|
Linda Francis’ work may be considered geometric, but its conceptual basis goes well beyond formal properties. The following is a discussion with artist and writer Thomas Micchelli about some of its key points. |
|
“It involved a lot of things: the relational aspect of form; possibility as a variable of viewpoint; the paradox of appearances; movement as form.”
Linda Francis, Galaxy, 1992. Chalk on paper, 39 x 29 in. Courtesy of the artist.
In Conversation: Thomas Micchelli Interviews Linda Francis
Linda Francis’ work may be considered geometric, but its conceptual basis goes well beyond formal properties. The following is a discussion with artist and writer Thomas Micchelli about some of its key points.
Thomas Micchelli: Do you see yourself as a Romantic?
Linda Francis: I’ve always preferred to spend my time imagining things other than social reality. I guess one could say I am a Romantic, but I’m not. What I am is an escapist. I am appalled by society, embarrassed by people’s conceits and ambitions, and upset by what passes for lived reality.
TM: And yet you see art as a calling.
LF: It is just that I experienced it as a calling. Once I made an object of art, I had no choice but to continue on that path. It was an important decision, but one I didn’t make. I don’t see how one could choose to be an artist. It is a problematic life, to say the least.
TM: Your early drawings were made in chalk, with both hands simultaneously spiraling out from the midpoint of your body. These drawings prefigured others that are based on the universality of the spiral, from galaxies to microscopic crystals. Do you see a correspondence between the intrinsically imperfect—a mark created by a hand rotating from the shoulder—and the perfection implied in archetypal abstraction?
LF: They are the same thing.
TM: Is that why a critic once called you a Neo-Platonist?
LF: “Imperfect” and “perfect” are part of the same discussion. They depend upon each other for definition. In the end, one runs up against the problem of language.
TM: The evidence of the hand was very apparent in your work until you abandoned drawing for painting in the late nineties. Was the movement from freehand drawings to precisely executed paintings a conscious stripping-away of the significations of “art”?
LF: Everything in a work must be accounted for in some way. A medium must be considered both for its intrinsic properties and for the specific function it serves.
TM: You’ve mentioned Gödel and his belief that mathematics isn’t a language, but a fact. We tend to think of the formal qualities of art as a syntax or language. Does your work employ a language, or do you view it as a kind of objectified reality, a thing in itself?
LF: I think that’s probably what is meant by “Neo-Platonic.” Objects act as proxies for a certain set of meanings. A language becomes problematic when it is only self-reflexive, but an object must in some way become a fact (possibly reflexive) that is reflective (in the deepest sense) of some a priori concept. Gödel was against formalism in mathematics and philosophy, which, as I understand it, limits constituent meaning so much so that it obviates the possibility of meaning.
Communication would not be possible if we did not share a priori assumptions about such fundamentals as rightness, goodness, and meaning. We wouldn’t be able to find satisfaction in art across cultural and temporal boundaries. That said, in contemporary discourse we often find interpretation gaining ascendancy over the art object, advancing unexamined acceptable codes and substituting the simple recognition of signs for understanding or knowledge.
TM: In your drawings, you have consciously addressed universal structures by applying force (the eraser) to mass (the concentrations of chalk), following a set of rudimentary rules that yielded spontaneous, elemental shapes (circles, squares, spirals).
LF: It involved a lot of things: the relational aspect of form; possibility as a variable of viewpoint; the paradox of appearances; movement as form. I wanted each step to present a paradigm that is overturned by the appearance of another. It became a kind of visual epistemology.
TM: In other words, it is abstraction about something. By developing rules and formulas to create a piece such as Neutron Star (2008), would it be off base to suggest that this work is a chart of the progression of a thought? You lay out your premises and that becomes the painting. Its power lies as much in its objectivity as in its material density. We have discussed art as a vessel for shared experience, but does your adherence to mathematical signification purposefully circumscribe what a painting can and cannot do?
LF: Yes, I am fascinated by the limits of knowledge. But I don’t believe that there is a delimitation of meaning or interpretation in the work. I hope one feels a moment of clarity when what appears to be about form or configuration becomes concept: the geometric ideas expand into or become analogous to other philosophical ones.
TM: Still, I detect in your work a counterintuitive sense of the tragic.
LF: I tend to be impatient with exercises in style or series of formal minutiae, and so I would say that emotion and a certain regard for consequence come into play in how I think about my work.
The neutron star, after all, is a remnant: First a great supernova, then homogenization, then collapse.
