Richard Artschwager: The artist who doesn't fit any category | Documentary "Shut up and Look"

whenever anyone asks me what artists are important to me richard is the first person i mention you know you know after cezanne oh they say i mean alive oh richard he's an artist artist uh let's say he was a maverick i think that's a better way of putting it you know he's a guy who's not resisting anything he just does it his way he really is a magician eyeball to eyeball i think he's a kind of master of enigma i will say he's goddamn oblique for over four decades he's been very variously categorized as a pop artist a minimalist conceptualist artists knew about him and collectors knew about them and dealers knew about them but in a way it wasn't a big you know like warhol or roy lichtenstein school of if you're school of you're dead the only chance you have of not drowning is to be original he winds up being in a corner by himself which is pretty much where i expect he wants to be i don't know whether you can put him into a category what would you say [Music] that's fine no i just was hoping you would put one on the ceiling well but on the ceiling on not uh close to but on i stay off the walls all right can't have the floor nor the walls oh you've got the floor and then i'll take the ceilings sculptures too well right now my heart belongs to these to the flips see how that's gone a blip is like an easter egg the kind that has to be hunted for but found it will control the wall very much the way a dot on a piece of typing paper well that's good and right in there is perfect but it looks very good and when you get close to them it's a bit like looking into the void you don't know what you're looking at you could be looking at right into space into the black hole blips were born in california in the winter of 67-68 and then i started putting some up and then i just kept pulling them down until at one point i had just one and that was the moment of truth and then i cut one up on the ceiling and then out the door and then on the billboard made a hundred of these things and detroit i put the last one up in detroit and just as they uh like johnny appleseed he kind of enlisted me and a number of friends to go out at night and spray these blips around the city uh we would go up to a movie place on madison avenue and put one down there like that and get back in our car and i think we did one in one of the walkway as over the east river reaching down and so on we put them all over graffiti came out at the same time which was defacing and of course this is defacing also but it's this is sort of a middle class defacing you know when you see this one it reappears in the same spot where it disappeared kind of okay i have somebody else to to watch to make sure that nobody's watching and uh making a fuss and then off you go i i put a bunch of them around in kansas city missouri and even on the museum's two uh pillars which i don't think they appreciated that the story i like though is the director he might have been the assistant director the museum had a beautiful monet over his fireplace and had a drinks party or a dinner party or something richard and i think john toriano took the painting down we're able to take the monet off of the wall and spray one on the wall and then hang the monet back up so you can imagine as the owner that's a little bit on the upsetting side there were uh reported uh comments on the radio that some kind of uh black power mark might have been being made you know and did you take photographs no it wasn't about that documentation no no no no it's a trip's a trip and this was a an impeccable trip [Applause] i revel in the drawing because i've been at home with this kind of paper and this kind of drawing instrument which is charcoal uh it's it's what i started with it can be looked at for more than five seconds that's uh i think the object of artistic and making a picture is see how long you can get somebody to look at something [Music] i look i look for that which is underfoot he decided to simply depict or draw everything in a given room in his house the main elements and that became an endlessly generative series door window table basket mirror rogue so a long time ago at a concert in vienna the gal who was sitting next to me who i later married was my first wife was no longer with us uh she said shut up and listen and then since then i've adapted that to shut up and look but meant politely what it really means is i don't know what to say that's silly if i kept doing that for a long time it wouldn't bother you so much who said the longer you look at something any anything the longer you look at it the more interesting it gets paraphrase the longer you do something the more interesting it gets i don't know because his father was german and his mother was russian he could speak german because he was brought up in mexico he could speak spanish he was you know brought up with a kind of european approach towards education so therefore he knew a lot about philosophy and i think all of these interesting contrasts you know uh new mexico in the 40s can you imagine what it was like you know in las cruces it was really a small town it's like january it's 85 during the day 35 at night you go out to your car it's still there you go to the bank there's no line you know you come out you still have wheels you know nobody's dancing on your car new york was a little rougher in those days and don't step too far echoes of my mom's voice going back 70 years don't step too far [Music] and a canyon this is a real canyon it's just on a small scale his mother was a painter so she had richard looking and studying and his father was an amateur photographer so the baseline of a family that was astutely interested in looking at the world was one that he grew up in if you were an inch tall that would be a real adventure chugging your way through here and it would make more sense if that were let's say 50 60 feet down this way it's just it's more of a picture of something that it isn't his father was a botanist and his mother did a lot of the illustrations for his father she was a painter the tendrils do know right from left they know clockwise and counterclockwise going up it's clockwise and going up it's clockwise let's keep going on this we need one more it's like three witnesses in islam that's all you need and somebody's dead meat and it is consistent it's right-handed this thing is right-handed not left-handed right hand why you ready i majored in biology and in college and i could go to science or i could go to art my girlfriend at the time said you have the temperament of an artist you don't have the temperament of a scientist that wasn't quite true though i don't have the temperament of scientists but but i immediately said okay and then that night you know i made a decision it's like falling off a cliff and i didn't sleep well at night what the hell have i got myself into um richard always believed in having a job other than selling art he always has believed in a cottage industry richard worked as a baby photographer for a diaper service and so he was photographing thousands of infants on a regular basis you know that's a great truism with artists you never have a baby come to your opening because everyone's going to look at the baby right richard wittily realized that if he painted a baby people would look at his painting [Music] and he was instrumental in establishing workbench making custom-made furniture people don't believe me i actually have probably the only one existing actual functioning couch made by richard ashford if i flipped it over it's signed by richard he built me that couch when i moved to new york watch me get a hernia he says power to the people see that manufactured april fool's day 1971 and and this is ashwagar signed in arie galas this is how he survived a studio fire a disastrous workshop fire richard always says that it was disastrous for his business but very positive for his art because it was at that point that he stopped making furniture and turned his work to art he began making works that that smack of function although though they are without [Music] function [Music] okay uh mirror mirror table table i'm sitting on a part of this piece of art the table part of it which would throw its tableness into question [Music] my favorite in a way is that little early one from about 66 that's made out of formica that looks like a walker but of course it's set up to hit you right in the shin bone so it wouldn't function at all bridges works kind of hysterical to take a chair and fling it against the corner of a room and have it stick bought that piece for the whitney called the the organ of cause and effect that's from that happy period well it's just it's made out for micah it's really cheesy for micah and you're looking at a wall-mounted organ with pipes and it's quite funny and have it called the organ of cause and effect made me laugh and each chair in this edition is slightly different because of course each hide has a different aspect to it all of the other elements remain the same but what's interesting too is that it has a humorous twist to it because there's sort of like two kissing cheeks in theory i mean they're horrible even that one that he made the double loveseat with that pony skin it just doesn't really work unless they're two of you and you're both kind of fat it was just it was just the the model for it was just a set of blocks you know for children that milo's daughter used [Music] she came up with this i i really didn't want to hurt and with very little change very little change just scaled it up tell me about your american academy of arts and letters uh what got me in was for micah i just know that for mike okay i would think that would be the thing that would keep him out of it at the museum of contemporary art in chicago [Music] 69 there was something a show called art by telephone in which richard called me up and say steal a rug from victor cord so this is victor cord uh richard wearing his famous luffa leather coat and of course that's me with my cape what's really funny is that i could be able the way i was able to get into viktor's house is because victor's ex-wife was was richard at that point and she had the keys to his play so she mailed me the key i think when uh richard started to show with mary boone when mary boone had the big space on west broadway across from the old castelli building that that began to make richard's work much more part of the art world it was the show of our sculptures that were actually art crates that were intentionally made to be art it was amazing you went in and at first you thought is the show up and then you knew it was him you know what i mean richard often has seemed to me like a walking off-broadway show he's like a living samuel beckett and then from there your mind can wander to magellan going around the world in this thing that was about well maybe three times as big as this little room that we're in not much bigger than that and they had uh to use an extra sexist expression they had balls cojones and spanish and uh in german they don't seem to have a word for that and nothing comes to mind right away uh i'll have to think about that but uh i'll let you know next week if i'm around anybody who could do a lecture on his own work and start with alaska caves and work his way up to the 20th century it's got to be applauded it's like that that's uh thinking and pausing lucy everybody knows about lucy or no you don't know about lucy uh it was the old duvy gorge and these people or the proto people they're about three three feet tall and uh they're on their way to somewhere they're walking up the old dubai gorge and they get this they're walking up the older by gorge and this is i'm lucy now all we have is those footprints and the footprints are there preserved over thousands of years somehow and they go like this and then they actually do this and i don't know who named the owner of those footprints lucy but she would get a kick out of it if she knew one of the things i always appreciated about richard is his the way his mind would work and i have described it to people as similar to the way that the knight moves on the chess board all the other movements of all the other uh pieces on the chessboard are linear whereas the knight goes two up and two over right that's how his mind works so he'll you'll be talking about this and he'll jump over there and it'll be the perfect thing in the conversation you know and i i've i i see that quality in his mind also manifest in his work [Music] i had a black spot painted on the ceiling and i was stoned and i saw the black spot as three-dimensional so then i made it like a knock worse you know a three-dimensional thing [Music] that was the only time i had any practical you know art input from weed that i'm that i'm aware of maybe you could just tell us a little bit about uh well maybe you're schooling or training as an artist school of hard knocks [Music] i wasn't in chicago then but i got a phone call from a friend i said you better sit down i got some news for you there was an earlier painting of a rug which got lost in a fire and showa in chicago [Music] and i always wanted to do another another rug so i did [Music] that's unfortunate when you lose something in a fire i lost a whole bunch of stuff yeah the whole show the whole show yeah when it was done about 20 years ago or 20 or 30 years ago [Music] see if something lights a fire and maybe then from that you'll end up actually putting something on a wall somewhere and then it would be like take the next step what whatever that would lead to [Music] and you have to start with something and you could just be blindfolded or just just do something like that or you can just do that and uh just doing that is one of the starting points that i i used to the cold empty period [Music] i thought he was so interesting a man because he kept moving on to different things he if they would all be about the about perception but they would be differently executed and so i was always curious to see what his next show would be about and what he was trying to do [Music] i've been inclined to try out different things and the lord knows i've done that and period paragraph it's a fiber fiberboard that has a very rough surface so that the paint would drag and skip and early on that celatex was was manufactured as kind of sealing acoustic panel the first one was a cityscape and i developed this from an image that was in one of the newspapers and when advertising from about this size and i blew that up to a i think a 4x8 and in the transition it through into question the whole appetite of what is pretty or what is order his idea of the heroic was to take something like a newspaper image and make it bigger so that in effect the celetex was a way of expanding paper to make it seem like it got bigger i always thought that was really funny [Music] he already had a deep connection in my mind and his too i think pasura who really employed the tooth of the paper and his drawings so to take that to an extreme position which richard would of course want to do at least in an experimental way celetex offered you know surah times 10 000. i learned about art by studying the school of paris and starting with understanding uh no van gogh of course the impressionist great painting how did it come about that you can see brush strokes for one thing he animates the surface he really does a thing with black and white he gets the movement there so much and that's where i see this van gogh parallel that i'm sure nobody else probably sees but of movement within the surface of the painting in black and white the sailor one is sculpture rather than really just a painting almost like a window it was the graduating class of a training camp in somewhere in upstate new york these were people who were came from simple surroundings they knew that they had a good chance of getting killed but there's an attitude that goes with it part of it was counted shaft camaraderie and some of it was that's looking into an uncertain future maybe that one that i was working on before that was turning into well let's see where it goes he did a whole series of works about being you know across the table from the person you live with day in and day out about the confrontation of daily meals and the intimate life the men and women sitting at the table there's something very beckett-like about them there's a sense of waiting but it seems to be waiting for nothing you know just this sense of sort of suspended time of an impulse of the inability to communicate there's nothing animated or reassuring about these domestic scenes there's it has feeling of being trapped in a kind of architecture the faces that have just somehow devolved into a kind of pulp well his work is not exactly uh attractive i mean it's very nihilistic on all those grey paintings you know sort of depressing i can't say i like it i know that it's important you don't have to like something that you think is important since i am myself not an artist it takes me a while to adjust when the first time i see it i feel oh my god you changed the game and i don't like your new rhythm particularly or you know this is a new dance step that i can't follow and you shouldn't be doing it either and then a little bit of time elapses and it all looks like it should and i think eventually we catch up i actually think the work in many cases um isn't likable it wasn't intended to be likable it was intended to be experienced and that um i think what's interesting to me is that the early work now looks very beautiful in a way that i'm not sure richard intended it to be it's a very pregnant picture something is going to happen somebody's going to come in the door which actually makes it very unstable it was uh really i don't remember where i got that but a beautiful image and it was uh serene it was like uh it was really like a communion oh yeah that was being given to the dog yeah oh that's interesting sort of a saint francis of assisi well yeah but uh no she's not okay this painting has pretty much become one of the the poster painting of the show for the poster girls i guess and it's it's such a wonderful image and it's called three women but it's really one woman and three poses three dresses or a cinematic cinematic that's has happened on the on the runway or for whatever it's women do this nice thing and i love the way women move richard went to um university of wisconsin as a visiting artist and fell madly in love with kathy cord and brought her back to new york and so therefore he had to have a divorce and part of the settlement was a certain amount of money and he was going to make the money by auditioning this piece and he needed to do it fast so he enlisted a number of friends myself included and it's made out of solid uh white oak uh the sides are and the files are and then the top has is imitation white oak for mica it's a great piece you know and it reflects a lot of uh what richard was about at the time if if you pull the first drawer you get the outside illusion of white oak inside then the next drawer bottomless so you look right down to the floor the third one has a piece of glass in it which makes it into a window and you have the mirror which serves as a narcissus experience and then you have pla the signature [Music] the material is something i stepped on once there was a piece of it you know on this on the sidewalk and i looked at that and i was inspired by what goes on there which is i'm very given the drawing but i but i saw as a lot of lines that stuff which is truly repulsive because it looks like very thick pubic hair sort of as a symbol for all of the you know dust bunnies of the world [Music] i mean i look at some of that rubberized hair because i have a couple of them in the hallway at my house and they're you know moderately repulsive which i think is what he's seeking and why do you have them in the hallway because i like being moderately repulsed is that a drawing you said that your son uh originally yeah this was just from uh recollection it's the kind of climbing that an eight-year-old seven-year-old or even six-year-old will do for any kid when they really begin to have the mobility and uh and then the world gets interesting in a way because you got access [Music] had some interesting times here the third man hated by a thousand men desired by one woman joseph cotton in his most successful performance as an american caught in a whirlpool of continental intrigue [Music] what's that it's your old stomping ground yes yes it was liberation occupation which was then wartime starvation time and and not a whole lot of food as it happens with cities the cities suffer the most and i did go hunting somewhere out here in the suburbs i uh saw a couple of pheasant and i i snuck out with my over and under 20 gauge shotgun and flushed them the 2000 and i got one with one barrel and i got the other one with the other barrel which was uh not supposed to happen but uh i was quite thrilled and packed them up and and headed to vienna went to the bristol hotel and went to the kitchen and you know whoever is in charge there and i said look i got this i got these two birds uh i'll give you one of them and you do the other one up for me and you do it nice so i have this reach into uh earlier times and one of the nifty things about being my age is that you have a personal recollect you have a sense of history that you can taste because you've been there [Music] my job during the war is to get tactical information which i did from prisoners of war but mainly civilians including children and as i've said before none of this under due arrest it was just a conversation whatever and wanted to tell me and the only time i i can remember breaking that rule was uh i've been uh questioning this soldier and i i needed to trip him up and i said to him you know you're gay he said no wrong and then he proceeded to tell me all these things that the proof that he could possibly be gay and all these soldierly things that he had that he had done where he had been so some people like to talk [Music] now this is the pack is right this thick yeah so next one hmm where the bus stop is 41. does it look at all familiar i'll try them again uh actually uh does that mean he's pushing the door [Applause] this is another one of his likes which is yeah just goes on when somebody comes walking behind this is all commercial nobody is around but it's the house i remember the floor i feel like i'm a ghost the floor definitely yes this is definitely it and i would have been upstairs oh i'm very um advanced [Music] oh great okay the last time i was here was an american soldier oh my goodness and uh and we had occupied this house and i was quartered in this house i had i do remember the floor most definitely and the dining room i think was dance there's the kitchen and dining room is that correct well you know this is all been changed into apartments so yeah there is of course so it's i'm sure that that looks i understand this was 50 years ago that i was i think he saw you know power chaos destruction counter power counter chaos and counter destruction so having been in the battle the bulge must have been a bit of an eye-opener and then being later in counter-intelligence after the war or at the very end of the war must have been an eye-opener as well my knowledge of richard was that he was an artillery spotter that he would sneak into a german town at night and then he would climb into a church tower and i guess because he spoke fluent german that he would if somebody stopped him on the street i can only assume that he spoke german well enough to perhaps talk his way out of it and down here you have two hearts those are the two hearts and three-quarter time and there's a i think probably strauss or one of these somebody after strauss [Music] a real viennese [Music] richard and john toriano are rivaling for the number of wives that this is again sort of the way richard is i think in the art world where a lifestyle can include intensive promiscuity i mean i think that they probably had no more or less relationships than a lot of other people they've just gotten married maybe richard likes to get married a lot he looks good in a suit and he's a hell of a dancer there's a quality of fred astaire to richard [Music] he married uh molly and had two children with her and i married her first eventually she had an affair with him and they ran off he left kathy they ran off and then something happened between him and her and he ended up with anne it's a small world all right so what do we do now now are all the pieces in is this possible to stand up or not absolutely let's stand that thing up maybe a couple of centimeters it looks good together it's not mannerism it's not seen at an angle the thing wants to be seen straight on it wants to be running somewhere [Music] right into the shadow that's that's just another one centimeter at this point don't put it in the shadows no i think that's perfect this is good it's only the the hair a little bit of a distance and then it jumps right off the wall [Music] zeitgeist presented that's something that i thought would would fit in nicely with whatever it was adjacent and i thought the jump in color would not be disruptive but but would fit with what's there and this trial and error and looking at this verbalized and what goes good with that and i think i think i hit it just right looks like it's a work of a 35 year old artist isn't it totally fresh he's 88 years old and that is a challenge every day i wanted to get on going on some color i've done a lot of black and white and then with a little bit of color in it and i wanted something that was bored integrated well i just love the colors i he is just so much of a weird colorist i mean he's the colors are really off and yet they they work beautifully what makes archwagers work so absolutely avant-garde is the fact that they're just always so ahead of the curve i mean i just think that people cannot grasp the work initially there's something very strange and exotic about each painting in each sculpture when it's seen for the first time it's really they're stupendous the colors are wild wild it's so it's such a shock actually to see this much color absolutely i haven't seen you use the color like this in a long long long time i am blown away by the color is it you're using color it's so exciting it's fun isn't that wonderful after all those years of black and white anyone who's older than me is turning out this kind of work i want to see richard what's going on in the window well that's another encounter this is an encounter those would be the same to the same people or it could be thought of that way but they're uh are they outside the window or is that or are they watching is he watching a movie that had been done of of him and her or where do you paint uh upstate new york uh hudson new york which is definitely no move docks and where are you from where do you live god where do you live well i live right now i'd like to live right here [Laughter] and i don't i don't really relish the idea of going back can you believe that oh you're worried of wire are you this is this has been voiced at all i always thought you worked for the cia i've watched him change as we both have gotten older he is willing to look around into himself and he's willing to accommodate change which is probably the biggest charge in life now just recently which i think is really fascinating he's been primarily making drawings drawings that are rooted in his imagination he actually has gone back to the new mexican landscape [Music] mm-hmm [Music] oh [Music] foreign i think i have to get bigger 12 feet 16 feet i mean that's the wall back there and what i've done is to put a hammond organ there and as you see i'm not playing it and i'm going to have to i'm going to have to move it because it's it's it's wrecking the wall and probably the clock will have to go too so in other words i need to get serious and i better do that i have i think i have lots of time ahead of me but it's not unlimited and i better get into some big ones period paragraph so so [Music] so [Music] so foreign you

Channel: wocomoCULTURE

Views: 532,531

Keywords: Documentary, Richard Artschwager, Blps, pop art, artist, Conceptual Art, conceptualist, Minimalism, Richard Armstrong, Agnes Gund, Malcolm Morley, Joe Zucker, biography, life, USA, Vienna, Mexico, painter, sculptor

Id: jByNPGlGIAo

Length: 57min 7sec (3427 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021