Good evening. I'm Joanna Marsh, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to the Smithsonian American Art Museum tonight. This evening's program is the third and final lecture in the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture series for the 2011 calendar year, and I'd like to extend really special thanks to Clarice Smith, whose generous support makes this whole series possible. So just a little round of applause for Clarice. As always, we would love to hear your feedback after this program and others like it, and our public affairs department is currently conducting an audience survey to help evaluate current programs and develop new ones. And if you'd be willing to participate in the survey at the end of the program tonight, staff members and volunteers will be handing out survey forms and clipboards that you can just fill out before leaving the museum this evening, and in return we will give you a free voucher for a coffee or a tea from our Courtyard Cafe, just as a little thank you. I just want to ask everyone to silence their cell phones and mobile devices if you would. There will be a short question and answer period following this evening's lecture, and if you would kindly, if you have a question, which we certainly encourage, if you would kindly use one of the microphones that's set up in either aisle in the middle of the auditorium so that we can have our audience tuning in via webcast hear all of the questions and the answers from our speaker. And now it is my really distinct honor to introduce Julie Mehretu, who joins us this evening from New York City, where she lives and works. Mehretu was born in Ethiopia in 1970 and raised in Lansing, Michigan. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, and is the recipient of some of the most prestigious art awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship which she received in 2005. Over the past 10 years her work has been collected and exhibited at major international museums, most recently in a major survey exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York in 2010. She was also commissioned by Goldman Sachs to produce a major mural, an 85-foot painting, in New York City for their building. Mehretu is best known for her densely layered abstract paintings that seem to pulsate with energy. Small clusters of geometric marks are superimposed on vast plains of intersecting grids that derive from a vast array of visual imagery. Flight patterns, floorplans, city maps, and architectural renderings are just a few of the sources that Julie references in her works. All of these are compressed into a dynamic array of patterns and perspectives. Each heavily worked composition seems to oscillate between a state of creation and collapse, just like the ebb and flow of cities and lost civilizations which Julie references in her paintings. Now it's my pleasure to welcome Julie to the stage. Thank you very much. I would like to thank, I mean, everybody for coming out this evening, and I'm honored to be here and appreciate the interest in the work. The title of this talk is-- I was asked to give a title and I've never titled a talk so-- I took the opportunity to think about, I mean to name the title of the talk Grey. And when I was first invited to do the talk I had just completed the work for the Guggenheim paintings which were titled, the show was titled Grey Area. And I've been really focused on grey for a while-- 15 years-- as well as a lot of color, but so i just thought i would read, you know, just think about grey for a minute to begin with. And then recently I found this article in a, from '67, that was a round table conversation about black-- the color black-- and it was a round table between different sound artists, musicians, painters-- Cecil Taylor, Ad Reinhardt, Stu Broomer, Harvey Cowan, Michael Snow, and others-- and the idea was to qualify the social-political implications of black. Black is stasis, negation, nothingness, and black is change-- impermanence and potentiality. These are some aspects of the experience of black discussed by seven men in conversation between Toronto and New York in 1967, and it was published in Arts Canada journal. And for me, when I found this I was really interested because to me, the conversation around black between these different, very little about, it was just a very interesting conversation so I thought I would open with one, what Cecil Taylor, each participant opened with one statement and then the conversation continued. And so in '67 this was the conversation, and just thinking of black as some, as really being a part of grey. Taylor says, "I think for my first statement, I would like to say that the experience is two-fold; and later, I think you'll see how the two really emerge as one experience. Whether it's bare pale light, whitened eyes inside a lion's belly, cancelled by justice, my wish to be a hued mystic myopic region if you will, least shadow at our discretion, to disappear, or as sovereign, albeit intuitive, sense my charity, to dip and grind, fair-haired, swathed, edged to the bottom each and every second, minute, month: existence riding a cloud of diminutive will, cautioned to waiting eye in step to wild, unceasing energy, growth equaling spirit, the knowing, of black dignity. Silence may be infinite or a beginning, an end, white noise, purity, classical ballet; the question of black, its inability to reflect yet to absorb, I think these are some of the complexities that we will have to get into." And then, another quote that I think just to set the stage for the, and then I'll get into my work, is Kodwo Eshun talks about in a lecture, I mean in an essay on Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality, he says, "At the Century's End, the Futurhythmachine has two opposing tendencies, two synthetic drives: the Soulful and the Postsoul." My work if I, I'll just go back to the earlier, to the evolution of the earlier language in the work, with the different operating languages in the work, and talk about how they evolved, and then I think I can talk more clearly about the more recent work. I was always painting and drawing and interested in being able to define my, to build a language in this material, in painting. And I was very, at an early place really interested in working with drawing. But like I was making all these kinds of marks in painting and not really understanding in-depth how I was working, but I knew that this is the language that I wanted to work with. So early on I started to take this language and make it into, make these marks very, very small in an effort to somewhat study them or analyze them. And so these marks that I draw, I would draw them and I thought of them as actually behaving-- by themselves they don't really have any meaning, but as they participate in a group of marks that behave similarly, maybe they could have a sense of meaning or sense of being. So one mark, if this mark is exactly the same, as it moves through the surface in the way that the different marks interact with each other, their agency affects the way the entire surface is read, or the way the entire painting picture plane is read. So these groups of marks then, while being so small, had a strong amount of power, had a certain type of power in the picture, and for me that was what I became, you know, most interested in-- that gesture, just even that reality. And so for me that drawing, and when I talk about the drawing or the painting and in the painting, I'm talking about these marks, these little marks that I work with that began as glyphs, as little notational-- not notational but began as little symbols almost, little marks that had, similar to the marks I showed you earlier, that had a little kind of circle or a line, and anyway, they each had a certain type of social behavior in my mind. And as that language evolved, in the last 15 years, the the marks became much more notational and less glyph-like. But for me, the drawing operates from a very intuitive place in the studio. And I think of it as, you know, it has its own evolution, it works similarly to the way that language works. For me, these marks-- the making of it, its realization-- it's a materialization-- the marks are becoming, they're growth. Working in that form, it's a type of insistence on the hand, and to me there's something really important in that way of working. But at the same time, these marks couldn't exist in a place-- well they could, and I'm more interested in that now-- but at the time I thought they really needed a place of context-- a social space and time, a relationship to this place, so that they weren't in this other the world existing in their own space, which I'm very interested in again at the moment, but ten years ago, 15 years ago, as the marks evolved, I really needed a place for them to exist and not just this grey no space. So I started to really think about using architectural language as a place, as a way to offer place and time for these marks and for the drawing, and for the behavioral aspect of the of the studio process. In addition to the architectural language operates, then you know, has a very specific type of, I mean in the paintings I only use the wireframe line drawings of the architectural buildings or of architectural images. So I'm not, I'm tracing the photographs but you don't really see these photographs, you're seeing aspects of these types of structures in the painting, the wireframe line drawings, or representations that are see-through of these buildings, that are then layered on one another-- so sometimes it's just a detail of a building that you really can understand, really connect with in the picture, or it's the layering of all that architectural language that then becomes a different type of space, or suggests some type of mimetic experience. It becomes something-- the architectural language provides a certain social context for the viewer but also how you interact with the final image between the drawing and the architecture have a, you know, it has a certain type of complex interaction with the the person who's vieiwing and each person looks at these very differently through your own personal experience. But for me, the architectural language-- I was compressing time in this way, because I could go from the Neolithic, through the Renaissance, into Beaux Arts, Art Nouveau, International Style, and go back in time again as many suggestions in architecture somewhat do. But my real interest in that is that each of those moments articulate a particular political and social thinking and attitude and climate and place-- and for me it was the compression of all of that into the context of the painting, into the context of this space, where these characters were interacting or challenging, digesting, participating with this architectural language. There's another process in the studio that's I think really important to talk about, which is the mapping or analytical process. There's the intuitive which creates the drawing and that generates the desire to make pictures and the existence of them; then there's the mapping and analytical Cartesian process, which is a process of trying to make sense of what I've done in the studio and what I've done in the drawing. And this started early-- this was when I first started to, when I was making these paintings and I was looking at them in school thinking why am I doing these, I took the marks apart to try and study them. And that process of trying to study the work, trying to study my intention, almost study myself, using Cartesian, scientific, rationale, systematic methods in mimicking geographical, sociological types of techniques to study and, you know, using kind of mechanistic techniques to study the the works. So if I made a drawing, I would then literally put a piece of transparent paper over it and map that drawing, and codify behavior in the drawing for myself, as absurd as that was, because the next day could be a different interpretation or a different idea of that. But in a way, this language that made me, that really helped me understand what the intention was in the painting, not the intention but what structure emerged from within the drawing and how the marks operated, and how actually composition was formed and operated. So in the paintings I would layer the mapping, and that language, as well as the different types of approach of that language within the drawing and within the architectural. So some of the images of my work that you've seen there have been paintings that look much more like maps, and other paintings that look like theatrical stadium type of space, where the characters and the painting and the drawing interact in this space with aspects of the more, the language of the analytical. And then there's a layer of color in some of the work-- when grey is not the color that over, that takes-- really I think grey is the middle ground in the paintings. But when the color comes in, the color really comes from usually in the past-- and I'm less interested in this now-- comes from particular social reality, so in these paintings, these were either colors taken from actual stadiums, maps, or plans for these types of spaces, or from parts of these flags, of national flags of the nations that exist in the world at the time that this painting was made. And those colors were taken apart and then reconfigured into the painting in different ways. But they operate with some type of social signage as well. And there's somewhat of that analytical approach into the use of color. So as the drawing evolved-- which was this very intuitive but informed process-- and became much more notational, gestural, and action-oriented, my knowledge of architectural history and architectural language and phenomenon also involved, but only through the study of it, through the use of it in the paintings. And how particular kinds of buildings would inform the way that we would interact with the painting of this particular scale. So I started to use the stadium, as maybe one book-end of what I thought of as a very iconic building for an urban space-- the other, far other side of that would be the military-industrial complex-- fortification, the need for fortification. So you have these two types of space-- the protective space, the creation of a space, of a public space that is defined somehow, and then the space for spectacle-- public arena, stadium, performance, theater, community, in a sense. And these two bookends and their collision for about five years really, and how those two types of different space, and the theater that that space creates in an urban context became really, I think a focus for my work for five, six years. And this was maybe in 2003, through 2005, 2006. Then, one of the things that also happened during that time is my work used to be smaller, map-like work early on, and when I was working with this type of architectural phenomenon, I started to want the paintings to envelop you and become the space, mimic the space of the architectural information that I was dealing with in the work and in a way, to create this arena. Social arenas has been part of the interest and still is for me. And part of that is because as a viewer, you're participating within that social arena, so you're one of the layers in the painting, as standing in front of the painting. And your interaction with what you're seeing is, I mean the painting comes around you and engulfs you, and there's not a way for you as an individual, when the paintings reach a large scale, to see the whole painting when you're really in front of it, engaged with the drawing. You have to really step back, and as you step back you get a distance from the picture and you can really try and see the larger composition, and the painting becomes a different system and make sense in a different way, the image. But when you're in front, when you're very close to it, you're as immersed in that particular narrative or aspect of drawing-- and then when you move or travel through the painting it becomes something else. So your interaction with it is very much like your interaction in an urban space, or mimics that type of idea in a way that there's not, only from a distance can you really understand everything and even from a distance, you can't see the the picture in detail. So it's constantly shifting, the way that the painting interacts with you as a person. And in many ways, this is our interaction with space and time-- and how much we can understand or make sense of our social space and time. And another, I think, focus for me in this work is that as a painter, you're an artist-- you're really looking for ways to continue to work and continue not just this kind of, for me it's a certain type of, there's a language and there's a commitment to that language and almost an obsession with that language. But there's also, for me, there's this world that I participate in, and the studio practice is one that's very internal and I have to get into this particular zone to be able to really make, and be able to access my work intuitively and be able to really create something in the drawing, even in the characters, that is always becoming in front of me and teaching me something. And making the paintings, conceptually building them and thinking about them and how I will make the next paintings, really they interact with the world around me-- and so what is going on in the world at that time really informs how I'm thinking about what's interesting as a point of departure for what I will do in the studio. But it's not meant to describe or articulate what's happening in the world around me in that sense, it's just a point of departure because these images become part of what I'm digesting, and they become part of my internal, my studio system if you will, my digestive process in the studio space. So there's all these layers, that images and information comes into me, comes into the studio, gets processed, gets digested, and then becomes something else through making. In 2007 I was in Berlin, working as a fellow of the American Academy, and while I was there, I was in this place of trying to sort out what would be the paintings I would make for the Guggenheim show. And I was also, I had never been to Berlin and I didn't have a lot of interest really in Berlin or Germany. I grew up with, my father's Ethiopian, and for some reason there wasn't a lot of excitement. If you have come from an Africanist family there's a lot of, you know, interest in learning French or English but German is not-- in certain places maybe-- but really Germany, especially since the war was, I don't know, Africans aren't that, in this way, that's not a big exciting... So there wasn't this drive in me, whereas my partner Jessica comes from a family who, she has grandparents who have survived Auschwitz, and there's a different interest in this. She studied German-- it was part of her social and cultural background in a way, so she had an interest and her family had traveled there and so okay, let's go to Berlin, do the American Academy. And it was incredible because being there, it was being in this space where, one, as a city it took me-- just physically, there were aspects of it that reminded me of Addis Ababa architecturally and there's a reason for that-- but it's a city where all of the issues that i'm thinking about in the work-- this layering of space, layering of time, history, to make sense of a moment, makes sense of myself in a moment-- that exists there, that's open there, it's transparent in Berlin. And it was there that I was, what am I going to do next, what am I going to be able to make next in this work, and I had a plan for these paintings for the Guggenheim where I thought I had this project, I'm going to do these paintings that really focus on these major urban centers and throughout the world that were really crucial to me or I thought so at the time-- and I was working on these small paintings in the studio, this being one of them. And while i was working on these paintings, just trying to figure things out, I painted this large colored shape in the center of this painting, and I spent a lot of time drawing in this painting, and there's a lot of architectural language that is hard to see. And then I sanded this whole section out because I really disliked it. And this was in that process of just making, and being intuitively kind of involved with the work. And then when I turned around, there was this-- and physically it's much more apparent-- there is this almost poltergeist appeared in the painting. And this absence in the center which became the erasure became the most interesting action for me. So the marks and the layering of the marks and their behavior contributed to the evolution of this image to the point where it led in a sense, in a way, to its own need for a point of collapse. And in that collapse, I had to erase that or remove that, but there's this trace of that in the picture-- and as you're standing in front of the painting, the erasure almost becomes forward, it almost separates from the surface of the image and appears as almost like a phantom, a revenant right there in front, for me. And that was really an exciting moment. And it took place in Berlin, where that experience I think happens regularly in that city. And for me, it became a really potent place to explore because that also mimics and brings up aspects of thinking about my past, and where I come from, and aspects of that past that keep appearing in that way. And so it became, on many different levels, this dragon that I was chasing in the studio. I decided to focus the whole show for Berlin on, and for the Guggenheim on, erasure and that type of grey space and that space of what I thought of as potential or, when this presence appeared in the painting. This is another painting that was, an earlier painting that preceded the other one, but it was an earlier erased picture where I traced, well an assistant traced, each architectural drawing in this book Architecture Since 1900. Each iconic building in that book was traced and then erased, once it was drawn into the painting. So from a distance, it looks like this grey, cloudy, mythic, dreamscape city, urban space and futuristic-- and then as you come closer to it, you really start to see, it kind of defines itself and you're able to pick out certain pictures and certain iconic buildings really stand out-- and then as you get even closer to it, those lines disintegrate into this dust, these atomized pieces of ink-- and it's also as you erase, it somewhat gets mashed into the surface of the painting, so this overall hue of grey is part of, is within the image, within the surface, within the image. So there are these two forms of erasure-- and as I was working with and thinking about these paintings for the Guggenheim and being in Berlin, part of the reality of being there was having the responsibility of the Bush administration as the leadership of, you know, being a citizen of this country, living in Germany, and working there while, you know, there's this major war going on in the world-- in Iraq and Afghanistan specifically-- and specifically in regards to Iraq, being in Germany that did not support this situation and being somewhat-- I mean I'm not trying to compare times at all or conflate that-- but being able to be somewhat sensitive to the reality of an experience of having to take responsibility for your political reality. And so as an American working in Germany, working in Berlin during the Iraq war, that's the context that I was thinking of making the work for that. And so the types of architectural information that I was really looking at were the architecture, the militaristic kind of architectural history. I really studied the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, Hitler's Atlantic Wall-- I was really interested in those ruins. I started to really think about the contemporary ruins that were being created daily through this experience-- the space in Berlin is this layered reality, as many cities are, but it's very visible in Berlin of those current and contemporary ruins, layered and then regenerating to a different type of space in front of you. And preceding Berlin, or right after my first six months in Berlin, I went back to Michigan-- I was working in Detroit, I had a show at the DIA. And Detroit is another type of city like this. I was after that also in New Orleans-- we just took the train through Baltimore, which brings us up. But the evidence of this current or contemporary ruin that surrounds us and what does that, like, I was really interested in that type of space. So rather than using architectural language that was about built space that had specific social and political intention, this was the remains of that. But what do you, how do you work with this type of language? How can I make these paintings with this kind of language that these images aren't already doing? So the earlier desire of the building, this utopian picture-- we're looking back in this way at that type of phenomenon of this-- I was starting to really use the ruin and housing, that type of social, using the context of the arena as a site maybe for the space that you exist in, that you look at these paintings within. But that didn't really translate into the painting. So the paintings-- at this point, I wasn't concerned with them seeming like that type of arena or that type of social space, participating in that, but really being these images in the way that traditional paintings operate, where they are this type of pictorial space where this, but they operate very abstractly where this action-- almost the way an ocean comes in at you just as a wave just approaches. I wanted these images to operate as pictures do, or paintings traditionally could in a space, and not engulf you in that way, although they are large-- but that they become, an image actually appears in them, as abstract as they remain, this being one of them. They're 10 feet by 14 feet, so they're quite large. But they don't have the same type of theatrical space maybe, or architectural classical orientation, even as disjointed and broken as that was in the earlier paintings. They're, the drawing, the space, the type of space, the architectural elements that are in the space, are really these kind of parts of what construct the other type of space, as well as the drawing which becomes within that space. In the collision of interacting with that architectural space, it becomes, creates almost a third space. And this is that third space that's hard to describe, but it really operates, in a way it becomes, it has its own motion, has its own intention, it has its own type of... it operates, it has its own behavior, and it interacts within the person, within each painting has a very different way of behaving in that way. And so this-- I'll maybe talk about this one painting-- the architectural language is very hard to see in this image, and a lot of it has been erased, but it was taken, started with the Believer's Palace, which is, this is a ruin of the interior of it, which is one of Saddam's main bunkers. And I mean not palaces-- meeting halls where a lot of news conferences were held, and images of him speaking to the public were held in the space, but they have this really complex bunker underneath it. And for me, I just came across this in the Times, and was interested in this type of space that mimicked the interior of some of the Atlantic Wall ruins that I was looking at, the bunkers. But I was really interested in part of the remnant of that space, what happens, but really the kind of classical description of that space that was described in that photograph. And rather than the characters and the marks shifting what the intention was of earlier architectural buildings, like being able to digest and consume, you know, a building, an International Style building that was built a particular way, and then become a different kind of picture-- so you have this classical structure that was created by the architectural language-- the drawing informs that and it becomes a very different picture, or the stadium. This becomes the drawing, and the erasure of the architecture, these bits become other elements-- they become almost hyper- elements that come together, seem like they're coming together to form something else. What is that, what could that other form be? Is the presence in the the ratios the presence in the coming together of these marks to create something out as marks as as as as as drawing as depiction of space as nanobots what could they how how didhow today how does how did it come together and there's a site type of opacity that is created by the layering of all that information but there's also in the erasure this light or paring down that comes out through the painting this is an image of layers and layers of drawing of these buildings were built in the early nineteen hundreds that were really just early early modern buildings really pre-modern housing in Germany there that you see everywhere in Berlin but that were really most of these places that we drew into this painting where you were erased so earnest in a way i was looking at the erased space we looking back at these old photographs to and redrawing these buildings as they existed in these put in these in these plots but then some of the some of the building still exists but then the eraser happens in the lair in the amount of information and the and the and the the opacity that is built up through the layers through the amount of drawing then the amount of information that that occurs becomes so layered that it almost denies hour or denies what it what it is in a way it also becomes very alive and when you're in front of it the painting starts to move in as you walk through it actually starts to visually you can you can get if you really want to pay attention to get a slight vertigo because it actually starts to the windows and the way that the drawing interacts it actually starts to shift so this show that the interest again was in how these different types of working with the erasure and working with this language in very different in very different ways but really the focus was on that gray space on that erase space and and I think it it's not even until recently that I really able to to understand that third space that is what I'm what emerged from the making of these that is what i'm interested in and that the reason these pictures exists is for that third space this place between the draw architectural between the ruined between the erasure and that in the drawing in that collision that-that-that-that space where maybe this the something else occurs this is a painting that is made from the Atlantic Wall bunkers it does the the architectural drawing in it very very very fine lines I feel like something's moving on the screen do you see that I don't know what that is but there's behind that movement there's these lines that that the architectural John and though those are made up of of Hitler's Atlantic Wall bunkers images we had of those and then we're able to translate into wireframe drawings and then trace into the painting and then into that I drew and and worked into the the very competent complex space but those spaces are concrete bunkers big deal thick looking ruins along the beach that these are Paul videos photos of the of of a few of these bunkers that remain that just watched the ocean we have some in San Francisco similar that I've seen on the on the Pacific coast of you know to watch the ocean to have you have a big gun in there and then you can protect yourself from anything that's approaching although this notion that this space is quite vast but they're very to me super interesting structures and the materiality of them what is not really what you see when you're looking at the painting the painting has all this transparency in the drawing is the opposite of that there's one moment in the top left corner where there's a dark gray patch that that maybe suggests there materiality but this type of being able to see through being able to move through this trapezoid into the into this space and and then in that this kind of presence come comes about this this is almost like a crow nope it's just right there you can you're in this in the painting in this space where we're in that collision you see this you almost can experience this layer this of time and for me like I was upset about the other Guggenheim pains that was really the the focus or interest in in the work so this was in a way a new way for me to work and before that was very their way of working where all the other architectural language and the gesture drawing and mark making and then the maps and the analytical language the the with their interaction was what happened very clear distinct separate layers this this this way of working and I'm really was it was putting laying the groundwork for me into a new drama into a new new way of making and and making paintings but also in a new way to be into existence as a painter and a big at the same time I was working on and started the work for the mural in Berlin i just have you know this collection of archive images of types of the race pace so in different ways that that exists but at that I was really thinking of a goldman sachs this this this this commission that i received two to make this painting and I was doing that made that painted the same time that I made the paintings for the Guggenheim show and gray area pains and a big part of the thinking for the Guggenheim painting was looking for the goldman sachs painting a mural was to think how do i how could I host given the opportunity to make a painting for this space how could I why would I make a painting for this type of a space what what what would be like what what could i do that i could not do with my work if they want to buy a big paint and make they're not small paintings that I make it they want a big pay for the wall so there had to be a real reason to do it and for me there's this wall that they they had was 80 feet by twenty three feet tall it was a while that you can see from the street and so the proposal that we put forth i went to two friends an architectural historian and straw and Beth striker and another architect artist friend of mine and talk to them about this idea that I wanted to create this mural this absurd idea to create a mural if it that could map in a way or become a pictorial realization or or or or ideas of the history of capital capitalism with that how is that even something that you know could be and so they help me with this research really looking into the history of the bourse and the exchange place in that and and early trade routes the earliest trade routes so we split into two Beth researched the maps that have formed and earliest maps of the Silk Route and early caravans to there are two the lawrence really researched the institution's these these these types of structures from the earliest exposed you know outdoor exchanges to and this in a way was always but it was because of these kinds of aspects of the urban space and and creating a system out of what were these what what are these different phenomenon that existing urban space the market is a big aspect big humongous aspect that flies in the middle of the stadium and and this military industrial complex you have this is what feeds all of that and so for me it was it felt like a really interesting project proposed made this proposal and they were they were interested in the in in what would what would occur in this type of pain so goldman sachs supported this painting then what these are the images i showed goldman sachs and the proposal the images i'm showing you images of the bourses images of these types of various types of migration and early maps and and so we went when we received the Commission we went to Berlin to create the painting because i needed a certain time scale space and that's where i also made the the Guggenheim paintings when we went back to Berlin we rented a massive space that could there was a turned out to be a munitions factory owned by Ludwig lova in the before the First World War it was it was it you know he this was in this part of town called vetting and he created the Luger pistol as well as other major cannons that were used during the first war in this Factory in this account in the setting and then of course it was area eyes during the Second World War so that's just part of the layers history of space that was of interest to us but these are the beginnings of those panels laid out and there's these pillars that we could put create the building supports on and actually recreate the wall that the painting a mural sits on in or manhattan the early parts of this painting i went with an idea of drawings that I had made and that and i went to Berlin with history with these drawings and projected this huge idea on the honest and on the on the on the wall and the painting just collapsed it didn't hold up because of pain that scale you have to do we can't think of it in a screen like this you can't think of it on the drawing really exist in space so i had to take apart everything I put into the painting and do it we started with just the lines that were informed by their trade route maps and as well as other kinds of maps and then into that least I started to project these various shapes to come from a wide source of wide archive of sources but one thing that really started to happen with the golden with this painting working for this mural the shapes I started I had this history this this key of shapes had used in paintings in the past this part of that analytical process in the studio folding it back into the painting but in in that process i also started to create new shapes that just existed that that suggested something rather than actually coming from a moment or some type of social rather than coming from a logo coming from some type of part of us of a bit of a sign or part of a part of a flag they actually they they could they could come from they work they were just coming out of the intuitive process of working and but they referenced or seem to bring up aspects of that so in a way that the this new type of abstraction started to exist in the painting this is the crew of us that work we had 22 people working on the painting in its height and width when there was the most when there was we had two shifts of people working because of the scale to to translate than the amount of drawing into the surface and into this massive surface of an end of in terrain of abstraction this kind of map space I in these in these quotations these abstracts shapes that were operating like what like like almost sonically in on this on this wall we drew these the history of these type of this type of architecture the type of architecture that it was in the the site of lower Manhattan as as as a place for the for the earliest exchanges in New York and of center for that in a way and and so this painting becomes the wall becomes this historical reference within it but it also becomes a witness for this for the context that it's in it exists there in in in manhattan on 200 west street across the street from ground zero and it it's there for however long it will be there but its its its it has this past in it but it also will will will will participate in the current or future time by just being there by existing there so there's this layer in this dimension of space and time within the painting because of the context and what it's mimicking around it into this into that that two layers of architectural drawing that that are imposed on this as well as this these these as well as this map type of space for this the more analytic space if you will as well as being this kind of reference to this too early modernist utopian type of mural paintings of the past and and the gestures of that and the hope that was in those paintings in were their intention kind of relied on the war existed on that this this there is this the hand and the gesture and that's that gesture on that hand that's that's that insistence that's that within this larger system within this this context there's this there's this you know arrogance of the hand or work or this type of persistent urgent resolute kind of determined hand that would in marks that participated and shifted an undulated and effective the surface of the painting and it in wit and from from a distance you can see this painting that has an audience that you can see it from across the street you can see from down the street and it looks like a small little painting at the end of the street and then as you come closer to it and if you can go inside to see it then then your interaction with the picture becomes something else and the pen image aspects of the painting like the orange lines on the top the yellow squares those disappear when you're inside you're only involved with moments of the paintings will be it shatters into many many different paintings and then the drawing becomes this whole other experience that much more intimate experience and so this this may be the way that if you didn't have any trees or anything any way that you could see the painting except with these bars for the window there's about six different main bar that the meter the painting from a distance you can see this huge composition and it has a structure and parked it but in it and it has emotion and then as you come closer that disappears and it becomes this other experience right at first I really thought that the colored shapes would really be informed by the signage and then some aspects they are from various participate errs people apart participants in the exchange in this world of exchange but and and what I mean by that is really quoting logos and and parts of the Insignia from different banks and but that became that wasn't became really uninteresting to me i mean i was working on this also i should say this which I got this commission in 2007 and we started work at the beginning of the summer of two thousand eight and by the end of that summer when we had finished the ground paint the first layer of the colored painting we had the Act you know you summer 2008 i think at the end of the summer 2008 august-september of 2008 wasn't really i think very clear i mean we all have a real understanding what happened to this especially to this world into every single you know to the to the to the to the economic climate of the United States at that time in the world and although in Berlin never just like onsen this way it's always been winners were used to it but so this was the contact that we were working on this painting far away from from from what was happening and in a way maybe the abstraction yeah really shifted but it became something else one because of the demands of the scale but to and-and-and in in the painting and that's what drives the work fundamental use the work itself and what the work needs but also the the the the the way that this the way that this these shapes and and this is what I'm really kind of really interested in now how these shapes that come from in there some quotations of other parts of paintings and other public artworks of certain types of social meaning like you know and so their signage there's some of that but they become other things are drawings that you did they become their own shapes and they become major agents and the painting like that big red shape on the bottom right the blue robotics shape in the middle the orange square the yellow red shaped flying off on the left the pink triangle the type of camouflage shape on the top right and so for me those shapes and their and their their agency that in and cut the agency of that color became really is it is really important to me still and that that's movie that that's that's coming back to gray somehow not sure I'm working on I'm really making but but great you know everything about student right now still very great after that I did two paintings really in this in that that that that I've been working on since I came back to New York and my studio now looks over the hudson river when i drive down the hudson river every day from where i live in Harlem and the river and became really important to me just because it was the my it was the the at one part of the city is a daily and it was one part of the world that I saw every day and it changes every single day it's a different color two different experience and this was this this is in a way the climate of the when I started drawing into these paintings but I was asked to do this project 4444 space and venice that had that had a very square shape to it and it was in a in old customs house and it had it was a central space in this old customs house and if you really look at the map of Venice it's almost right in the center of Venice but it's also if you're it historically was a point of introduction to the city and its in the dog II the punta della dogana which is they're trying to the point that comes out right it across from the doge's palace in Venice and in that in that building which was the customs house and we're all part all everyone who went to Venice had to process through that space this this this space i was interested in you looked at it on a map it be if you create and you created this you were to look at it with this Cartesian model there's right in the middle of that space you could drop a grid and it because it was a cube i started creating the neighbors to make something for the space two paintings one that was vertical and one that would be horizontal and I had this format but I didn't really know what I would do with architecture with the with images but I've had this Vista of my studio of the river and of New York and the river brought up Venice for me I mean very just fundamentally and these cruise ships came in the increased its you see in Venice when you're it in Venice but so there they became very clear but then it will as I started to just think about that the ub you know New York City has the fortified walls all around it as well especially in lower Manhattan and these works really built to to to create these ports along the end to make it much more functioning Harbor but also in a way to protect the city now has to be reconsidered in terms of the water but to be able to really protect the buildings that were being built in the city from from the water itself and there were there many other relationships to Venice that can be made so for me it wasn't like I was trying to make some major conceptual argument for these two places but just having done this big painting that was thinking about this the the industry and in context and and world of finance at to try and take the language button to really think about the language that had been making the Guggenheim paintings which I was making at the same time as that mural I wanted to try and I was thinking about you know naturally New York and Venice's these two sort as these two major centers for that type of exchange and so I made these one the horizontal painting New York the vertical painting Dennis architectural II just thought i would look at that will be at those two types of architectural different architectural phenomenon lot of Venice and then what happens in those buildings exist all through New York and at the same time there's this major shift started in january and our social reality and in the global social reality and that informs i think that the Act the action of the drawing in the in the painting of new in New York I wasn't it was it was it wasn't really the intention and I'm thinking of it really now looking back at the painting but for me that that that this paint that this painting that the build from the architectural elements of New York really you know in a sense becomes something I mean as that source be you use that source to then create this other image and with it with with the interaction of the drawing and the and the drawing really takes over and the erasure and and that grace base maybe it's not the drawing takes over but that third space takes over and these major presence is appear in the painting this painting is about 22-feet wide or 23 feet wide 10 feet tall and the vertical painting is about 12 feet wide and 15 feet tall the vertical painting doesn't have any of the hand or the gesture in it this is the space that the paintings were it and there's a skylight above the paintings and through that skylight the vertical painting on the other side of that vertical painting there's a dome and it's almost there are many buildings that are drawn upside down in the top of the vertical painting the vertical pain as i said is all architectural drawing it all all tracings of these elements of the kind of the exhibitionism of and kind of intention of Venetian this space that you see when you arrived in venice this type of drag early-type really in print showy type of gesture that you'd seen that architectural language and it was it to me that there that was really mean footage it's it's it's a it's an incredible achievement what what what occurs and that's when you approach that city looks so small it there's a there's this kind of intense capitalist insistence and and and and showing us in in historically when you thinking about what those buildings do and so we these are traces of all those that detail so you have that on the other side of this this this intense action there's no third space in this if other than the layering of all the drawing and where these little aspects of the architectural details start to actually become or vibrate in their own existence in the in the surface of the pain but it's almost as if the dome folds in on the space so for me the thinking of the paintings occur in the space in the city in this in this school in in a good in a larger global context but they're also these these two images that are that are interacting with one another and creating almost this this there's this third space that exists between them in there in this in the room that they were made for so I'll end on an image of the of the Nile River and daniel joseph martinez catalog for the chiro biennial he shot you took a photograph of the Nile and i find it is it just an interesting image since it was Hudson i was looking at as the at the end image for the for the top thank you so if there's any questions how should we do that ok ok so I'll start on the others ok oh yeah about the arm the goldman sachs painting one of the things that really struck me the first time I saw is that it get AI sod very close to the time that was installed and of course global markets are crashing and all that kind of stuff and it just seemed to me that it it described in some way they encounter at the inn inability to really comprehend all that financial information i was wondering if you could comment on that I've been a in terms of has an image yeah yeah yeah i think it was speaking to somebody at goldman sachs just about the archiving information and they have to archiving centers of information that just just to archive I mean this is DC this is everywhere in sure but we're where the amount of energy used to archive these two sent to places in in new york state that that that each one consumes the amount of energy of white plains new york trip to archived information just by itself and theirs and theirs top doubles you have to have two of each of those and I mean and I'm sure that is for every that's just one or you know one so yeah I mean it three times the project itself was was was futile it in a sense it's the painting has this challenge but it what's the point of making a painting today and part of part of the reason I paying and draws is this is this you know and in part of the that is that determination that each person or that that decision insistence on set on being on the individual on the self that agency and so in in that picture i don't think that picture is trying to be there's a sense of it i mean they don't think its its its its intention is not to be medical intention is to become this other experience that exists in this but using all of that as a point of departure but it's not at all trying to be descriptive i'm curious how you decide to place the tracings that you do love the architecture onto your larger canvas do you just put them one on top of each other of the other or do you space them out from all over I mean it depends on the image with you it usually i'm thinking of creating a particular type of space so I collect for example with the goldman sachs pain and collected had a huge right archive of images and from those i worked into the painting when I would work one image at a time layering them into the painting where I thought they needed to be to create space that process putting them in the paint somewhat intuitive as it that's the space evolves there's a very kind of informed idea of house baby have how what'd that space could change and when you put two buildings on top of one another how they interact I mean and he worked with that type of language for the last 10 years it informs the way that you think about how you're going to all and so every you know each time I'm trying to also do something for myself that's interesting and challenging the way that I will interact that space so it's really about creating a particular kind of space or capacity of space within the layering of that space and I just had a question about how you feel in your position as a painter and being someone who uses so much drawing and how you feel that you are working within painting or as an artist in the history of painting or do you feel free from that genre i guess i'm just curious how do you take on through the history of painting in the way that you work now I mean I'm a painter I think of myself as a painter and making paintings and I draw as a big part of that process but they don't exist on paper on the wall or on another support really i work i construct these work on canvas and stretch it over a stretcher that even the mural was made that way so it's stretched canvas over stretchers that come together to create this large painting and for me that there's something very I'm very invested in that the material mean the material i work with is all acrylic paint and and ink and all the color comes as are all various types of cocaine the surface is very considered and is also made from a couple different types of acrylic paint and other material so i don't i mean i don't i don't think drawing on the painting shifts she takes it outside of painting I mean I think they're there other aspects and approach an end in the way that I approached the work that i did try to deal with the history of painting differently or or contribute to that but it's not really me their paintings i think of him that way you have a question of ICU plug your technique towards man main structures have you thought about applying it towards on things in nature like repeating patterns like factorial designs repeating on geometric structures have you thought about that maybe yeah I think that that that that's that's such an interesting area 22 and and I have a lot of images of that type of information and and but somehow in the drawing and in the layer that the information that what what what I'm interested in that type that that almost occurs somehow if it maybe it could occur that it doesn't not doesn't really but maybe it could suggest that that's occurring in the paintings in the interaction of the marking art making and the various types of information to get layered into the painting so in a way I hope is that they behave that way through through their evolution but yeah sure i'm looking at that I'm hi i was wondering if I'm if you knew or it seems to me that your work is extraordinarily related to Gordon matta Clark's work who did a lot of physical cross-sections of buildings that we're going to be demolished and I think about how you almost take 3d influences and then apply them in a 2d setting but then somehow incorporate like 40 i think it's like hypercubes and like time and so I was wondering a little bit about how 33 d kind of the 3d venue would play into your work while its absent from the images that you create in a way all the images that you showed in between your own work we're so extraordinarily physical and three day yeah sure if there was a really a question there but there are a lot of questions in here that relate to those comments I appreciate that no I mean it's the question about sculpture yeah yeah i mean from working is very the process of working for me is very slow it involves very slowly i try to work as fast as i can and it's still very very steps are are pretty I think very slow so i mean the the I've make from the world that exists but they're making abstract paintings abstract pictures very 2d pictures but they have they suggest this type of so that's that's a question that I've been thinking about about that about that leap into into space I'm not a am working with that in the studio and i am not really in a place to be able to talk about it really but yeah definitely it's it's it's it's a bit of presence there yeah yeah thank you hi i have a little bit more of a personal question i guess about the third space that you were talking about that emerges and some of your paintings and I'm just wondering what your emotional reaction is to the third space what it does a cure and how how you relate to it have what kind of feelings come up and she could describe those little bit more what it means to you and where you think that would take you feature it's it's that third space is so hard to describe and talk about because it really about experience and but it i don't know that it's all I mean sometimes it's an emotional response but but it in the way that I would have an emotional response to a lot of the photographs that i showed in the dark as well but for for me for me it it really it's a space where something else can occur it's a space where it's a it's a place of potential but it's also a space that have everything that has ever happened happened in this space it's it's the space of the sublime if you will just but it has this experience an experiential aspect to that that occurs when you're in front of it the piece and that's really the different the thing about paintings you have to be in front of painting you have to stand in front of it or sit in front of it you have to stay there for a long time for painting to really make sense and i say that about any anything anybody's paintings they require that type of attention and it had been in in a way that divert they operate them and especially these paintings for me operate like a lot like film like you have to really watch that the painting emerge and it takes that time so thank you what was your what's your literary and philosophical area but you what do you like we have a very literary artist last lecture yeah and she really referenced a lot of personal deep meanings and things what you have yeah I don't I mean I'm that's like that ask that your Facebook page what is it your political orientation that it is political what is it called I don't really use Facebook there you have your status your relationship status and then you have your political affiliation and religious affiliation everything is listed but i'm not really a facebook user I I mean that I think that what i read and what I what I wanted to really try and talk about in this talk is is is is is something else I'm met there there there are times where particular books play a big role in the work and but i don't i can think of one just offhand right now when I was really looking at the history of the ruin and I'm and-and-and-and-and the history of the use of the military-industrial complex i was reading Austerlitz by save all the time and so that kind of really structured her informed that the way I was thinking about those pains but but I read you mean it wasn't really focus of the conversation tonight because I mean intentionally but so but that yeah i mean that I don't have a participate in the world fully I don't just you know what pic I'm not just reading the news that were paying attention to that side of what exists i think it but anyway thank you oh there's one more here and you don't mind I don't know hi i want to say thank you first of all you're one of my favorite artists and I really appreciate you coming out I'm always drawn to your work when i see it i just have a few questions i saw the last images you had up of the uprising this past spring and winter is that supposed to show us what's to come what is going to be influencing your work the Arab Spring the images right i think that that was just what was happening like I had the teeth the computer took a photograph of myself in the computer just to shoot the head that that when when when when when those major and that was happening in Tahrir Square and in need of dollars wat i mean that was playing in the studio is I was drawing that was occurring so it's just what was happening just to give a context for what was going on in the world around me and but it was in the studio to because it was out playing on the computer live in on the television so it's really not not necessarily about the future in the practice but just about that time that I was making those pain thank you very much
