vija celmins & the artist's process
my mind kept coming back to vija celmins today
I was remembering how she described her process before I could picture a work. I chased up this art forum article and this piece on eflux and jotted down some things that stuck with me -
on how paintings don’t function the same as photographs, even if closely copied
I choose an image because it attracts you to a painting. But a painting isn’t a window. A painting has its own reality.
time which separates the mediums
My tools are like hours, and it becomes a real part of the work. Whereas in photography, it’s instantaneous, and then you pick which image.
the process is the primary point and the works are a record of the process
This work is a record of examined + intense looking, something internal from me to it, and something said back to me. A relationship, an opening of some innocence and a disappearance of time in its making. In the work I like best, these qualities remain.
I was then reminded of this exercise I’d do in my sketchbook, a sketch from life. then a sketch of that sketch, and a sketch of that one and so forth. I was interested in the ‘slippage’ between the two, like the author writes
For Celmins, copies are never perfect, just as repetition never yields precisely the same results. The slippage, however minor, between two nearly identical images is the space the artist has explored her entire career, and undoubtedly accounts, at least in part, for her interest in working with the same image more than once, in repeatedly starting over.
note to self to come back to idea of copying as being (optimistically) generative & something about the artist as the machine
that is all for today folks
Privileged to see her retrospective at the Whitney with John and Elizain NY eliza later interviewed her