Robert Mangold in "Balance" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

[ 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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