GREG SLICK: THE ART OF SYNTHESIS

English literature, Chinese painting, fictitious film stars of the 20s, Tlingit iconography, visual data systems, the Tao, and calligraphy as ritualized movement are just a few of the inspirations and energies that inform Greg Slick’s art. And as he explores and navigates these idea-rich subjects, he creates a body of work that is as much about the beauty of synthesis as it is a document of its processes. In drawing, painting, photography, film and videography, Slick manipulates cultural meaning, emotional content and graphic acumen to produce invigorating, perceptive and always compelling visual ideas. Incorporating a long history of these influences, he uses them both as laboratory and coat of arms.

From pristine and exacting minimalist canvases to thought-provoking videos, his work is a full extension of his wide range of knowledge and complete involvement in every project. Attuned to the transitory nature of objects and the innate fragility of what is human, Slick’s artworks are perfect semaphores for a wide range of visual language and its communication.

 

Quantitative expression becomes pure visual feast. With unerring simplicity, and with conceptual clarity, he is able to show us a multiplicity of choices as we examine each work; not only of the subject itself but of the choice of medium in which it was explored. The found object is always the surprise; the gift for us is how it is transformed for our delectation. The formal and the narrative have complete freedom in this imagery; its lexicon is that of dialogue, and therefore always an on-going conversation with the viewer.

You studied English and Comparative Literature and received your degree in that. How did literature first inform your focus and development as an artist? You also studied calligraphy and Chinese painting. How did these two areas of study come together in the beginning of your work?

GS: English Lit was an area of study so broad and non-specialized that, oddly, it turned out to be a good thing. What it did for me was enhance my intellectual curiosity through books of all kinds. I read a great deal of classic and modern literature and was transformed. I was intrigued by the poet’s view of life. This awareness of books and ideas was a big step towards becoming an artist. Narrative, archetypal characters, myth, metaphor—these were ideas useful to making sense of the world around me. I also looked at lots of art books, studying the reproductions and reading the essays. Every period of art in every culture was interesting to me. The more I looked and read, the more I wanted to create.

When I was nine or ten I became obsessed with Asian art. I suppose it was because Asian art looked so different from any other art I saw around me: there was a graphic vividness to it that pulled no punches and appealed to my young mind. I’d go to my local library and take out books on Chinese, Japanese, and Indian art and study them until my eyes hurt. I began to make watercolor copies of the reproductions in the books. I was hooked. Years later, when I was doing mostly photography, I finally embarked on a formal study of the practice of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Initially, I was interested in learning these things so that I could apply traditional Chinese ideas of composition, light and dark, and empty space to photography. However, I ended up developing such a love of the materials—paper, brushes, ink, and pigment—that I increasingly turned to doing paintings, though not in a strictly Chinese style. The paintings were Western, figurative, on canvas, but with Chinese ideas embedded in the technique and composition.

Your abstract paintings have a very stark essence, and one that evokes Asian visual concepts of simplicity, balance, and focus. Yet, there is a wonderful sense of play to them. They have an almost comic gesture and confidence. The titles are marvelous – how did you arrive at them?


GS: I turned to abstract painting a few years ago, with an idea to reinterpret some aspects of Modernism, particularly Abstract Expressionism. Part of what attracts me to this period of art—no surprise there—is its indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese painting, especially Zen painting. It seemed to me that if I wanted to engage in a discourse with contemporary art that included my obsession with Asian art, I had to find a medium in which such a synthesis was possible, where the composition, color palette, and “flatness” of Chinese and Japanese painting—as well as other influences—could be transformed into a visual language that is not culturally bound, and in which it all could make sense and not seem merely decorative or even kitschy. That was my starting point. Where I’ve ended up is terra incognita. My paintings are, as you say, evocative of Asian visual ideas, but they are also in a realm now where they seem to mirror natural forms, such as stones, branches, and leaves, but in an artless way. Of course, to say they are “artless” is something of a paradox. Perhaps I should say they are “worked.” To me, they feel elemental, perhaps even crude at times. The titles are a good indication of how literature—and music—play a role in my paintings. What I’m reading and listening to at the time tends to inform my paintings in subtle ways. While I’m perfectly happy to label my paintings “Untitled,” I often feel compelled to give them titles that allude in an oblique way to what I happen to be thinking about at the moment.

What periods of Chinese painting are you most interested in? What other Asian cultures inspire your work and ideas?

GS: I’ve always been interested in the Northern and Southern Sung, including the literati and ch’an painters of the latter period. Many important innovations happened during these two dynasties. Some standout painters for me include Kuo Hsi, Ma Yuan and his son Ma Lin, Hsia Kuei, and Mu-ch’i. In addition, Japanese, Indian, and Central Asian art are sources of inspiration.

In paintings such as “Trend”, and “Information”, you have taken the bar chart to significantly more beautiful visual use. I’m thinking of Edward R. Tufte’s “Envisioning Information”, where components of art become elements of quantitative expression. But you also see this as a means in itself: the power of simple design and composition. Can you speak to this?

GS: I was very much thinking of Tufte when I made those paintings. They are an earlier expression of my abstract work and constitute some of my first forays into hard-edge abstraction. These paintings are read as charts but, to me, they also become something conceptual. There are no values represented anywhere, and the idea of information becomes visually interesting beyond any meaning. Aside from that, they are very much about painting and color choices.

You’ve stated that your work is an “…..evolving lexicon of imagery…ranging from crowd dynamics to Chinese calligraphy, from street art to Tlingit iconography.” I can see this in your use of forms interacting with each other, and with your play with stasis and movement. For instance, in the paintings, “Looking The Other Way”, or “May All Your Tomorrows Be Forgotten.” They have a presence – perhaps what you term “Transhumance”?


My current work draws from a big pool of influences, and that pool is getting bigger. Movement is important to me because of its implications in nature: the idea of flow as described in Taoism. Achieving a sense of movement is something that’s hard for me to do in abstract painting. Looking at things like street art and schematics used by people who study crowd dynamics give me clues as to how to make these strange, elemental forms I paint appear to move against and away from each other. It’s tempting to add perspective and many layers to my compositions; however, I think these choices are already very well explored in contemporary abstract painting. Keeping my forms flat and close to the picture plane feels like a more radical approach to abstract painting.

How did you first begin work in photography?

GS: I walked around Hoboken, Jersey City, and some of the boroughs of New York City and took pictures of what looked like abstractions. This was 20 years ago. I’d find things like boarded-up windows and doors and put a very tight frame on them. I started to decontextualize what I saw and hoped that the viewer would see some other meaning in them. They were very formal works that explored light and texture. Eventually, I introduced narrative into my photography.

Your photographic images continue your investigations of the formal and narrative; yet you capture moments that are also transitory – certain light will be gone in a moment; certain shadows will change; nothing is permanent and yet you capture that temporal instant that the eye finds. I’m thinking of the very fragile, yet luminous image of the plant in snow, with tracks of some being, that is the entry to your website. It is an image close to what you also achieve in the delicacy of your drawings.

GS: I’m taking photographs that share ground with the abstract paintings and drawings, in the sense that they are driven by observations of natural forms. Like the paintings, they are contemplative, but also have much to do with a primal knowledge of where one is physically standing versus a GPS-derived idea of one’s specific location. They are about human awareness in a world where so much of what we feel is mediated. They are not anti-technology, mind you, but simply pose questions about what we increasingly take for granted.

Your drawings are the simplest of your forms. Yet their ethereal quality – the lightness of the charcoal and line; the shapes they inhabit – all seem to focus on specific depiction, rather than abstraction. Is this so?

GS: They are often ideas for elements that may eventually appear in my paintings. When I think about creating an abstract shape, the first step is to take a natural form and push it into uncharted territory. The drawings are that first step. But they also stand on their own as finished works. In terms of technique, they are very experimental and, in the end, they are about mark making.

How did you come to film? What did you first explore in that medium?

GS: The conceptual underpinnings of my photographs that deal with physical location felt as if they could also be expressed in video. I’d wanted to explore video and its narrative possibilities for some time, and this body of work became a perfect fit for the medium. This first video—“On the Taboo Against Knowing Where You Are”—experiments with ritualized movement and a percussive soundtrack. The sole actor portrays a woman who gains sudden knowledge of her dislocation from the earth. She literally does not know where she stands and rages against it.

In “Purification”, the throw of the coins involves both movement and expression – the hands of the woman, and her face as she watches how they will fall. Later, her movements integrate with the movement choices of the camera – fade in/out, multiple exposures – to create a sense of time’s passage. How did the idea for this work come to you?

GS: It’s an idea that had been percolating in the back of my mind for some time, and came from my early exposure to books on Chinese art. Again, here was a project that fit the medium of video. “Purification” is about Wang Xizhi, China’s greatest calligrapher. According to legend, in 353 AD Wang gathered 42 of his literati friends for a poetry contest, which featured a drinking game where cups of wine were floated on lotus leaves down a creek. At the end of it, everyone was drunk and had produced a poem. Wang gathered these into an album and wrote a preface, which comes down to us as a classic of Chinese literature and calligraphy. In my view, Wang was responsible for what may be the first “happening.” The video reinterprets history by using dancers to portray Wang and his friends in the heat of poetic composition, and represents their calligraphy as ritualized movement.
What other ideas are you exploring in your film work?

GS: Since last year I’ve been working on a trilogy of silent “films”—actually video, which feature the saga of a fictitious film star from the 1920s. The main character, Belle Dawson, and her situation were inspired by the fact that D.W. Griffith used Mount Beacon, which is near my studio, as a location for at least three of his early films. The first of the trilogy, “At the Lodge,” introduces Belle and the memory—or ghost—of a man who may be a slain lover. As in “Purification,” the video’s pace and the actors’ motions are a study in ritualized movement. I plan to shoot part two this spring.

Do you work on all three of your mediums at the same time? Or do individual projects suggest a specific medium to work in? Have you painted, drawn, and filmed the same object?

GS: Well, as I mentioned, in the case of my concept on physical location, both still and moving images were the mediums of choice. More often than not, an idea will somehow match itself to one ideal medium, and that’s what I focus on. But that’s not to say that I won’t execute the same idea in different mediums at some point in the future. I could certainly see this happening for the video trilogy I’m working on.

How did “The Illustrious Mr. X: Museum Collection as Character Study come about? How did you and Karlos Carcamo develop the idea?

GS: Karlos Carcamo and I were invited by the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz to guest-curate a reinterpretation of their permanent collection. The show is presented in two volumes, with the second part now on display until July 17, 2011. It was a big undertaking, because the Dorsky has a large and wildly eclectic collection, and there had to be some kind of overarching theme or narrative that could make sense of it all. The idea of having all the works we selected somehow relate to a central character who would embody the essence of the show made perfect sense to us.

What were your experiences in working on such a curatorial project? You have here combined writing in depth with the conceptual creation of an exhibition that becomes a biography or memoir.

GS: Karlos and I had total freedom in coming up with a concept for the show. The museum was very open to something fresh, not necessarily academic, and even radical. As the idea for a fictitious character evolved, it became apparent that he should remain anonymous. Mr. X’s life would be told through the evidence of objects, and the visitor’s imagination would fill in any gaps. In essence, the exhibition is a tour through each chapter of the autobiography of Mr. X, and explores a rather different idea of narrative in the context of a curated museum show. Working with such a different format for an art exhibition made us look at the work—some of it by well-known artists—in a very different way.

How did you determine choices of art to use in the exhibit? Where are the texts from?

GS: Because the exhibition is about Mr. X, the works in the collection were all placed on equal footing in our minds. No one work was more important than any other; their value was judged on whether they fit in with the themes and design of the show. A radical idea for some people! But we wanted to demolish hierarchies in art and just show the work for what it is without focusing so much on its back story. The main narrative for the show is contained in the text panels, which Karlos and I developed from scratch and wrote as “excerpts” from the autobiography of Mr. X.

How can museums change the perspectives of viewers through more experimental curatorial projects?


GS: All art museums would do well to include experimental shows in their programming. I think very formal academic shows are fine: they’re instructive and have their value as such. But visitors tend to glaze over after about 20 minutes. Why not give visitors something unexpected in the mix? The key, I think, is to avoid placing the visitor in the role of the patient student. The visitor as explorer or voyeur is a much more exciting proposition, one that can truly influence perceptions.

What are your current/future projects?

GS: Last year, I started a curatorial project called The Artist’s Statement Picture Show. It’s a nomadic, one-night-only, art film and video program featuring emerging and established artists. So far, I’ve done one in Beacon, NY, at a small venue called School of Jellyfish. It was very successful, with way more people showing up than we could handle. I’m planning to do one this year with a guest curator, filmmaker Mollie McKinley.


All images copyright Greg Slick, 2011. Used with kind permission of the artist. 

Images, top to bottom:  "Conjugated Form"; "Looking The Other Way"; "May All Your Tomorrows Be Forgotten"; "Hand" (video still); "Pile 2"; "Rhythmic Sticks"; "Purification" (video still); Gallery installation, co-curated with Karlos Carcamo: "The Illustrious Mr. X: Museum Collection As Character Study", Dorsky Museum at SUNY, New Paltz; "Portrait".