一則訪談
看起來似乎是一個很受大眾喜愛的畫家
PC: You started out as a conceptual artist, using text in your work and then moved to painting landscapes. You’ve said in an interview with Robert Enright, “...like it or not—all artists portray the artists [that is, they portray themselves].” Do you think that’s true in conceptual art? In landscapes? And, if so (you could see this one coming, I’m sure), how do you portray yourself in your landscapes? Is that the dialectics you talked about in the interview with Michael Rush: your conflicting desires “the Martin Johnson Heade part of me that wants stillness and a certain kind of clarity and then there’s another part of me that needs turbulence and moves towards Turner...sometimes even within the same painting”?
AG: The choice to make conceptual, abstract and/or landscape art reveals something about the artists who make it. Obviously the result is not necessarily direct self-portraiture, but can be close to it. In the sense that my landscapes are emotionally expressive of, and specific to me, they "portray" me. The conflict you mention is essential to what I'd consider a kind of truth about myself, and about the dimensionality being human, i.e. that there's both an erotic and a thanatopic component, or other versions of that dialectic, that is necessary for a work of art to be fully expressive. The best work I make contains both at once. Not equally, necessary, but both are represented.
PC: In moving away from conceptual art towards the end of your BFA, midway through the two semesters in Nova Scotia, you said in the Rush interview that you were “dissatisfied with way my whole art progress was going, and especially in talking to one of the other faculty members there who was having a similar crisis I sort of worked myself out of that intent...and began trying a lot of other things...” Would saying more about that series of discussion be a violation of privacy? Would you mind saying who that person was and what role your teacher had in determining your decision?
AG: Not at all, I had the good fortune to have Richards Jarden as my studio advisor in my year at NSCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art and Design]. We had many discussions about applying theoretical texts, like those of Piaget and Claude Levi-Straus, to art-making, which is what I'd been doing. We were both interested in revitalizing what we thought was a dead end that painting had reached, and content was a big part of those discussions. I didn't arrive at painting landscapes during those two semesters, nor did I "solve" my dilemma, but I was able to reject the activity of illustrating structuralist texts as a means of self-expression at that time, and began to move toward something more personal. I wouldn't have called that move a decision, exactly, rather more a revelation.
PC: How did the process of teaching students influence your painting, such as consciousness of and exploration of technique (density of surface, details, amount and kind of paint, brushwork)?
AG: If you are referring to the time I'd worked with adult painting students after I graduated from NSCAD, I would say that the principal influence came about in trying to describe to them why they should like minimal and conceptual work, which they found puzzling, and realizing that I personally was finding it lacking. I didn't reveal that to them, but tried to be fair and to communicate to them what was powerful and interesting about minimalism and conceptualism, because I was trying to improve their sense of art history in general, and contemporary art history in particular. Describing art movements while showing them slides taught me a lot about what I really thought about a lot of different kinds of consciousness in art-making. I myself wasn't acute enough as a painter, having really only recently gotten into it seriously at the time, to have been able to make much sense of exploration of technique, although I could tell them where they were engaged or being perfunctory in their own work, and could encourage them to remain aware of their own better proclivities. The class was not for beginning painters, anyway.
PC: You’re not a plein aire painter, and your early paintings—ironically begun when you moved to Manhattan, I believe—were imaginary? You’re known for your large landscapes—was the first one you did (not the sticks that you painted on the boards glued together) enormous?
AG: The first landscape paintings I did were in Nova Scotia. I began on boards, "graduated" quickly to plywood, and then in 1980 in New York realized I wanted to make a painting that was bigger than a full sheet of plywood (4' x 8') and reluctantly switched to stretched canvas. I don't know how enormous 4' x 8' seems, but I felt a kind of natural impulse to make paintings that felt like they experientially surrounded the viewer. It took a while to realize why I wanted them to be that scale, but most of the understanding I've arrived at with my work has been retrospective and not immediate.
PC: You began using photography when you first visited the desert. What was there about the desert that made you decide to use a photograph as a reference, rather than painting a version of what you remembered?
AG: The work was imagined, exclusively, until I went to the American Southwest for the first time, which was in 1980, and saw the desert for the first time in my life. I had a camera, took pictures, and realized that no dream or vision I'd had was much stranger than that. Since I had been painting a lot from dreams, there was a sort of natural surreal (if you'll pardon the oxymoron) quality to the work, and the desert had that in spades. I felt like I was looking at a dream landscape.
PC: You’ve mentioned the decisions in landscape painting: the perimeter, the type of light. I was struck by the words you used in describing the light: “passing,” “falling,” “happening,” “fading”—all words of transition. In other words, not static. The curator of the Neuberger where you’ve recently had a huge mid-career retrospective, Dede Young pointed out that in many of your paintings ambiguous moments “prevail as a psychological state of the moment where something is changing or happening and the viewer, depending on who you are will see it as foreboding or relieving.” You’ve said paintings are “vulnerable to interpretation.” Do these all go together? or do you want to comment on the observations separately?
AG: Your question nicely sums up what I think about the "moment" I like a painting to contain, which is both active (in the sense that it's ambiguous and, as I said, should be vulnerable to interpretation) and passive (in the sense of it being a moment frozen in time, and also because of that, vulnerable to interpretation). I think of paintings as being objects, and even states if you will, that invite interactivity. They provided the first experience of virtual reality, and still remain the best, in the sense that the hand of the artist remains in them, provoking a further intimacy because the viewer can react with the history of their making as well as the imagery present.
PC: You began working with a computer after you were given a computer for Christmas—in, what year was that? Or was it that you were given the computer because you’d started working with one and wanted to do more? As I understand your process, you photoshop and collage a number of photos, some yours, some that you find, and through collaging transform them. Do you continue also with the sketches in addition? Have you considered saving the intermediate steps on disks so there will be a record or your process?
Does this new method make the blank canvass less formidable?
AG: I was given a computer for Christmas because I was tired of being so disorganized. I knew other people, including Eric [Fischl], who were keeping track of their work on their computers, and I wanted to do that as well and not just depend on my gallery. I think that was Christmas 1994. I had a scanner to make little images for my filing program and at one point I stuck a photo I had of a painting I'd been working on in it and then started horsing around with it, tentatively, in Photoshop. I made some corrections on it and suddenly realized I had a great sketch tool at my disposal. I'd made small sketch after sketch previously, correcting as I went along, and the worst thing about that was continuing my thought process at the speed that I could draw as I'd make changes. Photoshop speeded those decisions and made some interesting perspectival changes possible. I do collages from photos I've taken, and ones I've found, and/or downloaded from the internet.
PC: In an interview with L. Kent Wilgamott you said as to why your landscapes weren’t “normal, easy pictures,” that “I think they express the Other for me. For me, landscape is the Other. I’ve heard it theorized that for men, women are the Other. For me, maybe landscape is the Other.” And in a radio interview with Michael Rush, you asserted that “Nature for me is the other. It represents the great thing that’s the most unlike me I can imagine...” Those interviews weren’t far apart, nor were they long ago. Is it a matter of mood, or were you in the process of finding a new way of articulating what’s happening in your art. (That seems to be a constant, a periodic or ongoing re-examination for everyone who’s seriously working at something.) Where do you situate yourself with Nature now?
AG: Maybe I didn't talk about it too much early on, but I've thought that Nature represents the Other for me since the early 80s. Nature itself can sometimes feel the way I feel when I choose an image to work with, that is, it feels like something incredibly familiar and meaningful, a kind of deja vu, and also something that's utterly mysterious and compelling and inscrutable. It draws me as a self-defining possibility.
PC: Does that have anything to do with your being “an American painter”?
AG: I really don't know the answer to this. It seems possible, based on Robert Rosenblum's fine book "Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition", e.g., since I fit squarely into that notion of abstracted or reinterpreted landscape, but I'm too close to it to have a firm opinion.
PC: I wonder if a time will come again when the question of gender will not be included in an interview of an artist who is a woman. But here it is again. A number of years ago you said, “I get asked increasingly, usually by young female artists, whether I feel there is a different sensibility for women artists than for male artists. I used to say no, no, no, we're all the same, an artist is an artist, don't call me a girl artist. And I've totally changed my feeling about that.” Which reminds me of the cartoon in the New Yorker of two women, sitting at table, engaged in earnest conversation, and one says to the other “And now I would like to be called a girl again.” In the late 90’s a report of your lecture at the University of the Arts, stated, “She said that in the last year or so she has become convinced that there is something in her painting which is essentially female. [...and was looking for a] word that was the female equivalent of ‘phallic.’ She wanted that word to describe ‘the sexual power that I have as a woman that expresses itself in my work.’” The word you were looking for is “yonic.” Could I convince you to talk a bit about how that yonic power expresses itself in your painting?
AG: That specific female power expresses itself in my work in all sorts of ways, but the essence of it for me, I suspect, is the way I use space and my willingness to make penetrable spaces in my work, using symmetry and often deep space, which of course goes against the tendency of modern painting to flat, flatter, flattest. I think about landscape as architectural space that you move into and through. There's also some more obvious yonic imagery, like waterways and waterfalls, that occur. Much of it is subtle, and personal, though. And both men & women can make yonically (?) powerful art. That word has been suggested to me before, but it certainly doesn't carry the cultural freight of a word like phallic. Maybe someday.
PC: In your current artist’s statement, you state succinctly, "I am an artist that values, above all, the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful." In an interview with Constance Lewallen, Kyoto, Japan, 1988, you said “I've always talked about my work in terms of it being fictive and artificial. Artificial has a bad connotation in our society...But my feeling about artifice is that artifice is beautiful and is essential to art.” Is your comment about artifice still, as the phrase once was,” still operational.” Would you please tell us a bit about how the artifice fits in with your concept of beauty as throughout your career you’ve mentioned “beautiful” in connection with, as a subject of your paintings.
AG: Artifice is for me another way of saying fictive, in that the kind of realism I employ is familiar and "natural" but also skewed and contrived. Artifice for me is the manipulation of imagery to give it power, and then the way I paint and construct drawings and paintings uses the power of manipulation in the way fiction reifies life and narrative. It feels real, but it's very interpreted. I "interfere" with reality in a way that hopefully engages the viewer in a more direct and emotional, as opposed to a simply pictorial, way.
PC: You’ve said, “My paintings are places to be alone, to have a place to safely be a witness to chaos, which storms and nature often represent.” And yet the perspective in which you place the audience is mid-air. How does that contribute to his/her having a safe place?
AG: What you imply is right, mid-air isn't typically a safe place to be. It just feels good to me. The way that the mid-air position evolved was initially from painting images from flying, and other, dreams, but it serves a useful purpose in that it kind of throws the viewer into the picture. I guess a feeling of safety depends on how comfortable you'd be in a flying dream or up on a hill looking at something taking place apart from you. Looking at a storm at sea, for instance, can be thrilling. Knowing it might come ashore is part of that thrill. "Safe" is necessarily relative. Because the paintings are meditative I hope that people would be invited to contemplate storms and nature, and experience whatever complexity of feelings might be evoked by those states.
PC: You’re known to be a fan of opera. At least two paintings refer to opera, “Renata’s Lake” (for Renata Tebaldi) and “Brunhildes Wahl.” Do you paint listening to opera? Or other music? And are other paintings related to opera, either specific operas, composers or singers?
AG: I haven't been listening to opera that much in recent years because I OD'd on it, but I still enjoy it. The light in "Renata's Lake" was specifically inspired by listening to Tebaldi's voice. "Brunhildes Wahl" was titled that because of a possible interpretation of that painting, although I was listening to Wagner a lot around that time. I don't mean either to be illustrational.
PC: The double is a visual theme in your paintings: rocks, fire, islands. You’ve mentioned before how they represent the doppelganager, the possibility of a portal, architecture, existential questions of the self and other. What else would you like to say about the theme—or expand upon for our readers.
AG: I think that about says it all. It's kind of a metaphysical state for me that I haven't gotten to the bottom of, nor do I expect I will. That impulse, to see a pair of things in a landscape, keeps coming back, often unexpectedly. For instance, I didn't realize that the two trees in The Fall, 2001, were also representative of that kind of pairing until a couple of years after I'd painted it. So much of what I know about my work is retrospective it's not funny.
PC: You’ve written about scale and size, calling attention to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and “‘intimacy in immensity’, by which he’s referring to the way we can make even an immense space be able to be absorbed by our imaginations, and in the case of a poem or a painting, induce a person to have the experience of vastness that feels in proportion to his or her inner expansiveness.” And you’ve commented about size and scale in your own paintings, the “somatic response” the audience has to a painting when standing in front of it. Do you know why the window size paintings are not what you like to make? Could it possibly have something to do with the effect of the window size putting both the artist and audience in an interior looking out, while you’re trying to be outside, returning to your comment about “when you were a kid seeking the outside as a relief...”? (interview with Rush)
AG: I really like that interpretation you made of why the window size doesn't feel comfortable. That size cuts off some ability to become very small or feel comfortably human scale. That said, the drawings are that size, so that belies my supposed rejection of it. But drawing as a medium uses paper as light, and has a natural openness, to me, that paintings don't have. Paintings are much more implosive and powerful and dense, so I'm more comfortable with them either accepting my entire body or being an invitation to miniaturize myself into them. Both those states of being are to me delicious, important, and poetically fraught. Looking at a scene that's neither feels somehow claustrophobic, limited, incomplete. I'm going to use your window interpretation of both viewer and artist being stuck only looking out as my new extended explanation, though, thanks!
[ 本帖最后由 inkdog 于 2007-12-10 21:33 编辑 ]
