Los Carpinteros, "Bola," 2008. Photograph courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York.
MERRILY KERR: What brings you to New York?
Los Carpinteros: We’re designing the set for a ballet performance by Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. Using windsocks filled by fans, we’ll play with the drama of Rachmaninoff’s “Suite for Two Pianos.” We’re combining the technical and emotional, a bit like at the airport, when windsocks are the last thing you see before you leave the earth.
MK: How has the difficulty of traveling to the U.S. affected your work here?
LC: After 9/11, the interest in Cuban art calmed down because visas were impossible to get. So while our work kept developing in Europe, South America and Asia, we had to arrange our last exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery by email. When we do an exhibition, we like to touch everything, and this was too cold.
MK: If less of your work is handmade, will your name become meaningless?
LC: By now, Los Carpinteros is like a family name, so it won’t grow old. Originally it didn’t just refer to woodworking; we were acting as outsiders to the art scene, which made a lot of sense in the ’90s when censorship was an issue. We’ve actually been given a new label in a book project with Thyssen-Bornemisza coming out in May: Post-Industrial Craftsmen, which describes how we use industrial and prefabricated sources and craft them to our inventions.
MK: What do you still make by hand?
LC: The exploding rooms, for example, are still a labor of craft. Our work has always been about constructing, but for these we deconstruct a fragment of architecture making it both alive and static. When we showed a version of the piece in Prague in 2005, we didn’t want it to carry political overtones of the fallen Berlin Wall, so we decided to include furniture, making it unclear whether a storm or bullet had struck.
MK: Do you suppress politics in your work?
LC: We did our most politicized work in Havana when we exhibited a functioning lighthouse lying on its side in a dark gallery. We expected this symbol of fallen power to be censored, and were surprised when it wasn’t. Making political work can be addictive. They say that creation is an allergic reaction to reality. When you have a political situation you have a lot of opportunities to make political work, but we don’t abuse it.
MK: Do you consider how people from different cultures will interpret your work?
LC: It’s always a surprise. We try to choose the most polysemic, works. A piece might be understood completely differently in Cuba, South America, Asia.
MK: How does this apply to the humor in your work?
LC: It’s one of the most difficult things you can imagine to make a joke, especially because we don’t use human figures. Creating humor with cinder blocks, for example, is a challenge. We had an idea for a series of one-roomed hotels, which turned into a drawing illustrating an actual proposal in Athens to construct brick caravans to house gypsy families. The idea is heretical, but our work doesn’t judge.
Originally published in Flash Art International, no 270, March – April 2010.
For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine Felix Harlan & Carol Weaver printing Louis Bourgeois's 'Twosome', 2005. Photo by Johee Kim, courtesy of Harlan & Weaver
Felix Harlan and Carol Weaver met as young printers at a print workshop in downtown Manhattan. When it closed, the couple founded their own printshop with a rented press, inherited equipment, and a desire to push traditional techniques to meet the needs of contemporary artists. Now celebrating its twentieth anniversary, Harlan & Weaver is a well-respected, specialty workshop where some of the best-known young and established contemporary artists make prints, using a variety of intaglio techniques. Art on Paper’s Merrily Kerr talked with the couple in their bustling studio.
MK – How did you start out in printmaking?
FH – We met each other in 1980 in New York at Aeropress, which was run by Patricia Branstead. She had been Kathan Brown’s assistant at Crown Point Press in Berkeley, California and brought some of Crown Point’s techniques and professionalism to New York printmaking.
CW – Crown Point Press’s method, was to use standard etching techniques but keep the process contemporary by eliminating preconceived ideas.
MK – What was it like when you went out on your own?
FH – In the beginning, we rented a press, and also printed with Jeryl Parker, who was doing work for Parasol Press, including big prints by Donald Sultan. Jeryl would approach problems with a different kind of thinking, sometimes doing the exact opposite of what most people would do. Even the way he designed his aquatint box, which we now have, was unusual. When we moved here, it was with his equipment, which was a big boost. Working with Jeryl was kind of a bridge. Then we began to get jobs ourselves, and the business took hold, despite a downturn in the market.
MK – The market is strong now. How are things different?
FH – It’s a very productive time in printmaking in general in New York, particularly for etching. There are more possibilities now to publish and to show graphic work. Also, the potential of small letterpress, etching or litho shops is finally being realized. It used to be that printshops had to be large and offer every technique possible. There has also been a shift in taste on the part of people who are buying prints and in curatorial interest in specialized shops. Being a part of that shift, we feel a kinship with a lot of other printers in New York and around the country.
MK – At the same time, you’re a fixture on the Lower East Side.
FH – Twenty years ago, when we went out to look for a studio, the only space we could find in our price range was on the Lower East Side and it was small.
CW – At the time, we were friends with several artists who showed in East Village galleries, and they introduced us to the area and to other artists.
FH – In fact, back then, we met James Siena, who has been doing engravings with us for ten years, because he’s a neighbor in the building. He introduced us to Steve DiBenedetto and Michele Segre, so now we’re working with them. We mostly work with artists who live and work in the New York area, who can drop in and do something and then see it printed a few days later and do more work the week after.
CW – We have also stayed here because we were able to expand within the building, and because artists like the space, which has good natural light.
MK – What’s unique about the shop’s abilities?
CW – When we were younger, we strove to learn all the techniques. We were fortunate to have worked with some painters who wanted to do multi-plate color prints – technically challenging work.
FH – But we’ve continued to use fairly traditional techniques, which we customize according to what the artist wants. We rarely use photo processes or a lot of handwork after printing. The emphasis in this shop is on what you can do with the platemaking – how to alter the metal and then print in a very straightforward way.
CW – We believe that etching is versatile within every technique, whether aquatint, hard ground, or engraving. There is a myriad of ways of approaching etching, and we want to keep all the options open.
MK – Do you work with equal numbers of returning and new artists?
FH – I know there is an emphasis now on working with artists who haven’t been published before. There is a certain cachet about doing the first print, but I don’t think it’s all that important. I’m happy to work with an artist who has done a lot of prints and can bring that experience to the studio.
CW – We enjoy working with artists, young or old, over a period of time. There are artists who have returned many times, including Kiki Smith, Richard Artschwager and Louise Bourgeois. We published prints by Louise and Kiki for the first time in 1999, and we continue to work with both of them frequently.
MK – What will the next twenty years bring?
CW – We’ve always done contract work, but have more recently begun publishing more, which is where we hope we’re headed in the future.
For ‘Contemporary’ magazine Kutlug Ataman, 'Kuba', 2004, courtesy of Carnegie International, Pittsburgh
Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art is remaking itself from the ground up, aiming to become ‘a truly world class museum’ via its new building (opening in 2007) and recent curatorial appointments. Fresh from curating the 2004 Carnegie International, Laura Hoptman joined the museum’s staff this winter as a curator, bringing with her an ambitious, internationally oriented agenda. Merrily Kerr spoke to Hoptman about the New York art world, what she learned from the Carnegie International, and the New Museum’s new role.
MK – Will you bring your experience curating on an international level to the program at the Museum?
LH – With an important building under construction, a larger staff and a bigger budget, the New Museum is going to move to another dimension. I haven’t joined the staff yet, so I don’t know exactly what my parameters will be. But there is a gap in exhibition making here in New York City that can only be filled by a serious institution that concentrates on contemporary art. We have PS1, but it is a Kunsthalle, rather than a museum; of course, the big museums look at the contemporary, but not in the way that an institution that’s devoted only to contemporary art can.
MK – Is the Museum’s expansion part of a national trend of museum growth?
LH – Mid-sized institutions are creating a very important niche everywhere. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, for example, is the star institution for contemporary art in Los Angeles, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London is giving the Tate a run for its money, and the Castello di Rivoli in Torino is the best contemporary exhibition venue in all of Italy, bar none.
Over the past fifteen years in New York, we have witnessed the demise of the not-for-profits which left the commercial galleries with the task of exposing new art and artists, by organizing idea-based exhibitions that addressed trenchant issues in culture and/or visual art in particular. Times are changing. There is a new kind of energy being generated in mid size institutions which concentrate on contemporary art. They are more flexible, faster on their feet than the larger museums and as a result, have a stake in leading the discourse. And that, after all, is the ideal goal of a contemporary art museum; not to reflect, but to act and to make something.
MK – Will you consider what other art is being shown in New York when planning the exhibition program?
LH – Absolutely. My first job in New York was at the Bronx Museum in the South Bronx. It was a real introduction to community based programming and, in a sense, I haven’t changed at all even though I did curate the Carnegie International. By comparison, the Carnegie International and all big international exhibitions don’t really have a local community. Pittsburgh wouldn’t want a Pittsburgh oriented exhibition. So I was curating for an imaginary audience – the art world and the world at large. I found this particularly challenging and am happy to return to a more community based kind of programming, albeit in the savviest, most international art community in the world.
MK – You’ve said that ‘every era gets the art it needs – or deserves.’ Is there a new kind of art being made since you planned the International?
LH – I can speak with most authority on what I have observed in the U.S. Here, it seems that we’re still in a moment of apocalyptic uncertainty. Two or three years after 9/11, people were still searching for the reaction, but the self-questioning really began before that, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton and subsequent election of George Bush. I think the country changed. The way this change has been reflected in contemporary culture I think is one of the most pressing and interesting questions of the moment.
With the last Carnegie International, I tried to explore, with the help of the thirty-seven artists that I worked with, an attitude toward art making that differed from a kind of frivolity that had been proliferating, especially in New York City, in the late 90s and early 2000s. That kind of ease in the world is losing its relevance, though it’ll come back, I’m sure. It has been replaced by unease and desire to seize the power, whether it be in a spiritual or even supernatural sense, or through philosophy or even politics.
MK – Doesn’t the legacy of Pop still hold sway?
LH – Yes and no. It’s certainly not the only strategy for a relevant, politicized art. The last Whitney Biennial, quite wonderfully emphasized the Pop and post-Pop strain of contemporary art; the show was the polar opposite of the International, a fact that emphasizes the notion that there are many ways to define contemporanaeity. Whereas the Biennial was to me filled with art about our own backyard – racially, socio-economically and in other ways, the work in the International was about more macro issues like ethics, and spirituality. The International posited a different purpose for artmaking, a larger one I think.
MK – Reviews of the International were mixed. Were they fair?
LH – It is important to say at the outset that the Carnegie International hasn’t gotten a positive review in the New York Times since the nineteen eighties, and that all massive group exhibitions of this kind are naturally magnets for creative art criticism. How easy a target is a show that claims to sum up an entire world of contemporary art from one point of view?
That said, the breakdown of good and bad reviews for this last show were telling. European and Canadian publications liked the exhibition; so did regional papers like Philadelphia and Cleveland. The problematic reviews mostly came from the American newspapers. I think that this proves that there is a big gulf between what’s going on in the contemporary art worlds in Europe and American centers like New York; we have a very provincial streak here in New York, and what we look for in exhibitions might be different than what others look for. Our concern, or lack of concern, about some things is not necessarily translatable to Zagreb, or even to Berlin, and the universalist ‘us and them’ attitude that we can’t help but have here in the center of the art market is one that is not necessarily right. That’s why, to quote a friend of mine, I curate on the basis of need. I consider the needs of the people who are looking at an exhibition, as well as the needs of the artists, and most importantly, the needs of our time. That’s the ultimate aim; to do the best one can for the time one lives in.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Roni Horn, Cabinet of 2004, Special Project for Flash Art
They’re jarring, garish, disturbing and…they’re portraits of us. Roni Horn’s clown photographs are a departure from previous projects, more provocative than the stony-faced Icelandic woman in ‘You Are the Weather’ (1996) or the roiling surface of the River Thames in ‘Still Water’ (1999). Nevertheless, they’re still intended to make her audience reflect on its own response to the work. As Horn explained in a discussion with Merrily Kerr, the viewer’s experience is paramount, even more important to her than the aesthetic aspects of the photographs and sculptures themselves. Acting as ambiguous symbols, the clowns lead viewers to analyze their process of looking and the reactions that arise.
MK – In the book format of ‘Cabinet of’ you see the clown’s face one image at a time, while this project for Flash Art is arranged in a grid. How will the viewer’s experience be different?
RH – I originally conceived of it as a grid on one wall. When I had the working photographs up for the pieces I did with Dia, they hadn’t been color corrected or scaled, but that’s how I had them on the wall – going 12 feet up. I thought, it’s very harsh [and] really aggressive, but it has a quality that interests me. I’ve [also] installed it as a surround like ‘You Are the Weather’. Sometimes a work has more than one option in terms of the kind of relationship it can have with the viewer. Book form offers a very different experience than an ‘in the round’ experience. I’m interested in these differences. So I often work in dual forms.
MK – The viewer’s experience is the goal of your work, right?
RH –There is no other point for me. There is no other reason to involve an audience unless you’re dealing with the quality of the experience you’re putting out there.
MK – You’ve been quoted as saying that you don’t consider yourself a visual artist. Could you explain?
RH – The thing is, I prefer not to be anything, because then I keep all my options. Once I say what I am, then it’s like excluding everything else. So why bother saying it? I don’t think most of my work comes from the visual. It starts in a more conceptual realm and the visual precipitates out of it. Language is a big factor in the development of the work. It’s kind of pre-visual.
MK – Speaking of language, you often talk about Emily Dickinson’s writing in relation to your work.
RH – There is something in the way that Dickinson uses language that allows me to cultivate the idea of presence around it. And that’s what I’m doing with those objects [text sculptures]. When I think of language it’s an intangible form. Language is, to some extent, a philosophical device or mind device. It’s based in the need to express or communicate, perhaps, but there is this interesting amalgam that occurs in Dickinson that is both of language and of actuality.
She, for whatever reason, in a very isolated fashion, was having this extraordinary dialogue with the empirical – what was in front of her. Basically, I’m amplifying her implications. [It relates to] that idea of language in Jewish culture which is really a substitute, in part, for not having access to the graven image. So there is an element of that in where these pieces come from. They are views in a room. What I mean by that is that when you look at it, you have to enter another space to have that experience. And that other space is the vertical dimension of what it says and where that takes you. In the sense of your understanding where that takes you. And that is all yours.
MK – Does ‘Cabinet of’ challenge viewers to look for the experience instead of musing on the clown imagery?
RH – ‘Cabinet of’ is a kind of self-portrait, definitely. But, it’s a self-portrait of the person looking at the work. And that’s the way I see it. Clown is just a metaphor for mirror. Because what a clown originally functioned as was an amoral symbol enabling viewers to imagine themselves in these roles or to understand their own morality through the clown figure, which was a kind of symbolic form. You could say it’s a generic portrait of humanity or you could imagine it as a self –portrait of the viewer expressed through the clown image – these are the same thing.
Basically, the clown thing isn’t what interested me originally. Not historically [but] more in the idea of appearance. The clown is not about actuality. It’s the opposite, it’s of appearance; it’s a symbol. And the cloud, all it is is appearance; it’s moisture and air. Now this isn’t very interesting to me to break the thing down that way, but really, the two objects are immaterial realities. One in the fabric of nature and the other in the fabric of humankind, but both functioning exclusively through appearance. They have no other life. So that was how they came together. ‘Cabinet of’ came out of that and that obviously is connected to ‘Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ the film. It’s again, not literal, but every cabinet is an interior of some kind.
MK –Your work requires viewers to have a degree of self-knowledge. Are people able to be that self-aware?
RH – I have to work, in a way, with these assumptions about my audience. Because these are the things I value and seek to embody or activate. I think a lot of people won’t. A lot of people will see an object and they’ll go on to the next show. It’s about individual character and what moves you. I think the work acts more as a mirror for one’s limitations or one’s potential. I’m not trying to educate, I’m not trying to communicate or impose my morality. This is what I have to do.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine
In nearly five years as art critic for the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz has written over 200 essays on art exhibited in New York. A selection of these appears in ‘Seeing Out Loud,’ a book that Saltz calls a ‘core sample’ of art seen in the city. Whether he is musing on the state of the art world or examining exhibitions by artists as diverse as Kai Althoff and Norman Rockwell, Saltz never shies away from making his opinions known.
MK- How did you determine the book’s contents?
JS –I kept most of the one-person reviews, a few of the two persons, and most of the museums. Like a lot of people who make things, I hope I’m getting better not worse, so I put the more recent reviews first. My deepest fantasy is that my work could be like desert island reading, where you could dip in and out over and over.
MK – Your writing is self-aware. Do you think that’s an important part of what criticism should be?
JS – I want subjectivity, subjectivity, more subjectivity. I think that’s all there really is. There is no one rule that says ‘Rubins is great’ or ‘Rubins is not great.’ I think it’s all a matter of taste. I write what I think, but I hope that plugs into a bigger, shared feeling so it’s not just some cockamamie nut, running around going, “Oh I like this; I hate that.” To me an ideal review has an opinion in every sentence – some temperature. I hate it when I don’t know what a critic thinks.
MK – Are you unusual in that respect as a critic?
JS – It’s strange. Only in the art world do people say, “Why write about things if you don’t like them?” You would never say that to a restaurant critic or to a sports writer, “Write about the Mets, but only say they’re good.” I think critics let everyone down, especially artists, when they don’t share a strong opinion one way or the other. Frankly, that’s the situation we’re in, and I think that has to stop.
MK – You’ve written that the critic has no power. Can you explain?
JS – I don’t say this to be a provocateur, but art critics don’t have true power. Theater critics have power; they close shows. Art critics can’t do that (Although I sometimes wish we could). If something I write curtails a sale, I’d like to think that those collectors shouldn’t be buying that work anyway. If a dealer backs off you because of what I write, then something’s really wrong with the dealer.
MK – Do you need an eye to be a critic?
JS – Everyone has an eye, and everyone, I suppose, has a voice, so anyone can be a critic. But only a few people can be good critics. For that I think you do need a good eye. But you also have to write clear, entertaining, jargon free prose; you should never take anything for granted, talk down to the reader, or think you understand everything you see. Art is about experience, not understanding. In a sense, it is beyond words. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from trying to put what I see into words.
