STRUCTURES DON SOKER GALLERY OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 30 2007
“The Insistence on Perfection” Studio Visit: Theodora Varnay-Jones in Conversation with Robin Hill
RH:
Most of your work is now installed in your solo show at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco. Is there a piece in the show that embodies all the elements or concerns that are essential to the ambition of the work? Or is this way of looking at the work even interesting to you?
TVJ
I’d rather not think about my work this way. My main concerns are the relationships, not only within a piece, but between the pieces and between the pieces and the space. I can point out a group of pieces, which are the most interesting to me: “Step a Side” is a freestanding piece, a stair shaped form on its side. “Transparency #32 is a layered, dimensional wall piece and Transparency #27, next to it, a wall and floor piece. I feel these works open up new possibilities. Transparency #32 has affinities to the layered, translucent parts of the other pieces. Transparency # 27 could stand on its own without the other two because it has the structure and an empty space which could be filled. It is only just recently that I am able to see the potential of these pieces.
RH
The quality of transparency in your work seems to be moving towards invisibility and emptiness. One might think of your pieces as containers for experience. I think we both understand that phenomenon on a metaphysical level, but I’m also really interested in your ideas about the structures themselves, what they are doing practically in the space, as well as what they are doing psychologically.
TVJ
Practically, the structures are physical and concrete. They not only define space but also serve as support for the translucent layers, within the works. Psychologically, they are containers, which I, as the artist, fill with what I want to say, and which you, the viewer, fills with what you want to see. It does kind of open up to that thing which is physically absent. Transparency-Round #1 is different. The piece is sitting on a stand, a Plexiglas cube. I used Plexiglas because I wanted the stand to be invisible, it is not an important part of the piece. It just raises it up.
RH
It is interesting that you see these elements as structural devices designed to merely support the work. Maybe this is where an installation allows us to see things that we had not planned, but which are interesting enough to take back into new work.
TVJ
It is extremely important to me to have open-endedness in my work and in my mind; to reflect the constant shifts and changes in our lives.
RH
Time plays a role in your work, not just in it’s production, but as a subject. Can you comment on that?
TVJ
I am glad that you asked me about time. I use impermanent materials, which may slowly transform over time. I’m also aware of and interested in the shifts which occur each time a piece’s context is changed. We only have the fleeting moment, so to hold on to the idea of permanence or eternity is only an illusion.
RH
I want to ask you something about chance verses calculation. Your work has an inward energy, a quiet presence. Does a whimsical or intuitive form of chance come into play anywhere?
TVJ
I do not make sketches or write down ideas. I wait until a mental image accumulates and is ready to be visualized. My desire is to be concrete, to be specific, and to have reason. The manifestation of these desires is the structure. It is the language of geometry, which defines and gives body to my shapeless vision.
I do have tremendous respect for and curiosity about the material world. So yes, encounters with materials do, quite often, make me change directions as I go along building a piece. I have always felt that my work requires a proven system to materialize the abstract, the shapeless. I am driven to find something that is certain. I’m talking about proven systems, which are commonly understood, such as the science of numbers with their structural qualities and variations, which I also found in music. I was good in math. I loved it. It really fascinated me from an early age, before I knew I was going to be an artist.
RH
So when you are talking about proving you are talking about truth. What is your work proving? What is the hypothesis? What are the questions driving your work you? I think you have opened a big door in our conversation.
TVJ
I’m not proving really anything, because there is nothing to prove. There is nothing unless you make it. It is not one thing. It is me, my ego. I’m lucky if I know some of me. I don’t fully know the whole package, who I am. It’s like consuming and in the end throwing up. My work is a distillation of all the things I hear, see, and touch. What interests me is the route between a starting point and the destination, the relationship, the context. What is happening between this and that, and if I move this, what will happen to that. To me that is the most important thing.
RH
So you are talking about perception.
TVJ
Yes, it is perception. This is the basis of my thinking, how I look at things and how I analyze what I see.
This analytical thinking is going on and on.
RH
Can you talk about what you look at when you are not exploring that phenomenon in your own work?
TVJ
I am trying, simply, to be where I am. I try to give full attention to my surroundings. I want to sink into things and I think I do have the ability to see the wonderful in the ordinary. The details of things are most interesting to me and these details do stay with me, such as the glare that comes from the sun reflecting off of the water. I think about the way the wind blows the grass. I’m constantly looking. My eyes are the physical instruments for my work.
RH
In your work I think about what is revealed verses what is concealed. In many ways you are drawing us in with seductive qualities. The sheen draws us in but when we get close the sheen becomes a fog. It’s a bit of a tease. I would be curious in seeing your work on a larger scale. Would this be interesting to you? What do you say to people who look at your work and think about models, and architecture?
TVJ
The sheen is there, consciously, yes. I have spoken to people about this, and contrary to what everybody feels, I think that the glare, the sheen, that slick material does alienate, keeps people away. It is a condition of our contemporary life. It is solitude. I would definitely want my pieces to be bigger. I admire architecture. I love lots of buildings. I’m coming from a two dimensional background, but it is my desire to make three-dimensional pieces. Architecture is practical and, yet, it is sculpture. Moving from the wall to the floor was a slow evolution. It is only in my most recent work that I have made the leap into sculpture. I have reached the point where the pieces stand by themselves without any aid from the wall or the pedestal. I have noticed that when my mind is occupied with something, I am able to see the relationships between my work and the world more clearly. Sometimes the work I create seems to be in the air, it is already present in our lives.
RH
There are bodily proportions in your work. Do you ever think about the figure?
TVJ
Scale largely depends on relativity. I should say that most of my pieces are human-size. Within that, I like variations. I often use units, arranged in a line or as a grid, to create larger works. I favor horizontals, where the units have a sort of equal status, following each other on the same level, where they are non-hierarchical; they are only ongoing. I draw horizontal lines on my surfaces too; their function is to fill the space. For Agnes Martin the lines are parallel to her belief in a kind of transcendent reality. For me the lines are replacing that notion, they are just ongoing lines. I was thinking about stairs as going somewhere and nowhere. But it was too literal for me, so I turned it on the side to null the suggestion that it is going anywhere.
RH
There is an odd interplay of coolness and primitivism in your work. There is such precision, yet the hand-made quality is very prominent. If placed alongside a Donald Judd, one would definitely be talking about your work through the lens of the hand-made. We’d be talking about touch and the importance of imperfections, which come with the handmade. Your work is the opposite of the machine-made, it is not rational. Yet it does live more in the Judd realm, through its insistence on precision. You have created a set of relationships between colors and sheen and scale, all in one place, to speak for themselves in an autonomous object. I also think about Agnes Martin. It’s almost like there is a little bit of an argument going on in the work between precision and calculation and a kind of refinement verses primitivism, intuition, handmade and imperfection. I have to say that the desire for the work to be rational is winning.
TVJ
It is interesting that you mentioned Donald Judd because he is the manifestation of minimalism, which was tremendously interesting for me, when I came to this country. But at the same time my interest went to the other side, to artists like Bruce Nauman* and Beckett. They are both dealing with ideas of impossibility. It is very interesting that minimal art did take psychology out and left only the material, as is the case with Judd’s work. True minimalists ignored the other side, as in Bruce Nauman’s video of falling down and getting up or in the famous saying of Samuel Beckett: “Go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” They are both talking about the same sort of void, or the absence of true cause. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, there is this insane waiting for someone who will never arrive. I’m relating to both approaches, in the sense that the material is extremely important to me. At the same time I’m dealing with an empty space too, where one can’t grasp the thing. It is there and it isn’t there. So all this obscurity, the physical blur in my work between the layers, what I see and what I don’t see, is that thing which is there but unobtainable.
RH
There is always a contradiction within phenomenological art that is stationary. In the end the work is an abstraction. Have you ever thought about creating a piece where the elements could be experienced physically, with the whole body, and not just optically? Your pieces seem to be looking at us. I would love to get inside one of them and look out. Do you ever think about looking out from inside your work?
TVJ
What is really intriguing to me is that there are things physically there, but you cannot get to them. It is the same thing with a person, I know there is a lot inside, and it is the same with everything.
As I build my pieces, each added layer alters what is underneath. There is an accumulation and transformation. Tomorrow I will not be the same person I am today. Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice. This moment in our conversation is already in the past.
RH
I want to talk about your background and how you feel your sensibility has been shaped by geography, by culture, by your age or generation.
TVJ
I got my MFA from Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1972 in visual arts, geometry, and art history. My mother was a teacher and my father was an army officer. In order to explain why I left in 1972, I would have to explain the whole history of Eastern Europe. The art school was very academic and very old fashioned. One learned to draw by drawing the structure of the whole skeleton followed by the muscles. I had ideas, but I was unable to see original works of contemporary art. When I came to the United States I just sank into all that was going on conceptually. I was in heaven. I found a printmaking workshop and I got into printmaking very deeply actually. What interested me was the physical action of making the plate. I was much less interested in the image. I think I have been fighting illusion all my life, or maybe I just don’t have any interest in it. I am guided by practicality and ambiguity. There is no truth and there is no “for sure”.
RH
What are your earlier memories of the art that poked holes in your training and made you realize how much more you had to learn? Maybe we can talk about literature and philosophy and a kind of equivalence that those disciplines reach in your work.
TVJ
This is you know a slippery slope. I do not like to illustrate or symbolize. Certain literature, which is highly conceptual satisfies my need to push my work further. I once cut out a passage from Proust and built it into a structure. It was readable but I’m still not sure if I wanted it to be read. I relate to Proust through my own childhood memories, the gardens, the afternoon teas, the walks in the country. All those things are highly personal yet I am unable to use them in a really sensible way. I got most of my intellectual stimulation from books and science and mathematics. I read the classics, from the Russians to the French. It was kind of an escape. When you do not have the ability to “do” then you think and build up a world, which is only intellectual. Ultimately you have to get rid of or revise a lot of it if you want to do something concrete.
I remember my grandfather taking great pride in underlining mistakes in letters sent to him. He would often send them back with his corrections. He was a very interesting person.
RH
Maybe your insistence on perfection comes from him.
TVJ
Yes, it is coming from somewhere.
* https://www.artsy.net/artist/bruce-nauman
RH:
Most of your work is now installed in your solo show at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco. Is there a piece in the show that embodies all the elements or concerns that are essential to the ambition of the work? Or is this way of looking at the work even interesting to you?
TVJ
I’d rather not think about my work this way. My main concerns are the relationships, not only within a piece, but between the pieces and between the pieces and the space. I can point out a group of pieces, which are the most interesting to me: “Step a Side” is a freestanding piece, a stair shaped form on its side. “Transparency #32 is a layered, dimensional wall piece and Transparency #27, next to it, a wall and floor piece. I feel these works open up new possibilities. Transparency #32 has affinities to the layered, translucent parts of the other pieces. Transparency # 27 could stand on its own without the other two because it has the structure and an empty space which could be filled. It is only just recently that I am able to see the potential of these pieces.
RH
The quality of transparency in your work seems to be moving towards invisibility and emptiness. One might think of your pieces as containers for experience. I think we both understand that phenomenon on a metaphysical level, but I’m also really interested in your ideas about the structures themselves, what they are doing practically in the space, as well as what they are doing psychologically.
TVJ
Practically, the structures are physical and concrete. They not only define space but also serve as support for the translucent layers, within the works. Psychologically, they are containers, which I, as the artist, fill with what I want to say, and which you, the viewer, fills with what you want to see. It does kind of open up to that thing which is physically absent. Transparency-Round #1 is different. The piece is sitting on a stand, a Plexiglas cube. I used Plexiglas because I wanted the stand to be invisible, it is not an important part of the piece. It just raises it up.
RH
It is interesting that you see these elements as structural devices designed to merely support the work. Maybe this is where an installation allows us to see things that we had not planned, but which are interesting enough to take back into new work.
TVJ
It is extremely important to me to have open-endedness in my work and in my mind; to reflect the constant shifts and changes in our lives.
RH
Time plays a role in your work, not just in it’s production, but as a subject. Can you comment on that?
TVJ
I am glad that you asked me about time. I use impermanent materials, which may slowly transform over time. I’m also aware of and interested in the shifts which occur each time a piece’s context is changed. We only have the fleeting moment, so to hold on to the idea of permanence or eternity is only an illusion.
RH
I want to ask you something about chance verses calculation. Your work has an inward energy, a quiet presence. Does a whimsical or intuitive form of chance come into play anywhere?
TVJ
I do not make sketches or write down ideas. I wait until a mental image accumulates and is ready to be visualized. My desire is to be concrete, to be specific, and to have reason. The manifestation of these desires is the structure. It is the language of geometry, which defines and gives body to my shapeless vision.
I do have tremendous respect for and curiosity about the material world. So yes, encounters with materials do, quite often, make me change directions as I go along building a piece. I have always felt that my work requires a proven system to materialize the abstract, the shapeless. I am driven to find something that is certain. I’m talking about proven systems, which are commonly understood, such as the science of numbers with their structural qualities and variations, which I also found in music. I was good in math. I loved it. It really fascinated me from an early age, before I knew I was going to be an artist.
RH
So when you are talking about proving you are talking about truth. What is your work proving? What is the hypothesis? What are the questions driving your work you? I think you have opened a big door in our conversation.
TVJ
I’m not proving really anything, because there is nothing to prove. There is nothing unless you make it. It is not one thing. It is me, my ego. I’m lucky if I know some of me. I don’t fully know the whole package, who I am. It’s like consuming and in the end throwing up. My work is a distillation of all the things I hear, see, and touch. What interests me is the route between a starting point and the destination, the relationship, the context. What is happening between this and that, and if I move this, what will happen to that. To me that is the most important thing.
RH
So you are talking about perception.
TVJ
Yes, it is perception. This is the basis of my thinking, how I look at things and how I analyze what I see.
This analytical thinking is going on and on.
RH
Can you talk about what you look at when you are not exploring that phenomenon in your own work?
TVJ
I am trying, simply, to be where I am. I try to give full attention to my surroundings. I want to sink into things and I think I do have the ability to see the wonderful in the ordinary. The details of things are most interesting to me and these details do stay with me, such as the glare that comes from the sun reflecting off of the water. I think about the way the wind blows the grass. I’m constantly looking. My eyes are the physical instruments for my work.
RH
In your work I think about what is revealed verses what is concealed. In many ways you are drawing us in with seductive qualities. The sheen draws us in but when we get close the sheen becomes a fog. It’s a bit of a tease. I would be curious in seeing your work on a larger scale. Would this be interesting to you? What do you say to people who look at your work and think about models, and architecture?
TVJ
The sheen is there, consciously, yes. I have spoken to people about this, and contrary to what everybody feels, I think that the glare, the sheen, that slick material does alienate, keeps people away. It is a condition of our contemporary life. It is solitude. I would definitely want my pieces to be bigger. I admire architecture. I love lots of buildings. I’m coming from a two dimensional background, but it is my desire to make three-dimensional pieces. Architecture is practical and, yet, it is sculpture. Moving from the wall to the floor was a slow evolution. It is only in my most recent work that I have made the leap into sculpture. I have reached the point where the pieces stand by themselves without any aid from the wall or the pedestal. I have noticed that when my mind is occupied with something, I am able to see the relationships between my work and the world more clearly. Sometimes the work I create seems to be in the air, it is already present in our lives.
RH
There are bodily proportions in your work. Do you ever think about the figure?
TVJ
Scale largely depends on relativity. I should say that most of my pieces are human-size. Within that, I like variations. I often use units, arranged in a line or as a grid, to create larger works. I favor horizontals, where the units have a sort of equal status, following each other on the same level, where they are non-hierarchical; they are only ongoing. I draw horizontal lines on my surfaces too; their function is to fill the space. For Agnes Martin the lines are parallel to her belief in a kind of transcendent reality. For me the lines are replacing that notion, they are just ongoing lines. I was thinking about stairs as going somewhere and nowhere. But it was too literal for me, so I turned it on the side to null the suggestion that it is going anywhere.
RH
There is an odd interplay of coolness and primitivism in your work. There is such precision, yet the hand-made quality is very prominent. If placed alongside a Donald Judd, one would definitely be talking about your work through the lens of the hand-made. We’d be talking about touch and the importance of imperfections, which come with the handmade. Your work is the opposite of the machine-made, it is not rational. Yet it does live more in the Judd realm, through its insistence on precision. You have created a set of relationships between colors and sheen and scale, all in one place, to speak for themselves in an autonomous object. I also think about Agnes Martin. It’s almost like there is a little bit of an argument going on in the work between precision and calculation and a kind of refinement verses primitivism, intuition, handmade and imperfection. I have to say that the desire for the work to be rational is winning.
TVJ
It is interesting that you mentioned Donald Judd because he is the manifestation of minimalism, which was tremendously interesting for me, when I came to this country. But at the same time my interest went to the other side, to artists like Bruce Nauman* and Beckett. They are both dealing with ideas of impossibility. It is very interesting that minimal art did take psychology out and left only the material, as is the case with Judd’s work. True minimalists ignored the other side, as in Bruce Nauman’s video of falling down and getting up or in the famous saying of Samuel Beckett: “Go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” They are both talking about the same sort of void, or the absence of true cause. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, there is this insane waiting for someone who will never arrive. I’m relating to both approaches, in the sense that the material is extremely important to me. At the same time I’m dealing with an empty space too, where one can’t grasp the thing. It is there and it isn’t there. So all this obscurity, the physical blur in my work between the layers, what I see and what I don’t see, is that thing which is there but unobtainable.
RH
There is always a contradiction within phenomenological art that is stationary. In the end the work is an abstraction. Have you ever thought about creating a piece where the elements could be experienced physically, with the whole body, and not just optically? Your pieces seem to be looking at us. I would love to get inside one of them and look out. Do you ever think about looking out from inside your work?
TVJ
What is really intriguing to me is that there are things physically there, but you cannot get to them. It is the same thing with a person, I know there is a lot inside, and it is the same with everything.
As I build my pieces, each added layer alters what is underneath. There is an accumulation and transformation. Tomorrow I will not be the same person I am today. Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice. This moment in our conversation is already in the past.
RH
I want to talk about your background and how you feel your sensibility has been shaped by geography, by culture, by your age or generation.
TVJ
I got my MFA from Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1972 in visual arts, geometry, and art history. My mother was a teacher and my father was an army officer. In order to explain why I left in 1972, I would have to explain the whole history of Eastern Europe. The art school was very academic and very old fashioned. One learned to draw by drawing the structure of the whole skeleton followed by the muscles. I had ideas, but I was unable to see original works of contemporary art. When I came to the United States I just sank into all that was going on conceptually. I was in heaven. I found a printmaking workshop and I got into printmaking very deeply actually. What interested me was the physical action of making the plate. I was much less interested in the image. I think I have been fighting illusion all my life, or maybe I just don’t have any interest in it. I am guided by practicality and ambiguity. There is no truth and there is no “for sure”.
RH
What are your earlier memories of the art that poked holes in your training and made you realize how much more you had to learn? Maybe we can talk about literature and philosophy and a kind of equivalence that those disciplines reach in your work.
TVJ
This is you know a slippery slope. I do not like to illustrate or symbolize. Certain literature, which is highly conceptual satisfies my need to push my work further. I once cut out a passage from Proust and built it into a structure. It was readable but I’m still not sure if I wanted it to be read. I relate to Proust through my own childhood memories, the gardens, the afternoon teas, the walks in the country. All those things are highly personal yet I am unable to use them in a really sensible way. I got most of my intellectual stimulation from books and science and mathematics. I read the classics, from the Russians to the French. It was kind of an escape. When you do not have the ability to “do” then you think and build up a world, which is only intellectual. Ultimately you have to get rid of or revise a lot of it if you want to do something concrete.
I remember my grandfather taking great pride in underlining mistakes in letters sent to him. He would often send them back with his corrections. He was a very interesting person.
RH
Maybe your insistence on perfection comes from him.
TVJ
Yes, it is coming from somewhere.
* https://www.artsy.net/artist/bruce-nauman