Page 106 - Flaunt 170 - The Phoenix Issue - Bosworth

JP: Rhode Island has a tradition of porcelain? AS: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller gave an amazing collection of porcelain; the porcelain room \[at RISDM\] hadn’t been touched in 30 years and nobody cared about it. I was researching a lot, so then I did a big installation at the museum and reinvented their porcelain room and their practices of exhibiting porcelain. JP: How long did that take? AS: I worked on that for about a year and then I did a contem- porary. I love the idea of screwing around with these, so the more pokey and silly that something is—like when I first started work- ing on ceramics, that was certainly deemed a dumb, marginalized material. So seeing this Meissen tradition, it was so marginalized that even the museum couldn’t have cared less, but I think they knew to think about all of their collections. JP: You were also an alumna at that point? AS: Yes. When The Frick asked me to do it, that really came because I did this project at The Rhode Island School of Design. The curator of Decorative Arts at The Frick had heard about it and the director had actually gone there and seen it. I think they thought that I was going to install this Meissen collection in the cases they had. I went and tried, thinking about it and thought, ‘I can’t do it.’ JP: Did you change it? AS: I changed everything. I couldn’t change how you entered the room, but I built all of the furniture based on furniture related to what else was in it. JP: It didn’t come from a big idea? AS: No. JP: Is that true for most things? AS: Yes. I want to feel my way through it. It’s sort of what I say about building sculpture, I never liked the idea of making a draw- ing, it just bores me to death. I feel like time is better spent just feeling it and visiting. I probably made 20 visits there. JP: So the thing I should really talk about is this new show coming out. What I was sensing was the Madison Square Park show \[Full Steam Ahead\] pushed your boundaries a lot. The scale of it. The enormous consideration of how it was used. You also changed the structure of the benches. You were pushing the limits of porcelain. And then I thought, she’s fearless. AS: I’m not fearless. JP: Oh god, it sure looks that way. AS: C’mon Judy. JP: No, really. What I think is impressive to me is that all your work has a kind of elegance, you seem to really understand where you want to take the work. You mix things, not just color, not just geometry, some come from the body, some come from music or compositional things. There’s a density and an openness with your decisions within the work so the scale now is heroic. AS: I mean it’s not heroic in terms of sculpture. Heroic for me. JP: For you and the materials you’re using. AS: Yes, I’m pushing new materials. JP: You don’t flirt, you power through. You are present. AS: I think it comes from having a good husband and having children and having all those years of not having a lot of time to work, so I’m letting it rip. My kids and my family are primary, and I feel so lucky to have that. And all of them are big characters in my life. Basically, late at night trying to see if I could do anything, sometimes in an exhausted state. I had a lot of pent up energy and ambition. JP: Can you talk about that? AS: I want to own ambition. I think we can talk about ambition in relation to gender. Because people say crazy shit to me, like ‘I don’t know how you do it!’ Or even back then, as you know, being a woman in the art world, having children was not something that you were welcomed to do. No one did it. Somebody in their 20’s was talking to me over the weekend and said, ‘Oh, all my friends in their early 30’s are going crazy,’ and this person was an artist. ‘They’re going crazy because they’re worried about having chil- dren and stuff like that.’ Then she said, ‘Were you worried about that when you were in your 20’s? I said ‘opposite.’ Now, I see that I got off easy because the idea was that you were not supposed to have children, that actually having a relationship was a wish and a prayer. I mean Judy you had several marriages. JP: Three. AS: I know, I looked up to you for that. Even that was a no-no. The whole thing of any kind of family was a contradiction of your seriousness. JP: The best work is being done by women. A long time ago in the early ‘80s I was in a show in Cologne, Germany called West- kunst. It was a survey from 1939 to 1981, and there were no women in that show. Hundreds of American and European artists—no women in the historical section. There was a corridor for emerg- ing called Heute, which had three women. It was not apparent to me then how the women artists had disappeared, perhaps because I was being treated well. AS: One step forward, three steps backward. There’s a great pod- cast series that Helen \[Molesworth\] is doing in conjunction with The Getty. I just listened to Lee Krasner. It’s using original voices. You got treated well, but not as well as you should have been treated, Judy! If you were a guy, you would have been raking it in and having your choice on galleries. JP: So Pace. AS: Pace. JP: It represents a staple but it also has a cache. It’s powerful. This is another step. AS: Yeah, it’s another step. JP: I think it would be interesting on how it affects you. You’re like kicking ass in there so it seems like you’re on good footing. By the way, is some of that flocking? Is that a green in there, is that a glaze? AS: It’s a glaze. JP: Where did you think you got the confidence to make these moves? Even within tradition, with outside work, with jumping to this. Did it ever feel like, ‘I’m not worthy?’ AS: No, it felt like ‘I’m gonna die.’ JP: And you might as well do this now? AS: Not just now. There was a big turning point in my life where my best friend from art school, Carole Bale, got a horrible variant form of cancer in her 30’s, and went from being completely be- 100