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NANCY
GROSSMAN Loud Whispers
So
I didn't cry. Instead, I asked halley harrisburg (the gallery director, who
doesn't believe in capital letters) to have an interview with Nancy Grossman,
and she accepted. I must be honest: I don't consider myself an art critic and
I was unaware of her existence or her art work
until about a year ago. Many people warned me she's a very sharp woman, so I
went completely unprepared, I had the feeling I didn't have to ask her any
questions, all I had to do was listen. And I did. She preferred not to be
tape recorded, so out of respect I only wrote what we talked about. Now I'm
left with scribbled notes that read like: "all you have to do is touch
something", "I'm as critical as I..." and so on. Nancy
Grossman is an incredible woman. It's hard to describe the energy that both
herself and her work emanate. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is currently filled
with this magic, and Grossman being there made me feel like in the eye of a
tornado. Though, as Robert C. Morgan put it, "she is unassuming both in
her work and in her desire to make art. Grossman has never been a careerist
in the trendy, market-driven sense of the word."1 In fact, I
plainly asked her: "Why aren't you world famous?" "My work is not slick", she replied, and I
disagreed. We then spent a good deal of time arguing on what was slick and
what was not, and at the end I had to agree with her, her work is not slick
or fashionable. Possibly, it's just too strong for this market. "When
art is less viable as a product it becomes more accessible. Philosophically,
I became an artist when abstract expressionism was around, and the way I work
is still within the same approach. It comes out of necessities, irresistible
necessities. It's like a compulsion I have to do this kind of work. Hadn't I
been an artist I would be a criminal." SP:
"So do you find your work to be a struggle?" NG:
"I do, but that doesn't sound good, does it? It's always a struggle because
sometimes it's hard to know where it's going. What I liked from Dada was the
idea of chance. Accidents in the working process are very important and
sometimes I try to capture, or present, an accident. But struggling in the
working process can also be being afraid of accidents." I
guess that was a silly question. The energy that comes from her work is such
that it would be impossible for it to come out of a smooth process. Her
"infamous" heads, hand carved in wood and covered with leather,
strapped and zippered (too often associated, superficially, with S&M and
fetishism) have the inner despair and the explosive anger of the true
existence of humankind. They encompass the whole existential history of
humankind, from Michelangelo to Van Gogh to Artaud to Marc Quinn to the
future. Nothing has changed. The everyday frustrations may be different, but
they're all there, inglobed into a wooden portrait constrained by leather.
Once again, I didn't have to ask her about her heads: NG:
"It wasn't just an idea, it's a whole world. I wanted to fill the
space with friends. I have a lot of friends, but that can also be very
lonely. The heads are self portraits. The reason I covered them with leather
was because I was using found wood that I would laminate together in order to
have a piece big enough for the work." "One of the most stunning sights I've ever seen", writes
Lowery Stokes Sims 2, "was an installation of over thirty
of these heads on several tiers at the entrance to Grossman's 1991
retrospective exhibition at the Hillwood Art Museum". If I wanted to
cry by looking at three of her heads, I probably would have fainted seeing
that show. Earlier,
halley harrisburg was telling me how she never associated a gender to those
heads. Though they are all extremely masculine in their look, I couldn't but
agree. These heads go far beyond issues of gender or sexuality, they engulf
the whole of the human condition. SP:
"Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist?" NG:
"Definitions are so closed. You can define my work conceptual, as you
can call it sensual. I like to think there's less to read and more to touch,
less to say and more to feel... no, I can't say that, it's too poetical.
Sculpture strikes me as being deaf and dumb. It's a necessity, more than
anything else, a way to escape from all the rules with which you were brought
up. There's something very lucky about being able to transform the
physical form. You should be as good as you can be to master what you do.
When I studied at Pratt in the late fifties they tried to teach me this kind
of Bauhaus idea of color, to me it was as impossible as the English
grammar... Richard Lindner was a very important teacher for me. He taught me
what are the tools you need to get where you want to get. And the most important
thing is to get to that point yourself. You know, it's you, it's you, it's
you!" And
she pokes me with her index finger at each "you", as if I didn't
get the message. I got the message. Not only that, I feel that this poking
cast a spell over my troubled being of artist and writer. Half way through
this article, I felt so inadequately equipped to write about Nancy Grossman
that all I could do was stop and savagely make a huge expressionist painting.
And I haven't painted in seven years. She herself told me she wished she
could write. "Things would be much simpler," she said, "I
could be anywhere and just write". Nancy Grossman was compelled into
being an artist. She couldn't be anything else, not like so many young
artists of today, who choose art as a profession. As halley harrisburg
pointed out, she didn't choose. I can only complete this struggling
transcription of the interview with her own words: "I left behind this
document of the evidence of the unspeakable".
"trying to sell the magic, that's the art
market" 14-15 November 2000 1)
Robert C. Morgan, Nancy Grossman: Opus Volcanus, Sculpture Magazine,
August 1998 Vol. 17 No. 6. 2) Lowery Stokes Sims, Loud
Whispers, Catalog for the exhibition, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NY,
2000. 
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"Opus Volcanus",
1994. Leather, wood, metal, rubber, acrylic, 50 x 80.125 in. Photo: Larry
Lamay. "B.S.T.", 1969. Carved wood, leather, and grommets, 16
in. high "T.Y.V.L.", 1970. Patent leather over wood, 15 in. high "I can hardly contain myself. If I hadn't
been an artist I would have exploded" "the
only time I feel alive is when I disappear" |
