Owens, Laura by Whitney Museum of American Art

Owens, Laura

Scott Rothkopf

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

CONTENTS

Adam D. Weinberg Foreword

Scott Rothkopf Introduction

———— Selected Bibliography

642

Exhibition History

651

Acknowledgments

656

Oral Histories Carol Hendrickson—Childhood

Deborah Kass—RISD

Alex Slade—CalArts

Laura Owens—Rosamund Felsen exhibition

T. J. Wilcox—Gavin Brown’s enterprise exhibition

124

Eric Palgon—Teaching

158

Mungo Thomson—Patrick Painter exhibition with Jorge Pardo

190

Laura Owens—LA, Chicago, New York

196

Scott Reeder—China Art Objects Galleries exhibition

266

Laura Owens—Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum residency

306

Chris Ofili—Cavepainting

322

Paul Schimmel—LA MOCA survey

336

Laura Owens—Bookmaking

432

Edgar Bryan—Clock paintings

442

Calvin Marcus—Pavement Karaoke

484

Andrew Cannon—Twelve Paintings

496

Ethan Swan—356 Mission

520

Rachel Kushner—Flamethrowers reading

534

Henry Bryan—Capitain Petzel exhibition

564

David Berezin—Ten Paintings

592

Scott Rothkopf—Whitney survey

632

Essays David Foster Wallace Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood

bell hooks “when i was a young soldier for the revolution”: coming to voice

Diedrich Diederichsen Triumphs, Setbacks, Rear Exits, and Cease Fires: Some Aesthetic Issues Concerning Albert Oehlen, and Some Architectural and Musical Comparisons

Bruce Hainley How Should a Painting Do?

138

Jenny Jaskey Flag Girl

152

Frances Stark The Architect & the Housewife

180

Sianne Ngai Our Aesthetic Categories

230

Francine Prose Somewhere else completely

302

Rozsika Parker The Creation of Femininity

372

Kirsty Bell On Laura Owens’s Idea of Edges

418

Jonathan Gold Fallen Fruit

478

Seth Price Fuck Seth Price

548

Gill Saunders Who Used Wallpaper and Where?

608

Gavin Delahunty Talking Back

630

INTRODUCTION SCOTT ROTHKOPF This book could use some explaining. When Laura Owens and I embarked on planning a Whitney survey of her paintings late in 2014, I assumed the show would be accompanied by a typical museum catalogue featuring a few scholarly essays and illustrations of her work. The following year Skira Rizzoli released a lavish monograph on her art, which took the form of my imagined catalogue and the wind out of my sails. With its insightful texts and ample reproductions, the tome proved both a boon to my research and an obstacle to my thinking. Now what kind of book could we possibly make? Eventually, as months ticked by and deadlines neared, a sense of hindrance gave way to liberation. One thing you should know about Laura is that she likes a good adventure. At an early brainstorming session she produced The Daring Book for Girls, pilfered from her daughter Nova’s shelf. We pored over this bestselling children’s title, its pages bursting with a motley assortment of obscure facts and DIY crafts, all assembled to inspire curiosity and wonder. Something about the book’s energy and aim squared nicely with Laura’s aspirations for her art and also with our inchoate sense that whatever we published ought to be both a chronicle and a catalyst of artistic production—a kind of instruction manual or curriculum without a prescribed objective. Soon we were devising an improbable miscellany that wouldn’t so much trace the arc of Laura’s art as touch on related topics, from Victorian needlework to the invention of wallpaper. We traded ideas back and forth, some of which stuck, but after a few months our approach started to feel, well, too miscellaneous. So I headed out to LA to dig into Laura’s archive in search of bedrock on which to ground the project. Another thing you should know about Laura is that she’s a pack rat. One by one, we raided more than a dozen plastic trunks stuffed with preparatory drawings and research materials, as well as shipping receipts and decades-old price lists still stamped with little red dots. There was also a trove of personal effects, such as childhood notebooks, fading faxes, snapshots from openings, and scads of valentines and birthday cards tenderly inscribed by her grandmother. As we sifted through the reams of information we began to realize that the contents of this archive could tell the story of Laura’s life and art—and, importantly, the crosscurrents between them. For many artists such connections could seem tangential at best and superfluous at worst. Yet Laura’s work has always been open to and guided by her personal life and artistic passions, inflected with a sense of excitement and discovery as much as one of frustration and failure. I wanted 8

this unbridled spirit to guide our book, and Laura proved willing to put literally everything on the table. It takes a certain kind of courage and confidence to lay oneself so bare. We envisioned a narrative that stretched from Laura’s childhood home in Norwalk, Ohio, right up to the very show we were making—largely told, appropriately enough, through pictures. Aided by the invaluable insights of Laura’s collaborator and fellow artist Asha Schechter we assembled a timeline of key moments that might structure the story. Some, particularly in the early years, have a strong biographical tilt. The opening pages, for instance, provide a taste of Laura’s suburban Midwestern roots, which can feel utterly generic on the one hand yet pointed and prophetic on the other. She played high school tennis with bangs in the 1980s, sketched the Beatles, and painted a jangly abstraction crowned with an egg sunny-side up. Sound familiar? If so, that’s because one could easily imagine the same motifs and palette cropping up in one of Laura’s paintings decades later, just as a local newspaper article picturing her as a teenager actually did. Fast-forward to 1999 and this echt American milieu is warmly evoked in an exchange between the artist and a German gallery assistant delicately inquiring after Laura’s recipe for a mysterious homegrown delicacy commonly known as Rice Krispies Treats. Yet another vignette in this bildungsroman covers Laura’s grad school years at CalArts. The period comes to life through images of paintings, diary entries, report cards, photos of fellow students, and even a touching plea to her advisor Charles Gaines for more financial support. Political commitments surface in ephemera related to the safe-sex advocacy group REACH LA and later reappear in correspondence promoting Howard Dean’s failed presidential bid and deploring Donald Trump’s successful one. Sometimes the paintings grow dark with the epoch. The bulk of this book’s sections delve deeply into individual exhibitions. Not all of Laura’s shows are covered, but paradigmatic cases highlight different facets of the genesis and experience of her art. For example, she has long pursued an unusual form of site-specificity by making paintings that address a particular place’s physical and associative qualities. These crucial traits, however, are ordinarily lost when her canvases subsequently circulate in the world. They shed both the memory of the walls they were designed to fill and their poetic resonances, with venues ranging from a Scottish botanical library to a Boston museum crammed with Old Masters. But within the pages of this book, initial exhibition sites are conjured through floor

plans, installation diagrams, and documentation, along with meticulous notes and epistolary exchanges about precisely what size a painting should be in relation to precisely where it should hang. One finds a Polaroid sent by the art dealer Sadie Coles that pictures a column standing between a window and a wall in her gallery, an installation view of the painting Laura made to hang opposite the pole, and a detail of the dusky trompe l’oeil shadow she brushed onto the canvas to mimic one the column might cast. Other spreads illuminate how she often works in sets of interrelated pictures rather than in traditional series. Two canvases obliquely depict others with which they were originally displayed, while fragments of words span multiple panels that ultimately lead separate lives. One aim of this book is to reconstruct these largely forgotten histories. Once we had assembled the broad strokes of the narrative, we often chose to burrow deep. Production notes, studies, source material, full-scale cartoons, process photographs, computer files, and detail photography reveal how Laura figures out paintings both before and while she makes them. In the beginning she performed much of this work on her own, though she has increasingly come to depend on studio assistants and collaborators who lend their own considerable ideas and expertise. Individual shows like Pavement Karaoke in London and the mind-bogglingly complex Ten Paintings in San Francisco are revivified through archival materials that reveal Laura’s practice to be among the most audacious, assiduous, and technologically challenging of any contemporary painter. The story lines and digressions within this book coalesced over countless hours in front of a computer screen. I would go out to LA and sit for days alongside Laura, Asha, and the graphic designer Tiffany Malakooti, who gave subtle structure to the sprawling contours of the project. Tiffany devised a template in which factual information like captions, plates of paintings, and even this introduction would sit on a neutral white ground, while a polyphony of voices and images piled up in the spaces above and between. Although at first glance the results might look like a casual scrapbook, each bespoke spread functions as a mini subplot amid larger ones, with connections sparked among the words, images, and pages. Taken together they constitute a sequence of authored arguments, albeit in a highly unconventional form. Intermittently, longer texts appear. Those in white letters on a dark blue ground derive from interviews we conducted with Laura and others who played key roles in shaping her journey. The more substantial of these oral histories specifically introduce vignettes that unfold on the following pages, while the shorter commentaries relate to individual works or documents illustrated nearby. Texts in black on a lighter blue background fall roughly into one of three categories. Some, such as those by bell hooks and Gil Saunders,

inspired Laura at around the point at which they sit in the book’s chronology. Others, such as David Foster Wallace’s reminiscence of his teenage years playing tennis in the Midwest or Francine Prose’s meditation on the painter Elizabeth Murray’s feminism, were chosen to refract various aspects of Laura’s life and work. The remaining essays were newly commissioned for this volume from critics and curators whom Laura admires. One more thing you should know about Laura is that she’s a very social animal. This volume demonstrates how she and her art have evolved within a capacious network of friends, colleagues, teachers, students, assistants, rivals, dealers, lovers, patrons, curators, family members, and other sundry characters. Their likenesses appear in photographs, their words in emails and texts, and their recent recollections in the oral histories that trail like bread crumbs throughout the book. We sought to reveal, unvarnished, the impact these relationships have had on Laura and to suggest more universally the complicated interpersonal dynamics at play in an artist’s life. The book relates, for example, the intense amalgam of desire, need, trust, and support that can exist between an artist and a dealer; the mutually enriching creative dialogues that mature between intimates over time; and even the possibility that a child might shape a mother’s work. Laura’s abiding knack for fostering friendship and community manifests itself through group shows she has organized and, most conspicuously, in 356 Mission, the exhibition, event, and gathering space that she cofounded with Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao near downtown LA. The personal and the professional are inextricably entwined. This book tells Laura’s story as well as many broader tales. Nearly every document and image within it was selected not only to elaborate her history but also to open onto a more general case. At least that was the criterion by which we hoped generosity and scholarship might forestall narcissism and anecdote for its own sake. How does a student find her voice in school or hustle up contact with a famous artist she admires? How does she make rent? What potent mixture of trepidation and yearning propels the preparations for a first survey show? How do such mundane trials as ordering a crate or making a child’s birthday cake embroider an artist’s life? As the pages and years flip by, we sense the changing contexts in which such questions are raised. Communications flow from postcard and fax to email and text; studies pass from notebook doodles to progressively sophisticated digital files; and images travel from minilab prints to pictures snapped on phones. Prices rise; rejections occur; the art world grows; new generations emerge in LA; and an artist’s horizon expands from a tightknit circle of friends to encompass the larger globe. This book is a portrait of an individual called Laura Owens and also a glimpse into how art gets made, eras take shape, and an artist’s life—a person’s, really—might unfold. 9

September 29 1997 Laura Owens Senior Seminar

Language surrounding works of art , whether it is anecdotal, historical, or critical, occupies a space. This class will attempt to look at and locate that space and relate it to the space that physical objects occupy. How does the academic setting frame the way language is formed around works of art? How does one institution or teacher differ from another? How does the title of an art work relate to the object? Looking at the space of ‘critique’ and the many methods will hopefully allow us a somewha¿t open space within the classroom to look at works of art and to listen to one another. Requirements

for the class.

1. One oral presentation on contemporary art around midsemester. (Another handout will describe in detail) 2. Present your own work in an informal manner within class. ideas, works in progress and/or finished work)

(i.e.

3.End of semester slide presentation of finished work accompanied by a more formal lecture and discussion. 4. Class participation in all discussions. 5. You can miss one or two classes, however a third absence will result in an incomplete.

I will be planning at least one field trip and one visiting lecturer. To be announced at a later date.

160

Class description, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997

Choose one of these artists to do an oral presentation onwrite your name after the artists name: Polly Apfelbaum____________________________ Bernard Frize______________________________ Kaus Merkel_______________________________ Fiona Rae________________________________ Lydia Dona________________________________ Carl Ostendarp_____________________________ Fabian Marcaccio____________________________ Moira Dryer__________________________________ Lari Pittman________________________________ Juan Usle___ç_______________________________ Adrian Schiess_______________________________ Maria Eichhorn_______________________________ Manual Ocampo_______________________________ Jonathan Lasker______________________________ Monique Prieto_______________________________ Udomsak Krisnamaris_____________________________ Elizabeth Peyton________________________________ John Currin____________________________________ Sean Landers___________________________________ Albert Oehlen____________________________________ Mary Heilmann__________________________________ Beatriz Milhazes__________________________________ Luc Tuymans_____________________________________

Laura Owens: When I was making work for the show at Rosamund Felsen and then again for the space Gavin rented I was thinking a lot about sculpture. The body moving through the room in relationship to the sculpture was an important part of the experience. Holding something in your periphery or remembering it’s behind you was also part of the artwork. I was trying to make painting do what I felt like I had learned minimalist sculpture had done. And so when you talk about someone like Charlie Ray, everything he said I was really into. I was super influenced by him; I think he was so important. Sharon and Frances worked for him and I would somehow hear him talking or hanging out with them as a group, or they would tell me stories. I can’t remember. He hired me to teach a class when I was twenty-seven, in the sculpture department at UCLA.

Foreground: Owens and Charles Ray, Southern California coast, ca. 2001 Background: Prompt for class assignment, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997

161

Laura Owens: When I was first asked to give lectures I often referred to images by Charles Schulz, ideas from Dada, and some quotes by Monica Seles—particularly ones where she referred to tennis as being her life but acknowledged that it was only a game. For me this attitude was similar to a kind of lightness I had learned from Mary Heilmann and her approach to being an artist, which emphasizes being serious about not being serious. Alex Slade knew I was a fan and gave me this photo of Seles playing at the US Open.

162

Foreground: Monica Seles quote in Julie Cart, “It’s All Relative,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1997 Background: Monica Seles on court at bottom, US Open, New York, 1995 Inset: Paul Dermée, originally published in Dada 7: Dadaphone, March 1920

163

164

Foreground: Fax from Sadie Coles, 1997 Background: Detail of Untitled, 1997 (see p. 172)

Sadie Coles: When Laura did her first show here the gallery was tiny, one small white cube. Her approach was impressive because we had zero access: there was no lift in that building and we had a very narrow staircase. She made two large paintings that were at the very limits of the dimensions of the space. When we brought them in we had to illicitly saw through the iron handrail and make a gap the width of the canvas in order to slide the paintings up the stairs and through the gallery door on the second floor. We soldered the metal staircase back together afterward and hoped our landlord wouldn’t notice— and he never did. The gallery also had this single Victorian cast-iron column in the middle of it, which for any artist is a bit of a nightmare. But Laura included the shadow of the column on the nearest painting. We also had the “museum painting,” which made our tiny gallery feel like the National Gallery.

Foreground: Polaroids of Sadie Coles HQ, London, 1997

165

166

Letter to Sadie Coles, 1997

Floor plan, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 1997

167

168

Fax to Sadie Coles, 1997

Fax from Sadie Coles, 1997

169

Laura Owens: I would usually start out on my studio couch with a sketchbook, making little rectangles and writing lists of words, ideas, or what I was thinking about. Inside the rectangles I would very quickly draw random ideas I had for paintings. In essence it’s note-taking. So in this sketchbook I wrote something like, “What would be the hardest painting to make? A sunset painting, because it’s a cliché.” I was thinking about my trip to Sadie Coles in London and showing my art for the first time in a different country. Also about time and space and how to represent the space between the paintings. I wrote, “Dawn in New York, noon in the Midwest, and sunset in LA.” Times of the day and stretches of land. It was a portrait of America, but also an organizing principle and a metaphor for types of light and space in between the work. Having these loose terms helped me make decisions and start painting. I was looking at a lot of Shaker quilts and folk art—that’s in the bright, saturated colors. The shadow on the potted plant is definitely a high-noon shadow. Since I had never visited the gallery I asked Sadie to send pictures and a floor plan. I noticed there was a pole right in the center and opposite the largest wall was a bank of windows. I imagined that at sunset the pole would potentially cast a shadow, so I painted a trompe l’oeil one on the right two-thirds of the largest work, so the shadow determined the painting’s off-center placement within the gallery.

170

Sketchbook pages, 1997

Press release draft, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 1997

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172

Installation view, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 1997, with Untitled, 1997, acrylic and oil on canvas, 49 ¾ × 45 ½ in. (126.4 × 115.6 cm), and Untitled, 1997, acrylic and oil on canvas, 96 × 120 in. (243.8 × 304.8 cm)

173

Laura Chat on hall of mirrors painting

174

Foreground: Invitation, Steinberg, Galerie Maeght, Paris, 1973 Background: Sketchbook page, 1997

Laura Owens: When I was working at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 I had a point-and-shoot camera and took a lot of pictures while walking around the museum. One of them was of a floor-to-ceiling Andy Warhol Mao painting, seen through the Asian art wing. It was very large, but it seemed like a postage stamp receding at the end of all those rooms, a football field away. I had that photo hanging in my studio for years, and when Sadie showed me pictures of her gallery I wanted to do something like that in the office. I thought it would be funny to do a painting that covered the entire wall and was composed of many smaller paintings, adding more space to the office and also camouflaging the work’s size. The painting alludes to things I was looking at, like a van Gogh that was in the Norton Simon Museum. I added an easel and an industrial push door at the end of the hallway instead of the Mao. I thought this was a funny nod to the formalist rule about never having a hole in a composition. It reminds me of this postcard of a Saul Steinberg painting that I found later, in Italy, and kept hanging in my studio for several years.

Untitled, 1997, acrylic and oil on canvas, 96 × 120 in. (243.8 × 304.8 cm) Inset: Research photograph by Owens, Art Institute of Chicago, 1997

175

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Foreground: Study for Untitled, 1997, acrylic and oil on canvas, 22 × 20 in. (55.9 × 50.8 cm) Background: Sketchbook page, 1997

Untitled, 1997, acrylic and oil on canvas, 84 ¼ × 75 ½ in. (214 × 191.8 cm)

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Foreground: Postcard from Frances Stark, 1997 Background: Sketchbook pages, 1997

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