• I like shoptalk, even when I don’t completely understand it, and I like it best of all when the shop is the studio of a working artist. To be sure, a lifetime in journalism has taught me that some artists are incapable of talking about their work—or anything else—but it’s surprising how often a skillfully edited interview can shed useful light on the myriad mysteries of creation. Moreover, I’ve also discovered that I don’t necessarily have to like the work of the artist in question in order for me to take a respectful interest in his working methods. Whenever I teach a course in criticism, I tell my students, “Always treat artists with respect. Most of them know how to do something you can’t do.”
Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, has been interviewing artists ever since he was a graduate student, and now he’s spun 34 of those interviews into a book called 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes. As an art collector, I have strong and well-defined tastes in painting and sculpture, and insofar as Auping’s choice of interview subjects reflects his own taste, I’d say we don’t have much in common. Only one of the artists represented in 30 Years, Martin Puryear, is also to be found on my own list of personal favorites, while several of the others make my teeth itch. Yet I still read 30 Years with close and consistent attention and learned much from it—though not all the lessons were intentional.
It didn’t exactly surprise me to find, for instance, that the conceptual and politically-oriented artists questioned by Auping are inclined as a rule to emit great clouds of blather (“The kind of art we have today is really just a throw-off of the maximized profit, a function of the capital which is poured into it”). Conversely, the most interesting artists are usually—though not always—the ones with the most interesting things to say. Asked about the art of Fernand Léger, Louise Bourgeois replied, “He was very rigid, very limited. But he could find emotion in that geometry. Léger could be hard and intimate at the same time.”
Nor was I greatly surprised to find that minimalists tend to be brief. Like, say, Ellsworth Kelly:
I will say that at a very early age I felt that I saw things abstractly. The more carefully I looked, the more abstract they became.
Again, not always: Agnes Martin’s reply when asked what she tells her students was both lengthy and worth quoting at length.
You have to be careful with the intellect as an artist. The intellectual struggles with the facts. That’s not inspirational. If you are an intellectual and you are going to buy a house, you would think about the cost, check on the taxes, look at the survey, and go through a whole list of things that make you feel better about buying the house. If you couldn’t rationalize it, you wouldn’t buy it. If the house genuinely inspired you, you wouldn’t worry about the list. You would find a way to buy it. You have to deal with the practical matters, but you wouldn’t worry about them because you would be involved with your inspiration. That’s what artists have to do. They have to stay involved with their inspiration. They can’t be constantly worried about the cost of paint.
As for Puryear, he mostly talks about matters of technique, and his comments are very specific. Asked about the genesis of Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1966), the best-known of his wooden sculptures, he tells you just what you want to know:
It was made from an ash sapling—a very tall, young ash tree that I cut on my property and brought into the studio. I kept it for quite a while and I knew I wanted to do something with it because it was such an interesting form. Most samplings that grow in the woods grow ramrod straight. This one had a lot of very interesting undulations in its stem . . . the undulations were fascinating to me, and I kept it for quite some time just in that shape, with a kind of broad trunk with the bark on it. Eventually I peeled the bark off, and began thinking about it in relation to the ladder.
You can see what he did next by going to the Museum of Modern Art’s Martin Puryear retrospective, which is up through January 14, after which it travels to Fort Worth, Washington’s National Gallery, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. If you can’t catch it in any of those places, pick up a copy of the catalogue. It contains, among other good things, a fine essay by Michael Auping, and the 165 illustrations will give you some idea of why I recently praised Puryear as “the American Brancusi, a master woodworker whose elegantly crafted creations, by turns playful and mysterious, allude subtly to political matters without once bowing to the tyranny of the idea.”
