[ birds chirping ]
[ ROBERT MANGOLD ] The thing that began to fascinate me about painting was that
it didn’t deal with time in a sense that almost every other medium does.
You could take out a camera and take a picture of the painting and you’d have it all there.
You can’t do that with almost anything else.
If you come into a sculpture gallery, you can walk around the sculpture before you have to come to an opinion.
Painting doesn’t give you any of that time.
It plants itself in front of you and says, here I am, plunk.
You know you get in front of it, you look at it, you’ve seen it.
I live here in the country and I see wonderful sunlight and great
cloud formations and all kinds of stuff all the time.
Fields that are covered with a certain yellow flower at one moment. But I’m never aware of any of
that coming into my art, ever.
It may, but it doesn’t come in any direct way.
Rather than my influence coming from nature, it comes from culture:
the culture that comes from the history of art and the culture of our times.
I do a lot of works on paper building up to the idea of work on canvas.
I want to see how something’s going to look.
So if it presents me with a visual structure that’s a little off from what I’ve done in the past,
then that gets my curiosity more interested.
This is kind of like juggling an idea and going from, do you do one and then you go and you say,
"Okay that’s interesting but what if I did it this way or something?" So they’re really all tryouts.
In some cases, one idea follows another and in some cases, it doesn’t.
When I get to one that really interests me,
like this one I think really interested me and so I thought,
"Okay, I’m going to do a larger one of that." I like the way the lines hung from the diagonal.
So then I do it with colors so that I can get a sense of you know, what it,
what it looks...what it would look like if it were done that way.
I ended up not being so crazy about it in the end, because I didn’t like this big droopy curve.
As a young artist I was very connected to what was going on at the moment in New York.
The latter part of Abstract Expressionism.
Pop art, which had just arrived.
It was a time to start over, go back to the elements of painting.
It was all part of what later became minimalism.
It was all a kind of seemingly simple, single idea exposed in a raw way for people to experience.
And it was a refreshing and got rid of a lot of stuff that needed getting rid of so that you could begin, start things over.
Maybe all generations feel like they’re starting things over for themselves.
But this was really I think a period when it was certainly true.
I got this invitation to the Barnett Newman show in Philadelphia.
On the invitation card was this vertical piece of his. Almost all of my work had been horizontally, left to right reading art.
I suddenly thought it would be really interesting to work on a vertical painting
that you can’t read that way. It’s my thwarting the viewer kind of idea.
Me, the viewer. You can’t read a vertical painting from left to right.
So then how do you read it? Do you go up and down, or, I don’t know. It was just a kind of sense like,
it was something I wanted to deal with.
It’s not so important that I get the color just right here because almost anything would do so
that I could see the work. I can decide later to change the color.
If you think of the rings as being two connected columns,
I’m still working off that in a way. Only now I’ve brought them back into a completed form.
Two vertical lines going up. You have them bent into a wheel.
- Get a little fresh air. [ exhales sharply ]
Okay, come back and take a look.
There was a group of us who had studios near the Bowery.
Sylvia and I were in a building that Bob Ryman was in, Lucy Lippard. Sol LeWitt was around the corner.
Eva Hesse across the street.
So we would all visit each other’s studios.
There was a lot of action there. There were people doing videos. There were people who were performing dance,
making happenings of one kind or another. It was an incredible time in the visual art scene.
There was something exciting going on all the time. And it was contagious.
I loved being in New York City. And I loved the industrial quality of it,
I loved Lower Manhattan. There was just a quality of being there and the sounds.
I was very romantically in love with New York at that point.
- Yeah, I might have to make the line a little stronger.
Whether you ride a bus or a cab or subway or whatever you see everything in bits and pieces.
You see everything in parts.
You'd see buildings going by and you’d see gaps between buildings going by.
And I became very interested in this idea of
pieces of architecture that were both solid and that were atmospheric.
And the idea that a similar form one way could be a gap between a building and in another way, could be a building.
I like setting up problems for the viewer.
And that viewer isn’t someone detached from me, I’m the viewer, I’m the first viewer.
I like setting up problems like how do you visually deal with a ring
when what’s usually in the center of a painting is very important?
It was the idea of what was missing that’s in a lot of my work.
It keeps coming back in one form or another.
By picking away the center, that forces that viewing a step further.
It’s like the main course isn’t there and you’re having to deal with everything around what would normally be the main course.
- Yeah, that looks pretty good.
Yeah, the reflected light is pretty good here, I think it’s all right.
I was approached about doing something for the Buffalo courthouse.
The only reason I considered it was I come from that area.
Most of my childhood, we lived in relation to Erie Canal.
Instead of having a railroad, the barge canal with the tugboats was a romantic illusion I guess.
I lived so far in the country, my uncles were all farmers and I worked for them.
I was pushed into being artist by teachers. I liked to draw, so the idea of art school seemed fine.
At that point, my idea of art school was probably Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post covers.
I don’t think I knew that there were contemporary painters.
I went away to art school and I chose Cleveland. It seemed like a little art factory.
There were people making weaving and people making jewelry and doing paintings and illustration.
So I thought, "This looks good to me."
- So the entrance is over there, that’s the main entrance.
- Right, people, people come in this way and then they turn that way to go into the courthouse. Or they can come.....
[ MANGOLD ] The building wasn’t built yes. I just had plans in front of me.
It’s like working blind. For someone who likes to have more control over what he’s doing,
it’s like taking a chance on something. It’s tricky.
My idea was that if this
wall became a transition between this entryway and the courthouse itself,
which was very formidable and very big, if in fact this wall could become a really beautiful thing,
it would be a nice experience going from the one building to the other.
I’m not a person who does stained glass a lot.
It’s kind of tricky understanding that you’re dealing with light in a way that is totally dependent on the
world you’re situated in and the time of year and the time of day and so on.
It seemed like an area that would really work out for these tall
column ideas that I was working on at that time.
It was a continuation of what I was doing in my paintings and drawings of 2004 when this all began.
I wanted this to be both inside the pavilion and outside the pavilion, a kind
of humanist sense of color and light that would be...
beautiful, you know? It would be beautiful.
The show was composed of ring images and split ring images.
My titles are always redirected into the painting, like "Square Within A Circle."
The reason I don’t title them something more pointed is that I would rather leave that book open.
Majority of my paintings have dealt with the curving line, the elliptical line, the ovoid,
the circle in one way or another.
It’s the same elements juggled in a more complicated way.
It’s like the column paintings led to the ring paintings.
The ring paintings have kind of led me to this.
It’s a way of taking the idea another place and seeing what’ll happen.
And I’m a romantic artist. And I think romanticism by nature implies something
that takes it beyond a formal idea.
Sometimes I think, "Oh Bob, you’re just a damned formalist," but then there are other times when I argue with myself about it.
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