(gentle music)
(bright music)
- Not knowing is a state that I think abstraction
is really, really important for addressing.
Because it's not an illustration, it's not a representation,
it's an experience of understanding
certain kinds of physical
and formal relations: space, color, time, weight,
heaviness, lightness, ugliness, beauty.
To mark, to stroke, to struggle, to contradict,
to offset, to whittle, to abstract.
Part of doing improvisational work is pitting yourself
against the materials and the resistance that they offer,
and trying to figure out how to make something happen
where you're both working with the materials
and also very much working against them
and questioning them.
I only use scrapers, paper towels, and sort of sticks.
And occasionally I use foam brushes and I have some brushes,
but like I don't have very many
because I don't really use them.
So it's kind of about finding a way
to get some stuff on
and then finding any possible scraper, wiper,
rag, trowel, et cetera to get it out of there.
So removal is a big part of it.
So I need a sink in my studio.
(gentle music)
You're editing with your body, you're making these decisions
to like spill something out, cut it off, put it over there,
move it around, to drag, to pull, to scumble,
to cut, to like try to smear it over it.
And the next thing depends on the thing before it.
You're dealing with mistakes all the time
and you're dealing with regret
and like thinking, oh God no, let me do that again.
So on the big level and on the little level
and on every level in between,
the slippage between control
and finesse and form and wanting it to be good
and constantly adjusting things
and trying to make it better.
And between just like first thought, best thought,
like let it all hang out, like do a thing,
see what you're surprised by.
That tension is the tension of me making my work.
There's this paradox at the heart
of trying to say what something means
that you need the person's personal story
and at the same time you can't rely on it.
(upbeat music)
It was in the mid to the late '70s,
painting was very much under assault or critique.
And the only argument for painting was, I like to do it.
And that didn't seem like a very compelling argument.
I had friends who were doing experimental music
and experimental poetry and experimental film,
and I noticed that the idea of an improvisational music,
sound, video type of thing could be applied to painting.
The work I was interested in was playing with art history
and playing with form or shape or color or process.
It might have had the same spirit
that the gestural painters in the '50s had,
but somehow by the time
those kinds of paintings became commodities,
the sort of spirit of it was gone.
And what was left was the sort of heroics.
And so it was kind of an anti heroic position
that had to be like remade in painting.
So I guess I'm rebuilding something from a much more scrappy
and casual and weird position,
and also at the same time pulled in a different
set of references and I had a different spirit.
(bright music)
It's not perfect, it shows its scrape downs
and it shows its revision and it shows its finickiness,
but it also shows its openness.
And this maybe vain attempt
to like push further or dig deeper.
Do you want me to turn the lights off so it's less yellow?
- [Cinematographer] Sure.
- I can flip through these.
There's millions of drawings.
I mean I really make a lot of drawings.
I mean I have stacks and stacks of drawings,
boxes and boxes and boxes of drawings.
I don't know if I have a feeling about them
until they become sequenced.
And then there's a point of view
that allows that particular edit.
(bright music)
I make these two kind of things.
I make these paintings that are a million layers
that you can only see the top of.
And then I make these long horizontal drawing
and printmaking sequences
and painting sequences to, in some way,
inveigle the viewer into a situation of time.
I always take photographs in my studio,
like with my phone
and just see myself at night
like what the sort of progression or animation is.
And in this case,
I wanted to unpack and excavate
actually the whole history of one painting.
So I took all the photographs that I could find
of the history of that painting
and then we printed them on plates
and sort of invented a stand for them to be mounted on
so that a person could walk across the space.
And you see how it comes to be
and you see how it gets ruined
and you see how it turns around and you see how it changes
and you see that the image
and the format, none of it is stable.
All of it is kind of in flux.
(gentle music)
I used to always ask my students, what is your unit?
There's an atom, there's an inch, there's an hour,
there's a day, there's a hand, there's a year.
What is your base unit?
Because I'm assuming that everybody's is totally different.
And they would give me these beautiful answers
that were super concise,
like one person would just say "it's one hour."
Whatever they said, I would take it seriously.
And I thought like,
how do you build a language out of those units?
Because everyone's kind of making up
a grammar for their own work.
I don't know.
I can't even answer the question.
I think my unit is trouble.
You go to trouble, then you get out of trouble,
then you get back in trouble.
So trouble or not trouble,
getting to it and getting away from it
and getting from one trouble to the other trouble
is the unit.
I'm always pretty much looking for something
that contradicts the layer that came before,
creating a certain kind of tension
and creating something that feels like
it sort of holds together
and it's sort of falling apart at the same time
and creating something that looks like it's built
like a drawing, but it holds together as a painting.
But you're not sure why.
It's a very elusive position
that takes a lot of time to find.
And then you can't name it.
I've done a lot of writing,
but this is a non-linguistic activity that,
on some level, is foiled by language.
So to answer these questions is an impossibility.
(gentle music continues)