conversation transcript, edited for format
Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago
when the after-image is the image
February 19th 2022
Lynne Tillman: I was thinking, you know, both of us really love Etel Adnan, the poet and painter.
Brendan Getz: Yeah.
Lynne Tillman: And Peter Dreher the painter, and what I was thinking about was how both of them are poets, artists of quiet. Their work is very quiet, and I think yours is also. I wonder how you came to that, because quiet isn't necessarily associated with a 20- or 30-year-old or whenever you started that?
Brendan Getz: Yeah, I mean that's a great question. I think that finding something exciting, in a landscape of reality, where there's so much coming towards us all the time, there's so much to be stimulated by, I think there is something to obviously slowing down, that can be incredibly radical, when things are moving so fast. So it's really an effort to see something closely, to the degree that I can, which always falls short, but it's just for that possibility.
LT: To me this body of work you're showing is in a domestic space. I mean it's an– I don't know if it's an apartment house, but there are what, eight rooms or something?
BG: Yeah.
LT: I'm curious about how that beckoned to you in a way?
BG: You know first, going to grad school in Chicago, Chicago has such an excellent DIY scene where artists are working and producing. They’re kind of working together from the ground up to make things happen and continue conversations with one another, which is incredibly beautiful. I think that's where you know, a lot happens in apartments, especially in Chicago, but also, it's happening in Los Angeles and the Bay Area where people are looking at space in new ways. Rather than seeking a direction through a particular institution, or seeking support through a specific institution, it's nice to see there's a possibility for something to come from within a living space that can generate discourse. So that's kind of like the genealogy of it, or where I'm coming from. To have an opportunity where Carrie has her gallery space in this really beautiful dwelling space, with also a kind of museological undertone to it, it makes for an opportunity to mix a lot of different types of gazes, which is something that I'm really interested in. The sort of domestic gaze, the museological gaze, how you feel when you're looking and walking through a museum, how you feel when you're walking through a gallery, but also how you feel when you're inside of a living space. When all of those start to become conflated or intermingled, exciting things can happen. I mean it's like right now we're talking from our respective homes. I feel like, over especially in the last few years I mean, the space between living and working are mixing with one another so much and you know the attitudes of public life or private life are too. I think those two things mixing are clearly fraught, because there's privacy and there's so many reasons why it could be fraught, but also with respect to the vulnerability that somebody might have at home or in their own home you know, there’s a potential for possibility there. So I think affecting that way of looking, how the conditions of your atmosphere and your periphery orient your way of looking, is something that is very much a part of the show.
LT: Some of your paintings are very much of the domestic, a glass jar, or I don't know, many are, but what you're interested in is the image as an after-image, and I've been thinking about that because it’s really a metaphysical question. What does it mean to be sort of enthralled, not to what you see, but what you see after you've seen it?
BG: Yes.
LT: And I think that then engages issues around memory without thinking. You know, we all talk about memory a lot, so I'm really more interested in talking about what one thinks in the present, right in consciousness, being conscious of something. And so, there are certain thoughts that don't leave your mind. I'm wondering about this desire of yours to paint that, the image that is no longer there, but is sort of shimmering.
BG: Mm-hmm. I think the title, when the after-image is the image, is something I wrote down maybe a few years ago. I'm not quite sure, it rattled around in my mind, but also it’s a way of thinking about the latency or residual aspect of looking. So even looking in the present, when the present moment, as a time period, gets expanded or stretched. It's when the after-image is the image, it's both the past and the present on top of each other kind of simultaneously. It's when they both arrive to you. As far as the after-image goes, it’s something I've found when painting these suns. The light coming from the sun was blue. I've never really seen a blue sun, but in the painting, if you let the sun sit in your peripheral vision, you'll see the blue kind of flicker. It's the feeling that you've been looking at the sun too long, or a bright light too long, when it's kind of that complimentary blue from the warm yellow, it starts catching up and overlapping on top of it
LT: Weren't you told as a child never to look at the sun?
BG: Yeah for sure, and actually I didn't paint these from looking at the sun directly. I had some photographic references, but these don’t actually look so much like the photographic reference. I actually kept painting them until that effect started to take hold in my eye, until it felt like I shouldn't be looking at it, so it was really a kind of memory effect. If you let your eyes focus on the outer edge of the painting, and then let the sun be in your peripheral vision, that kind of blue flicker happens.
LT: That has a throbbing effect.
BG: Exactly, there's a throbbing that happens in your eye. What I find actually so beautiful about that experience, is this is a very direct kind of way to talk about it, or a very sensual or physical way to talk about it, but when you're seeing something, and its after-image is also on top of the very thing that you're seeing in real time, it's a way in painting to expand time. It actually is kind of creating a latency, like there are more images that you're seeing at once, or there's more of time that you're sensing. It's time actually being pulled out and stretched. For me anyway, that's the feeling that I get, that I'm seeing something not just in an instant, but I'm seeing something that has a history, or I'm seeing something that I've been looking at for a while and it's catching up with itself and overlapping.
LT: It's interesting to compare this to Adnan's paintings of the sun, because she doesn't produce a throbbing effect, it's much flatter. It's also beautiful, but it's an interesting thing, why one wants the effects one does. In writing, that’s true also. Now a lot of people, a lot of writers, want to use italics, younger writers. I don't like the use of italics, except for a film title or something. I mean, I avoid it, because I think that the sentence, what the meaning is, where the emphasis lies, should be clear from the rhythm of the sentence, and this is going against this contemporary move to make that emphasis absolutely obvious, and it's very curious for instance. My position, why I feel strongly about it, is probably idiotic, but I do. So letting the paint do this kind of work, this throbbing effect, it's coming from the way it's painted. It's not as if you're drawing markers around it, and making pointers.
BG: This is something that kind of happens for the most part in a lot of my paintings, where the hottest or brightest point is a tempered, ultramarine blue. It’s very subtle, but it's one of those things that you know when you put a white sheet of paper up against it, you can see how vibrantly blue it actually is. There is something to the clarity of sensation. I love your clarity, the clarity that I see in your work, but it's of a specific kind of clarity, that clarity of sensation which is so difficult to talk about. Susan Rothenberg said a painting should have a figure, a ground, and something else. For me it’s not the figure or the ground that I'm looking for, it’s the clarity of something else. That something else is a kind of experience of flickering, but not just the flickering, what that flickering does as a feeling.
LT: I can't tell what that object is, that's creating this after-effect, at first I thought it might be a ring. Then I thought it was a tv set, then I thought it was a pair of sunglasses. I mean it's interesting that the after-effect or the after-image is really the image because the object is hard to clarify, and you know clarity in writing, it's a complex thing, because it's very different from painting. I could try to describe this in words, but its affect and effects would be lost, really, because it is experiential, and I think that's why looking at art, you know actually seeing art, especially if you can see it in person, is a different kind of experience from something that gets written. On the other hand, when one writes, when I write, I am also trying to put the reader in the position of having an experience of whatever it is they're reading, so it's done so differently in a way, and yet I can really be helped in the way I write from looking at art. Not that I'm describing the art, but for instance, what you've done here, or what Dana DiGiulio does, and she’s listening somewhere, I would be hard put to write something equivalent to that, but it would make me want to write something.
BG: I feel the same, I mean I guess I feel that writing, and particularly your writing affects and informs me, but it's really thinking. I think what I feel is in common, or even the particular clarity that I'm seeking or looking for, is in this notion of thinking as feeling or feeling as thought. You know, feeling through the mind and thinking through the senses.
LT: I think they're very extremely hard to separate really.
BG: Yeah.
LT: It's like a chicken and the egg thing in a way. Who was it that, I forget whether it was William James, I think, who talked about how the word comes after we feel something, that in trying to articulate an emotional response, that you turn it into language let's say. I think one of the reasons people are afraid, or intimidated by contemporary art, is that it's much less easy to have a simple response to it. As great as earlier art was, and still is, it wasn't as much interested, I think, in challenging any comprehension. Of course, the cubists and others challenged apprehension for sure, but I think now you know why we experience something, in the way we do, is part of what making art is.
BG: Yeah.
LT: I'm not so sure that I can make a good argument about what I've just said, but it’s something I'm thinking.
BG: What you just said reminded me of this beautiful idea from Édouard Glissant, who talks about the thought of the other as distinguished from the other of thought. So there's thought of the other, you know thinking about what another might be, in the world, or thinking of the other, maybe even the capital O Other, thinking of another person as outside. Thinking of whatever the Other might be, as outside, but then that stops short somewhere, because it makes a kind of object of the other, in a sense. Whereas the other of thought is actually an attempt to inhabit another way of thinking, or inhabit another way of sensing the world. I think that it's the other of thought, and I might butcher this, but he wrote, you know, you change, and you exchange. I mean that's the part of the fullness of being, of living in a collective, and living with more than one person, which we are all more than one person, even individually, but part of what's great about that is the fullness and diversity of experience. The fullness of being in the world, and the opportunities to feel that fullness from other people, who have had other experiences, and how they've triangulated them. How you can attempt to even inhabit that, or get into those rhythms, is something that I really get from an experience of art, but also an experience of reading. I mean it's what I love about your work, or reading your work, I feel like I can be in a rhythm of thought or inhabit another way of thinking. It does kind of get me into that, and that changes the way that I experience the world. It changes the way that I inhabit the world, and I think that has ramifications socially and politically, all the way up and all the way down. It’s very much about living, but it's also about living with other people.
LT: A couple of things I think, we should look at more of your works, but I wanted to attach some of this, especially now, after what you're saying. I know we both also like Gertrude Stein's composition as explanation, which I think is one of the best critical essays on art or writing that I've ever read, that and Kafka's Josephine the Singer, but one of the things she said, and I mean you've used the word everyone right? One of the things Stein says is that not everyone is interested in art, and she isn't hierarchical about that. She says they're interested in other things, and I think that's really important to consider, that you might be, I might be, everybody here might be interested in art, but many are not, so some of what we're doing doesn't include everyone, but is paying attention to our needs. She just says that they're not interested in it, she doesn't, oddly enough, because you don't think of Gertrude Stein as not thinking of herself as above and beyond everybody, she's not critical of that, she says this is just the way it is you know? So what do you call this wonderful piece?
BG: This is containers, in the plural. You know I've painted a lot of objects around the studio and where I live, and there is one of the rooms in the exhibition here which is a series of objects, this being one of them. Thinking about that Gertrude Stein you know, I think that points of access are really important to me. There’s something about the work operating on multiple layers and multiple levels that I think is extraordinarily important. You know, especially, even a painting like this, that could be very easily recognized, it's very simple and can be seen and quickly assembled in the mind as one thing, but it's something that has more to offer with longer looking.
LT: It really isn't easy to look at.
BG: Yeah it's got something that's so… I mean what attracted me to it in particular, it's still in this position in my cupboard right now, and this is actually one of the few artificially lit works that I have, but the shadow through the object is so fascinating to me. The object itself is distorted by its own shadow, and the shadow is only produced because of the wall that it's being projected onto. All of those things for me become formally very interesting, and then of course there is the indistinct space and indistinct objects that kind of surround it. There's something that is happening in my senses that is hard for me to speak about, but happens in the painting itself. It's a very clear phenomenon of both seeing through something, and seeing it as its surface.
LT: Also, I keep trying to put them together. I mean, there's a way in which I feel in my brain or mind, I'm not sure. I mean, they're different so maybe it's the brain, I'm trying to push the image to get the two images together. I want them not to be separate, I feel. And so, I'm… I mean it's not like looking at Peter Dreher's glass. This presents me with a problem about how I'm seeing, and why I want to see what I want to see. I mean, I'm very drawn to this, but I think if I looked at it for a long time I'd go insane.
BG: Yeah, I mean, it's an irresolution. It has a character of irresolution that for me gets really exciting. It's those moments of irresolution that I find so exciting in painting generally. At a great distance, you can have something, you can have something at a distance like this, you know, and things can feel really pleasant at a distance, really assembled and very concrete and together as images or illusions. Then you can approach them, and the closer you get, they fall, they fall apart in a sense. And that's something that's also, you know, its depth is its surface. And that's something that I keep coming back to. Surface is depth when nothing is superficial, that line from Men in Apparitions that is so wonderful. Yeah.
LT: Do you think about Luc Tuymans work?
BG: I do.
LT: I'm seeing a relationship, especially when you started talking about coming closer and being farther away. I think the first big show of his work I saw at Zwirner, maybe 10 years ago, there were very small paintings. And in the distance, I mean you were forced to have to come closer, and then what you saw was very different, and sometimes extremely upsetting. They were, some of them, Holocaust based images. There’s something in the way you're treating that irresolution. It reminds me of Tuymans, also the palette. The soft tones here.
BG: I mean nothing can be more disturbing, in some senses, than a sort of rupture of reality, or a reality principle. I think that having an idea of the world, that is concretized and firm, feels comfortable and secure. Modeling a rupture of that, can happen within painting, where things can have far more malleability. Maybe out of safety or out of comfort, or, you know, that's where form and content for me become one and the same. I mean I really do think that form and content arrive together. Much of what the painting does, how it orients you, how it leads in looking, but also just formally how it's shaped, arranged, painted, everything, all of it, the whole thing.
LT: Do you think of your work as portraiture?
BG: I love portraiture. I think portraiture, in a sense, is the hardest thing to paint. I'm really excited by it. I think that it's hard because it's so easy to assemble a singular view from a portrait. To challenge that is actually something that Peter Dreher did so well. His series of portraits are amazing, and for me they're amazing because they achieve so many things simultaneously. They lose the familiarity of a portrait. They kind of shed that immediate access of a familiar person, and present a surface as painting, as mark making, but arrive in a way that still retains the personal aspect of portraiture. There's another thing in portraiture that I'm obsessed with, you know, I love the glint, the marks in the eyes. The kind of thick finishing moves in the eyes that indicate a wetness that show it's alive, or indicate that it may be alive. Those marks are so intriguing in the sense that sometimes they're very thick. It’s what that very small dab of paint can do as far as indicating life. It's like a ‘life indicating mark’ that can be applied to other objects. So yes I think of these objects, you know, not necessarily in a Jane Bennett kind of vibrant matter way, which I'm sympathetic to, but I definitely anthropomorphize objects in many ways.
LT: I'm thinking about them, as you know. In my mind, I'm trying to relate some things to writing. And I think about the character in fiction, how the character carries a lot of the weight of the story. And when you, for instance, in this painting of an ice tray, it looks like, and you did this and both of the other ones that we looked at, there's always, not just the shadow behind, but you do something to the side that makes me think of portraiture. It's to create a kind of atmosphere around the object, which becomes a character in that sense. You know how you look at it and then, yeah, these very common, ordinary things, you know, being used to make paintings, is also very curious. We're much, much more used to that in photography. I think of William Eggleston's freezer, you know, that open freezer with all that stuff in it. You know Stephen Shore does similar stuff, and, well, thinking about Justine, but no, Justine Kurland doesn't do that, but who else? Anyway, it will come to me. Who is? She's a friend, she does the store window, I mean she did the whole series of store windows.
BG: Zoe Leonard?
LT: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s much more usual I think. I mean when you had paintings, let's say, by, you know, the 17th and 18th century Dutch, but 17th I suppose more. I mean they were interested in ordinary life, in a way, also, or even earlier, Jan Steen. But excerpting this, you know, very nothing, ice maker cube. I mean it's just an odd thing. Of course the more you look at it, the more it becomes something else, too. That you make a painting of it is, I think, really interesting.
BG: It has a dignity that I really appreciated, but also when I was in my kitchen, I was washing it out, and I set it up to dry. It had a flicker in all of those spaces. You know in these moments, and it had a flicker that I felt was looking at me, it was like a reflection of eyes. And also, these kinds of containers within containers, which I'm always interested in the idea of containers within containers, but there is a tonality, and the edge that you're talking about, that is something. I love the development of that and something like Diego Velasquez, you look at his early paintings that are very hard edged in their execution, and over the course of his work, you know, in something like, Venus at her Mirror, or you know, The Toilet of Venus, the edges on the face are so blurred. That edge is so blurred. In a sense, for me, it gives it vitality. It gives it a sense of vibration, like it's moving. Like it's turning. Like that head is turning.
LT: But you know nothing prepares you for Las Meninas.
BG: Oh yes.
LT: Which I guess has to be, you know, if I had to choose a favorite painting in all the world and everything, it would be that, because for many, many reasons. But if you look at Velasquez's work, the leap to Las Meninas, you just wonder where did this come from? How did he move from this extraordinary narrative painting, and it is so contemporary in so many ways, but anyway that's this.
BG: It's related. I feel like Las Meninas is so amazing because it is a kind of wild plugging of vision back into itself. It’s about to get, you know…It's the gaze. It's looking at the subject itself. A subject, you know, the king and queen, who are being painted in that moment. The entire painting is, you know, in a sense from their point of view, in the way that I read it.
LT: How he makes it, makes us know it's really a painting, the painters in it. There's in fact a kind of wall on the left side, sort of semi blocking the image.
BG: Yeah.
LT: The top half, it's about the top third or more is black.
BG: Right, right.
LT: It's as if this image could just disappear.
BG: Right. In a sense, I read it as portraiture as periphery. You know, I mean this is just in my sense of looking at it. There’s a sense that it's, to me anyhow, that it is a portrait, but a portrait as the periphery. This is kind of what's constituting you, you know, you are not this, but constituted by all of this in a certain sense, as one of the gestures of it.
LT: Brendan, I see time is flying. What is this that we're looking at?
BG: Oh, so this is why I brought this up. So this is related, in a sense. I mean to me, and Las Meninas, in the way of portrait as periphery, or what's kind of happening here. So this is my floor mat in my studio. This is where I stand, typically. And this is against the wall to the studio, but this floor mat is also an art object of a sort. I mean, a lot of people have presented things like this in different ways. But the thing that I'm really fascinated by, is that my attention is directed, you know, at the wall, or I'm making or arranging a painting that has, you know, a specific mode of attention. For me that is a focal point, or at least where I'm addressing my activity, but my activity is also being addressed under my feet. All the while, my activity is being affected all over the studio, all over the place. In that sense, for me, that's what's happening in the periphery. These forms of peripheral attention are also constituting objects, they're also making something that's worth looking at. I mean it's, in a certain sense, psychoanalytic. It’s kind of like, what's not happening is also happening, or what's happening in the background is also always happening. I find it fascinating, I mean it's a way to step back and see. You know, I'm always curious about what's going on, and I don't know. I don't have the answers. I'm way less interested in figuring things out, but I'm curious about ways of producing some kind of distance, so that I can look and see.
LT: It's another form of mark making isn't it?
BG: It is. It's totally another form of mark making, and the marks are beautiful. I mean, for me the marks are very beautiful.
LT: Is this shown on the floor?
BG: Yes, this is on the floor. There's something that is in my painting that I… I really love the uncanny. I mean Freud's idea of the uncanny, being somewhere familiar that you don't recognize anymore. It's a sense of the strange that I find when the scale of something made, or produced, or presented, is very near to the scale that it is as you would interact with it. So, for instance, if I paint a pair of sunglasses, I really like those sunglasses to be very close to the actual size of the object, because there's a strangeness for me that's produced in that relationship. Versus, if something is very large, or very small, for me, it becomes conceptualized easier, in a certain sense. And so, this is another place where it's happening. This is a chair from my studio, that I was sensing in relation to a painting of the Tetons in the summertime, that has just sort of, some residual snow. But then I find that they start informing one another, and this happens to me in my studio all the time. I think about the objects that I touch every day on a constant basis, and how much that's affecting my thinking, or looking. You know, I think about even just having two arms and two legs, and wondering if that affects my, kind of, thinking in terms of twos. I mean it's something as simple as that. I don't know if that is doing anything to me or not, but I really do think that it's important to pay attention to what we touch every single day, and how that's impacting everything.
LT: I think every day about the fact that I have running water. That always amazes me. But just to talk about this object and then I think we should get to some questions. But it's interesting to me that the chair is not facing the painting. So, it's not really an invitation to look at the painting. It's, either a scant, or it's an ironic position, that the reader or writer or viewer might take. It is, I guess, uncanny because you are familiarizing the approach to a painting, you know, we would be looking at it head on.
BG: There is that uncanny aspect for me, between seeing the painting right here, seeing the flecks of paint that are kind of in the mountain, that were very intentionally placed. Followed by the position of looking at the painting, and to see the unintentionally placed marks in the chair. Seeing these two in relationship. I mean, for me, I see the residual snow and the paint below. So, if you were to be standing here, those are kind of two ways of looking, but then also the form, the form itself, seeing mountains with mountains. As basic as that. This relationship to image making, in what is around you and how those things help to constitute or inform sort of what I'm feeling there, and through this that's something I love. I find that in your writing so much. I find that it's so open with what is constituting the thinking. It's always, in a sense for me, gesturing toward a look at the context, or what is informing this way of thinking, what is informing the image, what is constituting the image from the landscape of culture or the landscape of, you know, just being in the world. The objects in the world. I love it and find it totally inspiring.
LT: Thank you
BG: Should we open for questions?
LT: Do you take care of that Lisa?
Moderator [Lisa Solar]: Yeah, I have a list of questions here. Could I maybe start with the first one? Okay. This is from Julia who has a question first for you Brendan. It says, you may have touched on this a bit, but during the process, how did you embrace ambiguity? As the images began to evolve? It's clear that Lynne experienced ambiguity in viewing the paintings and sometimes discomfort, and one might wonder how you arrived at that point. You mentioned a glimmer caught in your eye on the ice tray, but to stay with that image through painting it, what was the metaphysical wrestling that went on, or real physical wrestling that went on emotionally to keep you engaged?
BG: That's an excellent question. I feel like the ambiguity, or not even settling on the idea of ambiguity… It's so funny we have a word for ambiguity, and that turns it into a thing. I think when things are oscillating between known and unknown, that's a really exciting place for me. That's something that motivates me to go deeper into it. It's not a tear in reality, but an opening, something about a curiosity where things open up. And, you know, of course I love the Keates sense of negative capability. You know the idea of dwelling in the uncomfortable or uncertain and remaining there. I think it’s something that's really evocative and important for me too, but it keeps me motivated. Lynne how do you feel about that, about negative capability or dwelling in the unknown?
LT: I think it's inevitable. There's no… I mean so much is unknown. I think that's very disturbing to us who want to read everything, you know? I mean there's just so much you'll never know, you can't know, you don't have the framework to know it. I mean it could just drive you mad, you know?
BG: The more you read, it only gets worse I feel like.
LT: I wonder about, you know, the idea of just reading the same book again and again the way Peter Dreher painted the same water glass again and again. I thought about that, but I don't think I'm going to do it.
BG: Oh, I mean, I love that. And also I meant to tell you I read Men and Apparitions again, before this talk. And, you know, I had read it in grad school and in reading it again, it hit me in such a new way. It's amazing how you read a book again and feel like you're reading a different book, if that makes sense? I mean, have you had that? Have you had that experience before, where something is entirely new?
LT: Well you are reading a different book when you are reading it again. I realized how little, how little I remember, and how little I got, so actually the second reading is the first reading, I think.
Moderator [LS]: I have another question from Kelly long. She was noting that when you spoke about art informing your writing, and Brendan how writing informs your art, so she's curious and wondering if you can elaborate on the relationship back and forth and its importance to you.
LT: Well, I'll try to make this brief, because that's actually a very complex question to answer. But when I studied painting, studio painting in college, it was the elective I could take again and again. And when I was painting, I realized I was thinking differently. You can even feel that another part of your brain was lighting up, you know? And that became very fascinating to me. I didn't want to become a painter, because that was not the space, the canvas was not the space I wanted to address myself to. It was always the page, to writing. But I think the imagination of others, looking at, you know there's so much said that's horrible about the art world, and this and that, but if you separate the art world from art. And, you know, I go to see galleries, of course in the last three years very hamstrung by that, as everybody is. And you see work that's surprising. You see people doing things that are completely unexpected. You realize that they're thinking about the world very differently than you do. And so, that always makes me happy, and that's to me encouraging, and inspiring. So, that's a short answer to that question.
Moderator [LS]: Brendan I'm wondering if you as an extension of that question, can you bring up the painting on your screen share of side mirror, side mirror, wait. Carrie is asking Lynne about your thoughts, because she feels like this painting in particular presents a narrative quality.
LT: Yes, I mean I think one of the things about paintings that have objects in them, again, they can become characters very readily. And so right now I'm imagining, it's a plane. I'm on a plane and I'm somehow seeing buildings upside down. Maybe the plane is upside down, which would be horrifying. But, yeah, that I could begin to think of a moody character who's flying somewhere she doesn't want to go, and begin to make a story from that. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if it'd be a good story, but I mean, there are elements in that, but of course the fact that it's really off kilter, it's not the way an airplane window looks or is. And, you know, I keep on thinking that's the Statue of Liberty, but I know it's, I don’t think it is, but the fact that it's off kilter would throw the story, you know, kind of to be something that rebounds, that you'd have to deal with.
BG: I love that. This painting, I love the slippage between the reading and the painting, and the title, and the way that these all work together, because I feel like when work is generative and it's producing something, in the sense that it's producing thought, it has an openness, but it also has a specificity that is speaking to its tone, or its feeling, that is associational, that brings in associations.
LT: But you're really, the emphasis, I mean I think, Brendan in this piece, you have created something that really is about how do we look at something. Because again I think I want to turn this upside down. You know, I mean I want to move it around.
BG: I mean, I love that. I really love that. I do feel like I'm only 50% of it, however I'm thinking and whatever I'm imagining, even when I'm making the work. I mean, for me it always has to be intensely personal, when I'm making something, but that's only 50% of it, so the way that it's taken after that is, is how it goes.
LT: The way that it's taken afterward is the most important way.
BG: Yeah.
LT: I mean in books also. I mean Duchamp, in that interview book with him. I forget who did it, but I believe Paul Chan’s Press brought it out. He says it doesn't, it doesn't matter.
BG: Yeah.
LT: It's what people make of it, always, and that's absolutely true.
BG: Yeah.
LT: Of anything.
BG: It's public. It’s thinking in public that is so exciting, and that's the risk. You know, thinking about work or art or whatever it may be, that's the risk. It is that mobility of mind in public, or allowing one to think in public, which I think is related to vulnerability, and is very beautiful, but also it's the read, those different directions. I'm learning constantly about the work, even in hindsight, that I don't know. You know, I can have motivations or ideas, but it's just what I'm using for myself in making it. But you're absolutely right. The way that it moves in the world, or with others, is where it is.
LT: But, you know, if you were to take out all of the objects in that window, it would be like a Ron Gorchov shaped painting, but mounted on a black background. And that always, the continuity in making things, as different as they are, they're building on each other. Which is what Virginia Woolf said about books. You know, books continue each other.
BG: Yeah, I fully agree. That for me, that's another layer of the after-image, or something that I'm interested in, in the way that, you know, you can move from one work to another work and see a kind of continuity, but it's different. It's a strange continuity. It's not just formal. It's also, there's something that moves between them, that I think is really exciting.
LT: Another question?
Moderator [LS]: Yes, I have a handful more for you. This one's from Josh Murphy, says your current exhibit seems to allow the onlooker the space to lean in, and in turn interact, with the space of what you've made and how we react to it. Much like the title of the exhibition, there's focus on what is remembered or felt. The question is, what discernment do you use to utilize that space, as opposed to making something more overt and upfront?
BG: The space of feeling in, in memory? I'm sorry, Lisa, would you read that question again?
Moderator [LS]: Yeah, let me read the last part, just the question part. It says what discernment do you use to utilize that space, as opposed to making something more overt and upfront?
BG: Hmm. You know, discernment, that's a good word and a really interesting word in a sense. I think discerning happens from trust, and a sense of being hands-off. I don't know, this is where I come to it. I think that there is, in such a strange way, the work does kind of… there's a point at which the work takes over and kind of makes itself. I don't know, Lynne, if you feel this way when writing, but there's a point that I'm kind of continuing an activity, but the activity feels very led, without too much in specific intention, it’s kind of going there and you're trying to keep up with it in a certain sense.
LT: Don't you think also, when I'm writing, so I've been writing and writing and there's a logic to the material in a sense. I don't, at a certain point, I don't have a million ways to go because I've already set up the parameters.
BG: The internal logic.
LT: Yes, that's right. That's the thing. I mean, I don't deal so much with plot as the internal logic, which I hope comes across so that it creates a story.
LT: This painting that's up here. What's the title of this painting?
BG: This one is Gleam Plane, East Bay. So this is a painting of the park that we go walking in, maybe three or four days a week. But that's looking back at Berkeley. So there was something this time of day, maybe there's an hour of the day. You know, it's the other blue hour. It's after sunset, but when everything is very blue, you know, there's a feeling to that time. And I think, you know, over the highway, there's a lot of these very brilliant lights that just get pulled out and expanded over the water.
LT: It's very beautiful, Brendan.
BG: Yeah. I mean, I'm still figuring it out. It's one of those, you know? Actually, these parts of it are quite thick. And they're also, they're also very blue. It's something that I don't know. Again, it was kind of like, from the other paintings. It's so strange the way that they drift. I mean, it's like this, the marks. This is from the tarmac out of the window of an airplane. But these lights for me, start drifting into these lights. From seeing one thing, I start seeing another and another, and that's kind of the way that it works for me. But the discernment, or even, like knowing where to stop or where it's going, there is an internal logic that starts, but also I feel there's a certain submission or a kind of letting go to what is already happening in your mind and your heart at any given time. Yeah, I feel like I try to do my best to get out of the way. That's what I feel like I'm doing when I'm working most of the time.
Moderator [LS]: Hey, Brendan, we have, I think we have time for one more question. And I'm going to be really selfish and take it myself since I'm in control. It will be my question. You know, back when you were, and I can't remember the title of the painting, there's a lot in the show, but the really bright spot that Lynne was saying she first thought was a TV, or, you know, yeah, that's the piece you were talking about. And then all of the blue that's in, in that bright white that we're perceiving, and I had posted a comment about forbidden color. Do you know the concept of forbidden color? So it's on my mind all the time for some reason, which is that, you know, we perceive color. This is really pretty nitty gritty and nerdy. You know, we perceive color by using opponent neurons, right? So that's part of where you get the idea of contrasting colors is because red and green, you can mix them with pigment, but you cannot perceive a color, which is an actual blending of the two. You can't perceive green and red light at the same time. They're only, you can see one, and then you can see the other as an after-image. And there's, there's a zone of color that really can't be described when you're looking at a blue and then you close your eyes and up comes the yellow. There's these mixes in there that don't really exist. And I sort of feel like you're almost rendering those, what makes them vibrate is you're almost rendering those colors using pigment. You know, like when you're talking about looking at the sun and perceiving it with this blue color that kind of buzzes. And the first thing I wanted to do is run upstairs with a photo color card, a white card from the photographer's case, you know, to see just how blue is that sun that you were talking about. But I was just wondering if you knew about this concept? They're called either forbidden colors or impossible colors, which I think are both very poetic. And they've done studies of trying to get people to look at a color and then describe the color that comes in the after-image, to describe it using words they know about other colors. And they can't, they can't say what it is.
BG: I love that. I think that's so fascinating. I know about something like magenta being a color that's a kind of contradictory color, that's made in the mind, because we may not have the rods and cones to sort of work that out. But then it also makes me think that it's like the Josef Albers thing about red. You know, you could say the word red and you would have 50 different reds in the minds of 50 different people. I think there's something where color is clearly psychological and mental and sensory, in that sense. But the fact that it transcends at all, the fact that we can have a shared reality at all, astounds me. And I think that's miraculous. And that's something that is the deep question that I feel really provoked by. It’s how that, how that even happens between us, which is amazing.
Moderator [LS]: Thank you for indulging me in that. I think that we're about to wrap it up. Britton, did you need to say a final word? I'll offer my part, say thank you to Lynne and Brendan.
Gallerist [Carrie Secrist]: Actually, I'd love to kind of jump in.
Moderator [LS]: I see Carrie Secrist, there you are, you will say something.
Gallerist [CS]: I just wanted to say, what a perfect and beautiful experience this was, of listening to this dialogue today. And it couldn't have been a more perfect way to introduce what I want our new CSG programming to be about, which is about simply this exchange, this dialogue, these amazing minds and ideas coming together and bringing them, what's in front of us into all different directions, the salon of Gertrude Stein, bring that sense of community back to Chicago, back to the art world in general. We are going to be fully committed to this in our new space, which will soon be announced, hopefully soon. But this exhibition in the space we've been in, which has been kind of a godsend during the pandemic. This, you know, this lovely dwelling, basically. This show is the perfect way to sign off of this space. But this program in particular, to be the thing that's starting our new focus. So I want to thank Brendan so much, Lynne so much for beginning the conversation and we hope that it will continue and grow with the people that are on this today, and what will be coming next for all of us. So thank you both so much. Thank you. And thank you, Lynne.
BG: I mean, from the bottom of my heart, what a wild experience to share your company and sit with you for a little bit. I mean, you are, you know, my favorite writer, thinker, I mean, for me, the philosopher of images and a good friend. I'm so grateful for you joining us. And I send my love and gratitude to you. Thank you so much.
LT: Thank you. It's really wonderful to talk with you and about your work, which is very, very compelling, really very, very. I kind of love it. Bye. Bye everyone. Thank you. Thank you.