Gary Stephan in Three Dimensions
Cheryl Donegan
Painter and printmaker Gary Stephan and the filmmaker and painter Cheryl Donegan have known each other for over 20 years, since she was a student at RISD and he was showing at Mary Boone Gallery. They met at Stephan’s studio recently to discuss his new sculptures, the reasonable limits of interpretation, and his continued attempts to expand the definition of picture space.
Cheryl Donegan: You’ve been making more sculpture! Some of these look like kid’s ceramics. This one looks like a mountain with snow.
Gary Stephan: Virtually all of them are landscape metaphors in some sense. One nice thing about these is I don’t have responsibility for them. There is so little investment in time and materials. They are mostly aluminum foil, paper and paint. This was a paper towel I crumpled up. Later, I thought to pour paint on it and it became something.
CD: So you’re saying you do not take a lot of responsibility when you make them. You trained as an industrial designer. Design takes a moral responsibility to make things better for people. Do you think design makes an attack on art for just being art, for not taking responsibility? I wonder, because you have thought about design through the different phases of your investigations.
GS: The reason I left design and became a painter was because design can take on reasonable questions but it cannot take on the metaphysical. You can’t get at what it is like to be here; you can’t get at the meaning of things.
CD: These objects are delightful, but unreasonable, because you think: What is this? It’s just a piece of cardboard with some glue dumped allover it. Does it thrill you that the works are so vulnerable? Does it frighten you? Do you feel you take it seriously?
GS: I like that it doesn’t have the burden of matter. Most sculpture resigns itself almost as a virtue to the limits of matter. Sculpture has a built-in humility because it is so there, so bound by gravity.
CD: So you think the vulnerability is a value.
GS: I am not interested in works of art that defend and protect us. I want to find a way to accept the vagaries, the frailty of life. I am trying to the greatest degree possible to take away the fetish value of them as objects and let the value reside in the image. But these works are not meant to be opportunities for just any experience.
For example, imagine coming upon a BMW in the jungle having never seen a car before. You see this glossy object there and the windows are down and you’re attracted to it as an amazing object. Then you see the side opens and you get in. Fiddling with the shiny things on the dash you get the radio on and now you are listening to music. Eventually you return to the jungle. That is using the BMW as a truly open text, but it’s not the best use of that car. Art has latitude built into it but not so much that you make up what you will. I think it’s within a range, and if you see enough of it you get the rules of the argument.
CD: There has been a case against elitism and yet what you’re suggesting is that there’s a pleasure in the privilege of knowing more rather than knowing less. But there is still some flexibility in terms of how people receive the images. Not a completely open text, but still a lot of play. In many of your paintings there’s a tranquil center, or a center that seems vacated. There is a lot of pressure on the outside edges of the pictures. Any idea of what that is about?
GS: What you are noticing is part of a central theory of mine. That you see it so readily tells me I am doing it more overtly than I thought, or that you are a very good reader of pictures. If I’ve made a contribution to expanding the definition of picture space, this is it. The purpose of emptying the center is to misdirect the eyes. They move back and forth searching for the depth of field between the material they are finding on the edges and the middle, where they expect something. If you can get the eyes to move back and forth, searching for focal length as though they were looking at 3D space, when they are actually looking at a flat object, then it kinesthetically expands the definition of how we look at pictures. Because one of the fundamental cues in looking at the real world is that the eyes move searching for depth. I think these might be the only paintings that bring that experience to a flat object.
CD: Tiepolo comes to mind. I get a feeling of vertigo when looking at his paintings at the Met because you see at eye level a vision that depicts a space soaring above your head in which figures cling to the edges of the framed space in a strange perspective, and the empty center seems infinite.
GS: A few years back Steven Westfall said they functioned like Tiepolo.
CD: Whoh, I didn’t know that. I don’t think about 18th C Venetian painting so it’s a strange reference for me to pull out of the hat.
GS: Maybe you’re onto something.
