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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
From: Artist Bio- Petah Coyne
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.Review, November 2005 issue
2,734 words
Petah Coyne
October 7, 2005-January 8, 2006
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kansas City, MO
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 […]!
From: Bomb Magazine: Petah Conye by Lynne Tillman
Petah Coyne, Untitled 1017P01, 2001, Gelatin silver print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery, New York
From: International Sculpture Center- Sculpture- Controlled Passion- A Conversation with Petah Coyne
Controlled Passion: A Conversation with Petah Coyne by Jan Garden Castro
Jan Castro: You told one interviewer that in medieval Catholicism, birds take the soul to heaven. In “White Rain,” the work Josephina features a figure being swallowed by a funnel of scarlet birds. What are your associations here? Petah Coyne: I’ve always been interested in birds, and this exhibition has both real birds and birds that I’ve made by hand. The red birds on top of Josephina are actually discarded feathers. They have been dyed red and put back together. The feathers came out of China about 10 years ago. They’re incredibly crafted. For me, the figure’s head is being consumed by the birds. Not long after that, her body. It’s a funnel coming down, at least that’s my impression of it, and the victim will be swallowed up or taken away—very much like what we were taught about the Holy Spirit in Catholicism: it approached, consumed, and then you were transformed into something else. That, coupled with Catholic cardinals, who wear impressive red hats. When a cardinal dies, his hat is taken and hung from a rope at the top of his cathedral, next to those of his predecessors. When the rope gets old and rots, the hat falls to the ground. This is to remind the current cardinal that he, too, is human and will be judged—a warning to use the power the church has placed in his hands with great care.
In one of these niches, next to one of my favorite birds, I’ve actually buried my grandmother’s pearls, pearls I lusted after as a child. You can see them. They are earthly goods. Giving an offering, a ransom of sorts, to see if I could stop her descent is similar to praying for a soul in purgatory or limbo. For some reason, this particular person wasn’t good enough to get into heaven, so she’s making her descent. Through that descent, the most painful part is being surrounded by all of this beauty, all of the things of which she will soon be deprived. Then only Hell and a faint longing will remain. JGC: The birds are really 100 years old? PC: Yes. They’re from a Canadian museum that has closed. It’s a very Catholic idea to take a thing that is considered trash, basically no good, and to re-energize it and give it new life. Even though they have long been dead, the birds seem beautiful to me. Each one contains a personality, the residue of a life lived. That relates to a book by Yasunari Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties. It’s about a very old man who goes to a secret house for old men. There, they pay to sleep with drugged virgin women, who never move. The mingling of death and eroticism is at times suffocating, yet the author intrigues us with his description of each “sleeping beauty.” Maybe it’s how her skin looks or a perfume she wears, but each comes alive with a full and complete personality. That’s exactly how I perceive those long-dead birds. JGC: That brings us to the work about the two Marys. PC: Mary/Mary began with a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was facing the wall, and I was trying to make her gown very full, almost as if she were transcending. I was speaking a lot that summer with a good friend named Mary, who was, coincidentally, pregnant. She kept commenting on her size and saying how big she had gotten. One day, I looked up and realized that I had made this particular Virgin Mary pregnant, a synthesis of my friend and the Virgin, which is why I call her Mary/Mary.
This longing for perfection and the impossibility of its complete attainment seem clearly figured in this piece. I actually cut apart a chain link fence, and although I covered it in silk flowers to give it beauty, a seduction of sorts, it still does its job, keeping the viewer at bay. The face of Mary/Mary is barely visible, only if one really cranes one’s neck. And even then, her face is dripped in thick wax, barely discernible against the wall. This is how the Catholic church presents its most sacred images, almost there, but mostly hidden. JGC: Chinese Landscape has another hidden figure. To me, that was a stunning and tender work. The surprise of seeing the Madonna hidden in the crevice in the wax was a little unsettling. It reminded me of Duchamp’s Étant donnés. PC: That was exactly my intention. It’s the flip side of Duchamp, but no less erotic. His work was from the male point of view and mine is from the female. It took us over five years to make that piece. We started in ’97 or ’98. She used to be more exposed. We made the front of the wall, and I never felt that it was quite right. It sat for maybe a year, and then I knew what I needed to do. Originally, that piece started out at four by two by two feet. Then it grew to eight by four by one. That wasn’t good enough, and it had to be eight by 10 by one. It finally ended up 10 by 10 by two feet. JGC: Let’s talk about the technical aspects—your special wax and the construction of the base. PC: All of my pieces seem fragile. But that is deceiving, because they’re all begun with steel understructures. Yet I want each one to look incredibly delicate and to have that feminine sense of appearing soft and seductive. But as any number of women have shown, we have an internal strength and drive that is hard to fathom. As far as the wax is concerned, I always use a commercial chemist to make the formulas. I expect this work to have its own lifetime, long past my own. Each flower we attach is made from silk, and each bird wing is rewired so that nothing can fall apart.
PC: For a number of years, I had been using what we call “chandelier wax,” made for the pieces that hang in the air. But making a wall wax is a very different animal. The chemist had to invent a new formula. To get the surface texture, we often scar the work with razors, and we are not beyond sculpting those drips ourselves. I’ve studied Chinese landscape painting, especially the work done in the 16th and 17th centuries. That is the period I love most. When I began working on Chinese Landscape, I stepped back, as I often do, and immediately recognized its sources—the feel of the landscape paintings, the lengthening that can stretch across vast areas. On the front of the piece, there’s a seagull covered in black silk ribbons. Seagulls seem almost clumsy in how they take off and land, and I thought it would be a challenge to take something so awkward and make it seem graceful. I’m hoping that people don’t recognize exactly what the imagery is from the front. It’s only when they go around the back that more is revealed. But you’d be surprised at how few people look inside. We lit it by cutting a hole in the front that sent light through to the back, illuminating just a bit of the figure. JGC: I’ve read that you were home-schooled. Could you describe your art education? PC: My mother is a writer. In my early years, we traveled all over the world because my father was military. Everywhere we went, my mother always made us live in “real” neighborhoods—no army bases for us. She absolutely did not want to raise a troop of “army brats.” In Germany, we lived in the German neighborhoods. In Ohio, we lived with the Amish for a summer. In every location, we were encouraged to study the beliefs and customs. I always felt more connected through these experiences. When I was very young, we lived in Hawaii in a Japanese neighborhood. That was the home I loved the most. My mother was a great teacher, but not in the traditional sense. To get us interested in visuals and reading, she would take every opportunity to expose us to real life. Once when a large whale had beached itself on Waikiki Beach, she ran to get us out of school. Moving us as close as she dared, she told us to pretend we could put our hands on the whale and feel its labored breath. Then she took us home and read us Moby Dick. The images came alive for us in a really profound way. I didn’t like school at all; I felt like I never fit in. My parents told me that if I didn’t want to go to school, I had to figure out a way, within the system, to not go and they’d stand behind me. The easiest solution seemed to be to test out of classes. So my mother began to tutor us in the summers. Every room was a different lesson. One would be the history room, another the math room, and we’d move from room to room every 45 minutes. We really hated doing this in the summer while all of our friends were playing. But throughout the school year, I only signed in for homeroom and then immediately left school to work on my art. Once when I wanted to do some bronze casting, my mother took me to the local foundry, and we learned how to cast and pour bronze. She was a great role model, fashioning whatever was needed to reach our goal.
PC: My parents had been to Japan a number of times and always brought back treasures. Captivated by their stories, I read a lot of Japanese literature. Then in 1991, the Asian Cultural Council, an arm of the Rockefeller Foundation, gave me a fellowship. For six months I was able to just travel and observe; nothing was asked of me. Being there and reading a book every day, or at least a book every other day, I began to understand Japanese thought much more clearly. Often as I read and wandered about the country, I couldn’t remember if I’d lived the things I thought about or read them. Today my greatest pleasure is reading Japanese literature; it’s my secret escape. JGC: How have you expressed sexual difference in “White Rain”? PC: Women and men are so different, and I think that we address different issues in our writings and in our vision. Because this is the first century of women sculptors of any kind of quantity, the differences between the genders are more apparent. I enjoy looking at and thinking about these differences. In many of the art schools, it seems 75 to 80 percent of the sculptors are women. Why is that? Possibly because we have no history, we’re totally free to make our own history. And we’re making a different history, which is thrilling to me. I don’t express ideas consciously. It’s more when you step back. At mid-life, this exhibition is very much about looking back and looking forward at the same time. Recently, I moved my studio, and all of my works passed before my eyes. I began to pick and choose different materials from those I had used in the past. Materials such as black sand, birds and feathers, soil and flowers, chicken wire, and even the statue of the Virgin, which I first used in 1984, came back in this body of work. In the last year or two, my ideas are more about architecture, and sculptures leaning against the wall or becoming walls themselves. There’s a piece that for me is extremely tender, “sisters” or “twins.” It’s about my sister BZ and I, and our family connections. BZ is holding a perfectly formed baby, and my child is headless and broken. Nonetheless, just a different kind of baby, one that is more interesting to me. We’re all in a puddle, melting together. It’s the melting that’s so beautiful—and sad. Beauty comes when you least expect it, and that beauty is the kind I love most, although often I am criticized for it. Seduction and the power to seduce cannot rely just on that beauty. It must be poised to reveal yet another layer, possible a darker layer but, at the very least, something more.
The exhibition is called “White Rain.” As an American, I felt I also had a staining from the atomic bomb, a responsibility for it. There is a sadness in creating all this. I felt as if the white rain was mine to carry, just as the black rain was theirs. On September 11th as I watched victims walk up Broadway away from the devastation, I could not help but think of Butoh. Everyone in the vicinity was covered in white ash, which was literally the pulverization of the buildings, including the ashes of the people who were caught in them. It’s still hard to say this, but this image of Butoh, the dance of the dead, born in Japan in 1959 to portray anger and rage after Hiroshima, was now here also. The porcelain white with which the dancers cover themselves ironically exposes them and the humanity of their souls. JGC: In Kabuki, too. PC: Yes, but Kabuki is much older. Butoh is about violence, sexuality, repressed anger. In its infancy it was never supposed to be performed in theaters, but in alleyways, in the forests, or on rooftops. It is much wilder, which fits with its character, a total abandonment of the traditional formal Japan. I think that’s what has happened to us. I hope that September 11th will make us better humans. Already New York is a nicer place to live, even though it’s much more frightening. Every day when the wind blew the right way, we could smell the smoke. You almost couldn’t breathe because of the mixture of emotions that overwhelmed you. I do not believe anyone living here will be able to smell fire again and not have a wave of sickness come over them. JGC: You’ve worked with interns on various projects, but you’ve also said that you need to develop your work over time, without consulting others. Could you discuss the need to work without consulting others? Or is this still the case?
I’m trying to use that instinct more in my personal life. I think women in particular are given this intuitive instinct. My male sculptor friends know less what I’m talking about when I refer to it. My women friends know exactly. But the tragically humorous part is that we don’t trust this, our greatest gift. I can still hear my mother’s voice: “You have this incredible instinctual power and you must learn to trust it.” So that’s what I try to do. Sometimes I don’t even look at it, I just make it. That’s my collaboration—with the outer limits | ||||||||||||||||
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