David Humphrey Studio Visit
TJ: Can you just tell me a little bit about your year in Rome and how that was for you? What was that like for you to leave also? I feel like you are such a scintillating person in your environment and I always think of you in New York. And I wonder what it was like for you to leave…
H: It’s really hard to leave. It’s hard to tie up every little thread, in fact insurance policies accidentally went away. But it’s a wormhole into a parallel reality. And, in some ways it’s a wormhole into much more studious engagement with place. It’s so focused on Rome and Rome is such a pile up of histories and stories. That was very absorbing. The academy is filled with scholars who have special perspectives on this place. It really was a kind of romance with the place. Now I had already felt that Rome somehow embodied my method—or at least what I hoped for my method to be—which has to do with kind of collage, intersections, pile ups and mostly what they call spoliation: the reconscription, the converting of one person’s monument into another, spoils. So the was really my trophy.
TJ: And were you painting the whole time?
PS: I painted all the way through it. I can’t only absorb, it becomes like an indigestion, I get mental indigestion. So in order to process all the new information I have to be making artworks.
TJ: And who were you in conversation with while you were there?
PS: There were a lot of people and each one was compelling in their own field. There were other artists. There were architects, scholars of all kinds, composers. And each one was addressing the city in their own way, but then also trying to navigate the sort of reality show, mental hospital environment of collective living.
TJ: And you guys were all housed in…?
PS: Yeah, it’s like a palazzo, and our studios were there and very civilized dining area and there’s a library—a really great library—gardens. So it’s a sanctuary.
TJ: And how’s it been to come back?
PS: It’s nice to be back and it’s difficult to be back, because you really get used to this very simplified process of taking things in and making work in that environment. But that happens here, it’s just that here there is so much more, many more demands on your time.
TJ: I want to talk a little bit about the book. That’s sort of a good opportunity for the readers to get to know that side of what you do. I just picked up one of my favorite books again, which is the writings of Smithson, and I was reading Jack Flam’s intro and how he talks about the writing in relation to Smithson’s work. And just looking over the book I was thinking a lot about writing, obviously in relation to that part of your practice, but also in relation to your work. And I was wondering if you could talk about that first and then also about the book itself specifically?
DH: About the use of sources?
TJ: Yeah, source or about narrative. I mean they seem so intertwined: your practice of writing and the way you construct your works. At least in my view. And the sort of like open-ended proposition is like such an underlying structure…
DH: Yes, I haven’t really thought about that so much, except that I find that when I’m in the middle of making work in the studio, it’s very source-sensitive. I like having lots of sources around that I’m hybridizing or breaking apart, or reconstructing or just addressing, or maybe even re-presenting in the work. And so, that the activity of making art is kind of a lens to other art and other images in the culture. And I find that when I’m doing my writing, that it has that effect on reading. When I read, I read with this sort of roving attention to the possibility of ideas sparking off of the reading into the writing. And so there is a sort of source-sensitivity there that I think is analogous. I guess making the book is a little bit like making a painting, in the sense that it’s pulverizing my own practice. At least this particular book, as an anthology, is sort of a remix.
TJ: I know that some of the writings in there are some of the works that have been published in magazines. But some of them seemed more diaristic in tone.
DH: They are all published. Everything in there… it’s kind of the history of whoredom. I was paid for everything in there. So, even the diaristic things—and I know the one you are thinking of—there’s a couple that are, but that one was for the Stanford Humanities Project special book on crowds in the 20th century, and it was looking for anecdotes about crowd experiences, and so that was where that particular one came from. And I think there was another that I think was from Meaning magazine. Because Meaning magazine over the years would query artists on certain topics or subjects. So, those weren’t things I was paid for, but they were things that I was solicited for. And I guess, in a way, I kind of think of it as related to the work thematically in that almost all of the writing are occasions in which I am officially and thoughtfully addressing somebody else’s gesture towards spectives. And so that’s where the blind handshake idea originated, it’s that this sociability between artists and spectators, who never seen each other, but have this encounter through the agency of the work, and that writing is a way to really take that seriously. Or to play with it, because sometimes those solicitations are a solicitation to play. I guess it’s like the conversational aspect of it. That there are unexpected turns: that the work will take your thought in the act of writing to areas that you wouldn’t have gone otherwise, but which in some ways illuminate something about yourself along the way to try to get something straight about what’s there in the work.
TJ: And so how would you hope that people would (9:20?)… of the magazine approach?
DH: Well, I hope that reading is somehow analogous: that there’s all these chains of sociability that run from my relationship to the artworks to the reader’s relationship to my writing. That these are other, sort of, consequences: that there are other solicitations in the writing to kind of engage conversation. That hopefully the writing had some kind of independent relationship to … the same kind of independent relationship it has to readers, it has to the works. That the whole thing is underwritten by a certain chaotic freedom to read it in all kinds of different ways.
TJ: This is kind of a personal question because in this last couple of years I have been writing a lot. And it’s definitely changed the way I think and work on my own work, would you say that’s …
DH: Yeah, it does. Often times I’ll choose things to write about because I intuit that I am going to sort something out that I want to think about or that I’m trying to think out in my own work. So it’s an opportunity to do that. And I’ve been lucky that my editors over the years have given me the freedom to write about whatever I like, and often times I don’t feel compelled to write about the most successful, the most important, quotes, or even the work that I love the most. It’s really the work that kind of sparks the possibility of some thinking. I’ll write about work that I’m not sure about. I don’t even know what I think yet. But I know that at the end of the writing process I will have gone somewhere. So, a lot of my writing was for the magazine Art Issues, in the 90s, LA magazine. And they allowed me to develop this format in which I would review three different shows, which I would try to shape into some little curatorial shape. And so, that was great because then I could link shows based on some maybe not so obvious thematic, that then in the process of reviewing them would become clear. Maybe that’s not such a personal answer.
TJ: No it is, it’s perfect. You’ve had a long relationship with both painting and writing so I would imagine that it’s changed over the years. Questions always reflect what someone is thinking themselves, because it’s recent for me, but I imagine it’s sort of worked its way into your process?
DH: I don’t suffer in the studio, I love being in the studio. And oftentimes if I have a writing gig, I will work on paintings and drawings with just the greatest joy because I’m procrastinating writing. So it’s good for studio. Because I just hate the process: I suffer so much. I love what it does to reading. I find that my reading is much more acute and hungry when I am in the middle of a writing project. And I love having finished writing, I love the last polishing and editing, and even more though, having written. But goddamnit, it never really got easy and I’m always at the edge of retiring.
TJ: Did you write while you were in Rome at all?
DH: No. I wrote the acknowledgement to the book, and I did a lot of work on the book, but it was all cut and paste. And it was all editing, shuffling, image gathering, which is like writing, but no, I didn’t write a word. Thank you mommy. Thank you daddy. But I was a full out student and I know that the writing I do after Rome will be irradiated by all these classical studies.
TJ: Can you talk a little about these paintings? Because I was really interested in what you said about hybridizations of different forms, which has been a part of your work for a while, but there’s a lot of love, there’s a lot of lovin’.
DH: Well, I guess in terms of intersubjectivities, like if the book is a solicitation to intersubjectivities, along the lines of blind handshake, that a lot of themes in the paintings are ways of dramatizing that. And in Rome there were so many images of predation and interspecies dramas. And I wanted to use those as a way to allegorize intersubjectivity, like what happens between people, like either being undone, or states of love, or kind of anxieties of lost boundaries. And in some of the paintings they become fused or hybridized in this sort of mutual defining. That’s what it is: they are sort of defining each other through their difference.
TJ: They toe abstraction: like there is so much abstraction in them. I mean, that’s what I’ve loved about your work so much. The line is so taught between the two, and I feel like the emotion and also these sort of obscuring of certain features has really pulled that even tighter. It’s really amazing.
DH: Well, I hope that when they drift abstract that they pick up the possibility for either some kind of subjectivity, or even their very blankness acts as some container, or that the image is becoming unraveled or undone under the pressure of something.
TJ: Yeah, that open endedness is sort of like proposition, like I was saying earlier. That’s really hung from these.
DH: Thank you. I’m trying to introduce gesture into the paintings more than I ever have, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to stage gesture so that it’s not just a gratuitous exercise of the artist’s “specialness,” but that somehow –
TJ: Gawd forbid!
DH: -- Yeah, God forbid! I know!
TJ: Are you going to recognize the sort of dramatic narration of the inanimate parts of the paintings, like the plants? That’s something that you’ve often …, and I’m very partial to that.
DH: I guess in a way, if there’s often a kind of dramatic binary between protagonists in the picture—two beings encountering each other—there’s almost always an analogous one between the protagonists and their place.
TJ: Yeah, it’s like the field and event definitions get really blurred.
DH: Exactly, exactly.
TJ: I’m glad these are in the book. When are you going to show them?
DH: Soon. I’m sorting it out. It’s been great coming back from Rome and just looking at the work and trying to sort out what I did there. And to finish things that I started there. To maybe start a couple more, to sort of consolidate and get perspective on that. I kind of gave myself freedom to roam and experiment, and so hopefully now it will all come together.
TJ: Yeah, and act out for a while.
DH: I love somehow these histories: for instance I had loved Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture when I was a student. I thought it was one of the great books, and I hadn’t realized that he wrote it while he was there. And Rome is just like the living manifesto of that idea.
TJ: My parents played a festival in the ? Mountains a couple years ago and I went with them for the first time to Rome. And I remember just looking through probably about half a mile of space and seeing that (19:45?) that you were talking about. It’s so unreal, it’s like you forget the future when you are looking at it. It’s like remembering the past actively, you’re like embodying a layered reality. I don’t ever feel that here.
DH: Definitely not. It’s hard to think of a single place in Manhattan where you have a couple thousand-year-old objects piled on top of… like seamlessly objects traveling…
TJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
DH: I guess the idea that the book is hoping to enact a couple of things, but one of the things that I hope it also makes palpable is the idea that writing can exist as part of studio practice. That drawing, painting, making things, is entangled with words and that that tangling can have a sort of beautiful, productive character. That the book, in all of its mad, unexpected design, thanks to Jeff Kaplan, tells that story. And, is an exhortation to take it further or for other people to sort of engage it and do their own version.
TJ: I’m glad that you say that, because I feel like never more than the present have artists been solicited, for example, to talk about their work and to represent it in words, and there is still this sort of reticence to acknowledge that that is ok somehow. And that just seems like such an antiquated AbEx sort of: I’m gonna rat-hole myself in the studio and not come out.
DH: And I share some of more traditional ideas; that the artwork disables language or that it gets around language or finds something that is either under it or is, I guess I already said it, but is demolishing it. And I even write about that in the book, so in a way that very aspiration is entangled with language because there is a sort of a struggle dance between image and text that I think is analogous to some of these interspecies dramas.
TJ: I feel like there is also, in terms of structural language parts, you seem to play with those in the language of painting too. Like when you talk about the gesture, that makes a lot of sense to me. Like the affect that is preverbal, and then these narrative parts that exist in the realm of more linear descriptions.
DH: I guess that’s where abstraction makes some sense, in that there are moments in the painting where the paint is untransformed. That it still has its material character or that it’s in some process of dissolution or … abjection? No, that’s too strong. And that the very process by which those elements become a picture or representation is part of the story in the painting. And I think maybe this has to do with their slightly anti-skill, anti-expert, sort of crudity: that they want to kind of play at the edge of failure.
TJ: Yeah, that you are extending that possibility as part of your handshake.
DH: Right, and maybe it’s a problem because sometimes people will look at them and see the open endedness of them or the unfinishedness of them and they’ll think “Well, I would do it differently. Oh you did this, but maybe…”
TJ: But to me, when I talk about your extension, that’s part of them for me is that willingness to extend that possibility and allow people tread on the territory that creates like a venn diagram overlap for them in their understanding of it.
DH: I hope! It’s a risk but it’s an invitation to participation. Like, it hopefully says come on in, play with me! I don’t have it all sorted out and maybe you can help me. I guess that’s the argument for making wounded paintings: “please!”
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