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Art Relived caught up with the New York-based artist who has seen it all when it comes to the past 60 years of contemporary art and who is still making it on his own terms. He also shares his views on artists who have been overlooked and provides candid advice for up-and-coming artists including this wisdom: "go to a lot of parties"
Art Relived: John, I believe you started out studying art history. When did you realize that you wanted to go from studying art to making art and making that your career?
JW: In 1961 I boarded a student ship bound for Europe in order to do research on the drawings of an obscure Renaissance artist named Mariotto Albertinelli. He was to be the subject for my MA thesis at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts where I had studied for three years. It is hard to say why, during that crossing, I decided to become an artist. Maybe it was just the dramatic leaving of everything behind combined with the liberation of being out in the middle of the ocean with those mind-clearing, endless vistas to the horizon. A change. A new day. Who knows? And perhaps a coming to realize that in the end I would not make a very good art historian. In any case it was then that I threw my Albertinelli notes overboard. So much for my intended research. I decided on arrival in Le Havre I would just travel about and have a wonderful waderjahr feasting on as many sites -- and sights -- as possible and visiting as many museums as I could. The six months I spent doing that solidified my resolve and by the time I arrived back in New York I was fully committed to try to make the kind of things that art historians spend their time thinking and writing about.
Art Relived: I understand that when you were 13 years old your parents gave you a book about star gazing. Tell us how your interest in the night sky has influenced your art?
JW: John and Geneva, my parents, gave me the book because I had from a very early age been entranced by the mysteriously beautiful panoply of the night sky. As a teenager I had a telescope on a tripod which accompanied me in a nearby field for many an hour before bedtime. There was no reason for this fascination, no astronomical interest on the part of my parents or of any relatives. It was just something that was always there -- a source of endless fascination. When I began to work as an artist the idea of that most perfect geometric shape -- the sphere (the reality of those glittering points of light and indeed the reality of the very place on which I stood) along with its planar relative, the circle, came into play without my consciously conjuring them up. And in one form or another they have continued to beguile me. Very early on I had the idea to create new constellations to replace the ancient ones: actual star groups that would embody modern images -- airplanes, cars, television sets, etc. I never did it. But maybe now, so many decades later, I am actually envisioning new constellations, though from a very different perspective.
Art Relived: Can you tell us what it was like to be part of the art scene in New York in the 1960s and 70s? Any interesting stories to share with our audience? What do you think is the biggest difference between then and now for young, aspiring artists and in the ecosystem of art in general?
JW: Compared with the global, headline-grabbing, money-obsessed art world of today, that of AbEx [abstract expressionism] in the 1950s was almost quaintly family-like. The art worlds which followed and which I knew in New York -- those of Pop, Minimalism, Op -- were not very much bigger. Everyone tended to know everyone else and we all made the rounds to museum openings -- and to each others' openings on Thursday evenings. The galleries were all either on 57th street or the upper East side. Andy and Marisol, for instance, showed up at my first opening at Richard Feigen's gallery in 1963. In those days the notion of "making it" in the art world was only just beginning. Let's not forget that Pollock's buddies sneered at him when Life magazine did a big article on him. Selling out, eh, Jackson? But by the end of the 1980s SoHo was booming and being an artist became a 'cool' professional decision. As a result art schools became jammed with hopefuls often with little talent but in love with the notion of being an artist -- and the concomitant prospect of making lots of money. Alas, it continues exponentially today.
Advice to aspiring artists?
1) only make art only if there is no other alternative in your life; in other words if it is something you must do.
2) Avoid art schools if at all possible. If you need to learn a technique (like printmaking or casting bronze) attach yourself to someone who does it and learn it that way. Learning by doing is really the best way.
3) Pay no attention to and care nothing for advice on how to 'navigate the art world.'
4) Realize you are alone and much the better for it.
5) Banish any thought that you will someday "make it." The chances of that happening are, alas, infinitesimal.
6) Try not to take yourself too seriously.
7) go to a lot of parties.
Art Relived: I believe you’ve now been creating art for about 6 decades and are still very active. What has kept you inspired and driven to create over that span? Can you tell us a little about your current work and how people can learn more about it?
JW: Someone once said that the reason an artist makes art is to see how it will turn out. I speak only for myself, of course, but what keeps me going is whatever I am currently involved with. A work completed is the inspiration for the next. What you have just done points to further ideas: you say "Oh, but then I could do . . ." Of course unexpected things can swim into your ken and also influence what you do. After looking up for so long at one point I began looking down -- down into the earth and to the mineral deposits that create stone, brought to life through slices of variegated marble. For some years I painted invented variations on the look of stone and marble.
And there also comes a time, if you live long enough, that it is too late to stop making art and start doing something else. Being an artist has settled in and become an intractable part of your being and gives you a sense of fulfillment. Asked by an interviewer why he bought a shovel at the hardware store and proclaimed it a work of art, Marcel Duchamp said "Because it amused me." By which I take him to mean not that it made him laugh (which it may also have done) but because it engaged him. Being engaged: that is what makes art -- and any other creative effort -- happen.
It is engagement that allows inspiration to happen.
Art Relived: Art Relived’s mission is to share the stories of artists from the past or who bridge the past and present with the newer generations. We also believe it’s important to recognize the work and achievements of artists who aren’t necessarily the biggest brands or household names.
Are there any artists from the past who you believe are significantly underappreciated or overlooked today, even by experts in art? And are there any newer, contemporary artists today who you particularly admire?
JW: The list is long but three names pop up offhand. Two are no longer with us and another is a recluse.
Donald Evans, who would be 75 had he not died in a fire in Amsterdam in 1977, devoted his short life to imagining invented countries and issuing postage stamps for them. These were stamp-sized water colors, made with a very very fine bush, and numbered in the thousands. One of the countries he imagined was a tropical archipelago called Amis et Amants, another an Italianate state of Mangiare. There was a book published about him -- "The World of Donald Evans" by Willy Eisenhart -- but Donald has sunken into obscurity.
Another is May Wilson who lived to 81 and made extraordinary sculptures and collages unlike any others. Friends would bring her discarded items -- shoes, frying pans, stuffed toys, dishes, the leg of a chair and other such everyday detritus. She would then combine and fasten them into sculptural assemblages and at the end spray them with a unifying coat of paint. Her collages are uniquely witty, often incorporating photobooth self-images applied to postcards and other photographs.
Cletus Johnson, the recluse, lives alone in upstate New York. From the beginning he was fascinated by theatres, a passion that continues to this day. He makes glass-fronted box constructions of imaginary theatre facades which incorporate lights, particularly in the names of the theatres: UTOPIA, NUBIA, AURORA and NONSUCH among them. They are architecturally inventive, mysterious and completely unlike anything else anyone does. He used to show at Leo Castelli [gallery], but that was a very long time ago.
As for young contemporary artists, a confession. I'm not very interested. The longer I live the less and less I care about new and not-even-so-new artists. I am sure there are good ones out there, there always are. But the field today is too vast. There are just too many to sort out and the prospect of trolling the galleries (one estimate puts their number in New York City alone at well over a thousand) to find them exhausts me even to think about. Sounds egotistical but really at this point the only artist's work that interests me is mine. Hey, time's a-wastin'.
Additional Note 4 May 2021
Art Relived: Following the initial interview, John shared an additional overlooked artist who he admires:
JW: Jean Holabird is another artist whose work I admire and who is under-recognized. She makes three-dimensional cut-out constructions of heavy paper, brightly-watercolored abstractions relating to various architectural tropes. She has also created a book, "Out of the Ruins", which features small watercolors done in her neighborhood -- Tribeca -- in the days after the 9/11 attacks. Another book she produced, a kind of object in effect, is a meditation on the synesthesia of Nabokov: "Vladimir Nabokov, Alphabet in Color." Her incomparable diaries, a series of Moleskine books of now many years running, illustrate her every day life as well as her travels to Africa, Mexico and other places.
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