NANCY SPERO: Even though I have over 500 images in my art at this point to choose from,
nevertheless I have what you call “stars.”
Like stars in Hollywood, they’re appearing and reappearing in different roles.
Certainly the ancient Egyptians, the musicians, are stars.
And I had made a design with many of these ancient Egyptian images
for this subway station here in New York City.
See a continuum, see a procession.
Now this procession is kind of formalized and dance-like.
Let’s say it could be for an opera.
After all, this is Lincoln Center.
I’d like to think that I have all layers of conceptual in the art,
that it...it’s easily read.
But on the other hand, I do hope that it’s more complicated
and that it’s not just one easy read and then that’s it.
See I have too much stuff.
This is from about....
This is a lot of years and many different people printing.
I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest.
I don’t know if it’s railing against the world or something, but I am protesting.
And as an artist, I…
I am privileged to create in things the way I think that they should be,
you know because that gets out my message to the world.
See I’m interested in messages.
And if people want to take something from it, I am thrilled of course.
The War Paintings are certainly a protest because it was done with indignation.
The U.S. had gotten involved in Vietnam and I remember during that time,
reading newspapers and I remember this terrible image of like this woman running from,
you know from her house that had been set afire by helicopters.
I thought of the victims in Vietnam
and what they would think of these war machines.
And that was working on me and then I started painting the War series.
But I felt then that the symbol of the Vietnam War was the helicopter
and that became my primary subject matter.
I think the political came by having a partnership with Leon Golub.
My husband, my partner really of over 51 years, he’s recently deceased.
Leon always had some sort of foot in the political in his art,
whether it was overt or not.
And I think that that aspect of his thinking influenced me a lot.
This back and forth of ideas and discussions,
I think that Leon’s painting is incredibly ugly,
which makes it incredibly beautiful.
But the main thing is the power and the action in it.
It was pretty damned difficult contending with someone who was so,
not only did he do big paintings and fantastic ones,
but you know what, he...he was really brilliant and that’s pretty hard.
I had a really hard time contending with such a person.
But I decided I, I just had to do my thing
and so I started doing very small work.
Very small work.
Figures that are sometimes an inch tall or even less.
Almost microscopic. And so in a way that’s a retort.
And also it’s a retort to the large works of the mostly male New York artists.
Leon of course always in my mind was an exception.
How totally sympathetic he was to my art.
Over the years the work has evolved from a more traditional format
of either the rectangle or the square or whatever in front of one’s eyes.
And if we move our eyes, it would be eventually nothing there but blank wall.
And so I have let it continue.
This is in Malmö, Sweden that I showed it, THE BLACK AND THE RED.
This was an enormous room.
In seeing this huge, huge gallery, I just kind of took a deep breath and I put…
I put the paper piece around in a single band.
I continued along printing on the wall like a trompe l’oeil
to reiterate the images in the printed piece.
And when the show was over, I could pick up and take THE BLACK AND THE RED,
that which was on paper, but I couldn’t take THE BLACK AND THE RED,
that had been printed on the wall.
It’s like theater, when the play is over, it’s finished,
it only stays in the memory of those who saw it and remember it.
SPERO: So we’ll have a few on the ground, yeah. Wow.
SAM KUNTZ: ...(OVERLAP) have them on the ground or not?
SPERO: No, no I thought we’d...maybe just a couple on the ground you know.
Yeah.
Ooh, that’s good.
Ooh, ooh, that’s really white.
Oops, oops, oops.
Yeah, yeah.
SPERO: I was invited to be in the Venice Biennale.
I thought, what in the devil am I going to do?
And I was thinking about one of the paintings I had done in the War series.
And in that I had done a maypole with bloody severed heads
hanging from gaily colored ribbons from the maypole.
And finally I thought to literally make a maypole.
So I just started working on the maypole with the help of Sam Kuntz and Marybeth Craig.
Marybeth’s in printing the images
and so Sam has been working her part of the magic in transforming these heads.
SAM: Nancy has such a facility to render an expressive, pained figure.
And what’s amazing to me is that if you look at these carefully,
they’re very small and the line has been drawn very quickly.
And this expression is articulated perfectly.
I mean and...and they’re all different. It’s not....
I mean it’s, it’s a kind of freedom that she has.
SAM: Some of these might even have been done as part of the War series
which would be 1966 through ’68.
She saved some of these heads that were never incorporated into any of the pieces.
And so now we’re blowing them up to make printing plates of polymers
so that we can print a back on aluminum on a large scale
and make these disembodied heads.
SPERO: But I feel that the images I did long ago which I can’t recoup.
You know I mean I cannot re-draw them, in the same way.
I’m on another ...I’m on another direction altogether.
But I thought that I couldn’t cannibalize what I have done forty years ago.
I have the idea of printing on the metal and then cutting it out.
So I’ve envisioned it then that it would be on this metal and that maybe,
I don’t know how we’re going to do this,
but have a few kind of together.
And so if they banged up against each other it would clank.
If one goes into jail for instance and hearing the clank of the door and there you are, you’re....
I mean it even leaves me breathless now,
thinking about that, the sound of it.
And there you are.
I mean, there one is in this jail you know
and one can’t get out until that guy with the keys or whatever left…
lets you out.
And, and, and so it is all of these things running through my mind
and what it means to be metal and severed heads.
And so it kind of got a feeling of…
of the resemblances of all this brutality.
Just trying to show the insanity, really the insanity of war.
I actually have cannibalized my own work to kind of liberate myself from
what I have done and what I really want to do in the future.
For Spain I had this idea of the repetition of that image that I so blatantly liberated,
I saved from the ancient Egyptian, uh, Mourning Women.
Then I thought that somehow to emphasize this…
this kind of prayerful, looking up as if looking up to heaven or god knows what,
I decided that it should be on the ground, like a real funeral procession.
In the gallery in New York I retitled and kind of redid it again,
but entitled it Cri du Coeur.
It was the first piece after Leon died.
Like a “cry of the heart,” but to me it must mean something kind of like intense emotion,
almost like praying, a cri du coeur you know,
plea-ing you know with heaven or…
or something like that I think by the gestures.
It’s almost...it’s always so strange,
it’s so empty and then you just put one…
these stupid little things in and…
and it’s too much then. This is good.
Maybe over near.....
Why do I do art?
What isn’t a reason for doing art?
I don’t know, it does need something.
That’s why it’s not finished, because I can’t think you know what…
what to do.
SAM: Maybe it needs something to throw it off balance.
SPERO: Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm.
SAM: Something awkward.
SPERO: Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm. I think I have to think about it in another time.