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Use Value: An Interview with Richard Artschwager
Up and Down/ Back and Forth is what Richard Artschwager has entitled
his
exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim. From May 10 to July 6, 2003, over
40 drawings, sculptures, paintings, and multiples created between 1965
and 2003 can be seen in the exhibition hall in Berlin. Cheryl Kaplan
visited Richard Artschwager in his New York apartment and interviewed
him exclusively for db-art.info.
Untitled (Library), 1989
Deutsche
Bank Collection
©VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2003
Richard Artschwager creates intrusions. You'd hardly suspect. All seems
perfectly above board. Then something slips in, making us realize that
what we think we're seeing might be splitting up before our eyes. First
it was Formica, then it was the blp and Celotex. Appearing in
abbreviated form, from exclamation points and quotation marks to
drawings, paintings, and sculpture,
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Richard Artschwager in his appartement
New York City 2003
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Artschwager's language is a long-term system that expands
on the inside. Things get blanked out. But you might not know that right
away. That he spent years making furniture is just another part of that
index. In the late 60s and mid-70s, Artschwager was part of the inner
circle of pop art that included Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and
Lichtenstein. Artschwager, however, always stood slightly apart.
Untitled (Quotation Marks),
1980
Courtesy of Alexander Edition © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2003
It makes sense that his grandmother attended
lectures given by
Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the
periodic table. But then, the code that is Artschwager's is also ours. And
it is very human. It would be easy to see Artschwager's architectural
drawings and paintings as buildings. But he reaches through, seeing what
Wystan Hugh Auden saw in his poem, Musee des Beaux Arts:
"About
suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they
understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else
is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; …"
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Richard Artschwager in his studio,
2003
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As I'm about to leave, Artschwager shows me a series of
photographs accounting for some of the
blp's peripatetic existences. The blp, missing its "i," is commonly
understood as belonging to radar. It's that spot of light that indicates
the position of a detected object and comes with a high-pitched electronic
sound. In Artschwager's world, the
blp began in 1963, in one of his notebooks. He was searching for a "very
hard, dense, heavy after-image." [Artschwager notebook, labeled 12/23/63].
As Artschwager quickly tells me, he spent a lot of time drawing on
magazines, doing what
Duchamp had done to the Mona Lisa: defacing things. Inasmuch as the blp is
about language, it is also about deletion or omission. "The blp was born
in the winter of 1967-1968 while Artschwager was teaching at the
University of California, Davis." [Ingrid Schaffner, Parkett, vol. 46, p.
26, 1996]
By late 1968 and for years afterwards, the blp would
appear on power plants, museum walls, and even a university campus. Tamed
to paper, the blp continued to have a life of its own as it jettisoned
back into the world. It was occasionally fuzzy and often rubbery. Acting
as a non-container, the blp's mission is to interrupt by not interrupting.
The blp, like most of Artschwager's work, is discreet. Artschwager once
described the blp as "a mindless invasion of the social space by a
logo-like, totally useless art element. It is small, has high visibility,
relentlessly refuses to give up its uselessness." [Artist's statement, Art
& Design, vol. 8, May/June 1993, p. 80]
Locations, 1969
©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2003
Returning from a short swim in a pool
Johnny Weissmuller once trained in, Ann Artschwager is getting ready for
their journey abroad. In twenty-four hours, the Artschwagers will land in
Brittany. As Richard tells it: "When I get there, I'm going to send a
postcard to
Britney Spears' parents – they should know how to spell her name!"
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