February 1971
Frank Bowling talks to Larry Rivers
[PICTURE]
Larry Rivers, Me and My Shadow 1 [1970], 79" x 71 1/2" x 24 1/2", canvas, photomontage, plastic and wood construction.
Frank Bowling: Larry, before your things went up to the gallery, they were all around the studio, I among others, was in and out. Recently it occurred to me that perhaps your work is about "common seeing." The question with common seeing - as an example, your preoccupation with black faces - is not so much, it appears to me, an investigation of the "shape" of Negro features and its relationship to all other heads, but rather the particularities of seeing through something like a camera. What kind of seeing do you think you become involved with when you are working?
Larry Rivers: In certain instances I have an idea for a translation of what I see three dimensionally into two dimensions. Sometimes I take from a photograph, sometimes I trace, sometimes I project ... so what these images do under those conditions will determine what I'm going to take from them. In other words, if I take a photograph and project it, it gets larger - certain parts of it ask to be sort of taken out from their general context to represent what is there in totality. For instance, take lips. I've always thought to myself that in order to make a pair of lips I have to investigate the line between the two lips more than anything else. If I'm lucky enough to get something that goes on between the two of them, it seems to speak for the upper lip and the bottom lip.
FB: What is line? Does it describe space?
LR: Line is like the division between one and the other ... it is the beginning of one and the end of the other.
FB: Is that space?
LR: Sometimes it goes so far as to actually ... not describe space, but it begins to tell you what is happening. You can make as much space out of it as you want to.
FB: You can make the line as long as it is broad?
LR: Well, the line between the two lips begins to be ... on the top lip it's the point at which the top lip goes in and meets the bottom lip which already is beginning to sort of move out. It's like two curves.
FB: The two curves, that's more of a concept. The curve is something different from the line; the line is really the fact.
LR: Yes, the curve is something that you sense and each one would sort of do it differently. But the fact, it's true, is more objective. I mean, we can say more about it and agree, and know what we're saying.
FB: I started to pin down "seeing" as opposed to corporate symbols that everyone knows ... The camera seems to provide the means for a kind of total objectification, where the eye does not. The eye does better in concept but not in fact.
LR: I understand you, but what does that lead us to?
FB: It possibly pushes us back to common seeing. Do you feel that objectification - making a thing more accessible by making an object of it - and common seeing are so separated that it creates confusion?
LR: What do you mean by common seeing?
FB: It is related to the eye ... there are as many possible variations of what a thing is as there are eyes, yet objectification as process denied this. I don't really want to touch on your art in terms of advertisement and all that well-known stuff. I mean, I want to talk about seeing. The shape of Negro features and its relationship to all heads is not an art idea, it's a philosophical or an anthropological thing.
LR: It is like some objective fact. If you would separate each feature you would befuddle everybody. I had a day where I tried to find what would constitute a Negro person's lips. If there is anything the average person thinks distinguishes the "European" face from the African one, he would say the lips ... the Africans have bigger lips, more sensuous lips. I spent twenty-four hours looking through magazines and just cutting out lips; separating them from the rest of the face, from the nose, from eyes, from color, from shape of face ... and I could not do it. I had a man whose photograph I kept for five years. He as an East African. That man's lips, if they weren't African lips ... I mean, there were no pair of lips I ever saw that were African when I took them out of the context of the face. Do you remember, I put them on a female Vogue model's lips, and no one was able to say to me, "Where do those lips come from?" They looked perfectly natural. I've been trying for years to do a painting of a Negro person, take all the features and transfer them onto a pink background or what we call a white person, and I've never been able to do that test. White people probably think I'm nuts, black people think I'm insulting ... I tried to do that with the Identification Manual.
FB: A thing which is structured differently for every individual seems to lose its many facets when you nail down the particularities seen through the objective - I mean through the device of a camera. Common seeing is ruptured by the camera, which proceeds to "objectify" that image. The process of identifying, the "investigation" or the building process in art -is that kind of seeing different?
LR: Yes.
[PICTURE]
Larry Rivers, Black Olympia [1970], 78" x 41" x 34", mixed media.
FB: Now that you've wrestled with that, I want to ask you about the use of certain words in criticism. In Beyond Modern Sculpture Jack Burnham says, "Rivers has consistently created fetish figures."
LR: But isn't fetish some sort of aberration within a certain culture?
FB: I've been checking out the word fetish. Here is what I got: religion, sentiment, acts of religion, idolatry, canonization, sacrifice, holocaust. It apparently also means pictures.
LR: Critics and people in general don't seem to realize that an artist can only talk about a work he made in a certain way, either out of prudery, self-consciousness, pride, or whatever word that seems to cover whatever one is embarrassed by. On another level the work may really be about something that you would just like other people to discover ... That's there just as well. Lamp Man Loves It can look like it is about a simple myth of black man's virility in a sexual situation with a white woman ... and I read that thing to you the other day, from Fanon. The subject, if you want to carry it further, is really quite serious and can go back to slavery and make one understand what is going on all the time. I mean, would you ever have though that I, in doing that work, though to myself: in order for a white Christian to be able to behave toward another thing he knows is a human the way he did toward a black who was supposedly a slave, he had to make him something other than human - he had to make him into an animal or an object in order to make him a slave.
FB: I would have thought that people like Marx and Freud cleared all that up anyway.
LR: This work, you can say, is some kind of final personification of the guilt of this white man, in having to make the black man an animal by saying, "Well if he is closer to an animal, he is much better in bed." It's as if, if he is much better in bed, his notion of him as a beast is true and therefore he can continue to behave the way he did toward him. That's a very serious accusation ... Now, it's contained in the work I call Lamp Man Loves It. On the surface it would seem like a fucking simple dopey funny Pop thing. Is it Pop? Has anybody who's gone into any of these works thought that I do like that? No! I mean, I would ... if I started to say something like that, I would ... I sound as if I'm the most serious thing since Albert Schweitzer!
FB: So in effect, this work, among others in your recent show at Marlborough, cannot be assessed, judged, and hence evaluated in formalist or literalist rationale.
LR: You could look at it that way, I'm that too ...aren't I? ... I had to put it together, I had to use plastic, I had to use wood. It looks as if I had a great interest in that part... I did. But underneath it there is also something else going on in my thought. The same with this work that I did on the Black Olympia, or I Like Olympia in Black Face, that title we had made up. Did you notice what happened in the show, it was Black Olympia ... but at any rate, it is a work which on the surface seems to be about Manet or something about now and the change. Let's see what a subject matter that comes down in the history with a white whore and a black domestic ... we'll make the whore black and we'll make the domestic white ... let's see what it looks like. But no one talked about it that way, no one went into that ... Why? When I did Washington Crossing the Delaware, it took about seven years for people to finally come around to the fact that maybe I did something that was the beginning of something else. Because of Pollock and everybody's preoccupation with a certain kind of abstract art, it just seemed like something that fell down in the middle of nowhere for no reason. It's the same thing that think is happening now ... Maybe my work just seems to fall into the old-fashioned idea of subject matter, and so they don't see yet that it requires anything new from them in talking about it.
FB: Quite, which brings me to -
LR: I still want to say one thing. Now, you know, the show we've done called Objects of American History ... in the context they are going to see the works, it's going to be just the opposite; it's going to be like a hammer blow, which isn't completely the intention either. They will only examine it from the point of view of ... oh, a slave ship, and what is meant as a slave ship ... and then nobody is going to look at the structure, at the ribs, or the way it's made.
FB: An appreciation of any new kind of art comes about in one, or all, of several ways. A couple of these could be a reaction against current taste or perhaps some compromise with current taste. Everyone was talking about black art a little while back; it is now clearly a dead issue.
LR: Just when I'm getting interested in black art you want to bury it ... treachery!
FB: Why don't we talk, say, about Pop art. I have it fixed in my head that it all began in London with people like Kitaj ... the catalyst for that kind of image came directly out of your work, for instance, The Last Veteran, the first one you ever showed publicly. What is your feeling about that, about the ways any kind of new art comes out?
LR: There could be a third route. Like the guy is so blotto about what is going on that he's doing something that doesn't come out as a reaction. I've been pretty steady about the fact that I may like what we call primary-shape sculpture and everything like that, but I always felt that in some ways I had to do something else ... it has to have a certain lift for me. I had to touch on something in life, I suppose. The work is the work, and I know it is - and I know it only exists as a work - but it has identification with certain things we've gone through, visual memories, etc. I don't know if my things are against current taste. I don't know if there is such a thing as current taste any more ... in the museums, in the universities ...Where?
FB: Wherever art is being made, shown, discussed. I don't mean there is a tyranny, but it has to do with the issues discussed. The discussion runs through everything; for instance, is there such a thing as Black Art? Your relative position forces this question. After all, there is this Texas exhibition ...
LR: I don't know ... would you call it? ...I would say the blackest white art I've seen, in the sense I've inundated myself with information.
FB: Is art about information?
LR: In my case it is in many instances. It is like a distillation of information. I get a hold of this, of that; I read that ... You know more than anybody else the time I've spent ...It's getting on for two years, doing this work. It has probably embarrassed more black painters who have been involved with cubes and squares. I would think that Jacob Lawrence, suddenly, if he saw this work, wouldn't know what the hell has happened. The only thing is that you find that because of my experience "prior" to this work, the manner, the abstract actuality of this work just looks different.
FB: Prior experience...are you also talking about political positioning, activities, consciousness of injustice, white supremacy?
LR: Well, look, I did a map of Africa before it was connected with this particular work. So you could say that it was all about the fact that Clyfford Still's work looked like maps to me.
FB: How much influence has Still had on your work?
LR: Not very much. It suddenly seemed as if a map was an absolutely valid move to make. I also think that my experience in jazz, the number of black guys who have filtered through my life from time to time, gave me some ideas. Whatever I would do on this subject would not just be an interesting idea ... it came out of the fabric of my life.
FB: Well, back to language.
LR: Black language has a wider attraction, the lines of communication are so varied ... But that's political ... Governor Rockefeller goes down on the East Side and eats bagels, he has spaghetti with Italians. This language thing has an appeal, it attracts students, but I don't think anyone owns it. We use it at moments for better or for worse, we just try to see what it can do for us.
FB: This seems to work as well in making art - the way you tackle anything to turn it into your kind of magic.
[PICTURE]
Larry Rivers, Throwaway Dress: New York to Nairobi [1967], 45 3/4" x 78" x 3", oil on canvas and wood construction.
LR: That's something else, that's a translation. I don't think one can get that into art, that's a pretty fancy idea. As yet no one has come along and employed that language. When they do, like Walter Jones, it's mainly out of belligerence: it's as if while whitey was looking at it, he was going to get a lot of shit thrown at him ...
FB: There is a lot of painting going on now ...
LR: Really?
FB: Yes, painting with paint. But that's only one aspect of what I mean by current taste.
LR: Well, it takes a certain strength, for instance, for someone like William Williams to ... when he walks over to his studio ... to sort of obliterate all that ever goes on in his mind through being black; knowing him as little as I do, it's quite a strong thing in his life. I mean being black is not just something he has like a lollypop; he is responding to it daily in a very strong way. Yet when he gets into his studio he doesn't want it ... it takes a certain kind of strength and he has to be admired for it.
ARTS MAGAZINE / April 1971
Structure of Color at the Whitney
For one hell of a long time now, a body of works has needed a body of literature to go with it. This is why, after viewing The Structure of Color, an exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker, I had to get the catalogue. For apart from accepting that Mrs. Tucker "knows what she likes," the show seemed purposeless.
If as Mrs. Tucker contends, Joseph Albers uses the square as "only the dish I serve my craziness about color in," what is Frank Stella's twisty-twirly "plain" geometry doing or, at the opposite end, William Williams' irrational bars of color, whose only geometrical logic is forced by the dominance of the rectilinear format to which he sticks?
The most mysterious and evocative painting in the show [Ad Reinhardt's black Abstract Painting ] is roped off cheek-by-jowl with not the best example of an artist who has produced a body of work which, though uneven, has greatly influenced a group of young painters whose art is essentially a response to color. Quite the opposite of Reinhardt, who one might say without apology, drove painting into a cul-de-sac. We don't need words. As Reinhardt made clear: "No colors ... Colors are barbaric, physical, unstable ... cannot be controlled" and "should be concealed" [quoted from the catalogue]. Look at the art I ask you! Where do you go from there?
The rest of the essay and the artists' statements in the catalogue are tautological, justifying the dismissal of the occasion as just another excuse to show the same old paintings. This game is surely given away by assertions about an exhibition's basic premise being the questions paintings themselves raise about the nature of color. Color in painting is different from any other kind of color because of the transcendental and evocative nature of the position which painting finds itself in, as a first-order activity in our society. The day man decides that painting, like philosophy, is not helping, but perpetuating the choking emptiness, all will be burnt and then, perhaps, we will all be able to breathe again - and perhaps see. Until then, exhibitions like this show that people [painters] are trying, and Mrs. Tucker ought to be thanked along with the Whitney Museum for letting us know. [ Feb. 25 -Apr.18]
FRANK BOWLING.
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