Interviews, Issue 8

Amy Sillman

Dysformation

Words RACHEL HAIDU

“My whole impetus in making art, making work, writing, drawing, is to function as a kind of combination bricoleur, flâneur, voyeur, radish farmer, auto mechanic. To take parts, and with my labor, remake a strange new language” (Amy Sillman, 2020). As a way of introducing her practice as one that switches between so many modes and surfaces, perhaps fusing them to build something new (bricoleur), perhaps growing silent small underground crops (radish farmer), I’ve asked her a few questions about her past, how she came to round out her work as a painter with writing and teaching. Since she was in the midst of writing an essay for Robert Rauschenberg’s catalogue raisonnée when we spoke, and since he, like her, grew up in response to the glories (and eventually harsh critiques) of abstract painting, I thought I’d also ask about how she, as a notoriously perceptive and persistent art viewer (voyeur) tinkers with her painting, especially given her recent forays into printmaking and other aspects of reproduction that have been imported, layered, and ultimately made into her painting (auto mechanic).

RACHEL HAIDU: I thought we could start by talking about movement in the simplest, most literal art-terms: how does a mover, a visitor or guest, fit into your conception of a show? I’m asking that as broadly as possible but also thinking about your show at Gladstone Gallery, “To Be Other-Wise,” which was one of the most talked-about shows of the summer.

AMY SILLMAN: It started out just thinking about how people walk around in a gallery, once I started to show in those kinds of places. Earlier on in my artmaking life, before the mid/late ’90s, I was not showing that much in public. So I mostly made smaller things, and intimacy was a big question for me, like “Can we still find intimacy in painting?” — a medium that was so fraught with critique and strategy. So, during that period in my work, it was just basically all about the privacy of my room. But when I started to have more public shows, a major discovery for me was realizing that I had “viewers” and that I should think about how strangers might move through spaces.

RH: That’s so interesting to hear you say, and it makes a lot of sense. One of the reasons I feel that I can write about you is that you profoundly conceptualize your exhibitions and think of exhibition space so intensively. When you started exhibiting publicly, what kind of things shifted for you?

AS: Well, I think two things, one is the scale, and one is about creating a sense of inner motion and restlessness moving from one thing to another that are not all the “same.” Regarding scale, it was just a question of how to make bigger things that work in space, so from the beginning, I was thinking of keeping on making intimate things but then stringing them together to create a bigger, expanded thing, or something that is revealed slowly over time. And then, in terms of the restlessness, I always wanted to make shows that SHOWED a motion, and E-motion, a gamut of feelings from one thing to another, and a collection of different kinds of things together that kind of defy a narrowed field. So I started to think about how to “stage” an art show—like to have big things and then oppose them with little things. Also, there were always formal changes in my work, according to what was going on in the world or in my own life — personal or political events, aesthetic and critical ideas. There’s always a dialogue between the world and what your life is doing. But from the beginning, I was also personally really close to poets and video-makers, and I loved how, in their fields, there were logics to work with that were not available in painting, because they just weren’t struggling with the kind of critical intensity and big market forces that painting was undergoing. And anyway, all along the way, and for many reasons still, painting is such a “bad” area.