Transcript read by Amy Sillman and Mimosa Echard
Clark Coolidge: Well, you were thinking about what I said about the image.
Philip Guston: When you looked at that picture, you were saying that it’s incredible what it takes to make an image, no?
CC: How close you could come to having it not be an image and yet still be one.
PG: Oh, I see. Well, when I’m painting it, if the image locks itself in there too quickly, or if I’m aware of it too much before I do it, then it’s boring and I wipe it out. I mean, who the hell wants that? You’d rather have the image in your mind than just have to look at it, isn’t that so? I’d rather think about something than actually see it.
CC: How much do you think, how much do you see, before you put that down? That’s the gap that’s interesting.
PG: Well, it’s very vague. It’s not nebulous, and vague isn’t the right word, but it’s like hovering, you know? It’s not solid in your mind.
CC: I mean, did you think of a hand?
PG: No.
CC: How did you start? I mean, since that’s there.
PG: Well, I’d been doing some hands previous to that, those pointing fingers and all that stuff, and then I was through with that. I didn’t want to do it again. I think there was some repainting on that paw. Whatever was there previously, I erased it.
CC: Was it a hand before?
PG: Some kind of a hand, but it wasn’t a hand with a stick, drawing. That I didn’t think of. In other words, I just started with some white on that pink ground, and roughly, vaguely, I know what it isn’t going to be. It’s not going to be an elephant or a tree.
CC: You saw a hand somehow.
PG: A hand, yeah, but I didn’t know how it was going to appear or anything like that. But it came, as my images always come, very rapidly, and that rapidity has to do with the image and what it is as you’re doing it. Which has to do with when you stop, because you stop the moment you recognize it. I don’t mean recognize it as a noun, or as an image either, but recognize the minimum of what you need of what’s there to make this thing exist. I’m always excited by the thin line which divides the image from the nonimage. What’s exciting about an image is that at any given moment it would take so little to wipe it out completely, to have chaos, to have nothing there.
CC: What about the time it takes to physically put that paint on?
PG: Quick. It’s very quick.
CC: There isn’t any drag at all between . . .
PG: No, because if it feels right, if the pistons or cylinders are going right, you can’t predict that or control it. When you’re in that condition, many things happen. First of all, you don’t see yourself painting. One way to test that you’re not there is when you constantly see yourself doing it, and that’s a drag. I mean, you might as well be wrapping up Christmas packages or something. I mean, you just see yourself doing something, like hammering a nail in a door, screwing something to something else.
CC: Sure. You’re not in the activity. You’re out, watching the activity.
PG: That’s right. You’re watching the activity while you’re doing it. So that’s when you know you’re not there. But at that very exciting moment when it all comes together, you’re not even aware that you’re painting it. You don’t even see the brush. I don’t know how in the hell it happens, but the brush just seems to go by itself like it has its own life. And of course it’s what I meant by the third hand. There’s a third hand at work here.
CC: Well, I was thinking about the enigma, starting with your middle-sixties pictures where you’re painting it up out of the paint and there’s a lot of erasures, and that’s the point where you said something like “The recognizable image is intolerable because it’s too abstract.” And I was thinking maybe there’s an equal if not greater enigma in wanting to see the thing that you even have imagined in some way as an image actually in paint. I mean, that might be something that wouldn’t necessarily be thought of as enigmatic. But the process of going between a mental image and painted image . . .
PG: Can become enigmatic? Yes, I’ve done that, too, what I’ve described as process I didn’t mean to imply was the only and exclusive way I work. I’ve also, to test myself almost . . . You know, boredom can set in pretty rapidly, boredom of one’s processes. Something you do can become a way, can produce predictable results. It doesn’t work and you get bored with that. And I became, in some of those pictures of 1969, 1970, fascinated with whether it was possible for me just to do the opposite of what I had been doing. That is to say, to work in an opposite way.
CC: You thought of it that way.
PG: Exactly. As you know, you’ve seen in the studio many sketches and so on, that I would do before I started painting. Well, I’ll take away mystery and enigma. That comes later. You don’t start with that. What you start with is a kind of itch, a desire, a strong desire to see what you imagine, or preimagine.
CC: I remember you said that once.
PG: Just to see it! Like you might think: wouldn’t that be fantastic to see a hand eight feet long!
CC: Because it can’t be the way it is in your head.
PG: Exactly. Because the moment it gets into physical matter, when it gets onto the picture plane, in this flat mysterious thing we call the plane . . .
CC: It’s all different.
PG: It’s all different. It gets warped and it’s billowed and shrunken and pulled and . . .
CC: It’s a different physics.
PG: Exactly. I’ve thought a lot about this and it may border on a kind of voyeurism in a way, because it’s almost a desire to see what the hell this would look like. I’m going to make a very extreme silly example, as if we were in a room with a party of people we all know, all friends, a social evening, and suddenly you start imagining, what if they all started screwing each other? What would it look like? And I would imagine these scenes, not screwing scenes, but these characters and figurations I was working with. In a room, in a door, there’s a window, there’s a light. And if I put that all together in a natural spontaneous way, in my way of working, I wonder what the hell it would appear to be like, you know?
CC: People in positions you never see them in.
PG: Exactly! And even though the work has become, what’s a stupid word, “figurative,” and so on, “nonfigurative,” that’s not the point. Because I was never trying to duplicate visual data or anything. I was making a total construction of some kind. So there is that kind of itch and desire just to see it. And then the enigma becomes what I think you in the past have called a “clear enigma.” I’ve always liked that combination of words, because the enigma is sometimes thought to be something fuzzy and mysterious and misty. But then the enigma consists, in my case, of having pulled aside a curtain, almost like taking away the fourth wall of a room and looking at its contents.
CC: Right. Like opening up the side of a building in New York and seeing in each one of those little cubes.
PG: That’s right. I once had a conversation with Harold Rosenberg where we were talking about the enigma, and unfortunately I feel he got my intention all wrong. Because he brought up the subject of Magritte and I said no. I insisted on saying no, because I think there’s a world of difference between fantasy and enigma.
CC: So do I.
PG: Because I think to have a table’s legs turned into claws or paws, or a shoe ending up into toes, is fantasy.
CC: And that, to me, means it’s understandable.
PG: That’s understandable. And I don’t mean I’m against it, because I like Magritte. I just wanted to locate it. I mean, Magritte’s fine up to a certain point with me, but I don’t think I could enjoy that forever.
CC: Well, enigma, to me, often has to do with common objects. I think of fantasy as something almost embroidered by the mind. You start out with something and you make something fantastic out of it. Which probably has to do with your sexual or whatever drives. I mean, you elaborate on it. And that’s what Magritte looks like to me, like ideas fantasized.
PG: That’s right.
CC: Taken one step further.
PG: Like, it could exist. Which is good fantasy, in writing and certainly in painting. I believe Magritte is not really traditionally a surrealist. I think he’s a fantast, basically.
CC: I think he’s close to writing, by the way. I think he’s very verbal.
PG: Yeah. I think one reason why he paints in as tasteless or styleless a manner as possible is to eliminate anything that would be in the way . . .
CC: Like sensuality.
PG: That’s right, sure. Or any paint technique. In other words, he’s painting in a dry commercial manner, like a sign painter of the old days, so that this object that he makes should look as clearly as possible, and in the light of day, as if this is what it would look like if it existed.
CC: Yeah.
PG: Well, that’s fantasy.
CC: Just simplified a little bit by the process of painting.
PG: Well, that’s in the technique, in the nature of the medium.
CC: Almost cartooned, in a way.
PG: That’s right, sure. Well, what the hell is enigma?
CC: Enigma is totally baffling, for one thing.
PG: Chirico, in that marvelous self-portrait at the very outset of his career, painted himself in profile, in a box, and around the box, lettered in around the frame, he says in Latin, “What shall I paint if not the enigma?”* Then, sometime later, in reaction against the cubists, and he painted these things at the time of the cubist revolution, he said that he didn’t want to reconstruct the world, which is what the cubists were doing. He said he wanted to paint the world in such an aspect, and in such a light, as if it had never been seen before. Now is that the enigma? It’s not a fantasy.
CC: No. Reconstruction of the world is fantasy.
PG: In other words, you might say that the cubists were fantasts. A kind of genre fantasy. I mean, it was a fantasy about café life, bottles of wine, and Le Journal, a kind of genre still-life painting really.
CC: Because, to me, enigma always comes with the feeling that it came from out there, somewhere I haven’t ever seen, or ever been. A fantasy I identify as being internalized. Like a reconstruction of things you’ve seen and taken in.
PG: Yeah, but even if it comes from out there . . .
CC: Well, I don’t know if it does. It probably doesn’t. But it has that feeling of otherness, although it might just be this [object on table].
PG: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. But, even though it has a feeling of otherness, it seems to me there must be this kind of pull, like an umbilical cord, to an image, to an object. And it could be, as you say, a banal or everyday object, but it has to have, somewhere along the line, a feeling of a certain kind of recognition.
CC: Yeah.
PG: As if you’ve never seen it before.
CC: Now you’re putting your finger on it. It’s very difficult to talk about.
PG: The recognition must be as if you’ve never seen it before, and yet you have seen it before, perhaps something forgotten.
CC: Maybe that’s why it has that charge. It’s not something consciously known, but it is something you have seen. Or maybe it’s two things you’ve seen that are then put together.
PG: In collision, uh-huh.
CC: I mean, I have this feeling about collisions and juxtaposing. But I don’t like the word juxtaposition because it sounds like art history.
PG: Yeah.
CC: I mean this, or this, or wherever it happens to be. And I don’t mean me manipulating it. See, ’cause why I said “outside” is because the feeling of enigma to me is always that it came to me, beyond my doing it. I believe what you say about the umbilical cord must be true, but nevertheless the image has that feeling of unknownness.
PG: I know.
CC: Not your own familiar fantasies recombined, but something that just absolutely stops you. As if we looked out the window and saw something that we’d never seen.
PG: Yeah. To be specific, to go back to that painting of the paw, and we were talking about the state I was in when I did it. I remember very distinctly that it happened quickly, maybe five or ten minutes of painting. The right accent in the right place, and then the dots on the paw. Because the proportions it took began to push it away from the human and it became an animal’s hand, or partial . . .
CC: Beast’s . . .
PG: A beast’s hand. And against that salmon-colored plane, indefinable, you don’t know what the hell it is, there’s no horizon line or anything. And when it was done I looked at it and my heart started beating and I started to get very excited, and I said, “Gee, that’s like the first hand that ever drew.” In ancient Egypt or in the Valley of Ur or something like that. And then I started thinking about man and about the missing link, since we really don’t know what happened. I mean, what did the man’s hand look like, who first drew a line or wrote something or made a mark on a rock? Now, was it like a paw? Didn’t it look like a beast’s hand? It must have. Maybe it was half-beast, half-human? I’m going way off here, but . . .
CC: You know what that makes me think of, though? The enigma is the first time something happened, too.
PG: Yeah, tell me about that.
CC: Well, I just happened to think, if you’re thinking of the first time a man ever made a mark on anything, then somebody seeing that, or the man himself doing it, and realizing it had never been done . . .
PG: Oh, I see.
CC: He’s having the experience of enigma, maybe. Because that had never happened before.
PG: Oh, I see what you mean. Of course.
CC: Which leads back into art, and why we do this.
PG: Sure.
CC: Every time we do something we’re trying to make the enigma. We’re almost trying to “produce” enigmas, which may be an impossibility. But the first time of anything maybe…
PG: Of anything. I know.
CC: That could almost be a definition if you wanted.
PG: Well, that gets us into the whole area we were talking about in the kitchen, when we were bitching about other artists and being very bitter about the scene, both in poetry and in painting, being very disenchanted with certain artists. And I was talking about de Kooning’s show, and you were talking about certain writers and what they were doing. And it just occurs to me now that you’re saying that the trouble with the work is that they’ve stopped doing things for the first time. So therefore it has no enigma to it, no mystery, and all they’re left with then are their own mannerisms.
CC: Right.
PG: So then it means that to be an artist you always have to do something the first time.
CC: Yeah. It also means you always have to be discontented, probably.
PG: That’s right.
CC: Which is the rub.
PG: Yeah.
CC: But you know what? I think the reason I get so pissed off when I’m talking about other failings, the limitations of other poets, let’s say, is not so much them. It’s that they keep bringing up to me my own limitations. They keep reminding me of the times when I didn’t do it, when I held back or when I repeated. You know what I mean?
PG: Oh, I see what you mean. Of course.
CC: And I don’t want to be reminded of that. When I look at art I want to be pushed in the direction of, let’s say, the enigmas. I don’t want to be reminded of what I did.
PG: That’s right. They make you see what you hate.
CC: Yeah. In yourself.
PG: Hate about your own work.
CC: Exactly.
PG: So that’s where the discontent comes in.
CC: Yeah. I think really that’s the discontent. It goes beyond people and friends or whatever. I mean, that’s just the basic discontent.
PG: So then, if one were to make a principle of it, you could make a principle of discontent. Discontent is a very difficult thing to learn.
CC: The other thing I was thinking about: Some of these newer paintings, contrasted against the mid-sixties dark paintings, are mainly an image in space with no history. There’s nothing around them. The sixties ones, they’re surrounded by their history, right?
PG: They’re surrounded by their past. I mean, where they’ve moved from.
CC: Their states.
PG: Their states, that’s right.
CC: And I just wonder how the process changes, from working up through states which are then left there…
PG: Into these images, you mean? Like that book?
CC: Yeah. It seems, like you said, like a reverse of what you were doing before, a reverse of a process.
PG: Well, if you concentrate on a single object, or something somebody has made marks on so it looks like a book…I had no idea it would become so bent. I think I wanted to make it feel like pillows, or not like pillows but like a kind of ancient stone carving. In fact, some of the books, as you remember . . .
CC: Are absolute slabs.
PG: . . . are like stone. They become like tablets.
CC: Yeah.
PG: Well, what can I do? I didn’t feel like putting it on a table. I didn’t want to make a wall in back of it. I didn’t want it to be on a specific plane, or located in a space. There is no space, because the whole space is . . .
CC: The space is within that book.
PG: . . . is within the book.
CC: I mean, all those little lines, that’s the history, right?
PG: Yeah. That’s right. It’s there, it’s in the image itself.
CC: In the past, which is what a book is.
PG: Sure, exactly.
CC: But then it’s will, actually.
PG: Will?
CC: Well, the decision to start with an image . . .
PG: To focus on the object, yeah.
CC: . . . and put an image on, rather than starting with paint, as in the mid-sixties, and see how it comes up. It seems like the process really did change.
PG: Did change totally. Absolutely.
CC: It’s really interesting how that could happen.
PG: Well, one of the things that plagued me in that transition . . . I mean, don’t think that during the sixties, in those black and gray pictures, or even the fifties, there weren’t repeated attempts to make specific objects. There were. But I couldn’t retain it. They would have to go. And then a picture would finally come about because of the removal of the images.
CC: You think it was a struggle to do this [new pictures]?
PG: Yes, I think so. As I remember, at that time I resisted because of a fear I had of specificity. And if I were to speak critically of myself from this vantage point now, I feel I made an aesthetic of, or was too open towards, the idea of ambiguity. Thinking then that if I didn’t allow myself to be specific with images, by working then with exclusions, there resulted a certain kind of ambiguous thing where it almost was something but wasn’t something. The brush seemed to make the form and so on. Well, a lot has been written about that, about the powers, or the effect of one area on another area, acting on each other and so on. I think what happened was that I became weary of that kind of ambiguity.
CC: Because that wasn’t what you were trying to do.
PG: Exactly!
CC: That’s really ironic, you know . . .
PG: We never even talked about that before.
CC: That whole aesthetic came up out of erasures.
PG: That’s right.
CC: A whole “beauty” of . . .
PG: Yeah, I know.
CC: Some sort of horrible . . . mistake.
PG: Misunderstanding. I just had my fill of it and I reacted against it in the most violent way. And that’s the reason I turned and then started these very pure drawings. I couldn’t even paint for that year or year and a half. Just like clearing the decks and saying, “Well, let’s see what one line and another line do to each other.” Just that, you know? And that’s a very important period because, even though it’s objectless, in a real sense it’s very close to, and led directly into, painting a book, a shoe, a hand. The everyday common objects I started painting. And it wasn’t just a desire for tangibilia, though that too was there—almost counter to the whole idea of the flatness of painting, which I detested. Because I think there’s a hunger for touchability. It’s touch. To feel a form.
CC: Sure, because paint is tangible.
PG: That’s right. So that I felt that maybe there’s an ambiguity that I haven’t even dreamt of. In other words, what would happen if I did paint a simple object like a book or a hand or a shoe? That finally became to me the most enigmatic of all. It seemed to me like an even greater enigma. Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity. It’s a different kind of ambiguity I wanted. I was weary of that whole thing that had gotten so accepted, which made it repulsive to me and thrown back to my face again and all that. An ambiguity that became so diffused and generalized that there was nothing left of it anymore.
CC: That’s really clear. I can see your sense, in the sixties, that those paintings were like dragging your own sludge with you.
PG: Yeah.
CC: And then to have that sludge held up as a great abstract work . . .
PG: That’s right.
CC: That must have been really a tough thing to . . .
PG: Terrible. I know it.
CC: Because you want the clarity. You want the discrete, in the best sense.
PG: The discrete?
CC: Discrete is a word I like in the sense of, not social discretion, but discrete objects. Bounded edges. The edges aren’t ambiguous. That’s another thing, that you could have ambiguity of edgelessness or you could have an ambiguity of absolutely edged . . . I don’t mean objects, but bounded . . .
PG: You mean monolithic?
CC: Well, some of the last paintings that you did really got into that area. After you spewed everything out of your mouth and there was stuff in the air.
PG: Just floating around.
CC: And it was all tangents. And absolutely discrete images, and the fact that they were so clear made the gaps between them and their relation to each other even more enigmatic or ambiguous. You wanted that clarity, I think, to get back to being able to deal with them at all. Because otherwise I think maybe you had your own smokescreen going. Is that a possibility? I mean, those gray pictures might’ve begun to seem like you had too much of your past still hanging around. I mean, you’d have to say that, but…
PG: Oh, yes. But that has to do with what we were talking about previously.
CC: And that’s a whole fascinating process in itself.
PG: Oh, sure. Well, as you know, in the sixties the final form that appeared, a black shape, a head, a form of some kind against a lot of overworked dense surround, I became fascinated with that form having lived in other places before it came to rest in this one place. This absorbed me very deeply for many years. But now, in these recent pictures you referred to, with these fragments floating around, none of those were overpainted or repainted. It’s almost like open-eyed dreaming, you know? As if I were in front of the canvas, dreaming and almost knowing what I was going to paint.
CC: How about where those things are?
PG: I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t worry about where, and more often than not it worked, that I just trusted my instinct for location. So maybe I had to do all that, ten years of that sixties painting, to feel like, well, I don’t want to repaint anything anymore. I mean, let me just put it there, put that shoe there, put that bottle there, put that guy’s mouth there, and that stick of wood there, and that brick there. Yeah. And in fact, I don’t even think it’s trust. I think that’s an artificial way, a kind of conservative or academic way, of talking about it. Actually, I discovered over a period of time that there are two elementary or basic ways my forms work anyway. Either they’re coming together or they’re going apart. And I think that’s about all that composition is anyway.
CC: Never still.
PG: That’s right. They seem to want to clump together and stay there, and that’s okay for a moment. But then they want to move apart, and then want to go back to the center again, like a control center, as if that’s home. And home lets them out, magnetically, for a little while, just to enjoy themselves.
CC: A rest period.
PG: Rest. And then they want to come back again. So there isn’t too much accident involved anyway. I think that’s a myth.
CC: I think so, too.
PG: I find I’m so intimately involved with these two movements that I don’t think I’m risking anything. The only thing I really have to do is get myself to paint while I’m dreaming. That’s about all it amounts to. Does that mean anything?
CC: Yeah. It makes me think about how the positions of objects, or arrangements of things, have always fascinated me. Like these objects on the table. You might call these accidental arrangements, but, I mean, not the artistic, this-balance-that kind of thing.
PG: No, we’re not talking about that.
CC: Maybe there’s a way of getting objects to exist more like they exist, not the aesthetic ways you have in your mind. Maybe that was what was meant by “accident” in a sense?
PG: Well, accident has no real meaning anymore. It had a momentary meaning in the early years of the century, when Duchamp, or Man Ray, or maybe it was Max Ernst, one of the early dadaists, dropped a string on some setting plaster, and of course the string made an interesting and fascinating surface. But I doubt whether that was even an accident, because there are physical forces involved.
CC: Well, I’m just sort of hammering against the aesthetic history of manners of arranging elements in a painting, which are so well known that you know them in your sleep. And you don’t want to do that, because it’s done and done and done.
PG: Well, there’s no desire to. I mean, there’s no surprise.
CC: And yet you want to see things in relation and non-relation, but you don’t want to see them that way. That’s why I’d rather see this [table objects] than a painting that’s all balanced.
PG: Well, look, anybody would rather look at life than art. I mean, I would much rather drive my car to Saugerties [near Woodstock, New York] and just look at all the buildings and rocks. But the fact is that when you put down some paint on a surface, let’s say it’s a red shape of your pack of cigarettes, and then you mix up some gray and put down the table that it’s on, it’s not what you see in real life anyway. It becomes itself. We all know that. But the question is: What does it become there in this field that you’re creating on? There’s meaning in everything. The question is: What kind of meaning? Let’s see. At this point, what were we talking about? Control, as against no control?
CC: I guess I was talking about habit, actually. Learned methods of relations. The kind of thing that is so non-enigmatic that it’s just past history. And yet there is a fascination with the way things are arranged, in a painting or here, regardless. As long as it isn’t the same damned old way of relating.
PG: Things that you’ve seen again and again, yeah.
CC: And I was trying to get through that to your method of painting now. The fact that you no longer follow where a thing has been and . . .
PG: I’m not so involved with process. You mean, actual physical process?
CC: Yeah. I mean, where this shape has been in these various places and now it’s here. And you say: “It’s done when it’s been everywhere I can think of.”
PG: Yes, and comes to rest momentarily.
CC: But just momentarily.
PG: Just momentarily. That is to say, that it must then feel as if it could go somewhere else. It’s just pausing. Which is, of course, the promise of continuity. It means not death. It means promise of continuation of life. But actually I’m more fascinated now with something different than that. I almost want to call it the Egyptian feeling. That is to say, I don’t want something to look as if it can move and be somewhere else. I want it to feel almost, not entirely, as if it’s just there forever that way.
CC: So therefore, what you said before has changed? About your forms always going together or coming apart? Now that you’re talking about this Egyptian sense of the thing always being there.
PG: There. Well, I know that sounds different, doesn’t it? It sounds conflicting. Well, I guess the answer to that is that I’m fascinated with both, really, at different times. In the work I did last winter, I was very involved with the feeling of forms moving apart and coming together. Forms feeling as if they had left home and then were coming back to this control center, eventually. And of course, to be psychological for a moment, what is this center? The center is me. That’s what the center is, right?
CC: Right.
PG: But then in this summer’s work, in some of those panels you were talking about, I became fascinated in another way with not that, but with forms just being there. Almost static, not movable. Why, I don’t know.
CC: Well, I think that’s probably because that’s a quality of the act of painting, to get something down. Everything that’s in the sense of that phrase. To make it stay there. To stop it, in a sense. Like that book, to make it be there. Maybe that’s part of the original impulse for making a mark at all. To have a part of yourself, an act of yourself, be on the world.
PG: That’s right. Well, there’s something I think I’ll probably constantly keep vacillating or wavering between, movement and no movement. I think it’s true of my whole past, as far as I know my past, to be fascinated by the one and the multitudinous. Sometimes I’ll put a lot of forms into a picture and think: Why do I need all that? I really don’t need this multitudinous feeling of forms. The world is filled with multitudinous forms. I really am looking for one form, a static form, from which the multitudinous forms come anyway. Like that bulging book we’re looking at now. It’s a sculptured book and yet it’s done very simply, in a very minimal way. It’s one of the best books of the series. There’s just something about having a single form which is there in a space. There’s no movement to speak of, visually. It’s just there, and yet it’s shaking, like throbbing, or burning or moving, but there’s no sign of its moving. Now that book, I may be reading my things into it that other people don’t see, but I don’t think so.
CC: No, I see what you mean. It’s vibrating.
PG: It vibrates! In other words, it’s like nailing down a butterfly but the damn thing is still moving around. And this seems to be the whole act of art anyway, to nail it down for a minute but not kill it. That’s what I mean. Whereas in the act of painting sometimes, when I don’t feel so all together, and I want to keep in motion, I’ll paint movement. I mean, I’ll just put down a lot of things. And finally that doesn’t satisfy me, and I always wonder why it doesn’t satisfy me. But it doesn’t sum it up for me. There’s no need for it. That is to say, instead of painting all those forms moving around in the pictures—what the hell, I could just as well pull up the shade and look out the window on the street. Why do I have to do it? I don’t have to do it on canvas, but I want to do what nature doesn’t do. I mean, I can look out and see trees blowing, wind moving, and things are happening. I don’t have to duplicate that. But what I don’t see is a single form that’s vibrating away, constantly, forever and ever and ever to keep vibrating. And that seems to be magical as hell, enigmatic as hell, really. Gee, I never said that before, that way. Now that book is really moving.
CC: That goes back to my feeling that we’ve talked about before, that in art you always work between opposites. Between stopping and going, stasis and movement, abstraction and figuration.
PG: Yes, that’s right.
CC: I think it’s like a machine that keeps us going, like electricity.
PG: It’s a tension between the two.
CC: Between gaps, between poles. Which causes a lot of our dissatisfaction, because we go more to one side.
PG: You mean, a necessary dissatisfaction.
CC: Yeah. Because at any one time it’s more one or the other.
PG: Veering.
CC: When we’re toward this, we think maybe that one’s wrong.
PG: That’s right.
CC: But we don’t realize that we’re constantly moving. You never really stop anything, unless you die. Wherever that is.
PG: But even that I think should be accepted. Well, it’s been a bad couple of months, as you know, but nevertheless I did a couple of very small oils. That’s all I’ve done in these two months. Each one is a head of a guy with a cigarette in his mouth. He’s just smoking. An off-profile or something like that. Now those heads look like they’re dead. I mean, they don’t look like the thing we’re just now talking about at all. I did them both in one day, or two days, and because of other things I haven’t been able to work, but I do go in the studio to do this and that, and I see them, and those two heads have kept me going. And what I think about in my thoughts around that, and I know I’m going to burst out in these new pictures very soon now that my pictures are back and the racks are built and all that stuff, is . . . Now don’t jump, because I’m contradicting everything I just said.
CC: Well, we always do.
PG: We always do. I’m thinking about death. That is to say, I don’t mean about me physically dying, I don’t mean that, but about forms that absolutely don’t move at all, that are just dead forms.
CC: Well, dead forms and live forms, that’s another two poles.
PG: The only life in these forms is the smoke. These two heads are like dead stone, dead mummy heads, glazed and dead. The only movement is the smoke going up.
CC: Of course, I have a feeling that nothing is really static anyway. I suppose physically you can always say there are atoms spinning around, but I like to think about geological time. Slow erosion, gradual moving of strata of rocks. Incredibly slow time, to us, because our time . . .
PG: Our time is different.
CC: Yeah, and everything is like that. I was looking at my cat the other day and wondering about the sense of time the cat must have, since it only lives maybe fifteen years or so.
PG: Or less, yeah.
CC: A day must be an incredible expanse of time.
PG: Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, sure.
CC: To us, it’s like “Ahh, the damn cat came in again, he just went out, why doesn’t he . . . ?” But to him it’s a whole sequence.
PG: That’s right. And to us, we can waste days, knowing that we have the span that we do have.
CC: Which is working against yourself, I think.
PG: I know, yeah.
CC: To lay back on that, and we do it all the time.
PG: That’s fascinating, yeah.
CC: Another thing, back a ways you were talking about how important those simple lines are. To me it seems like one of your really basic things is line. I mean, just drawing a line.
PG: I agree with you.
CC: And these new paintings are getting back to line, right?
PG: Well, that’s getting back to what you call the bones of the whole damn thing, which is line. That’s right.
CC: Because the mid-sixties was hardly line. It was mass. You got so into mass that you had one big mass.
PG: Exactly! In fact, I wanted to eliminate line. One of the great excitements of those black, dark pictures in the mid-sixties was to eliminate line, to eliminate contour and work with mass.
CC: Which you had done in drawings in the early fifties.
PG: That’s right. And I swung just the other way after that, with line. Well, one of the things about line is that it’s the most direct, primitive . . .
CC: It’s the mark.
PG: Mark, of a division of space. When you come in the studio, because of the photographs that Steve [Sloman] is going to take, I picked out about twenty-five or thirty of these which you haven’t really seen. And some of them are only one line, or at most two lines or three lines, dividing the space. And I realize now that I had to do that, and why I did that.
CC: It’s the bones.
PG: It’s the bones of the whole thing.
CC: Because you can look at a line and it’s fantastically ambiguous, too. At the same time as being the most solid thing you can make, you could see it so many ways. You can see it as a cut, you can see it as a stiff iron, you can see it as a division…
PG: Well, at this point, however, I must say something about that year of drawing, when I did hundreds, literally, maybe even into the thousands.
CC: In Florida, right?
PG: That’s right. And up here.
CC: It strikes me funny that that was in Florida.
PG: I know. Well, for many reasons that we don’t have to go into now, I was cut off, you know.
CC: I know. And it’s because I always think of Florida as a good-for-nothing place.
PG: It is! That’s exactly what it is. It’s nothing.
CC: Where rich people go to do nothing.
PG: I know. It’s just a nothing place.
CC: And you go there and you do that.
PG: I know. Well, I didn’t work there for some weeks or months and then finally, out of desperation, I started this. And, in fact, when I was doing these line things, I suddenly got a call from [Morton] Feldman, who was in Texas making that show for the de Menils, in Dallas? Or Houston, I guess it was. And he said, “I’m in Texas, come and see me.” No. He said, “Can I come to see you?” And I said, “Please come.” He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m down to one line.” And he said, “I’m coming right away.” And he appeared two days later. I met him at the airport and I showed him all these things. They were all over the walls, the floor. The whole studio was just bulging, hung with these drawings. They were just brush ink on paper. They were all over the floor—you couldn’t walk in. So we looked at them. And that night, after dinner, we took a walk along the beach, and I started kind of weeping. Not weeping but sort of shaking. And I said, “Well, I’m really down to nothing now. I’m just down to, like, one line.” I mean, there were literally dozens of drawings with just one line. And, you know, Feldman always has a kind of obtuse way of talking, and he said that the last great trick of Houdini’s was to put himself in a trunk, the trunk was locked, the key was thrown away, and they threw the trunk over the Brooklyn Bridge into the river. You remember that famous trick?
CC: Yeah.
PG: So he told me that story. And that was all I needed to hear, that story.
CC: What does that mean?
PG: Well, he said that’s exactly the state, the situation you’re in.
CC: Wow. But I bet he secretly loved that . . . simplicity.
PG: Well, that’s Feldman. Anyway, look what happened from that line. But here’s what I want to tell you about that. You know, you do things and then you get critical and you become not so enchanted with the gesture anymore, and you begin seeing what it’s doing in the whole field. And the ones that were thrown away were where they were just lines. Who the hell wants lines? Any more than you want mass or color. I mean, they talk about color field painting as if we’re all panting and hungry for color. Who needs color? Or who needs line? Who needs anything?
CC: Right.
PG: What you want is . . . something. This enigma is what you want, this mystery. Right?
CC: By any means.
PG: By any means. So that the ones that worked and that I kept, and by worked I mean kept on exciting me, kept on vibrating, kept on moving, were the ones where it is not just line. When it becomes a double activity. That is, when the line defines a space and the space defines the line, there you’re somewhere.
CC: Right. And that’s not balance or anything.
PG: Not at all, but that’s the mysterious part. So this was just as mysterious to me as an eight-foot painting. I mean, this one line on the right is gently pushing that other line. The second line feels like a wind is blowing it into a totally open space.
CC: Right. Or partially open.
PG: Yeah, I mean partially open space, that’s right. You mean, it’s defined as to where it’s going to go, that one line?
CC: Well, it’s just breaking loose, too.
PG: Breaking loose.
CC: You got it at the moment of detachment.
PG: That’s right. Exactly. It’s like in physics, an elaborate concept could be contained in a simple symbol, you know?
CC: Yeah.
PG: That’s like a symbol of a very elaborate system there.
CC: Like an infinity sign.
PG: Exactly.
CC: It’s ridiculous.
PG: Exactly. Exactly.
CC: I mean, there’s something endlessly . . .
PG: Which has to do with that area being open all around.
CC: It’s just an endless action.
PG: That’s right.
CC: Because it never stops.
PG: It keeps renewing itself. But then, you see, that same phenomenon can happen with a more tangible . . .
CC: Ah!
PG: . . . form. This is what I wanted. Now, I may be all wrong. Maybe the whole thing is a catastrophe, and there are many days of doubts as to whether I should have stuck with that other thing. I mean, there have been people in this house who said, “Why did you leave that?” But the idea of just staying with that kind of disgusts me. If I had stayed with that, what was I going to do—make a show or a whole aesthetic out of that? I think I wanted to know whether with objects in the real world, just as we talked about, everyday objects, whether that phenomenon isn’t true there, too. Well, then what’s the difference between that book and that [one-line drawing]? You tell me. It’s not doing that, is it? Well, what is it doing? And is one better than another? Is one more valuable than another?
CC: You know what happens: You look at it and you make an identification in your mind.
PG: A recognition.
CC: Yeah. And you do it with anything. You try to make it identified. You try to name it, and when you do that it’s not interesting to me. I mean, the moment where it’s identified is like a shrug. But what’s going on after that, after that’s happened, the way the thing won’t die, you know what I mean? The way it won’t just stay a name. It’ll keep on going like you said, the vibration. Then, I think it’s doing the same thing that’s doing.
PG: You do?
CC: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. Well, not exactly the same thing.
PG: I don’t mean just optically.
CC: No, I don’t mean that either. But what makes it vibrate? What keeps you looking atit?
PG: Well, this [book] is more mysterious to me than that [one line].
CC: What kept you looking at it long enough to paint it? What makes that more interesting than just a book? In other words, you said, “Paint a book,” and you went like this [shapes rectangle in air]. So what? You obviously didn’t just do that. You said: “Each one of those little things is a whole world.”
PG: Yeah, the writing in there.
CC: Okay, that’s that act, which has a similarity to this act. I’m just talking about process now. But you’re going to say: “Yeah, but how come I’m more interested in that?”
PG: How come I’m more interested in that than this?
CC: That’s what I’m trying to . . .
PG: This has been going on now for five years, and I’m just as puzzled by that. Why couldn’t I have stayed with that? These lines, this reduction.
CC: I think it has to do with a sense of tangibility and physicality.
PG: Can you enlarge on that?
CC: Well, I had this thing I thought of where for some reason it seemed to me that I got a stronger feeling of the paint as material from looking at a painted image rather than a less defined one. And that seemed to me odd. Why? It would seem like the paintings of the mid-sixties would leave you with paint, with material, a lot stronger. But the more I look at these, like that little book you gave me. I’ve got it in front of my typewriter.
PG: You wrote something wonderful in a letter to me once about that book.
CC: What was that?
PG: Well, to paraphrase you, you said that you’re constantly mystified by how a mark or marks become an image.
CC: That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s like we want to be all of our work. We want to bring to bear everything. You want the name and the thing.
PG: Sure.
CC: And the movement. That’s still vaguer than I want to say, but it just seemed that the longer I looked at that book the more I was aware of it as a book and as paint. Equally, maybe.
PG: To go back for a minute, one thing you just said in talking about that book, that the recognition puts you off: book, shrug, so what? But then, after the recognition, come all these other feelings. Well, what I think, in my own back and forth between the pure thing, the essence thing, and the figurative thing, that tangible object, is this: it’s as if I want a mask. And I think this is important, significant. I’ve thought so much about it, that one of the difficulties with this essence thing is that it is not hidden.
CC: Too open?
PG: It’s too open and too evident, for me.
CC: Okay, well, what about artifice then?
PG: Well, wait a minute before you use the word artifice. It seems to me that when you paint an object, when you talk about the recognition, a significant value or ingredient is the hidden and the masked. And what I mean exactly is this: Now, all good painting, and I think my painting is good, has always dealt with forces. But that’s a generalized statement. By forces I mean you’re dealing with movement and magnetism. The magnetic pulls of one form on another. The things which happen in the spatial field that separate. And also the psychological overtones and so on. All right. Now, it seems to me that an important ingredient here is that I don’t think we want those forces to be so evident to us, that when they are somewhat masked they seem to last longer for me. In fact, I think that’s where the enigma is, in the hidden. And when it is not as hidden, there are hidden things there, too. It’s not an either/or situation. I think the reason I couldn’t live too long in that place of that essence thing is that what was happening was too immediately evident to me. So I thought, well, okay, so I’m not a modern artist. I can live with that, too. Modern art being that which is most direct, most evident. It speaks to you with nothing hidden, everything exposed. I mean, modern art has to do with . . .
CC: Taking things apart?
PG: Taking things apart and exposing. And traditional art, the art of the past, is a hidden art. And it could be that, temperamentally, the source of my difficulty here, if it is a difficulty, is a constant pulling, veering, between exposing and hiding.
CC: Well, there’s another one of those polarities.
PG: That could be. Because I think a guy like Philip Pearlstein doesn’t have a problem. He just paints those stupid elbows and knees. I mean, I’m not talking about realistic painting. But when a formal painter like myself starts dealing with objects, these elements do come into it. And by the way, it just occurs to me that one of the reasons for the resistance to my recent work was that it couldn’t be placed easily. That is to say, it was neither abstract nor figurative. “If it’s figurative,” many critics wrote, “why doesn’t he paint the way things are and look, like Pearlstein or Alex Katz?” But you know, if you deal with objects with a great heightened sense of form, of forces and abstractions of forces, you’ve got something that looks mighty peculiar.
CC: Right. That’s why I said that thing about recognition, because you can recognize that [one line] as something, too. Not as an image but as a certain kind of art. I mean, you can have that flicker and say, “Ah, that’s . . .”
PG: That bothers me. That bothers me.
CC: I must say, though, Philip, that goes beyond that, and you know it, too.
PG: Yes. I know that, too.
CC: But let’s not get off the argument. You’ve got something good going here.
PG: You mean about the hidden?
CC: The exposed and the hidden.
PG: Well, then if you deal with objects, you are hiding . . .
CC: Those artists of the past believed in spirits and gods and magic, right? More than we do. We’re a pragmatic age. We’ve got this fucked-up Greenbergian take-it-apart school. So, here’s a guy who just does the backgrounds; he’s a color field painter. And here’s a guy who makes actual objects.
PG: This is great. We never talked this way about it. But you see, to me, and I think to you, too, art is still a primitive magic. And the artists of the past believed in art as magic and art as exorcising, et cetera. In other words, this was the original function of art anyway, from the caves onward.
CC: The spoken word, too.
PG: And the spoken word, too. So that it seems to me the only hope for art, at least the only thing that excites me and makes my heart go pitty-pat, is the magic, the imagery. At dinner you were talking about Melville, Moby Dick. Well, for God’s sake, I mean, as you said, that’s a cosmos there, no? The whole thing is about magic.
CC: You know what’s interesting about that book, too, is that in that book he believed in Jehovah. He believed in the Shrouded of Ages, or whatever you call it. Only at the end of his life he weakened and took up what Olson called the soft hermaphroditical Christs of his later work.* Like a man going down the drain, you know? But before that, he had the fucking forces of the world in his hand. The pyramids. Did you ever read that magnificent description of the pyramids that he wrote?
PG: No.
CC: It’s in a notebook. He said they neither seemed to have been built by man or God.†
PG: Isn’t that fantastic?
CC: He said the more you look at them . . . And there’s the enigma.
PG: Well, that is the enigma!
CC: He absolutely put his finger on it.
PG: That’s the riddle of the sphinx.
CC: You see, and let me just take it into words for a second. There’s the recognition of naming with words, which has become so facile that it’s the shrug. I mean, we’re in an information age. What we want from words is the information. To me, the word is magic. If you say book and then you keep looking at the word, or sounding the word in your mind, you realize that the word has a lot of qualities that aren’t just a matter of a simple exchange, you know what I mean? In early times, we’re told that there were only certain men who were allowed to speak certain words, because those words were absolutely evocations of something that only existed at that moment. They had this magic quality. And that’s what I want to get.
PG: I feel so much what you’re saying. That’s what I want, an image to contain that, to be as fraught with that danger and evocation and risk.
CC: We don’t even know what it is, right?
PG: No. But, it seems to me, that’s the only hope for art now. Otherwise it can just be information art.
CC: Absolutely. And that’s what most of it is now.
PG: You see? Or optical art or…
CC: I mean, back to words, an art that you can call, that you can name and shrug off. This art, that art, all those little modules.
PG: There’s something else that fascinates me, and I’ve thought a lot about this: that when movement substitutes itself as a form, that’s fascinating. That is to say, it puts on clothes, so to speak, becomes bodied, rather than disembodied.
CC: Right. Like that book picture. There’s a kind of graspability factor that should be brought up, too, which isn’t just a matter of identification.
- Charles Olson, Collected Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 90.
PG: It has to do with kinesthesia. It has to do with being blind. I mean, I wanted that book to feel as if you were blind in a dark room and you came in and you felt an object. How would you paint something that you only felt with your hands?
CC: Painting a book in the dark.
PG: Yeah. Or you grab that paw and feel its pulpiness, or its tendon, or whatever you’d feel. So, it’s not just a noun, not just recognition.
CC: You know what, though? The words themselves are masks. That’s another interesting thing.
PG: Yeah, tell me about that.
CC: The word book, let’s just say that. What has that got to do with the real book really?
PG: No. It’s a separate thing.
CC: It’s booooook. Like in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, he takes the spool of tape and he says, “spoooooool,” and he says it over and over again, so it’s like an incantation.
PG: You’re talking about the space between the thing and the word, which we have invented.
CC: Yeah. When we’re naming something we’re really masking it, in a sense.
PG: Of course you are.
CC: Because we’re using this word which doesn’t relate to it, except by acceptance of a meaning. But this thing, this mask, what is it? It’s absolutely fascinating.
PG: Well, then would you say art is a mask?
CC: Yeah.
PG: Art is a mask.
CC: Very strong. Yeah.
PG: And furthermore, to confound this more, frustration is a very crucial ingredient here. The frustration of not being able to make them identical. That is to say, the word book is not the book, because you can feel the book and tear it or cut it, squash it or crumple it. But book is a word. And so my painting of an object has to do with the frustration of not being able to paint the object, either.
CC: Which, to further confound it, isn’t what you want to do anyway.
PG: Of course not. I know it. But I would say that the frustration is a crucial ingredient here.
CC: Absolutely. That’s the resistance.
PG: It’s the resistance. It’s the frustration of the desire to not paint altogether. That is to say, art is the frustration of the desire not to make art, you know?
CC: Wow. I’ve got to hear that, myself.
PG: And the trouble with that . . . I’ve had my lonely winter nights worrying about that, those two lines . . .
CC: That is the desire to make art.
PG: That’s right. And that’s why I had to give it up. That makes art too available to me. And that’s where my fight with Feldman is, and he knows it and that’s why he won’t call me. He wants me to do that.
CC: Well, that’s what I meant. He loved that, right?
PG: That’s right. And he wants art.
CC: You were in hell, and he was loving that.
PG: He was loving it. And he wants art. And I don’t want to be an artist really. But I am and I’m going to be and I want to make these forms.
CC: Well, that’s what you said in your letter, “the irresponsibility to art.”
PG: That’s right. And talk about Melville, boy, he burst those bounds.
CC: He was illegal for all time.
PG: That’s right. He was somewhere else.
CC: I mean, no wonder nobody liked it. It was a punch in the mouth.
PG: Well, you’re not supposed to burst the limits of art.
CC: He was supposed to write travelogues.
PG: He was supposed to make literature.
CC: You’re not supposed to be able to create.
PG: That’s right.
CC: It’s like the original sin.
PG: Exactly.
CC: Don’t touch it.
PG: That’s right.
CC: Boy, this goes a long ways.
PG: You know, I never thought of it before. I’ve got to hear this again. Why don’t we have ourselves a drink?
CC: Okay. We’re about to the end of the tape anyway.
PG: Just let it run out.
CC: I have the feeling I’ve dealt with these things but I haven’t thought about some of them, you know what I mean? I guess you feel that way, too.
PG: Sure. Well, you talk about discontent . . . I think discontent precisely has to do with, and I guess I must put it sort of blatantly, it has to do with the disgust with art.
CC: Yeah.
PG: I think the greatness of Beckett, really, is that deep and lifelong profound disgust with art. And, paradoxically, that’s why he became a great artist. But if you go into this devil’s work, and it is a devil’s work, there’s no insurance you’re going to come out.
CC: Yeah. Right.
PG: And the reason that there are hundreds and thousands of good, safe artists is because there’s a threshold which some are perhaps aware of, others not. And those that are aware of it don’t want to pass that threshold.
CC: That’s why I say, it’s not that I’m so discontented with my friends who are poets. I’m just discontented.
PG: Yes, I know what you mean.
CC: And therefore I’m discontented with their lack of discontent.
PG: Of course.
CC: I feel like: I’m discontented, what’s the matter with you guys?
PG: Yeah. Why aren’t you discontented?
CC: What did you say, “devil’s work”? You know what Melville said, that famous quote? He wrote to Hawthorne, after he’d finished Moby Dick, and he said, “I’ve written an evil book…”
PG: No!
CC: “. . . and feel spotless as a lamb.”
PG: Oh, that’s fantastic! As spotless as a lamb.
CC: Yeah, he saved himself somehow.
PG: That’s right. That’s marvelous.
CC: He went there and he came back. It’s like going into a deep psychosis and coming out.
PG: I know just what that feeling is. Oh, that’s marvelous.
CC: Which is what [R.D.] Laing and those guys believe, that you go through your psychosis. You go all the way into it and you come out. You don’t try to stop it with psychoanalysis or drugs or something. You go through.
PG: Well, isn’t that true? Like we once talked about, artists who settle somewhere. I once made an analogy that, in painting, creating, it’s a court. But unlike a court, you’re the plaintiff, the defendant, the lawyer, the judge, and the jury. And most artists want to settle outside of court. No trial.
CC: It’s a perfect image, because that’s how you do make money in court, you settle out. If you don’t, you lose all your money in the process.
PG: That’s right. Well, in Italian, trial is processo. It’s called process. Or in German, it’s prozess. And in French, it’s procès. The trial is process.
- “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” Herman Melville, Correspondence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 212.
CC: Sure. I suppose that’s even true in English. Like trial by fire. Going through something.
PG: Going through, sure. So that Kaa’s book in Italian would be called Il Processo.
CC: Fantastic.
PG: Yeah. [laughter]
CC: That all makes sense. It’s perfect.
PG: I like what you said about Laing. How some people, in going into psychoanalysis, prefer to stop.
CC: Treat symptoms.
PG: Sure.
CC: That’s what our medicine is all about.
PG: Is to stop somewhere.
CC: Float. Float for the rest of your life.
(c) 1972 P. Guston, C. Coolidge
(c) 2025 A. Sillman, M. Echard