A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky
by Christian Rattemeyer , 2008
This conversation took place at the desk of Werner (Wynn) Kramarsky in midtown Manhattan on November 6, 2007. Present at the time were Wynn Kramarsky, Christian Rattemeyer (The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawing, The Museum of Modern Art), Philip Van Keuren, and Theo Stanley. Theo Stanley filmed the conversation, and Stephanie Brown, the 2007-2008 Pollock Curatorial Intern, transcribed the conversation from the film.
Christian Rattemeyer: I’ve been reading a little bit, both in terms of previous interviews in this series and the dog interview with you [On Drawing: A Conversation with Wynn Kramarsky, Connie Butler, and Harry Cooper, Pollock Gallery, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 2000], and one of the things I realized is that, for me personally, I am very interested in the beginning, when it started for you. Not necessarily when you started collecting, as a conscious decision, but I want to focus a little bit on the moment when your, let’s say, formal sensibilities or the kind of stuff that you like worked itself out through contemporary artists. Because a lot of the material in this exhibition [at the Pollock Gallery] is of a younger generation—I suspect—of a younger generation than the material you started out with initially. I want to get a sense of how your sensibilities were shaped in the late 50s and early 60s to see how that translates into younger generations.
Wynn Kramarsky: Well, I lived in those days very casually in a lot of places in Greenwich Village and places like that. I knew a lot of artists. Nobody had any money and I was very fortunate because I actually had a real job, which meant that I regularly ended up buying meals or beer for a lot of people who were artists and who were my friends. They came to whatever place I was living in. I went to their places. That was the time that I saw a lot of things that today are known as “abstract expressionism” but at that time were unnamed as yet. It was really in the early 60s that I saw some Sol LeWitt work and that really settled it. I mean, I had collected quite a few things before then, but seeing the LeWitt work and beginning to understand what he was thinking was pretty determinative for me. I had bought work, interesting work, before then, and I think that probably the story that everybody loves is the fact that in 1958, when Jasper had his first show at Castelli, I bought a little drawing. A very small drawing that cost $175 at the time and it took me six months to pay for it. It’s the only work of a living artist I have ever sold. And I sold it because after about seven years it started to fall apart, or so I thought. I went to see what it would cost to have it stabilized or restored, and although I was single when I bought the drawing, by the time that it started to fall apart I was married and had a couple of children and a third one on the way. I couldn’t afford $1,000 to $1,200 on the off chance that it might survive. So, that’s the only work of a living artist I’ve ever sold. But I think to some extent this was also formative for me because even then I was interested in how something was made. It’s always been sort of “how is it made?” From very early on, from childhood on, I was interested in “how does this work?” and “how is this made?” In drawings, for me, that was always an easier thing to probe than it would be in a painting because you can actually see what was happening. Then, maybe fifteen to twenty years later, I said, “Well, you know, I’ve got a fair group of nice things. I ought to really focus back on the people who are young now, because these people were now twenty years older and twenty years more expensive.” So I started looking in studios. I was always interested in the minimalist, post-minimalist, minimalist-related, constructivist-related, and, to some extent, earthwork-related. All that material interested me because it’s all about how something is made.
CR: For one, I think your story about Jasper’s drawing is very, very informative because it means that the only time you forced or you made yourself sell a work is because you realized you couldn’t adequately care for it anymore. It speaks of a very profound respect not only for the artist but also for each individual work.
WK: I’ve got to tell you, that’s giving me far too much credit. You know, circumstances. To some extent, circumstances determine what you can and can’t do. And you make those decisions and I don’t think you really think them through the way you’ve just thought that through. I don’t think that was as much on my mind, but not selling work of a living artist has been very much on my mind and in my pattern.
CR: You have to keep in mind that I’m a historian. It’s my job to retroactively rewrite the history to make sense of it. [Laughter]
WK: One of the things that really bother me today is that artists are constantly asked to give things to auctions and things like that. And it’s bought by somebody for much less then what that artist’s market price is and three years later you see it in an auction. It’s demeaning and it’s disgusting and I get very angry about it because I really think that it’s taking advantage of artists. Most of them are not Jasper Johns or Brice Marden. They are not rich. They are living day-to-day in a studio by themselves making work because that’s what they have to do.
CR: They don’t get the tax break for it.
WK: No, they don’t get anything. As a matter of fact, most of the people who buy that stuff take a tax deduction, which they shouldn’t do.
CR: Right, right. That’s tax law that artists only get the value of the material for the work.
WK: Well, we hope that’ll change soon.
CR: Yes. We hope. Well, that’s one of the reasons Artists Space, which is my former employer, adamantly refuses to do auctions because they don’t want to take work from artists.
WK: In all the times that I’ve done exhibitions, when I did exhibitions, we never got between the artist and the collector. If somebody wanted to buy something that was in the show, we sent them to the artist and let them make their own deal or sent them to the dealer that at that point represented the artist because sometimes that happened. I, much to the chagrin of many of my friends, also have good words for the dealers, because without them how would the artist’s get their work into the world?
CR: I’m interested in that notion of how things are made. I’m coming back to this point because one of the credos I grew up, something that was sort of said around the kitchen table growing up, was what Franz Meyer, the former director of the Kunstmuseum Basel said, who claimed that you always only really understand the artists of your generation. Which, in his case, was already somewhat wrong because most of the artists that he claimed to be his generation were about twenty years his junior. But it just happened to be because he came to the art world a little later being a lawyer by training. I guess my question goes to understanding the social circumstances out of which you came to collect art. What exactly was it about the processes, about the working methods, that drew you to this kind of material? Was there something about that relationship between a proclaimed rationality and irrationality? Or do you have a sense of what it is about the making of these works that sort of immediately draws you in?
WK: Well, it is a very good time to have this conversation because on the desk between us lies the catalog of the Seurat show and it is a classic example of where you really, really have to look at how it’s made. My interest is, I think, partially because—well, what little interest I had in school was in geometry and physics. So, it’s mechanical. I really look at things and see—before I even begin to think about “what does this mean?” I look at “how did it get made?” and “how did it get put together?” And from there you begin to think of “why was it put together?” and that’s a whole other theory. I think that there is some argument that you could only understand the art of your time in terms of the social, cultural impetus that the artists of your time are living with, but if you are a reasonably educated human being you have some sense of what the proceeding two generations, maybe even three generations, lived through culturally. I think that it is probably more true of my generation then it would be of a generation that is twenty, twenty-five years old today because living through wars, holocausts, and all of that makes you more aware of your history then people today probably are. But I still think—I have a lot of trouble with some of what is being made today because I don’t understand the cultural impetus for it. I am not watching a lot of television, and I don’t listen to a lot of rock music and a lot of the art that gets made today, quite properly, relates to that. So, I quite readily admit that there is a lot of stuff I don’t understand and I go and look and I try to understand because I feel that’s my duty.
CR: I have the same thing. It’s also generations are getting shorter and shorter, I think. Now I go to a gallery and I see people who are five years younger then I am and they refer to completely different references and so on. And that is beyond whether or not you follow the same kind of popular culture, in a way. A first generation is coming into college age that was born after the Berlin wall came down.
WK: Yes.
CR: You know, there are certain general geopolitical parameters that have since ceased. I am probably the last generation that actually lived through the Cold War, which I think has tremendous consequences on the kind of environment or the kind of historical consciousness out of which you produce work.
WK: For me, for example, I look at certain work and I can see, yes, thinking back this artist probably knows something about what Woodstock was all about or this artist knows something about what 1968 was all about and what happened in those days and what it meant to the artist community of that time. But I also see a lot of work where I absolutely don’t understand the reference and then I ask and I very often don’t know the names. It’s part of getting older.
CR: When I think of Sol LeWitt, when I think of the 60s, when I think of everything that happened in that time, I believe we all agree, now looking back at it, that there was a tremendous wealth of really radical innovation that was made. Not just in terms of general culture but also in terms of very specific art historical things. Most of the important concepts that we look back at originated in that decade. But, with regard to the artists of that generation and of that time, did you have the feeling that during that time it presented itself as radical, as experimental, as something genuinely new? And do you think that a younger generation of artists you follow has a different relationship? That what you see in the work is almost a reference to those moments rather than a genuine experimental continuation of it?
WK: Well, let me take that in two parts. At the time, in the 60s, we were just as radical ourselves, and involved in so much of the radical material that was happening that you didn’t really think about that in those terms. You didn’t think it was radical. You thought it was exciting, beautiful, sometimes disturbing, often very much commentary on its moment, but you didn’t think of it as being radical because you were radical yourself. We’re sitting here with Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt drawings and those were made in that moment and they were exciting but we didn’t really think radical. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we thought very much at that time about the history of it. Even when you read today what Bochner and people like that wrote at that time, they didn’t write about it as having been particularly radical. They just thought about what they were doing.
CR: But they understood they were part of a group of like-minded spirits, if you will.
WK: Absolutely.
CR: I think there is a genuine difference between a sort of bonding and an understanding that there is a certain limited of a group of people who think alike, maybe less limited than we like to think looking back at it, who produce work in a similar vein, who move it forward, and who are, in one form or another, in opposition to what everybody else thinks.
WK: And in addition to that, in opposition to some of their colleagues of a slightly older group who were making work that had very specific references to European work and were knowledgeable of that. And, yes, there is that feeling that you are embattled with the group and you show in places that other people would never think of. Yes, that does exist and did exist and it exists, to some extent, today. It’s what we see at Artists Space and The Drawing Center and places like that, which were created because there really wasn’t a commercial place that would take artists who were that young, expected to be inexperienced or unexposed. By the time you got into a commercial gallery, you were supposed to have a number of sales, whereas with Artists Space and The Drawing Center, once you got a dealer you couldn’t show at those places anymore.
CR: Which has changed because with so many dealers around, you shoot yourself in the foot, in a way.
WK: I still think that there are an awful lot of artists around who do not get to show in the commercial galleries and who would use places like Artists Space and The Drawing Center if that opportunity was there for that kind of work.
CR: Absolutely, absolutely, and I think those institutions ought to pay attention to that and understand that.
WK: It should be part of the mission.
CR: I think it still is to some degree. I guess the second part of my question is that I went through the resumes a little bit and I realized that a lot of the artists, at least in this group, were born in the second half of the 50s and early 60s. And looking at the work, there is almost something that feels classical in relation to that first generation of minimal, post-minimal process art, especially if you understand that within the context of the 60s it was seen as experimental. Maybe it didn’t feel as radical at the time, but historically you would look at it and say there was a real moment of radicalization there. Whereas, with this generation it feels as if there is a—I don’t want to make them into mere followers, which I don’t think any of them are—but there is a sense of classicism in the work that is interesting to see. It feels like a continuation of something and a looking back and a referencing back.
WK: To some extent that probably is more due to the fact that when I selected this group, I selected them for a particular purpose. If you look at them, they have a distinct purpose—they all demonstrate different media, different supports, different ways of using a particular medium. They are selected as, basically, teaching tools. Most of what I’ve given to the educational institutions is selected that way. So that puts a certain limit on it. But of course, you’re right. My eye and my sensibility come out of that earlier period. Maybe what my eye does is classicize that.
CR: Maybe I should say a second thing that relativizes that to some degree, which is that I was surprised going through this selection of artists to see the amount of almost expressive or vaguely surrealist choice of imagery, way of drawing a line. A hand that is much more reminiscent of early Eva Hesse then early Sol LeWitt. Which is almost a going back to—
WK: Let me stop you there, because you’re probably right in that it is more expressive and more related to early Eva Hesse and also to late Sol LeWitt. Because that is a part of it. Really strict geometric abstraction, although there is some of it, is less useful from that teaching point of view that I was interested in. So I suspect that you are right. There are fewer hard-edge geometric abstraction drawings in most of the teaching material that I have given away, but there is quite a lot of word art in it, which leans back to that. There is some geometric material. I guess that Sol’s later drawings, which I think of as romantic, the colors and their motion, also played a part in what I gave away in later years because by that time I had looked at a lot of that.
CR: I think late Sol LeWitt is an excellent moment to dwell on because I think no one else from that generation insisted as much on the material qualities of the process. Of trying to move forward and push further what you can do with the paint and with the paper with the exception of maybe Richard Serra’s drawings, which are becoming more and more material driven, particularly if I compare it to other conceptual artists. For me, Sol LeWitt was always the artist who brought along the late 60s conceptual traditions where it really moved away from materials and where the process got pushed into the theoretical arena. To insist on Sol LeWitt and to carry that through into the late drawings, in a way, puts a primacy on the material. I’m interested in that because the way you talk about this material selected as a teaching tool—where you learn about the paper and the support and the various graphic tools and the way in which they translate the line and what kind of line comes out—I think is a very particular focus on how process is understood through materials rather than through concepts.
WK: You know, I’ve often said that if I were forty years younger and was going to become a curator the first show I would want to do would be called “Support, Not Money.” And I would do a show about support, about what really is necessary to make a drawing, what is necessary to make a painting, and what is necessary to make a sculpture. What is the material? I guess that has always been part of my interest although I’ve never really expressed it that way until now because I’ve never really thought about it that way. But, yes, Sol also did not let structures of previous work interfere with his new work. They were not necessarily leaps, but the steps were very, very carefully expressed and you could always tell that it was his hand he was thinking about. Even in the sculptures, which were not necessarily fully made by him, if you have them in the original they were painted by him and you could tell that. You could see that he cared deeply about how something was made and how that care was communicated. Sol, for me, almost more then anybody, warms my heart. It’s a terrible loss. Since you’ve read some of the dog interview, the worst thing that happens to a pet owner is when a dog dies. When Sol died it was unspeakable for me for two or three days. I just couldn’t handle it. It’s a thing that communicates in a way that—Eva does, Cage does—these are people that communicate that way. Many of these younger people who are working from a different orientation are communicating in much the same way because they are taking a support and their medium and working it in such a way that it tells about the process and it tells about time. The one thing that I find difficult with a lot of very contemporary art is that the time component doesn’t speak to me. It’s a nasty thing to say, but I call a lot of it “plop art.” It doesn’t seem to have taken any deep commitment of thought or time. It is very communicative but it doesn't communicate a concept that includes time and effort.
CR: Do you think that the role of the artist or what an artist does and how it contributes to cultural production at large has changed in that way? There is a sense in which work is produced in a different way because many of the younger artists who work in a, let’s call it “minimalist vein,” for lack of a better differentiation, work about it in very specific referential way. They are extremely interested in some of the elements of what minimalism meant, of how it worked, but they go about these references in a very, very different way than even this slightly older generation of artists. They are interested in the formal qualities of minimalism as it is read as an image or an icon or an advertising branch. They are interested in lines and x’s and squares and triangles and cubes as something that communicates in a very specific way, almost like the Mercedes-Benz logo does, rather then looking at the things and looking at how they’re made, where there are tape marks, where the hand comes in. It is a different understanding of what an artist does in contributing an image to society.
WK: I’m sure some of that is accurate and true and I’m sure that some of it comes from some of the art schools. I think another part of it comes from the fact that much of what was the art of the 60s and 70s became logos for advertising. So, since that is an economic factor that a contemporary artist cannot ignore, he or she also has to think “how do I get to that point?”
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WK: As for the process part in the younger artists, I don’t think they are nearly as concerned with the question of what they are using for support or what they are using as media as older artists were. It was a major breakthrough, particularly Eva. I often refer to artists as the sons and daughters of Eva because of her revolutionary choice of some materials in her sculpture.
CR: She paid a very high price for it.
WK: And she paid a very high price for it. If you think of the use of Mylar and Jasper’s early use of Mylar, those were very deliberate decisions and I’m not sure that many of the younger artists really think about it that way. They know the material is available and they go and get it and they deal with it that way. I’m fascinated by younger artists today who make decisions that deal with that. There is a young woman named Karen Schiff who has been using laid paper and her work is to highlight the ridges and valleys of laid paper. That, to me, is a very interesting thing to do because that is a way of using abstraction in a most direct way and a wonderfully communicative way. It turns out to be very beautiful.
CR: I want to come back to that because in the earlier interview, the dog interview, you were asking the question at some point and then it opens to the audience about the use of the computer. I realized the interview was in 2000 and even in those seven years the proliferation, the potential, the fluency of the computer has multiplied and moved light-years ahead. One artist, in particular, I am thinking about is a young artist and good friend of mine named Wade Guyton, who makes a lot of work in very specific reference back to formal vocabularies of minimalism. One of his earliest series is called The Printer Drawings, where he takes pages of old museum catalogs, black-and-white catalogs with works by Naum Gabo, and Antoine Pevsner, and the Bechers—you know, what Benjamin Buchloh called “Cold War Constructivism.”
WK: Yes, but he has much more of an accent then you do. [Laughter]
CR: Wade just basically makes these very simple grids and lines and x-style compositions in Word or very basic computer programs and then prints on that page of the catalog. Sometimes the ink smears because it’s a glossy paper; sometimes the computer and the printer makes these lines because the printer hasn’t been cleaned properly. So you get these processional marks that are purely technological that come out of the technology he uses. It’s a high degree of differentiation on the level of how color is distributed and how the color and the paper interact, but it’s completely relegated to a technological realm. I had to think of that when you were asking the question of who uses computers, because in a younger generation he is probably one of the people I know who most consciously goes back to a language of minimalism to investigate it and have a dialog with it but does it in a technological way that, for me, immediately came up as an example of that question you were asking seven years ago.
WK: Well, there is an artist named Sharon Louden—I think I may have been one of the first people who ever bought a work of hers twenty some-odd years ago—who now also does work on a computer and actually animation on a computer screen. She had a recent show and I went and looked at it and I thought the paintings and drawings were beautiful, and I went and looked at the animation and I guess I’m not fully adjusted to that idea. To me it looked a little mechanical. Now, I am very comfortable with the computer. I use it for a lot of things. I’m not computer phobic, but it’s difficult for me to see how to get any warmth out of it. I think it makes no rational sense, I fully recognize that, but, for me, it doesn’t generate warmth. Even the harshest work, for me, has to generate warmth to be of any interest whether I like it or not. Nick Serota, the director of the Tate, once said to me “If I see work that I really, really, really truly hate I figure that two or three years later I’ll be showing it.” Well, I feel that way. To be interesting, work has to generate that kind of heat that you react to. I don’t react to it on a computer, I just can’t. I don’t know why.
CR: Well, maybe it’s today’s expression of the Swiss concretism of the 70s that takes a certain kind of mathematical precision to the final end. Growing up, I remember being very early on taken by Richard Paul Lohse, Max Bill, and that kind of material, but never really being able to embrace it in the way that I was just completely smitten by Mondrian and understanding the messiness of it and looking at it and seeing how he figured out where to put the line by trial and not by mathematical computation. There is something to be said about that kind of interaction, even on a compositional level, that is different from the one that is arrived at by purely mechanical means.
WK: I think Mondrian is probably a very good example because there you actually can see how it’s made.
CR: Yes.
WK: You very much relate to that, as a matter of fact. A print of a Mondrian, for example, where that is lost—we were just talking about an Ellsworth Kelly print where some of that work evidence is lost, the warmth disappears. The hand is very important and, in a way, unavoidable. I think the time will come when it is no longer an issue whether someone like me feels warmth from it. It will not be germane anymore because people will be accustomed to seeing certain things in certain ways and they will react the way they are meant to.
CR: You begin to understand to read that work in a different way. I remember, very distinctly, there was an Albert Oehlen computer drawings show in the late 90s in Berlin. And a friend of mine who is a computer programmer and Internet artist walked in and he said, “You know, all these jagged lines that were seemingly drawn in Photoshop and then printed out, no Photoshop program currently in existence is actually able to create that crude of a line anymore. Either he used first-generation Photoshop, which doesn't run on any machine anymore, or he had to hand re-create the crudeness of the early computer line in a much more advanced program, which would have taken him an exorbitant amount of work.” He could look at it and exactly understand which lines are possible to make with which kind of program and read the labor that went into it, which for me looked like a crude mouse-drawn computer line and I didn’t give it a second thought. Those kind of visual proficiency with a different kind of language is very generational and for me not even attainable anymore.
WK: If you look at Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, when we first saw those we didn’t realize that he had to invent those forms. They didn’t exist. He couldn’t invented them without a computer, but he did invent them by using the computer. That I understand, but then there comes a point where you see a model of that and how much hand goes into that. And that is what you are also saying, that a great deal of hand went into making those lines.
CR: Absolutely. I showed work by two architects, Aranda/Lasch, who work with the computer and do a lot of algorithmic design and basically make the computer make design decisions. But then they choose to collaborate with Terrol Dew Johnson, who’s an Arizona-based Native American basket weaver, and they gave him the computational patterns. Exploiting the similarities between weaving and pattern design, both of which are based on the repetition of patterns. So computer design and weaving are very similar. They basically gave him this computer-generated design and he translated it into baskets. They were the weirdest-looking things. They showed that next to the 3-D plot, basically a printout of the computer program. They were related, but they were fundamentally different also. You could see that relationship and then it becomes interesting.
WK: Yes. I think, in a way, I can’t see that yet when I see work on a computer. I just don’t see that relationship and I don’t know enough about it to know how difficult it would be to do that.
CR: I think it comes back to the object. I think it’s a program on a computer; the computer is just the tool. It all has to come back to the object, and for Richard Serra the object just happens to be an incredibly spectacular giant steel sculpture that has an effect on us.
WK: Richard is also interesting because he really does know exactly what he wants to do. For example, in a large set of drawings that was shown three or four years ago, the drawing is made by placing a plate on the floor, covering it with oil stick, laying a sheet of paper on top of it, and then walking on the back of the piece of paper so that he gets that image on the front that he wants, which is really the reverse. That’s a hell of an idea. But that’s the object and you go to that and you go to that with people in this kind of a show. There is an artist in this gift [to the Pollock Works on Paper Study Collection] named Nancy Haynes who I have collected for many, many years, almost exclusively monoprints. I consider monoprint a drawing. This is actually a drawing that’s there. She uses her experience as a printer to make drawings and her drawings are, for me, instructive because of how that work actually translates when it comes down. Color and shape, if you see a lot of her monoprints, she’s worked them out there and then it appears here. There are always people like that who work in different ways to accomplish that.
CR: How do you find new artists? Where do you look these days?
WK: Well, now I don’t at the moment, or very little. I spent a good twelve years going to studios two or three days a week. When I had the space downtown where I could show work, I went all the time. Now, once people in the art world know that you’re willing to look at work and willing to actually buy work, you are inundated. We became very careful. I had some very unfortunate experiences where I went to places to look at something and I found myself trapped looking at work that was, at best, Sunday painter, but often with people who were older, if not much older, and were very needy. How do you get out? It’s awkward. So I had to being to set certain limits and say that I wouldn’t look at work unless I saw slides or transparencies or something else first. In a month, I’d see forty to fifty artists. A lot of it was just looking and deciding whether I was interested or not, or whether I was sufficiently interested to acquire work, or if I wanted to refer to somebody else. I did a lot of that. Then we decided to do shows in that space. We showed work. So it was an ongoing process. It stopped in part because I moved uptown, because I got to the point where I didn’t like to walk up six flights of stairs in SoHo.
CR: When did you have your space [at 560 Broadway]?
WK: From 1991 to 2006. A lot of artists came to visit and say, “Can I come and show you work?” I almost always said yes, unless it was really not what I was interested in. People began to know that I was interested in drawings and that drawings were a great wide field for me. It seemed to me, at the time, that even though there were a lot of not-for-profit spaces that would show work, they were deliberately all over the lot. They would show any kind of work as long as it had some quality. I was really interested in a particular kind of work and people got to know that, so I saw a lot of that.
CR: Right. So a lot of it was brought to you?
WK: Yes, a lot of it was brought to me. People would send me slides or something like that, but most of the work that I did anything with I went to studio. I think in all of the collecting that I’ve done, there are two unique drawings that I bought without having seen them because they were in California. Other then that, I always saw the work and, of course, occasionally catalogs.
CR: Do you go back and acquire historic materials by artists?
WK: I try to, yes. For the big names of the 60s and 70s that’s no longer possible.
CR: Right. I know, those 50s Jasper Johns drawings have now—
WK: Yeah. Although I still bought some at auction fifteen years later. It was still possible. We were just talking about the fact that in a current auction there is an Eva Hesse drawing that was estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million. A drawing much like the one that is up there only that it was one of the circle drawings that came out of the Gildon Collection. I knew the drawing very well. It’s a beautiful drawing, but $1 million? Ain’t what it use to be, I guess. [Laughter]
CR: I guess there is a limited—they are finite bodies of work.
WK: Yes.
CR: I’m thinking about that because there are artists in this Pollock gift like Julia Mangold, one of the people that I immediately recognized. I remember when she was a young German artist and I was coming across the work for the first time in the mid-90s. I haven’t heard from her in a number of years until I came across her work both in our collection and then here. In both cases, I think, having come from your collection originally. I’m interested in how you come across that, because—
WK: How I found her? Well, Julia is a special example. Somebody told me, “You ought to look at this work,” and I said, “I want to see some work.” She was actually in New York and she came and showed me some drawings. I did a show of her work with some sculpture. She now lives over here, you know. I also visited her in her studio and looked at the work there because I wouldn’t have done the show if I hadn’t done that. It is work that should be much wider known than it is. I think she is a very, very, very good artist who has looked at the history of that kind of work and looked at some of her contemporaries and said her direction is more oriented toward that which she had seen out of the 60s and 70s. But there is another German artist who is also doing that, Frank Gerritz. I don’t know if you know his work.
CR: I don’t.
WK: He also came and showed me work because he heard about that. I went to see him and I have some of that work and I’ve shown that work also. I think, except for an unfortunate show that I did of the work of nine Icelandic women—I planned to go to Iceland to see Richard Serra’s sculpture on the island. That plan was very well along the way. I was going to go to Rome and from Rome I was going to fly to Iceland. I was going to meet Annie Philbin there and we were going to look at the Serra sculptures. So, Thursday afternoon I’m sitting in my space at 560 Broadway and a guy calls me up and says, “Mr. Kramarsky, you don’t know me but I have the so-and-so gallery and I have committed to do a show of nine Icelandic women. That show is going to be opened by the President of Iceland and it’s scheduled for…,” and he told me when. He said, “I have to, for family reasons, close my gallery. I have to cancel that show and I hope that you might be willing to take this on.” I thought it would be bad karma to go to Iceland having said no to that. So, I said yes. It was all somewhere between painting and sculpture, all sort of leaning against the wall. It was three-dimensional. It was interesting. It was fun to do. But it was not my cup of tea. That space had two rooms, the front room was where you entered. One of the women had made a piece that had shoes in it and the shoes were sitting on the floor. Whenever people came in the door they thought they had to take their shoes off, so that was one part of that. The best part, however, was that the President of Iceland actually came over to open the show. She is a head of state so she has Secret Service protection. I don’t allow guns anywhere near me so I told them they couldn’t come in—the Secret Service guys with their guns. We had the biggest fight about what you can and can’t do. I said, “I’m very sorry but it’s my space and you aren’t coming in.” They finally compromised by having one of the secret service men taking two guns and standing outside and the other one coming in. The President of Iceland was very nice about it. She said, “ I don’t need either of these guys to protect me because there is no reason to protect me.” Anyway, it was very funny. It’s been great fun. That’s the only work I showed that I hadn’t ever seen.
CR: Right.
WK: I want to go back to this work for another minute not so much for a particular artist but—it’s so difficult to take this kind of work and talk about any one piece without talking about a number of them. Andrew Spence is a good case in point because that really is a very contemporary piece that very definitely refers back to the 60s and 70s and does so deliberately. It is a reference that is knowledgeable and appreciative and it is still perfectly contemporary and speaks to a contemporary sensibility. One of the things that I have always tried to do with any of the work that I have given away is to have it fit into the mission of the particular institution, to expand that in some way because usually there is not relatively contemporary work in those collections of any nature or value, and to hope that people will think about the fact that the reference is to support the medium and how they relate to each other and how the process of making work is evidenced. And that’s really all you can do. You know that better than I do because you do it every day that you put a show together. For me, that became the mission when I started giving work away. When you give it to a collection like MoMA’s you just have to pick stuff that you hope will in some way or another serve that institution because that’s such an immense collection that almost everything is a redundancy except very contemporary work.
CR: Yes, or very, very important key pieces.
WK: Well, that’s always true.
CR: For me, going through our collection when I started and putting together a “Lines-Grids” show was just a sheer “we have that too,” “oh, we have that too.” Coming across Ellsworth Kelly’s study for the Paris Window is just one of those moments. I had to put that in the show for no other reason than my own wonderment and marvel that we actually had this work in the collection.
WK: There is another Kelly in my collection that you would really want and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it—I’m going to figure out how I'm going to do it—but he made it the afternoon after he met Duchamp on the street in Paris. He went and did an automatic drawing. They had a talk about automatic drawings and he made a drawing of the smoke stacks that he could see outside of his window. It’s, to me, a classically exciting drawing of that period and of Ellsworth Kelly’s.
CR: It boils down to what you’re drawn to because I can very distinctly remember when I was twelve years old or something like that and just being drawn to Mondrian and being drawn to that kind of work; and right then and there knowing that this is exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in.
WK: At eleven or twelve was when I first decided that I was interested in drawing because you could see how they were made.
CR: You were talking earlier about the mathematical and process and I wrote down Molly Nesbit’s Their Common Sense. It is a book about the learning of technical drawing skill as it was taught in French schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As engineerical drawings, as something that they thought kids should know—they should know how to make a technical drawing. She argues that there was a common language, an almost physically acquired language, that Picabia, Duchamp, and that generation of people just knew how to speak. And how that kind of drawing practice from Duchamp’s studies for the Large Glass and Picabia’s technical drawings goes back to a certain kind of grade school instruction that they had at French schools. You were talking about automatic drawing, how it can leap a generation, and when Ellsworth Kelly meets Duchamp it’s almost as if a transference of a certain kind of knowledge of drawing had taken place. It skips a generation and rematerializes in a next generation of artists.
WK: And, of course, if you look at the painters that were trained in East Germany they trained so well that they can do anything. What they do with it is different than what you might want, but the artisanal skills are so good that they can do anything. And that will pass on to other people who study with them and make that decision to learn how to do anything. I think that is a crucial part. I’m not so sure that our art schools are as interested in training people. I think they make a distinction between training and educating and I don’t think that is a distinction that holds in the long run. It’s wonderful if they are educated, and it’s necessary, but there is also a certain amount of training, a certain amount of basic skill that, unless it is there, that work doesn’t work. That’s some of what I’ve seen that isn’t there. There is a real knowledge of what you want to say but there is not a real knowledge of how you skillfully put it together. I’m not talking about the fact that people make things that are deliberately to be picked at—that’s not what I’m talking about—but the fact that I look at many of the things and say, “You know, just a little mechanical knowledge would make that look more solid.”
CR: Right, it’s interesting. I remember when everyone looked at John Currin and talked about how masterly his painting technique is. The unsaid part of it was “for someone coming out of Yale.” They would never say that about someone who graduated from the New York Academy School. Unfortunately, very rarely do you see the technical skill that is taught in some institutions and the historical, conceptual open-mindedness and deep understanding of what came before you that is taught at a different kind of school come together and really influence each other. Some of the people who come out of schooling where you learn how to do everything still think they’re Ingres.
WK: There is one thing we really need to say. The business of making work is hard work. It’s skill, it’s talent, it’s opportunity, and then comes the question of luck because you also have to have luck. Without luck, you don’t get into a gallery or into a show or all of those things, because you can make all the rounds you want to and your work can be absolutely exquisite but if you’re not lucky the right person doesn't see it. You said before how often do I have to talk about the business of abstraction or contemporary art. I talk with artists all the time, and obviously I have a lot of artist friends, and I tell them that a large piece of this is luck. You can have all the talent and all the skill in the world and you can work very, very hard but you need an opportunity. So one of the things I try to do is create opportunities for people. You give work like this to an institution and maybe somebody will see it and say, “Hey, that looks interesting. I wonder where that artist is?” And find them and either show them or acquire work or something like that.
CR: It reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor at an art school in Germany who said, “You know, everybody is mourning the fact that there is no life drawing anymore.” In German foundational school, out of a Bauhaus model, it’s called Formenlehre—the basic teaching of forms. And he said, “We have to institute a different kind of Formenlehre. We have to institute that people know how to put together a portfolio, how to apply for a public competition, how to present and conduct a studio visit.” It’s basic knowledge that an artist has to know because as much as it is luck, it is also something that you need to learn how to do.
WK: Well, the fact is that a little Formenlehre wouldn’t do any harm either. Having a real knowledge of how to make a drawing, a real foundation knowledge of how to make a drawing, is a very, very, very important part of it. It teaches you about relationships that are crucial to make work.
Citation:
Rattemeyer, Christian and Werner H. Kramarsky. Conversations 6: A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky. Dallas, TX: Pollock Gallery, Southern Methodist University, 2008. © 2008 Southern Methodist University.
Christian Rattemeyer: I’ve been reading a little bit, both in terms of previous interviews in this series and the dog interview with you [On Drawing: A Conversation with Wynn Kramarsky, Connie Butler, and Harry Cooper, Pollock Gallery, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 2000], and one of the things I realized is that, for me personally, I am very interested in the beginning, when it started for you. Not necessarily when you started collecting, as a conscious decision, but I want to focus a little bit on the moment when your, let’s say, formal sensibilities or the kind of stuff that you like worked itself out through contemporary artists. Because a lot of the material in this exhibition [at the Pollock Gallery] is of a younger generation—I suspect—of a younger generation than the material you started out with initially. I want to get a sense of how your sensibilities were shaped in the late 50s and early 60s to see how that translates into younger generations.
Wynn Kramarsky: Well, I lived in those days very casually in a lot of places in Greenwich Village and places like that. I knew a lot of artists. Nobody had any money and I was very fortunate because I actually had a real job, which meant that I regularly ended up buying meals or beer for a lot of people who were artists and who were my friends. They came to whatever place I was living in. I went to their places. That was the time that I saw a lot of things that today are known as “abstract expressionism” but at that time were unnamed as yet. It was really in the early 60s that I saw some Sol LeWitt work and that really settled it. I mean, I had collected quite a few things before then, but seeing the LeWitt work and beginning to understand what he was thinking was pretty determinative for me. I had bought work, interesting work, before then, and I think that probably the story that everybody loves is the fact that in 1958, when Jasper had his first show at Castelli, I bought a little drawing. A very small drawing that cost $175 at the time and it took me six months to pay for it. It’s the only work of a living artist I have ever sold. And I sold it because after about seven years it started to fall apart, or so I thought. I went to see what it would cost to have it stabilized or restored, and although I was single when I bought the drawing, by the time that it started to fall apart I was married and had a couple of children and a third one on the way. I couldn’t afford $1,000 to $1,200 on the off chance that it might survive. So, that’s the only work of a living artist I’ve ever sold. But I think to some extent this was also formative for me because even then I was interested in how something was made. It’s always been sort of “how is it made?” From very early on, from childhood on, I was interested in “how does this work?” and “how is this made?” In drawings, for me, that was always an easier thing to probe than it would be in a painting because you can actually see what was happening. Then, maybe fifteen to twenty years later, I said, “Well, you know, I’ve got a fair group of nice things. I ought to really focus back on the people who are young now, because these people were now twenty years older and twenty years more expensive.” So I started looking in studios. I was always interested in the minimalist, post-minimalist, minimalist-related, constructivist-related, and, to some extent, earthwork-related. All that material interested me because it’s all about how something is made.
CR: For one, I think your story about Jasper’s drawing is very, very informative because it means that the only time you forced or you made yourself sell a work is because you realized you couldn’t adequately care for it anymore. It speaks of a very profound respect not only for the artist but also for each individual work.
WK: I’ve got to tell you, that’s giving me far too much credit. You know, circumstances. To some extent, circumstances determine what you can and can’t do. And you make those decisions and I don’t think you really think them through the way you’ve just thought that through. I don’t think that was as much on my mind, but not selling work of a living artist has been very much on my mind and in my pattern.
CR: You have to keep in mind that I’m a historian. It’s my job to retroactively rewrite the history to make sense of it. [Laughter]
WK: One of the things that really bother me today is that artists are constantly asked to give things to auctions and things like that. And it’s bought by somebody for much less then what that artist’s market price is and three years later you see it in an auction. It’s demeaning and it’s disgusting and I get very angry about it because I really think that it’s taking advantage of artists. Most of them are not Jasper Johns or Brice Marden. They are not rich. They are living day-to-day in a studio by themselves making work because that’s what they have to do.
CR: They don’t get the tax break for it.
WK: No, they don’t get anything. As a matter of fact, most of the people who buy that stuff take a tax deduction, which they shouldn’t do.
CR: Right, right. That’s tax law that artists only get the value of the material for the work.
WK: Well, we hope that’ll change soon.
CR: Yes. We hope. Well, that’s one of the reasons Artists Space, which is my former employer, adamantly refuses to do auctions because they don’t want to take work from artists.
WK: In all the times that I’ve done exhibitions, when I did exhibitions, we never got between the artist and the collector. If somebody wanted to buy something that was in the show, we sent them to the artist and let them make their own deal or sent them to the dealer that at that point represented the artist because sometimes that happened. I, much to the chagrin of many of my friends, also have good words for the dealers, because without them how would the artist’s get their work into the world?
CR: I’m interested in that notion of how things are made. I’m coming back to this point because one of the credos I grew up, something that was sort of said around the kitchen table growing up, was what Franz Meyer, the former director of the Kunstmuseum Basel said, who claimed that you always only really understand the artists of your generation. Which, in his case, was already somewhat wrong because most of the artists that he claimed to be his generation were about twenty years his junior. But it just happened to be because he came to the art world a little later being a lawyer by training. I guess my question goes to understanding the social circumstances out of which you came to collect art. What exactly was it about the processes, about the working methods, that drew you to this kind of material? Was there something about that relationship between a proclaimed rationality and irrationality? Or do you have a sense of what it is about the making of these works that sort of immediately draws you in?
WK: Well, it is a very good time to have this conversation because on the desk between us lies the catalog of the Seurat show and it is a classic example of where you really, really have to look at how it’s made. My interest is, I think, partially because—well, what little interest I had in school was in geometry and physics. So, it’s mechanical. I really look at things and see—before I even begin to think about “what does this mean?” I look at “how did it get made?” and “how did it get put together?” And from there you begin to think of “why was it put together?” and that’s a whole other theory. I think that there is some argument that you could only understand the art of your time in terms of the social, cultural impetus that the artists of your time are living with, but if you are a reasonably educated human being you have some sense of what the proceeding two generations, maybe even three generations, lived through culturally. I think that it is probably more true of my generation then it would be of a generation that is twenty, twenty-five years old today because living through wars, holocausts, and all of that makes you more aware of your history then people today probably are. But I still think—I have a lot of trouble with some of what is being made today because I don’t understand the cultural impetus for it. I am not watching a lot of television, and I don’t listen to a lot of rock music and a lot of the art that gets made today, quite properly, relates to that. So, I quite readily admit that there is a lot of stuff I don’t understand and I go and look and I try to understand because I feel that’s my duty.
CR: I have the same thing. It’s also generations are getting shorter and shorter, I think. Now I go to a gallery and I see people who are five years younger then I am and they refer to completely different references and so on. And that is beyond whether or not you follow the same kind of popular culture, in a way. A first generation is coming into college age that was born after the Berlin wall came down.
WK: Yes.
CR: You know, there are certain general geopolitical parameters that have since ceased. I am probably the last generation that actually lived through the Cold War, which I think has tremendous consequences on the kind of environment or the kind of historical consciousness out of which you produce work.
WK: For me, for example, I look at certain work and I can see, yes, thinking back this artist probably knows something about what Woodstock was all about or this artist knows something about what 1968 was all about and what happened in those days and what it meant to the artist community of that time. But I also see a lot of work where I absolutely don’t understand the reference and then I ask and I very often don’t know the names. It’s part of getting older.
CR: When I think of Sol LeWitt, when I think of the 60s, when I think of everything that happened in that time, I believe we all agree, now looking back at it, that there was a tremendous wealth of really radical innovation that was made. Not just in terms of general culture but also in terms of very specific art historical things. Most of the important concepts that we look back at originated in that decade. But, with regard to the artists of that generation and of that time, did you have the feeling that during that time it presented itself as radical, as experimental, as something genuinely new? And do you think that a younger generation of artists you follow has a different relationship? That what you see in the work is almost a reference to those moments rather than a genuine experimental continuation of it?
WK: Well, let me take that in two parts. At the time, in the 60s, we were just as radical ourselves, and involved in so much of the radical material that was happening that you didn’t really think about that in those terms. You didn’t think it was radical. You thought it was exciting, beautiful, sometimes disturbing, often very much commentary on its moment, but you didn’t think of it as being radical because you were radical yourself. We’re sitting here with Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt drawings and those were made in that moment and they were exciting but we didn’t really think radical. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we thought very much at that time about the history of it. Even when you read today what Bochner and people like that wrote at that time, they didn’t write about it as having been particularly radical. They just thought about what they were doing.
CR: But they understood they were part of a group of like-minded spirits, if you will.
WK: Absolutely.
CR: I think there is a genuine difference between a sort of bonding and an understanding that there is a certain limited of a group of people who think alike, maybe less limited than we like to think looking back at it, who produce work in a similar vein, who move it forward, and who are, in one form or another, in opposition to what everybody else thinks.
WK: And in addition to that, in opposition to some of their colleagues of a slightly older group who were making work that had very specific references to European work and were knowledgeable of that. And, yes, there is that feeling that you are embattled with the group and you show in places that other people would never think of. Yes, that does exist and did exist and it exists, to some extent, today. It’s what we see at Artists Space and The Drawing Center and places like that, which were created because there really wasn’t a commercial place that would take artists who were that young, expected to be inexperienced or unexposed. By the time you got into a commercial gallery, you were supposed to have a number of sales, whereas with Artists Space and The Drawing Center, once you got a dealer you couldn’t show at those places anymore.
CR: Which has changed because with so many dealers around, you shoot yourself in the foot, in a way.
WK: I still think that there are an awful lot of artists around who do not get to show in the commercial galleries and who would use places like Artists Space and The Drawing Center if that opportunity was there for that kind of work.
CR: Absolutely, absolutely, and I think those institutions ought to pay attention to that and understand that.
WK: It should be part of the mission.
CR: I think it still is to some degree. I guess the second part of my question is that I went through the resumes a little bit and I realized that a lot of the artists, at least in this group, were born in the second half of the 50s and early 60s. And looking at the work, there is almost something that feels classical in relation to that first generation of minimal, post-minimal process art, especially if you understand that within the context of the 60s it was seen as experimental. Maybe it didn’t feel as radical at the time, but historically you would look at it and say there was a real moment of radicalization there. Whereas, with this generation it feels as if there is a—I don’t want to make them into mere followers, which I don’t think any of them are—but there is a sense of classicism in the work that is interesting to see. It feels like a continuation of something and a looking back and a referencing back.
WK: To some extent that probably is more due to the fact that when I selected this group, I selected them for a particular purpose. If you look at them, they have a distinct purpose—they all demonstrate different media, different supports, different ways of using a particular medium. They are selected as, basically, teaching tools. Most of what I’ve given to the educational institutions is selected that way. So that puts a certain limit on it. But of course, you’re right. My eye and my sensibility come out of that earlier period. Maybe what my eye does is classicize that.
CR: Maybe I should say a second thing that relativizes that to some degree, which is that I was surprised going through this selection of artists to see the amount of almost expressive or vaguely surrealist choice of imagery, way of drawing a line. A hand that is much more reminiscent of early Eva Hesse then early Sol LeWitt. Which is almost a going back to—
WK: Let me stop you there, because you’re probably right in that it is more expressive and more related to early Eva Hesse and also to late Sol LeWitt. Because that is a part of it. Really strict geometric abstraction, although there is some of it, is less useful from that teaching point of view that I was interested in. So I suspect that you are right. There are fewer hard-edge geometric abstraction drawings in most of the teaching material that I have given away, but there is quite a lot of word art in it, which leans back to that. There is some geometric material. I guess that Sol’s later drawings, which I think of as romantic, the colors and their motion, also played a part in what I gave away in later years because by that time I had looked at a lot of that.
CR: I think late Sol LeWitt is an excellent moment to dwell on because I think no one else from that generation insisted as much on the material qualities of the process. Of trying to move forward and push further what you can do with the paint and with the paper with the exception of maybe Richard Serra’s drawings, which are becoming more and more material driven, particularly if I compare it to other conceptual artists. For me, Sol LeWitt was always the artist who brought along the late 60s conceptual traditions where it really moved away from materials and where the process got pushed into the theoretical arena. To insist on Sol LeWitt and to carry that through into the late drawings, in a way, puts a primacy on the material. I’m interested in that because the way you talk about this material selected as a teaching tool—where you learn about the paper and the support and the various graphic tools and the way in which they translate the line and what kind of line comes out—I think is a very particular focus on how process is understood through materials rather than through concepts.
WK: You know, I’ve often said that if I were forty years younger and was going to become a curator the first show I would want to do would be called “Support, Not Money.” And I would do a show about support, about what really is necessary to make a drawing, what is necessary to make a painting, and what is necessary to make a sculpture. What is the material? I guess that has always been part of my interest although I’ve never really expressed it that way until now because I’ve never really thought about it that way. But, yes, Sol also did not let structures of previous work interfere with his new work. They were not necessarily leaps, but the steps were very, very carefully expressed and you could always tell that it was his hand he was thinking about. Even in the sculptures, which were not necessarily fully made by him, if you have them in the original they were painted by him and you could tell that. You could see that he cared deeply about how something was made and how that care was communicated. Sol, for me, almost more then anybody, warms my heart. It’s a terrible loss. Since you’ve read some of the dog interview, the worst thing that happens to a pet owner is when a dog dies. When Sol died it was unspeakable for me for two or three days. I just couldn’t handle it. It’s a thing that communicates in a way that—Eva does, Cage does—these are people that communicate that way. Many of these younger people who are working from a different orientation are communicating in much the same way because they are taking a support and their medium and working it in such a way that it tells about the process and it tells about time. The one thing that I find difficult with a lot of very contemporary art is that the time component doesn’t speak to me. It’s a nasty thing to say, but I call a lot of it “plop art.” It doesn’t seem to have taken any deep commitment of thought or time. It is very communicative but it doesn't communicate a concept that includes time and effort.
CR: Do you think that the role of the artist or what an artist does and how it contributes to cultural production at large has changed in that way? There is a sense in which work is produced in a different way because many of the younger artists who work in a, let’s call it “minimalist vein,” for lack of a better differentiation, work about it in very specific referential way. They are extremely interested in some of the elements of what minimalism meant, of how it worked, but they go about these references in a very, very different way than even this slightly older generation of artists. They are interested in the formal qualities of minimalism as it is read as an image or an icon or an advertising branch. They are interested in lines and x’s and squares and triangles and cubes as something that communicates in a very specific way, almost like the Mercedes-Benz logo does, rather then looking at the things and looking at how they’re made, where there are tape marks, where the hand comes in. It is a different understanding of what an artist does in contributing an image to society.
WK: I’m sure some of that is accurate and true and I’m sure that some of it comes from some of the art schools. I think another part of it comes from the fact that much of what was the art of the 60s and 70s became logos for advertising. So, since that is an economic factor that a contemporary artist cannot ignore, he or she also has to think “how do I get to that point?”
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WK: As for the process part in the younger artists, I don’t think they are nearly as concerned with the question of what they are using for support or what they are using as media as older artists were. It was a major breakthrough, particularly Eva. I often refer to artists as the sons and daughters of Eva because of her revolutionary choice of some materials in her sculpture.
CR: She paid a very high price for it.
WK: And she paid a very high price for it. If you think of the use of Mylar and Jasper’s early use of Mylar, those were very deliberate decisions and I’m not sure that many of the younger artists really think about it that way. They know the material is available and they go and get it and they deal with it that way. I’m fascinated by younger artists today who make decisions that deal with that. There is a young woman named Karen Schiff who has been using laid paper and her work is to highlight the ridges and valleys of laid paper. That, to me, is a very interesting thing to do because that is a way of using abstraction in a most direct way and a wonderfully communicative way. It turns out to be very beautiful.
CR: I want to come back to that because in the earlier interview, the dog interview, you were asking the question at some point and then it opens to the audience about the use of the computer. I realized the interview was in 2000 and even in those seven years the proliferation, the potential, the fluency of the computer has multiplied and moved light-years ahead. One artist, in particular, I am thinking about is a young artist and good friend of mine named Wade Guyton, who makes a lot of work in very specific reference back to formal vocabularies of minimalism. One of his earliest series is called The Printer Drawings, where he takes pages of old museum catalogs, black-and-white catalogs with works by Naum Gabo, and Antoine Pevsner, and the Bechers—you know, what Benjamin Buchloh called “Cold War Constructivism.”
WK: Yes, but he has much more of an accent then you do. [Laughter]
CR: Wade just basically makes these very simple grids and lines and x-style compositions in Word or very basic computer programs and then prints on that page of the catalog. Sometimes the ink smears because it’s a glossy paper; sometimes the computer and the printer makes these lines because the printer hasn’t been cleaned properly. So you get these processional marks that are purely technological that come out of the technology he uses. It’s a high degree of differentiation on the level of how color is distributed and how the color and the paper interact, but it’s completely relegated to a technological realm. I had to think of that when you were asking the question of who uses computers, because in a younger generation he is probably one of the people I know who most consciously goes back to a language of minimalism to investigate it and have a dialog with it but does it in a technological way that, for me, immediately came up as an example of that question you were asking seven years ago.
WK: Well, there is an artist named Sharon Louden—I think I may have been one of the first people who ever bought a work of hers twenty some-odd years ago—who now also does work on a computer and actually animation on a computer screen. She had a recent show and I went and looked at it and I thought the paintings and drawings were beautiful, and I went and looked at the animation and I guess I’m not fully adjusted to that idea. To me it looked a little mechanical. Now, I am very comfortable with the computer. I use it for a lot of things. I’m not computer phobic, but it’s difficult for me to see how to get any warmth out of it. I think it makes no rational sense, I fully recognize that, but, for me, it doesn’t generate warmth. Even the harshest work, for me, has to generate warmth to be of any interest whether I like it or not. Nick Serota, the director of the Tate, once said to me “If I see work that I really, really, really truly hate I figure that two or three years later I’ll be showing it.” Well, I feel that way. To be interesting, work has to generate that kind of heat that you react to. I don’t react to it on a computer, I just can’t. I don’t know why.
CR: Well, maybe it’s today’s expression of the Swiss concretism of the 70s that takes a certain kind of mathematical precision to the final end. Growing up, I remember being very early on taken by Richard Paul Lohse, Max Bill, and that kind of material, but never really being able to embrace it in the way that I was just completely smitten by Mondrian and understanding the messiness of it and looking at it and seeing how he figured out where to put the line by trial and not by mathematical computation. There is something to be said about that kind of interaction, even on a compositional level, that is different from the one that is arrived at by purely mechanical means.
WK: I think Mondrian is probably a very good example because there you actually can see how it’s made.
CR: Yes.
WK: You very much relate to that, as a matter of fact. A print of a Mondrian, for example, where that is lost—we were just talking about an Ellsworth Kelly print where some of that work evidence is lost, the warmth disappears. The hand is very important and, in a way, unavoidable. I think the time will come when it is no longer an issue whether someone like me feels warmth from it. It will not be germane anymore because people will be accustomed to seeing certain things in certain ways and they will react the way they are meant to.
CR: You begin to understand to read that work in a different way. I remember, very distinctly, there was an Albert Oehlen computer drawings show in the late 90s in Berlin. And a friend of mine who is a computer programmer and Internet artist walked in and he said, “You know, all these jagged lines that were seemingly drawn in Photoshop and then printed out, no Photoshop program currently in existence is actually able to create that crude of a line anymore. Either he used first-generation Photoshop, which doesn't run on any machine anymore, or he had to hand re-create the crudeness of the early computer line in a much more advanced program, which would have taken him an exorbitant amount of work.” He could look at it and exactly understand which lines are possible to make with which kind of program and read the labor that went into it, which for me looked like a crude mouse-drawn computer line and I didn’t give it a second thought. Those kind of visual proficiency with a different kind of language is very generational and for me not even attainable anymore.
WK: If you look at Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, when we first saw those we didn’t realize that he had to invent those forms. They didn’t exist. He couldn’t invented them without a computer, but he did invent them by using the computer. That I understand, but then there comes a point where you see a model of that and how much hand goes into that. And that is what you are also saying, that a great deal of hand went into making those lines.
CR: Absolutely. I showed work by two architects, Aranda/Lasch, who work with the computer and do a lot of algorithmic design and basically make the computer make design decisions. But then they choose to collaborate with Terrol Dew Johnson, who’s an Arizona-based Native American basket weaver, and they gave him the computational patterns. Exploiting the similarities between weaving and pattern design, both of which are based on the repetition of patterns. So computer design and weaving are very similar. They basically gave him this computer-generated design and he translated it into baskets. They were the weirdest-looking things. They showed that next to the 3-D plot, basically a printout of the computer program. They were related, but they were fundamentally different also. You could see that relationship and then it becomes interesting.
WK: Yes. I think, in a way, I can’t see that yet when I see work on a computer. I just don’t see that relationship and I don’t know enough about it to know how difficult it would be to do that.
CR: I think it comes back to the object. I think it’s a program on a computer; the computer is just the tool. It all has to come back to the object, and for Richard Serra the object just happens to be an incredibly spectacular giant steel sculpture that has an effect on us.
WK: Richard is also interesting because he really does know exactly what he wants to do. For example, in a large set of drawings that was shown three or four years ago, the drawing is made by placing a plate on the floor, covering it with oil stick, laying a sheet of paper on top of it, and then walking on the back of the piece of paper so that he gets that image on the front that he wants, which is really the reverse. That’s a hell of an idea. But that’s the object and you go to that and you go to that with people in this kind of a show. There is an artist in this gift [to the Pollock Works on Paper Study Collection] named Nancy Haynes who I have collected for many, many years, almost exclusively monoprints. I consider monoprint a drawing. This is actually a drawing that’s there. She uses her experience as a printer to make drawings and her drawings are, for me, instructive because of how that work actually translates when it comes down. Color and shape, if you see a lot of her monoprints, she’s worked them out there and then it appears here. There are always people like that who work in different ways to accomplish that.
CR: How do you find new artists? Where do you look these days?
WK: Well, now I don’t at the moment, or very little. I spent a good twelve years going to studios two or three days a week. When I had the space downtown where I could show work, I went all the time. Now, once people in the art world know that you’re willing to look at work and willing to actually buy work, you are inundated. We became very careful. I had some very unfortunate experiences where I went to places to look at something and I found myself trapped looking at work that was, at best, Sunday painter, but often with people who were older, if not much older, and were very needy. How do you get out? It’s awkward. So I had to being to set certain limits and say that I wouldn’t look at work unless I saw slides or transparencies or something else first. In a month, I’d see forty to fifty artists. A lot of it was just looking and deciding whether I was interested or not, or whether I was sufficiently interested to acquire work, or if I wanted to refer to somebody else. I did a lot of that. Then we decided to do shows in that space. We showed work. So it was an ongoing process. It stopped in part because I moved uptown, because I got to the point where I didn’t like to walk up six flights of stairs in SoHo.
CR: When did you have your space [at 560 Broadway]?
WK: From 1991 to 2006. A lot of artists came to visit and say, “Can I come and show you work?” I almost always said yes, unless it was really not what I was interested in. People began to know that I was interested in drawings and that drawings were a great wide field for me. It seemed to me, at the time, that even though there were a lot of not-for-profit spaces that would show work, they were deliberately all over the lot. They would show any kind of work as long as it had some quality. I was really interested in a particular kind of work and people got to know that, so I saw a lot of that.
CR: Right. So a lot of it was brought to you?
WK: Yes, a lot of it was brought to me. People would send me slides or something like that, but most of the work that I did anything with I went to studio. I think in all of the collecting that I’ve done, there are two unique drawings that I bought without having seen them because they were in California. Other then that, I always saw the work and, of course, occasionally catalogs.
CR: Do you go back and acquire historic materials by artists?
WK: I try to, yes. For the big names of the 60s and 70s that’s no longer possible.
CR: Right. I know, those 50s Jasper Johns drawings have now—
WK: Yeah. Although I still bought some at auction fifteen years later. It was still possible. We were just talking about the fact that in a current auction there is an Eva Hesse drawing that was estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million. A drawing much like the one that is up there only that it was one of the circle drawings that came out of the Gildon Collection. I knew the drawing very well. It’s a beautiful drawing, but $1 million? Ain’t what it use to be, I guess. [Laughter]
CR: I guess there is a limited—they are finite bodies of work.
WK: Yes.
CR: I’m thinking about that because there are artists in this Pollock gift like Julia Mangold, one of the people that I immediately recognized. I remember when she was a young German artist and I was coming across the work for the first time in the mid-90s. I haven’t heard from her in a number of years until I came across her work both in our collection and then here. In both cases, I think, having come from your collection originally. I’m interested in how you come across that, because—
WK: How I found her? Well, Julia is a special example. Somebody told me, “You ought to look at this work,” and I said, “I want to see some work.” She was actually in New York and she came and showed me some drawings. I did a show of her work with some sculpture. She now lives over here, you know. I also visited her in her studio and looked at the work there because I wouldn’t have done the show if I hadn’t done that. It is work that should be much wider known than it is. I think she is a very, very, very good artist who has looked at the history of that kind of work and looked at some of her contemporaries and said her direction is more oriented toward that which she had seen out of the 60s and 70s. But there is another German artist who is also doing that, Frank Gerritz. I don’t know if you know his work.
CR: I don’t.
WK: He also came and showed me work because he heard about that. I went to see him and I have some of that work and I’ve shown that work also. I think, except for an unfortunate show that I did of the work of nine Icelandic women—I planned to go to Iceland to see Richard Serra’s sculpture on the island. That plan was very well along the way. I was going to go to Rome and from Rome I was going to fly to Iceland. I was going to meet Annie Philbin there and we were going to look at the Serra sculptures. So, Thursday afternoon I’m sitting in my space at 560 Broadway and a guy calls me up and says, “Mr. Kramarsky, you don’t know me but I have the so-and-so gallery and I have committed to do a show of nine Icelandic women. That show is going to be opened by the President of Iceland and it’s scheduled for…,” and he told me when. He said, “I have to, for family reasons, close my gallery. I have to cancel that show and I hope that you might be willing to take this on.” I thought it would be bad karma to go to Iceland having said no to that. So, I said yes. It was all somewhere between painting and sculpture, all sort of leaning against the wall. It was three-dimensional. It was interesting. It was fun to do. But it was not my cup of tea. That space had two rooms, the front room was where you entered. One of the women had made a piece that had shoes in it and the shoes were sitting on the floor. Whenever people came in the door they thought they had to take their shoes off, so that was one part of that. The best part, however, was that the President of Iceland actually came over to open the show. She is a head of state so she has Secret Service protection. I don’t allow guns anywhere near me so I told them they couldn’t come in—the Secret Service guys with their guns. We had the biggest fight about what you can and can’t do. I said, “I’m very sorry but it’s my space and you aren’t coming in.” They finally compromised by having one of the secret service men taking two guns and standing outside and the other one coming in. The President of Iceland was very nice about it. She said, “ I don’t need either of these guys to protect me because there is no reason to protect me.” Anyway, it was very funny. It’s been great fun. That’s the only work I showed that I hadn’t ever seen.
CR: Right.
WK: I want to go back to this work for another minute not so much for a particular artist but—it’s so difficult to take this kind of work and talk about any one piece without talking about a number of them. Andrew Spence is a good case in point because that really is a very contemporary piece that very definitely refers back to the 60s and 70s and does so deliberately. It is a reference that is knowledgeable and appreciative and it is still perfectly contemporary and speaks to a contemporary sensibility. One of the things that I have always tried to do with any of the work that I have given away is to have it fit into the mission of the particular institution, to expand that in some way because usually there is not relatively contemporary work in those collections of any nature or value, and to hope that people will think about the fact that the reference is to support the medium and how they relate to each other and how the process of making work is evidenced. And that’s really all you can do. You know that better than I do because you do it every day that you put a show together. For me, that became the mission when I started giving work away. When you give it to a collection like MoMA’s you just have to pick stuff that you hope will in some way or another serve that institution because that’s such an immense collection that almost everything is a redundancy except very contemporary work.
CR: Yes, or very, very important key pieces.
WK: Well, that’s always true.
CR: For me, going through our collection when I started and putting together a “Lines-Grids” show was just a sheer “we have that too,” “oh, we have that too.” Coming across Ellsworth Kelly’s study for the Paris Window is just one of those moments. I had to put that in the show for no other reason than my own wonderment and marvel that we actually had this work in the collection.
WK: There is another Kelly in my collection that you would really want and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it—I’m going to figure out how I'm going to do it—but he made it the afternoon after he met Duchamp on the street in Paris. He went and did an automatic drawing. They had a talk about automatic drawings and he made a drawing of the smoke stacks that he could see outside of his window. It’s, to me, a classically exciting drawing of that period and of Ellsworth Kelly’s.
CR: It boils down to what you’re drawn to because I can very distinctly remember when I was twelve years old or something like that and just being drawn to Mondrian and being drawn to that kind of work; and right then and there knowing that this is exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in.
WK: At eleven or twelve was when I first decided that I was interested in drawing because you could see how they were made.
CR: You were talking earlier about the mathematical and process and I wrote down Molly Nesbit’s Their Common Sense. It is a book about the learning of technical drawing skill as it was taught in French schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As engineerical drawings, as something that they thought kids should know—they should know how to make a technical drawing. She argues that there was a common language, an almost physically acquired language, that Picabia, Duchamp, and that generation of people just knew how to speak. And how that kind of drawing practice from Duchamp’s studies for the Large Glass and Picabia’s technical drawings goes back to a certain kind of grade school instruction that they had at French schools. You were talking about automatic drawing, how it can leap a generation, and when Ellsworth Kelly meets Duchamp it’s almost as if a transference of a certain kind of knowledge of drawing had taken place. It skips a generation and rematerializes in a next generation of artists.
WK: And, of course, if you look at the painters that were trained in East Germany they trained so well that they can do anything. What they do with it is different than what you might want, but the artisanal skills are so good that they can do anything. And that will pass on to other people who study with them and make that decision to learn how to do anything. I think that is a crucial part. I’m not so sure that our art schools are as interested in training people. I think they make a distinction between training and educating and I don’t think that is a distinction that holds in the long run. It’s wonderful if they are educated, and it’s necessary, but there is also a certain amount of training, a certain amount of basic skill that, unless it is there, that work doesn’t work. That’s some of what I’ve seen that isn’t there. There is a real knowledge of what you want to say but there is not a real knowledge of how you skillfully put it together. I’m not talking about the fact that people make things that are deliberately to be picked at—that’s not what I’m talking about—but the fact that I look at many of the things and say, “You know, just a little mechanical knowledge would make that look more solid.”
CR: Right, it’s interesting. I remember when everyone looked at John Currin and talked about how masterly his painting technique is. The unsaid part of it was “for someone coming out of Yale.” They would never say that about someone who graduated from the New York Academy School. Unfortunately, very rarely do you see the technical skill that is taught in some institutions and the historical, conceptual open-mindedness and deep understanding of what came before you that is taught at a different kind of school come together and really influence each other. Some of the people who come out of schooling where you learn how to do everything still think they’re Ingres.
WK: There is one thing we really need to say. The business of making work is hard work. It’s skill, it’s talent, it’s opportunity, and then comes the question of luck because you also have to have luck. Without luck, you don’t get into a gallery or into a show or all of those things, because you can make all the rounds you want to and your work can be absolutely exquisite but if you’re not lucky the right person doesn't see it. You said before how often do I have to talk about the business of abstraction or contemporary art. I talk with artists all the time, and obviously I have a lot of artist friends, and I tell them that a large piece of this is luck. You can have all the talent and all the skill in the world and you can work very, very hard but you need an opportunity. So one of the things I try to do is create opportunities for people. You give work like this to an institution and maybe somebody will see it and say, “Hey, that looks interesting. I wonder where that artist is?” And find them and either show them or acquire work or something like that.
CR: It reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor at an art school in Germany who said, “You know, everybody is mourning the fact that there is no life drawing anymore.” In German foundational school, out of a Bauhaus model, it’s called Formenlehre—the basic teaching of forms. And he said, “We have to institute a different kind of Formenlehre. We have to institute that people know how to put together a portfolio, how to apply for a public competition, how to present and conduct a studio visit.” It’s basic knowledge that an artist has to know because as much as it is luck, it is also something that you need to learn how to do.
WK: Well, the fact is that a little Formenlehre wouldn’t do any harm either. Having a real knowledge of how to make a drawing, a real foundation knowledge of how to make a drawing, is a very, very, very important part of it. It teaches you about relationships that are crucial to make work.
Citation:
Rattemeyer, Christian and Werner H. Kramarsky. Conversations 6: A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky. Dallas, TX: Pollock Gallery, Southern Methodist University, 2008. © 2008 Southern Methodist University.