(Highlights) VOICES OF THE SHINNECOCK INDIAN NATION
/We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected.
SHINNECOCK INDIAN NATION
/We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected.
(Highlights) CLAUDIA BUENO
/Artist in Light, Sculpture & Sound
Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.
CLAUDIA BUENO
/Artist in Light, Sculpture & Sound
Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.
(Highlights) DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
/Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and other performances. In the late 60s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite applied to paper and chipboard. Her “visual equations” based on set theory were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Her later paintings draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia:Beacon, and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting. Of course, he gave you these books, but it's interesting how those walks you took together with the mathematician Max Dehn also illustrated what he was teaching you about abstraction.
DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that. I don't know. Ever since the chip entered the universe, I don't know electronics now.
But when I was a kid, when I was even living in New York on Chambers Street with my daughter, we had a TV set which broke down periodically, and I would take out all the tubes, test them at the local store. I just was interested in how things tick. Always. In nature and in mechanics and so on. So, math just kind of was a natural for me the way Max taught it because what he was really teaching was astronomy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And you can see that sense of wonder everywhere in your early artworks to the ones that you just shared with us today with the beautiful copper over paper and all these textures. They're just a wonderful meditation. I think the expression you used was on the nature of nature.
ROCKBURNE
Yes. There's something about this life I have, and I've had since I was a child, about studying the creativity of the arcane. I studied Egypt since I was six. That's where I go every day.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You were talking about time and your experience of time. And you said you don't experience it as...it's not linear. I don't know. How would you say?
ROCKBURNE
It's hard for me, for myself, to define what the past is. So when I was doing the work at DIA, I felt like I had found about this work and formed it yesterday. Then, as I said, I have extensive diary notes on it. So, it was easy to go back to '80. I have 73 diaries. And look at it and then share it with all the people that were working with me at DIA.
Of course, you know, like they have only seen this in reproduction. They don't know what the work behind the work was like. And so, once we were talking about, and we had to track it. The big reason it took three years is that none of the materials exist. We had to substitute and test new materials to substitute for the old materials. Nothing. You know, it's like Rauschenberg once lost one of the Coke bottles of his work, and he finally found one in a mountain in India or something like that.
It's that kind of thing. The stuff that was so ordinary. Paper that was so ordinary. We had a special paper made in it. So that's what really took the time. But in terms of the sequential time, I experience very little difference between yesterday and today in my work.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Benjamin Appel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Elena Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
/Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and other performances. In the late 60s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite applied to paper and chipboard. Her “visual equations” based on set theory were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Her later paintings draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia:Beacon, and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting. Of course, he gave you these books, but it's interesting how those walks you took together with the mathematician Max Dehn also illustrated what he was teaching you about abstraction.
DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that. I don't know. Ever since the chip entered the universe, I don't know electronics now.
But when I was a kid, when I was even living in New York on Chambers Street with my daughter, we had a TV set which broke down periodically, and I would take out all the tubes, test them at the local store. I just was interested in how things tick. Always. In nature and in mechanics and so on. So, math just kind of was a natural for me the way Max taught it because what he was really teaching was astronomy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And you can see that sense of wonder everywhere in your early artworks to the ones that you just shared with us today with the beautiful copper over paper and all these textures. They're just a wonderful meditation. I think the expression you used was on the nature of nature.
ROCKBURNE
Yes. There's something about this life I have, and I've had since I was a child, about studying the creativity of the arcane. I studied Egypt since I was six. That's where I go every day.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You were talking about time and your experience of time. And you said you don't experience it as...it's not linear. I don't know. How would you say?
ROCKBURNE
It's hard for me, for myself, to define what the past is. So when I was doing the work at DIA, I felt like I had found about this work and formed it yesterday. Then, as I said, I have extensive diary notes on it. So, it was easy to go back to '80. I have 73 diaries. And look at it and then share it with all the people that were working with me at DIA.
Of course, you know, like they have only seen this in reproduction. They don't know what the work behind the work was like. And so, once we were talking about, and we had to track it. The big reason it took three years is that none of the materials exist. We had to substitute and test new materials to substitute for the old materials. Nothing. You know, it's like Rauschenberg once lost one of the Coke bottles of his work, and he finally found one in a mountain in India or something like that.
It's that kind of thing. The stuff that was so ordinary. Paper that was so ordinary. We had a special paper made in it. So that's what really took the time. But in terms of the sequential time, I experience very little difference between yesterday and today in my work.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Benjamin Appel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Elena Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
(Highlights) ETINOSA YVONNE
/Photographer & Videographer
Winner of the World Press Photo 6*6 Global talent in Africa 2020
I’m not just taking beautiful pictures. I’m collecting their voices, collecting their movement, collecting different aspects, and preserving this moment because they will not always be here. I don’t just see myself as a photographer, an artist. I also see myself as an archiver. Someone who is archiving as a researcher.
(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT
/Novelist and Essayist
The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.
SIRI HUSTVEDT
/Novelist and Essayist
The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.
RICHARD FLOOD
/The New Museum
When you're looking, really look very, very hard at the new. Look very, very hard at what challenges you. If you're bothered by it, go deeper. So it was "Don't take the easy way out and say 'I love that'. 'Why do you love it?' 'I just feel it.' No, unacceptable. Just feeling it is not enough, if you're a responsible party. If you're a member of the public, fine, have whatever kind of experience you want, but if you're a professional, know why you're doing it.
(Highlights) GEORGE MANGINIS
/Academic Director of the Benaki Museum
If we are to use a few words to characterise the Benaki, we can say it is the only museum in the world that presents Greek culture from the history to the 21st century, and culture seen holistically, so not just fine art, but also applied arts and historical documents, literature, photography, and architecture. It’s a very inclusive perception of art, but also in relation to global art and world cultures.
GEORGE MANGINIS
/Academic Director of the Benaki Museum
If we are to use a few words to characterise the Benaki, we can say it is the only museum in the world that presents Greek culture from the history to the 21st century, and culture seen holistically, so not just fine art, but also applied arts and historical documents, literature, photography, and architecture. It’s a very inclusive perception of art, but also in relation to global art and world cultures.
VALERIE STEELE
/Director & Chief Curator · Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
Like many of us, I was always personally interested in fashion as a means of communication and masquerade, but it was in graduate school when a classmate of mine did a report on two scholarly articles about the Victorian corset that I suddenly had an epiphany, and I realized that fashion was a part of culture, and I could study fashion history.
DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS
/President of the Acropolis Museum
I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is.
IAN WARDROPPER
/Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director · The Frick Collection
I firmly believe that the arts should be a part of everybody's education. It's not just learning the history of art, but it's about opening up creativity as a means that can be useful to somebody throughout one's life.
MARK SELIGER
/Photographer
I always tell people the worst picture can ever take is one you don't take. And that is a simple philosophy. If you don't go out there and do the work, then you will never know. You may think there's going to be another great snowstorm. You might think there's going to be another great moment where a block is going to have a certain kind of rhythm or a culture is going to have a certain amount of innocence or a musician is going to be as reluctant or vulnerable or sympathetic. You just have to embrace the moment and do the work.
(Highlights) RALPH GIBSON
/Photographer
Whatever I do, quite often I say– Is this good for my work? Should I go here? Should I do that? When I had my initial debut, I became known for a book called The Somnambulist. I took 24 of those pictures in one weekend and then I worked for three years on the next 24.
RALPH GIBSON
/Photographer
Whatever I do, quite often I say– Is this good for my work? Should I go here? Should I do that? When I had my initial debut, I became known for a book called The Somnambulist. I took 24 of those pictures in one weekend and then I worked for three years on the next 24.
(Highlights) MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY
/Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer
I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser
All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. That’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that. – Orrin H. Pilkey
MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY
/Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer
I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser
All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. That’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that. – Orrin H. Pilkey