Diana Al-Hadid Plays the Classics | ART21 "New York Close Up"

[audio book narration playing from stereo
system]

--"The artist Mihailov was, as always, at
work when the cards of Count Vronsky and Golenishtchev

were brought to him."

[New York Close Up]

--"In the morning he had been working in his
studio at his big picture."

--"Never did he work with such fervour and
success as when things went ill with him."

[Diana Al-Hadid, Artist]

--"He was making a sketch for the figure of
a man in a violent rage."

--"A sketch had been made before, but he was
dissatisfied with it."

I think I have to start here.

--"The paper with the discarded sketch on
it was found,"

["Diana Al-Hadid Plays the Classics"]

--"But it was dirty, and spotted with candle-grease."

--"Still, he took the sketch, laid it on his
table, and, moving a little away,

screwing up his eyes, he fell to gazing at it."

--"All at once he smiled and gesticulated
gleefully."

I love storytelling,

and I love stories,

and I love novels and characters.

But, there's a part of me that resists that
kind of specificity.

I like to hold back and be more ambiguous.

I think all of my work is kind of like how
I draw.

It's just a lot of build up,

a lot of little parts,

a lot of construction--

taking away and cutting and adding and pasting

and bending an morphing something.

I'm very physical with my work.

I think it's mostly driven by temperament.

My work isn't really one decision that's stable;

it's a lot of interwoven and fluctuating decisions.

And that's why it permits me a different kind
of brain activity--

like, I can listen to Anna Karenina and not
be disrupted.

[audio book continues]

--"Chapter 12."

--"He had positively forgotten that picture
he had painted three years ago."

--"He had forgotten all the agonies and the
ecstasies he had lived through with that picture"

--"when for several months it had been the
one thought haunting him day and night."

--"He had forgotten, as he always forgot,
the pictures he had finished."

So much of the visual vocabulary of the sculptures

came from wanting to dissolve the work--

dissolve as much mass as I could from the
object.

These drips, right?

These drips that are kind of suspended in
isolation.

When I realized that I had this capacity to
make this surface liquid--

or to make it kind of seem like it's still
moving--

then I thought, "Whoa, that's an opportunity

to really think about image building with this material."

[audio book continues]

--"The figure from a lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such that it could never be changed."

--"That figure lived, and was clearly and
unmistakably defined."

With every project, I'm kind of asking,

"How can I re-think this process that I've
become familiar with?"

So, when the images all kind of, let's say,
glued up together--

when it's all set and ready and dry and we
can take it off,

we peel it off the wall and it pops off.

Those become dimensional things.

It's actually such a textured process.

I don't really know how people read it; but, it's not an image anymore, it's an object.

[audio book continues]

--"He did not believe that his picture was
better than all the pictures of Raphael,"

--"but he knew that what he tried to convey
in that picture,"

--"no one ever had conveyed."

--"But other people’s criticisms, whatever they might be, had yet immense consequence in his eyes."

Sometimes when people know the source material,
they're like,

"Ah, that's what that means!"

Or, "That must have this, kind of, you know,
'A-plus-B-equals' significance."

And I want to slow down the interpretation
a little bit.

Not having grown up in a Christian home,

I don't always know the, kind of, biblical story
about those paintings.

It feels like they're so generous,

and so they allow anyone to take from them.

It's part of my history--

it's part of everyone's history.

[OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles]

[Diana Al-Hadid: "Ground and Figures"]

I kind of just steal the compositions--

like, the bare, skeletal, faintest...

but I obliterate everything else.

The details are gone.

Nothing is stable.

Everything is moving and dripping and messy.