From: Interview with Petah Coyne

Interview with Petah Coyne
Review, November 2005 issue
2,734 words

Petah Coyne
October 7, 2005-January 8, 2006
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kansas City, MO

Hanging dried resin-coated fish and frayed hemp rope from the ceilings of her New York studio was a compulsive pastime for Petah Coyne at the beginning of her artistic career. In 1987 Coyne established her public emergence as a sculptor when she completed a six-week summer residency at the Sculpture Center with a mystical swampy installation that filled the gallery. In this exhibition, hay sacks were strung up to conical bundles of inverted trees and fabric to create standing forms reminiscent of primitive dwellings.

Following this key exhibition, Coyne has varied her sculptural materials throughout series that are defined by their distinctive groupings. Her sculptural materials have ranged from branches to wire, from shaved car hair to human and horsehair, from plaster Virgin Marys to black sand and oil, and from wax birds and flowers to mud. Her sculptures are commonly suspended from the ceiling, but she is also know for leaning and hanging pieces on the wall, or creating free standing sculpture. In 1991 she began exhibiting her black and white photographs, to discuss motion by using lingering shutter speeds.

Though her work has been shown throughout the United States and has been written about by prominent art critics such as Eleanor Heartney, her works have also maintained visibility in Kansas City through exhibitions at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery and articles by Keith Davis and Elisabeth Kirsch.

From September to November 2005 the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is participating in a traveling retrospective organized by Douglas Dreishpoon (curator of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York). This retrospective offers a valuable and fresh insight of Coyne’s career by featuring works from her prominent sculptural series as well as new work and photography. Before giving her Artist Talk at the museum, I was able to meet with Coyne for a moment and ask a few questions about the work she has created throughout her successful career.


Amelia Ishmael: How does it feel to be the featured artist of a traveling retrospective of this scale?

Petah Coyne: It gives you the opportunity to look back and to look forward at the same moment—which I think is a really beautiful gift. To see similarities, but also to see changes that you really want to occur in your work. It allows you to see your strengths and your weaknesses. It also pulls a lot of things out of different collections that I haven’t seen for a while because they’ve been across the country. To see them in relationship to the new work is a real treat.

AI: Is this one of the largest retrospectives that you’ve had?

PC: Yes. This is actually the first time that we’ve mixed all of the different periods together. We’ve had lots of traveling exhibitions, but they’ve always been a certain body of work—like all the hanging wax, or maybe there was an exhibition of just the very dark sand pieces.

AI: This oil piece [Untitled #634 Largest Oil Piece], did it use to have a really fragrant smell?

PC: That’s right, it doesn’t any longer. There’s a hole inside there that’s a metal container, and that used to hold used car oil. So it really was smelly—which I really liked because I love working with certain smells. But oil creeps, and by the end of the exhibition I could see it. It crept up the wall [of the piece] of the inside. What I didn’t want is to have it creep all over the whole piece. So instead, what we did was we took it all out, and we cleaned, sanded it all down and gave it a fresh coat. Because I wanted it preserved as it was. The oil would have eaten away at the piece, you know, over a long period of time. So that’s what we did, and it’s still called Big Oil.

AI: Has the experience of this latest retrospective created a new impression for you of the work that you have accomplished over the past 18 years?

PC: It is humbling, because you forget how much work you’ve done, and I work all the time. Also, a lot of people had seen different periods—like they’ve seen the hair, or the black sand, or the wax—but very few people have known it was one artist.

AI: What do you think is the most popular series?

PC: Oh, you’d be so surprised! People leech onto one period and that’s what they like, and they’re convinced that’s the only good period, but there’s no one period that wins out over the others.

AI: It is, because I’ve heard so much about the candle pieces!

PC: And some of the people only like the hay, and some of the people only like the hair, or the hair only creeps them out. And that only reinforces the idea that you just have to follow your own vision, and you can’t listen to anybody.

AI: Your usage and shifting of materials is one aspect that separates you from many other artists. The variations of materials, and their combinations, seem to define each new series. How do you decide when it is time to redefine your materials?

PC: It seems to be every four to five years. It takes a two-year incubation period where you’re just working with the materials, but your not producing anything. Then you shift and your finally able to control them, work with them, and use whatever properties are good. At that point you are able to make very vulnerable pieces, and pieces that are stronger—maybe pieces that are really finished. It’s really hard to shift, because you could just produce, and you could get known just for that, but I’m bored by that point.

AI: How do you find the materials that you want to go to next?

PC: Well, like this material over here [Untitled #695 (Ghost/First Communion)], do you know what material this is?

AI: Is that the shaved car hair?

PC: It’s the shaved cars. What I often do when I go to a lecture, I always ask the graduate students to take me somewhere unexpected that they find fascinating. This one student took me to a place […] where they totally dismantled everything, like locomotives… everything. And it was miles of piles that would fill this room of just, like bumpers, or stuff that you didn’t even recognize. It was just, like, debris. They were strapping these cars down a chute, and I asked if I could have some of it. They would compressed [the car shavings] and mashed it, and then send it to China to reconsolidated it back into liquid metal, and then send it back to the United States and make new cars. So I took it in that in-between stage and spayed it with black sand, so there’s a real black, kind of ghost, quality to it.

AI: When commencing a new piece, do you work with sketches to evolve the forms?

PC: I wish! No.

AI: So it’s all intuitive?

PC: Yes, unfortunately.

AI: Why unfortunately?

PC: It’s so much harder. You don’t know where you’re going! But you’ve just got to trust your instinct. Sometimes you’ve got to turn a piece upside-down or cut it in half. Like, this piece, [Untitled #1103 (Daphne)] was so short, and then she got taller and taller. I told my dealer, “no problem, she’s going to be very tall and thin,” and all of a sudden she started to get this skirt—and I tried to hold it back, hold it back, and then I said “ah, just forget it!” and it just flowed out. It’s like a child, I suppose, in a way, where it just becomes its own thing. It’s you, but it’s also many things.

AI: What is the process that you and your assistants go through during the creation of one of your sculptures?

PC: Oh, you don’t want to know that, do you? It’s difficult! Even when we know, like in this piece [Untitled #1103 (Daphne)] I knew she was going to be the roses and the wax—I mean, it took me almost a year. I worked on other pieces, but we figure I produce three or four pieces a year. It’s really slow. It’s very labor intensive. It is not a good way to make sculpture. But it’s my way, so I don’t try to change it.

AI: In the past, you would alter individual pieces to better fit the space that they were installed. Were there any alterations performed in response to this particular space [at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art]?

PC: Yes. On this piece, Three Tiered Chandelier, which I particularly like. It had been used for a dance performance. There’s big steel rings underneath it, where the dancers swung from it. And this piece too [Untitled #820 (MIT Peacocks)]. We lit them, and they swung across the room, and they were really beautiful. This one [Untitled #827 (Three Tiers)] can be greatly altered, depending on the rhythm you want of the three hats hanging over the big body. You can extend it, you can make it very short and squatty, you can put more or less bows, or none at all underneath. All that is kind of dictated by the space. But the pieces over all are generally already done, that’s it. A lot of them I don’t own any longer, so I can’t go around messing with it. They won’t allow that. So that becomes very problematic. None of these we really changed, but we did work hard to place them perfectly.

AI: What inspired the change between the chains—which I think is your oldest work, as opposed to the satin—which holds the newer work?

PC: I think of these as chandeliers often. In the 18th century they used to always cover the chandelier cable that held it from the ceiling in velvet. In fact, I saw in some big magazine, that’s a chain of really high-end furniture, that they’re now putting these velvet things on again. But I thought it would be much more beautiful to put it in satin, kind of like bridal satin, and really squash it down so it became a part of the piece, and part of the movement of the piece. I wanted it to look effortless. If it were chain, it wouldn’t look like it really connected, it wouldn’t be the same. But the chain works on those pieces, the satin wouldn’t work on those. Each piece kind of has to dictate what it is.

AI: The essence of time, in your work, alters during your transition between sculpture and photography. By using stalactite forms your sculptures seem to document time’s process, whereas your photography appears to distort time—similar to the work of Futurist photographer Bragaglia—by creating a shape representative of a motion. How do you mediate between these two forms of time?

PC: I look at it more like all the pieces are layered, they just have layer upon layer. As I make the pieces I move around them, so I’m continually circling these pieces and throwing just the right amount, and adding and subtracting, and cutting away, building back up. That’s very similar to the photography, in that the photography is conceptually based in that… when you and I have a discussion, what you say to me and what I say to you, maybe we cross over 10 percent, maybe not. But we think we understand each other completely, right? So it’s like your circle of thinking is going this way, and mine is going that, and the overlap is just that sliver. So, in all the photography, things are moving—going their way—and I’m usually running, or moving, or jumping—going another way—and for a nanosecond something crystallizes and becomes clear, but the rest is all lost. It’s never anything I expected, it’s always a surprise—as with meeting with anyone. It’s the same thing with the sculpture, it’s never anything I could have drawn before, it’s not anything I thought it would be. It has its own life, or its own memory, and its own time. For me all those things sort of mush. It’s just that, and then it isn’t anymore, it’s already past. It’s not just a blurry photograph; it’s about that movement and mine. Almost like Lartigue, when he was a little kid and he had those racecars. The car would be going this way, and he’d be going that way—you’d get just a second of it being really in focus, and everything’s out of focus. I’ve always loved his things. And this is a little twist on that.

AI: Are your subject matters as important as the shapes you’re getting out of them?

PC: To me they are. Whether people know that, or just get a sense of that, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve tried to just present what’s the most honest. If people come open to the pieces then they hopefully infuse their life into it—and that also layers the work. We have these monks [Untitled #738 (Monks 1)], and I’ll always see them as monks. They ran praying from tree to tree, and I thought they were so beautiful and I chased them for two or three days. But when we first exhibited these someone said, “oh, it’s an insane asylum with women” and I looked and I thought “wow, that’s really interesting that they thought that.” It was just souls and they were seeing a different side of souls.

AI: It does sort of look like Arbus’s last photo…

PC: Yeah, it does!

AI: One of the sculptures that deviate from this documentation aspect is Little Ed’s Daughter Margaret—that isn’t here—which incorporates a crying plaster figure. What was the inspiration for that tear?

PC: It was part serious and part humorous—which is always in my work. It’s a bit of a spoof on all these religious things that people see in like Chicago or Boston. I love that, I love that people see that. Maybe it’s there, and I’m not holy enough to see it. But I also think that it’s very funny. So I think it’s humorous, but also magical, because she only cried once or twice a day and only two or three tears. Her face was very dark, so you could barely see it. It was set on a timer that was really sporadic; it just did it when it wanted. So maybe it occurred in the middle of the night. I love that idea that if no one was there to witness it, it did it happen.

AI: What techniques do you use to capture the images that you are after photographically? You’ve said you run with them…

PC: …or jump off ladders while they’re going another way. Or, that first one over there [Untitled #885 (Saucer Baby)] is my little niece and we were throwing her and her inter-tube over the pool. She has a look in her eyes that’s both horror filled and thrilled at the same moment, I was jumping in the pool with these hand-made cameras that I had.

AI: The titles of your works are often formatted “Untitled, numbered, subtitled,” this method is often used by artists who wish to leave their visual qualities unbound by representational associations. Yet your subtitles (such as Gertrude and Juliana… or Black Atlanta) seem despondent through their specificity. How do you imagine your viewers drawing a connection between the work and the subtitles?

PC: Well, this is the first show that we’ve actually put the subtitles in, and the reason is that it was getting very confusing with the numbers and I had private names for all of them. We all knew the private names, and we’d always call them that because I couldn’t remember the numbers. The numbers were more for cataloguing, we have them catalogued under the number and so they’ll always have the number. And now we put in parentheses, meaning it’s this private name—but anymore it doesn’t matter if you know it or not.

AI: What about the hair one [Untitled #927 (BZ-CD-Put-Put)]? Are those all initials?

PC: BZ and CD, those are the childhood names of my siblings.

AI: And what was Put-Put?

PC: That was […] and if you tell anyone I’ll […]!