Frank Stella

Talking during the installation of his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, May 1985.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 7, Number 4, 1985

Transcript

Michael Archer: Frank, in the reports I’ve read of your Norton Lectures, you concentrated quite a lot on the space, a kind of space that Caravaggio managed to create in his work. Do you see what you’re doing here as being painting in the same kind of way?

Frank Stella: In the Norton Lectures when I talked about Caravaggio’s pictorial space what I was really interested in was the space around the figures, or the space that the human figures managed to describe and activate. I think in my own work something similar happens. You might say that the pieces of construction try to activate the space in the same way that the figures, say, in Caravaggio might, or the figures in any painting after Caravaggio might. But I don’t think that the fact that there is ... Well, the surface is not continuous, I don’t have a continuous surface, I don’t have a flat surface and I’m not indulging in traditional pictorial illusionism, although there is a certain amount of illusionism even in constructed objects. But the real point, I think, of the piece is that they be constructions and be paintings at the same time. Basically, the way you look at the paintings, or the way you have to look at the paintings, makes you look at them as pictures. They don’t seem to me to require a kind of special way of looking. They’re meant to be seen as pictures and so I think that even though they are constructions, the space that they create is pictorial. They do manage to create pictorial space at the same time as they occupy literal space.

MA: Is that partly due to the way that one looks at them straight on?

FS: You can look at them from the side too. I don’t think it matters where you look at them but they do have a fairly distinct frontal point of view and from that point of view they look like pictures. For example, you’re not looking at them in the same way that you might look at sculpture, although I hope that most people look at sculpture in a pictorial way anyway. Everyone picks a view, whatever the view might be. The criteria that you use are really pictorial rather than sculptural. I don’t think that there is a unique sculptural way of looking; there are sculptural descriptions. You might say that you are interested in a tactile quality of the material or something like that but the way you judge a sculpture is from each individual point of view. Even though you might circle 360 degrees around it, your view is made up of individual points of view. I think you have a tendency to look at sculpture in a very pictorial way. The sense of balance, the kind of aesthetic and visual take that you have on a piece of sculpture is the same kind of take that you have on a painting.

MA: Although with sculpture it is even more the case that however fixed your position might be, it is occupying the same space as you, it is a three-dimensional thing.

FS: Well, paintings are three-dimensional too, except you don’t look much at the back of the paintings, but when you take them down you can walk around them, they have sides. Paintings are not two-dimensional, they are three-dimensional.

MA: But certainly the two-dimensionality of painting is part of the rhetoric of twentieth-century art.

FS: It’s a pretty small part of the rhetoric as far as I can see. You know it’s hard to find Kandinsky or Mondrian or anyone in search of two dimensions. All painting strives to be real and I think you can take it for granted that by that they mean three dimensions.

MA: It seems quite central, in the writing of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, to the period in which you started to paint, or in which you came into prominence.

FS: Well, I don’t know what they wrote, that is I read it but I don’t remember it, so to say, but it’s not, I think, an interest in surface. The quality that painting might have that emphasises its surface qualities is a very different thing from being two-dimensional. I mean two-dimensional would really be a surface that has no depth. All painted surfaces have depth and they have thickness and they have ... as far as I can see they’re not even ... and, say, Ellsworth Kelly might be the best example ... even paintings that are coloured with one colour have a sense of depth. I’m not arguing that flatness, and a concern for flatness and surface, didn’t emerge during the sixties. I think that’s true, and I think that some of my own work had an emphasis on surface that tended towards flatness, but it was never the primary aim of my painting. When it did get flat, it seems to me, when it tended to become flatter, I tended to like it less, so flatness wasn’t my goal. The Black Paintings (1958–60) were never very flat nor were the Aluminium (1960) or Copper Paintings (1960–61). I mean some of the Benjamin Moore paintings [begun 1961; named after the brand of paint used] tended to become tight and sort of flat, and as such I think I was always worried about them.

MA: What constitutes the basis for working on a group of pictures?

FS: Well, there’s usually an organizational idea or a figuring of idea. For example, the paintings that are here at the ICA (London) had a certain kind of motif, the cone and pillar motifs, which are abstract versions of illusionism, 3-D illusions. They’re schematic versions of three-dimensional objects such as combs and pillows and the use of those figures runs through the group of paintings.

MA: Is there any relationship between the idea of these paintings here, the pillars and the cones, and the way in which you’ve titled them, using titles from Italian folk tales.

FS: I didn’t have the titles until after I’d made the paintings but they seemed to have a folk tale quality to them. They were dramatic, abstract, colourful and, in a way, childish at the same time, exciting in the way that those kinds of stories are.

MA: Could you describe how you go about making them?

FS: I have a couple of studio assistants and they generally work with me on the paintings. There’s a lot of work to be done on the making of models and so on. I make the models, then they go to a factory where they’re built, and in that part I don’t have much say. Then I go and check on what they’ve done and I make adjustments. I work at the factory on the surfaces that are being built, so that I might etch some of the skins into a shape, so I work on some of the things at the factory too.

MA: What is it that you like about using aluminium and magnesium?

FS: I like the metal surfaces because you can etch them, so I can sort of bite into the metal, and the other advantage is that the skins combined with the honeycomb make panels that are lightweight and make it possible to engineer fairly big pieces.

MA: Are you actually taking a stance in opposition to someone like Marcel Duchamp, who would say let’s get rid of the retinal in art, let’s get back to some kind of intellect and idea, some content?

FS: I don’t know that much about Duchamp and I don’t know whether that’s exactly what he said, but making a separation between any of the senses and the mind is a perilous undertaking. It just doesn’t work that way, so if there are blind intelligences, and we know that there are, you have to be taught a lot in every kind of way. All of our perception feeds our ability to learn, and intelligence is not an abstraction, it’s a process of growth, it’s a growing part of a whole. So I don’t see any point in separating it in human beings, in life experience, or any point in separation, in isolation, in art and the experience of art. Although art doesn’t need to be any particular way. It may be that it can be one particular way and still be good. Great, I don’t have anything against that.

MA: In the context of the Glaser interview, in which you said that, I suppose at that time it seemed related more to a kind of anti-Europeanism?

FS: Yes, at the time and still now I’m not for indulgent artistic effort, although there’s nothing wrong with that, I just don’t like it. I find it rarely produces any art I that I like or even respect. The more a person worries about what kind of artist he is or worries about his work expressing his artistic identity the less likely he is to be a successful artist in my opinion. You should be as direct and straightforward as you can be and just get on with the business of actually making the art.

MA: Have you ever had any desire to become figurative, or have any kind of figuration in your work?

FS: I honestly haven’t. I never studied art in the conventional sense, I never even really thought about it. When I was growing up the art that I liked, abstraction, was already established and I liked painting by Franz Kline, Mondrian, Kandinsky and, say, de Kooning, Pollock and Barnett Newman. That was the kind of art that I admired and that was the kind of art that I wanted to paint like. and it is the kind of art that I paint like. There’s nothing in figuration that I need, I absolutely can’t see any point in it.

MA: You can’t see the point in any figurative painting?

FS: Well, not today. I can’t see any point in it for myself and I don’t see much point in it for the people who practice it today. For example, most of the art in New York and Europe that’s fashionable has figuration in it but the figuration always seems to be added at the end. They want to make abstract paintings but then they get nervous at the end, they draw a few marks to give themselves a frame of reference, and it is always some kind of stick figure or something that they put into it. After they’ve gone through all this trouble of doing this painterly painting they trick it up at the end. When it works it’s sometimes quite nice and quite interesting but I find it a pointless enterprise. I don’t need it.

MA: Is that because painting should refer to itself?

FS: I don’t think painting should refer to itself necessarily, although I think for the most part it does, but the ultimate test in a painting is its sense of reality. You have to believe that what you see is real and I believe that I can make painting that is real, without resorting to figuration.

MA: Could you say something about the way you’re using the word real?

FS: Yes, but also, basically art is an illusion, it deals with illusionism, and the goal of art is essentially to make itself come to life in some way. Now, it doesn’t actually do that but when art is real when it’s good you feel that this does happen in a sense. If you go to see Velasquez’ Las Meniñas you know that they’re all dead, that they’re only illusions it’s not real but it feels real and you accept it and you believe it. You know it’s only art but it reaches a level of convincingness that you accept it and therefore you call it real, at least as real as art gets.

MA: I don’t know whether you’ve read the essay that Jean Fisher has written for this

FS: No, they’ve kept it hidden from me ... [laughs]

MA: At one point she makes reference to something that Dan Graham said a few years ago talking about your early work in the sixties. He allied it, rather than putting it at the end of the Greenbergian trail through de Kooning and Pollock and so on, he allied you much more with the kinds of concerns that the Pop artists at the beginning of the sixties had: their interest in surface as a kind of media surface and your own interest in surface.

FS: Well, I don’t know what the media interest in surface is but I think my interest in surface was pretty straightforward. It was pretty much developed from what painting had always been, at least that’s the way it struck me. So I don’t think it has much to do with Pop art. The Black Paintings don’t seem to me to be remotely related to Pop art in any way or remotely related to the media. They seem pretty much related to the kind of painting that had been going on in New York since 1945, Newman and Rothko and that kind of painting. That’s what they seem to be like to me, or at least that’s the closest reference in which to understand them.

MA: At that time you didn’t feel any kind of affinity with people like Lichtenstein?

FS: No, and anyway Pop art started a few years after I was making those kinds of paintings.

MA: I think he was talking about the Protractor series (1967–71).

FS: I don’t think that’s what I had in mind. I was really interested in the arcs and not so much the image; the colour travelling from one end of the piece to the other, and the organization, the kinds of things that were organizing in circles rather than in squares. My interests were pretty literal and pretty simple. I guess I don’t care what the other people were doing [laughs] in the sense that I don’t really care what people are doing in painting and in other fields.

MA: Do you look at a lot of new art?

FS: I try to see what’s going on and I exhibit fairly widely. I don’t say I’m not going to show in this show because they have, say, Kenny Scharf or someone like that. I show in whatever shows there are and my work hangs with those people. My work is seen with everybody else’s work and, just like everybody else, and it has to find its own level.

MA: Are there any developments that you find interesting?

FS: The only reason that I find the recent developments interesting is that I was worried during the seventies that people would actually forget how to paint. Everybody seemed to not know how to do it. On the other hand, now in the eighties all you see is that everybody’s proud of the fact that they went to art school, so you have a tremendous amount of advanced student painting; that’s no great shakes either. So while it looked like in the seventies you were going to just have bad student painting now we have a lot of good painting, but I don’t know how painting’s going to survive. I guess it will, one-way or the other. My take on what happened, say, after 1970 is no better or worse than anybody else’s take. On the other hand my take on what was happening from, say, 1955 to 1965 would have been very good. You have a really good sense of what’s going on with your own generation as it’s developing. Somehow you’re really tuned into things, but I don’t think you can stay that tuned in for very long. You live the life of your own generation and you’re stuck with it.