“Amy Sillman: To Abstract” | Art21 "Extended Play"

(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)