david sylvester, interviews with american artists

Published in 2001, the interviews are transcripts (some edited, some not) and commissioned by the BBC.  Should anyone ask me what I would want to do with this degree, the answer is this.  This is it.  Have the BBC fund conversations with artists.  Or writers.  Or illustrators.  Yes, thank you, where shall I sign?

It’s a matter of the chicken or the egg:  since enrolled in school, I’ve been noticing and reading nonstop, factual, historical and firsthand accounts of almost everything. So in that one sense, I am encouraged seeing all the applications and possibilitites.

On the other hand, my professor, as she so matter of factly pointed out, stated there is no money in publishing.  So then that becomes another facet of what hereforth will be referred to as, posturing.

This is the part I’m having the most difficulty in rectifying (in this case, ignoring, pushing down, turning a blind eye, as it were): if the degree and the publishing and the pay and none of it pays your electricity bill, then what of it?  It’s enlightenment – from whence forth will be referred to as posturing – but you need to have someone paying the piper.  This is where it falls a little short for me.  A working girl has no place in academia.  Well, that’s not very American, is it?

I am going to excerpt a few passages now from the Sylvester interviews.  A working girl can still dream though.  Nothing more American than that.

Willem De Kooning, 1960:

So in these paintings what sort of an idea do you begin with?

“…I imagine that Cezanne, when he painted a ginger pot and apples and ordinary everyday wine bottles, must have been very groteseque in his day, because a still life was something to set up of beautiful things.  It may be very difficult, for instance, to put a Rheingold bottled beer on the table and a couple of glasses and a package of Lucky Strike.  I mean, you know, there are certain things you cannot paint at a particulare time, and it takes a certain attitude how to see those things, in terms of art.  You feel those things personally and, inasmuch as I should set out to paint Merritt Parkway years ago, it seems I must have liked it so much I must have subconsciously found a way of setting it down on paper, on canvas.  It could be that.  I’m not sure.” (p 54)

Robert Motherwell, 1960:

So that painting becomes a clarification of what really are one’s attitudes?…A way of discovering what one is?

The essence of this particular historical moment is the problem of identity; traditionally, American literature is full of it.  It’s an American problem….Tribal customs are less strong here .  That puts much pressure on any given individual in relation to what his identity is going to be.  He has to choose, alone.” (p. 77-8)

Philip Guston, 1960:

(on finishing a painting)

It’s a peculiar moment to talk about.  The mind being as devious as it is, you could see the whole things as a kind of a moral test, I think.  And you know exactly and precisely when you are kidding yourself.  It’s a thirty-secondth of an inch bu you know, the narrower it gets, the more devious it gets.  We all know that.  I mean, writers are like that.  Actually, painting is exactly parallel to life….Did you ever listen to someone talk on a platform or in conversation when you knew that he was only telling you a story and your mind wandered?  But you always really listen is when they are not hearing themselves tell the story.  Well, that’s creation.  That’s all it’s about.” (p 90)

Robert Rauschenberg, 1964:

Do you always title them after you’re finished or do you ever title them while you’re still working on them?

Sometimes I think of a good word that interests me. (p 136)

Jasper Johns, 1965:

On how he decides what to put on the canvas

“…it involves the arrangement of elements before us, and it also involves the arrangement of our senses at the time of encountering this thing.  It involves the way we focus, what we are willing to accept as being there.  In the process of working on a painting, all of these things interest me.  I tend, while setting one thing up, to move away from it to another possibility within the painting…” (p 155)

Cy Twombly, 2000:

“I’ve found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for  or something.  Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn’t become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it.  You tend to be nostalgic.  And I think about my boats.” (p174)

Frank Stella, 1965:

“If I find a series of things  that I might read  about or a series of places I’ve been to, if I like the names enough, if they strike me enough, I jot them down or something, and then as I’m working or as I’m thinking about working …I try to match them up.”

Do you expect other people to see the point of the titles usually or are they a purely private concern?

“No, I don’t feel that there’s any reason for people to get the point.  I think they suffice as identification and that’s good enough.” (p185)

Claes Oldenburg, 1965:

“I love nature but in my work I’m concerned with what man has made of nature.  My subject is really the relation of man and nature or what man has done to nature.  Because I’m confined to city images, really, and I never go out into the country and sketch and, although I did once, I found that it wasn’t quite on the mark.

Yes, what I like best is the store window, the hardware store – and the street, a home, where all the objects in the landscape are man-made objects, where the rug is the equivalent of grass and so on.  And I’m especially interested when you have artificial landscapes made in nature, swimming pools, for example, as in California.  And any kind of architectural attempt to impose man’s image or man’s will on nature.  That’s my subject.” (p 208)

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