Douglas Witmer
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Wednesday, July 06, 2005
interview : linn meyers
The following interview is the result of several convergences, and was first published in three sections on Fallon & Rosof's Artblog beginning on June 20, 2005. I have been casually contributing to Artblog for a little over a year now. Last month Roberta Fallon inteviewed the artist J.T. Kirkland for the blog. I liked the way it came off, and wrote her to tell her so. I also suggested they start "commissioning" their artist contributors to interview other artists. The "artist interviewing artist" format rarely fails for me. Roberta and Libby wrote back and said, "go right ahead." I wrote back to them and said, "okay...some day."I first saw Linn Meyers' work in 2000 at George Billis Gallery in New York. The work wasn't on exhibit, but rather just sort of sitting around in a side room. Linn's processes related very directly to some work that I was making at the time. I think there are sometimes you can really see work and sometimes you can't. That day I saw it. I knew her work and had known her work. I put some info about her from the gallery in one of my desk drawers when I got home.
Several months later, I was somehow mysteriously on Linn's personal mailing list for exhibition announcements.
After getting a few exhibition cards, I wrote Linn what classifies as a piece of fan mail...just a supportive hello. We e-mailed 5-sentence messages maybe 3 times over the next few years. We were in the far back reaches of each other's minds.
I missed her opening this past spring at Margaret Thatcher, but did get to see the exhibition. And then I realized we would actually have the chance to meet in Philadelphia for her Gallery Joe exhibition. We had a nice chat, and then I remembered my Artblog carte blanche in my back pocket. I approached Linn with the idea of the interview, and she was game.
We had the conversation mostly over e-mail, with a few short phone conversations. Linn was extremely generous with her time and attention. And Libby and Roberta pushed me hard in a good way to make effective edits to the text. And then they put a great polish on it.
For my uses here, I have joined the three sections, and have also taken out subheadings that Roberta added for their purposes at Artblog.
DGLS--How did you arrive at the direction of the work you make?
LM--Up to my third year in college there were only a couple of pieces that I did that really mattered to me. I still have one, it's a painting of the sheet that divided my junior year studio from the other students' -- painted in chiaroscuro on a found piece of wood. Very renaissance, which isn't surprising, since I taught myself how to draw by copying pictures of old masters' drawings.
When I was in my final year at Cooper Union in 1989-90, I was doing some magical realism -- mostly involving landscapes. I remember thinking that the images should make the viewer feel out of balance -- the idea being that if one feels physically out of balance it will sort of wake you up to your internal world. Of course, most of those paintings were only moderately successful.
When I moved out to Oakland, CA in '91, the landscape paintings I was doing ended up being read as relating to "The Environment." At the time it seemed that everything was being understood in terms of one's political issues. My mentor, Dennis Leon, suggested I examine why I was using the landscape genre at all in the paintings, and that question lead me to eventually drop the horizon, which had become an artificial device. The resulting paintings, which lacked an identifiable perspective without the horizon line, became more abstract. But of course, I was still thinking of them as landscapes!
When I got back to New York in 1994 I began to let go of the few remaining references to nature that still existed in the compositions. The paintings became more about mark-making at that point, which was a big breakthrough.
At that point, I was also interested in doing away with illusion, which had come to seem like another insincere device. Unfortunately, when I finally got to the point where I was making paintings that had no illusion of space or light, images that were mostly just repetitive marks, I found that I didn't like them! I sort of hit a road block at that point, and I floundered around for a while, making things that now seem rather decorative.
Eventually, while I was on a residency at The Bemis Center in Omaha, NE, my work made a leap. I was given this huge beautiful studio in which to work without any interruption. It was winter in Omaha. And I was lost. Somehow, I ended up doing these system-based pencil drawings that lead me onto my current path. I drew small, individual squares; each square was connected at its corners to other squares. They looked like fishing nets rather than grids. As I inhaled, I drew a small square, and then as I exhaled I drew another. I tried to slow myself down. I guess it was a response to being in solitary confinement in Omaha. Rather than breathing faster to try to speed up the whole thing, I slowed everything down and became incredibly focused. It was amazing. Since that point, most of my drawings have had some sort of system behind them. And they have mostly had something to do with time.
DGLS--I’m particularly interested in what has lead you to focus on drawing.
LM I think it's the immediacy and directness of the medium. There's never a moment when I am forced to turn away from the picture I am making, (to mix paint, clean a brush, etc.) A pen feels like a direct extension of my body, so there is less of a partition between my work and me. I also just love the feeling of putting a rigid point (the point of a pen) against the hard surface of the Mylar on the wall. There's a lovely resistance between the two materials. "Resistance"--that's also something that I love. And its absence.
This all sort of loops back to those ideas I had in the late 90's. I've found that for me the way to really wake myself up (and hopefully the way to wake up the viewer as well) is to be deeply focused while I am working. Rather than looking to make an image that is out of balance, (as I did back in the late 80's and early 90's,) I am seeking balance. Or examining the way it comes and goes. Appreciating the temporary loss of balance at times.
DGLS--You work with a very defined set of approaches to mark making. Any of these approaches, in the accumulative way that you employ them, feel to me like they could go on forever. I'm interested in finding out how you come to define the beginnings and ends of these processes resulting in a finished work.
LM--Usually the drawing that I am [at work] on will give me an idea for the next drawing, and I usually start another one before the first is finished. Sometimes I have a whole list of ideas that I want to work down.
So I'll roll out a piece of Mylar that size, and get started. Sometimes the drawing works the way I expect it to work. If all goes as planned, the composition develops within the margins of the cut Mylar. But sometimes in the middle of a drawing I see something developing that needs more space, and I will go beyond the original size by splicing another piece of Mylar to the first piece, or by overlapping the first piece of Mylar on top of another piece. There's one drawing on my website (I think it's the 4th one down on the portfolio page) where I started with one piece of Mylar that was about 42"x62", and I ended up adding 5 more pieces that size. That drawing ended up being 10 ft x 11 ft. It just needed room to breathe.
It is important to me that the images have a clearly defined ending. Because they are pattern-based, I always fear that they will look like wallpaper if they don't have defined edges. Where the drawing ends is where it ends -- I don't want them to be understood as fragments. They are defined periods of time.
DGLS--What is a typical day in your studio like? What work patterns do you find yourself falling into? Are there activities in the periphery like music, reading, family, etc?
LM--My studio is in a building behind our house, so my commute is only about 150 feet. I have always had a hard time getting started in the morning, though.
When I used to rent a studio that was separate from our home I found it easy to get there but more difficult to get started once I arrived. I would usually spend an hour or so reading when I arrived.
Nowadays I start by clearing deskwork and answering or sending e-mail. Then I walk out to the studio (I sometimes pull weeds or poke at the plants along the path as I go out there,) and read for a few minutes, and then I begin to draw.
I have a hard time listening to music while I work because many of my drawings require that I count, and the music creates a weird distraction from that counting. So I usually listen to NPR, or work in silence. I screen a lot of phone calls.
Once I get going, I can usually draw for 1 and a half - 4 hours without taking a break. When my hand or my eyes get tired, I either spend a little time reading or I come inside the house to check my e-mail or get a snack. My workday is generally from about 9 to 4:30, weekdays. Two or three times a week I get back out to the studio at night for a couple of hours. Sometimes I sneak a little time in over the weekend.
DGLS--I assume Agnes Martin comes up a lot when people talk about your work. There is a superficial visual relationship. And it seems there is a shared reverence for nature. But when you were describing the development of your work from "landscape" early on towards the abstraction that you currently make, what immediately popped into my head was Jackson Pollock's famous quote: "I am nature." And then in your description of your work, I found myself thinking of the films of him working outside and what an incredibly even rhythmic meter there was to his movement in those films. Shifting back to your work, I thought about the album cover of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures." It features a graphic recording of the light pulses from the first discovered pulsar. Then the idea of your work as a graphic recording of the "emotional tremors" constantly happening within came to mind. And then I said to myself: "inner seismograph." How does this strike you as it relates to your work?
LM--I LOVE THAT!! As far as Pollock's quote, I sort of believe in the inter-connectedness of everything and everyone. "Everything matters," to quote the Gallery Joe exhibition title.
As far as Agnes is concerned, you should know that I do love her work. There are many big differences. One difference that I think is undeniable is that she was attempting to make paintings about pure joy and I can’t do that. When I draw I am interested in recording the full range of human experience: chaos, love, insecurity, joy, etc.
DGLS--Let's talk more about the idea of "resistance" you brought up. Obviously it's something quite physical for you when you are working. The term "excruciation" comes up in the essay from your recent Margaret Thatcher Projects catalogue. I scoffed a bit when I first read that word. But hearing you talk recently about the actual duration of time it takes to make some of your lines, I begin to understand. You need a certain dexterity to perform your work, and there is a bodily expenditure of energy, which may result in fatigue. A magic marker line doesn't exactly record you starting strong at one end and ending weak at the other like a pencil line might.
LM--RESISTANCE. I love it.
When I make the gravity drawings the resistance is minimal; it is mostly a matter of being present and simply mastering the technique. I tape the Mylar to the wall, I stand in front of it with both of my feet flat on the floor, I place my hand/pen at the top of the page, and I draw a straight line by harnessing the force of gravity. Then I do it all over again. The gravity guides my movement, so the only real resistance is the tip of the pen against the paper (and the side of my hand dragging downward against the Mylar.)
About a year ago I started making the horizontal line drawings. There's A LOT of resistance there. First of all, it's totally unnatural to draw a horizontal line. Agnes Martin did it with a straight edge, but doing it freehand is another story. So then you've got the drag of the pen and the hand, plus the resistance of my body to obey the rules. It's very exciting. Every moment is like a suspense movie.
The word "excruciation" or excruciating is not really in my vocabulary. I like my drawings to challenge me physically. It's another way of being awake. Maybe it can be "excruciating" for some people to look at them.
As far as the variation in marks: I think there is probably a lot of variation. Some of it is hard to see for the reason that you already stated -- pen doesn't show that sort of thing as much as pencil does. But the distance between the lines is one way of seeing the variation -- it think you can actually see moods in there. It's almost like an amateur reading Tarot cards though -- one doesn't always know what one is looking at. I'm not sure I can even really re-trace my steps in my own drawings.
DGLS--So you were working to get "decoration" and "illusion" out of the work. But there seems to be an incredible illusionism to some of the recent work, which you seem to be really going with. Can you talk more about how and why you allow this?
LM--As far as the illusion in the cube drawings...that started by accident. I had been making drawings with parallel lines, usually two blocks of parallel lines separated by a small gap. I was taking them down off of the studio wall one day and stacking them on my work table, one on top of the other. The cube thing just sort of happened by accident at that point, and I liked it so I pursued it further. For many years I had avoided the moiré patterns that occur when two or more patterns are layered, but for the first time, with the cube drawings, I felt that that event was working to my advantage
One of the things that I like about those pieces is that they seem to depict discreet objects, but they really do not do that at all. They are simply sets of parallel lines.
I talked before about the edges of my drawings and how important it is to me that they not seem like a fragment of something larger. Well, with the cube drawings, they really are separate from any thing else around them.
I love the way those pieces float through the exhibition space at Gallery Joe. I don't think my other works float. That's something I need to think more about
DGLS--I think it's kind of funny that you so flagrantly break the fundamental rule of Drawing 101: fill the page! But back to illusionism. But I can't help thinking looking at some of the recent work, particularly the ones with the more "billowing" images, that you are going for the illusion from early on in the process. It doesn't seem to be a by-product. When you say that in the end the works "do not depict discreet objects" I think you are right in the same way that one could say that all representational painting is abstraction. (Which is to say that I think some of the works DO, to a greater or lesser extent, depict discreet objects.) I wonder, what does allowing (cultivating?) this strident illusionism mean for you at this time? Or maybe I'm seeing something you're not seeing?
LM--First of all, I am aware that certain sets of rules (that I use in my drawings) produce certain effects. But the drawings are not composed, which is to say, I may know that the dots are likely to create a billowing effect, but WHEN they billow, or WHERE, is not something that I can anticipate.
On the same subject, I have, over the past few years, made peace with the fact that many people who look at art often allow their minds to draw references within the images that they see. This is something that we learn to Judge in art school, I think.
One of the best comments that I ever got about my work was from a woman who came into the studio who had absolutely NO art education. She kind of gasped and said, "Oh, are these pictures of the wind?"
Next, what's really funny is that I never even thought of that Drawing 101 rule! Honestly. I must've missed that class.
To me, talking about “discreet objects” and talking about abstraction don't necessarily belong in the same paragraph. They are two separate subjects that have an intersecting area.
I know that my work falls into the category of "abstraction" by default, but I really don't think of my drawings as abstract. (I know you've heard this argument before elsewhere, but I cannot help myself.)
DGLS--What I understand is that in this instance you are referring to the image that is produced, not the drawing itself, as the discreet object. So I guess that comes back to the idea of resistance/tension. And now it's not so much purely visual anymore. It has to do with one's mind and perception of what is real. Right?
LM--You got it. But the bigger question remains, (and I have no intention if having either of us tackle this one,) "what is real?" And that loops back to my point about my drawings not being abstract.
DGLS--Given what you have just said, what would you say is the word or phrase you use describe your drawing?
LM--I wish I had a word or phrase to define the drawings that I make. I've been searching for a precise and brief way of describing what I do, but I haven't come up with anything. I like the word "direct." I really DO NOT like the word "obsessive." I think it is inaccurate. And I don't think "abstract" gets to the point either.
I certainly do not make "Minimalist" works. However, maybe they are "minimal" simply because they are rather distilled.
On the one hand it is frustrating to not have a simple descriptive phrase that applies to the work that I do, but on the other hand, those categories can be so misleading, maybe I’m lucky not to fit into any of them.
6.7.05 