion as it has its explosion? What will this mean for our ways of seeing?

Enwezor: It will have a temporary affect. Artists will have to adjust to what their expectations are. Galleries will have to adjust the ways in which they instrumentalize the works of art to generate more profit, and I think the bubble, as you say, has collapsed. Whether this is a return to order is a different question. Yet I think that the moment that the market rebounds, it is almost inevitable that it will be back to square one. After all the new expression is the market collapsed; nobody ever asked whatever happened to all those great works by Schnabel and Salle. You don't see them in museums any more. So will the same kind of backlash happen with people like Damien Hirst and Koons and so on? I don't know. But I think that, certainly, there was already a sense at the very height of the market, some forms of resistance by artists towards this rhetorical, flaccid gesture. And there artists now who are working in the kind of opposite vein. This is what part of my lecture will be on this evening so that we can talk about some of these emergent relationships. After this height of the market, the M.F.A. became the new M.B.A. So bankers and artists. . .

AB: Which is why I wonder if this recession will distill some of the inflation? Will it distill the critique? Will art making continue to be next to banking as a sort of capitalist endeavor?

Enwezor: Well I don't think that art making was ever a capitalist endeavor. The marketing of art is a capitalist endeavor. But we must be very careful that we do not demonize the art market. The art world as such is a complex ecology. There are many different aspects playing a role in our ability to have access to the most challenging ideas that artists are putting forth. The art market is one of the entities that enables that, that supports artists so that they may make a living, to produce, and so on. The museums represent another one. There are many different mechanisms that enable art. My fear is that a collapse of the market might not simply just affect the ability of dealers to sell work, but that it might cause the erosion of resources that support experimental ideas that support younger artists. We've already seen that. Now there are very few philanthropic support networks dedicated to the arts, and this inevitably effects institutions. Institutions become more conservative. They become less daring. So the implications of this economic recession have the possibility of being very severe. I am very concerned for my students and their ability to have confidence that they will have a chance to present the public with their work. You know, we critique all of these biennals, but when they disappear, what replaces them? I can tell you that without these biennales, the shape of the contemporary art field will be very different from what it is today. We have the opportunity to see a greater number of artists than ever before. The recession affects the support for those networks in the same way it affects the support for the art market, in the same way it affects the support for the acquisition of works by museums. The endowment of curator postions is already affecting the support for research. Institutions have taken out moratoriums on programs which require research and travel. . . How do we gain an understanding of whatever this new art that is being made? How do we gain an understanding of this work? This is far more complex for me, in this sense. This is the concern I have.

AB: Do you still write poetry?

Enwezor; Oh dear. No! Well. . . Tim Griffin and I occasionally exchange poems with one another.

Interview with Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins' work is a mined animal. Its disparate elements are found and forged from the mud of surrounding detritus and soliloquy. Her work culls from a playful existentialism; Kafka telling a rare joke. It is raw and irreverent and does not adhere to trend or pomp but instead concentrates on a vibrant subterranean mythology. Hutchins is the conduit through which these things are born. They are seismic musings of the absurd and profound, informed by both philosophy and what it is to walk down the street. They are totemic fragments of the efforts to describe pain and joy as lived. They are the spiritual mud and love pie made by the freest child, who dips her hair in ink and, with the swank of the mime and the prophet, draws with it. As I walk into her studio, she purposefully presses a turquoise magnetic letter "C" to the surface of one of her piano prints to be shipped to London the following day.

PORT: Could you describe your process?

JJH: I usually think about it in the sense that all of my work comes out of previous work. I have such a history of making work that it all refers to itself now and comes out of curiosities left over from the show before or two shows before that I didn't have time to explore. There are different strains of thought as well, such as the investigation of the figure that is almost always going on, a sort of direct exploration which I am often coming back to. A big part of my process is using whatever is around me. So that is the work itself, but now it's also my family, or it was beer when I drank a lot of beer. It is the color of that dress lying on the floor or the way it feels to sit in that chair, after a while. Things like that.

PORT: When do these become symbols? In other words, when do the objects around you feel urgent enough that they have to become part of your work?

JJH: I think that the process of making symbols was urgent, really urgent when I first became an artist. I think you need a kind of urgency to actually commit your life to this brutal job. When I was in graduate school, I became really focused about trying to understand why and what I was doing. I feel like I did such a good and thorough job of it then, that I take for granted that I know the why and the what, and I've gradually just gotten freer and more confident. What was seminal was a feeling that I wanted the metaphors to come out of banality; I wanted it to occasionally be a kind of mundane banality and sometimes a more punk urgency. This is what requires me to use the material around me. It is a sort of D.I.Y., a sort of 'You don't have to be fancy to see God, Death, and Sex in this chair.' It's not that difficult, and it's funny. The process to me is also funny, and humor is an incredibly important thing for me. I'd go so far as to say that no work can be really moving, really compassionate, really transformative without being funny. But then someone said Rothko, Rothko. Rothko is not very funny. But even someone like Giacometti, those figures slowly disappearing, but there is humor to be found in that as well.

PORT: Do you do a lot of editing?

JJH: Yes, I do, but it is similar to what you saw [referring to the addition of the turquoise C]. There is so much that happens in the process. Is that what you mean?

PORT: Well, I wonder about your editing process because I feel as if your work has such a raw and direct quality that it doesn't feel edited, or pared down, yet I know that this quality often comes about from some of the most rigorous editing processes, the miraculous sort of lie of really good editing.

JJH: Yes, I work very hard on these. Like this [gesturing to a piece which consists of two forest green velour armchairs pushed up against one another, facing each other, one of which has a ceramic appendage resting atop its back pillow, faintly reminiscent of a drowsy head], this piece has taken me two years of putting things on, taking things off, cutting into the cushions, flipping them over, a plaster thing, a couple of different ceramics. Sometimes a piece is immediate. Yet the various parts might have been labored over, and then it's only when they come together that it is a kind of eureka moment. What often happens is that I might make ceramics for a certain piece yet know that they might not end up going on that piece but will become part of a playfulness in the studio.

PORT: When do you know when a piece is finished?

JJH: It is often a very different experience from piece to piece. In one instance, I was working on one of my favorite pieces, called Keith and Anita [after Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg], I remember this amazing feeling. I was a pretty young artist then, so it was one of the first times I had experienced this; maybe that is why it sticks out so much in my memory. I couldn't fucking believe that that thing existed. I loved it so much, I literally had to go run around. That piece was made of six packs, wired together. Sometimes knowing when a piece is finished is that visceral and that knowing, and sometimes I have to ask tons of people and have lots of conversations, worry about it, and take it on and take it off repeatedly, maybe then take a picture of it. When the piece has been pushed as far as it can go, and it doesn't have any extra fat, I know to stop. I know a piece is finished when something really rings true, and it has everything it needs and nothing more I guess.

PORT: Do you feel the need to address history? Attend to it? The artists that have come before you?

JJH: No, I don't feel a need. I feel pretty free. I trust the needs; they're natural. I got my undergraduate degree in art history, and my mother was an African art historian. I love art history. It is a very cellular part of me, because I grew up with so much art surrounding me. This show has tons of art historical references. This piece is called Blue Guitar, after the Picasso painting, [The Old Guitarist] which was in the Art Institute of Chicago where I grew up. So that one is mine [laughing]; that is my Picasso. It has always had a big effect on me. And I refer to that [making a gesture of two fingers almost touching in reference to Michelangelo's The Creation of Man, a printout of which she has adhered to one of the piano prints), which I've used since the nineties. It is so moving. I think it's funny. It's sexual. It's God and Man. It's creation. It's succinct. That is another thing I require from my work: to be succinct. That is in part where I believe the humor to come from. To talk about God, man, creation, funny, moving, death in a moment that small is amazing, and what makes it so amazing is that it is so succinct. Those are two big art history moments I reference a lot.

PORT: Do you feel like these art historical moments assist you in the making more or do you feel an awareness to take history forward at all?

JJH: Well, I don't feel compelled to take history forward at all, but I do feel like you should use everything you've got. Because it's hard, what you're trying to say. I enjoy finding more contemporary relationships in the work; I like having kin in it. I don't worry as much about my originality as much as I prefer making the piece work in the way it needs to. In regards to the piano piece which I love, that I just finished, a dealer was in my studio and told me about Sherry Levine's body of work in which she uses pianos as pedestals. I feel as if that relationship to another artist's work gives that piece an added context.

PORT: What does it mean to you to put something on a pedestal, either literally or figuratively?

JJH: The pedestal is a very important and fun tool that I use often and very consciously, just like the white box of the gallery. I love the white box. It is part of the pedestal. I have always thought a lot about writing, and I think about the white box of the gallery as a sort of page. The pedestal simply does more emphatic things within that. Lately, I haven't been using smaller pedestals, because the pedestal-like nature of parts of the pieces now have a dual function. Within the piece the pedestal directs your gaze and marks something as a contemplative object with the imperative: "Contemplate!". And the precedence is Brancusi, who I think of as being in my D.N.A. When I first looked at those Brancusi pieces, I felt as if his pedestals looked like stacks of prepositions as in: and, but, or, because--a bird! I think about my pedestals similarly, the relationships of the entire piece and its parts.

PORT: Absolutely. I also feel as if your pieces are very literary, almost character like. Often I feel as if each piece seems like a description of an event or personality within a much larger story. They do not seem at all like ends unto themselves, almost as if they're sort of waiting for us to leave so that they can continue on. Do you consider them in this way?

JJH: You know when you talk about them this way, photographs of Louise Bourgeois' studio and Brancusi's studio come to mind.

PORT: That is interesting because I feel as if your work and her (Bourgeois) work are linked in a way. As if you are both sort of these terrestrial conduits for these strange and vibrant subterranean myths.

JJH: I feel like myth is part of the activity that I am engaged in: the mythologizing of the banal, the mythologizing of Daryl Strawberry. I continue trying to work with allegory. I think it's a fascinating trope; things are stories and not stories and symbols and not symbols and both. I do think about a sort of broader narrative, although I hesitate on the word narrative. There was a time when I was very anti-narrative. I think there can be a sort of danger in being too narrative, but that the work gains a certain meaning and momentum from the work that has come before it, in thinking of it in the sense of trajectory. But I don't feel as if the work is narrative in regards to the idea of story.

PORT: I can't really imagine this work coming to an end, per se.

JJH: No, I am against the idea of linearity in the work. I want a sort of monosyllabic experience. Sculpture can do that. Even more so than work on the wall, which I feel always operates in some way like a text; you read it. You interpret it. But when there is a chair in the room, you cannot help but really feel it. In that way, the viewer has an all body, monosyllabic experience.

PORT: Do you feel as if the geography or place influences your work at all?

JJH: Yes, it must. There are the basic things, such as space and time and having an easier life, and a greater feeling of freedom. I didn't know Portland on a map when I came out here. I didn't know where it was. I had a lot of anxiety about that, about being so far away from New York. But I feel very grateful for the distance too. And I didn't know anything about this place, so everything here is incredibly fresh. My commutes are six minutes. Of course, you can make your life work wherever you are, but at this point, I can't see myself moving back to that city any time soon. If anything, I see myself moving deeper into the country.

PORT: We spoke earlier about your pieces having the aspect of possible character like qualities, do you ever see them as vessels of the self, existential portraits?

JJH: Not directly. It isn't something I think about when I'm working on them. For example, this piece here is called "SM", which are my husband"s initials, yet the piece isn"t a portrait. This is much more about trying to make language physical. It is an incredibly abstract rendering of an "S" and an "M," and it is the physical humor in that that I want to refer to but also the banality of marriage. I know I'm not answering your question, but maybe it's because I don't entirely know the answer. They are very intimate kinds of things, and they are very authentic.

PORT: I guess it is these particular ingredients: intimacy coupled with the direct aspects of your personal life as well as their direct, raw sort of vigor that give them this portrait of life aspect, so to speak; they speak to the banality of living while maintaining this odd character like, mythic otherness.

JJH: Well when you say portraits of life, I feel as if that is more accurate, because I don't really see them as portraits of individuals. I feel like I am always trying to get at bigger things, like something on more of an existential plane, not that you can't do that in a portrait. It just means that I don't think of them as characters.

PORT: When I was looking over your work earlier, I began to think about the sort of crazy obsession our culture has with the ideas of celebrity and how this obsession mangles and alters our visual language. Celebritydom has become a strange priority, and I wonder how it affects contemporary art often. Yet, it doesn't seem to touch your work at all. How do you maintain this autonomy from something so pervasive?

JJH: This doesn't affect me much; it's not what moves me. It is as simple as that really. I liked punk rock. I liked indie rock. I liked Moby Dick and James Joyce. I know all of the words to Taylor Swift because my daughter's into it. . .But the celebrity phenomenon itself is not the phenomenon that I am involved in. I am really involved in the things I'm involved in, and I have been for years. It just isn't that. Yet I have seen artists use the ideas of celebrity beautifully. And not like Warhol, who was really talking about celebrity, but in a different way. There is an artist named Chivas Clem, whose show I saw in the early 2000's, and I remember seeing something in his work that struck me; it was very clear to me. I felt that the use of celebrity culture in his work was like talking about the pain of existence is for me. He was doing the same thing. He was just using that as a vehicle in the way that I use HydroCal.

PORT: I recently read the introduction to Convivium which you collaborated on with Thomas Fisher. I thought it was an amazing introduction to your visual work in regards to the sense of candor and intimacy that pervades it, while coincidentally addressing more existential philosophies. In the introduction, you referenced a time in the nineties during which you felt the need to answer to certain philosophies and reconcile the ideas concerning the ethics of expression in order to keep working. I think these ideas are still very relevant issues to be addressed in art making. Could you elaborate a little on them?

JJH: Yes, that was seminal for me, and all of it is very alive. It is cellular, and I understand it. I know the plank that I walk to keep the work ethical, as I read ethical. In part, there was something about narrative that I found unethical. Unethical is so puritanical sounding, so let’s just say less effective. But in effect, it did feel puritanical; it felt very constraining. You can talk about it as more ethical, or you can talk about it as more fun, or more alive, or more useful. There is a certain type of mystery and openness and oddness that really excites and moves me. And there is also a certain kind of over-referencing and explainability which doesn't move me. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. The things that are too easy to dissect, as in, 'I have this image, and it’s a diagram of the stars.' People love that stuff because maybe it's easier to write about or something, and of course there is value to this too, yet I thought of this type of work as unethical. It didn't allow the viewer the huge space of their own otherness. I always want to address the ultimate unknowability of everything, and when my work gets really weird, that is what it touches on: that ultimate unknowability. The really weird equals unknowability. That is how I express it.

PORT: Did those philosophers provide you with the concept of ultimate unknowability or did they simply provide the impasse created by having to answer to such questions?

JJH: It was more of the impasse I had to work through that they incited for me. Simone Weil would talk about it in a really beautiful way but was incredibly self-effacing. It is easy to read your way into self destruction through that, and I did for a while. Levinas and Blanchot, those guys were really talking about Post Holocaust existence, as in 'How can you speak?' So it was pretty rough, and I was living it. It wasn't just academics for me. In fact, it wasn't academics at all; it was this personal thing I was living.

PORT: How did you reconcile those ideas within the work?

JJH: It was a long, hard crawl. First I had to pull myself together, because I really got dark. And then it was sheer desperation; it was urgency. Then I was led from the urgency, and then the work took me. It was a guttural urgency, and then the work was providing its own way out. As the work lightened up, it was more beautiful and unreadable but a celebration of the life in that. So, it was really through the work.

PORT: So this current work is a direct result of that struggle?

JJH: Yes, and the thing is that it also gave me an appreciation for an absurdity; this is in every piece I think. It is in every piece I make. It is sort of like, okay, we're going to try to talk about the pain of humanity, and isn't that ridiculous? Because isn't that impossible? And so that is where the humor and the ccch [guttural sound] comes in and the jeans hanging down [referring to her piece SM] or something. That is part of what that is.

PORT: Do you have any advice for artists undertaking certain philosophical dilemmas?

JJH: Mostly, my advice is don't listen to them. I guess they helped me, but mostly my advice is just to work. Don't ever let it paralyze you. And then don't fucking justify your paralysis. You just need to work. You can recognize it and have compassion for it and all of that. But you need to move your body, or your hands, or however you work.

PORT: We've spoken a little bit about the literary aspects of your work; you describe a 'monosyllabic experience' you are after and the ideas of stacked prepositions, and of course your collaboration with the poet Thomas Fisher. How does poetry influence or play into your work?

JJH: I am playing a lot with language right now. I love this strange process of making letters physical; I always get a kick out of that. I am interested in the ambition of hinting at something that is more than what it is. I don't read much poetry these days, but if you think about Emily Dickinson or someone like that, you don't have to read much. You can read one poem and think about it for the rest of your life. There is the way that a certain poem acts. There is a total simplicity, and then there is what the words say and how the phrases fit together. Yet then there is this whole sort of body that comes out of that, the More and Other that is created from the experience. And this is what I get from it.

PORT: Do you feel as if there exists today an ideological zeitgeist that you belong to?

JJH: No, but I don't think I would know, being out here. People say ceramics is making a huge comeback, as a backlash against something or other and thus a resurgence of craft. But I have no idea what these people are really talking about; I feel completely alienated by those ideas. I am influenced by art and other artists, and I love this world. I love having peers. When I find out that Sherry Levine also uses pianos as pedestals, this enriches what I do. But I can't really speak to a zeitgeist. Maybe I'm too old. I hear young artists complain that this or that is going on. And I think, yes, it is all going on, and it all was going on ten years ago and twenty years ago and will happen again in another ten or twenty years. I kind of feel like the art world is huge and varied.

PORT: How has the experience of having children influenced your work?

JJH: In a bare bones way, it has made me more efficient. That whole lying on the couch thing and wondering if it's all worth it is completely out the window. And that I don't miss, but I do miss having more gaps. I feel like having children has lightened me up. The value of what I do has only been underscored by having kids. If artists ever wonder whether their work is worthwhile, I've never wondered. I've never wondered whether or not art saves lives, but now it seems more fundamental. And once again, in the pragmatic sense, I work with assistants now, and I'm always trying to learn how to do that better.

PORT: Is the idea of risk altered at all, having kids? Not in the sense of 'Should I take this risk because I have kids?' but I imagine it to be a more sort of 'Everything is Fair Game' electricity.

JJH: It is more like that, because you can't take risks out there anymore. Which was really upsetting to me, when I first had the baby, as in oh my god, I can't do dangerous shit anymore. And it isn't as if I'm a danger seeker, but I wanted to climb mountains, hard mountains, but now, all of that is more fraught. But everything else, concerning my work, is sort of like anything goes.

PORT: Do you see the art market as being an influential entity?

JJH: No, not really. It's nice to make money. But it hasn't changed my life that much. But no, how could it really? How can you think about this [the work] and that [the market] at the same time? They are really two separate animals.

PORT: How does context affect these pieces, if at all?

JJH: I think it does. I spend a lot of time thinking about context. What I talk about in my work is a certain abstract experience, and I think of the white box of the gallery as a framing device. I do not necessarily rely on this device; I love the way these pieces have looked in people's homes and love the idea of them being lived with. But a lot of the work really profits from pulling it out of the studio, because it grows out of the studio. A lot of the visual decisions become more prominent and accented by the clarity of the gallery space. These decisions become reframed.

PORT: Who are the artists and works you think have had the most profound influence on you?

JJH: Brancusi and African art, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Picasso. Raymond Pettibon comes to mind. These are things that made me sing inside. As in, 'Oh yeah, somebody understands me.' I just read this article in the New York Times, and I appreciate good food, but I'm not a foodie so to speak. There was this ice cream thing on the cover, an article about all of these crazy ice cream flavors, and this woman was quoted as saying something like, 'You know when I first tasted Jesus Juice, which is red wine Coca Cola ice cream, I felt like it was the first time somebody really understood me.' And that was the first time I ever gave that culture any credit. I felt like, I guess it can be like it is in art. People really feel that way. I've never felt that way about food, but I have about art. So Charles Ray, Raymond Pettibon, and the way Ed Ruscha uses language is just mind boggling. Right now I am looking at a lot of women artists. Anne Truitt's work encompassing both her motherhood as well as her ideas is very interesting to me right now as well.

PORT: What gives you hope?

JJH: Oh, lots of things. My kids. Perspective. Victories of the past.

Let Them Look: An Interview with Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans' paintings are renowned throughout the art world for their chilling diagnosis of humanity. Tuymans' oeuvre is haunting, often combining the sacred with the mundane in order to instill a desired paranoia. Tuymans' work is attributed to the revival of the death of painting and has been exhibited around the world. I had the opportunity to speak with him this past March here in Portland, where he attended the opening of his exhibition, "Luc Tuymans: Graphic Works-Kristalnacht to Technicolor." The show is on view at PNCA's Feldman Gallery and Project Space until June 13.

AB: You've often been cited as reviving painting, which has been deemed a 'dead' art form for many years now. How do you think about that? Did you/ do you think of painting as a dead art form?

LT: No, never. The question often posed to me is "Why do you still paint?", and the answer I give I consider standard in the sense that I am not naive. Painting is the oldest and the first conceptual visual ever made, from the caves of Lascaux up until the grandest tableaux. Painting is also a much faster mode of expressive picture making than any technical tool because it is not bound to the same sorts of limitations. It is only bound to the physical capabilities of the painter.
So it's a very fluid, very unique medium because it is a tactile trace, a record of the existence and experience of a human being. It is a complex and immediate handwriting. That is what makes it so different. When you show someone a photographic image and a painting, they will easily remember the photograph because of its graphic qualities. It is much more difficult to accurately remember a painting because of all the detail and the nuance.

So the whole discourse about painting being dead or alive is, first of all, an enormous misunderstanding.

AB: Do you think it was a misunderstanding because people cannot imagine what the paintings of a future age will look like?

LT: There are tons of people that paint. As for me, having "revived" painting: I don't know. I was never busying myself with that to begin with. I was definitely painting at a time when lots of people were. And I was also working with figuration at a point when not many people were. Therefore, my first chosen small gallery exhibition was one that I paid for. It was a colleague's artist space that still exists, in Antwerp. He made post conceptual art. The gallery space was on the same street as a giant colloquium for the museum of contemporary art. People didn't talk about paintings then. They talked about conceptual images, which were paintings. (chuckling)

AB: I read somewhere that you had abandoned painting for some time to study art history when you were younger.

LT: That had nothing to do with the medium itself. That had to do with myself. I actually started out not as a figurative painter, but as an abstract, gestural painter. I used lots of color. Then I started to add figuration, but abstraction became very existential.

AB: How?

LT: Well, it was existential and tormented; you feel suffocated by it. You are too close to the thing. And then, by accident, a friend of mine shoved an 8 mm camera in my hands, and I started to film. That was from 80-85. I shot mostly Super 8, 16mm, and in the end, 35mm as well. Then I returned to painting. This was important, because this time period of four or five years allowed me to distance myself from the medium. And it was the distance which allowed me to make the image I wanted to make. I already wanted to make paintings with a sort of diagnostic view, but I couldn't because I didn't have the distance. Otherwise, filming continued to inform my paintings long afterwards because of the vocabulary I gained from using it: cropping, closeups, etc. Ideas came from looking through the camera, and I began to understand and accept that a detail could be blown out to become the image itself. That helped a lot. . .to come back to painting.

AB: What does an image need to be to become a painting?

LT: Well, my toolbox is very big now because I make either drawings, watercolors, tiny maquettes which I take polaroids of, my Iphone, websites, Photoshop, etc.. . . But the aim is to analyze the imagery in such a way that it becomes relevant to paint and that it will, through the act of painting, go through a transformation more dynamic and complete than any bound by just mechanics.

AB: Can you describe the elements of an image that would be relevant enough to paint?

LT: Well, to give you an example of what I am working on right now, I have a big show coming up in 2015 in Qatar. The exhibition space is 5,000 square meters. I am also going to make three mosaics for the Nation Museum of Qatar which will stay there. But during the last visit, the Emir asked me to make something having to do with the region. This new work would be combined with older works to produce what would be seen and considered as one body of work. The request from the Emir came as a surprise to me, because it's very complicated. It's a very difficult political situation in that region, and the Qatarians have a special role that they play. So I told them that I wanted to produce the a body of work solely with the region in mind.

Last Christmas, my wife and I were in Spain. I go to the Prado every time I am there, and when I was there this past time, I saw the Pinturas Negras of Goya's. I greatly admire Goya, and I said to myself, "That is exactly what I need for Qatar." I began to research and I found an old work that I made in 1978. I remembered that I filmed it later without the screen in front of it, and that gave me the Goyesque imagery that I needed and with which I am working. That is how things come about: through their relevance and through the element of creating a dialogue between reality and the proposition of what reality could be. This juxtaposition is then set against another proposition, namely showing. All of those things work together, and it takes a very very long time for me to conceptualize this. I conceptualize not only one image, but all the images for one show. An image should be, in itself, strong enough. That is one thing, but invariably, there are different connections that assign themselves to the images in the space when you put older and more recent works together, which I think should be possible. BUT, for a show in a gallery, there must be a mental vacuum space where the show is conceptualized. Once that is done, it's painted, one after the other. Not two paintings at the same time, only one. And only one a week. And only in the day.

AB: There is a very delicate line between severity versus the mundane in your choice of imagery. Is there ever an aspect of irony or kitsch that plays into the images you select?

LT: Sure, but one thing I have never succeeded in doing is making a happy piece. That I can't do. There is lots of irony in the work, yet not predominantly. I also don't think the work is overly serious. It is not happy. That's for sure. But on the other hand, it has impact. It was like I was saying before, the rabbi once told one of his sons, "Happiness is about thirty seconds. Suffering goes on forever." And also creates much more imagery, basically. Maybe irony is a bad word. . .sarcasm, or sardonic maybe is better.

AB: There is something about it that makes me think as if you are endeavoring to create a more self conscious society, as if you wish the world to be more aware of itself as an act of morality.

LT: Well I think, and this may be personal, but the reason we show artworks is in the least so that people should start to think and to distrust what they are looking at.

AB: There is something about painting in particular, at this point. . .as if the proliferation of images is so profuse that choosing to paint something is an incredibly loaded act.

LT: Because I am already working with appropriated imagery, it is very important to me that I know what my intention means. That is not to say that the viewer must see what I intend. But for me, to have the kick to make it, it must be meaningful. In terms of a moral stance, I don't really think so. Even in terms of my portraits, like the one of Condoleeza Rice, who is of course a major political figure, it is much more about the enigma of what the person is and what it meant to paint her when she was still the Secretary of State. Of course, a lot of people would see that in itself as a political statement, which they did the first time it was shown.

The most important thing in art is the fact that it is multilayered. Yet, it must be triggered and focused. Life is political. Every human interaction is political. So in that sense, my work is political. But not in the sense of propaganda.

AB: Yet at the same time, as much power as these images retain as paintings, there is also an aspect of remove. They seem as if they were images made underwater, as if the objects therein were the relics of a sunken ship.

LT: There is always an element of distance because for me, it's very important what an image does from across the room. There is also the distance you measure between yourself as a spectator and the image itself.

AB: Do you think this distance has anything to do with technology? A lot of the images are paintings of photographs of photographs. . . Do you think that kind of distance is necessary to be relevant in this age of images in general? We pay attention to photographs. We pay attention to things that are dissected and graphic, as you say. Do you think this quality is necessary to be relevant in this time or is it a quality that just developed as you were working?

LT: Not necessarily. I know a great painter in China who stopped painting after that famous photograph was taken in Tiananmen Square because he didn't believe in photographs anymore. He was the first guy to make ten meter long paintings of displaced people working at a dam. But he went to the actual dam and painted the workers on the spot, and that was also a statement. It can go the other way around: how you actually apprehend your reality. And for some people that's always different, but what is certain is that you have a total abundance of imagery.

I'm a product of a television generation, which means that you already have a mountain of experience and an overload of imagery. I learned English as a seven year old by hiding myself in a room looking through a little glass window looking at Manix. (laughing) Until my grandmother turned around! But that is how I learned English, from the subtitles on the television.

So there is this real reality that is virtual too, which is not totally lived through. Moving images have to be more compelling than photography. Then there is the element of the pause. You can pause the moving image to find the still image. When I have to say what painting is for me in one sentence, I say that is the whole construction of timing and precision.

AB: It seems as if there are also themes of horror and abuse that run through your work, as if you would like the public to fear what normally it finds acceptable.

LT: I think that a lot of violence is hidden in the banality of what is existence itself. And this banality is not solid. There is also the filmic element. Anything lit in a certain way and positioned in a certain way can give an element of danger or can spell danger. Most of my imagery has the quality of the silence before the storm. It is sort of like an annunciation. It is never the endpoint. That is probably due to my own personal character and my education. I was raised by a mother who said that, "It's going pretty well now, but in thirty seconds, it could be pretty bad." (laughing) And I was also bullied in school like there was no tomorrow. From a very early age, physically and mentally, I was aware of all of those things, took them all into account. Of course, there is fear. If you're bullied as a kid, there is constant fear, because it can happen at any time. But you learn to attack in certain situations like that. You learn to keep low. And of course, it forms you as a person, because you will come back at those people. And I did.

AB: What happened?

LT: Well, nothing really crazy, but it forms strengths surrounding those occurrences in your life. It gives you the drive to prove things otherwise. The greater thing though is about this inner violence and a quite high suspicion of human nature, basically. . .which I think is healthy.

AB: I feel as if this leads me to my next question because I want to talk about religion as a point of examination in your work. As well as fear.

LT: Any form of nationalism or fundamentalism is, in my book, exceedingly dangerous. I did a whole series in '99 about Passion plays, but that was like turning religion into cosmetics. It was based on an old brochure of the actors in a production I saw with my parents in 1974. Yet in 1999, I never would have thought that we would yet again evolve into another era where fundamentalism in terms of religion would be so opposing each other as it is now, which means that religion is quite important.

The country and region I come from is entirely Catholic, and the things we have produced in terms of paintings, or painters, or artists, from Jan Van Eyck to whatever exhibit how important and compelling religion has been in creating the idea of Western image building. They did it out of power. And they did it on purpose. And it functions. It opened up the gateway to the subliminal work of El Greco. And it opened doors to make visual language different in a very pragmatic, physical sense. The very first film making to me was done by Peter Paul Rubens. He was the first guy who made gigantic paintings, the first Cecil B. DeMille. The sistine chapel and Michael Angelo are of course included in that as well. All of those things are entangled and made more profane.

But the important balance that was kept by one person: Jan Van Eyck. In my opinion, Van Eyck was the strongest painter in the Western Hemisphere up until this point. Because Jan Van Eyck was so fucking unforgiving. My favorite painting, the Arnolfini wedding portrait which is, unluckily not in Belgium, but at the National Gallery in London. At that time, everything was religion; science was religion. . . But Van Eyck was the very first individual artist, that, by heightening the realism of cloth, meat, the eyes, flesh, everything, tore themes far away from the meta country of Christianity and opened up ideas of representation to the world. And the guy had a fantastic motto which was, "If I can," "Als ich kan." Might be interesting for Obama. (laughing) "If I can" means something like, to the outside world, there is an enormous amount of humility. Yet behind that humility are the most enormous enterprises and ambitions. That was my starting point as an art student. Therefore, you can't forget it. You are traumatized from day one.

AB: Is there the examination of human practice or belief in this work?

LT: There are many more images devoted to spiritual exercise, but I chose the more emblematic ones. I immediately thought of the color blue, the sort of blue that expands in a space. You first see the color and then the image.

AB: Do you maintain a spiritual practice yourself?

LT: Well, no. Are you asking me if I am a religious person?

AB: Yes.

LT: I have my takes from it. I have things that I feel I have to do out of compulsion, that have become ritual. Somewhere and somehow, I probably believe in something. I don't think of it necessarily in regards to religion, but more like the overarching feeling that you have to be careful. You have to stay sharp and open. There are stupid rituals, like the ones for each painting I make. I could easily buy enough paint to make three paintings, but no, I have to buy exactly enough paint for one particular painting. And then I have to go back to the shop to get another truckload of paint for the next piece. One at a time.

AB: So not a God fearing existence.

LT: No, it's more habit and maybe some kind of superstition.

AB: Do different appropriative sources have different qualities visually? Like video still versus polaroid, etc?

LT: Well once I know what I want to paint, then I will know how to paint it. The how is never first, always the what. Then everything is attached to that.

AB: I am intrigued by the images in the other room, the Walt Disney inspired versus the Mormon inspired. Can you relate them to one another?

LT: The Walt Disney series was right after the Jesuit series. My assistant found an image on the Walt Disney website that they were about to delete. It was the entrance of one attraction in Disneyland, an old photograph from the opening day where everything went wrong. It was the entrance of Alice In Wonderland. I thought that that was great, because it was also a symbol of utopia. The Jesuits also use the lure of utopic ideals yet still maintain a humanist aspect to their philosophies, but of course, with a hidden agenda. Now, here comes Walt Disney, who is a bigger than life character, who is utilizing the idea of fantasy, even making a park about fantasy. And of course, this man is a genius but also a control freak and something very scary in this controlling domain. I didn't want to make something about Mickey Mouse. I wanted to make something about this guy who had made a territory. That's why the title of the show was, "Forever, the Management of Magic." Disney saw himself as an entrepreneur, not an artist. Since he is such an icon, I thought that this was already a rather linear relationship, and yet a step beyond the ideal.

The Mormon thing came before the Jesuit thing, and that was just because I made a whole series called "Temple" which was made in aquatint, based upon a hallucinatory documentary about the Mormons. They had the biggest genealogical databank on the globe because even people that are dead, like the Dead Souls of Gogol, could be utilized. That was a fascinating documentary, with fascinating imagery. You have the missionaries sent out into the world, and the church and the databank. I found the organization of it to be more compelling than anything else.

AB: Those entities seem to very much relate to one another in terms of the grandiosity and brainwashing capable behind such utterly fantastic ideals. Fantastic relating to fantasy, not value.

LT: They do indeed have all of these utopic elements in mind.

AB: And then you have the image of the sea.

LT: Yes, the sea, "Shore". It is an image which was made in preparation for a larger canvas which does exist. It has to do with my fascination with the border of the sea. From my hometown in Antwerp, it is a one hour and fifteen minute drive to the shore. As a kid, your first vacations are at the shore. There are white sand beaches and grey waves. The sea is a natural force. And it's also a natural barrier, especially at night. And that, I find, has quite a magical element to it.

AB: You talk of borders and forces. .. The Kristalnacht image is something entirely different but depicts a forced boundary. Do these images relate to one another?

LT: I think that a lot of the imagery that fascinates me is not only about boundaries but also about power. Not so much the having of power, but how power is organized. That probably has to do with how an image itself can hold power as well.

AB: Do you write about your work at all while you are making it?

LT: No, but there is a book distributed by MIT press called "On and By Luc Tuymans" which is comprised of texts and lectures of mine in the first half of the book and then texts about my work in the second half.

AB: Do you see writing and painting as being very different things?

LT: Absolutely. And I have to say that writing is more difficult. I wrote some decent things, I think. But it's such a pain in the ass because the idea of formulating ideas into eloquent sentences is SO difficult. . .I have a great respect for writers.

AB: How does a body of work come into being? Is it visual or is it more of an impetus to convey an experience?

LT: The very first impact is visual. It is an image that grabs me. The images usually have the characteristic of being either frightening or arresting and end up recurring. These are usually images that I don't understand at all, that I can only understand by making the body of work. This appeals to me as a challenge, a sort of symbolic puzzle, if you will. For example, this morning, I walked from the hotel all the way to the university campus, and I passed the Oregon Historical Society. I saw this incredibly strange wall painting on the back side of a building, the one with the trompe l'oeil and the scary figures and the cars. It was fantastic. This is the kind of image that will stick in my mind and begin another body of work, this absurd, human thing, that people pass by every day and not question.

AB: You said that before you were making this work, you were making abstract paintings?

LT: We all have to, that's one thing. I still remember the moment when I stopped doing that, which was in a painting class.

AB: What happened?

LT: I painted an SS officer, which created a massive amount of havoc.

AB: Do you think there is an aspect of the abstract that you find necessary in these figurative works?

LT: Well I must say that I don't think there is such a wide border between figuration and abstraction. I mean, without the Russian icon, Malevich would not have had this type of imagery to begin with, or even this type of thinking, which is very much about the subliminal. Malevich's work is also still quite religious to a point.

I think that there is a type of thinking that goes into a kind of esoteric bullshit which is dangerous. The black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, the seagram paintings of Rothko, Mondrian. . .this is work that I am totally drawn to and which I think are fabulous, but it is something I can't do. For me, abstract painting is too emotional. Because of that, it can easily date itself, because of that type of emotion. And that is why I was drawn to the idea of what has meaning. Very early on, when I was in my early twenties, I told myself that I was not going to make art about art. I wanted to make work out of my own very near history.

AB: Because that, your own history, is real.

LT: Yes, and I think art comes out of reality. Even Rothko. Many people may deny it, but it's true. So I don't see the distinction between abstraction and figuration. People may make the distinction and turn it into a style or an ism, but those are distinctions made by critics, never by artists. People like Rothko loved Edward Hopper. Unfortunately, Edward Hopper was such a conservative asshole, that he couldn't half understand that Rothko was interesting.

AB: When you think of the future of painting, do you think of criticism having the same role that it once had in terms of isms or movements?


LT: The important thing with painting is that it is still very much something that people want to see and experience. In one day, my show in the states will accumulate I don't know how many visitors. When it got home to Brussels, in three months, it accumulated close to 90,000 people, which is the same amount as a Lucas Cranach exhibition. This shows you what the impact is. Although there are all these different techniques, and even though painting might not be in the center of the mother of invention, in the periphery, it is even more powerful.
To give an example, years ago, there was a photographer who won this world press award. It was during the Balkan conflicts, and the photograph was an enlarged picture of a Croatian mother with her dead son, a pieta. So, the painted image is so embedded even in the unconscious, that you cannot extract it. There is no discussion of whether it will be present in the future. It is too much a part of human history to not be a part of our makeup. It is a medium that works through time, over time, and with time. It doesn't work with the immediate. It doesn't work with the superficial. It works on your brain and your memory. And then there is the element of beauty.

AB: Do you think that when we discuss these topics, they are mainly for a Western audience?

LT: I undeniably come from Europe. I am undeniably a part of Western culture. I am not ashamed of it. It is simply what I am. So, sure, of course. There is a different way of looking and making in say, the Maori culture of New Zealand, than that of Western Europe. There is a different visual language, a different apprehension of visual symbols. However, there are also red lines that connect different cultures. Even the cave paintings in Lascaux are included in this, which were long thought of as being only for the initiated to become educated in hunting. It goes further than thinking of the educational or instrumentalized imagery that is passed out; it is really an experience, and that experience is similar in any visual language.

AB: Do you ever see images as being off limits?

LT: Of course, yes. Then again, these flowers here. . I would have never had the instigation to paint these flowers ten years ago. I would have thought it ridiculous. And the one beautiful thing about painting is that you can’t go back. You can't go back. I could easily repaint what I painted in the past, but it would be totally dead. It would be without intention and repetitious.

AB: What is your advice to students about being painters?

LT: Art, I think, is very very difficult, because it's incredibly subjective. I know a couple of things and can advise people only in a constructive way, not in a negative or judgmental way. As a teacher, you must always look for the opportunity for this constructive advice. Sometimes, this is very difficult, because things are just bad and people are not gifted, and you should prepare them for that type of disillusion.

AB: Do you think there is a place for published criticism in the art world right now?

LT: There is high need for it. The people that still do look, and the people that try to comprehend and understand are older than me. I am referring to guys like TJ Clark and Hans Belting. TJ Clark is in his late sixties; Belting is surely in his seventies. Gottfried Boehm is another one of these people who is also close to seventy. .These types of figures are the only ones, strangely enough, who I consider authorities. There are some younger people too, but I don't see how they will exist with the same stamina or influence. There was this one guy in New York who wrote an amazing essay on my work, a brilliant guy, but he just gave up. A lot of these young scholars don’t get the follow up they need. They become academics or something, and maybe that is not totally uninteresting, but most of them are swallowed by a network that is dealing with its own discursiveness, and that discursiveness is fully based on the sociology of the eighties, in which we don't live any more. And then you get this whole facet of art making: lots of images adapted to concepts on paper which no longer have any consideration in terms of their visual impact. And the same goes for curators. Just a couple days ago, my very good friend, Jan Hoet, died. He was in the camp of Arnold Sellman, Kasper Koenig (who is still alive), these sort of lonely, at the top curators who decided very individually what they were going to do and what they liked and what they didn’t like. They had a vision. That era is over.

AB: Why?

LT: Because we have become so extremely democratic. Everything has to be explained. Everything has to be incarcerated in whatever. Then you just totally kill every pleasure. You totally organize everything to death. What is left? That is actually not what the people want.

AB: Yet, it seems that the general public has some sort of need for this.

LT: I think that it was a need that was created in terms that they were totally and constantly underestimated. Which I think is a very foul thing to do. One should never over or underestimate circumstances nor people. This is truth.

AB: And it's condescending.

LT: Yes, it is condescending, and then it creates an educational system that is ludicrous. Let them look. The biggest compliment you can get as an artist, is a little kid, seven years old, who saw your show in the Tate Modern and was so shocked by it, that when you are in the bar years after the fact, the little kid makes you a drawing and brings it to you. That is what it's about. That’s what it's about. And the rest is bullshit.

Interview with Kristan Kennedy

Kristan Kennedy is the visual art curator at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. With this year's Time Based Art Festival just around the corner (the festivities kickoff this Thursday), I kidnapped her mid mad dash to talk about her insights into the city of Portland, its art scene, and the evolution and orchestration of the most exciting art event of the year, TBA.

A: Can you tell me a little bit first about the history of PICA and how the organization came about?

KK: Sure. So the story goes as follows, and there may be people that are better to tell it. I moved to town the year PICA was born, which was 1995. My experience of it was through the lens of a young artist who then became a part of it, whereas there are people who have been a part of it from the very beginning.

Kristy Edmunds was working at the Portland Art Museum at a program called "Art on The Edge" with a curator named John Weber, who I think now is at the Tang. Together they designed a kind of hybrid program that was about contemporary performance, installation, and visual art. I remember coming to town and seeing this great exhibition. It was the first time I had seen a video installation, and it was Gary Hill's tall ships piece which is incredible. After seeing it, I thought Portland was one of the coolest places I had ever been. I had moved from New York where I had seen tons of amazing art all the time, and I was really excited to see that kind of work represented in that museum. Unfortunately that program wasn't supported as much as I think Kristy would have liked, either financially or philosophically, and so she wanted to create an organization that would support emerging ideas. She wanted the organization to support artists that were working right now, that were alive, and that were producing work that existed on the boundaries of several genres. She came from a film making background and also wanted to represent performers and choreographers. She gathered a small group of people in a backyard, Joan Shipley's backyard I believe, and I think five or six people wrote a handful of checks for a small amount of money to start the organization.

One of Kristy's friends, Pat Harrington, a principal at Boora architects, lent her office space. She didn't have a desk or a chair but had a yellow legal pad and a pencil. People would come in and find her sitting there, writing out notes for this organization she wanted to start. That's really how it started. Then she got her first volunteer, and a couple of staff people came on, but it really was very tiny organization running out of this office in an architecture firm. The first programming included artists like Spalding Gray and Laurie Anderson and then included maybe a few performances and one or two exhibitions. Everything happened itinerantly, which is still very much the way we work now, which involved going into abandoned warehouses, other people's theaters, using conduit dance space. . .

In '96, I went to the second amazing show I saw in Portland, which was a show called, "Pushing Image Paradigm". It was in an old warehouse over in northwest industrial. It was a photography exhibit, and the thing I remember most about it was that there were more women in the show than I had ever seen. It was really strong photography, and most of the artists were from the Americas. Brad Cloepfil designed that exhibition, and he then went on to start Allied Works Architecture. Weiden + Kennedy people designed the catalogue. So Kristy was utilizing a whole group of young creatives in town who were all starting their own businesses and were friends of hers. Those beginning years were a lot of sweat equity from a lot of artists and herself and other people in the community. I've always held onto the quote: "PICA is about a community using its energy", and I think in the beginning that is really what she felt, as if we could really pull it off if that happened.

Eventually, the organization grew, and the performance and visual art programming developed into seasons, so we presented seasons of the work. In '99, she started talking to Dan Weiden, who was friend of hers, about being an anchor tenant in the Weiden + Kennedy building. So PICA made a big capital campaign to move into that space. We built out a gallery, got a grant from Warhol, hired Stuart Horodner as the curator, and developed the Resource Room. We became more formalized as an organization. It was both incredibly exciting and really problematic. Everything we had done in the past was a barn raising and so was that, but suddenly we were looked at as an institution, and I think we experienced some growing pains around that.

When you are starting an organization, it takes you a few years to get grants, and then when you finally do get the grants, you have to match that with community support. Then the economy dropped out. 9/11 happened, and we were one of the first organization in town to say, "It's not working". We weren't getting enough funding locally. We didn't have enough membership. There was a sort of shared blame everywhere. We were saying, "We need help." And the community was saying, "What have you done for us lately? Why haven't you shown more local artists?" It was a very tumultuous time. We made an incredibly painful decision to close the gallery and let go of Stuart. That was around 2003.

My own trajectory in the organization was as a young artist moving to town, not knowing what I wanted to do right after college. I was attending these events, and I thought PICA was this gigantic institution that I should rail against, even though I liked their programming.

They had their first DADA ball in that boathouse in North Portland, and I went with a bunch of friends, because they had a told an artist (who was a friend of mine) that they were going to scrim off his sculpture area outside. He took offense to it, and so did we, as if they were trying to censor his work. So we went and backlit this little scrim room, and he ground metal so that sparks were flying everywhere. I think I was standing on a chair fake yodeling. We thought we were making this big scene. But we were naive for a number of reasons. One, now that I work for the organization, they were probably sectioning off the sculpture so nobody sat on it or put their drinks on it, and two, it was the DADA ball so any interruption was part of the party. All of a sudden this little woman pulls back the scrim and says, "Who are you? This is amazing!" And I found out later it was Kristy. We were just completely deflated, because we thought that this gigantic act of protest was going to interrupt their party, and they just kept going. So we stole a case of juice and left.

Every subsequent interaction I had with PICA for years was basically being a thorn in their side. I was part of an artist collaborative, and we sent out these anonymous mailings. Eventually she found out who we were and invited us to participate in the DADA ball by making a piece. And it seemed that at every turn at which we tried to comment against the organization, we were welcomed in. It was incredibly confusing thing about what was going on with us as artists as we tried to understand where we belonged in the community and the ideas of possibly existing without institutions or are they necessary, that sort of thing. That was what was going on with me personally.

A: And you and your collaborators had basically figured that PICA was a threat to what you were doing and represented?

KK: Looking back on it now, it was really that I was terrified. After leaving the environment of art school, I didn't understand how to participate in a gallery structure or anything else. We created our own structure to present our work positioning ourselves against, but the people who were the most supportive were the people who were involved. We learned from just existing that we were part of the system we were railing against, and that we could behave in a certain way and still participate and not lose our ethics.

A: Is that how you moved into curating? from making work with this collaboration?

KK: We put on a lot of events and did our own shows and things like that, but I didn't think of it as curating, and it took me a long time to take on that title. The way that I got involved in the organization was as a volunteer. After the invitations to participate as an artist, I started showing up and sweeping floors and doing all of the stuff that I still do (laughing). Then I started to get involved in other organizations in town. I was on the board at the IPRC, and I started to know the PICA staff and understand what they were doing. I started attending events and going to dance performances and theater performances which was new to me, and I realized how interested I was in all of these other forms of expression. I became increasingly involved, and Kristy asked me to be on the board. We always have artists on the board. I was a very young artist. I didn't know what exactly I could contribute, but because I had been involved in these outdoor, temporary guerilla installations, I started to use those skills to help them get the word out to a younger artist community.

Then I got hired as their marketing PR person, which was completely strange to me. But from Vic's perspective (Victoria Frey, who was managing director at the time) and from Kristy's perspective (who was the artistic director), they knew that I was an artist who could talk about art. In my own collaborative, I had written press releases and organized events, but I wasn't doing that to market. I stepped into the organization right before the first TBA festival in 2003, and that was a huge shift. When I walked in the door in 2003, Kristy announced she was taking a position in Australia. We let go of Stuart, who we all still love, and we started the festival. Everything was new and in transition, and I really got the shit kicked out of me in those first couple of years.

The festival that year was a very new format that no one else was doing in the United States. Kristy had spent a lot of time traveling to Europe and Australia and Asia and attending these festivals and realizing that they were these incredibly engaging, civic activities. She would be in these smaller cities thinking, "This is what Portland feels like. What if we utilize the city in this way? What if we abandon the performance series thing, which is a model adopted by bigger organizations which we are not and have people walking around to different theaters and going around to different things and talking about art?" The one thing she wanted to change was that when she attended a festival, she was a V.I.P. Thus the access to the artists and the work was really for other curators and other producers, and she really wanted it to be about audience and artists communing together. That is when she came up with the idea of The Works, a place that wasn't just a curators lounge or an artist's lounge but where people could all hang out together and talk about what they had seen during the day.

When she presented the idea to the other people in the organization, everybody was completely freaked out. There was very deliberate conversation around it. But she was a true visionary leader, and it made sense for people to jump off the cliff with her. So we did. That first year I remember being really scared and completely exhilarated, and I watched the city change a little bit that day when everyone showed up.

Because the visual art program was closed, and I was a visual artist on staff, I continued to program resource room talks and slide jams with Jorg Jakoby and other great people. Then I brought in a friend who was working at the Wexner center in Ohio to organize a lecture series and a small residency program, and as that was moving along I was sort of doing both jobs. Vic pulled me into her office one day and said she thought we should put visual art on the festival in a deeper way. She said, "You know, you’ve been doing this job, and I think you should be the curator." And I said, "I can't be a curator. I don't have an art history degree." All of the curators I knew came from a very formal training, and it felt strange to take that title on without those credentials. So she asked me what I wanted my title to be. And I came up with "Visual Art Program Director", which was funny because I had no staff. Everybody at PICA is a director but nobody has any staff. It's hilarious. But that is what I started to do. I got charged with organizing a program to coincide with the festival and to keep some lectures and residency based activities going during the year. And I basically used my skills as an artist and followed Kristy's artistic leadership in terms of selecting artists and how we worked with them and what kind of projects they made.

A: Can you describe your creative process as a curator? I know you said that you began your career as an artist. Do those processes differ from each other much? I mean can you describe how ideas evolve into exhibitions? Have you tracked that at all, I mean it must be incredibly abstract. . .

KK: It is abstract, and it was an enormous identity shift for me to be someone who identified first as an artist, always as an artist, since I was very young, and then to suddenly be in this pseudo power position within an organization working with other artists and helping to facilitate their work. It felt natural in some ways because I've always been involved with organizing or volunteering. I understood how to do that. But in terms of putting the intellectual or conceptual framework around it, in the beginning, I really gravitated towards artists I was interested in, who I could have a conversation with and ask, "What do you want to do next?" I felt like PICA's role was to be an institution in the world and certainly in the country that said yes to artists for things that would not be presented in commercial venues and that may not garner the same kind of support from another institution like us at this point in their career.

And I just started paying attention. I was going to see art all the time, but I started to think about what things resonated to me in a different way, in a way that coalesced with the ideas the performance curator was talking about or that Kristy was talking about. I was familiar with the program, so I knew the kinds of artists that we would work with, and a lot of it came from residency based activities. So it wasn't like I was doing this cherry picking exhibition model, as in, I have a concept and I want these seven paintings to go along with it.

A: That curatorial process can be dangerous sometimes in terms of the curator's vision outweighing the the apparent and active voice of a community or a selected group of artists. . .

KK: It's definitely different. I count on those exhibitions being made, because I love them, and I want to learn from them. Because I knew PICA had come to a place in which a lot of work had been commissioned and developed in residency, what I wanted to offer as a curator was creative time and support in a very kind of scrappy and resourceful way. I wanted to say, "Here's what we can do and what do you want to do and let's make this happen." I think also, because the things I express in my own work are more abstract and more formal, working with PICA gave me the chance to exercise this other side of me which was more political and associative and really into pop culture and putting all of these artists side by side. This allowed me to make a comment on what was happening in the world through artists' eyes.

We always say it's not our idea, it's PICA's mission to trust the artists and to follow their lead. When I would talk to artists, naturally their thoughts and their projects would have something in common because they’re all reacting to the world. That is where the time based art festival originated. It wasn't time based art media projects. It was time based art: the art of our time. That term then began to be recognized as video, so it became more confusing, but for us it really is about representing work of our times.

When I decided to take on the curator title on, it was because there was sort of a misunderstanding that the festival was something that you apply for, that it wasn't curated. That was one reason. Another reason I took on the title was because the language of the art world is so specific that when you say you're a visual art program director, no one knows what the hell that means. When you say you're a curator, they know exactly what that means. It became easier for me to talk to other artists and gallerists and other institutions using their own language. To me that word has a lot of weight and none at all. But over the last couple of years, I found myself having more of a desire to contextualize the work of the artists to support them in a different way. That does feel like what curators do. I realize that artists also need the other side of that support, which is to decode their work, to demystify their work and put it into context for the world. Their job is to make the work, and our job is to do that. So I kind of straddle both lines all the time, and I'm definitely learning how to do my job all the time. I hope I never stop learning.

A: I'm sure that having both perspectives as both artist and curator allows your approach to be more fluid and not so academic as say, someone coming from a solely art historical background. It can allow you to see the work from a more experiential place.

KK: Exactly. I'm always teetering on the see-saw of insecurity which is that I truly believe in the artist as curator model, the untrained model. But I also really admire the curatorial mandate of the intellectual and the academic model. I'm often faced with my own fears that I'm not qualified for this position. And many people probably think that I'm not, but my communion with the artists has proven really fruitful and transformative for them, and that's really where it starts for me. Through learning from my colleagues and other people in other organizations, I've realized that this is how we do it. Even the most academic curators are still painting the walls and talking to artists about their ideas, and those are the curators I respond to. I have a harder time with people that are in love with objects only and feel that artists are not to be trusted. I think that is the scary side of curatorial practice, which is that artists are not to be trusted, that they don't know their own work, and we have to be the experts.

A: Do you think that is one of the biggest mistakes a curator can make?

KK: That is what I believe, yet I am sure there is a counter argument. I do hear curators talk about not trusting artists to talk about their own work, and I don't know where that comes from.

A: What is the hardest part of curating?

KK: Knowing when to stop and trying to create the strange balance between your own personal taste and what may need to be seen now. If I was putting a show together of what I love to look at or what I wanted in my own personal collection, it would be a bunch of De Kooning paintings.

A: Ooh, me too.

KK: But what I want to see in the world is a whole mix of things that includes experimental music and film and dance and video and slick objects. I often present work that isn't my own taste but that I feel has a place in the mix of ideas that I'm presenting.

It was great to put together that painting show at the Feldman because it was a time I did exercise those other muscles and say here is a show where it really is about the paintings first and an idea. That came about from looking over thousands and thousands of images I've taken over the years and seeing all of this figurative painting and realizing that there was this thing happening and how could I reveal that. That work didn't really feel like it had a place in the festival, which is really about the forms being in proximity to each other. It really needed a space on its own, and that was what was so thrilling about putting that together. It was so interesting talking to my friends and colleagues, like Stephanie Snyder, saying, "Do you realize I've never done this before?" I've never put together an exhibition of twelve paintings. The simplest things about arranging them in a room were completely foreign to me, although I've done it with my own work. I'm still learning. I almost have the backwards curatorial process experience, which is someone like Patrick Rock saying, "I would like to present a forty foot inflatable elephant." Oh yeah, sure, I know how to do that, or helping Claire Fontaine set a room on fire. That makes sense to me. But when someone says I want to hang four photographs in a room, I am not as familiar with how that is supposed to happen. So I rely on other people to do that, and I will step into it every once in a while.

A: I want to go back to something that you touched on earlier which is why PICA thinks that a time based art festival is pertinent to today's contemporary art condition? It is of course 'art of our time' as you mentioned, but what it is about the formal temporal qualities that the work shares which seem poignant enough to garner this festival?

KK: I think it's interesting, because there is some buzz around the legitimacy of having all of this happen at once, as if the activity level takes away from each individual artist's work. But for me, what happens during the festival is this really radical thing where all of the forms are presented side by side. The artists and audience are together in the room. People are seeing each other's work for the first time. They're talking about it, and the work takes on a living quality, like a lived experience quality that I feel is very different than walking through a museum. Which I also love and is also about a public and is also civic but in a very different way.

The community that develops around the work seems very important. As I had Claire Fontaine visiting in town and was taking them around I was thinking, I really wish they were here for the festival. There is one way they experience their work which is to have someone install it and sometimes they never see it or to be there with the curator and have this public come in. But what would it be like for them to be involved in this other kind of activity, that is less about the art industry and more about the community of Portland witnessing this work. I know that this sounds like this hokey, energy field thing, but in experiencing it, i really believe it. I've watched visual artists who never go to see performance suddenly fall in love with a particular performer and continue following their work or collaborating or changing their work because they've been in the landscape of Oregon. The experience for the artists and the audience is so holistic; it's not about us and the other, the viewer and the object, or the viewer and the artist. It's really about, in the best sense of the overused word, a community that develops around it.

A: And the festival really is curated around ephemeral, temporal work that engenders this experiential art encounter; there are a few object based pieces, but the bulk of the festival is really an orchestration of the fleeting and then how it leaves you and what you are left with. Do you think about these experiences next to one another? I mean, do you organize the days into the idea of an entire experience unto itself or the entire festival as such? Is there an intentional linear arc to the festival as a whole or is it more logistically organized?

KK: It's a combination of both, but we spend a lot of time thinking about the context of experience day by day hour by hour. So our first instinct is to say, what are we the most interested in? Who is working today that we want to work with? That's the first thing. Then we talk about all of the projects, performance and visual, side by side, and then you start seeing these connections come together, and you think about those connections and fill in other areas where there may be gaps. As it starts to get closer to the scheduling time, we're thinking about what the experience is as someone moving through their day at the festival, and that is something that we have only learned from putting on ten years of festivals. We talk about an "arc". I am not sure what that arc is; we've never done any scientific experiments, but we talk about that flow from beginning to end.

For myself, the first thing I am dealing with is a title. I don't know why, maybe it is because I am in love with the poetry of words. I remember last year's program, "Human Being", came out of my experience being in the (washington high)school for the first year and presenting a program that was really about dystopian ideas and the fall out from war and our political time and space. As I watched the public walk into this building that they somehow understood because it was of course designed for people, I observed them run through the hallways with utter joy. And I thought to myself, but this program is about anxiety. . .Why is everyone so happy? And I had to think about where the audience was pushing me, you know like, what is our individual experience and what does it mean to be human and how do we look at work and how do we interact with it. That is where the second program originated.

This year's programming came out of a very simple conversation I had with my brother. It rang in my ears over and over and over again, and as I started to look for work it started to center around those ideas. So I have something that is pushing me along. Sometimes I am operating with blinders on in terms of the performance program, but when I emerge, I'm sitting in Miguel Gutierrez's performance, and I feel like, "Oh my gosh, this is the piece that sums up everything that I have been thinking about all year." And it was a dance performance that was programmed by another curator; it wasn't something in my own program. That wouldn't have happened had we over thought the entire process. We need to leave room for these ideas to congeal over the two weeks that everyone is here. I also love that the visual art program has this whole other experience that happens after the festival is over which is more private, more of a traditional viewing space to have time to look and think about things.

A: And return to it.

KK: And return to it.

A: So how do you think the festival functions for the city?

KK: As an artist, and as a community member in Portland, I really believe that the festival has changed the way the art world looks at Portland. From the most obvious and legitimate place, this is the place the performance curators of the country commune every year to talk about issues of the field and what's going on: the Wexner, the Walker, the ICA, Yerba Buena. . . Very interesting curators with their own programs and their own agendas come to this format and really identify with the work here in Portland and love it and love the city because of it. They think of Portland as a place where great art is made by regional artists and to where great art travels, from all over the world.

In the visual art world, it is a counterpoint to the way art market driven cities operate. The artists I am bringing here from outside the city have a very unique experience here. They are not treated the same as they are in larger cities and by other institutions and sometimes by their own galleries (although most are very supportive). The festival allows them to be treated purely as artists. It's really a safe haven. And I feel that the community, for the most part (I hope), feels welcome to participate in that, to investigate and be as curious as the artists are. I feel as if a lot of other art viewing experiences are set up as those who are invited and those who are not, and TBA at least strives to be an open experience for everyone who comes.

A: Do you think this would be a different festival if it was in a different city?

KK: Yes, definitely. I feel like Portlanders, and I consider myself one of them because I've been here long enough, (even though maybe you shouldn't quote me on that because I hate losing my Brooklyn) are revolutionaries. This is the west. There is a great independence and a curiosity and an energy here. That is what Kristy saw in 1995 when she was starting PICA, and that is definitely what I see now. It is the reason why there are constant throngs of young people here who are trying to start things all the time, and it's why people hang out and do their own thing and make this their home. It's a very open, warm community, and the artists definitely feel that. They feel welcome and fall in love with the place and move here. It is a home.

A: Do you think you curate with a Portland audience in mind?

KK: Oh, definitely.

A: What does that audience look like?

KK: The first year I did the program I invited this artist, Matthew Day Jackson. He was born in the Pacific Northwest, and his work was dealing with this revisionist history of America but through the lens of the natural environment. I was thinking of all of the artists who were working in that way here and how they could be in conversation with his work and how artists from other cities might join into that conversation with a different perspective. He had an incredible work ethic and a sense of craft that I felt like other artists here would respond to and desired to see. So I definitely think about the audience here, but I really hesitate to pander to anyone. I don't allow myself to think about whether or not people will like the work; in fact I don't even allow myself to think about whether or not I 'like' it, per se. I often say that contemporary art is not about liking, it's about looking. There have been so many things over the years that I've absolutely detested; when I realize that I am still thinking about them, I know how good they actually were. I don't want to make my mind up about things right away. I think about a Portland audience in terms of its capacity and its energy and its desire to see and participate, but I don't think about it in terms of taste.

A: Where do you think Portland exists on the country's art map? And what do you think is its general direction, if it's moving in a certain way?

KK: I think it's a giant, vibrating question mark, or maybe like: asterisk, question mark, exclamation point. . . I don't know why I'm describing it that way, but I think that what is interesting to outsiders about Portland is that they sense that there is a great amount of activity here. There are a lot of artists here who are exhibiting nationally and internationally. This is not a podunk town. It is an art city. But our institutional framework is confusing to other cities, because they are used to having this ecosystem of organizations that have a very traditional ladder and support structure. We just don't have that. Visitors come to Portland, and they know us (PICA), and they know our programming, but there's not a building for them to walk into and an exhibition for them to see. They know there are a lot of young artists, but they don't necessarily know where to find them. The responsibility of the curators and the artists and other people in town is to constantly be talking about what's interesting. And we all do. Everybody in town is always pointing at someone else in town, saying you need to walk down the street to that place, or you need to go out to the Cooley Gallery at Reed. You need to go to Publication Studios, you need to go to Carr Hole. You need to go here and there, because it's not a city of major institutions. It's a city of minor institutions that form a much more interesting network of people.

When I moved here, no one knew what Portland was, and now it is written about in every paper nationally and internationally because of bike culture and our attitudes toward the environment and the coffee and the art. There is a kind of come hither vibe about coming out here and exploring. My desire and wish is for our own community to match the enthusiasm of the outside world and to start really investing in the artists here by collecting and buying their work, by supporting the institutions that support artists, and by attending and really showing the outside world how much this community actually supports the arts and artists.

A: Would that be your only critique for Portland in terms of the way in which it represents its arts community and its artists?

KK: I don't want to say it is a criticism necessarily, because we have something pretty good here. Yet, there is a thin network here of collectors that really support work in a significant way. I want to live in this idealistic world where art doesn't need to be traded, but in terms of history and preservation and a day to day level of survival, we need people investing in the arts all of the time. It's not something that is culturally valued. I feel like there are so many artists here that should be being collected locally that it pains me. It's hard to convince someone to take that piece that they love into their home, and I'm not sure what that's about. . .I don't want to just rest on the no collector thing, because it's too easy, but I do think that financial support for the arts in Oregon is an issue. And everyone who is fighting for it is giving all they can. We just need more investment.

A: What is your ideal experience for visitors seeing this year's festival after seeing everything? I know that is a huge question.

KK: Well first it's for them to see everything. I feel like I have a crazy stamina for this festival because I grew up inside of it. But I get it; it's hard business to give up your life to attend. But I want someone to come away with a new understanding of the world through the artists' eyes. That's really it. It's as simple as that.

I would also love our local artists to get out of their own studios and have a hunger for media that lives outside of their own practice.

A: My last question to ask you is what qualities you look for in the work that you choose for the festival, beyond the apparent notion of the theme of the festival?

KK: I'm sure someone from the outside can evaluate my choices over the last few years and see some very clear patterns, but for me it is a strange combination of instantaneous desire: seeing a piece and wanting it and wanting to continue looking at it.

The other thing is meeting with artists and talking with them about their work. It is a really generative, generous experience when artists take you into their studio and talk to you about what they want to do. The plausibility of their ideas happening is a huge impetus to work together. This year, in particular, I was very interested in representing this idea of revolution, either personal or political, so that became the lens through which I looked at everything. Sometimes things didn't necessarily fit into that idea literally, but I hope that, through the festival, the connection will manifest itself.

I got to go inside Oscar the pink elephant yesterday in a test run, and I feel as if that might be one of the pieces that may be hard for people to understand in terms of being included in an exhibition titled "Evidence of Bricks" concerning political revolution. But it's also about personal revolution, and experiencing that filled me with a kind of ecstatic joy that was similar to having my candidate win, or watching an evil dictator topple, or having a joyous moment in the studio. It was so powerful that it felt like the right thing to have in the festival. And its conception began as an email from the artist and a drawing. You have to envision the future potential of what these artists' ideas will be and hope that you both can get it there together. The missing quotient is the audience as in what will it be like when they show up.

A: Yes, it seems to me as I pour over this amazing lineup for this year's festival that the underlying intention of it all seems to be about a certain type of destruction that lends itself only to a wild unknown possible outcome, ultimately a contemporary revolution being witnessed from the inside, as it's happening.

KK: I kept focusing on this brick as a social sculpture, being the foundation of both buildings and violent protest. It is often the first thing people reach for to throw through a window and thus the symbol of a violent possibility of change. I feel like that is what an artist's job is; eroding that kind of experience in culture has caused a lot of damage, and I feel it. That kind of creative potential is missing. I want people to pay attention to what is going on; we are not in a good place. We can read about it. We can watch the news and attend a rally, but there is also a different way we can interpret the current state of things, and I feel like that is through looking at art and making art.

A: And destroying it.

KK: Yes, and destroying it. Starting over.

An Interview with B. Wurtz

B. Wurtz is a lyrical formalist, a classicist, and a provocative senator of the mundane. He poetically points to the sidelines of our daily lives in an effort to point out the beauty and significance of an immense reservoir of objects discarded as refuse. From what we regard as worthless, he culls a rich vocabulary with which to form his oeuvre. Talismans of culture are formed out of plastic bags and wire as Wurtz asks us to pay attention to our surroundings and to the moments that actually make up our lives. Through his work he poses questions of beauty, value, money, and art itself. His intentional, elegant arrangements are foiled by a sly prodding, encouraging the re-examination of both the source and complacency of accepted definitions. Through Wurtz's work, we are refreshed and reset, awakened and reminded to look again our environments, how we create them and they us. I had the good fortune of meeting with the artist during his recent visit to Portland to discuss his work and motivations.

AB: Hi B! I was lucky enough to hear you speak the other night at PNCA, which was amazing, so thank you for that.

BW: Oh, you're welcome. I thought it went well.

AB: I wanted to ask you first off: how does humor play a role in your work?

BW: I think it's definitely there. People talk about the humor in my work, so I think it's definitely there. I really enjoy humor in life, so somehow it ends up in the work even though I don't deliberately intend to make humorous pieces.

AB: Really?

BW: No! (Laughing) I don't! But I like that people see it in the work.

AB: Because it seems like there is this tongue-in-cheek, rather sly attitude hovering about your work, almost a sort of childlike bravado. It often seems as if you are trying to overstep some boundaries just to see what might happen or whom you might be able to provoke. Each formal experiment seems like a prod to your audience which says, "What if I do this?"

BW: I think that is very well put, because I do mess around with the conventions of art. Years ago Dennis Cooper wrote a review of one of my shows and said that very thing, that I kind of fuck around with convention.
Often I am not so into art about art, but on the other hand, art is a part of life. I'm not against art about art to an extent. It's all sort of a balance, so I even confess some of my work is art about art. It's about what could be art. I think I was saying in the talk that I think a lot of my pieces on the wall relate to painting because, being on the wall, they automatically have that history to them. So I do have this thinking of: what could be a painting? Sculpture operates like this too, especially because it is so monumental and additive but sort of absurd at the same time.

AB: When I consider your body of work as a whole, I see these questions as an issue of perspective. It always seems to be the way in which you view the work, whether it be through the lens of photography or the arrangements of colorful everyday objects into lyrical sculpture, it always seems to be perspective as the provocation of a different way of thinking and looking.

BW: I strive for elegance in the pieces. I feel like that is part of what you are picking up on. You seem like my ideal viewer, because I want people to see the work as humorous and a little bit disconcerting, maybe, but I hope they see the beauty in it too.

Richard Tuttle said recently in an interview that if you treat something with respect you will get it back, which is what I do. I have respect for all of the objects I use in my work because they are so essential to our life. It is not about them being items of capitalism or consumerism or advertising. I think of it more as the stuff that is all around us so I have a great love for it.

AB: In your talk, you mentioned going to the MET, and upon seeing an entire room of some of the big AbEx paintings, feeling as if they were saying, "Pay Attention to Me!" It seems as if you are trying, in some ways, to create the same effect with these objects which could be seen as mundane but could be considered beautiful if you paid attention to them in a different way.

BW: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

AB: Do you ever make work out of anger?

BW: Out of anger. . .wow. . . what an interesting question. . . I don't think I do. It's not that I don't have anger. But, on the subject of anger, I think I learned long ago (and this is completely from observation) that the worst thing that can happen to an artist is to get bitter and angry. I told myself that no matter what happened that I would not let myself do that. It doesn't mean that I wasn’t frustrated, because I did have a lot of years of struggle and times when people just did not get my work. There were some people that always did get my work, and they were people that I really respected. And that was a wonderful thing. But it didn't take away from the reality that I was being ignored by the main art world, and I was having financial problems. I don't mind saying that; I think it's interesting. With my teaching, I think it's interesting for my students to know that it's not always easy being an artist in spite of the way it's presented now. It's a really tough life, and I had financial difficulties, but I stuck with it. I feel like I'm an example of perseverance and being a bit proactive.

All right I got a little off the track. . .right. . . anger. So, no. For me, the art was always the healthiest part of my psychological makeup. I am curious; did you ask that because you see some aspect of anger in it?

AB: No, I ask that out of the sheer curiosity pertaining to the humorous part of things that seems to take a stab at certain conventions. It not that I see anger in the work, but that I wondered if maybe the impetus for some of it might have been out of anger.

BW: Oh no, I see what you're saying, but it was more like jabbing at something more playfully. Because I love art, and I don't deny that. When you mentioned the big paintings at the MET, I want to go see work like that. I think a lot of people work well within the conventions of a standard, stretched canvas on stretcher bars. But for myself, I just had a different way of wanting to do things.

AB: Can you describe your process of making?

BW: You mean like how a specific piece evolves?

AB: Yes, do you notice a pattern in yourself as you make work? Is it different with each piece?

BW: It varies somewhat. People are interested in that question. I think for any artist people are interested in that question. I can kind of describe it. As I mentioned in the lecture, I had limited the found objects, and I got on this theme of food, shelter, and clothing which had to do with basics of existence, daily life, that kind of thing. So I sort of had a subject matter in the back of my mind, so I wasn't grasping for subjects. I think this is pretty typical for most artists; they kind of have something they do.

As far as an actual piece, sometimes I do get an idea of something I am going to do, and I think it tends to be based on some kind of found object. I like to work off of something. For example, in the show at PNCA, the bread paintings on the wall(i were based on the little plastic fasteners that fasten a bag of bread. All of those plastic fasteners in the pieces were culled from bags of bread that I ate. Clearly, I am looking at those plastic things a lot. In the past, I have made works where I kind of did schematic representations of ordinary things like that. So I was just kind of noticing things like that, these bread things, and then I thought, Oh, well I would like to use that in a piece of work, especially because it's so tiny. So that is sort of an example of how I get an idea for a piece. But usually what happens is that the actual formal properties of the work change as I make it. I am very much a maker and make decisions based on each choice. I think of this kind of making as being similar to when I was a child, I used to sit on the floor and play with blocks. That playfulness and the physical moving things around and trying them out is still very much in me.

In regards to the bread fasteners, I originally had the idea that I was going to mount one in the corner and then make a giant, monochrome shape of it. That was my original idea, but then I realized it just didn't seem interesting. So then somehow I got that idea of doing a painting and to simply paint the void, paint the negative space, which made the shapes on those pieces. And then I used text from the thing itself, so it just kind of evolved. But it started out slightly differently. This is often the case with me. I start out with something. I get a little image in my mind of something I'd like to make. Once in a while it stays pretty close to the idea. Most of the time it starts out as something, and I have to make a lot of changes. And this is the most fun, especially if something reaches a stage of total failure, where I have nothing to lose, so that it might turn into something completely different. Is that kind of what you were asking?

AB: Definitely. I wanted to ask you as well about the limits you imposed on yourself early on: the food, clothing, shelter limits. . .How did those limits come about and did you ever want to deviate from them?

BW: I think I do deviate somewhat, but I think I knew that there was going to be this enormous palette of found objects, and I felt a little overwhelmed. How am I going to deal with this? I think putting the limitation was an advantage in that it made me need to put more effort into what i did with them, the formal aspects of the pieces, the composition.

The thing about the found objects that I noticed was that these things were so interesting just as they were, especially slightly antiqued things. People would sort of place it as sort of an objet d'art. I really wanted to avoid that. I steered away from anything that I felt was already too resolved in itself. I wanted something plainer, more ignorable, and that created more of a challenge for me of what to do with it.

AB: Was that why you mentioned in your talk of not really relating to other found object artists?

BW: Yes, I feel like often so many objects are used and often the effect is to abstract the object so that they lose their identity. I just felt that, for me, that didn't seem to work. That isn't to say that it wouldn't work for someone else.

AB: How did those limits come about? Do you see them as existential or philosophical limits?

BW: Yes, I think there is a philosophical component to it definitely. I'm not very interested in theory. I'm not even very well read in philosophy, but I did realize my work has a lot to do with phenomenology. Stuff that I was interested in didn't have to do with transcending the world, it had to do with being in the world at that moment. And that is philosophical. I mean, it is very related to what is usually termed eastern philosophy and the people that have reached so called enlightenment. My understanding of that is that they have learned to let go of preconceived ideas in order to be in the present moment, in the here and now, in the world exactly as it is, not as one wishes it to be and all of the things that complicate and make our minds chatter all the time. I am not saying that I am enlightened. But I am interested in that concept. In terms of my art, the idea of the here and now had to do with very simple objects, and these are the things that have to do with humanity period. One of my students was pointing out to me the other day that the objects I use are objects used by everyone; they are not related to class. Everyone needs to eat, and everyone wears clothes, and people live in houses that are generally constructed in the same way and serve the same purpose. It is sort of a philosophical basis.

AB: It seems to make sense on the ends of both form and content; found objects are the way of making art out of our surroundings. The here and now is your subject, and a fantastic way to illustrate and remind the viewer of this immediacy is to ask them to look at the every day differently, to consider it as something of worth and beauty, as art. When you moved from California to New York, did you notice anything changing in your work? Does geography influence your art?

BW: I really don't think it changed much. Some of it does have to do with geography in that some of the plastic bags I use have New York addresses on them. I was certainly aware of that, and I like that; it's sort of a mapping of where I am. So, in a sense that makes it geographically specific, but on the other hand, there certain points at which I make little decisions about what the rules of the game are, and this might not be so obvious. But I think I would basically make the same kind or work wherever I lived.

AB: I also wanted to ask you about the few instances when text comes into your work. When do words need to come into your work? It seems rather rare.

BW: It is rarer than it used to be. I was definitely interested in art that used text. It was one of my interests and clearly I was absorbing that kind of work. I think the reason that there is less now is that I started liking the idea of trying to do what I was doing with text without it. The text now is from the yogurt lids and the bags, but I don't do so much of my own text. It may appear. I haven’t decided never to do it again; it just naturally started to happen less.

AB: Despite the unnatural nature of your materials, nature always seem to be referenced. Is this intentioned as commentary or is it simply a formal choice?

BW: Yes, you are right about that. I think it is something I can't help. I love nature. I don't use it as subject, but somehow it has gotten in there anyway. People have commented that my wire sculptures with the curving wire and the mesh things are like floral or plant forms, and I know that is where those shapes come from. I definitely feel like the curving wires are branch-like. So yes, I do reference it, and it's intentional not so much in a deliberate way. It just sort of happens because it's something I'm interested in.

AB: When you see it happening, are you content with it being seen as such, as nature referenced? The reason I ask that is because it could definitely be seen as being quite a loaded commentary on the state of the environment, with the plastic bags formed into the shapes of plants and the like. .

BW: I am super aware of the environment and concerned about it. But it's not part of my subject matter. Not really. I think it can't help but be there in a way because I am using things that could be discarded or recycled; I just happen to recycle them into art. I am kind of an environmentalist, it's just not really part of the work.

AB: What is your ideal experience for the viewer to have when looking at your work?

BW: I think it would be kind of what you said in one of your very first comments. I hope that people would look at the objects in a new way and realize how often these objects are ignored. I hope the work makes them smile. I like it if people see some humor, and I hope that they see a kind of elegance that could be weirdly calming. Roberta Smith called me a classicist, and I am totally happy with that, because I think I am, completely. I feel that within certain classical things there is a calmness.

AB: The work is often poetic. . .I was wondering if you read any poetry. . .

BW: I don't read that much poetry, but I'm completely in awe of writers, and I am interested in poetry. I tend to more be interested in prose that is poetic. There are some writers in particular that I am always drawn to, like Peter Schjeldahl and Bruce Hainley: writers that also write poetry. I am completely into words. So I like it if you would see the work as poetic.

AB: Have you ever thought of giving up on art?

BW: I have in the past, yes. It wasn't very realistic. I had a teacher at UC Berkeley, my first real art course, called "Materials and Methods in Painting". It was taught by an artist named Jerry Ballaine, a west coast artist, and I never forgot him saying to the class: "If there's anything you can think of doing other than be an artist, than you should do it because it's a really tough life."

AB: They say that to all of us don't they?

BW: Did you hear that too?

AB: Yes!

BW: And I never forgot it, and in my moments of frustration in my life, I really wished I could just walk away. But I feel like the older I get, the more I feel like life is about each of us learning who we are and accepting that. I made some attempts, but not really, because what would I do?
I really love the Antique Road Show on television. I am totally interested in those experts; they know so much about one thing. It just fascinates me. In one of my moments of wishing I could be something other than an artist, I thought I would want to be one of those experts. And then I realized I am. I know a lot about art, and that is what made me rethink teaching. I used to think, I really don't have anything to teach people. It's not for me. I just want to do my day jobs, which have nothing to do with art. But for years I had been a visiting artist at various schools, and I always really enjoyed it. And I started thinking, well, wouldn't it be interesting to meet with that person again? And again? When I considered becoming an expert on the Antique Road Show, I suddenly thought to myself: but wait, I do know a lot about art. I have to accept that my thing is art.

Maybe if I had been one of those people that had had critical and financial success from the beginning maybe I wouldn't have continued. There are all kinds of patterns of what happens with artists' careers. Like I said, it wasn't really realistic. I had to make a choice between music and art; my piano teacher wanted me to study music after high school. She had my career planned. I was living in Santa Barbara. She wanted me to go to the college of Creative Studies and study music. I love music, but I loved art also, and I just thought I couldn't do both. And I felt like I wouldn't be a great musician. I still love music.

AB: Did studying music influence the way you approached art?

BW: Yes. I began studying piano when I was in fourth grade, and I always enjoyed it. I would play and sight read, and later I would compose too. When I decided to take piano lessons again when I was older, around the time of high school, I had a much more serious teacher. She was an accredited teacher, and we had auditions at Music Academy of the West. All of a sudden I was in this thing. I was just going to take piano lessons, and I was suddenly in this serious world of music, going and doing auditions and stuff. But she started teaching me more things about music like phrasing. Before it was very basic: learning the notes and playing them. But learning something like phrasing really changed the way I understood and played music. There were certain ways to press the keys and move your hands so that you would get a certain sound from the keys, and when she began to teach me these things, I really thought to myself that it related to art. I thought that I could use that way of thinking to influence the way I made art. I realized there was a lot more subtlety that could be a part of art.

AB: So this is kind of back to the work itself. ..It seems like your making process involves a sort of fleshing out of an idea in sets or series. How do you know when those sets or series are finished? How do you know when something cannot be made in another form?

BW: You mean, when does it stop? I am definitely not the only artist that works this way. But I think that it has to do with the impulse to collect. I think often I make something, and I want to see what another one looks like and then what they look like together and then what more look like together. That's part of it. But I also think that it's because I use mass produced found objects like plastic bags. I use a lot of things that exist in series in themselves. I was also extremely interested in Andy Warhol, which probably isn't the most obvious influence, and Warhol was so interested in series and multiple images.

In a way it's a bit inexplicable. I think the most logical thing to me is that it has to do with the impulse to collect, which I have. I've collected chairs. And then I started collecting Oriental rugs from Ebay for our house. And again, these are things that exist in series, and they're interesting to look at as a series in order to notice their similarities and differences.

AB: I think you might have touched on this a bit, but I would like you to expand on it: what is the difference for you for a piece to be on the wall versus on the floor? Or pieces that do both?

BW: Or a pedestal, or a shelf. . .I used to make paintings when I was young. I made oil paintings, ink, water color, drawings. I think the wall pieces come about because I still have that in me, that interest in painting. I don't literally activate a space the way Richard Tuttle does in an installation, but I really think about a room where my art will be seen, so I like to use the walls. I just find it interesting, even in terms of the way one would arrange something in one's living room. I'm interested in the way things look on the wall; there is the flatness of the wall combined with the experience of walking around something. And then there is that question of whether something will sit on the floor or on a pedestal.

AB: What is the difference in the experience in making something that will sit on the floor or hang on the wall? Do you make it on the floor or on the wall?

BW: I usually make the wall pieces on the floor, but I am picturing them on the wall. I tend to let myself use color more for the wall pieces, painted elements I use on wall pieces. And in my experience, that rarely works for me in three dimensional sculpture. I don't know why. I know some people can do it: put paint or color on a sculpture. For me it's like gilding the lily or something. It's not that the sculptures don't have color, but it's usually the color that is already in the objects.

AB: Is the canvas you use also found? Paint is also another element that is not part of the found vernacular. Is that a weird process comparatively?

BW: To put the paint on the canvas?

AB: Yes, you've mentioned that you've made paintings, but is painting a different kind of making process because you aren't really working with something that already exists?

BW: I am interested in the canvas as a material, almost as a sculptural material. Even though it's flat against the wall, it still has a depth, and I've made a lot of works where there are loops at the top and the entire piece simply hangs on nails, so it's loose. It has some depth, whether it is waves or wrinkles. So I'm interested in the canvas as an object. I'm interested in the fabric. I've done pieces with buttons on the canvas, because buttons normally are sewn on a piece of cloth. When I add the paint, I'm really thinking of paint as referring to a traditional painting, but only to an extent. A piece of cloth on the wall references a painting, and it's logical there would be paint on it. I am interested in color. With the sculptures it just doesn't usually work. The color has been the thing. So the paint on the canvas, yeah, it's interesting to think about. . . I like to be almost objective about myself if possible. Like, why do I have the need to do this stuff? It fascinates me. Why did I need to do this all these years?

AB: When I look at certain of your pieces, this one piece in particular, two different sets of materials (the plastic bags and the paint) are linked to one another by their own material. I think of these materials as acting as foils to one another. It's the same sort of idea as art and the world being one and the same.

BW: Exactly. Someone made a comment in a review that the lines in the piece seemed to say: "see same difference." I think that's very true. I think that I was thinking of them as being equal. I intend to do more of those. I love the idea of bringing paint subtly back in.

AB: I feel like if you just keep making what you're making, it will figure itself out.

BW: Well, hopefully. There is always the question of running out of ideas. I am sure every artists has that panic sometimes.

AB: I think it depends on the way you make and conceptualize. When you look at your life's work it seems as if one thing leads to another.

BW: I think it comes from that place of trying to be objective about oneself. I saw the show after Matthew [Higgs] had installed it. I felt that it was so weirdly consistent. But I was kind of relieved to find that I didn't repeat myself, that things changed and evolved over time even though it was very much part of the same central impulse, yet it didn't repeat itself. It was really kind of a relief, and that makes me more hopeful about the future. Hopefully it will continue. It will be me, but it will evolve.

AB: Which artists do you relate with?

BW: Definitely Calder, who isn't often mentioned by reviewers, but I really loved him as a child. I never really thought about Calder as having been the inventor of mobiles as a kid. When I realized this it really astonished me. I still just love seeing his work. Marcel Duchamp. I went through a very heavy phase of being fascinated by Duchamp in the early seventies. He was a big influence. Duchamp has always been important, but I don't think he was always in such high esteem as he is now. Warhol. I still am fascinated by his work.

AB: What do you think of the contemporary art market/world?

BW: It's kind of crazy. I try not to think about it too much. But the reality is, we all need money to live. I am not against selling my work or other people selling their work. I think collectors are incredibly important. I like collectors because i relate to that collecting impulse. Somebody needs to take care of the work, and they step up and do that. It's super important, and that's related to the art market. It's necessary in the same ways that art fairs are necessary. It's not the ideal way to see art, but they are what they are.

AB: Has it changed at all since you've been in New York?

BW: Yes, it's been up and down. There was the early eighties boom and then the crash, and then there was a huge boom right before the last crash. You remember it. What is funny to me is that I always remained on the outside of it.

AB: I was just about to ask you if it affected your work at all.

BW: No, it didn't affect my work. It didn't affect me. I was hardly selling anything in the boom times. And then the crashes would come, and it didn't make any difference. Now I'm doing better in that respect, and we're in the middle of a recession. So I'm not quite in sync with it.

AB: Do you have any advice for young artists?

BW: Ok my advice is kind of what I said earlier. I think the most important thing for an artist is to really try and delve in to find out who they are. If that means being able to walk away from art, then they should do that and not worry about it. If it means that they really need to make art, then they will figure out how to do it. It may not be easy, and we all need money, but money is not the most important thing in life. It's only money. And I see this: people do figure out what to do. And always, the work is most important; never lose sight of that. Even though we have to make a living and hopefully even sell our art. I think it's better to never expect to make a living from selling one’s work. I think it's healthier. There are many ways to figure it out. Having a day job can be interesting. It's not all bad. That's a lot of advice, isn't it? There was a period in time when it seemed like there was an expectation that you would come out of grad school and immediately have a show. Like the dealers were going to the schools and taking students right out of school. That was a little unrealistic. I think it's better to be patient. Of course as artists we have to think about our careers and what we can do to promote ourselves, but ultimately the work is the most important thing. People manage to figure it out. I guess I am saying it could be difficult, but it can work out. And if you need to be an artist, accept it.

One of my themes of thinking over the years is when I start to think: being an artist is just insane. It's insane. Why do we even need art? But then I realized that there are so many artists and others in the art world: gallerists, curators, writers, and these are really fascinating intelligent people. So it can't be that insane. We have a need as humans to have art. It would be sad to live without it. That is why people that need to be artists must find a way to do it, and they'll figure it out.

AB: Thank you.

Interview with Matt Kirsch, Associate Curator of the Isamu Noguchi Museum

Originally posted on PORT May 2013

"Isamu Noguchi: We Are the Landscape of All We Know" is on view at the Portland Japanese Gardens until July 21.

Isamu Noguchi was a brilliant sculptor and ideological innovator who pushed and challenged the notions of space and form into unprecedented territory. His oeuvre extended from freestanding sculpture into public parks and industrial design. To Noguchi, all of his work was art, and all of it maintained the inherent potential to shape the way we live and think. His legacy reverberates infinitely in today's art and design world as we endeavor to continue efforts to raise consciousness and pique the intellect through the shape of our created environments. I had the chance to talk with Matt Kirsch, the associate curator of the Isamu Noguchi Museum, the other day about Noguchi's art and life.

A: I wanted to ask you first a bit about your background as a curator. How did you begin your curating career?

MK: I got a master's degree in art history from Temple University. I had lived in New York before that, and then I came immediately back to New York after that and ended up working in galleries for about five years. I did everything from installing shows to writing press releases. At a certain point I realized that I didn't want to own my own gallery, so I went back to school for an advanced certificate in museum studies at NYU. The director of museum studies at NYU was my advisor and also happened to be the former director of the Noguchi museum, back in the nineties. I met with the then curator, and we got along very well. It was a nice, easy transition. I have been with the Noguchi Museum for almost six years now.

A: When you worked in galleries was the work exhibited contemporary?

MK: For the most part, yes. The George Adams gallery's program was probably three fourths contemporary, and then once in a while there would be a show of an artist that he had absorbed from the Allan Frumkin Gallery, of which his gallery was an extension. So there was an occasional exhibition of work from the sixties and seventies, but it was contemporary for the most part.

A: What do you think of the arc of the curator's role as you moved from dealing with exhibitions of contemporary work that changed every month to the Noguchi Museum, an institution solely dedicated to one artist? Do you feel like more of a conduit for the artist's work or more of a creative voice for the exhibition?

MK: Well, I think this is pretty self effacing, but I don't really see myself as a pure curator working at Noguchi. Obviously our mission is to show the best of one artist and take advantage of the resources that were left behind by that artist. One floor of the museum and another entire gallery are pretty much how he left them installed when he died. We try to honor that. For me, it is almost like working as a researcher, just getting to know the work and finding associations within the work. Sometimes I get to promote work that I like and have seen in storage and really hasn't been seen that often. So, it's a different kind of curating.

AB: So what is the real difference between working for an institution solely dedicated to one artist as opposed to having a continuously shifting roster of work and artists? I read on the museum's website that sometimes it takes years to realize exhibitions. You're almost like an architect of exhibitions, so to speak.

MK: Our museum is slightly different. In the past, we've worked with guest curators, and we're always actively encouraging scholarship in Noguchi. Occasionally a curator will approach us with an idea for a show. And I will work with them to not only find works within our collection that fit within the parameters of the idea for the show they envision but also point them in the direction of private collections that have Noguchi's work.

From the first day that I started at the museum, I was working with a dealer and a curator named Amy Wolf. She had an idea to hold an exhibition that really highlighted his friends and collaborators from the first 35 years of his career. That encompassed so much. Noguchi collaborated with Martha Graham pretty early on in his career, and I think it expanded the parameters of his own definition of sculpture.

He was close friends with Buckminster Fuller from 1929 on until Fuller died in '82. He had the chance to collaborate with John Cage and Merce Cunningham by virtue of being in the same scene in New York, and he did work on a project called "The Seasons" in the 1940’s. That was really before either Cage or Cunningham was very well established. That was a really amazing show for me, because I essentially dove into his biography and history and learned all about figures he had pure luck in aligning himself with. Sometimes there was a concerted effort made to step into the path of certain people, but for the most part, he had a very Zelig like existence: always being at the right place at the right time. I guess sometimes being at the wrong place too.

AB: Had you always followed Noguchi's work?

MK: I probably had the same understanding of him that most twentieth century master's art history students have before working at the museum. I knew a handful of sculptures from visiting museums in New York, and I knew some of his public projects. But I really didn't know fully what he did. I didn't really know about his theater set design or some of his larger landscape projects. I really only knew public sculpture and "Kouros" at the MET and a couple of pieces at the MOMA.

As far as industrial design, I only knew of the table; I didn't really know he went beyond that. I thought it was like an artistic one-off.

AB: The arc of his work is pretty amazing.

MK: Sometimes it's nice to come in without any strong preferences or a strong understanding of an artist because you get to learn that much more about them.

AB: Absolutely, and you bring such a fresh perspective. How do you see Noguchi's life's work in the context of the contemporary art world?

MK: I feel that Noguchi was very ambitious very early on in his career, and some of his ideas were taken up much later and realized in a climate that he didn't have access to. I find that really amazing; he wasn't really tethered to the limited range that a lot of sculptors were in his generation. He was a very young sculptor in the 1920's, and he quickly realized that he wasn't interested in doing work for someone's home. It was hard to sell sculpture. It was harder then to find collectors. And he ended up storing his best work, and that is why we exist as a museum. It is amazing to see that he really anticipated a lot of the earthwork and landscape art of the sixties and seventies.

AB: How do you think his work was influenced by history?

MK: His mother was very well educated Bryn Mawr student and got him interested in mythology at a very young age. He was also exposed to Japanese culture from the age of two to thirteen. I think that he was able to draw a lot of inspiration from very disparate cultures and make connections between them. I mean, the fact that he became friends with Joseph Campbell. . .

AB: I didn't know that. . .

MK: I could imagine where the origins of their conversations would start because he was a voracious reader. I don't know how he had time to read, because he was always traveling or working. For some reason, India captivated him before he had even seen it; he had only known it through photographs. He spent a great deal of time there in 1949 or so and went back once or twice after that
.
He applied for a grant through the Boilingen Foundation which supported mostly projects for writers and scholars but for artists as well. And he applied for this grant to travel the world and study public spaces and how they influenced culture and every day life. These travels fed into his larger, grander projects later on and influenced how he saw man's connection to spaces, how spaces might promote an intellect within a mass culture.

Noguchi was born the same year as the invention of the airplane. Fuller notes this in the introduction he wrote for Noguchi's biography from 1969. He was very interested in technology and kept up with it, through Fuller, who was probably directly in line with some of the most avant garde ideas about how technology influenced and had the capacity to improve mass society. These ideas fed into Noguchi's sculpture and his philosophy on why he made sculpture. There were projects in the 1970's where he tried to use primitive computer technology to run the fountains he designed for Expo 70 or the Dodge Plaza in Detroit.

AB: What was Expo 70?

MK: In Osaka, Expo 70 was one of the international exhibitions that popped up throughout the world in the twentieth century. And his friend, Kenzo Tan, I believe, did the design for the entire site. He asked Noguchi if he would contribute in some way, and instead of creating some sort of monumental sculpture, Noguchi became more interested in working with water. So he designed a series of five fountains within a large pond that were all automated, each with a unique spray patterns and applied technology in a way that a lot of people hadn't thought of.

AB: Noguchi's ideas and intentions surrounding myth and the calm amidst chaos seem to be a recurring motivation in his work. Do you think the work still relays this even after his death?

MK: I don't know. I think he was very interested in Jungian philosophy and imagery, and he was very well read in that. But I think we live in a very different era now where we have just absorbed that as culture, and I think that most people don't really take the time to read about it or explore what captivated so many artists not only like Noguchi, but anyone who was say doing automatist art.

AB: In my reading about Noguchi, he really believed in the social significance of sculpture and the historicity of all sculptural monuments relating to each other.

MK: Yeah, I think a lot of artists tried to produce works that had commonalities across different cultures, and I think that Noguchi, in particular, was a conduit for everything that he absorbed. I don't think there was a precise and intended result for each piece. And I believe his titles came after the fact. He was often just as surprised by the final product. There were pieces that were very intricately planned because they had to be. And he created paper models to figure out proportion and stability of what might be a small architectural piece. But especially during the last 25 years or so of his life, he was very open to a sculpture evolving. Sometimes a sculpture would take ten years to complete, and he would just step away from it and return to it to see if it had any deeper significance that was more immediate to him at that time.
So I think his intention is still there, but I think it is perhaps buried a little deeper. I think most people have very little education in terms of mythology, so that when they come to Noguchi, there are probably a lot of questions in regards to the cultural sources that fed his work. But I think that is one of the great, open ended aspects of the experience of art; there are so many different influences that it would be great to have access to the artist to enlighten you to them, but you actually bring a lot to it as the viewer.
I think people come to the museum and are surprised, not only by the scale of some of the stones when they first enter the museum: the basalts and some of the granite pieces that look almost like boulders with such minimal manipulation that the viewer might ask what was actually the artist's part in it. I think that was Noguchi's aim however: to give the piece a timeless aura while knowing it had been shaped by an artist and a mind.

AB: I always consider that kind of artistic decision as being incredibly subversive

.MK: There is this quality of less is more. Noguchi comes from a long line of sculptors, you know, he worked with Brancusi in 1928 for a brief period and was very influenced by him. Artists then wanted to work directly with stone in order to see what would be revealed. They felt this to be truer to work done by earlier cultures as opposed to the status quo of western art at that point.

There is a place for all kinds of artistic philosophy, from Warhol to Koons. I enjoy some of the ideas that come through Koons' work but mostly on the technical end of things. I recently met someone named Peter Carlson who worked with Noguchi on some of his fabricated sculptures from the 1980's, one of which is outside. It is a galvanized steel piece that is hot tipped. To think about how Noguchi used this process to produce such unique pieces, and he had to step back as the process was out of control in terms of what exactly he would get.

When I met Carlson, who now works with Jeff Koons in realizing the balloon dog sculptures, of which there are I think, five on this planet, I realized how intense it is to create these sculptures. They are the products of hours and hours and hours of testing material and inventing processes through which to get a perfect surface and a flawless sheen. I absolutely appreciate that.

AB: It seems that Noguchi and Koons are coming from opposite ends of a spectrum of ideology. Noguchi's work seemed to be very much about his sort of spiritual self and his work living in a social space to inspire humans in a spiritual and intellectual way, whereas Koons is commenting on a culture in a very complex web of materialism and capitalism. But in the end, you have these enormous works that both become the products of an American experience and thus become the culture themselves.

Do you know much about Noguchi's process? Like how a piece would begin to be realized?

MK: I actually just curated a show called "Hammer, Chisel, Drill", which comes down very soon and is all about Noguchi's studio practice. Originally, we wanted to do a show exhibiting just Noguchi's tools, but we quickly realized that his best tools were pretty well dispersed throughout the world. What we had on site was just what had accumulated over time, just like his sculpture. In the end, I ended up concentrating on his five most productive studio periods in his life. During one of them, from 1969 until he died in '88, he kept a studio on the island of Shikoku, in Japan, which is now a museum on its own that we are distantly related to. At that point in his life, at the age of sixty-five, he had finally accrued a reputation in the world, designing gardens for UNESCO and major projects with architects in New York. But he came to Japan to do one sculpture, which is now in Seattle, and while he was there he met a stoneworker who was the youngest son of a family of stoneworkers in Japan. And they had an amazing rapport. And that is kind of the origin of the last part of his work: finally having access to some of the finest and hardest granites and basalts in the world through this family.

AB: Was the stone from Japan?

MK: Mostly from Japan. This family imported a lot of stone, but Noguchi prized Japanese stone over all others besides Greek and Italian marble, which he also liked quite a bit. But he had already spent a good ten years working with marble at that point, so the challenge had dissipated for him at that point. Marble is a soft stone, so he wanted a harder stone, but his age was a bit of a factor at that point, so his assistant, Masatoshi Izumi, helped him realize some of those ideas. It was an amazing collaboration because Izumi was basically the yard boss for a crew of other people. Noguchi oversaw this work fabricated by the team, and it allowed him to be incredibly productive. He enjoyed this immensely. He also had a deep philosophical attachment to stone, because he saw stone as the bones of the garden and the rest as the flesh. The flesh wears away but the stones are always there. He felt that stones were the link between humans on earth.

AB: Do you know much about his philosophical conundrums? Like things he struggled with as an artist?

MK: Many people that have written about Noguchi write about his not fitting in to either of the cultures of his birthright. He was born in Los Angeles but lived in Japan as a child and then returned to the US at the age of thirteen. So he was already living outside of that culture and then being reimmersed in it, having to try and catch up and become part of it. He had a very complicated relationship with his father who he never really was close with. He never really felt accepted in Japan until his return trip in 1950, and that was an acceptance by a group of younger, avant garde Japanese artists. So, he was still treated differently. He was kind of a wanderer. He never felt completely at home.

In the 1940's, he voluntarily interned himself at an internment camp in Polston, Arizona, but was not accepted by the Nisei there. So he never really integrated into either culture. He considered himself as a man of the world. I think he had a lot of frustrations based around that, war being one of them. I am sure there are a lot of artists who had an apparent anti-war philosophy in their art, but I am really amazed by his outspokenness. He did a series of works in the 1940's that reference war and the atomic age. And this was twenty years before Bruce Conner was fearing for his life and going to Mexico to hide out because he thought nuclear war was imminent.

AB: I mean as an artist, did he ever become disillusioned by art itself?

MK: Yeah, I think pretty early on, which is what I think drove him to work outside the traditional modes of sculpture. I don't think he ever liked the idea of making work to have it be stored away in museum storage. He always enjoyed making sculpture, and that was a very personal thing, but I think he always wanted to be working on a grand project.

AB: Do you think that was because he believed in the social significance of what he needed to do? Did he believe that industrial design or art had more social clout?

MK: He really believed that sculpture could be anything. He liked certain materials, and there were meaningful associations with those materials. He always thought that stone was the best, but he wasn't afraid of working with aluminum or stainless steel. I think he really disregarded a lot of people's opinions on what could be art. In the 1930's he started working in industrial design, and he never separated that from his other work. He saw himself as a sculptor, and on a particular day, he was going to work on the housing for a baby monitor. Or next week he would endeavor to design a playground system that might work, and coming at it from different directions. He failed two or three separate times in attempting to make a playground made of earth.

AB: Speaking of playgrounds, I know that those designs still exist. Does the Noguchi Museum ever consider actually having them built?

MK: Part of the role of the foundation is to try and protect his ideas a little bit, and if it wasn't already in progress when he died, we cannot attempt it. There was a park in Sapporo, that Noguchi was working on with Shoji Sadao in the last year of his life. Sadao was an engineer and architect who really helped get a lot of Noguchi's ideas off the ground. He also worked with Buckminster Fuller as well. He was kind of like a shared staff member between the two. The city of Sapporo approached him to design this park, and Noguchi used the opportunity to create sort of an anthology of a lot of his ideas. Unfortunately, he died a year into the process. Shoji Sadao carried on the process and did his best, based on his experience in working with Noguchi, to remain true to how he would envision it. After that, we really shied away from trying to realize his projects. Occasionally, we'll make a model based on his ideas and using another fabricator, but it's really just to advance the study of Noguchi. If we take it upon ourselves to recreate something that he didn't do in his life, then that opens the door for other people coming to us and wanting to do it. We kind of have to protect his legacy in a way, as much as we would all love to see that playground.

Some of his ideas were absorbed by a younger generation, and i think that is where Noguchi's legacy has kind of caught up. In the seventies, New York had very cookie cutter playgrounds under Robert Moses (link). And once he was out of office as director of the parks department in New York, that kind of opened new doors for designers, and there was a resurgence of interest in playgrounds in New York city. A lot of the designs submitted at the time, I think, were directly indebted to Noguchi. Earth was suddenly being molded and the playground was thought of as an environment for the imagination.

AB: In some of my research, I came across that particular playground that Noguchi had worked with Louis Kahn on to design. They collaborated on it for such a long time— six years wasn’t it? During that time, play was thought to be the birthplace of creativity. I think we need more of that type of environment in this country.

MK: Oh, and how we wish we could build it! But there are so many hurdles. To have Noguchi's personality and attempting to charm some city official would be the asset required, but we're just one step removed.

AB: That's so unfortunate!! Such a shame! I can barely stand it. What do you think was Noguchi's ideal experience for his viewer?

MK: I think it comes back to an attitude he embraced from the beginning, which was to have the viewer bring his or her own self and assocations to it, to bring their own intellect to complete the work. In making his work, Noguchi often stood back until the very end. I think that is a very encouraging part of the process for the viewer as well.

AB: Is his work affected by context?

MK: I know he thought so. A lot of people approached him once he was a known figure to make commissioned projects. You know, they wanted a Noguchi for their courtyard. He didn't really want to give you a piece and let you do what you wanted with it. He would rather have the setting to work with as well. I think it was mostly because he understood space. He had an amazing grasp on how it worked, how if you offer the viewer many different options on how to enter a space, then their experience can change endlessly.
So I think the work was affected by context within his lifetime, and to some extent affected now. When I walk into a museum now, and I see a Noguchi, I know that he really wasn't a fan of this set up. He really believed in works having their own space to breathe. The context he was absolutely against was museum storage, which is why there is the Noguchi Museum. So yes, some of the mechanics of the art world were not the best context for his work. His entire process was really based on where he was and what materials were available at the time.

AB: What are your hopes in terms of the way Portlanders receive this exhibition?

MK: Well, I think it is a great setting to see his work. I worked with Diane Durston closely in selecting the work for this exhibition, and I think in the end, it was a fantastic collaboration. There was a very intuitive rapport in our conversations. We wanted to show both sides of the coin, but I think that a good deal of it is work that responds to the idea of natural materials and references landscape quite a bit. My ultimate hope is that it's a nice compliment to the garden. I hope it seems like an intuitive fit for the garden for people that might be visiting the garden without knowing that Noguchi is here and vice versa. I hope that Portlanders will visit the garden because they hear Noguchi is here.