Conversation with Carol Bove + Kelly Baum
An Interview with Workspace artist Carol Bove
Workspace is an initiative at the Blanton Museum of Art that showcases experimental work by innovative contemporary artists. Currently on view through October 1 at Workspace is New York-based artist Carol Bove’s “setting” for A. Pomodoro, curated by Kelly Baum, the Blanton’s Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art. As the title of Bove’s exhibition alludes, the work of Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926) figures prominently in the installation. Pomodoro’s sculpture from 1963 is featured in one of two “settings” or “sculpture gardens” created by Bove that narrate moments in the history of twentieth-century art though materials and objects that function as cues. Though not a particularly well-known artist, Pomodoro was active in Italy and California during the sixties and seventies. While he traveled in circles with the Beat poets, Lucio Fontana and Louise Nevelson, his work doesn’t belong to any specific movement or school. Pomodoro complicates a conventional, canonical understanding of art history and, as such, is in keeping with Bove’s own approach, described by Baum as “very personal and idiosyncratic.” Minutes after installing “setting” for A. Pomodoro, Carol Bove and Kelly Baum met with …might be good’s interviewer Laura Lindenberger (LAURA AUGUST) to discuss the work, its relationship to histories of the twentieth century and how peacock feathers entered the mix.
…might be good: Could we begin by discussing the works themselves – I’d like to have you talk me through them and how they work for you in this space.Carol Bove: I always feel more satisfied if the piece is being imperiled in a way. It activates [the works] to me – there’s a feather here moving a little bit, or this piece looks like it’s almost about to fall off the edge here. It could almost break. To me, that you can have a sense of pathos for something inanimate is really exciting. … At a certain point I realized I wanted you to be able to enter the piece psychologically and I felt like making the shelf at eye level and putting objects in a tableau invited you to enter it psychologically. When I first put the objects on the plane, I thought, these are sort of temporary placeholders for the real thing I was actually going to put there later, which included a whole bunch of other things. I did it sort of unconsciously and then once everything was on there, it didn’t require so much. … I think about the whole piece as being a chronometer, where this plane is a representation of the twentieth century and the continuity of forms from the historical avant-garde moment to more of a neo-avant garde, going from pre-World War I to post-World War II and into the mid-1970s. There are forms that have a life that spans that whole time and it’s not discontinuous. This plane (referring to hanging bronze rods. On March 2, 2006, at 9 p.m., the rods suspended over the “sculpture garden” aligned perfectly with the stars congregating over the ceiling of the Berlin gallery where the work was being exhibited) is happening in the vertical, it’s built in advance of a celestial situation that’s going to come into alignment with the place and the time of the sculpture, so it’s totally contemporary, totally determined by when the exhibition is and where the exhibition is and our time now. But there’s such a built in obsolescence to that too, which makes it pointedly not work after the alignment. Or if it has some relationship to site-specificity, it’s documentary.
…mbg: In the pieces I’ve seen, you have a lot of books lined on shelves and in different configurations. I was interested in how the books become very tactile objects and whether the content of the books plays into the viewer’s experience of the piece. There are no books here, but I think this work plays on some of the same kind of questions because there’s a real tactility to the objects. They’re very sensual and personal. Could we talk a little bit about touch, how you see your viewer interacting with it, and how you interact with the individual elements within the work?
CB: The books I’ve used have been around for a long time, so you have a sense of this life that they bring to the piece that has nothing to do with my authoring it. They have their own life. And they have also relationships to the viewers; a lot of people within an installation would know of a book and would say, ‘Oh, I had that when I was 16’ or ‘That makes me think of my friend who had it.’ … I like using mass-produced books, which are no longer in circulation because they have that quality of having been circulated and having entered the popular consciousness. With this, it’s different because a lot of the patination is really artificial. I would never do that to a book, like scratch it or put it in the oven to look old; I think I prefer things that have their own life and my authoring them seems a little bit withheld. As for the specific materials, I don’t know how people would interact with them. These pieces are really new. Different materials have a lot of content and for me, the concrete cubes were something I started making for sort of a different project. And I thought that scale was exciting and that a lot of the stuff I had been doing is architectural, but more humanized.
…mbg: When everything is taken out of this space, it feels so institutional and you’ve managed to humanize it. I’ve read that many of your spaces become very domestic. It’s interesting to see how you’re transforming the space into something more intimate and personal.
CB: But it’s totally not domestic. I was thinking about the feelings I associate with the university art museum, which are kind of heavy and a little gloomy. Which I don’t mean in a bad way at all. … For me, it’s a really early art experience—that was one of the first art spaces I would go to was the university art museum at Berkeley and it was a really brutalist, concrete building. I just thought, it was such a cheat that that was the kind of architecture you got in the 1970s. My idea of the present and progress and modernism as a little kid was like, in the old days you got something where they actually tried and there was ornament and this is just so ugly. Now that kind of stuff has really grown on me and I really love that building. I wonder if that’s nostalgia or sophistication. I can’t really separate those two things. [The work is made of] really sensual material and it makes me think about that kind of architecture and minimalism but also prison and paving over the world and the kind of violence of modernity. But then also, the scale [of the work] makes it funny.
…mbg: Hearing you talk about this post-war moment or minimalist moment and your own experiences of the museum as a child—what I find really interesting is how these things collapse and how you work as both a collector and an artist. I wonder if you think of yourself as a collector, as an anthropologist of sorts, as an artist/historian?
CB: Basically not. I don’t see myself as a collector because I don’t collect. I accumulate, but then I disperse. I’m engaged with history, but I don’t think of myself that way. It’s not that I’m not disciplined, but the way that I approach it is really different from art historical discipline.
…mbg: It seems more personal, through experience.
CB: It’s really trusting if I just sort of follow my interests and intuition, then I’ll come up with connections that I wouldn’t if I approached it more rationally or more linearly. Sometimes something appears to me that seems so totally irrelevant and I think I’ll follow that, and it prevents me from anticipating what I might find.
…mbg: The Pomodoro sphere is really a beautiful addition to the installation.
CB: I wanted to put the Pomodoro in the middle of the room. It’s like an eye. Kelly was saying something that I didn’t know, which is that he worked after World War II doing rebuilding in Italy. She was comparing his world being destroyed and recreated at the same time, which has something to do with participating in World War II and then being active in the reconstruction. … I think about the different elements—they’re not specific references to anything, but they remind me of things. Like that reminds me of a Giacometti piece and that reminds me of Anne Truitt and this leaning thing is John McCracken a little bit. John McCracken was one of the first people’s work I saw and, you know when you’re a kid and you’re like, ‘I understand that’s supposed to be art, but it’s so simple.’ That really stuck in my head. … With both of these pieces, I feel like there’s a continuity of forms, both of Constructivism over the twentieth century and of Surrealism. The tonal qualities and the feelings of Surrealism are in the lighting. And the forms themselves are more related to Constructivism.
Kelly Baum: When you were describing the peacock feathers, it was so rich and the objects were so saturated with meaning for you and it kind of epitomized the way materials and objects work for you in general—they’re so multifaceted and the stories are like mythology.
CB: You’re right—
KB: It’s like one idea suggests another.
CB: I would never want to have something just be equivalent, like a one to one relationship. It’s always going to be rambling or dispersed. The peacock feathers—I feel like they have all these different points in history where they have a certain moment of interest and I think about classical mythology—they’re the eye of Hera. In the Metamorphosis there’s this beautiful story about Io and Jove. Well it’s a long story, you should read it… In Symbolism, late-nineteenth century, there’s this re-interest in peacock feathers, and in Surrealism they have this understanding of the eye quality. And then in 1966 there’s a big exhibition of Aubrey Beardsley’s work in London and there’s sort of a fashion for him and he’s crazy for peacock feathers, and there’s a revival of the 1890s stuff in the 1960s. But still, in the ‘60s, there’s a survival of the Surrealist forms and then at the same time, in men’s fashion there’s the peacock revolution; men’s fashion got exciting all of a sudden in 1966 and they called it the peacock revolution. Suddenly the males are more interesting than the females. It was widely in the popular vocabulary, the peacock revolution. But then, personally, my grandmother really loved green and blue and she loved peacock feathers. Her whole fashion sense and her sense of culture was really related to classicism and classical culture, but then she was always striving to be modern. But she was so backwards-looking that she was never engaged in a legitimate avant-garde—but she was always striving. And peacock feathers were always arranged in her house in a way for me that was emblematic her forwards/backwards sense of culture. She died recently and so after she died, I became very attracted to peacock feathers.
KB: I have a question about the driftwood—do they have an art historical reference?
CB: I made seats—that was the first part of this project, the seats. It’s hard for me to say what they are exactly. They feel very modern, they also feel very modernist and they also seem like someone specifically and then they also kind of feel like an abandoned pier—the whole thing feels like an abandoned pier to me.
KB: They seem to have lived—all their experiences are recorded. You like materials that have a story and these definitely do.
CB: Making things out of driftwood has this really nice quality because you wonder where it’s been. It could have come from Guam, or maybe from Queens, how long has it been in the water? I live near the water, so I’ll go down pretty much every day and I’ll check out what’s new –
…mbg: Is that where you found these?
CB: Yeah. I’ll have a collection and one piece will be the one that kind of inspires the intervention. I’ll have to think about that—I wonder what they are specifically. I think they’re a little bit of Mark di Suvero. … Arte povera, Pop art, but then also kind of materialist use of found materials too.
KB: The twentieth century is encapsulated in this gallery
CB: Like a kind of gloss on the twentieth century, but a very personal one.