Fortune Cookies
“To me, there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”
- Woody Allen
Having worked with a number of the artists in The Working Title, Progress Report gave me this opportunity to reconsider those that I am familiar with and to learn about the ones that were new to me. Looking at this group, I have noticed one overarching aspect: the show intends to expand the connotations of “abstraction,” but it also highlights an overwhelming sense of creative freedom that has emerged over the past few years. For each of these individuals, the masterpiece is long dead and their work reflects the present, as ambiguous and conflicted as it is. They are more involved in making proposals than being didactic or providing definitive truths.
Today, exceptional artists are rarely self-satisfied and engaging work is essentially always in progress. As a result, I think there is a relaxed, but sophisticated spirit in many of the pieces in The Working Title. Some people have been operating outside of their comfort zones and others have tapped into their own inimitability. They can move freely between disciplines, from painting to sculpture to media, and explore idiosyncrasies. I have often been surprised when, revisiting a studio a year later, a previous body of work had been discarded, shelved or even painted over. In other cases, I’ve been impressed to find people delving further into a seemingly singular format and pushing through dead ends.
Essentially, the artists in The Working Title want to make something. Their presence is there in the choice of materials, textures, palette, concept, etc. Not unlike the majority of contemporary art, irony, pastiche, intuition, and reverence are all involved but they are present in indistinguishable patches and permutations. Influences creep in from all aspects of the modern life. Many of them teach, curate, and write, and their sources are innumerable. This affords the viewer the similar freedom of absorbing, debating, and digesting the reasons that people are making what they are making.
This is one reason that the artist’s voice should be taken into account today. Though their word doesn’t have to be the final one, it’s very important to hear what they say (or don’t say) about what they do. With this in mind, I asked the artists two questions each based on seven categories: peer influences, outside of the studio influences, the concept of ‘progress’, the idea of ‘originality’, objectness, decision-making, and materiality. The answers don’t necessarily embody what they are doing but are intended to open a casual conversation that gives a more complete picture.
Jon Lutz
Independent Curator
Inna Babaeva
More Than You Think, 2011
softwood lumber, pvc clear sheets, casters
64” x 90” x 40”
JL: What role, if any, do the non-studio activities/interests like writing, music, teaching, traveling have in what you make? How is this reflected in your work?
IB: More than anything, my work has been influenced by the necessity to compensate for lapses in my surroundings. Growing up in a society that praised uniformity and scorned luxurious possessions, I usually missed the experiences and objects that I longed for. Living there offered only a void of beauty and a monochromatic palette. Making art was the way to defy the imposed dullness. The wish to expand my environment and possessions still triggers the work I do. It helps me to rewrite boundaries by infusing light, color, and self-amusement into my sculptures.
JL: Can you describe your approach to materials and how it has evolved over the years?
IB: I once looked at materials as merely the means to an end. They only had to be functionally satisfying for what I wanted to produce. Now, the materials themselves give me guidance. I work with a range of industrial hardware – sheet metal, copper tubing, plexiglas, insulating foam, casters, hinges, and other objects that captivate me by their visual qualities and hidden personalities. These objects turn into subjects.
Pamela Jorden
Echo Music, 2010
oil on linen
44” x 60”
JL: How is your work influenced by art history? Is it more important for you to extend previous conversations or attempt to invent new ones?
PJ: My work is influenced by the continuum of my experience. I stand in front of a Philip Guston and consider a painting made at a particular moment, its context in the museum and what I know of the artist and his politics. At the same time, I revel in the visual, tactile, and visceral experience of looking at the painting. This experience connects the past with my present. I imagine myself involved in many conversations as my paintings run alongside the work that inspires me, tumbling around with expressionism and geometry, chasing off after what surprises and confounds me.
JL: In making work, to what degree is your decision making process intuitive vs. deliberate? Is there a competition and/or struggle between the two?
PJ: My paintings often begin with a simple idea or proposition. For example, what happens if diagonal lines are scraped into a washy gray ground? Painting for me is an experiment in which marks and color have weight and energy with the power to harmonize or disrupt. My process is one of creating problems as much as solving them. Intuitive vs. deliberate? These impulses are not at odds for me, they operate in tandem: action/reaction as the painting takes form.
Matthew Deleget
Shuffle (for Grandmaster Flash), 2011
acrylic, fluorescent and metallic acrylic on mdf
18” x 18”
JL: What role, if any, do the non-studio activities/interests like writing, music, teaching, traveling have in what you make? How is this reflected in your work?
MD: Non-studio activities are hugely important to me as an artist. One of the most influential activities I’ve been involved within recent years is MINUS SPACE. I co-founded the project with my wife, artist Rossana Martinez, back in 2003. MINUS SPACE is a platform for reductive art on the international level. We founded it originally to facilitate dialogue and community-building among our colleagues and other reductive artists in NYC. The project has grown over the years into something much bigger than we had originally envisioned. In turn, I now see MINUS SPACE as an extension of my studio practice. As an artist, I am first and foremost interested in ideas and how those ideas are subsequently expressed in concrete terms. Both my studio practice and the gallery enable me to work both intellectually and physically. Taken together they’ve created a highly positive feedback loop for me, the result of which has profoundly impacted my studio work. I am more informed now than ever before about other working artists’ concerns, which has really upped the ante in my own studio. I feel I am making more rigorous work as a result.
JL: How is your work influenced by art history? Is it more important for you to extend previous conversations or attempt to invent new ones?
MD: Art history plays a central role in my work. As a graduate student, I did simultaneous degrees in both painting and art history. I wrote my graduate thesis in art history, for instance, on the conceptual painter Alfred Jensen, who continues to be a critical influence in my studio practice. As an artist, I am first and foremost an historian of my own practice. I think it is critical to understand the conversation to-date in order to add anything of consequence to it. My work hinges on that understanding. I often sample from my precedents in recent art history, sometimes paying homage to them, but more commonly subverting them.