So I did a series of improvisational projects that were based on "seven African powers." And these are all monoprints. There are a combination of monoprint and wood cut, where I would do a monoprint and then look at the monoprint and decide from the monoprint what kind of woodblock needed to be cut to go along with it and print those both those things just one time. So there's a series of those. This would be the one that's SU. And this one's actually in the show, the Mastry show that's traveling.
So anyway, you're starting to get the picture. So by the time I started art school in 1977-- so I graduated from high school in 1973. And I was born in 1955. I think Jessica said that. But if you think about what was possible-- so what was available to artists to do in 1955, which was the year I was born, 1955 was a good 41 years after Duchamp had used the ready made object as the emblem of an artwork, when the idea that an artwork wasn't something that had to be made by an artist. It was simply something that could be selected by an artist navigate to this website. That was 41 years before I was born. They had already exhausted almost all of the strategies that were developed out of cubism, surrealism, futurism. All of that stuff had already been exhausted before I was born. Abstract expressionism was almost kind of on its last legs by 1955 when I was born as well. And so all of the options that artists could deploy were already codified and were already on the table. So it wasn't a question of people inventing new things, because if you look at what's happening in the art world from the 1950s on up to now, we're not really talking about the invention of new things, we just simply talking about the way in which things that are already available to us are now deployed for purposes that they hadn't been used for or utilized for up until a particular time. And so when all of-- as somebody had written, you know, writers like Foucault, Benjamin Buchloh, I mean when they write about the way in which all of the options are kind of already on the table and that at the moment in which people arrive at conceptual art, we're engaged in what they call endgame strategies, where you're doing a sort of shifting a little bit here and a little bit there, but you're essentially doing things that have already been codified and defined. I mean, at that moment, then the question becomes how do you choose from the available options you have to do things that those options hadn't been used for up until that time and then to solve some problems or answer some questions about representation that hadn't been asked before? So that's what the question actually becomes at that point. And for me, so the notion of the artist that's the kind of singular expressive individual who is invested in a kind of internal dialogue with himself of which the manifestation is a kind of artwork, that kind of question and that kind of argument that seems sort of out of play. And that at that point, when you know so much about the kinds of things that can be done, you can't make the claim that you don't have a clue when if you are making a work and you end up-- you go through a process and you end up with this thing in front of you that you can't somehow define, that just doesn't work for me, because I don't think you can make that kind of claim any more that you have engaged in a kind of mediumistic practice wherein you go into a kind of a trance, you do some things and when you wake up, there's this thing in front of you and then you subsequently can't define it with language. This doesn't appeal to me. And the history of what I do sort of suggests that. You can find a lot of motivations, a lot of reasons for and a lot of things that will help you to generate a new artwork. So these collages actually happened to be based on the refrain in a poem by Aime Cesaire, called "The Notebook of a Return to My Native Land." They don't look like it.
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And then I don't know exactly what the time frame is when we're going to start the Q&A session. Somebody is going to have to give me a cue, because if you don't stop me, I'll keep going. But these are some very early works.
And they simply have to do with the way in which you understand the different functions of different modes of representation or image making or object making or painting making. And I had made it my mission from early on that the only way I was going to be able to get where I wanted to go was to know everything that everybody else who seemed to be interested in art knew. So that in a single individual that I would be capable of having a conversation with anybody, no matter where they started, no matter what they were interested in, no matter what they thought was important, that I would have I would be able to be there and I would be able to have something to say about that too. And so I made sure I could do anything that could be done or anything that had been done within the parameters of what we call this idea of art making. And that meant that when I started school in 1977 at Otis and conceptual art was the dominant mode of operating for artists at the time, I understood what that was about too. But there was still something else that needed to be done, there was some unfinished business that needed to be addressed. And that if I was going to solve the problem that I felt existed within the whole historical construction of art history, that the only way I was going to be able to solve that problem was to resolve that first issue first. And that first issue was a kind of invisibility around the representation of blacks objects in painting. And that once I was able to resolve that, then as long as I knew and understood all of the other modalities then I was free to move on to those other things when I needed to and at will. That because I was doing figurative work I wasn't trapped in figuration. Or if I was doing abstraction, I wasn't trapped in abstraction because I couldn't do figuration effectively. That every one of the things that I did had was done because I took what you could call an instrumental approach to what it meant to be making art, that I made art based on its use value within the historical narrative of art making and the function that it could perform in helping to resolve a certain series of inadequacies. And so where minimalism as a kind of device could be used effectively for a particular idea, I adopted that strategy because it seemed to be the best way to communicate that particular idea. So this is a painting called "Two Invisible Men Naked." [LAUGHTER] So and the way in which that those ideas of invisibility are figured have to do with the way HG Wells wrote the novel The Invisible Man and the way Ralph Ellison writes the novel Invisible Man. And the distinction between those two concepts of invisibility matter. And they have something to do with the structure of the picture that I'm going to make. One is an optical invisibility. The other is psychological invisibility. So it's that way of thinking through the work I'm doing, that's how you do work without being lucky because the work is directed and it's self-conscious and it's instrumental in trying to resolve a problem which is all the idea of making art is organized around in the first place. How do you solve a problem about visibility and about representation? And these are just some examples of other things. So there are always phases in which you do a lot of experimentation. And the only way you can understand how some of these things operate is to do them so that you understand how they work from the inside out, as opposed to from the surface and its appearance And so the way that I do it-- that's just another book, sorry, a part of that thing. And we'll come back to this DARPA thing. Maybe I won't come back. Let's do this now. So how many people in here know what DARPA is? What it stands for?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration. It's an arm of the military industrial complex. And the motto, the principles under which DARPA was organized, their motto is to prevent technological surprise-- to prevent technological surprise-- which means that you set up a structure in which you try to guarantee that no other entity, no other person, no other country is able to develop technological advances that you are not aware of and that you don't have a counter response to. Because being on the short end of that kind of an exchange, the consequences are unacceptable and almost unbearable. And in the same way for me, when I was looking at the way the art history books were written, being on the short end of the art historical exchange was also unacceptable and something that I couldn't leave to just dumb luck or to just chance. There had to be a way in which you could guarantee that you would never be on the outside of this exchange, but it had to be something that you controlled as opposed to something that other people imposed on you. And so I made a decision to take charge of the way I would participate and the way I would operate in whatever arena I was going to be a part of, that there was not going to be areas within the art world or within the art history that I wouldn't be aware of and that I wouldn't have something to say about. So this is the way I started out. So and this is the way you sort of erase the consequences of not knowing or not having abilities and leaving oneself vulnerable to simply being lucky. And so the question ends up, then how do you negotiate the meaning the between the difference between the image on my right, your left, and the image on the right? Those two things made by the same person but at different times. Could those two things have been made for the same reason and to perform the same function? Well, the appearance of them suggests that it could not be. But the difference between those two things, in their differences automatically demonstrate that the person who made those things had choices, and that the choices they made must have some reason and that those reasons have some kind of consequence. And so operating between these two spaces is the space in which the value that we assign to art sort of finds its full measure. And the same is the case with two woodcuts. One on the left, on your left, done before the one on the right. And a person who is making the work that's been done on the left, why would you then make a work that looks like the one that's on the right? What is the purpose of that difference? And it's negotiating the reasons for those differences that have driven almost everything that I do. And when we look through the rest of the works that I show, these kinds of differences become a key part of the reason why all of the things that I do look the way they do. And they have something to do with whether or not I feel like the choices that I'm making are the ones that put me in a place where I can participate more fully in the construction of the narrative of art history or whether I am at the mercy of somebody else's generosity. So the first two pieces and this painting are all sort of-- this is a self-portrait. So there are three self-portraits you've seen in this array of pictures that have come before. Each one of them different than the other. And each one designed because they explored a very different kind of idea in a very different way in which the idea representation can be modulated. So now when I'm going to sort of go through the speed round, because I think I have about 40 minutes to talk. |
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