Distillations Introduction: Jarrett Earnest Essays by Michael Taussig, Paolo Barbaro, David Levi Strass, and Ellen Handy Interviews by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, and Leann Davis Alspaugh ORO Editions, Novato, California Nancy DrawingsGoldringandFoto-Projections 1971–2021
ORO PublishersEditionsofArchitecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.cominfo@oroeditions.comPublishedbyOROEditionsCopyright©2022NancyGoldring.Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying or microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Author: Nancy Goldring ORO project manager: Kirby Anderson Book Design: Pablo Mandel Typeset in TT Commons Pro 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition ISBN: 978-1-954081-66-6 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China. ORO Editions makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications. As part of this goal, ORO Editions, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations. Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.
Contents Introduction: Perspectives 6 Jarrett Earnest I. Thresholds Winter Windows 10 Roman Windowman 13 Via degli Spagnoli 14 Two Illustrations That the World is What You Make of It 16 Blind Ice 17 Urban Amnesia 20 Urban Amnesia 26 Michael Taussig II. Sites Imagining Egypt 30 Borobudur 36 Tunnel Visions 40 Isurumuniya 42 Place Without Description 44 Other Landscapes 52 Paolo Barbaro III. Sets Studio on Stromboli 56 Symi 58 Re Building 60 La Guarida 65 Nancy Goldring Interview with Leann Davis Alspaugh, Hedgehog Review, Summer 2014 129 Contributors’ Biographies 133 List of Works 134 Nancy Goldring Exhibitions, Bibliography, and Awards 140 Acknowledgments 146 Parma Palimpsest 68 David Levi Strauss IV. Perspectives Amavarati 72 Palimpsest 74 Via dei Solitari 80 Sea Saw 82 Broken Landscape 89 Nancy Goldring Interview with Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Artforum, September 28, 2018 93 V. Dreams and Visions The Great Sea Deluge from New Jersey 96 The Traveler Remembers 97 Wanwood 100 At Sea 102 Ave Avis 104 Nancy Goldring’s Distillations, Meditations upon Light, Memory and Distance: a Theater of Transcendence, Ellen Handy 108 VI. Chiaro Scuro Ellis Island 114 Legend with Robert Lax 116 Shadows’ Shadows 119
Over the past fifty years, the artist Nancy Goldring has pioneered “foto-projection,” her own unique process that melds drawing, collage, photography, and installation. The product of an encyclopedic understanding of perspective within the history of representation, her work moved beyond linear sys tems of perspective. In search of visual methods that could accommodate dreams, she claimed interiority as a material component of space itself, within and against the complex cultural frame that brings those systems into being. This book begins in 1971, the year Goldring became involved with a group of artists interested in working between art and architecture to develop a new hy brid approach to public space. Her participation was much influenced by her activist years in Florence, where she first studied and then researched on a Fulbright grant. With four other artists, she co-found ed the now-famous group, Sculpture In The Envi ronment, or SITE. Collaboratively, they came up with imaginative proposals for interventions into archi tecture, design, and public art. Lecturing widely, and through their own magazine ON SITE, they pioneered and theorized the term “site-specificity” in contem porary art discourse. After several years of participating with SITE, Goldring retreated into her studio to pursue her own work, at first primarily drawing from life. It was there that she found a personal approach to image-making that became a lifelong exploration. She had been making perceptual drawings of the view from her stu dio window, focusing on only the structure of the win dow and the interior, noticing the specificity of the casing, the dangling plants, and the shading of the panes themselves. To better understand the way oc ular perception functioned, she decided to sandwich a black-and-white analog photo of the view from her window with her drawing of the same, thereby mak ing a composite image, or what she called a “double drawing.” She photographed this image for reproduc tion in a book by Robert Kaupelis called Experimental Drawing, and, while projecting that double drawing to check its quality, the projection happened to land on the (originating) window but now included the view out onto the city. The result of this chance event was unlike any she had seen before and triggered years of exploration. The drawing, projection, and physical space within them—both inside and outside—blurred in ways that spoke to subjectivity of space and vision.
6 Introduction: Perspectives Jarrett Earnest
In 1977, these earliest experiments constituted the work in her first solo exhibition at Monique Knowlton Gallery in New York City. With this intuitive explo ration, Golding set out on her own path artistically and philosophically and termed the products of her cumulative process “foto-projections,” which even now continue to evolve. She almost always works in series, taking photographs of various combinations of slides on the relief collage so that each image remains open to possibility and the place on which she is working undergoes a potentially infinite number of variations on the theme. The resulting bodies of work each represent the kind of permeability and fluidity of a specific site, the psychological and perceptual whole that Gol dring experienced, and also a kind of amalgamated construction within the mind’s memory. Each image represents a specific moment in time, arrested, the space framed within the particular vantage of the shot. However, with the layering images, often rendering them only partly legible—making the texture of a wall into a sky for instance, or a sculptural outcropping into the sea—the figure and ground, proximity and distance, and form and detail are all interpenetrated in ways that undo the ideological underpinnings of perspective that have prevailed since the Renaissance. Goldring introduces the dimensions of subjectivity into our experience of the work, in the sense that what we call “public space” is more clearly understood as “transpersonal,” and which the foto-projections address in all their forms and implications. Distillations offers the first comprehensive over view of fifty years of Nancy Goldring’s artistic work. It is divided into six thematic sections: “Thresholds,” “Sites,” “Sets,” “Perspectives,” “Dreams and Visions,” and “Chiaro Scuro.” Within each section, the works— presented chronologically within the chapter—are
7 prefaced with a brief statement by the artist, which situates the piece. Often several stages of each piece are reproduced, including initial drawings, relief collages, and several examples of Goldring’s foto-projections. For reasons of concision, only a selection of the many permutations of any given project appears. Some have been exhibited as architectural installations, with multiple projections timed among ever-shifting slides on timers. In sev eral instances these views have been reproduced (see “Tunnel Visions,” “Studio on Stromboli,” and “Ellis Island”). Between every section is a piece of critical writing that explores a specific facet of her work in greater depth, including texts by pioneer ing anthropologist Michael Taussig, photography historian Paolo Barbaro, theorist and art writer David Levi Strauss, and art historian and curator Ellen Handy. Two illuminating conversations with the artist, by writers Lauren O’Neill-Butler and Leann Davis Alspaugh, round out the presentation. Taken as whole, they offer an account of Nancy Goldring’s achievement, as an artist and thinker who has spent her life considering the most basic problems of representation and visual form: the transformation of three-dimensional space into the abstraction of two dimensions, in ways that are inextricable from history, meaning, and memory. In this she has created her own unique form, and images of such rigor and beauty—a true poetics of space.
10 Views from my studio window in New York City made during the initial and highly experimental stage in the development of my process. Winter Windows
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13 This was one of many projections during a period of experimentation. Roman Windowman
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This series, which derives its title from a poem by Wallace Stevens, conjures a place in western China near the border with Burma. High over the Yantzee River, a small Tibetan monastery presides over the valley. From this point, not far from the village of Lijiang, I spent an afternoon at the edge of the cliff, contemplating the sacred site.
Place Without Description
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“La Guarida” is based on a specific site in Havana, Cuba, which I visited in 2001. The grand turn-of-thecentury mansion had become home and factory to at least 50 families who carved out their personal spaces from the elaborate building. La Guarida
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Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, 2013 NYFA Emergency Grant 2012 The Distinguished Scholar Award, Spring 2003, Montclair State University Fulbright Southeast Asia Fellowship, 1994–1995 New York State Council on the Arts, Inter-Arts collaboration with Ze’Eva Cohen, 1986–7 Polaroid 20 x 24 Camera, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 Fulbright Fellowship, University of Florence, Italy, 1967–68
141 HONORS AND AWARDS
Throughout my career, I have been sustained by a multitude of colleagues, friends, and especially, family. With too many to list here I will, therefore, confine my words of thanks to those who aided me with this daunting project—a reflection upon 50 years of making images. I am so very grateful who helped along the way. It was Jarrett Earnest who ignited and helped formulate this project, and Ashley Simone and Sarah Rafson of Point-Line proj ects provided crucial, additional support in this endeavor. Jessica Holmes’s most precise and excellent editing was essential to its preparation. My ever good-spirited assistant Claudia Cortinez provided a watchful eye on the images, and curator Vanessa Kowalski was at the ready in any emergency. I could always count on my writer friends, David Levi Strauss, Mick Taussig, Paolo Barbaro, Lauren O’Neill Butler, and Daniele Balicco for much needed advice and reassurance. I relied on the eyes of Gianni Martini and Paola Rosina at Martini & Ronchetti Gallery, Genoa for the selection of images. Giulia Oskian and Andrea Pratt’s enthusiasm boosted my morale when needed. Artists were many, but my pal Adam Putnam was a great resource and Michael Webb’s belief in my work has long been essen tial to my spirits and a model of excellence. My family, especially Steven and Mary, Peter and Catherine were my main-stays, always encouraging my efforts and I hope they know how much I value their steadfast enthusiasm. Reaching back through the years, Myrna and Miles Wortman, Frank Yeomans, and Carlos Garay have lined the walls of their homes with my work and I know I can rely on them always. Jay Tolson has been an energetic and generous advocate. And finally, I am so grateful to my comrade Victoria de Grazia, who has been an extraordinary force in my life and work, and (Harriet) Kyn Tolson and David Holihan whose vitality and good humor have enriched my days.
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Acknowledgments
