Finding the Right Line

A Conversation with Jenny Phillips

Jenny Phillips is showing her encaustic artwork at the Inclusions Gallery in Bernal Heights from July 8-August 14. Although her pieces retain traces of her background in graphic design, they reveal multiple sensibilities at play.

Q: When did you start making art?

Phillips: Before high school. I have been painting for a very long time. Some of the work was figurative and some was spare and abstract—I haven’t really developed much, have I? In college I combined photography and printmaking, but it wasn’t terribly interesting. I also did a lot of silk screening, which led me to graphic design and away from fine art. Recently, I’ve been working with issues of scale, changing the scale of details, most often those found in nature.

Q: Where are you showing your work?

Phillips: At a small gallery in Bernal Heights called Inclusions. I had been in a group show there and they asked me to do a solo show. But I can’t produce a lot of work with the graphic design business and family obligations, so I suggested a joint show with another encaustic artist.

Q: What’s your goal with this work? Why do you do it?

Phillips: My goal? To do more and more art. I do it for the pure joy. It’s embarrassing to talk about it. When I am into it I just love the process of creating. I try to get everything to its most simple state, and derive energy from the work’s silence.

Q: Which artists inspire you?

Phillips: I feel connected to Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, but I don’t have a complex theory about their work. I remember walking into a Ryman exhibition and hearing the ocean. When art moves you, several senses come into play.

I think Martin’s work is akin to textile in its simplicity, which I love. Yet, it’s also mysterious. The historical context of when she was working is inspiring; at that time, abstract expressionists like Motherwell were pursuing just the opposite. I think she was brave.

I also really love Ben Nicholson.

Q: But didn’t he do a lot of figurative work?

Phillips: He did a lot of pieces that are just linework. It is simple, but he layers. I think he influences me.

I work a lot on paper. There is no conscious intention when I am making a piece. I mostly want to feel that line, and have the confidence that I know where that line should go. When I don’t sense that, the piece doesn’t work out well. But when it comes together, I feel it inside. That’s where the confidence comes from.

Q: How did you start working in encaustic?

Phillips: I attended a workshop at class at the Kala Institute in Berkeley. Besides the luminosity, I love the sensuous, tactile nature of the material, and the way it smells. I used to worry about all those odors but then I just opened the windows and told the family to get used to it! Every sense is going when I am working in this medium.

Q: Is it hard to work with?

Phillips: It isn’t hard, but it depends on what you are trying to do with it. You have to understand what it can and cannot do. I am impatient so I don’t like the heat gun, and will use the torch instead. Like when I am cooking dinner, if it says put the oven on 150, I’ll put it on 450. The time thing gets in my way.

I like the material’s inconsistency but I don’t like the bubbles which develop if you rush encaustic. This piece in front of me isn’t working; I have put on 40 layers because I can’t get what I want.

I am also trying a more sculptural piece that has a lot of texture, to get away from this smooth surface. I built up this piece, white on white, and just lines. I want it to be very tactile and emotive. But I am not there yet.

In all my encaustic work, I really care that the surface feels good.

Line Weave 16 x 20

Works on Paper

Q: Did you get going right after the workshop?

Phillips: There was a studio in Santa Cruz where you could do this kind of work, but that was too far to travel, so I started working in my office. That was not OK. You need to stay super clean for graphic design, and I was getting wax on my comps and my tools and everything was getting smudged. I had to separate the two kinds of work. The studio space just got finished; I am taking over the family room!

Q: Did you practice art while you were a graphic designer?

Phillips: Whenever I finished a job I would take a few months off and take another art class. Every break from graphic work meant time for painting.

Q: So what drew you to graphic design in the first place?

Phillips: When I graduated from college I came home and my mother asked me what I wanted to do. The only thing I liked was making stuff, and I didn’t think I had a natural talent but I said, “graphic design.” I looked in the Times and there was an ad for an entry level graphic designer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She said, “You don’t know a thing, you’ll be perfect.”

I had no portfolio just silkscreen posters from college and it wasn’t a great interview. Then the woman asked me my birthday. When I said, “December 18th,” she said, “Oh you’re a Sagittarius. That’s perfect.” And so I was hired.

She showed me how to use an X-acto blade. I thought you were supposed to change it every time you used it—it was just laughable! But it worked. The Brooklyn Academy of Music was the best. We got free tickets to every show in the city and I went to theater every night.

Q: What drives your minimalist approach in your work?

Phillips: I am really attracted to the spare. I am obsessed with stones. I collect them at the beach. I am just trying to find the simplicity and complexity of this one rock in this painting. But again, I haven’t quite gotten it yet.

I am not a draftsperson, and cannot draw well. My whole life I wanted to be an artist and wanted to draw well. I have taken more life drawing classes than you can imagine. I’ve made a little progress, but I never feel exhilarated the way I do when I am painting or using encaustic.

Chalk Spine 12 x 24

Wave (16 x 20 each)

White Lines on Black 6 x 12

Q: Joan Mitchell didn’t draw well either. It’s not necessary. What about color?

Phillips: Right now I am working in greys, whites, blacks, and browns. But I work with eight shades of white. Every time I try to use color I don’t like it. I have some pieces with dark saturated color, but that’s not where I am going right now so I have put them aside. Eventually, something will happen and they will be useful.

Q: Is your minimal palette a response to all the color in graphic design?

Phillips: Maybe. In one piece I thought one red line would bring it all together but oh my God, it didn’t work at all. I do use color in the paper pieces, but not in the paintings.

Q: Can you describe your process more?

Phillips: I use an encaustic base with many different whites and some yellow. I used to use string, but I kept burning it. I use X-acto blades to carve into the surface, and make many of my lines with an X-acto blade. I love my X-acto blades. I have all these blades that have been worn differently and which make different kinds of grooves. I cut the line, then I cover the board with oil paint and wipe off the excess. It’s like printing. I brush on some more wax and then torch it. After each layer you have to fuse the wax. I also work with India ink, and graphite.

Right now I am working on this really simple piece and I cannot get it right. One day this week I worked for five continuous hours on this one concept: A white line. But I couldn’t get what is in my head. So I melt the whole thing down and start over. The thing is, my pieces are extremely simple and when I start to overwork them they start to fall apart. If the piece is going to happen, it happens quickly.

Q: What do your kids think?

Phillips: Well, they lost their playroom. My youngest one says, “Don’t you think you can get away from scribble scrabble? I can do a better job!” But my son connects with the sensibility and he hangs out with me and does some work. He is totally into it and has good suggestions. Quite often he will say, "When I grow up I want to be an artist," and my response is always, "me too."

Jenny and Fin at the beach.

Looking for Light in the Darkness

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter
by Patricia Albers

I’ve been on a bit of Joan Mitchell bender. Recently I finished the new biography Lady Painter by Patricia Albers. Also saw the documentary from 1993, Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter, reread the catalog from the 2002 Whitney retrospective, and trawled the Cheim & Read Gallery website.

The lady took up all the oxygen in a room. In art and apparently in person. If there was another star in her presence, it was a celestial explosion. When I saw her work at the Whitney several years ago, it was breathtaking. Really, she just took your breath away.

At the Whitney, each gallery could only handle a few paintings. If you are serious about looking, they command all your attention. There were the usual comments overheard: “My five year old could do that….” But these are always the viewers in the fast lane. Mitchell, like most abstract painters, gives more the longer you stay with the canvas. Yet I rarely found myself contemplative. I felt anxious and exhilarated at the same time. Jumpy like a kid, zinging back and forth between galleries.

UNTITLED
1991
Pastel on paper

UNTITLED
1980
Oil on canvas

Childhood has everything to do with Joan Mitchell. This is what I took away from the biography. Most of her early years, after her unhappy childhood, read like one long bar brawl. Her later years were filled with trying to cope with side effects of the early years. The author recounts that Mitchell’s longtime lover (and abuser), the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, said that the artist “destroyed everything that came near her.”

The biography is highly detailed but detached. A rape while visiting a friend in a mental hospital and beatings by her partners are treated as everyday kinds of occurrences, not as the aberrations they were. What is the link between the great beauty of the work and the violence of her life? If the author were more in the middle of the turbulence, it might have just read like a litany of broken plates and black eyes. After 400-plus pages, I still didn’t really understand the effect of alcohol or violence on the work. Given the seriousness of her alcoholism, it’s amazing she lived until the age of 66.

As a longtime patient of psychoanalysis, she wasn’t exactly a poster child for the effectiveness of treatment. Following her move to France, she found an analyst in Paris and began to see herself as “little Joan” and “big Joan.” This is how she explains her personality in the most moving scene of the documentary.

Yet she was a consummate editor. She knew how much paint was enough and which color could hide behind and then dance in front of another. Often she painted indoors at night, and yet she created light.

SUNFLOWERS
1990-1
Oil on canvas diptych

YVES
1991
Oil on canvas

RIVER
1989
Oil on canvas diptych

Lady Painter is a fine biography, but Mitchell was not terribly forthcoming about what went on in her work. Perhaps the most interesting biographical information related to the art comes early in the book, when we learn that Mitchell experienced what is called color-graphemic synesthesia, a condition in which letters or numbers are seen as colored. Albers suggests that Mitchell also had personality-color synesthesia, where people feel like colors. She also had something called eidetic memory. Albers has written, “She did not so much remember as relive the past.” She did not paint outdoors but memorized so intently the places and emotions of her life that she could recall them as a kind of catalog. According to Albers, Mitchell was unaware of these special perceptions as a named condition. These ways of perceiving may have been both a freeing agent and a burden.

In Mitchell’s work, a fearlessness in color and form like those found in the work of the best abstract expressionists combines with the near abstraction of late Monet. It wasn’t either/or. She painted barely perceptible forms, like Monet did at the end of his life, spun them apart, and caught them, for a brilliant moment, in the middle and latter half of the 20th century.

UNTITLED
1991
Pastel on paper

All paintings © Estate of Joan Mitchell
Courtesy Joan Mitchell Foundation and Cheim & Read, New York

For more information on Joan Mitchell:

Please check out the Cheim & Read Gallery website:
www.cheimread.com

A few paintings are reproduced in the biography, but I would recommend acquiring a copy of The Paintings of Joan Mitchell to provide a visual accompaniment. The 1993 documentary Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter can be purchased from Amazon. You can see her at her sly seductive and cranky crude best. There is also a lengthy interview transcript from the Smithsonian available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-joan-mitchell-12183.

A more esoteric connection might be found in Mark Doty’s poem “To Joan Mitchell,” which you can find in his volume Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, or you can listen to the poet read it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCefcM289iY.

Squeak Carnwath

Squeak Carnwath
© 2009 Peg Skorpinski

I met Squeak Carnwath in the early 1980’s through her husband, architect Gary Knecht, who belonged to the same preservation group I was in. Gary and Squeak lived in Alameda in a rambling Victorian full of Squeak’s work. The confusion was wonderful.

Over the years, I’ve followed Squeak’s work at John Berggruen and elsewhere. Sometime in the ‘90s, I bought one of the early prints she made at Paulson Press, entitled “Pysch 101.” The Dick & Jane characters spoke to me from childhood.

In April 2011, I interviewed Squeak at Paulson Bott Press as she was finishing four new prints. Our conversation turned to painting and teaching. Although her loyal dog, Vermeer, kept vying for attention, Squeak had no trouble concentrating on the topic at hand.

Interviewer: Do you paint every day?

Carnwath: Yes.

Interviewer: Even while you travel?

Carnwath: Well, it depends. I had a little travel book that I filled while on a three week train trip in Russia. I'll do it on a long trip like that, but if it's a short trip, no.

Interviewer: Do you think you'll ever go back to ceramics?

Carnwath: No, not at all. I don't want to make sculpture. I love sculpture but it’s too real, it’s something you can bump into. I'm on a mission to prove that painting is the queen of the arts.

Interviewer: What do you mean?

Carnwath: I think that painting is a philosophical enterprise in that people believe that what they’re seeing is a real thing, even if it's abstract. In other words, even though it’s just a thin film of paint on a flat surface, people believe in a painting’s reality. Even a Rembrandt portrait is on a flat surface.

Painting is not 3D, like sculpture. You can't walk into it, you can't pick it up. You have to make that leap that what's happening on the surface holds some kind of reality you're willing to believe in.

Ideas, 2009
Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel

Sampler, 2010
Oil and alkyd on canvas

Like Science, 2009
Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel

Interviewer: But I would say your painting is questioning reality all the time.

Carnwath: It’s questioning a different reality, though, like the reality of how we navigate the world. Is that real, or is that all in our imagination? Maybe it’s more of a Buddhist line of questioning: Are we actually occupying a body, or are we all an illusion?

To me, painting is about this line of questioning, rather than replication or illustration.

Interviewer: Your paintings contain a luminescence.

Carnwath: Yes. I strive for that. It’s one thing you can't get with printmaking, where you’re dealing with the available light of the paper, which is already there. It’s what lends the print luminosity. But prints are always going to be flatter, and be more graphic—they have lines, and drawing.

They will never be like a painting. In a painting, there's no available light. You have to build light. You can’t do that in printmaking, unless you do a monoprint, but then you're basically doing a painting.

Marked, 2010
Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel

Painting Is, 2010
Oil and alkyd on canvas

Interviewer: Do you find that frustrating?

Carnwath: Just different. And it proves my point that painting is the queen of the arts.

Interviewer: What would be the king of the arts?

Carnwath: There is no king. It's only a matriarchy. There's no prince, either.

Interviewer: There are prints, but no prince!

Carnwath: That's right.

Interviewer: You retired from teaching, correct?

Carnwath: Yes, but I'm volunteer teaching a painting class at Berkeley in the fall. I also work with some grad students. I told the department I would volunteer if they needed me to because the department has no money. They can use that money to do something else if they get me for free.

Interviewer: What drew you to teaching for so long?

Carnwath: I needed to make a living while being able to do what I wanted in the studio. Teaching allowed that. And it helped me develop better social skills. I'm basically really shy, and teaching has helped me become less shy and introverted.

Also, I wanted to teach people things that I was never taught. When I was starting, I always heard people talk about how painting is all about light, but nobody really described what that meant, in terms of how you did it, or its philosophical value. I wanted to be able to impart valuable knowledge that I have learned along the way. I would do painting demonstrations and assign projects based on techniques used by painters like Rembrandt, and then combine techniques in the assignments.

I also wanted to encourage people to be more brave so that they could do what they wanted to do, whether as an artist or as something else.

Interviewer: Have students changed over the years?

Carnwath: Students are less creative than when I started teaching.

Interviewer: Why do you think that is?

Carnwath: Because their parents are helicopter parents. Kids haven't wandered around and gotten lost because everybody is worried about them getting kidnapped. And also they are more risk averse. They are afraid to fail or make mistakes. Art making is all about making mistakes to come to something successful.

Interviewer: And the technology they grow up with?

Carnwath: They don't learn how to do things. Or they learn how to do things so well that they just copy, and want people to like what they do. It's not interesting.

Interviewer: They want approval?

Carnwath: Approval is really important to them. If they show a skill set, even though it's not serving them, they want to hold on to that skill set instead of realizing that it’s just a means to an end, a way to further enhance or develop a conceptual idea.

A Little Crazy, 2010
Graphite, pastel on paper

Face Recognition, 2010
Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel

Interviewer: Do you talk to them about your personal stories?

Carnwath: Well, I sort of feel like my life is everybody's life, and my particular stuff is not that different from how everybody else feels. My story is the way for the viewer to access their own story.

Interviewer: So when we see things in your work like a map of the heavens or quarters or Dick and Jane…

Carnwath: Yes. It transports you to something in your own past or narrative. One of the great things about artwork is that it’s personal. Even if somebody's doing still lifes, the way they touch something is unique.

But you have to be careful because some of it's tricky. For example—and I'm going to get in trouble for this—I can't stand the touch of Gerhard Richter's work. I think it's cruel, the way that he makes the felt surface, it is the way he handles the paint, the way he makes his art. To me the feeling of his paintings is mean spirited. To me his paintings lack empathy.

Interviewer: As if the human being wasn't there?

Carnwath: No. I think it's a cruel human being that is there.

Interviewer: That’s interesting because I’ve found that his dexterity leaves me cold.

Carnwath: Me too. I went and saw his work twice in New York, and two, maybe three times in San Francisco—and really felt like it was oppressive. It just creeped me out.

Interviewer: There was a kind of Aryan perfection.

Carnwath: Yeah. I really hated it. There are things I love about his work, for instance, in the Baader-Meinhof series. There’s something about the struggle of the people involved in that work. And the beautiful tender paintings of the typewriter or the roll of toilet paper.

Interviewer: There's ambiguity.

Carnwath: Yes, there's a little ambiguity.

Interviewer: But there's not much ambiguity in his other work?

Carnwath: Take, for instance, the Speck murders. I thought it was really, really repellant to me the way he was using something to manipulate the viewer in some way while blaspheming these dead nurses. It pissed me off. I'm one of the few people who don’t like him; most everybody I know thinks he's great.

Interviewer: Well, I came away from that show just annoyed, but I didn't know why.

Carnwath: You should pay attention to that.

Interviewer: Yeah. Did you see the small Eva Hesse show at the Berkeley Art Museum?

Carnwath: I love her work. It's fabulous, it’s so intuitive. It tries to find the name in the object or the heart in the object or whatever you want to call it. She is trying to uncover something and doing it in a really elemental way. Her pieces are beautiful.

Interviewer: Are you encouraging students to access their own narrative?

Carnwath: Yes, I think that's really important. It could be totally abstract, like Anne Appleby or Robert Ryman, whose work is driven by his interest in what material will do to a single color. I love his work. It doesn't have to be recognizable imagery.

Fenestration, 2010
Oil and alkyd on canvas

No Proof, 2010
oil and alkyd on canvas over panel

Interviewer: Do you feel like you have so many ideas that you don't have enough time to paint all the paintings you want to paint?

Carnwath: I don't have that. I'm fairly patient. I hope I have enough time. I figure I must.

Interviewer: How do you keep track of all your ideas? When we spoke about your prints you mentioned that you like to get all your Artist Proofs up front. That’s pretty organized.

Carnwath: When I did the Chronicle book, we worked a lot on the arrangement. We started organizing the paintings, the slides, everything, in a database.

Now, I have everything from the beginning organized in binders. I keep all the notes that I write about paintings in their binder page. I have drawers full of these binders. Sometimes, I will frame the pages and keep them in a suite of drawings.

In addition to the print archive, I have also archived the studio notebooks I’ve saved, with all the little weird notes and scrawls. I just save all this stuff.

Interviewer: Where will it end up?

Carnwath: I would like to find a place to sell it to. Now, all my stuff in the building is going into something called the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, which I started. When I started it, it was going to be the Squeak Carnwath/Gary Knecht Foundation, but Viola Frey said, "Well, can I be a part of that?" I said, "Sure," and then realized we had to have a general name for it so that other artists could put their work and estates into it. Then, the foundation can manage their estate and give cash awards to other artists to do their own work. Anyway, Viola’s work is in the Artist Legacy Foundation now.

Interviewer: We haven't talked very much about her. She was a great ceramic sculptor. Did you two have a dialogue about this queen of the arts idea?

Carnwath: No. I think I came to that later, maybe even after she died.

Interviewer: How did she encourage you?

Carnwath: Around ’68, I showed up at CCAC to look it over after I'd been over to look at the Art Institute. At the Art Institute, everybody was really cool— they wouldn't talk to you or say hi or anything. Things were closed.

But at CCAC, building doors were open and you could wander around. I wandered into the ceramic studio because I'd taken some ceramic classes and had every intention of continuing to take classes. I found this woman loading a kiln. And we just talked for three hours.

By the time I left, I had decided I would go to CCAC. So I went to register. Back then they didn't have computers; the faculty set up card tables for each department in painting, print making, and ceramics etc.. You'd go talk to one of the teachers in those departments and they would put your name on the list for whatever class. The chair of the ceramics department, Vernon Coykendahl, was manning the card table. He said, "No. There're no classes left. We're all full… but go talk to that woman over there." I look over, and it's Viola, so I go over to talk to her, because I thought she was another student. She said, "Yes. I saved three classes for you." I signed up and took those classes.

Viola always encouraged me by making sure certain opportunities were available. She let me into grad school without an undergrad degree. I had dropped out, and I still see no reason for an artist to get an undergrad degree; the only thing it's going to do now is get you into grad school, and we're cranking out way too many grad students. Liberal arts education can make someone a better critical thinker and problem solver and those abilities are good for life and for art making.

But, I wouldn't have been able to teach if Viola hadn't let me into grad school. She gave me other opportunities as well; she would let me work in the studio during Christmas break.

Interviewer: Did Viola encourage you to pursue the personal narrative?

Carnwath: The first thing I did in grad school was write a series of stories about different towns and cities that I'd lived in as a child that had influenced my becoming an artist.

They were called the “I Stories.” I recorded them all and made a record that would tell you when to turn the pages. I had Viola and Charles Fiske come listen to it. They were encouraging. She never was discouraging.

But when I was in grad school, she was also not very verbal. She would say, “you know, on the thing, on the thing.” That was the extent of her critiquing.

Interviewer: On the thing?

Carnwath: Yeah. It was the weirdest phrase. She would grunt and point. I'd go, "Yeah. Okay. Fine. Yeah." For some reason, it made sense to me. I can't even say why.

After Viloa had a stroke, a bunch of us took her to the neurologist They did an MRI, and they saw that she had had in the past, maybe years before, a brain stem stroke, which she didn't know anything about. When she was saying “on the thing,” it could have been that she had already had the stroke pictured in that MRI.

Interviewer: It seems that Viola was a teacher by example, not by complex theory.

Carnwath: No. Her teaching wasn't complex. But it wasn’t simple either. She was very bright and complicated. In fact, she didn't even finish her MFA, but nobody knew that until after she died. So in retrospect, it made sense that she let me into grad school without the undergrad degree.

Interviewer: Did the recent survey show at the Oakland Museum feel like a painting memoir of your work?

Carnwath: No. I have these sheets of paper that live next to my paintings that serve as their memoirs or diaries.

Interviewer: You mentioned those earlier. Explain them to me.

Carnwath: Well, I keep little notes next to my paintings to remind me of what I want to do next, or I write something down that's going to go in there that's not ready, or that I've painted over and I want to put it back in. It is like a memoir of the painting. I think of the papers as the crazy papers because of the way they look, with crude drawing and scrawls. For me they are my drawings.

Interviewer: But when you see a group of paintings, they don't feel like a memoir of your life?

Carnwath: No. I don't see them like that, I just see them as individual objects that I experienced and worked on but that are part of a bigger picture or a larger process. I mean, it would make sense given what's in the paintings.

Interviewer: Does it bother you that when your paintings are purchased you will never seem them again?

Carnwath: No.

Interviewer: It sounds like you document them fairly well.

Carnwath: I document, but when I finish a painting, I finish it. That's it. I let it go. I keep paintings, but I don't keep paintings until they've been out, and people have had a chance to see them.

Interviewer: Either in a gallery or in a show?

Carnwath: Yes. Sometimes, they go to different galleries, so there are many chances for people to see the piece. Then, if I'm lucky, the one I really want comes back. I have those paintings that I hoard.

Interviewer: When you saw the Oakland Museum exhibition were there surprises?

Carnwath: I was surprised by how well it worked together, and that the paintings held up. That was surprising to me. I don't know why.

Interviewer: In other words, you saw a thread?

Carnwath: There were things that I have abandoned, techniques for instance, that I thought I would pick up again, but I don't know if I actually have. There were things that had evolved into something else that I could revisit and use again.

Interviewer: Revisit?

Carnwath: Maybe on some level, but not entirely because I like to move forward. I don't like to go backwards. When I'm done, I am done. And I don't like to fix paintings either—in fact, I really dislike fixing paintings. It's like being thrown down a dark hole.

Interviewer: You mean, if it's damaged?

Carnwath: Yeah. I don't want to fix it. I’ll get a restorer. If I start scraping it off and go down to the bottom, I'll have to start all over again.

Interviewer: And that would be a different painting.

Carnwath: Yes, and I don't want to do that. It’s in the past. It's not the present.

Thought and Pleasure, 2010
oil and alkyd on canvas over panel

All painting images courtesy Squeak Carnwath.

For more information please visit:

www.squeakcarnwath.com
www.berggruen.com
www.artistslegacyfoundation.org
www.paulsonbottpress.com

Finding Platner at Princeton

Warren Platner endures as a bright (if occasionally shiny) light from the 1960s and 70s. As an architect, he is best remembered for interiors and furniture design. Interiors tend to disappear, but furniture endures. Since his chairs for Knoll cost so much to make, the tables are the ones that most designers can readily identify. But it’s time to look at him again for his architecture too.

courtesty dwr.com

KnollStudio®
Platner Lounge Collection

KnollStudio®
Platner Dining and Low Tables

Like his former employers, Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche, he was trying to break out of the ubiquity of corporate modernism—American style. Sometimes he could go overboard, but the excesses of postmodernism make his explorations look disciplined, if not exactly restrained.

His own house in Connecticut runneth over with multiple level changes, window seats, nooks, and luxurious materials. Makes me think of Christopher Alexander gone modern baroque. Like an excited kid sketching, he didn’t know when to stop. The living spaces suggest that he might have gotten too generous a discount at the furrier.

Alexandra Lange, one of my favorite design journalists, has written about Platner in Design Observer. A few years ago, her long piece used Platner’s bold use of brass as a jumping off point (see http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12047

and

http://observersroom.designobserver.com/alexandralange/post/in-dwell-platners-opulent-modernism/21868/)

Platner was on my mind in early May when we were invited to venture out to Princeton for a Mother’s Day brunch. Oddly enough, we could not locate a map when we got off the train. Since we were early, we decided to wander around until we found our destination, the faculty club, guessing that it would be in the center of campus.

Thanks to an abundant landscape, Princeton University is still a beautiful campus. Just walking around, I got the impression that the school seems very conflicted about its architectural identity. This is a school that loves its history—in any era. A lot of revolutionary war events took place in the modest structures near the town/gown edge. Over time, commissioned architects borrowed heavily from the neo-Gothic and neo-Tudor. Sort of a U.S. university straight from central casting impersonating a (stone) British university.

Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Whitman Hall
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Occasionally that conflict gets resolved beautifully, like when Gwathmey Siegel, in its moment of modernist glory, repaired the Greek Revival Whig Hall after a fire by inserting a sculptural intervention (1972). For years, the school’s favorite architect seemed to be Venturi Scott Brown, who navigated the tension between old and new with a heavy tilt towards old. Brick with stone graphics.

More recently, the university seems to be looking forward with new buildings like Rafael Viñoly’s Icahn Laboratory (2002), Fred Fisher’s Sherrerd Hall (2008), and another engineering building on the boards by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, But then at the same time, it just looked way backward with a neo-Hogwarts dorm and dining commons (2007). The monstrosity was built largely with funds from eBay zillionaire (and failed Californian gubernatorial candidate) Meg Whitman and of course is named for her.

Icahn Laboratory by Vinoly
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Robinson Hall by Yamasaki
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Earlier buildings such as Feinberg Hall by Williams-Tsien (1986) and Marx Hall by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (1993) negotiate this tension of building modern in a neo-everything-goes context with grace, finding a thoughtful middle way. One of my favorite buildings was I.M. Pei’s unapologetically modern dorm, Spelman Halls. The interesting geometric plan offers the pedestrian a kind of dense walking experience drawn from the spatial experience, but not the literal forms of European universities.

Of course there are the usual starchitect suspects sprinkled throughout the campus: the requisite Gehry silver lump, in this case the recent Lewis Library (2008); the squat and ungainly Pelli (a pool from 1990); some bizarre Yamasaki affairs (1965, 1966); and a much-needed lightening of the dour 1960s architecture school by Architectural Research Office (2008). I am eager to return to see all that I missed.

Lewis Library by Frank Gehry
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Lewis Library by Frank Gehry
Photo: Princeton University, Office of Communications.

Our destination turned out to be the highlight of our tour. We came around the backside of Prospect House and saw the glass and concrete dining room in all its bold modern glory. I remembered it from Platner’s book Ten by Warren Platner. At the point in the late 1960s and early 70s when modernism held sway, Platner was commissioned (in some kind of collaboration with Pietro Belluschi) to renovate the school’s faculty club, which is housed in Prospect House (c. 1850), the university president’s house from 1979 to 1968. Platner didn’t make much of an effort to relate to the “context” or reflect the existing architecture in his addition. Instead, he just attached a concrete trellis to the back of the Victorian mansion to create a kind of grand screened porch for dining. He also refurbished many of the antique public areas with his own trademark furniture. Judging by our casual observation, that groovy early 1970s decor has been banished and returned to a vague historic blandness, but the dining pavilion remains largely intact. What a simple elegant joy it is.

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

Princeton Faculty Club, Location: Princeton NJ
Architect: Warren Platner
© Ezra Stoller/Esto

The waffle slab ceiling has punched openings along the outermost trellis and along the one wall that attaches to the house. The balanced light, which can be modulated by the sliding wood shutters, provides a wonderful daytime dining experience. We were seated in the center of the room at a large table but could easily hear all of our dining companions. Looking out over the beautiful Prospect Gardens, the room nearly disappears. The building seems to be a mini-me of Platner’s Kent Memorial Library in Suffield, Connecticut (1973), which apparently has been saved.

If you’ve got a friend on the Princeton faculty, go have a meal there. (The corner glass detail alone is worth a visit!) Have your generous host take you on a walking tour of the campus afterward. Then you can go back and look again at Platner’s bold humility and be inspired.

p.s.

The Mother’s Day buffet was really good!

Different Perspectives on Julius Shulman

Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis

When Sam Lubell, the West Coast editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, told me that he was working on a new book on Julius Shulman, I thought he was crazy. We already had several titles, and is there a lot more to say? He began mining the archive at the Getty Research Institute for a different narrative, and indeed, the story turns out to be much larger than we imagined. In this interview, Sam tells us his thinking behind the new volume, entitled Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis.

I enjoyed the essays that begin each chapter, but there is not a lot of text in this book. What was your role?

I did write a fairly lengthy introduction providing background about Julius’s work in Los Angeles, his photographic approach, his love of storytelling and of Los Angeles, and his concurrent blossoming with the city. Julius’s daughter, Judy McKee, also wrote a foreword that’s a more personal reflection on her father’s career and his relationship with Los Angeles. The bulk of the work, though, was curating Julius’s photographs. There are well over 100,000 photos in the Getty archive, and we had to somehow narrow it down to about 220. That took over a year and a half of visiting the Getty Research Institute and bringing the pictures into a coherent and fresh body of work.

How did the project evolve?

Rizzoli originally wanted to do a book on Julius’s interiors. But we realized early on that we wanted to differentiate it from the many other Shulman books out there. Anne Blecksmith at the Getty Research Institute pointed us in the direction of his lesser-known photos, which in the archive are the higher numbered boxes of contact sheets. When we started looking through those, we knew we had uncovered another side of Julius’s work that we thought needed to be shared. Most of this work was in the Los Angeles region, so we decided to focus on that. And we were most intrigued by the work from the 1940s to the 1960s—sort of the glory days of Los Angeles and of Julius. So that’s how we started to narrow it down.

You met him fairly late in his life. What were your impressions of him?

Even with diminished faculties, he had an amazing charisma and presence. Just his smile and his direct manner of speaking kept you in a sort of spell. Not many people have that effect. And he always made you feel welcome. He would welcome anyone who loved architecture into his home and made them feel like part of his life. You could tell how much he loved what he did and where he lived. And he never hesitated to show off his work. When you look at all of these factors, and the sort of legend he built up for himself, it’s not surprising that he was as successful as he was.

As you point out, Shulman had an eye for composition but also an ability to spin a tale. Do you have a favorite tale?

It’s really difficult to narrow it down, because there are so many. I loved talking to him about the picture he took of Neutra’s Miller House in Palm Springs. The shot shows Mrs. Miller sitting in front of a large window that shows off the expanse of the desert. He was telling a story not just about the beautiful architecture, or about Mrs. Miller (who he pointed out had “nice legs”), but also about the majestic expanse of nothingness that both were now part of. That’s what made the picture stand out, and what grabbed people. It’s funny because now that house is completely surrounded by development, and that magic effect is gone. Sort of like much of the region.

© J. Paul Getty Trust,
Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis
by Sam Lubell and Douglas Woods, Rizzoli New York, 2011.
Poolside at Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, 1947.

© Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica,
Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis
by Sam Lubell and Douglas Woods, Rizzoli New York, 2011.
A machine-age detail of the Sixth Street bridge, Los Angeles, 1933.

What were some of Shulman’s biases?

Julius had an eye for visual drama. With modernist buildings, he loved capturing the strong lines stretching toward the horizon, the merging of inside and outside, and the often heroic exposed structures. Some of his earlier shots, in more enclosed, traditional buildings, lack this sense of visual drama. In my opinion, he was of course an amazing photographer, but he also found a style of architecture that really matched his sense of optimism and excitement, and it showed in his pictures. His less “architectural” pictures were able to hook you in the same way. He again used strong lines and diagonals that could “suck you in.” He often framed pictures like a filmmaker. And he knew what it was about each shot that would make you stop in your tracks.

One visual bias I have noticed is that Shulman favored the horizontal image. I suppose that is a chicken/egg kind of question. Los Angeles was a horizontal city. Do you agree?

Yes, I think that’s correct. My instinct is that it’s a function of what he shot. The majority of the houses and landscapes he visited were horizontal—a jarring contrast with the verticality of traditional cities like New York and Chicago. He was capturing that sense of expanse and sprawl. When he did shoot in vertical cities, you’ll notice that most of his shots were vertical. So I think he was just taking in what he saw and maximizing its effect.

You write that most of Shulman’s archive is not architectural. Are you trying to reposition him as a recorder of culture as much as modern architecture?

It’s certainly not one or the other. He recorded architecture as well as culture and development together. Of course most of his assignments were to shoot buildings. But they were not all precious and “architectural.” Most of his work was the bread and butter variety that really filled up the city. And it’s looking at those works in their urban and suburban contexts that gives us a much fuller perception of the city.

© J. Paul Getty Trust,
Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis
by Sam Lubell and Douglas Woods, Rizzoli New York, 2011.
Mobil Gas Station, Smith and Williams, Anaheim, 1956.

© J. Paul Getty Trust,
Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis
by Sam Lubell and Douglas Woods, Rizzoli New York, 2011.
A view of the Biltmore Hotel, Schultze + Weaver, downtown Los Angeles, 1959.

Why did you select the very architectural image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House living room for the cover if you were trying to get away from the architectural?

We start with what people expect from Julius: a beautiful piece of architecture. But then as you look at it, you become sucked into the scene of the city outside straight ahead of you. You see the streetscapes of Hollywood and you want to venture outside to see what it’s all about. It’s an arresting picture (always important for selling books!) that also tells the story of the book. His work was about architecture but also about the city around the architecture.

Is this book going to open up a new interpretation of Shulman?

I don’t think it will transform people’s impression of Shulman, but it will certainly give people a more complete idea of his legacy. Of course he still took shots of the most famous modernist buildings in the world. But he also took shots of every other piece of architecture imaginable.

Did he throw out much work? By that, I mean did he edit his archive before he filed the image?

That’s an excellent question. It’s unclear how much of his archive was self edited. Even the curators at the Getty don’t know the real answer to that. But given how many pictures are in the archive, and the variety of images in each shoot, I would have to guess that he kept most of the stuff that he shot. He certainly wasn’t afraid to put in duplicate images or images with crop marks or other edits on them. Some even have doodles on them, such as an image of Greta Grossman with glasses and a moustache drawn onto her. I have no idea what that was about. I wish I could ask him more about it.

When his house by Soriano was new, he had a view out over the canyons and the city. Over time the garden became quite overgrown, like a jungle. Was it his fortress against the city that was choking on its rapid growth?

That’s another question that I’d love to ask Julius. I know that the thing he loved most about Los Angeles was its combination of urbanity and nature. The fact that his garden became overgrown I would imagine had more to do with his single-minded focus on his photography. But he loved the respite that the house provided him. From what I could tell, it was his favorite place in the world.

© J. Paul Getty Trust,
Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis
by Sam Lubell and Douglas Woods, Rizzoli New York, 2011.
Julius Shulman’s home designed by Raphael Soriano, 1951.

When you were preparing this book, what surprised you the most?

I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of Shulman’s work. His log book is amazing. He shot something basically every day of his life. And when he wasn’t working, he was shooting things on vacation.

What’s your next project?

Ha! It’s a good project. Nothing is official, so I hesitate to share. But I’m working on an exhibit and book about projects that never came to fruition in Los Angeles called Never Built: LA. I’m also talking about a book about one of Shulman’s contemporaries, Marvin Rand. We’ll see where those go!

Julius Shulman, courtesy LA Times

Looking at French West Africa

A Conversation about the Work of Photographer Seydou Keïta

Seydou Keïta
1921-2001

In May 2010, my niece Maya Caldwell graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in history and the history of art and visual culture. I asked her about what had really interested her, and she sent me a paper she wrote on an African photographer, Seydou Keïta. I had never heard of him, but was interested in how an invention of the colonial world could be used by postcolonial Africans to define their contemporary times. What follows is my conversation with Maya about Keïta’s work.

Why are you interested in the use of photography in colonial Africa?

I was struck by the way that photography was used as a tool of colonization, particularly in French West Africa. The French maintained a presence on the Western coast of Africa from the 17th century onward, and by the 19th century they ventured inland in search of resources, battling the Muslim conquest empires that stood in their way. They began to take photographs of the native people that they encountered, which were then sold as postcards. Over 8,000 different postcards were produced in colonial West Africa from 1901 to 1963. Often these postcards were intended to document racial “types,” as the French called them, or illustrate the progress of French development projects. The postcards were sent mainly by European merchants and members of the French military. These postcards circulated throughout Europe, received by friends and families back home.

What do the thousands of postcards tell us?

The postcards reveal the way that the French colonizers viewed themselves and the people they were subjugating. Printed and handwritten captions on the postcards often highlight the racism inherent in the imagery. For example, one postcard of a bare-chested young woman carrying a bowl of water has a handwritten caption in French which translates as, “Young virgin. Very naïve.” Another has a typed caption that translates simply, “West Africa. Dioula Type.” When indigenous settlements are portrayed, they are made to look chaotic and dark in comparison to the light, linear, and orderly depictions of French buildings.

How did contemporary photographers change this dynamic?

In the 20th century, African photographers appropriated the colonizer’s aesthetic, using similar techniques and modified visual conventions to recapture the agency that had been taken from the previous generation of Africans by European colonists.

Beginning in the 1940s, Africans turned the colonizer’s tool on its head, using the photograph as a visual means of resistance. Early African photographers like Seydou Keïta and Mama Casset strongly influenced succeeding generations, including Malick Sidibe, Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, and many others.

Why did you focus your studies on Seydou Keïta?

Seydou Keïta (ca. 1921-2001) is a very well-known photographer today, both in Africa and internationally. Keïta is almost never mentioned without reference to the French collector André Magnin, yet the photographs that made Keïta famous were taken decades before his meeting with Magnin, in a small studio in Bamako, Mali. He was one of the first African photographers in Bamako. His studio was a business, and the photographs were taken of or for private clients to “put bread on the table.” They were not made as art objects. This is not to say that the photographs aren’t artistic. If there was one word for Keïta’s photographs, it would be captivating. The composition, the light, the pose, every detail is painstakingly perfected.

How did he get his first camera?

In 1935, when Seydou was around 14 years old, his uncle Tiemoko brought home a 6 x 9 Kodak Brownie camera from a trip to Senegal. Tiemoko explains that he didn’t originally intend to give it away, but Seydou was so fascinated by the contraption that Tiemoko gave it to him. Seydou’s father gave him some land behind the main prison in Bamako Koura, and that is where Keïta opened his studio in 1948. By then, he had over a decade’s experience taking photographs for his own enjoyment.

Can you explain applying the Foucault argument to Keïta’s subjects dressing like the colonizers?

In Keïta’s photographs, subjects often opted to wear western-style clothing and use props indicative of European influence, like radios, glasses, sewing machines, and cars. By displaying these symbols of “Frenchness,” the subjects may have felt that they were showing their advanced social and economic positions. The photographs seem to reflect a desire to partially assimilate, but they are also an assertion of control over that assimilation, and the degree to which it will take place.

Julie Doring, a scholar who has written about Keïta’s photos, drawing on the work of Foucault, argues that these photos reflect a kind of colonial ambivalence that “may ultimately empower the colonized.” Foucault suggested that appropriation could function as a means of empowerment. It may seem incongruous that after centuries of subjugation, African people would choose to don the accoutrements of the colonizer. These photographs represent a time and a feeling that cannot necessarily be categorized as one thing or the other, but I do think there are empowering elements in these photographs. They were taken by Africans of themselves, which in and of itself was a dramatic shift from colonial representation. The ability to imagine and create one’s own image is a very powerful thing.

How did the political turbulence in Mali impact Keïta’s work?

Seydou Keïta closed his studio in 1963, when he was asked to work exclusively for the new socialist government in Mali. Keïta says that he first got the job because he was related to the new president, Modibo Keïta. Throughout the turbulent political goings-on of the era, Seydou worked as an official government photographer. Despite his relation to Modibo Keïta, he stayed on under the Traore dictatorship. Keïta hints at political reasons for his departure, but does not elaborate, saying only, “Around that time, I had a misunderstanding with some of the military people, and I decided that I was tired of the job.” After he quietly retired from his government position, he worked as a mechanic.

Tell me about the meeting between André Magnin and Seydou Keïta.

The very first exhibition of Keïta’s photographs took place in New York in 1991 at the Center for African Art. They were part of a show called “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art,” and the author was listed as “Unknown photographer, (Bamako, Mali.)” Curator Susan Vogel claimed that she had collected the photographs while on vacation in Mali and had neglected to save the name of the artist. Soon after the “Africa Explores” exhibition, André Magnin went to Mali to search for the artist at the request of collector Jean Pigozzi. The story of their meeting is told differently by Keïta and Magnin. The discrepancies between these two versions are full of significance. André Magnin, widely lauded as Keïta’s discoverer, paints a beautiful picture, describing Keïta’s Muslim garb, a boubou and fez, his pose in the doorway, the light in the window. Keïta, on the other hand, pokes fun at Magnin and his colleagues, claiming that they did not initially recognize him. Instead of being dressed up for the mosque, Keïta remembers that he was working on his engine. It is impossible to know what exchange actually took place that first day, but it is how they each remember the incident that underscores the controversy that later ensued.

What happened?

Whatever the real story of their meeting, Magnin and Keïta met and arranged a deal during Magnin’s visit to Bamako in 1991. Magnin selected 1,300 photographs to be enlarged and made into high-quality prints. The prints were sent to Keïta for signing, which verified the authenticity of the print and substantially increased the eventual price tag. The large sums of money at stake may have led to the discord that arose in the relationship between Magnin and Keïta. Apparently, their initial agreement had been a verbal one, as is customary in Africa. Towards the end of Keïta’s life, when it became clear that the artist’s health was failing, Magnin suggested to Keïta that he should entrust him with his estate. While specific details are hard to come by, it is clear that Magnin’s proposal upset Keïta. In October of 2001, just before his death, Keïta handed control of his estate over to his agent Jean Marc Patras, who helped him establish the Seydou Keïta Association in Bamako. The association eventually sued Magnin for the return of the negatives in his possession, but as of the latest media coverage, they have not been returned.

How do these images change when they move into the museum or gallery?

Since being featured in numerous museum and gallery shows, Keïta’s work has been the subject of some scholarly debate. Much of this debate centers around issues of authorship. At first, it seems obvious that Keïta is the author. After all, he took the photographs, he owned the negatives, he was (eventually) given artistic credit for the images. However, since these photos were created as a commercial product, the client had a collaborative role. Now, it is the viewer who collaborates with the finished product. When Keïta’s photographs are relocated to the museum or gallery context, they function differently. They are aesthetic objects available to the public for artistic interpretation and criticism, a use for which they were never intended. The audience often has little background on Keïta himself, and information about the subjects of photos, including their name, is usually nonexistent. In the museum or gallery setting, Keïta’s images take on new meanings, which may or may not reflect the intentions of Keïta and/or the subject.

Are they transformed from a commercial product into fine art?

I suppose it depends on how you define “commercial product” and “fine art.” Once again, there is no easy answer, and really it is up to the viewer to decide. One of Keïta’s most striking works is a photograph of a very large man dressed in a light-colored boubou, holding a tiny baby on his vast expanse of lap. The boubou is central to the image, and the man’s size only serves to underscore this focus. In addition, the size of the man and the size of the baby seem to play off of one another in a humorous way. The man’s good-natured smile shows that he is in on the joke. This man is one of the few clients whom Keïta remembered by name. Looking at this photograph during an interview, Keïta noted, “That big fellow there is Billaly.” Underneath this photo the name Billaly replaces what is usually the caption in the gallery or museum space. But while many of the works do not have names, the original subjects and viewers knew who they were. This is not the same kind of forced anonymity inscribed by colonial photographers. With Keïta’s photographs, it is only in the museum and gallery context that a name becomes a title or lack thereof. In the production of this image, Billaly was an integral part, and the image was made as an expression of his identity for personal use. In that sense, Keïta’s works are very different from works created for display in an institution. But does that mean they are not and should not be viewed as art in another context?

Are we participating in a kind of colonialism by promoting this work as art?

That is possible. It really depends on our perspective as viewers. What we create often has a life of its own that we cannot completely control. The viewer has the ability to place Keïta’s work in various contexts, and thus his work may take on a unique meaning for each individual viewer. I believe that it is also possible that through art we can promote understanding and develop something entirely new—that is not a kind of colonialism at all. The manifestation of that vision will require an ongoing global dialogue, which these questions are part of. By being displayed as art, Seydou Keïta’s work becomes a part of that dialogue. In any case, Seydou Keïta’s story is a testament to the power of images to both reflect and shape our perception of the world.

All photos courtesy seydoukeitaphotographer.com.