Abstraction
Thinking the politics of race in contemporary dance.
The artist talks about the genesis, composition, and execution of a recently completed work.
The artist talks about the genesis, composition, and execution of a recently completed work.
“The reward is getting through the tough stuff. And that’s what’s perplexing about the art thing. When I was going to school there were kids that could draw their asses off. There were kids that were better draftsman than me, for certain. But no one was more determined than me.”
Hovsepian addresses current matters in her work, but she does so in a vocabulary that moves beyond binaries and beyond Western mentality, one that follows a different way of thinking and feeling.
“I don’t want to mention names, but there are several black artists that would like to shoot me today because they weren’t in that show. Some of them are dead, but the ones that aren’t dead still give me a lot of bullshit every time I see them.”
It starts, of course, with water. A bath for the newborn, a baptism for the blank canvas.
“Every time you remember something, it’s not like you’re being teleported to the past—you’re actually physically experiencing it in the present.”
“I’m fighting between control and letting nature take its course.”
“With film, you have sound and you can construct this whole environment that allows for a certain feeling to exist for someone watching. There’s more of a burden on a painting to develop these kinds of feelings or experiences in one frame.”
“It turns out making art was the best idea [for me]. My mother’s idea was good because it got me started. She said, ‘Look, you are skinny; you are little. You can’t hang out with your daddy and them big guys.’”
“I started making this work because I was sick of seeing everything.”
This fall, Max Galyon, at my invitation, mounted an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures in my studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The show was intended to create a setting for spontaneous conversations between artists outside of any commercial context, and was open to the public on certain days.
“Traditionally, a painting treats you to the front and center seats. I like the idea you might get a seat that’s off to the side.”
Diao’s first comprehensive retrospective, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—fittingly, in the painter’s native China—is the occasion for a conversation that looks back at fifty years of artistic production.
