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Interview with Colson Whitehead

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- 4 views

Interview with Colson Whitehead at The Rumpus:

Rumpus: Do you ever think about what kind of writer you want to be? Or what you want to accomplish with your career?

Whitehead: I try to challenge myself. With Zone One, which borrows from horror movies, it’s a challenge to figure out this form—what I want to keep and what I want to throw away. So I want to keep growing as a writer. I find myself doing unexpected projects and sort of challenging my idea of where I am in my career, or what I’m supposed to be doing. In fact, I’m not supposed to be doing anything. Just finding projects that are challenging to me. I want to be a writer who keeps growing and figuring out new things and hopefully people will follow me along as I publish these things.

Rumpus: You have written about your interest in horror movies, especially your love of George Romero and Night of the Living Dead. Why do you think zombies are so compelling to us?

Whitehead: I don’t know why other people find them interesting, but for me they are a way of talking about how I feel about people. So zombies are a rhetorical prop for me. Elevators are a rhetorical prop for me in The Intuitionist. They allow me a certain way of talking about how I feel about myself and other people and strangers and people I love. So the various different ways that Mark Spitz encounters the living dead in Zone One provides different ways of looking at what it is to walk around the world. So the way I wrestle with monsters is what made me write Zone One.

Rumpus: Would you ever want to write a movie?

Whitehead: Yeah, I like movies. I’ve written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I’ll work for a couple months on this idea that’s been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I’ll just go try a novel because it’s a lot easier. That’s what I know. So why am I killing myself?

Rumpus: Did you always want to be a writer?

Whitehead: As a kid I was reading comic books and Stephen King and it seemed like writing stories about werewolves and superheroes would be a pretty good gig. So yeah, I watched a lot of movies, read a lot of comic books and writing movies or writing comic books, like writing Spiderman would be a really great job. I thought that at a really early age.

Rumpus: You write a lot about technology in both novels and essays. How do you think technology will affect literature?

Whitehead: I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it’s sort of crappy now. It’s always just you and the page. That doesn’t change. In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there’s still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn’t change. It’s just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn’t affect what I write.

Sean McFarland

Sean McFarland, “Cloud Opening and Mountain”, edition 1 of 3, 11 x 14 inches, polaroid photo, 2011

From KQED arts :

Sean McFarland is a rare thing: a photographer with a studio practice. Having long explored unconventional methods in photography, his current show, Viewshed at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, showcases his range and talent. The show is large, and features two distinct, though interrelated, bodies of work: his extensive Pictures of Earth Polaroid series, as well as his current endeavor, Dark Pictures, begun in 2008. Both groupings picture Western landscape as a thing both alien and cerebral.

The Pictures of Earth Polaroids are the largest grouping, at twenty-three images. The Polaroids depict natural scenes, most often shot from above, ranging from the bucolic (waterfalls and crop fields) to the catastrophic (explosions and tornados). The outdated format evokes nostalgia for the medium as well as the landscapes; the rolling hills are gradually disappearing alongside the light-sensitive emulsion of the instant photographs that picture them. The Polaroids also create a sense of detachment from the viewer; at 3.25 by 4.25 inches, the unique images are too small to be seen clearly, and feel less like photographs than private windows into parallel worlds. And here is the best part, saved for last: While some of these photographs where indeed taken in the field by McFarland, most are images of images -- miniature simulacra -- taken in the artist's studio. In McFarland's work, it makes little difference which is "authentic;" both capture the fiction of a distant American West.

McFarland's most recent body of work, Dark Pictures, is in some sense, anti-Polaroids: large, dark, and detailed images of foliage too dense to see through. Though they might easily be mistaken for unexplored forestry in a national park, the images were actually taken in controlled city parks, gardens and lots within ten miles of McFarland's Mission District home. These are man-made landscapes, developed for the sake of urban beautification. As in McFarland's Polaroids of existing photographs, you wouldn't know it.

While both Pictures of the Earth and Dark Pictures engage an element of fiction, the photographs give away no easy hints of their own construction. There is no trash peeking from behind the dense foliage in Dark Pictures, no trace of the artist's hand in re-photographing source material for Pictures of the Earth (the explanation is available to the curious viewer, but does not appear alongside the work or in its title). Instead, the images in both series are beautiful and uncanny, and never eclipsed by self-satisfaction in their making.

Steadfastly refusing to flatten landscape photography into irony or anachronism, this California-born artist has been garnering steady success. In 2009 he won both the Baum Award and the John Gutmann fellowship, both for emerging American photographers. With this show, along with a concurrent book being published (in an edition of one hundred) by Land and Sea, titled Pictures of the Earth, McFarland has established himself as a distinct and memorable voice within contemporary photography.

Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman, Untitled (1958)
10.125 inches square, enamel on linen. Collection SFMOMA.

“I’m not involved with any kind of art movement. I’m not a scholar, I’m not a historian. I just look at it as solving problems and working on the painting and the visual experience.” Robert Ryman

lo-fi version of GIF posted by shrimp

Bad Painting circa 1978

James Chatelain

James Albertson

Joan Brown

From New Museum:

"The freedom with which these artists mix classical and popular art-historical sources, kitsch and traditional images, archetypal and personal fantasies, constitutes a rejection of the concept of progress per se. . . . It would seem that, without a specific idea of progress toward a goal, the traditional means of valuing and validating works of art are useless. Bypassing the idea of progress implies an extraordinary freedom to do and to be whatever you want. In part, this is one of the most appealing aspects of "bad" painting - that the ideas of good and bad are flexible and subject to both the immediate and the larger context in which the work is seen."¹

“A show of so-called ‘bad’ paintings and drawings by fourteen artists who consciously reject traditional concepts of draftsmanship in favor of personal styles of figuration…In keeping with the museum’s policy of showing new and provocative work by living artists from throughout the United States, ‘Bad’ Painting raises several controversial issues about the nature and use of imagery in recent American art. The artists whose work will be shown have discarded classical drawing modes in order to present a humorous, often sardonic, intensely personal view of the world. Although for the most part they are well known in their own communities (they are from such diverse parts of the United States as Detroit, Chicago, Sacramento, Madison (Wisconsin), Houston and New York) their work has not generally been seen in New York." According to Marcia Tucker, The New Museum’s director, ‘Bad Painting” is an ironic title for ‘good painting, which is characterized by deformation of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and its rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste.” - from The New Museum Press Release

¹ Tucker, Marcia. "Bad" Painting. New York: New Museum, 1978.

Experiment in Yellow

LisLis

Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman
Untitled, 1961
oil paint onbristol board
12 x 12 inches(30.5 x 30.5 cm)

In Rio's stream

Vallejo Nocturno 2012 - ocean sand

Ryman on Video

Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman, “A painting of twelve strokes, measuring 11 1/4" x 11 1/4" signed at the bottom right corner,” 1961

Out of an interview (Ryman):

I came from music. And I think that the type of music I was involved with—jazz, bebop—had an influence on my approach to painting. We played tunes. No one uses the term anymore. It’s all songs now, telling stories—very similar to representational painting, where you tell a story with paint and symbols. But bebop is swing, a more advanced development of swing. It’s like Bach. You have a chord structure, and you can develop that in many ways. You can play written compositions and improvise off of those. So, you learn your instrument, and then you play within a structure. It seemed logical to begin painting that way. I wasn’t interested in painting a narrative or telling a story with a painting. Right from the beginning, I felt that I could do that if I wanted to, but that it wouldn’t be of much interest to me. Music is an abstract medium, and I thought painting should also just be what it’s about and not about other things—not about stories or symbolism.

You don’t think of meaning?

There is a lot of meaning, but not what we usually think of as meaning. It’s similar to the meaning of listening to a symphony. You don’t know the meaning, and you can’t explain it to anyone else who didn’t hear it. The painting has to be seen. But there is no meaning outside of what it is.