How to look at an abstract painting | Joan Mitchell | PROGRAM

what is it that makes it painful that makes a painter yeah oh some sort of sickness I mean you can't do without it it's like an addiction you have to go on doing it it's uh I don't know well nothing was indispensable to paint was in this bathroom thank you we're here today at David's Werner Gallery in this John Mitchell show Amy Selman painter writer old friend Aaron Kimmel art historian critic and part of the research team on the most recent John Mitchell retrospective currently in Paris one of the things I think about abstraction is we all think we know what it means it's it's also like this like little secret handshake that happens in the art world like art people are people who understand abstraction and then people outside the art world are like is that like why is you know from everything as jejune is why is that art to like okay I actually like it and feel moved by it but I have no idea how to talk about it that's very common like what what what am I looking at but how would you guys you as a abstract painter and you as an art historian like if you had to explain to someone who you really loved and who was really smart and they said to you I don't know anything about art so like when you say abstract painting what do you mean what would you say to that person um I would say that it's a set of relationships like a not I guess a non-verbal language based on a sort of expanding set of relationships what about you as a practitioner I I've always thought that you know you're in your studio you're listening to the radio you're not listening to the radio but somebody walks by you know you hear some news that echoes in your head all day even if you did turn the radio off how how could you get out of language and how could you get out of space and how could you get out of um the feeling of there being something slightly extrinsic to your own skin limit and slightly intrinsic to that feeling like how can you those are that's what it is to be a human so I don't think you that anybody's abstract if it means there's no language right because we're the language animal we right we we yes we are so abstract painting is for Mitchell I think also a language right two inch brushes three inch brushes unprime canvas gessoed canvas like these are all building blocks of a language right that we now associate with abstract painting but I think she's not trying to make it look like the cosmos or something or a cloud she's trying to work within like a material that she's committed herself to and then stretched that material as far as it can go right I think that that's right and I think she's also working within the tradition of like a a 500 Year tradition of Western oil painting I mean she's she's thinking about van Gogh you know as much as she's thinking about the difference it seems to me and the colors she was able to the pain she was able to buy in the States versus the oil paint she's able to buy and right in France of course they're the same Cobalt Violet is in Monet like that's the color of the land that she's in like it's his garden her garden and that's the color that's there it's not like she's not it's not abstract at that level it's actually like has a kind of one-to-one reference to the experience she's having no I always paint with the windows closed oh because the Sun comes in and I could never possibly copy that it's so much more beautiful than anything well I get a I look at that or I have a feeling on remembered feelings from nature of Nature and I paint out of landscape all over entirely but I can't copy it into together in the literature and I think just in our experience of Joan Mitchell's paintings she's often described equally as an abstract painter and as a landscape painter and I kind of synthesize these things in my head but if I think about them I realize like they don't actually work so well together and I guess I wanted to ask both of you what does it mean to call someone both an abstract painter and a landscape painter I don't think of her as a landscape painter okay I mean you know she she paints things that are related to space you know and I think for her space has feeling as well as form having a feeling as and color and Mark etc etc but I know that air and trees and stuff are all around her and that they're infusing you know the work in a lot of ways but I guess a landscape painter is somebody who represents Earth you know and sky and you know the condition of gravity and stuff and certainly the condition of gravity is not here things are you know waited in in their own way and um you know like the book says I carry the landscape with me I mean I think what that means is not there's a landscape inside me and I'm going to portray it I think what it more means is that the landscape isn't a category uh it's similar to a two other feelings that you also carry with you you know what about you Erin do you see her as a landscape painter I do see her as a landscape painter but I think landscape is a very fraught term like art historically um yeah we think of it in this really traditional sort of horizontal way um but I think she's painting perception essentially right um kind of recording perception trying to sort of put stored perception onto a canvas and then but she's I mean often she's looking out um at land and I see landscape in the paintings too like I can see the depth makes me feel like yes like we're laughing yes we don't all see depth the same right right right but I mean I think that that um a landscape painter would be a person who not only we all see landscape because we all walk through it all day right but do they deliver landscape you know so I mean I think like what does she deliver to me she doesn't deliver a reiteration of the Walk Through the Woods interesting I mean even when I first walked into this gallery and saw the painting that's behind us it immediately made me think of the big Cezanne bathers in Philadelphia except without the figures one of the things that I think is interesting to think about is how she is connected to Monet though she doesn't want to be considered in that lens entirely but like if you think what does Monet do with a landscape he also um does something that moves it very far in a way towards abstraction and away from any kind of like rational sense of like Earth's Edge horizon line you know yeah there's a cloud but the cloud is reflected on the plane of the of the water for instance so what you're literally looking at isn't there right you know what I mean so once you're removed enough sort of in a sort of structural sense you're no longer delivering a landscape you're only delivering what we hold in our in our experience of a landscape and I guess I would say that marks it as being pretty far away from the source yeah it's interesting I don't I mean it's I don't know what do you think Aaron I think it is far away from the source and it's like in the sense that it's mediated through her and I think the you know she closed the windows whenever she painted and she also listened to music often um she said to sort of get the Consciousness her self-consciousness out and just I think become a sort of medium for that physical sensation um so in so I understand what you're saying it's and she also said I hate nature I mean she literally of disavows she pits herself against it as much as she but she also loves it but she's also a contrarian yeah when Joan Mitchell says I hate nature what I hear is I love nature do you know like Chicago needs an opposition in order to get going like I never feel when I'm looking at a Joan Mitchell painting that she's making a painting about a room or about interior space do you know what I mean I always feel that there is something about both the scale the gesture the composition and the palette that indicates to me I am not inside human built space so so the the like dumb antithesis of that for me becomes like landscape you know because there are abstract painters who seem to me to be interested in what happens in a in a room or what happens absolutely in your body or what happens in your mind right like and that she does not appear to be that interested in any of that definitely not but I think it's we would have to get into the conversation about how she works which is partly from a work from a far away distance to regard from far away from the other side of the room right and to look at it for a really long time which is kind of like how you look at a lake right you know so it's more about distance and immersion than than landscape per se I don't know what you think I think it's helpful to understand it in landscape in terms well what she was looking at or what her sort of immediate direct experience was and I think of these later paintings as having more you know obviously the brush Strokes are much larger um and I think they can be harder to appreciate um because in a way there's not this the sort of grandiosity of like the scale of breaststroke I know she's doing this two inch brush a lot and um but she's spending so much time in the garden and she's very sad and alone when she's painting these I mean she has people coming through the house but I I think of these as Garden paintings and then when I get into that scale I understand the way you're moving through the painting is the way she was kind of daily moving through her Gardens you know yeah she lives in the country for some of the time which we don't all do so she's sensitized to the outdoor but also she grew up by Lake Michigan Right which I did and when you grow up by a great lake you also spend a lot of time like gazing out at you know a sort of watery thing the Horizon that is very different isn't really there that keeps shifting color and you could say that those things are sort of embedded in somebody's early Consciousness well I mean I think the more interesting question is could she be this kind of painter without living in the countryside in in France and could she be this kind of painter without living right next door to Monet or in his house or whatever it is and then she obviously chose to live right next door so you know I know she hates this idea that she's like taking the Baton from you know Mr Monet and all the other grand old men but but she takes it to another place she actually pushes the ball further down the court and really uh outlines areas of like where like we were talking about the verticality and horizontality are working at a at a at a an astonishing level that I mean she is taking art history further than it was going to go rather than interrupting it and just saying like you know let's critique the whole question of subjectivity she's like what how can I make it even more crucial you know so she's doing amazing work as an artist where I still think you could say the project isn't a critical project it's a it's a conservative project in the sense that we will keep what we had that was great and then see how far we can bring it is also part of why it's not a critical project is because it is so invested in feeling Jenny quilter has this great quote in her essay on poetry in the catalog and she's talking about Mitchell's early relationship to poetry in one quote from the book she says that Mitchell treated poetry as if it was philosophy so um to sort of take like I think that there's that like hyper analytical looking at feeling that she's doing which is kind of a philosophy but not in that like traditional Western sense that's a great segue to what we would do next which is that we will look at the paintings as if they are philosophy and try and break down like what are the actual arguments she's making through this set of marks through this set of color through these paintings themselves well we can do that but we have to also surpass the idea of that it's an argument because that's also like a tradition right right that's really surpassed here that this isn't an argument yeah that this is not this is that this is not a a you know an academic project right [Music] tree it has nothing to do with the real tree except to me it has to do with the real treat um I think to copy a real tree would be absolutely impossible I happen to love this painting and I thought it would be a really good painting to talk about what I call the competency like what do you need to know in order to look at an abstract painting I thought maybe I would give like a first blush of like what I do and see first thing I see in this picture is actually this sort of burnt reddish umbery marking because of the way it's positioned in the canvas in the top third and on a slight diagonal I feel that it is meant to indicate movement the next thing that happened to me when I saw the picture was the drips so the drips I have to say like I didn't realize how many of them there were at first like the drips caught me off guard they come up slower and when I began to see all of them two things happened almost it was like a Gestalt almost simultaneously in my brain I realized oh they Shimmer like rain as damn this painting is happening fast like they're like all of a sudden I feel the drips indicate to me there's a kind of velocity I'm curious if that way of thinking about how to enter the picture like how it resonates with you and how you come at it similarly or differently you go first well I mean this is how you do a credit in an art school you know you literally everybody says what they're seeing right that's what you do and then that with that material you can start having a language right um so I think everyone should do the reading you just did I would love that so I think for me um I don't read speed in the trips I read liquidity it's not how fast you paint it's how thin your paint is probably sometimes she throws paintings out because the drips are annoying her I don't think I go in Via individual marks like my my eye initially moves around pretty fast so I think I'm taking in the overall composition so my entry point would be blue cloud and then moving up to the orange and then brought back down by the orange and then sort of delineating maybe this foreground and then start like really looking hard and what is looking hard at me like what does that mean like getting up close to the painting okay and doing what looking at the situations in color like look at how many different Blues are in here right and then how many different colors does she have on the brush when she's making a mark and then start to notice like what she's laid down before she lays this down which is that pink and lilac and then I think I'm looking at the background layer then so once we get to this sort of like purple and I'm looking like at the I mean to me the harder you look then you start seeing like the complexity of how much she's laid down without letting you lose track of these relationships that she's making and then putting the drips on top of it I have a question does she get on a letter yes she is on the left so this she's on the ladder yeah the other thing that like we both agree is super important when looking at a Joan Mitchell is to like back up right because she herself backs up is always backing up yeah in a way that if we recall Pollock doesn't back up right like Pollock he's in it he's in it and he stays in it and the whole time and and it's on the floor right so there's not gonna there's not even really a backup and there's also a tremendous resistance there can be a drawing right when you step back talk about squinting I mean if you squinted like I could lay 25 very famous 19th century paintings over the composition of this painting right but the minute you get up close then of course it feels like improv but here it feels like almost out of Mystic like she's got a deep sense of Renaissance you know perspectival pictorial space I think it's also by this time she's older and she knows color ratios and like you were saying earlier she knows certain depths just in her and weights and weights right yeah um but I think it's very awkward and really weird and uncomfortable and ungainly I don't this painting yeah I don't think it's classical at all I feel like the whole painting is like the number five where you have one part second part third part fourth part and fifth part and so the painting is not at all composed as more of it's more deployed and it's like about ratios and zones of like deployment I guess I say it because I wonder about improv as a Counterpoint to the idea of composition right and I feel like there's a lot of that right and that's that's where radicality can occur where you're like okay you're not a radical with a sign you know saying [ __ ] the government right right but you're definitely messing around with what's supposed to be classical all and you're definitely proposing systems that right are counter-intuitive irrational and um that create difficulty that there's always a sense of balance I never feel torqued right she always wanted to keep the Plumb line of a dancer right in her right every composition it's very that's where it's both vertical and horizontal we've got them laid down now that she was a figure skater yeah yeah she's a she's an athlete she's an athlete yeah she understands how the body Moves In Space yeah right but that's I think part of what I'm calling Instinct and improvisation you know you get lucky you get lucky strokes and you get unlucky strokes and you have to paint the unlooking ones out looking at it right yeah like we that I mean to me that's the sort of Wonder of what part of it was an accident to your point and like how how does someone know how to do make this right and how do you know when to stop so can I ask you the plaintiff question then because I've been looking at the picture now for quite a while and had not registered the three different greens why does she use those three different colors but even more what I want to know is what do you think it means like if what we're talking about is how do we look at an abstract painting so here we are we've gotten to this moment was it me well that's what a poem is that's what language is that's why you would use you would you would struggle to find the exact right word you know when you first make your your your first draft and you're like I don't like the word indeterminacy I think I'll use Nuance you know and you know you gotta It's gotta look good so she's got this Emerald that's hidden in the hole that's popping up behind this dark earthy thing that relates to the brown almost right and then there's this very gentle kind of Mossy and I find extremely beautiful kind of Mark making at the bottom that is literally not impatient but not too big to have like left like drips and all kinds of pizzazz you know it doesn't have any um Pizzazz yeah it doesn't have sugar it's not showing but it's a very very beautiful little construction of of drawing I think of it as all drawing right because it's like it's how she gets space and so it just allows you to have this physical sense of pleasure where you can almost feel your body going behind the thing you know they always used to say like what's the picture plane right and you know at art school and the picture plane was described to me as like if you put us how a screen door is in a doorway it's a thing that both registers the doorway itself and it's it's dimensions and its reality and it's flatness but you can totally go go through it right foreign [Music] how would you start aiming with this picture where would you begin to look at it like where does my eye enter yeah wow the thing I love about this painting much more to my taste than the painting that we just talked about is that it has a couple of those um standout moments like the per particularly the purple verticals the weird emerald green you know leftover stuff and the dark purple dark orange weird dense blue crazy Marigold yellow it's like there's so much going on but it's all happening as if it's behind this sort of scrim that's getting denser as it goes to the right and so unlike the other one there's not a part to whole ratio to me you I sort of encounter it as like this absolute field there's tons of drips and there's this open space where it should be falling down into that space But I feel literally nothing but this up Uprising you know kind of sense of ascendant density this is formal work to me in the sense not in the sense of formalism or formal as opposed to casual but this is form-based Art where every kind of feeling and movement and a responsive kind of part of my body as it beholds it is responding not to narrative not to content per se that there's just this presence almost like exuding out of this object that has every kind of part of your emotional and intellectual experience as being a human being that's crammed into its own language and it's just literally it sounds so corny to say it but like the form is the content right and there is no other content except about the uh kind of a not just emotional aspect of being alive but the just the fullness of perception no it doesn't sound corny I actually agree with you like I don't have any of my like kind of landscape moment oh you don't happen here okay not at all in fact there's a metronome happening for me in this painting and it's like it happens down you know boom boom boom boom right and then it goes almost like there's a conductor like quality in front of an orchestra and here is like oh yeah sometimes the the tempo of your life is not um one two one two three it's all at once-ness that happens here right you know like I don't or excess oh well it's totally excessive and then it's excessiveness and it's metronomicness what I get to it for my corny moment is this is joy which could be the sunflower the hummingbird those ineffable moments that cannot be pinned down hmm do you have her I I see that I feel the landscape vibe in this one but yes I think that it feels like music as well she named it for music right but for improv improvisational music and she was interested more in like the colorist version of experimental music so less about that compositional structure and more about the Nuance of sound right and the sort of range of sounds and that feels fitting here and she was looking at a lot of lilacs at this time she notes that in her letters that um she was really sad um there were a lot of deaths happening in her life long-standing friends and her sister and this period she does this inward turn towards looking at her garden and she was planting a lot of lilacs all right so I wanted to end with this painting which when I first saw it gave me like really really major Saison Vibes it's not about it's not that version of Cezanne but it's more the bathers in the landscape version of Cezanne and there's a big space and there are two empty spaces there's the kind of trees and then a meadow and then the figures are forming like these parentheses around this empty space Oh yeah and I think it's partly because Cezanne knows the gig is up like they're like to put like nude figures in a landscape at the beginning of the 20th centuries it's like it doesn't make any it's it's nice it has ceased to make sense it cease to make sense and yet somehow he is still struggling to make a landscape that has lit like literal figure ground but he's also playing with a kind of emptiness in the middle and so what I see here yeah is a four-part painting that is fundamentally structured by the grammatical uh Mark of the parenthesis right right so purple pulls you into a pictorial depth the yellow makes you stay right on the surface of the picture and kind of careen's up and even though she's got that little margin on that one she doesn't have it there so to me it feels like the energy is actually leaving the painting which is not something I think she normally does even these Strokes are so much bigger and longer like yeah the short stroke there like this is very she has to move her whole body in order to get this kind of stroke and yet she's gotta like um hold that in and I see her as playing with like this tension between language painting as a language and Mark's behaving like marks and language too and then all of this just excess like that she's got more of something then she knows what to do with yeah totally I mean I think the best reading of this painting exactly like as you said is parenthetical right and that like it's therefore related to writing on a page and she's always done at this by this point so many of those uh those charcoal or pastel poem drawings where she does then feed the drawing paper into a tight old-fashioned typewriter and types it out right so she's a really aware of the typewriter font in relation to her drawing and I I just feel like this is a font almost right I think of it as that because because this is right after sister her sister died so one way maybe to read it in terms of like a feeling would be that she is putting parenthesis around something that she just is this chaotic for her and sad and I like the idea of her getting it she had such a hard time painting at this moment that she was just sort of getting it down you know and I think maybe you're right like there's more vulnerability in the way she's not uh she's not hiding the brush Strokes like we talk about how much she I mean what a wizard she is that sort of hiding uh the mark making where things start and end and here you just it's very it is really unusual I mean it literally looks like finger painting yeah exactly yes and so I think there's like this desperate quality of like of this kind of in the dark you know kind of going there's that way in which when we do talk about abstraction even in its most resolutely formal terms right I think we are often also talking about who the person is and what the picture is about in a different register well she's you know if you think of a sibling you think of sibling rivalry and she's sort of dealing with like the sibling rivalry that she has with the with the great painters that came before her right and she's sort of rejecting that um rivalry um and yet it's almost like by rejecting it you're sort of reinscribing it you know and so it's not like she's ignoring it there's always something that you know could partly explain like uh the the relevance of something you know when people like can see it again and I think like it's her sort of contingent relations that are kind of she fights she doesn't really accept I mean and in the painting itself right you know she brackets yeah but not but she doesn't reject right I mean there's a there's a mediation in all these um paintings I'm incredibly glad that both of you came today and that we were able to talk this long it's actually kind of rare I really really appreciate it thank you both now I'm nervous like we should I'm 99 sure we can always put a subtitle yeah I got it wrong there is one very similar yeah again [Music] I can't um quote thank God but it's in on that one letter he wrote about one of this so many beautiful letters where he says he gives gratitude to the um sunflower because it exists and I get gratitude to trees because they exist or two and that's all what my opinion is

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Length: 35min 28sec (2128 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023