ART WRITING

INTERVIEWS WITH ARTISTS

Bernard Piffaretti with Raphael Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Rail, June, 2022

In early May, French painter Bernard Piffaretti was in New York for the opening of his exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Chelsea. On the morning of the opening, Bernard and I sat down at the gallery to talk about his work. In preparing for our meeting, it struck me that even though I have known Bernard for a long time—we met in Paris around 1990 through Shirley Jaffe—I knew very little about his early years, so that’s where we began. The interview was conducted in French, which I have translated. A few brief written passages, also originally in French, were added later. Only the last four-word sentence, which clearly evokes Kerouac but maybe also Canned Heat and Willie Nelson (I didn’t ask), was originally in English. One more linguistic note: the word “poncif,” which Piffaretti applies to one body of his works on paper, turns up in one of Baudelaire’s notebooks: “Créer un poncif, ‘c’est le genie. Je dois créer un poncif” (To create a poncif—that’s genius. I must create a poncif.). In his recent edition of Baudelaire’s nachlass (Charles Baudelaire, Late Fragments, Yale University Press, 2022), scholar and translator Richard Sieburth explains that “A poncif is a pouncing pattern (or stencil)—or, more broadly, any trite, worn-out, or stereotypical expression lacking originality.” For nearly forty years, now, Bernard Piffaretti’s self-generating paintings, always begun with a central dividing vertical line that gets flanked by two identical compositions (sometimes called “the Piffaretti System”), have been raising difficult questions about originality, yet originality itself is never lacking in his work, and neither is genie.

Glenn Ligon with Raphael Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Rail, November, 2021

Glenn Ligon’s practice is so multi-faceted that separate interviews could be devoted to his curating and to his art writing, as well as to the most obvious topic of his art-making. Recently, Ligon has also directly addressed online misuse of his work. While we touched on those topics, this conversation, which was conducted on Zoom the month before his November exhibition of new work at Hauser & Wirth in New York (this will be his first New York show with the gallery), focuses on his art, especially his recent mural-scaled paintings using the entire text of James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “A Stranger in the Village.” For much of 2021, anyone passing by the New Museum on the Bowery would have seen Ligon’s 2015 neon sculpture A Small Band on the museum’s façade. Originally created for the 2015 Venice Biennale, the work was re-installed on the New Museum as part of Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, an exhibition conceived by Okwui Enwezor. After Enwezor’s death in 2019, Ligon, calling on his own extensive curatorial experience, was among those who helped the museum to realize Enwezor’s powerful exhibition. “Blues blood bruise,” the three words that make up A Small Band, derive from a statement by Daniel Hamm, a Black New York City teenager who was arrested and brutally beaten by the police in 1964. As is true with all of Ligon’s work, this glowing memorial displays a concrete engagement with history, a sensitivity to the slipperiness of language and a presence that combines immediate visual impact with a slower unfolding of complex content. And, it almost goes without saying though it must always be said, a witnessing and critique of the racism that continues to plague our nation.

Guillermo Kuitca with Raphael Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Rail, May 2020

Although I was first introduced to Guillermo Kuitca in New York in the early 1990s by Lacanian Ink editor Josefina Ayerza, whose SoHo loft served as an unofficial salon where young artists from her native Argentina made contact with the New York art world, it was only in 2019 that I finally visited the artist at his Buenos Aires studio. The reason for my long-delayed visit was a monograph I was writing on his work for Lund Humphries’s Contemporary Painters Series. The conversation we initiated in Buenos Aires amid his recent “Family Idiot” paintings (shown in May–August, 2019 at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles) were picked up again during his visit to New York last fall when we sat down to talk at the Rail’s offices. As well as asking about his paintings, old and new, and the shifting reception of Latin American art in the US, I wanted to hear about Kuitca’s curatorial collaborations with the Cartier Foundation, the latest of which was a project for the Milano Triennale. (Originally scheduled to debut in April, the Triennale was postponed to an undecided future date when the COVID-19 pandemic began to devastate Italy.)

Charline von Heyl with Raphael Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Rail, November, 2018

Breaking expectations, Charline von Heyl demonstrates that you can be an enthusiastic scavenger of bygone eras in art while producing paintings that look, and are, completely contemporary. If she borrows motifs and moves from various long-unfashionable artists who were trying to forge a new language of painting amidst a ruined and traumatized Europe following the Second World War, it’s not at the service of pastiche or irony: her work is too personal, and too sensitive to the present moment, for such pursuits. Born in what was then West Germany in 1960, von Heyl profited from exposure to various factions and options in the intensely competitive and keenly self-critical German art scene of the 1980s and ’90s. She studied with and worked for Jörg Immendorf in Hamburg and Düsseldorf, entered the milieu of Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen in Cologne, and emerged there amid an international cohort of artists and critics that included Michael Krebber, Fareed Armaly, Cosima von Bonin, Andrea Fraser, and Isabelle Graw. This intellectually stimulating context was not very interested in the medium of painting. In the middle of the 1990s von Heyl moved to New York, a city that offered more scope to painters, and a less factional, ultimately more generous, art community. She now divides her time between New York and Marfa, Texas. The following conversation took place in her Brooklyn studio during a show of recent paintings at Petzel Gallery in New York and a few weeks before the opening of a traveling survey of her work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D. C. Taking its cue from the presence of Emily Dickinson in some of von Heyl’s recent canvases, the discussion dwelt almost as much on poetry as it did on painting.

Shirley Jaffe with Raphael Rubinstein

The Brooklyn Rail, April, 2010

Can the same painting give us difficulty and joie de vivre? If you have ever encountered a painting by Shirley Jaffe, you know the answer to this question. If you haven’t, then you may be skeptical that such a thing is possible. You will have also, alas, missed some recent opportunities to see paintings by Jaffe in New York.

David Reed

Revue d’art contemporain ETC inc, Number 8, Summer 1989… de l’avant-garde

Contrary to some popular notions, painting did not disappear in the 1970’s, nor did abstract painting disappear in the early 1980’s. If proof is required of these things, one need look no further than the work of David Reed. Born in California in 1946 and working in New York since the late 60’s, Reed belongs to a middle generation which, too young to be Postminimalists, too old to be Neo Expressionists, had to wait out the 1970’s, keeping alive the guttering flame of painting on a minimum of oxygen. In the present decade Reed’s work, along with others like Sean Scully and Ross Bleckner, has caught fire, both with itself and with an increasingly large public. His dramatic, physically unwieldy, visually liquifying canvases resemble no others, yet are coming to seem more and more central to their period. Informed by Reed’sfanatic attachment to Italian Baroque painting and his sense of connection to Abstract Expressionism, but also involved with postmodernist questions of representation and contradictory orders of discourse, his paintings refuse every pigeon-hole except the one reserved for good painting. At the end of this interview Reed says that artists of his generation are doing extraordinary work. I would suggest that his own work is the most extraordinary.