ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #20

Thomas Nozkowski @ Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA

Untitled (8-53), 2003
oil on linen on panel
(55.9 x 71.1 cm)

Additional images of works


Be it a chequered blob in a greasy field, or a colour bar with stick figure legs on a drippy stripy purple-blue ground, Thomas Nozkowski (bn. 1944) has for the past 3 decades been making paintings in the same format (mainly 40.6 x 50.08 cm, growing recently to 55.9 x 71.1 cm and 76.2 x 101.6 cm), based upon the same basic principle: painting a "moment", re-working it, and painting even more. What results is -- like nature -- a new experience. Poet, critic and KF contributing editor Barry Schwabsky has described this Hudson Valley resident as one of the "most quietly influential painters on the New York scene". Consider it Song Dynasty painting occurring in the Hudson Valley. He's also the subject of a recent drawing retrospective at the New York Studio School and is currently garnering interest in Europe. Given the current moment of photography, clever painting and installation art, Nozkowski's oeuvre is a constant reminder of the undiscovered country.

Show runs till 20/12


Sherman Sam: Can we say that your work is "abstraction" in the early modernist -- European -- sense of the term? That is, an abstraction from reality? And that perhaps the "American" aspect of your work is that your formal language is more "inventive" or even more "eccentric"?

Thomas Nozkowski: My work is "abstracted" from reality, I suppose, in that each painting has an exact and specific source in the physical world. One of the reasons I do this is to find extraordinary formal devices -- colours, shapes, compositions -- which I would not have discovered with a strictly formal way of painting. I'm also not so sure I agree with your European/American dichotomy. But that's probably best explored at another time.

SS: If we described your paintings as of a remembered moment –- perhaps we could say "abstracting" the moment -- would you consider Howard Hodgkin and Raoul de Keyser (who are both currently also showing in NYC) making work from a similar impulse? But with different results?

TN: I believe time, "the moment", is just another quality one can work with in trying to make an image of something. Sometimes it is important and other times not.

SS: Marjorie Welish once described your work as "the vexed silhouette, usually pinned to the centre of the canvasboard..." It seems to me that this vexed silhouette has morphed into more vexed blobby-architectural fields in recent years. Perhaps a shift in your interests?

TN: That's a very good observation. Yes, I think this is true -- and I am only just now coming to understand why this change occurred. It is less the result of "a shift in interests" than it is an acceptance and embrace of the peripheral ideas that collect around any art object. I think the very meaningful part of art-making that "civilians", non-artists, never see, are the thousands of hours that every artist spends, alone, in front of their work -- staring at it and thinking about it. The wide range of ideas, references and variations that play through our thoughts during this studio time serve to create a dense web of meaning. This web is so rich -- for all artists, good ones and bad ones as well -- that, I believe, it is folly to think we can ever, truly, understand the full meaning of any artwork.

SS In a Bomb interview with the writer Francine Prose, you pointed at Pisanello's Legend of St. Eustache at the National Gallery here as one of your favourite art works, and more importantly, an influence on your work from the moment you first saw it in 1975. To me it seems an "episodic" picture -- that is as if each character/animal exists in its own space or moment. Your work appears to be a "singular" moment or event of painting.

TN: My paintings usually start out as messy conglomerations of everything I can think of that physically or mentally surrounds or touches my source. In the process of working and reworking images to make them function in as honest and straightforward a manner as I can, they are often conflated upon each other, simplified in form and obscured sometimes almost to the point of invisibility.

SS: Are there other influences (people, art, writing, politics...)? I remember you saying that you were trained by both Abstract Expressionists and Realists. Is your work an unexpected result? Or was it partly determined by your interests in politics?

TN: The list of people who have influenced me is so long as to be meaningless. I am very interested in film and in popular music and I always try to bring ideas and methods over from those forms into my painting. My training at Cooper Union in the '60s came from Abstract Expressionists and some fellow travellers who had started flirting with painterly figuration. But more interesting perhaps was the curriculum that these guys were following, which was created in a very purposeful way to imitate the Bauhaus with its professional approach to art making. There was a very weird mix of restraint and exuberance in the teaching there and it probably shows up in my work. I've spoken and written elsewhere at length about the role politics has had in helping me develop my work. It's a big topic and I'm not sure that this interview is the place to develop it.

SS: In the same interview with Francine Prose, she stated that she "didn't understand a single word" of the criticism of your work. I myself -- in reviewing the writing on your work -- have found that there was a tendency to make allusions, comparisons, etc., that is, to dance around it. Would you offer future writers some words to help them out? (e.g. "purple", "transitional" and "brushy")

TN: Francine was claiming turf, I think, away from some of our mutual acquaintances. Actually, most of the criticism written about my work has been literate and, often, adventurous. I've been especially lucky in having some really great poets write about my work: Lauterbach, Schjeldahl, Schwabsky, Welish, Yau... To the second part of your question, well, I would like future writers to create new compound words and acronyms. They should also use long and complex words in short and simple sentences. Misspelling some words -- either by doubling and tripppllling letters or by omitting thm -- could be especially meaningful as well.

SS: Good one. Will keep that in mind for future writings on you. Your sense of humour is a characteristic that I find both apparent and hidden in your work. Do you think that your years spent as production manager at MAD magazine had any contribution to the "quirkiness" of your venture?

TN: Like most of us, I've had all sorts of jobs over the years to stay afloat. The deep loathing I had for any job, for keeping me out of the studio, certainly colors any possible credit I might give them back. It would be a mistake to read my paintings as being somehow humorous or light-hearted. Maybe sometimes, yes, but not in any kind of continuing way. "Quirkiness" is another quality that I don't see in the work itself. But what do I know?

SS: Can "beautiful" be a word I could apply to your paintings? And is "beauty" one aspect of your desired goals?

TN: Spoken in a friendly tone of voice, I take "beautiful" as a great compliment.

SS: Good point. In a discussion with Catherine Murphy and Harry Roseman, they linked the intellectual discussion within your work to painters like Terry Winters. Would you say that's so?

TN: It's been great to have a show up in Chelsea simultaneously with a number of strong abstract painters. Terry Winters is a few doors down on 22nd Street. Jonathan Lasker and Raoul deKeyser are nearby with powerful shows. Hodgkins has new work two blocks away. There are a number of interesting young painters around now, too. I was very impressed by Rachel Howard's show at the Bohen Foundation. I think there is an intellectual discussion -- words and images -- going on here about abstract painting, right now, unparalleled by anything since the heyday of New York School Painting in the '50s.

SS: You're married to the sculptor Joyce Robbins. Has there been any cross-pollination in your work over the years?

TN: Joyce Robins is my first and best critic. I hope my work has influenced hers as much as hers mine. Every artist should marry another artist.

SS: Quite unlike the more purpose-driven art that has appeared since the '80s, I think "silent", less determined work like yours has found it difficult to find a context.

TN: Absolutely. I hope that things are changing today, but I wouldn't bet on it.

SS: Would you say that the current art world has moved away from abstraction to a more tabloid-sensation propagandistic art?

TN: Who are you including in the art world? I live and work among a fairly small number of artists, intellectuals and connoisseurs who are interested in, and capable of, looking at the most advanced and demanding work. I don't think there has ever been an historical moment that had more of these people than we have today.

SS: Yes agreed.



Sherman Sam is on the staff of KultureFlash, and is also an artist and writer. He has written for Blueprint, Contemporary, Mordern Painters and Third Text, while his paintings were included in the travelling exhibition Sight Mapping earlier this year. His works are currently/were recently included in a group drawing show Flix at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, and a painting show Photoptosis at the Bilkin Gallery in Bilbao, Spain. He is currently reviewing Thomas Nozkowski at Max Protetch for artcritical.com.

Image © the artist, courtesy Max Protetch Gallery

© 2003 KultureFlash Limited