In conversation: Libby Wadsworth and John S. Weber

In conversation:

Libby Wadsworth & John S. Weber

This conversation between Libby Wadsworth and John Weber was recorded over a series of sessions on Zoom and in person in Eugene, Oregon, in summer 2021.

John Weber: What are your first significant memories of art?

Libby Wadsworth: Mostly, my early memories of art are connected to architecture. My father and some of his college friends bought land on Prickly Mountain in Vermont in 1964 or 1965 and started to build these bizarre buildings that really were more like sculptures that you could sort of live in. It was the beginning of the design-build movement. I spent my early childhood weekends playing, and sometimes helping to build these unusual structures. It was great fun—and shaped, or warped, my ideas of what architecture could be.

JW: Architecture is very much about structure, and I look at your work now and I see a lot of interest in structure—words as components, putting things together, taking things apart, looking at different kinds of components and using them to build something. Did you study architecture in school?

LW: I didn’t; but I did take a lot of drawing classes and history of architecture classes. The college I went to was small and didn’t offer architecture classes per se. After college though, I spent two years in New York City working for architects. I worked for a big firm initially, as an assistant to an interior designer—helping with a giant office building being constructed in lower Manhattan right next to the World Trade Towers. I helped with organizing office spaces, chairs, desks, and fabrics, that sort of thing. The big firm was very structured and hierarchical. Later, I worked for a small firm in Brooklyn, on a much more human scale. I really enjoyed thinking about living spaces and about how to renovate old buildings to make them more contemporary and functional. But after two years I wanted to try something different.

I moved to Chicago to earn a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was so excited to be back in school doing something I really wanted to do. I took as many classes as I could each term. I felt like a kid in a candy store. After that, I applied to graduate school at the University of Chicago.

JW: What happened to your work in grad school?

LW: Grad school was about figuring out how to make text and image go together in ways that felt right to me. I was uncomfortable just putting words into paintings or drawings. I needed some kind of structure, as you say, to justify the move in my head. Somehow, I stumbled upon sentence diagrams. The diagram was perfect because it made the verbal, the sentence, into a visual object, and I could manipulate the form or the lines of the diagram to articulate space and depth in the painting. The diagonals could become like perspective lines.

“I work in a variety of different media, but examining aspects of verbal and visual language is really at the core.ˮ

The texts in the diagrams were very literal at this point: they would tell you what you were looking at, and then I would try to match the text with an image I could paint. Like “the apple is on the table,” or “we can see a grove of trees in the distance.” At this point, I had to learn how to paint a realistic apple sitting on a table. I wanted the painted representation to be seamless, like an “Old Master” apple to go with the declarative sentence. The other thing that interested me about words in the diagram was that they became harder to read. The diagram upsets the flow of reading. The words kind of became more object-like than the highly rendered apples on the table. The apples were apples and you didn’t have to think about them. They became the thing you looked through. So next I painted them hovering off the table, and the words and images didn’t match. And it went on from there. I began exploring different kinds of relationships between the words and the images.

Later, I began looking for other devices that push words to become more object-like. One such device I settled on and have used often is the grid. I was looking at the work of Christopher Wool, Jasper Johns, and Glenn Ligon. Their work is all very different in terms of the content, but the grid is central.

JW: How would you characterize your work today?

LW: I would say that language understood very broadly is the material of my work and has been from the beginning. I work in a variety of different media, but examining aspects of verbal and visual language is really at the core. I like to take things apart, examine the components, and then try to put them back together in a different way, an unusual way that might make someone say, “I haven’t thought of it like that before.” It’s about process; one that engages me and that hopefully engages viewers as well.

I am also intrigued by the unresolved back and forth between words and images where words and letters become visual, and where images become more word-like or sentence-like. Places where you are reading a word but also seeing it at the same time. A kind of unresolved buzzing, or oscillation where things don’t settle into one or the other. The categories, whether you’re talking about words or images, abstraction or realism, an image, or a concept, they aren’t this or that. They are both this and that. The work is about the ongoing conversation between elements.

JW: I was thinking about the title of the show—InFormation—and how you have spelled it. That intrigues me because it takes a word that conveys an essentially static concept, “information,” and that implies a static body of data, a body of facts, statistics or whatever. And then you ask us to think at the same time about something in flux, something that’s not fixed and not static. And that provocation strikes me as central to your work as a whole: it’s always about the process of cognition and cogitation as it relates to both seeing and reading. As you say, very much a both/and!

LW: Yes, definitely. The fun of it is the process, the thinking about an idea, the painting or making something about an idea. Physically making a painting or any artwork is a process; a thing literally in formation. I always think about Alberto Giacometti and his portraits when I’m painting. For me, his works are records of his thoughts and actions. Records of him looking at the model, making marks, looking again and changing the marks he’s just made, on and on until at some point he says, “okay, I’m done here.” A similar thing happens when you are reading something—each time you read a poem or a bunch of words, you might come up with a different understanding of those words, a different take or point of view. This formation of meaning, or meaning in formation, is really at the center of my work.

JW: Your new works with photography and letters, with the overlay of translucent paper, have a spare, minimalist feel. But at the same time, you’re actually making a lot of demands on your viewers. You aim those pieces directly at our minds, and you’re asking us to complete them by participating in these acts of linguistic dissection and reassembly that each work proposes. At least that’s one way of looking at the work—looking at them as something made for us, your viewers. But it could also be that that’s not really how you approach them. It strikes me that for you—even as you recognize how the audience will engage the possible readings they set up—you might be approaching the work as a fundamentally more personal investigation, a kind of linguistic play, or an essentially philosophical rumination on how language operates at the level of syllables and words, and the visual and the verbal. And so, I guess the question is to what extent, as you make the works, are you thinking about multiple viewers beyond yourself? And to what extent are you simply immersed in the investigation itself?

LW: I think this goes back to the both/and situation where initially it’s me playing around with words, and asking how many words are in this word, or how can I arrange these broken cups in an interesting way? And then, how do the cup fragments relate to this pile of words? Are there larger connotations or suggestions being made beyond the level of the teacup and word? I definitely hope and want viewers to engage with this process: to think about taking things apart and then putting them back together in different ways; to solve problems in different ways. And it works both from the maker side and from the viewer side.

JW: Where did the teacups come from?

LW: Well, the cups and still life objects in general have been with me for a long time. At first, I turned to still life because I was trying to learn how to paint realistically, or at least in the style of an Old Master. How do you paint something to look three-dimensional and luminous? What is a glaze? And how does it work? The still life objects were right there in my studio, or at the grocery store. I didn’t have to pay for a model or brave the Chicago winter to paint outdoors. I could also go to the Art Institute and study real Old Master paintings and then run back to my studio and try to make something that approximated what I had been looking at. And I say approximated! But over time, my still lives became more convincing. So initially, I chose still life for practical reasons.

I also began to think about still life through the lens of domesticity and the idea of women’s work. I was choosing still life objects to engage with and think through issues of being a woman artist, a mother, an earner, and a painter in a male-dominated art world; what kinds of statements could I make with still life, and how could I engage the genre by inserting myself in it, while altering the language in some way? So, to me teacups suggest a kind of hyper-domesticity and the ritual of English tea. I think of images of the “proper home” with a woman of privilege and means presiding. I felt I could use the teacups to comment on this language or structure. And then one day, I dropped a cup and it broke into pieces.

JW: I love that…the broken cups came from life, from a broken cup in your life. How about the layering in the new pieces? You have always had layers in your painting, too, but I’m curious about how you came to use the Dura-Lar, the translucent paper.

LW: A few years ago I had the opportunity to have a show with Eugene Contemporary Art. For that show, I made a large installation that included around 30 letterpress pieces along with drawings and paintings all based on the sequence of the alphabet. The letterpress pieces were all on white paper, in a set size. After making those, I felt like I’d run out of things to do with words and letters alone. Adding a layer or two of transparency seemed like a new approach. I could highlight different words by putting some behind and putting some on top. Danielle, in her essay, talks about GRASPING. This is one of the first pieces that I made with the Dura-Lar right at the beginning of COVID last March. This word has many resonances: the idea of grasping what we were heading into, but then also gasping for breath, and then the words asp and ring. The transparencies literally add another layer to the process.

JW: There’s something that happens when I look at a lot of these pieces: they suck me into this contemplative dimension where I think about language and I think about its operations on us and the extent to which we use it and the extent to which we inhabit it.

LW: Exactly. Language is constructed by us and it, in turn, constructs us, our thoughts and ways of representing the world. It’s an ongoing process of change and formation.

JW: When I was in your studio a long time ago, before COVID, I noticed a number of books of artists who have incorporated language in their work to one degree or another. And you have mentioned Jasper Johns in particular. I’m curious as to what came first, whether you moved into language and then started noticing artists who were working in language or how that unfolded? And Johns also, of course, works with found objects—the American flag, beer cans, his stencils, and so on.

LW: I have always admired Johns’s work, for so many reasons—the letters and words, and his use of encaustic paint. Encaustic is a wax-based paint which goes on in liquid form (melted wax with pigment). It dries and hardens almost immediately. The brush strokes are literally captured at the moment they hit a surface. The strokes become traces or embodiments of the artist’s hand moving the brush. When Johns paints letters with encaustic, the letters become extremely object-like and tactile, almost sculptural. I think my obsession with the physicality of letters was ignited by studying his work. And, ultimately, that led me to letterpress in my quest to find other media that can convey or embody the objectness of text.

Another artist who really struck me early on was Glenn Ligon, particularly his early black-text-on-whiteground paintings quoting the words of Black writers. Through his repetition of phrases and words, painting the same ones over and over in black paint stick, the surface builds up, becomes thicker, making the words literally more physical and present as you read down the painting.

The other painter whom I look to often is Jenny Saville, a contemporary British painter. You had one in the museum recently.

JW: Yes, it was of a face, and just gorgeous.

LW: With her work, it’s the back-and-forth between realism and abstraction, the juxtaposition of paint used to render a feature transparently and the use of paint for paint’s sake calling attention to itself as a physical medium. Her earlier work is often based on photographs. She puts the photographs together in such a way that it makes you conscious of the constructed nature of her image, and of the human figure. She makes very conceptual figure paintings.

JW: Your work is in some ways fundamentally conceptual art. But it often has these elements that are not what one thinks of as conceptual art—still life painting in particular—but you’re using it in a conceptual way.

LW: Definitely. My work often offers the viewer a “pretty” image to begin with, something you know already that might attract you. But the closer you get, the more you see there are other things going on. Conceptualism comes in the guise of a pretty picture.

JW: Let’s talk about the found object in your work, because to me that’s a through-line…working with things that are already there in some way. You have words as givens, as found objects that you then take apart and put back together. And when you take them apart, you’re asking us in a way to “unknow” them and then “reknow” them. But it seems to me that we could look at the notion of the still life as another given, we can look at that tradition as another found object that you also take apart and layer and play with and use as a way to ask us to think about perception and thinking and cognition.

LW: Yes exactly. The found object is an interesting way of thinking about the elements I choose to analyze or take apart. I haven’t really thought of those elements in that way. Thank you.

I draw a lot from the language of art history which I think of as a found visual vocabulary or grammar in a sense. I like borrowing and manipulating different aspects from this vocabulary in order to make the familiar unfamiliar.

For example, in this exhibition there is a diptych called inherit. I have painted three objects stacked on top of each other in a realistic Old Master style. They are believably present on a ledge, though precariously stacked. Both panels have the same three objects but stacked in a different order. The word inherit appears on each panel as well, though broken apart into components—“in her it” on one and “it in her” on the other. The words are rendered three dimensionally and are stacked to behave and mirror the still life objects. These are spare paintings and refer to minimalism as a style. They are also conceptual. All of these styles, or found objects, are mixed up and juxtaposed, hopefully prompting viewers to ask questions about how we engage with and think about aspects of language, how the languages we have created shape us and how we can continually shape and change these languages.

JW: So sometimes we’re looking at the window and sometimes we’re looking through the window.

JW: Do you ever have an urge to paint great big pieces?

LW: No. I think on some level it’s intimidating. On another level, I feel like that’s what guys do. I’m also more interested in the small, intimate, quiet thing that might speak more powerfully than it appears. And then the other practical rule is that it has to fit in my car.

JW: Right! John Baldessari once commented that all of his early work was the size it was because that was the biggest canvas that would fit in the back of his van. It also reminds me of something one of my teachers, David Antin, once said to his students: real artists are always practical—you have to make something you can actually make, something that you have the resources to make, and not just dream about things that are too big or too expensive, or that you don’t actually know how to make.

Now, these works definitely have an intimacy, but you were talking about COVID, and I see other social resonances in this work. I can’t help but notice the sense of brokenness, fragility. Can you talk more about that?

LW: For me, the broken cups have become representative of how broken our society has become in terms of our responses to the COVID pandemic, our fractured politics, and the Black Lives Matter protests. The systems are broken and they need to be reformed and reconfigured. These pieces have been and continue to be a way for me to personally express this feeling of brokenness and to begin to think through or think about metaphors for solutions. Through breaking will we be able to break through?

JW: Thank you, Libby, I think that is an excellent stopping point, underlining the questions your work asks us to contemplate. This has been wonderful. Thank you for your work.