EIGHT: Visual Arts

Most people don’t realize how difficult it is to make modern art—because the mind is so much in control that it keeps people unpoetic and unimaginative. At the time that I met Mark Tobey there was a show involving watercolors in Portland, Oregon, and the public was indignant because it was still in the thirties and they didn’t take modern art seriously then. They said that it should not be shown in the museums and that it was no good. So the people in charge of the museum put up blank paper on the opposite wall, divided the show into what the public could do and what the artists had done—and the public quickly learned that they didn’t know how to criticize.—Robin White (1978)

So, in that [thirties] climate my involvement with painting (and I had done some painting) was toward abstract painting. I was impressed by the Bauhaus, for instance, and I was particularly impressed by Mondrian, or such a thing as Malevich’s White on White. I was more or less of the opinion that representation in painting was not anything that could interest me. I was very much attracted by the fantasy of Klee, and even the late faces of Jawlensky. Curiously enough, with this love of abstract painting, I didn’t so much enjoy Kandinsky as I did Klee and Jawlensky, so the story really isn’t a clear line. Nevertheless, I didn’t think of proper painting of the time as being anything but abstract. If I were going to paint, and I had meanwhile given up painting, it would be abstract painting, and it would tend toward geometric painting. That is the position that I held during the thirties, and I came to New York only to find the Surrealists in sway, with André Breton here, you see. So that the current involvement in painting at the time wasn’t abstract at all, but was involved with symbols, and also their relations to the private aspect of an individual’s life. Even though I enjoyed the friendship of an evening at parties and so forth of a number of those artists including Max Ernst, David Hare, et cetera, my heart didn’t go out to Surrealism at all.

Even the idea of automatism?

Automatic art, in fact, has never interested me, because it is a way of falling back, resting on one’s memories and feelings subconsciously, is it not? And I have done my utmost to free people from that.—Irving Sandier (1966)

Did Surrealism ever come to influence you in any way?

I never liked it.

For what reasons?

Because of its involvement with psychoanalysis.

What are your objections to psychoanalysis?

The same as Rilke’s: “They might remove my devils, but they would certainly offend my angels.” But my objection was also my own, it came from an analyst saying that he could fix me so that I’d write much more music and, as you have pointed out, I already write a sufficient quantity; so it’s questionable whether I should do much more than I already do. It was such a fad. I think we are somewhat free of it now and I notice in society now a general willingness to criticize psychoanalysis. Surrealism is so closely connected with it—in my mind at least—that I didn’t find it interesting. I found Dada much more interesting, in the same way I find the work of Rauschenberg and Johns interesting in the sense of Dada, and I find the recent Pop Art after them uninteresting in the sense of Surrealism, not a Surrealism of the individual but a Surrealism of the society.—John Roberts with Silvy Panet Raymond (1980)

I definitely prefer Dada and Neo-Dada to Pop Art. Our environment is characterized by multiplicity and complexity. Pop Art is very simple, much too simple, and too easily produced. For that matter, Rauschenberg does not belong to Pop Art. He is, rather, a Dada artist.—Jean-Yves Bosseur (1970, in Dachy 2000)

Before we continue with the Surrealists, let me pick up something that happened to me when I was still on the West Coast, namely, the encounter with Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. And though I loved the work of Morris Graves, and still do, it was Tobey who had a great effect on my way of seeing, which is to say my involvement with painting, or my involvement with life even. I remember in particular a walk with Mark Tobey from the area of Seattle around the Cornish School downhill and through the town toward a Japanese restaurant—a walk that would not normally take more than forty-five minutes, but on this occasion it must have taken several hours, because he was constantly stopping and pointing out things to see, opening my eyes in other words—which, if I understand it at all, has been a function of twentieth-century art: to open our eyes; not to do as the Surrealists wish, that is to say, to make us less guilty perhaps, or something like that.

Or to certainly bring up unconscious matter.

Something like that. But this had to do with eyes, something that really I could use.

Just seeing what was there.

Just seeing what there was to see.

Now I don’t remember the exact date of it, whether it was in the early or middle forties, but there was an exhibition at the Willard Gallery which included the first examples of white writing on the part of Mark Tobey. I liked one so much that I began buying it on the installment plan. I’ve since, unfortunately, sold it. It was a painting that had no representation in it at all, though his paintings including his white writing paintings frequently do have representational elements. This one had nothing. It was completely, so to speak, abstract. It had no symbolic references. It was a surface that had been utterly painted. But it had not been painted in a way that would suggest the geometrical abstraction that interested me, so it brought about a change. And also that walk to the Japanese restaurant brought about a change in my eyes, and in my relation to art, so that when I left the Willard Gallery exhibition, I was standing at a corner on Madison Avenue waiting for a bus and I happened to look at the pavement, and I noticed that the experience of looking at the pavement was the same as the experience of looking at the Tobey. Exactly the same. The aesthetic enjoyment was just as high. Now this didn’t keep me from buying the Tobey, and painfully buying it. So, you have a change then in my view. Now this change, that was really the result of my involvement with Tobey, naturally opened my eyes to Abstract Expressionism, not to its intentions, but to its appearance.

In other words, I used Abstract Expressionism as though it were something I could use, not as something that had been given to me to understand, but as something that I could see in the way that I had been changed to see. What you have in the case of Tobey, and in the case of the pavement, and in the case of much Abstract Expressionism, is a surface that in no sense has a center of interest, so that it is truly distinguished from most art, Occidental and Oriental, that we know. The individual is able to look at first one part and then another, and insofar as he can, to experience the whole. But the whole is such a whole that it doesn’t look as if the frame frames it. It looks as if that sort of thing could have continued beyond the frame. It is, in other words, if we were not speaking of painting, but speaking of music, a work that has no beginning, middle, or ending, nor any center of interest—we come back now to talk about art. So, this makes it clear that the experience of art is essentially not an objective experience, but rather a subjective experience. And it is available only to the people who are equipped to have it. I would agree that the world of that person has been changed, but I would say that it has been changed due to changes in his way of seeing. In other words, it has been changed, not from the Surrealist emphasis on the subconscious and the unknown area of the collective unconscious in dreams and all of that, and automatism, but it had been changed by things that are more daytime accessible, that is to say, by what we experience through our senses.

But there is a shift here from the intention of Abstract Expressionism to the way their works struck you. You were aware at the time of their intention.

Well, I was vaguely aware. I have become more aware as time has gone on. I never agreed with their intentions, if I know what they are, and I’m not really clear that I do know what they are.

I recall a few incidents that would lead me to believe that we always disagreed. For instance, it was clear to anyone in the late forties that the work of Bill de Kooning was of extreme interest. I recall a painting of his with which I had no difficulty whatsoever—a black and white one which was exhibited for a while at the very entrance of the Whitney Gallery when it was still on Eighth Street. In the black and white, which had no center of interest, et cetera, had been impressed some newsprint. You recall the painting?

Yes.

This painting was one of the most glorious paintings I have ever seen. Now, maybe Bill meant something else by it than the way in which I used the painting. But the painting, as far as I was concerned, was exhilarating and introductory to the very life that I was living, not to some insight on the part of Bill de Kooning, but life itself.

Did you get the same feeling with the work, say, of Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman?

Reinhardt—the work was so appealing that I tended to resist its appeal. To be perfectly frank, I think it’s more recently that the work of Newman and Reinhardt have impressed me deeply. The present exhibition of The Stations of the Cross I think is superb, and I see now that it makes quite explicit what I would think are the intentions of Abstract Expressionism.

Or certainly part of them.

It would seem to be to me truly Abstract Expressionism.

The reason I raised their names at all was because Bill does have this way of introducing material out of our experience in a way that they don’t.

He did for me in a way that I could understand in that black and white painting with the newsprint impressed.

Now things get mixed up, because I can use those Stations of the Cross by Newman perfectly well, although I think I could use them better had he included a fifteenth station, which would not leave us in the void, but which would bring us back to the image that comes at the end of the ten ox-herding pictures in the second version of Zen Buddhism, namely, the fat man returning to the village bearing gifts with a big smile on his face. Now this smile is largely missing from Abstract Expressionism. I remember hearing Harold Rosenberg say, after the exhibition of Pop and Op art a year and a half ago, “Where is all the suffering?” And I continually made it clear in my discussions of art that I prefer laughter to tears.

Now how did I come to that view? I came to it partly through recognition that if art was going to be of any use, it was going to be of use not with reference to itself, but with reference to the people who used it, and that they would use it not in relation to art itself, but in relation to their daily lives; that their daily lives would be better if they were concerned with enjoyment rather than misery—it seems evident. I came to it that way, and I came to it also through my personal need which had brought me to a study of Zen Buddhism.

We haven’t mentioned one important figure in the whole setup, which is Jackson Pollock.

You were friendly with him?

Well, I more tried to avoid him. I did this because he was generally so drunk, and he was actually an unpleasant person for me to encounter. I remember seeing him on the same side of the street I was, and I would always cross over to the other side. Now and then I would be unable to avoid the encounter; we would meet, and he always complained that I didn’t like his work enough. And I didn’t. The first time I saw it was at Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment uptown. She had a hallway downstairs and there was this enormous mural of his of… It seemed to me to be taken from the human body, and that immediately made my interest diminish. Then came along those things that you would think I would like, namely, the all-over dripped canvases. But I was familiar with Tobey, and Pollocks work looked easy in relation to Tobey’s work which looked far more complex. It was easy to see that, from observing a large canvas of Jackson Pollocks, he had taken five cans or six cans of paint, had never troubled to vary the color of the paint dripping from the can, and had more or less mechanically—with gesture, however, which he was believing in—let this paint fall out. So the color couldn’t interest me, because it was not changing. Whereas if you look at the Tobey, you see that each stroke has a slightly different white. And if you look at your daily life, you see that it hasn’t been dripped from a can either.

But what about the pitch of intensity, the excitement?

Oh, none of those aspects interested me. They’re precisely the things about Abstract Expressionism that didn’t interest me. I wanted them to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I’m perfectly happy about my feelings. In fact, I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquillity. I don’t want to disturb my feelings. I don’t want to spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.

So actually de Kooning’s late works of the forties probably were a bit more to your liking than the most aggressive expressionist in the fifties…

I found the women very difficult to take. In fact, I didn’t really like them. I can see that they’re beautiful works of art, in fact great works of art, but if that’s what art is, it doesn’t interest me.—Irving Sandler (1966)

There is a paradox in modern art between the work of Albers on one hand and Pollock on the other. Rather than seeing these two things as opposites, I have tried to see them as the same thing, because you see these two tendencies everywhere in modern art—the one toward the symmetrical, and the other toward an overall surface without any center. They seem to be opposite, but I think the opposites are the same. I think the result of both is to engage the observer in his experience of each—namely, that when I look at the Albers and see it as symmetrical, I begin making a movement of my experience of looking which is not controlled by Albers but is original to me, because I’m not interested in symmetry. I can understand it immediately, so I begin traveling throughout the painting. And this is precisely what I do with Pollock; so my experience of the two, which appear to be different, is really very similar.—Lars Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson (1965)

Do you think you need a lot of scholarship to see Duchamp’s work?

I don’t feel I need much scholarship to enjoy Duchamp as I enjoy him.

How do you enjoy him?

The way I do. Whether the way I enjoy him is the same way he intended, I have no way of knowing. I could have asked questions about that, but didn’t.

Because you weren’t interested?

No, no. I didn’t want to disturb him with questions. Supposing he had not been disturbed by some question I had asked, and had answered it, I would then have had his answer rather than my experience. Furthermore, he left the door open by saying that observers complete works of art themselves. Nevertheless, there is still something hermetic or inscrutable about his work. It suggests scholarship, questions and answers from the source. I spoke to Teeny Duchamp once about this. I said, “You know, I understand very little about Marcel’s work. Much of it remains mysterious to me.” And she said, “It does to me too.”—Moira and William Roth (1973)

Schoenberg himself was opposed to other people writing twelve-tone music. I asked him a question once about some twelve-tone problem, and he said, “That’s none of your business.” People can take the attitude, say to Oriental thought, that the goal is to sit cross-legged and to do deep breathing exercises and to follow the letter of the system of deep breathing. My attitude was not to do those things that Oriental people did but to find, if I could, the principle of Oriental thought. And the same thing with Schoenberg, the same thing with Duchamp. So I never asked Marcel any questions about his work. Maybe I learned this from Schoenberg, because when I asked Schoenberg something about his work, he said, “None of your business.”

We think often in the West that we can ask someone who knows and he would give us the answer. But in Zen, if you ask the teacher the question and he gives you the answer, and if he asks you the same question and you give him back the answer, you get hit over the head. So it seemed to me it was improper to ask Duchamp questions. I already knew that Duchamp wasn’t interested in music—almost not at all; so I knew in that situation, it would be absurd, for instance, to ask him, do you like what I did. Even to ask him “do you like” was out of the question.

So it happened I was walking on MacDougal Street in the Village, and he was on the same side that I was. That was the period when I didn’t wish to bother him with my friendship, though I admired him. He may have asked me to come and see him, and I went to an apartment in the Village. I forgot who else was there. The one thing I remember from our conversation was that the talk turned to dope, and Marcel said that he didn’t think that dope would ever be a serious social problem. And we said why not? He said people won’t take any more dope than they now drink liqueurs.

Meaning by that alcohol?

No, crème de menthe, Cointreau,…

Later, it must have been in the early sixties, it just happened that one holiday season between Christmas and New Year’s, when there are so many parties in New York, we happened to be invited to the same parties. Suddenly, I saw him every night, four nights in a row; and I noticed there was a beauty about his face that one associates, say, with coming death or, say, with a Velásquez painting. And I realized suddenly that I was foolish not to be with him, and that there was little time left. And so I said to Teeny [Mme. Duchamp], “Do you think Marcel would be willing to teach me to play chess?” Because I knew that that would be a way to be with him without asking him questions; or if I asked him questions, they would be ones it would be useful to know the answers to. And so she said, “Why don’t you ask him yourself.” So I went up to him and said, “Would you teach me chess?” And he said, “Do you know the moves; do you know how the pieces move?” And I said, “Yes, I know that”; and he said yes. And so we made an appointment, then, for me to go to his house; and after that, we were together as often as possible, at least once a week when they were in New York, or sometimes twice a week.—Alain Jouffroy and Robert Cordier (1974)

Do you think your idea of silence has anything in common with Duchamp?

Looking at the Large Glass, the thing that I like so much is that I can focus my attention wherever I wish. It helps me to blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence in the work itself. There is nothing in it that requires me to look in one place or another or, in fact, requires me to look at all. I can look through it to the world beyond. Well, this is, of course, the reverse in Etant Donnés. I can only see what Duchamp permits me to see. The Large Glass changes with the light and he was aware of this. So does a Mondrian. So does any painting. But Etant Donnés doesn’t change because it is all prescribed. So he’s telling us something that we perhaps haven’t yet learned, when we speak as we do so glibly of the blurring of the distinction between art and life. Or perhaps he’s bringing us back to Thoreau: yes and no are lies. Or keeping the distinction, he may be saying neither one is true. The only true answer is that which will let us have both of these.

Duchamp seems so much less physical in his an than you do.

A contradiction between Marcel and myself is that he spoke constantly against the retinal aspects of art, whereas I have insisted upon the physicality of sound and the activity of listening. You could say I was saying the opposite of what he was saying. And yet I felt so much in accord with everything he was doing that I developed the notion that the reverse is true of music as is true of the visual arts. In other words, what was needed in art when he came along was not being physical about seeing, and what was needed in music when I came along was the necessity of being physical about hearing. However, with Etant Donnés, we feel his work very physically, not abstractly, and in a way which can be deeply felt. Music is more complex, I think, than painting, and that’s why chance operations in music are just naturally more complicated than they would be for painting. There are more questions to ask about a piece of music than there are about a painting.—Moira and William Roth (1973)

If I were thinking of the most delightful piece of architecture that I know of, it would not be the Taj Mahal, but the Farnsworth House near Chicago by Mies, which you can look under and over and through. You can almost imagine that it doesn’t exist. If you say it doesn’t work, who cares? The idea is beautifully expressed. For me it seems to be the peak unless you move over to the position of Buckminster Fuller. Now you’re in a situation which is much larger and much more humane than anything dear Mies had in mind, because it comprises a clearly considered view of the future, the survival of future generations and, as Bucky would say, “success on the planet.” If we continue as if Bucky didn’t exist, we won’t continue. His notion that a house should weigh nothing is more important than Mies’ view that the house should be invisible, but be very heavy in its invisibility. I visited Mies in his apartment in Chicago which was just stunning.

In his complex on Lake Shore Drive?

Yes. There was a very long, thick piece of marble in the room that came out of the wall with no support whatsoever. None. You can’t imagine what a delight it was to see. The answer to the problem was very simple: we went into the room on the other side of the wall, and the rest of the marble was projected on the other side. It was balanced between the two rooms. That solution is luxurious. Bucky’s way, on the other hand, is comprehensive in terms of human needs.

In the Farnsworth House, there’s a definite separation from nature in the way the house is lifted off the ground.

But not being on the ground also connects with Bucky’s notion that we are now living, not on the ground, but in the air and that we belong to the air. In a lecture he used to give, he would point out that if you start from where civilization seems to have begun in the Near East and if you go toward Europe, you go against the wind because the winds all blow to the West. If you go toward the Far East, you go with the wind. So people going toward Europe developed ideas that go against nature. People going the other way developed ideas that were in accordance with nature. These two different tendencies of going “with” and “against” the wind meet in America. In their confluence, they have produced a movement into the air; and that’s what we’re living in now. We have moved into the air.—Peter Franck and Bette Frank (1985)

Of all the painters of the forties, Tobey would be the most central for you— the man whom you esteem the most.

And of his work the white writing which had no representational elements in it.

Now, the person who changed that for me, Bob Rauschenberg, made those black paintings which appealed not only to me, but to Franz Kline, who happened to be at Black Mountain the same summer [1948], and I would approach them [the Rauschenbergs] on several levels—either from the Tobey point of view or from the Mondrian point of view. Those black paintings could be approached exactly as I had approached Abstract Expressionism—namely, as a surface having no center of interest, which was not necessarily confined by the frame. Furthermore, the composition, if there was any, appeared to be Mondrianesque. Now that, at the time, made it possible for me to embrace it wholeheartedly, because of my previous involvement with geometrical abstraction and my devotion to Mondrian. Later when I wrote about Bob, it became the one problem that I had with his work: namely, why did he cling to geometrical abstraction? And particularly to those horizontals and verticals, you see.

One of the interesting things you said before was that you could use certain Abstract Expressionist works, or, say, the works of Tobey and de Kooning, because it reinforced certain tendencies in your own work, say, chance, for example?

No, I used it as I walked around the city.

I see. You didn’t mean specifically in terms of your own work?

No, certainly not. That would happen, no doubt, and would happen in terms of reinforcing my notion that there needn’t be a climax in a musical composition. Such influences—certainly. But the way to use visual work, it seems to me, is not by, certainly, a dialogue, that is to say transformed, but transformed as I just mentioned, but the immediate use would be to change my way of seeing. Wouldn’t it?—Irving Sandler (1966)

I liked everything Bob [Rauschenberg] showed me, and he showed some earlier works. In fact, he gave me an early painting which had a Dada flavor, which was a collage of curious elements. Later he came into my house and painted over it, and I mention this in my article on him in which I say the door is open, and he comes in and paints, and what have we lost…. So I had to accept that because I was interested in his notion of impermanence. I had no argument against it. But then as Bob’s work became more and more representational, my eyes were opened by him to representational things by way of seeing; he made it possible for me to see not just the pavement that Tobey had made it possible for me to see, in other words an all-over situation, but he made it possible for me to see a Coca-Cola bottle for heaven’s sake.

Then there was a relation between that idea and the idea of using radios in your work.

Right. All of that goes together, then it brings back with great impact the work of Marcel Duchamp.—Irving Sandler (1966)

I think there’s a slight difference between Rauschenberg and me. And we’ve become less friendly, although we’re still friendly. We don’t see each other as much as we did…. I have the desire to just erase the difference between art and life, whereas Rauschenberg made that famous statement about working in the gap between the two. Which is a little Roman Catholic, from my point of view.

Meaning what?

Well, he makes a mystery out of being an artist.—Martin Duberman (1972)

I was not able to see Johns’s work immediately. It was again through Rauschenberg that I was able to see Johns’s work. And I continued, even though Rauschenberg had great enthusiasm for Johns’s works, to have difficulty with it. In fact, the difficulties I had with Johns’s work are among the difficulties I most cherish. They too have obliged me to change—not my eyes alone which needn’t change. For instance, you can look at a Johns work without paying any attention to it, except with your eyes. And so enjoy it the same way you would enjoy Abstract Expressionism or Tobey or anything that was nonrepresentational. But if you accepted it as a flag or a target, for example, your mind has to change, and this has been why his work has been not weaker and weaker as time has gone on, but stronger and stronger. It has changed the nature of art criticism, and more potently so than the work of Bob Rauschenberg. And it has made re-emphatic, it seems to me, the work of Duchamp.

You’re saying, then, that at one point Johns opened you up to that as well

I don’t take it as his opening me up to that; I take it as his changing my mind in terms of “Am I going to open myself up actually to include what it is he proposes, what it is he does. Am I going to change my mind, and my answer is yes.” But then I qualify that answer with “yes, but with difficulties.”—Irving Sandier (1966)

What questions come to mind when you think about Duchamp?

The things I think about him don’t lead me to ask questions, but rather to experience his work or my life. At a Dada exhibition in Dusseldorf, I was impressed that though Schwitters and Picabia and the others had all become artists with the passing of time, Duchamp’s works remained unacceptable as art. And, in fact, as you look from Duchamp to the light fixture (pointing in the room) the first thought you have is, “Well, that’s a Duchamp.” That’s what I think, and that doesn’t lead me to ask any questions. It leads me to the enjoyment of my life. If I were going to ask a question, it would be one I really didn’t want to know the answer to. “What did you have in mind when you did such and such?” is not an interesting question, because then I have his mind rather than my own to deal with. I am continually amazed at the liveliness of his mind, at the connections he made that others hadn’t, and so on, and at his interest in puns.

Would he pun when you talked to him?

He tried to every now and then. He liked it in conversation. He was very serious about being amused, and the atmosphere around him was always one of entertainment.

Would he talk to you about your work?

We really never talked about his work or my work.—Moira and William Roth (1973)

Another thing that Marcel used to talk about in those last years of his life, which recurred in his conversation—not with me but with other people, he would arrange it so that it came up. He’d say, “Why is it that artists are willing to let people look at their work from any distance?” And he, of course, was thinking of Etant Donnés, in which he obliges them to look through the peephole of the door. No one had thought, before he thought of it, of making a situation in which he would control the position of the observer, and for him to control, he who had been the one to remove control from art!—Terry Gross (1982)

One thing that was difficult for me to understand in Cadaqués was the attitude that Marcel had toward [Salvador] Dali. He admired Dali very much. Did you know that? The second year I went to Cadaqués Marcel asked me if I would like to visit Dali, and I said no. I was furious that all the postal cards in the local post office had photographs of Dali, and there were no cards of Duchamp. Poor Marcel. The next year, when I came back, he said, “I think you should visit Dali, whether you want to or not.” I said okay. So he made an arrangement, and we all went over to see Dali and what’s the lady’s name.

Gala.

And the moment I entered the house, I just didn’t feel at home. We sat in a large circle, and Marcel sat next to Dali; and I think it was outdoors in a kind of patio. And they served the pink champagne, and Dali talked all the time. Marcel never took his eyes off him. Marcel said almost nothing. Dali was perfectly happy talking as though he was the king, but the situation was the reverse, I thought.

Finally, Dali asked whether we wanted to see his painting. Marcel said, “Oh, yes.” And we went into his studio, and here was this huge painting, oh, four times the size of that wall; and Marcel proceeded to admire it. And it was vulgar and miserable.

After Marcel died, I was back in Cadaqués, and I was invited to a house where Dali was. We sat next to one another at a luncheon. I was searching then to see if I could find in Dali something that might have attracted Marcel; and I happened to notice his eyes were very beautiful. I don’t mean “beautiful” in the sense of being beautiful in themselves, but that they seemed honest, with some kind of transparency and even a certain simplicity; and that is the closest I’ve been able to get to an admiration of Dali.—Alain Jouffroy and Robert Cordier (1974)

What word would you use to characterize the artists in this show [William Anastasi, Dove Bradshaw, John Cage, Tom Marioni, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Tobey]?

Well, the word I would use, or the word I have used, is “non-intention.” That’s specifically what I would say. Bill Anastasi likes the word “dumb.” I don’t know what Dove Bradshaw says about her work, but of late she’s involved with things where the material itself is involved in physical change over which she has no control.

Which is another kind of “dumbness” or “blindness.”

It’s acceptance of the material, and the material is in flux. Tom Marioni makes actions, accepting the results of actions that are not in themselves produced with graphic intent. You might call it contingency, where he does the action and the drawing results from the action, but something else as well could result.

Doesn’t that resemble Surrealism automatism?

No, not quite that. It’s not psychological; it’s physical.

Mark Tobey was also involved in activities in which the mind was short-circuited, gotten out of the way. One of his ways of teaching was to put paper on the wall, have the students look at a still-life that he had made. When they were satisfied they could draw it from memory, he had them go and put their noses and their toes both in touch with the wall, and in that position, never losing touch, to draw what they had seen. And they of course couldn’t do it. So they suddenly became modern artists; the mind was no longer in a position to control. And he worked with all kinds of materials, different things, in order to arrive at results that weren’t in his mind.—Richard Kostelanetz (1990)

At what point in your compositional career did you begin to treat musical scores as pictures too?

That arose as a by-product. The intention was to make a notation that would recognize that sounds did truly exist in a field; that our previous notation had not permitted our recognizing this fact or even acting on this fact; that we needed other notation in order to let sound be at any pitch, rather than at prescribed pitches. In order to do that, it had to become graphic; and in becoming graphic, it could accomplish this musical purpose.

When this Town Hall [twenty-fifth anniversary concert] came up, sponsored by Bob [Rauschenberg] and Jap [Johns], through their energy and everything, they wanted to ornament this occasion in such a way that it would be prominent in the society of ’58 in New York. So they said we’ll have an exhibition of your scores. I had not thought of them as art. That they thought of them as something to look at was, of course, gratifying.—Irving Sandier (1966)

And it was music that out of its own generosity brought me back to painting. It’s not that I’ve given up music, but it’s that in the late forties and early fifties it became clear that there’s a physical correspondence between time and space. And music is not isolated from painting, because one second of sound is so many inches on tape. That means that the old metres of two, three and four are not longer necessary, and that space on a page is equivalent to time. Therefore, I began doing graphic notations, and those graphic notations led other people to invite me to make graphic works apart from music. And those led me in turn to make musical scores that were even more graphic, so that the whole thing is…I don’t feel that I’m being unfaithful to music when I’m drawing.—Ev Grimes (1984)

How did your plexigrams come about?

They were commissioned by a lady in Cincinnati, Alice Weston, who has a certain interest in both music and painting. She has commissioned Gunther Schuller to do work, and it was through her and her husband that I was made composer in residence at the University of Cincinnati. Then she got the idea that though I had not done any lithographs, I could do some. She asked me to do some. Marcel had just died, and I had been asked by one of the magazines here to do something for Marcel. I had just before heard Jap [Johns] say, “I don’t want to say anything about Marcel,” because they had asked him to say something about Marcel in the magazine too. So I called them, both the Plexigrams and the lithographs, Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel, quoting Jap without saying so. What I did was to subject the dictionary to chance operations and to use the I Ching with respect to a dictionary that had images, and to make a transition from language alone to language with imagery and numbers, and then as I say in the preface to all that, I think Marcel would have enjoyed it. I found a remark of his after I had done the work, that he often enjoyed looking at signs that were weathered because, where letters were missing, it was fun to figure out what the words were before they had weathered. The reason, in my work, that they are weathered is because he had died. So every word is in a state of disintegration.

How did you like that business of actually putting it all together?

Well, I didn’t do that work. It was done by Calvin Sumsion, I composed it. I wrote it. First we worked together, then I was able to tell him to do something, and then he would send back the work completed. Albers has used such methods—hasn’t he with his own work?—or he gives it to some craftsman to do. Those things. Many artists now, when they don’t know a particular craft, learn how to tell a craftsman what to do.

How did you like doing the lithographs and all that?

Oh, it’s very exciting, and it made me understand why so many artists become alcoholics, because when you put a blank sheet of paper into the press and something actually happens to the paper when it comes out, it’s so exciting that you just have to have a drink. Whereas with music, you can’t drink, because the occasion of hearing the music is a public one, not a private one, and the drinking all takes place after the concert.—Paul Cummings (1974)

And I am making etchings. I’ve been doing a great deal of that in the last five years.

Etchings…not of scores?

No, graphic work, in a sense bringing to that graphic work ways of working that came from music. And now I notice this piece Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras is responding to some of the ideas I got making etchings, to bring it back into music. That’s how these metrical passages developed. I had templates which were… I took this size of paper, and I made a grid of 64 by 64 on it to work with the chance operations. And through chance operations I cut the piece of paper, the full size of it, into templates. Those templates, of squares and triangles and such, are so that the points of the shapes could become sounds. Or holes could be put in the shapes to produce sounds. And shapes when, through chance operations, were put on the sheets, sometimes projected off that way or this way. Well, if it came off this way to the left, it would start one of these metrical situations going on the strong beat; and if it went off that way the right, it would start it off on the weak beats. And where it went off gave the pitch, because I had designed the paper to be completely sound. The reason these are so far apart is that the ledger lines of one instrument touch the ledger lines of the adjacent one. Then these will be the points inside or around the outside of the shapes and which of these possibilities you did was chance-determined, whether you were looking for the holes or the shapes themselves.

Do the etchings you’re doing have anything to do with Thoreau s drawings?

Yes they do. I made one series which was called 17 Drawings of Thoreau. I took, through chance, certain drawings of Thoreau and enlarged them through chance operations and so forth. But when I put them on the copper, everything was done so that the drawing would be clear. In other words, I was following the kind of advice that one would receive if one was moving toward high fidelity. Then, in a subsequent series, called Changes and Disappearances, I subjected all of those activities to chance operations. And the result is some of the drawings disappear, and some of them are only faintly visible, and so on. And then there is dry point, and I’ve learned to engrave. As that particular series continued, it moves from a kind of simplicity to quite a great complexity. Because I ask the question each time a plate reappears whether it’s mobile or immobile; and if it’s mobile, it receives a new image.—Andrew Timar et al. (1981)

Toward the end of the first day [in making a portfolio of seven prints called Seven Day Diary], I Ching chance operations were used with respect to two techniques—hard ground and drypoint—determining the tool to be used and the number of marks on a copperplate to be made with it. All marks were made without looking at the plate on which I was working. Lilah Toland kept count since I sometimes missed the plate.

What is the advantage of not knowing what you are doing?

It cheers up the knowing. Otherwise, knowing will be very self-conscious and frequently guilty.—John Ashbery (1978)

I was asked by a French editor who lives in Marseilles, André Dimanche. He makes a series of books; there will be fifteen. They’re called Edition Ryoan-ji, which is the name of the garden in Kyoto that has the sand and fifteen stones in three groups. He asked me to make a cover for a book of my writing [Le Livre des champignons, 1983] that they are publishing in the series. The paper that he has is about this size [ca. 9½ inches high, 18 inches wide]. I looked around the house for fifteen stones, and I simply drew around the stones at points determined by the I Ching. And I sent that result, which pleased me, to him, and it pleased him. That had fifteen drawings.—Press conference, Cologne (1983)

The drawings, I saw three of them yesterday at the gallery. Did you use rocks to make those?

Yes, they’re rocks in my collection of rocks. I’ve been using those particular 15 rocks for many years.

Are those rocks from Japan?

No, they are from all over the world and are here in my collection in New York. But there is nothing special about them, only that there are 15 of them. And that’s related to the number of stones in the garden at Roan-ji.

In Kyoto?

Yes. And I have another group of smaller stones that are 15 in number, and I have a group of larger ones and then (laughs) very large ones, that I use.

Do you do the drawings as contour drawings?

I work at a light table and when the light is on I don’t really see what I’m doing. I have the rock on the paper and I simply draw around the rock. But I can see a grid because there’s light. The grid of course is from the I Ching. There’s 64 horizontally and 64 vertically.

I think it’s fascinating that you use the hexagrams to determine the location of the rocks on the prints. Do you throw the yarrow sticks or coins to—

I used to but now I have it in the computer. Whenever I travel or go to a place to work, I have a stack of papers each one of which translates that number… I have them from 2 to say 225, and it translates that number into, what can I say…say 64, so that the number comes from 64 and then treats say 23 or 37 in those terms. For instance if you wanted to know if something is white or black, you would not work with 64, you’re working with two. White could be one and black could be two. So you turn to the page for two and if you had one it would be black and if you had one it would be white.

If you have a question involving size, then you turn to the page for size and the first number will give you the answer to your question.

So that what I’m doing is not using choice, but rather asking questions.

Thus chance operations.

Right. And in the case of the rocks, I have several questions. One is which of the fifteen rocks, and the next is which of the seventeen pencils. In some way of creating them there are six soft ones. There are two in the middle and then there are nine hard ones.

So there are various ways in which you can work. You can work by isolating a group of pencils, like that group of seventeen. Put close together. Or you could ask a question for each single pencil. And you’ll make one kind of drawing in the one case and another kind in the other.

But in terms of breaking up the space, is there some way that you leave that to chance?

Yes. I either take the whole space and belay it in both directions to 64, or I sometimes…there are two big prints, one is called the Missing Stone and another is called Seventy-Five Stones, and in both of those cases I made two grids, one above the other and they aren’t exactly above one another but a little off. In other words there are different ways of having grids. There are single grids or you can have a multiple grid.

Overlaid.

Yes.

So again each time you make a mark on the paper either with water color or the pencil, each time you circumscribe the stone, do you go through a random selection to see where that’s going to be in the grid?

Where the stone is going to be found by, there are two numbers. One would be the horizontal, which goes up to 64, so say I get 37, that would be fairly near the middle, and then if I get 62 it would be near the bottom.

Say the stone falls off, if I place it at the intersection of the two numbers, at that point, and say I place it…hold the upper left hand corner of the stone there… And say it falls off I can then take the intersection as having four possibilities. I can put it above, or to the left of the point, above or below. And in order to keep it in the space… You following me?

Yes… I think so.

If you let it go off, then another thing you can do, which I didn’t do in those drawings you have there in Santa Fe, or in the watercolors…another thing you can do is take the part that fell off and put it at the top. That happens in drawings by Jasper Johns. And sometimes I do it.—Simone Ellis (1990)

When I went to Crown Point Press, I took the stones with me. I began by drawing around the stones, as I had done for the drawing, but now on copper and drypoint. When we printed the result, it was absurd—absolutely uninteresting to look at. I worked for a week trying to find a way to print it that would give it a quality of being interesting, but it never became interesting. Then it occurred to me to have recourse to multiplicity, and so I multiplied fifteen by fifteen, which makes 225; and I drew around each one of the fifteen stones fifteen times, making three drypoints, which you see. When we printed them, they were immediately interesting. At least I think, and then people have told me they find them… We say, when we like a work of art, that it is beautiful; but what we mean is that it’s interesting, because the word “beauty” has no meaning other than we approve of it; the only reason we approve of it is that it keeps our attention. The reason they interest me is that I can look at them for a long, long time and I would never know the end of it; I see something I hadn’t noticed before. This is also the case for me with the work of Mark Tobey which I loved very much; so that these, in a sense, are my response to the work of Mark Tobey In another sense, all of my work is a response to Mark Tobey.—Press conference, Cologne (1983)

Would you say something about the prints you will be doing at the Crown Point Press?

I began last January making prints by means of fire. I’m building a fire on the press and putting the dampened paper on the fire and then rolling it through and then later also branding it with an iron, Japanese iron teapot, like the one you saw this morning. Now I’m going to continue that in a more carefully controlled way and use chance operations with respect to the time the fire is allowed to burn the paper. Having found out the least amount of time necessary for a print, and the amount of time it takes to destroy the paper completely, and then to use chance operations, finding out through them, how many seconds the fire should continue.—Ellsworth Snyder (1985)

On the interplay between art and music.

I think that this is a realization in music that is different from what music was at the turn of the century. It was then that music so greatly influenced the visual arts as to be the excuse for the turn toward abstraction; you recall, cubism and so on. All the manifestos spoke of music as having already accomplished this that was now being done in painting. I think that much of what is being done since 1950 in music is a response to this question you spoke of in the visual arts which was the response to music, and that the dialogue continued because the physical circumstances are different to bring about changes. So that music’s response now to the visual arts of the first half of the century produces a situation to which the visual arts must now reply, or may reply. I think it’s already involved film, for instance, in the use of a plurality of screens rather than one. That that is like music without a fixed score.

You see this can proceed in many directions. Not just, dogmatically, one. It can proceed—there is one film I saw at Montreal [at the Worlds Fair]; it was called Labyrinth. Now there was a case of several screens being used quite dramatically which I should say corresponded to a nineteenth century orchestration. So that one film related to another dramatically at special moments. And that if the films were not synchronized, fixed together, that the dramatic effect intended would not be gained.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

Could you explain the function of silence in your music compared to the “white page” of Mallarmé?

I’ve always felt very close to Mallarmé; and the book that was published posthumously, Le Livre, also is very involved with chance operations, is it not? I often think of him, though I haven’t studied Mallarmé closely. But one has the feeling of space in which a variety of things can be present.

But didn’t you say, on the other side, at least concerning your music, that there is no such thing like silence?

Right. There always are sounds.

Well, just in comparison to Mallarmé’s fear of the “white page”?

He had a fear of it?

In some way, yes, he had to write something on it at least—the fear of every author of having a white page in front of him.

Well, clearly, my silent piece doesn’t express that fear but expresses the acceptance of whatever happens in that emptiness. And the same thing was expressed by that empty painting, that white painting of Bob Rauschenberg, which I mention in the note which precedes [the article on him in] Silence. It saw that the white paintings came first and my silent piece came afterwards. And Mallarmé preceded both.—Birger Ollrogge (1985)

I’ve been trying to translate some of the aesthetics of your compositions to those of your visual art.

Could you compare Silence to White Space?

Well the first time it happened for me it was in relationship to the paintings by Robert Rauschenberg.

Oh the White Paintings?

Yes, the White Paintings. He loaned four of them to me once. He still shows those same four when he shows his White Paintings. The four white ones were four canvases that were the same size, and they were simply brought together. And I had them in my apartment where I lived at Grand Street and Monroe in the ’40s. (laughs) That was only 40 years ago! (laughs again)

Those white canvases were very much like listening to silence. Because as you look at empty canvases or white canvases, you see particles of dust, for one thing…or differences in the textures of the canvas. You see shadows. So that I spoke in my books of the work of Rob Rauschenberg as being airports for particles and shadows. A way of making emptiness visible.

Oh yes. The silence of the White Space isn’t silent, and before you make a mark on it—

Right right.

At one point you said, “I believe Time equals Space.”

Right?

So could you say that White Space equals Silence?

And the marks are somewhat like the occurrence of sound? The music.

Oh yes!

Right…(silence)—Simone Ellis (1990)

I thought it would be interesting to speak about the nature of silence in three different arts, one of them film. By that means, perhaps, we might get a notion of what the nature of the film may be.

My normal reaction to film, my everyday reaction to it, is that I enjoy all of it. Many people enjoy poor films. I, with them, am overcome by the pleasure simply of looking at moving images.

On the nature of silence:

You know that I’ve written a piece called 4′33″, which has no sounds of my own making in it, and that Robert Rauschenberg has made paintings that have no images on them—they’re simply canvases, white canvases, with no images at all on them—and Nam June Paik, the Korean composer, has made an hour-long film that has no images on it. Now, offhand, you might say that the three actions are the same. But they’re quite different. The Rauschenberg paintings, in my opinion, as I’ve expressed it, become airports for particles of dust and shadows that are in the environment. My piece, 4′33″, becomes in performance the sounds of the environment.

Now, in the music, the sounds of the environment remain, so to speak, where they are, whereas in the case of the Rauschenberg painting the dust and the shadows, the changes in light and so forth, don’t remain where they are but come to the painting. In the case of the Nam June Paik film, which has no images on it, the room is darkened, the film is projected, and what you see is the dust that has collected on the film. I think that’s somewhat similar to the case of the Rauschenberg painting, though the focus is more intense. The nature of the environment is more on the film, different from the dust and shadows that are the environment falling on the painting, and thus less free.

These things bring me to my thought about silence: to me, the essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention. As we might expect, few films follow silence in renouncing intention: when one looks at films (and I here lump together art films and Hollywood films) one sees that intention is almost never renounced. I think that the closest to the renunciation of intention—if we forget the Nam June Paik film which has no images on it whatsoever—would, in my experience, be through the films of Stan VanDerBeek, a renunciation of intention which is effected through the multiplication of images. In this multiplicity, intention becomes lost and becomes silent, as it were, in the eyes of the observer. Since he could not be looking at all five or six images at once but only at one particular one, the observer would have a certain freedom. However, even in this work of VanDerBeek, as in most dance, in fact, there seems to be an absolute unwillingness to stop activity, to renounce intention.—Cinema Now (1968)

On whether films must necessarily be “linear”:

It isn’t necessary. We see in the work of Stan VanDerBeek and others that it’s perfectly reasonable to have things going on at the same time that aren’t related, or as with the ONCE group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during their sixteen mm Festival. There something else appeared. It appears in my experience more and more. They discovered with that film festival that the films could be poor, but that the combination of them was not poor. Now this is very much what Bucky Fuller says when he says “synergy,” or what happens when we make an alloy of metals so that a strength comes from things that don’t have that strength until they come together. So that the whole question of quality which has been of such concern to the university —or to the whole question of education, to teach the good rather than the bad—is put in question because the bad if it enters into an abundant enough situation is no longer bad. In fact, it’s a little spicy.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

Another way to get the absence of intention that I spoke of is through the multiplication of films, the multiplication of intentions. This was done by the Ann Arbor group when they had a festival of sixteen mm films. Now, though each of the films was full of intention, the sum result was an absence of intention. And that brings us to our daily experience.

Yet in one film I have seen in the [Cincinnati] festival—[Stan] Brakhage’s The Dead, the one concerned with the tombs in the Parisian cemetery—I noticed that, at one point, there was something that looked like absence of activity—the point at which the camera moves behind the wall so that it couldn’t see what it had been looking at.

It may be a good thing for film to introduce this lack of intention, this silence. Or, perhaps it may not: such limitation would confine film to the medium itself, to film. It may be because of this potential confinement in the nature of film that filmmakers have chosen to present images that travel so widely into the world.—Cinema Now (1968)

I also liked Warhol’s films. I had an idea for a film myself, but I never made it, because Warhol had already done almost the same thing. My idea was to go to a pier in Brooklyn, to fix the camera there, facing lower Manhattan, which, seen from this spot, has a funny look like an island with water under the buildings. And then to film it from sunset from sunrise and to keep a number of images so that the film would last twenty minutes in all—a short. The night can then be seen in twenty minutes. That would have been very beautiful.

Do you have wishes on the subject of dance?

Thanks to technology, a ballet freed of gravity is conceivable. In spatial experiments, researchers often simulate the absence of gravity. That is what I think would be interesting to do in the art of dance. In my opinion, dance as practiced by Merce Cunningham is much closer to theater than what many actors do. Look at the writing of Antonin Artaud, in particular The Theatre and Its Double, and you will find this idea of a theater in which each event is centered on its own experience. Artaud has said the same thing: text must not be the center of theater. There cannot be any absolute center, rather a collection of phenomena that, once again, are each at the center of their own experience.—Jean-Yves Bosseur (1973)

Any experimental musician in the twentieth century has had to rely on painters.

Why is that?

Because the notation of music was like Latin, and any divergent use of it was like Protestantism, and you couldn’t expect the priests of the church to have any interest in what you were doing, because you were in a sense threatening the position of the whole Greek aspect of music, which is bound up in its notation, which is Greek to the layman. So, any lively musician—you just name them through the century—has had to go to poets and painters for friends.

But why have poets and painters been receptive in the first place?

Because they were the lively changers of art to begin with, and they did it by saying, “Well, look at music, music has done it already.” Music was abstract before we were. All the early documents about abstraction, cubism, and everything, refer to music.—Irving Sandler (1966)

[On the playing of his music as background during an exhibition of his visual art]

Don’t play it all the time.

Why, could it be disturbing? I don’t understand. If I hear two of your [music] pieces together, it is not disturbing to me.

At the Guggenheim Museum in New York, they always thought there was a close relation between music and art, and so they had music being played while we would look at the Kandinskys in their collection. I found it absolutely impossible.

What kind of music did they play?

The music that Kandinsky liked.

Cannot your lecture today be superimposed over your drawings?

I prefer the superimposition of things to be nonintentional, like the sound of traffic and church bells; that I can deal with. But when you play something which is from me, because you are looking at something from me, then you begin to make an intention.—Press conference, Cologne (1983)

Just now I mentioned Marcel [Duchamp]’s idea about ownership… Marcel Duchamp said, speaking of Utopia, that we won’t be able to reach it till we give up the notion of possession. And this work of Dove [Bradshaw]’s confronts possession completely… I was impressed by the difference between Rauschenberg’s empty white canvases and the monochromatic white works that Dove has recently made, which if you touch them—I didn’t do it—the pigment comes off. Not only is its nature in transition from within, but we can move it, remove it by contact. That’s not exactly the same as those years-ago, also beautiful works of Rauschenberg.

The white paintings…

And the difference is the difference between then and now. That then became beautiful for me by receiving dust. This now equally whiteness and emptiness is willing to give itself and to change itself, and without losing itself. So that then becomes a model for daily behavior because it is anti possession.

I look forward to our daily behavior on a global scale becoming Utopian, where we won’t have this hellish difference between rich and poor, and where ownership will quite naturally no longer be useful.

We’re confronting now in the very full way that [Bradshaw’s] work is itself working—the identity, not the separateness, but the identity of time and space. Of all the arts, certainly more than music, painting is fixed and is often rectangles, except for a few signs of revolt.

And a rectangle, usually horizontal, implies a narrative and a line moving. I love that movement when the chessboard rose up out of the amorphous ground and confronted you.

That’s real identity of time and space in the same fixed rectangle.

It’s happening both as time and space.

Such a change in a fixed way is done in a fluent, unfixed way by music.

Yes, and that complexity, that situation which [Bradshaw] constructs, we still can’t confront in any other way than to be confused. It’s in that confusion that we live and to enjoy that absence of security, particularly when security raises its head…it’s very curious but very true, I think, and very testing; it’s testing us in our tranquility.

Our desire that we ourselves be fixed and defined…

All of those things we need to give up. We’re being hit over the head by the need; it’s so clear… Most people now cannot believe that ownership will go… They believe that you should own a good thing rather than a bad thing. That just leads to more problems. They develop all these things seeking something that’s no longer spiritually available, namely fixity. Dove’s work is preparing us for a constant loss and a constant gain, and also of not knowing whether it’s good or bad.

The absence is left there by the [carbon removals] and the absence is what we see…. Your own championing of randomness and found sound, your concept of silence relates too, wouldn’t you say?

I would just take out the word “concept.”

It’s very interesting that [the] work[s] that aren’t fixed, but are changing through these chemical and physical means have led Dove to treat the floor as the canvas rather than the easel, like what Pollock did, to modify the action of gravity. But, as Dove has noticed, pools are apt to be formed on the surfaces…. And she recognizes this as something that works against what she’s actually doing, which is not doing anything. It’s doing too much of one thing, whereas she’s interested in an undefined freedom of action for the chemistry. Of not doing anything,—Thomas McEvilley (1992)

I mentioned before her involvement with materials that are in flux. Some of the more recent [works] are birds [originally done in 1969], and birds of course fly and have eggs, doing various things, and she thinks of the life of the birds and their activities as her work…by using birds as her materials. Not [as] her subject, but her materials. She would get two birds and put them in the gallery, and give them a place… To sit on a bicycle wheel—for instance, there will be two birds. The question is are they going to make love or are they going to have eggs? What’s going to happen?—Richard Kostelanetz (1991)