Page 108 - Flaunt 170 - The Phoenix Issue - Kiernan Shipka

yond alive to dying in a space of a year. She was in Boston then and I had moved to New York. But I spent a lot of time going back and forth and being with her as much as possible and being with her through to the end. Seeing that progression from life to death in such rapid succession woke me. I was so upset and grief-stricken when she died. I woke up one morning and I felt for the first time, ‘Yes, I’m going to die.’ I felt it. It was in my brain. And also I felt like the only way to honor this person’s life was to live as fully as possible. I completely threw out everything in my studio, and that’s when I got more deeper into the Bud- dhist stuff. I started making the plaster work. JP: Did you have a teacher? AS: I think \[Joseph\] Goldstein was the teacher who I went to talk with but I knew some great Zen teachers. I didn’t have a teacher, I had multiple wise teachers. JP: Did you travel a lot? AS: I traveled to Asia. Indonesia. That was an impactful experi- ence, which bled out into my work all those years later. Basically it was me saying, ‘I’m gonna die. What the fuck is there to be afraid of?’ JP: Click, it worked. AS: I mean I certainly have lots of fearful anxious times. JP: I just started this foundation and I keep thinking, ‘Oh when I’m dead this will work like this and this will work like that.’ And I could see it now. So my planning is kind of being enthusiastic about my death. I know some people think, ‘What are they gon- na say about me when I die?’ So there’s this preparing for the foundation and how it’s going to work. There will be classes, it’s kind of exciting for me! I had never given my thought to dying. AS: Because you and your work is exuberant of life. That is the same thing you’re asking me. I want my work to be of life, like yours is. Judy, you are the teacher of that. I moved to New York and thought this is the ‘most genius thing I ever saw.’ That kind of ‘of life’ thing. JP: Do you know how organized you are? AS: Yeah, I am organized. I am. But that also is part of being a parent. That taught me a lot—on top of being a fast cook. And I don’t have that much trouble making decisions. JP: I think that’s from you being present. I go around and around and around. AS: I don’t see that in your work. JP: I know! Because in the last minute I’m like, ‘I can’t fuck around anymore I have to make this decision now.’ But I think that if I had more structure or more confidence or was raised differently, I could get there sooner. I think I waste a lot of work time worrying about things. Everything I’ve read about you is pretty fucking great. They get it. But when I read about myself... AS: You hate it? JP: I hate it. AS: I don’t read that much. JP: Is there anything you want more noticed? AS: That’s such a good question. Well, there has been a lot of conversation about the base. I understand that, but I also don’t understand it because I took that for granted early on. Before I came upstate, I started using big blocks of wood. I had this show called Turn Up The Bass at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. I was going to explode it in a way. There is no separation for me. The thing that happens, and continues to happen, and what you will see in this show is I’ll make a wood part or a ceramic part and one is cast from the other. So casting the ceramics off of the wood is gener- ative. The whole thing is that one thing leads to the next, and so it should be incredibly apparent that it’s not that I’m seeing one thing as separate from the other, but I don’t mind that either. It’s not radically different from what I’ve been doing my whole life as an artist. What do you hate that people say about you? JP: That it’s kind of ‘fun stuff,’ meaning lightweight, mentally lightweight, or giddy, or riotous, or an explosion in a glitter fac- tory. That’s the sentence that followed me for years, and at that time, there was no glitter. I was thinking, ‘I love glitter but it’s not ARLENE SHECHET “IN MY VIEW” 2020. GLAZED CERAMIC, PAINTED HARDWOOD, PAINTED PLYWOOD. 58 × 26 × 20 IN. © ARLENE SHECHET, COURTESY PACE GALLERY. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHOEBE D’HEURLE.