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NY ARTS Interview
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On Painting Action:
An Interview with Terry Rosenberg
Richard Kendall
The following conversation between the painter Terry Rosenberg and the art historian Richard Kendall whose upcoming publication and exhibition Degas and the Dance will soon open at Detroit Institute of Arts and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Kendall recently lectured about Rosenberg's work at the National Gallery, London in association with the exhibition Impression: Painting Quickly in France 1860-1890.
This discussion took place this summer as Rosenberg was preparing for an exhibition of his drawings and paintings. Rosenberg's subject for the last twenty years has been the human figure in motion. It is his practice to work during dancers' rehearsals, as such his work in a manner represents collaboration with such dance companies as the American Ballet Theatre, Mark Morris Dance Group, Bill T. Jones, and others. His work has been exhibited throughout the US and Europe and is represented in museum collections including Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, and Brooklyn Museum of Art.
RK: I'm looking at the new drawings you've done and I'm seeing more words in the drawings than I'm used to seeing. Tell me how this happens and where these words come from.
TR: Dancers talk a lot about where, when, and how they're going to move and about patterns and body qualities. They count beats and spacing. So there's a lot of audio. As I write their words or numbers, they assume calligraphic and rhythmic qualities of words, music, numbers, changing spatial geometry, and the body merging. I try to keep myself open to respond to what they do, what they say, and I try to invent new ways to do this -- risking making things way too complicated, way too incomprehensible. I can always throw the work away. The whole process and doing it rarely seems sensible. (laughs) When you get into drawing movement it becomes the source of creation. There are so many levels of things going on, it's really a messy business. The whole point of this strategy is it allows me to take the drawing to different places.
RK: There's a drawing in the studio where you've got a single word written across it. It's like a brush-mark, and it's the model's name. It functions as a reminder that a real model whose name you know was present with you in the studio. It isn't just anybody's name. Obviously, her name is important to you. It's an interesting echoing of the traditional practice of the artist signing the drawing saying I was here. Instead you scribble the dancer's name across the top acknowledging that they are here as well.
TR: What I'm trying to do is form a union of consciousness with the dancer or group. It's a very intimate thing to draw someone moving like that: I have great respect for the dancers I work with, they reveal a lot about themselves through their movement. Being out there on stage is the ultimate risk. So, the drawing is a record of that, and there are also poetic qualities to their names. As for signing the work I always sign my work on the back.
RK: You were talking before about your collaboration with choreographer Wendy Rogers. It's an unusual collaboration because both of you are improvising in real time, you're both taking a risk in each other's presence.
TR: Wendy has described the relationships she has with her dancers, for instance doing a duet. I tried to find a way that she and I could have a similar relationship in terms of a duet. We came up with the possibility that she could respond to my drawings directly while she's dancing, by projecting the drawing on the wall. So we're trying in some way to use our two sensibilities, working in a place between the two art forms.
RK: Sometimes the writing comes together in a very innovative and suggestive way. It's almost like a graphic poem. You've even got the echo of a word in the drawing where the word is underneath. Some of the writing is legible and some isn't. Some of the drawing can be read as the body in movement and some could be any number of things, that wonderful level of legibility and illegibility, coherence and incoherence.
TR: When I'm drawing bodies in motion, form constantly disintegrates. Some of the drawings appear with what looks like a nucleus where form, light, words, and dynamic movement integrate or disintegrate. I'm drawing from a place where all these things collide and continuously change. It is inherent when focusing on the moment of creation, the ever-changing present.
RK: So instead of just doing what is already an incredibly difficult thing, which is making an image on a piece of paper of a body that's in movement, you're also introducing two other dimensions, the dimension of words and the dimension of music. It's not just one challenge it's three simultaneously. And it's almost as if you put yourself at the nexus of these three different worlds, where they collide, and try to make art in this immensely complex multidimensional spot.
TR: I'm trying to get a sense of this atmosphere, and moments in time. The complexion of all these things has a kind of logic from which I draw. Although it seems wildly illogical, there's something about the dynamism of the structure of all of it that has a precarious balance to it. It's the combination of the dynamic yet ephemeral nature of moments of creation that really hold my attention. I found a diagram relating to the speed of light several years ago. It indicates that as you accelerate toward light speed the present expands as the past and future diminishes. Moving objects tend to stand still. It clearly explained what I was experiencing when focusing in the present drawing dance. My intuition tells me that in the future, we're all going to be speeding through space, different kinds of space than we now know, relying on newly developed senses to guide us through.
RK: Several of the things you're talking about movement, music, and space, are abstract entities. It's as if you're moving into a more imprecise, nebulous universe of energy, time, and sound rather than what you have also tried to do, which is to make an image of an extraordinary torso or a sense of concentrated human presence in a particular space, at a particular moment
TR: The body is like a connective tissue between inner space and outer space that we can see and recognize moving through space here on Earth. When I look at these drawings they sometimes look like subatomic diagrams or images I've seen in science magazines, and also like outer space photographs of super nebula, although evidence of touch is very present. Drawing moving bodies in the present is a way to investigate primary forces and interpret them openly. Everything in the universe is made of particles, including our bodies, and the fact that this kind of energy comes through in the drawings is curious but not so surprising.
RK: But it's clearly a space that you're comfortable with, and one you're going into with your eyes wide open. You're interested by this resonance, even though it's grounded in dancers on their wooden floors in New York.
TR: I like that the work is open for interpretation. Some people would say it's figurative, and some people would say it isn't, and some would say both. People approach things with different ideas, intelligence, and perceptions. Those things I mentioned, that I like to read and think about, naturally make their way into the work.
RK: But they are not necessarily things you want people to read back into your pictures.
TR: Well, I don't want there to be some sort of prerequisite text for someone to enjoy my work. I think the work operates on different levels.
RK: But you're also putting yourself in a place where someone who is quite new to your work, who just walked in off the street and saw your drawings on the walls might not even realize they have to do with dance. And that doesn't trouble you?
TR: No.
RK: You're happy for them to exist as pictures, as visual constructions that succeed or fail in their own right?
TR: Yes. I can't really control the response people have to my work. I try to provide the elements that are essential to make the work interesting to me and hopefully they will go forth and communicate to others.
RK: You can't control what people's response is but at the same time you are making things which have an identity and that identity is something that you have to come to terms with. And if you found that people were seeing them one way that was completely at odds with the way that you made them and that you felt about them you might get a bit troubled.
TR: I'm very curious to hear people's responses to my work. I've learned a great deal listening to those responses over the years. So I take it all in and then when I actually do the work I really just try to open myself up to that which I'm drawing, and try to put everything else that I know or I've learned or heard behind me. When I'm drawing movement I have to leave everything behind to be able to keep up with that kind of activity.
RK: That's a tough answer but it's surely the right one.
TR: When I say this activity is like a meditation; it is. It presents a lot of challenges for me to leave my own personal baggage behind. What I think my work should look like or mean, or what people are going to think, or what I think, all of those things I have not much control over if truly focused on the subject. I am simply trying to draw the movement. And that is a wildly complex thing to do. So it made me realize that all those thoughts that come into my head clearly must be left behind on this trip.
RK: What of your choice of color? Do you accept it as arbitrary in some ways; reds and yellows don't correspond to the reds and yellows you see out there.
TR: It's not really arbitrary, nor am I using a natural palette exactly. Most often I'll be working in a studio and sometimes viewing the stage whose many variables (lighting, costumes, stage set, choreography, etc.) change each day. I don't know what a finished performance will look like until I see a dress rehearsal. So what I'm really concerned with is finding a relatively simple palette that best describes a synthesis of light, dynamic structure, and space-time relationships of the moment.
RK: You have also described to me a system where you pre-select certain colors and have them on your hands?
TR: Yes. I have a method where I put colors on a glove. I also cut a hole in a sock to get my thumb and hand through it, and wear it on my arm and put color there too. It eliminates choosing colors while I am drawing and painting which would take my concentration out of the moment. It was designed for speed, primitive as it is. A lot of color comes from an accumulation on my arm or on the glove. It's all happening at once. It's not like I'm picking this color and applying it and then picking another, instead I become a flexibly moving palette.
RK: When I've looked before at your drawings and paintings, I've seen the role of this process of erasing, which I think plays a very important part in your work. I've also noticed it in the context of your biggest paintings, the erasing in some passages is quite intense and complicated, unpredictable things happen with the paint. You rub something away and there is something wonderful underneath you couldn't possibly have known or constructed or imagined. To my eye, a dialogue is formed between those elements that are fairly controlled where you might be following a movement or describing a wall or a mirror, and these explosions of energy and movement and dynamism. I imagine that at a certain point you might find them to be too strong and intense, so you wipe it away and find this very subtle balance almost like a veil, a beautiful veil across the front, suggesting a body, carving through space, or drifting across the floor.
TR: Often, the eraser gives me a way of bringing light to things, it is also used to open up space or add another dimension. Every once in a while I'll use an eraser to vary them just slightly, in an attempt to ease tensions in a drawing. Sometimes, I wonder whether on some level I sense what's under the layers, because I laid them down a few seconds earlier. I don't generally go back and work on drawings or paintings after the sessions, because I never can get into that space/time again. It inevitably becomes a futile formal exercise.
RK: There is something we have talked about before, and we'll probably be talking about in ten years' time. When you make a mark on a piece of paper or on canvas which is a free looping, risky arm-based mark you're in a territory where a lot of painters have been before, most notably the Abstract Expressionists. Is that part of the baggage you have to try to leave outside the room when you come in? Do you feel that there is some sort of affinity with what Pollock did when he was making his drip paintings or De Kooning with his ribbon paintings, or is that just something that's off your map?
TR: I've certainly been influenced by Abstract Expressionism, particularly the action painters. They were the first painters where you really see the artist's body present in a painting, most notably Pollock. I don't mean a picture of the body. He changed the whole approach, when everyone else was still painting with brushes. Action Painters broke open painting from a body standpoint, creating from their own nervous system their inner landscape as De Kooning put it. We begin to see more of the body present with Impressionism as the brush loosens as the artist makes quick impressions. The paint also starts to take on a life of its own.
While this informs my work, I'm working with these body dynamics in two ways, my own and that of a perceived subject, trying to match theirs in a way. My work is affected by another person or persons movements, emotions, and intelligence opening my response system to theirs simultaneously, looping back in a way to artists painting from the model over centuries, but informed by other developments in art and science that have occurred up to the present.
RK: So what you've brought together here is again a challenging conjunction of elements, using a vocabulary growing out of New York painting of fifty years ago. But it is also about looking and experiencing bodies moving in space. Do you see that as a step back, or do you see it as a step beyond what the abstract expressionists were doing?
TR: Throughout history there are layers between great discoveries in our evolution. Depending on your perspective, whether you look forward in time or backward or you see through all the layers, certain moments in history speak to our soul. They are moments that we must address because they have relevance to the present. Between layers of history there are vast amounts of information that have been skipped over or never thoroughly investigated. They have been there all along but no one noticed. The same has happened with scientific discoveries about the universe. So I look toward Action Painting, its immediacy to give expression to the body and the freedom that comes with mobility in dance. It's the dance that brings human complexities to the work naturally. I find myself at times thinking, God these two dancers are doing this thing right in front of me that is just so beautiful! That's one of the other features of doing this kind of work that really holds my attention!
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