|
City Paper [Hagen]:
Tell me about your work at The Print Center.
Leon Golub: Basically, it's The Print Center, so they deal with
prints, but we used an expanded, spread-out, even disassociated
sense of the print medium. My part consists of various prints
that I've made, silkscreen or lithograph, and they deal with the
themes in my paintings - themes of power and vulnerability. For
example, there's a print of a sphinx and there's a print of a
figure Men Are Not for Burning, which was about the Vietnam War.
I also have an installation of three images, which are large Duraclear
images on transparent photo film. They hang, and if you walk near
them often, they'll move a little bit. They're not framed, they're
not enclosed or protected.
Nancy Spero: What's interesting is that they're not against the
wall in the gallery, and when people walk behind them you can
see through them. So it's very interesting watching the interaction.…
In the show I have a wall piece that's made of cotton duck that
was glued to a wall, painted over, and then was taken off the
wall. On it I printed the "Ballad of Marie Sanders,"
by Bertolt Brecht, about a woman who was victimized during World
War II. I also have a banner that is celebratory and really heraldic
- made originally for a baroque room in a museum in Salzburg,
Austria. It's hand-printed on the silk and then hand-sewn. They
go from victimization to the celebratory; they couldn't be more
different. They're both hand-printed on fabric, though. And we
also have a collaborative print.
CP: This is a very broad question,
but can you each talk a little bit about what your intentions
are as an artist, and how they how they have evolved over the
years?
LG: I am a narrative artist and, in a sense, I'm kind of a history
painter, and that is not the most common thing today. Art has
followed the 20th-century trajectory of trying to expand how it
functions in our civilization. It's related to abstract forces
and technological forces - and simply personal self-acknowledgement
of artists without necessarily confirming or denying anything
outside of themselves. Artists take that in many different directions,
of course. If you think of the Russian constructivists, for example,
they had a social vision, but it was largely an abstract social
vision.
NS: That's true.
LG: The futurists were a little more figurative, and the abstract
expressionists.… Not too much had anything do with realism
as such - because realism, and figurative painting, was largely
to tell things in an anecdotal sort of way, whereas the real forces
of nature were given a more profound, abstracted and symbolic
kind of expression. History painting as it existed until the late
19th century had become very sentimental and corny. So you get
the impressionists and everyone else reacting against it, and
modernism developed in that way. Many years later, I, and artists
like me, [are] trying to engage the world on another level and
are dealing with events that transpire in our society. So now
I'm talking about historical circumstances and struggles and violence
and American power and American dominance and what the hell is
going on in terms of the way society organizes itself, the way
our power is extended into the world. But then people could say
to me, "But yeah, that's what the photographs do."
NS: I think that Leon's work penetrates where the camera can't
go.
CP: Yes, and that's his intention - to somehow expose something
that's not being seen.
NS: Yeah, I really think so.
LG: So, I'm trying to give a picture of events and actions that
determine the very nature of who we are as Americans today. Let's
say we're dealing now with Afghanistan. OK, who and what are the
Americans at this particular time? I'm not dealing with Afghanistan
directly, but I'm dealing with the abstract sense of American
power, and crises that take place. I paint dogs running through
paintings - for example, Chechnya with dogs roaming the ruined
cityscapes - which become symbols of the devastation and the violence.
And then I add a kind of paramilitary police-type because that's
how violence is exacted on people. That's how they take someone
and twist their arm, and worse. I'm trying to put these things
together and say that this is part of our world. It's a kind of
narrative that has some kind of historical resonance to it - it
has to have a resonance that goes beyond the illustrative.
CP: Nancy, can I ask you to
talk about your intentions as an artist?
NS: I consider my work open-ended. It's changed so much over the
years and yet it all makes sense. My intentions really are to
make a continuum and to… keep ambulatory.
LG: That's your physical intention!
NS: No, no, my work, too! It is my physical thing, it is. But
in a way it's for the art, too, to get out in the world and keep
moving.
LG: That's a nice way to put it.
NS: Yeah, I don't want it to be static. And I don't want me to
be static, which I could easily become.
LG: I think you need to say a little bit how you worked on Artaud
and about Vietnam.
NS: OK, so I have gone from just painting on canvas to working
with images of lovers and prostitutes, animals, children and stuff
like that, too.
LG: She's going way back in time.
NS: Way back in time! I'm going back to the War Series. We had
just come back to the United States - we had lived in France for
five years. I did this war series for five years addressing the
Vietnam War. And war in general, too, the brutality and devastation
of it. And then from there I went to the Artaud Series, using
the language of Artaud, both the painting and the Codex Artaud.
I used Artaud, the French writer, this sacred monster, in a way,
of French intellectuals. He wrote poetry and he put on plays and
he was judged insane the last nine years but one of his life.…
I went from the war series to the angst of the artist in society.
LG: You're not saying this key thing you always talk about. Silencing.
NS: Oh, right. At that time, in 1972, I had joined various women's
activist groups here in New York City, and was studying and learning
about women artists' roles, and from that, making surmises about
women in American society. I realized how, in the art world, women
had been excluded and silenced. The Artaud Series was about being
silenced, because Artaud was screaming and yelling about being
silenced. So I said, "God, that's just what I'm so upset
about." There's nothing personal, nothing autobiographical
in my work, but like any art, it comes from a very powerful personal
impetus.
LG: She must have done hundreds, hundred of images of tongues
sticking out!
NS: Following Artaud, I did pieces about the torture and incarceration
of women political prisoners. You see, all this time, since '69,
I was really angry because I had something to say in the art world
and they didn't want to hear it. I had joined a group called WAR,
Women Artists in Revolution, and we investigated and picketed
and even presented a petition about parity for women artists.
In 1972 I joined an all-women gallery - it was powerful and difficult,
and sure enough I joined it. So from there, my work went to the
celebratory. Most of my work since '66 is on paper. I had decided
then that I didn't want to go back to working on canvas.
CP: So can I ask about why you decided to just work on paper?
Was it a moral issue for you?
NS: Yeah, at that time I didn't want to be so important - not
that I was - and do big work on canvas, like Pollock previously
had been so admired. You know, all these big guns.
LG: I was doing big paintings.
NS: Yes, he was doing big paintings, and so I said I'm not gonna
do this. My work became celebratory, about women celebrating our
own bodies and the freedom of it and the freedom not to hide,
to be out there. My latest work is the subway project in uptown
New York.
CP: How would you describe
your relationship as artists?
LG: Terrible! [laughter]
NS: No, no!
LG: Well, actually, over the years we've had a pretty great relationship
with each other in terms of each other's work.
NS: Well, we've had a discourse going on.
LG: Yeah. One of the problems that artists face after they leave
art school - because in art school you often have friends that
you can discuss stuff with and, you know, they're pretty frank
- is that a few years later you're not so frank with each other.
NS: Boy, that's true. You can't be.
LG: Yeah, yeah.… So basically, it's nice if you have a friend
or a companion that you can exchange ideas with in a really natural
way. And we are that way.
CP: How do you maintain the
distance that you need to do your own work? And do you get ideas
for your individual work from each other?
LG: To some extent we do pick up ideas from each other. …
It's a subtle thing, you know, we've picked up a lot from each
other in various ways. We both got interested in Etruscan art
at the same time.
NS: Well, we went to Italy.
LG: We both shifted to an interest in photographs. But who did
it first? Nancy began to use strong color before I did. You can't
help but pick some things up - it's a continual thing that's going
on between us. At the same time, our work is very independent
of each other's.
NS: Sure, sure, there are always influences and cross-influences.
… But it is difficult being so close - and for all these
years too! - to maintain our autonomy from each other.
LG: We don't even know how it happened that we stuck together
so long! [laughter]
CP: You must get along pretty well.
NS: We do, actually.
Reproduced courtesy of the Philadelphia
City Paper
|
