Vija Celmins : To Fix the Image in Memory

You will find yourself walking back and forth through the mesmerizing Vija Celmins exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, returning to earlier work to recollect details and then moving on with wonder and expectation to see how themes and ideas develop and metamorphize. You will also move toward the drawings and paintings to scrutinize their miraculous surfaces, smooth, inscrutable and cold as fruit from the icebox, before backing away to comprehend their totality.

You may also sit for long periods, indulging a sense of wonder and an occasional flash of frustration and exasperation. Why is an artist of such enormous talent, such consistent vision, such technical skill, such charm and wit, and such intellectual power, not commonly ranked among the greatest artists of the past half century?

Why is this Latvian-born American genius, who is just now receiving her first comprehensive U.S. exhibition in more than a quarter-century, not spoken of in the same breath as Rothko, Rauschenberg, LeWitt or Warhol?

“Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory” includes almost 150 works and will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario in May and to the Met Breuer in New York in September. It covers the artist’s career from early works she made in Los Angeles in the 1960s through the paintings and drawings for which she is best known — meticulous, monochromatic renderings of waves, the night sky and the natural clutter of the desert floor. And it continues up to the current moment, in which her career of more than 50 years continues to unfold with conceptual surprises and delights.

  

For decades, Celmins has been the most heroically humble of artists, quietly, idiosyncratically and patiently toiling apart from the dominant trends and ideologies of the art world while gathering up the sublime through devotion to ordinary craft.

Celmins, 80, was born just before the Second World War, and she spent several years in refugee camps in Germany before moving to the United States and settling in Indiana with her family. Her early paintings, which have the poetic reserve and melancholy of Georgio Morandi’s still lifes, focused on objects in her studio — a space heater, an electric hot plate and an oscillating fan, all rendered in gray tones. Although they seem to float in space, their shadows are carefully rendered, as if these affirmative details of traditional representation can’t be sundered from the objects themselves, which are otherwise abstracted from the world. There’s also a touch of humor: In the paintings of the heater and the hot plate, there’s a touch of red to suggest their heating power, perhaps a riposte to the bright colors of Pop Art and the “cool” aesthetic of Los Angeles art in the 1960s.

Celmins’ early career also included “disaster” works, images based on photographs of doomed military planes, cars on fire and the mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb. These are sometimes contained within a trompe l’oeil conceit, a drawing of a photograph ripped from a magazine, its curled edges casting a slight shadow, or a crease on its rumpled surface reflecting a touch of light. The image thus seems to represent the collecting impulse of the artist as much as the thing depicted in the photograph itself. After the 1960s, the disaster theme mostly disappears (a late sculpture of a gun is an exception), but the focus on building up images of trompe l’oeil deceptive power while conscientiously undermining their illusion remains an essential recurring gesture.

Indeed, the critical consensus is that the subject of Celmins’ work is this tension, between habits of representation and the thing that is represented. She isn’t painting planes or waves or spider webs, but making marks on paper or canvas. She works with photographs as source material not because she is interested in what the photographs show, but because it solves a basic problem: how to compose an image. The subject arrives ready-made, and the artistic additive is all in the representation of the representation

All of that is obviously true, and why Celmins’ work has been critically acclaimed, why it is considered complex and intellectually substantial, and why it regularly appears in larger exhibitions that survey the trajectory of 20th-century art or major themes in problems of representation. But the exhibition also undermines the critical consensus, revealing not just the consistency with which Celmins has probed the meaning of representation, but also how much subject matter — real things in the real world — in fact matters to her.

‘She does not intend a spiritual message,” declares one of the catalogue essays for the show. But it can’t be an accident that almost without exception, Celmins has always preferred to make images of things that most people find spiritually meaningful. There’s a good reason she hasn’t focused on visually dense and repetitive images of, say, snakes squirming in a pit or trash moldering in heaps. At some level, Celmins’ images of waves or the night sky aren’t just studies in technique and distancing; they are gracious offerings, allowing the viewer the basic pleasure of looking at things that are hypnotic, infinite and emotionally consoling.

In a survey of a great artist’s work, any single object may contain the whole of the artist’s oeuvre, while the sum of the works is greater than any of its parts. There are powerful examples of synecdoche throughout this show: for instance, Celmins’ 1965 “World War II Puzzle Toy,” a handheld game with a war scene rendered on a circular surface under a transparent dome. On the disturbing base are little cavities and inside the globe, little balls. If the game weren’t in a museum, you might move it slightly up and down, forward and back, trying to make the balls fall into place. The game of skill becomes a metaphor for the game of balance and comprehension implicit in many of Celmins’s other paintings and drawings.

If you stand close to her 2009-2010 “Globe” — a terrestrial globe, hand-drawn on paper and wood and light as a feather — you can use your breath to make it move slightly in the air. It counterbalances the dense earthiness of Celmins’ 1977-1982 “To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI,” a collection of painted, cast bronze “stones,” identical to real ones the artist found in the desert. Both the paper “Globe” and the small bronze cast stones are tantalizing and beautiful, and taken together they suggest the heroic side of her heroic humility. Celmins is determined to participate, on her own terms and without the in-your-face bravado of many male artists, in the project of world-making, the life-affirming hubris of the artist who will challenge God or the gods as a creator. She will remake the whole Earth as a gossamer thing susceptible to the lightest currents of air, and the smallest rubble of the Earth, stones from a riverbed, as microcosms of the entire universe.

Celmins’ “Globe” comes late in the show, and it is near a Richard Serra installation that can’t be moved and so functions as a distracting side chapel to the main event. The contrast between Serra’s thrown masses of gray lead, heaped on the floor, and Celmins’ thrillingly delicate globe is an accidental allegory not just of how the art world works, but also of how most institutions and social groups work: Heaviness, assertiveness, the sweep of the arm and the thrust of the self always win the day. But I had little patience for the Serra and started working my way back through the Celmins exhibition to a room of charcoal drawings and paintings of spider webs, which were beautiful on the first encounter but now seemed even lighter yet more profound.

Of course, Celmins would be attracted to spider webs — for their power to attract, their implicit homage to work, their delicacy and their mortal power to trap and fix things in space. In these works, as in almost all the others, she makes it clear that these images are mediated, by hints of blurriness and fogginess that suggest the distortions of a lens. But it seems to me now that Celmins does this not to destroy the illusion, or to reiterate a tired and oft-trod lesson about resisting the blandishments of transparent representation. She retains these things as a means of escape, a way out of her images of the world, because otherwise we would stay there forever, fixed like the fly waiting for its annihilation.

Genius artist only now getting a show worthy of her art. By Philip Kennicott. Marin Independent Journal,  January 2, 2019

“Vija Celmins: A reductionist by nature”  By Gordon J. Hazlitt.  February 1978

Talking with Vija Celmins is instructive, for much of what is implied in mainstream contemporary art becomes explicit. Celmins has a reputation as an artist who is meticulous in the conception and execution of her work, if not prolific. In recent years she has worked solely with graphite pencil, drawing small, semi-abstracted patches of ocean on desert floor.

Her studio, located in an industrial section of West Los Angeles, is still new and alien to her, and the dislocation has severely interrupted her concentration and output. She lives in a small apartment she fashioned upstairs but draws in a long warehouse room which is painted flat white and seems virtually empty.

Celmins thinks as clearly as her drawings are rendered and speaks with candor. “I am a reductionist by nature. I like to throw away what doesn’t concern me anymore. When I was a student I painted like de Kooning, but I tired of the huge scale and all the endless juxtaposition of little marks. I gave up cold because I found I really didn’t like it. Then I gave up painting entirely.”

About ten years ago, she saw a photograph taken by of the moon’s surface by one of the Russian space missions. The distanced, flat-appearing landscape triggered a response: “I had wanted a closer contact with the surface than I was getting through brushwork in painting. She began to work with pencil, drawing sky, sea or landscapes that were as “tight” as she could get them. Working with pencil proved satisfying because the pencil’s point sharply focused her attention throughout the process.

“I deliberately sought neutral images, in that the image as such, would be only one element among many and would balance with other qualities such a density, proportion or scale.” She now finds some of her earlier drawings of the surface of the sea “baroque” because they have a somewhat dramatic, individualized look. The new drawings, of sea or desert floor, are much “tighter,” more nearly pure surface. She has not dropped the image of sea or desert entirely because she believes that “illusion per se is inherent in art and must be dealt with but must not allowed to dominate.”

Celmins now often works in series. She will do two or more drawings of the same image, varying one of the few elements she keeps in her work. Taking a cue from Monet’s series of paintings of haystacks done in different light, she has done several extended series of drawings of galaxies and ocean in which she repeats the image as exactly as possible but varies the hardness of the graphite in her pencil. The completed work is a subtle spectrum of drawing. At other times, she will draw the same image at two contrasting scales on the same piece of paper. In all such series, the real content of the work is in the viewer’s perception of the difference the alteration makes.

Celmins is highly ambivalent about California as a place to work, though she speaks of enjoying the proximity to the actual sea and deserts. She says, “I feel real isolated here. Los Angeles is a dead town for art and lacks a good context for doing serious work.” When asked to contrast it with New York, she added that the problem is that “maybe in New York the context is too developed and artists get put in tight categories.”

How should her drawings be interpreted? “They are records of states of attention. When I do them, nothing is too little or too much to attend to. I hope people feel that nothing is hidden in them.”

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is home to a new retrospective of the artist Vija Celmins, whose drawings of oceans and lunar surfaces are so subtly and carefully worked that they resemble photographs. With that exhibition in mind, we have republished a short profile of the artist by Gordon J. Hazlitt, who wrote on Celmins for the February 1978 issue of ARTnews. He asks Celmins why her drawings are so obsessive. She tells him: “They are records of states of attention. When I do them, nothing is too little or too much to attend to.” —Alex Greenberger

From the Archives: Vija Celmins on Being a ‘Reductionist by Nature,’ in 1978. By  Alex Greenberger.  Art News   , December 14, 2018.

Vija Celmins :  To Fix the Image in Memory.  December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

In 1991, Vija Celmins sat down with Chuck Close and had a conversation than can only be shared between two artists deeply committed to drawing. At moments, they discover uncanny similarities in their developmental timelines, at other moments, they seem as if they're ready to walk away from the conversation in frustration (Chuck Close: "I'm sorry, I feel like I've failed you. Look at her face, she'd going to ask for another interviewer!") We return to this interview, excerpted in its entirety from Phaidon's monograph Vija Celmins, as her first exhibition of new works in seven years hangs in Matthew Marks Gallery (on view until April 22).

The artist, born in Latvia in 1938, fled the country before Nazi occupation to live in a United Nations refugee camp in Germany before relocating to Indiana in 1948. In the 1960s she became an active figure in the Los Angeles art scene where she produced pristine replicas of small things from her childhood in wartime Esslingen on a gigantic scale, such as a pencil, erasers, a comb, and a puzzle. At the time, Celmin’s trompe l’oeil paintings of wartime photographs rivaled that of Gerhard Richter’s own “photo-painting” practice, which also dealt with war, memory, and the representation of historical trauma. So if you’re still pondering just what to make out of the fake rocks and chalkboard replicas you saw at Matthew Marks, read on to get inside the curious head of this influential artist.  

Vija Clemins: In retrospect I have detached myself from my work somewhat. Now I can sort of see it as if I had nothing to do with it, which is perhaps one of the most interesting things that has happened as I have gotten older—that I am able to look back and say, what is this? So when I’m forced to look at imagery this way, the imagery has an intensity, especially in the early things. They have an ominous, kind of dangerous strangeness.

Chuck Close: I think those [early object paintings] are the most violent-looking paintings. What appear to be…

VC : Benign.

CC : That’s right. It is the most dangerous hot plate, or the most dangerous heat, or whatever, that I have ever seen. And they are scary for some reason.

VC : Oh, I don’t know do you think so? They do have that ominous feeling that there is something going on besides just still lifes. I think that it came about because I had been painting in an Abstract Expressionist manner and I had been trying to make my strokes—the painting space—meaningful. I had tried to do passionate kinds of paintings because I was full of this energy, like I think you were, like we were when we were twenty years old. A couple of years later, I began to feel that there was no more meaning in it for me. I lost my way, I rejected it. I couldn’t resolve the stroke-making with the essential stillness of the painting. So then I went back to some basic thing, like looking at simple objects and painting them straight, trying to rediscover if there was anything that might be more authentic. But the object paintings came out sort of twisted, with more energy in them than was needed.

CC : Do you think that we rejected Abstract Expressionism because we were coming to it so late, sort of fourth-generation junior Abstract Expressionists? We were imitating the look—it’s what we learned art looks like.

VC : It was hard not to make it at that time.

CC : That’s right. Do you feel that you purposefully pushed yourself into some corner where you had something more specifically personal to do?

VC : The truth is that I have always had a lot of stops and starts in my work. So sometimes it’s hard to see a logical development. When I realized that this painting that I was doing was getting so decorative and meaningless, probably for reasons you said—that I hadn’t really originated it and received most of this information from magazines—I had to leave it. I had to back up and find a place where I felt more comfortable.

CC : In the 1940s and 1950s art magazines were in black and white. Growing up in Seattle, I went over these magazines with magnifying glasses. As far as I was concerned, all these de Koonings and stuff were black and white. I had never seen any of the originals; I didn’t know what color they were. And it wasn’t until about 1961, when the magazine It Is came out, that I saw the first reproductions in color to see what these paintings actually looked like. Both of us have spent a lot of time making black-and-white work.

VC : I think I probably dropped the color for other reasons.

CC : Well, me too.

VC : I was dissatisfied. As I remember, many people moved on from Abstract Expressionist painting—so did I. I decided to go back to looking at something outside of myself. I was also going back to what I thought was this basic, stupid painting. You know: there’s the surface, there’s me, there’s my hand, there’s my eye, I paint. I don’t embellish anymore, I don’t compromise, and I don’t jazz up the color.

One of the things that I remember being very struck by was an Ad Reinhardt article. I think it came out in 1957, in ARTnews or something. Remember that article on twelve things not to do? I’m just going to read the very first one because I believe that I had never seen Reinhardt’s work, and I don’t think I’ve ever been influenced by his painting, but I have been influenced by his writing. He wrote twelve technical rules, or how to achieve the twelve things to avoid—I loved that. No texture, no brushwork or calligraphy, no sketching or drawing. Now you see I drew but I didn’t sketch. What I finally did was to leave painting: forms, design, color, and, I thought, invention.

I remember discussing this article in Indiana, of all places, in this very traditional studio where older students had their own little, messy workspaces. I remember being inspired to imagine what is art if you remove all these things. What was left was a kind of poetic reminder of how little a work of art really is art, and how elusive it is to chase the part that excites you and turns one thing into something else. And how tiny that part is, and how hard it is to define. So I was inspired to throw away as much as I could.

CC : Actually, we were on opposite coasts purging our work.

VC : Did you do that too?

CC : Absolutely, sever self-imposed limitations: I am not going to do this. I can't do that. I am not going to use this material. Get color out of there.

VC : Were your first things black and white?

CC : Yeah, I didn't work in color for several years.

VC : There were a lot of changes going on in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Johns, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Morley... all those people that started doing dumb objects, dumb panting, commercial-art painting, whatever you call it. I began to look at Morandi, too, because he was showing up in magazines.

CC ; As much as your work is purged of a lot—trying to get the handwriting out of there, trying to get the brushwork out of there, get the color out of there, and all that stuff—it is amazingly physical. There is a tremendous amount of physicality to it. It is not just ethereal. I think that is one of the dichotomies that is really riveting and so engaging in the work. At once they look like they just happened and yet there’s this physicality. The drawings are incredibly physical as well.

VC : Sometimes I’m convinced that there is nothing else but the physical art of making the art. Sometimes I refine it too much which makes it seem ethereal, which of course it’s not.

CC : You’re talking about how conceptual drawing with graphite is. There isn’t so much there, just decisions, just a record of decisions having been made.

VC : That’s because I see drawing as thinking, as evidence of thinking, evidence of going from one place to another. One draws to define one thing from another. Draws proportions, adjusts scale. It is impossible to paint without drawing. I see the drawing in your painting, too.

Going back to the object paintings I started in 1963-64, I dropped the scale and composition altogether and painted the objects one by one, life-sized: hot plate, lamps, refrigerator, radio…I made some of the objects three-dimensional like the Comb. I think of them as having fallen out of the picture plane. They are not really sculpture.

CC : I don’t think of your sculpture as sculpture, but more like painting that comes out of the room and occupies the space with us.

VC : That’s a nice way to put it. I was grappling with what it meant to work on a two-dimensional plane, and come out of it and go back into it.

CC : I think all this has a lot to do with artifice and the artificial. In a sense you are decorating a surface with painting, but then there is the desire to actually paint around something. It makes me think of your choice of photographs because you say in your notebook, “ My eyes were honed in nature. I practiced seeing the desert.” Some people think that you’re not looking if you’re looking at a photograph.

VC : Oh, that’s ridiculous.

CC : Why do you put this artificial layer between you and what you’re looking at?

VC : The photo is an alternative subject, another layer that creates distance. And distance creates an opportunity to view the work more slowly and to explore your relationship to it. I treat the photograph as an object, an object to scan. Actually, the first time I used photographs was really because I had been away from my family and was lonely. I had been going through bookstores finding war books and tearing out little clippings of airplanes, bombed out places—nostalgic images. At first I painted them, later I decided the clippings were this wonderful range of grays for me to explore with graphite. Then I started to do these moon drawings from photographs taken by a machine that had recorded the range of grays on the moon and had transmitted them back. Then they had been photographed and printed in a book, and then…

CC : There was layering in between.

VC : I thought of it as putting the images that I found in books and magazines back in the real world—in real time. Because when you look at the work you confront the here and now. It’s right there.

CC:  So you approach these photographs as an object in the same way as the lamp had been an object?

VC : Right, I did at first. I think you can see that the whole idea at first was that it might be possible to put something in a two-dimensional plane, or on it, or somehow solve that problem. You can see that the photographs have the same kind of single-object imagery, like the objects that I had been painting earlier. In a way, the photograph helps unite the object with the two-dimensional plane. Although I think that with airplanes there is a kind of wonderful place where they really float, and then they become dimensional, and they take off as well as staying flat. I did not realize it then, but now I can see that the subject matter has a kind of internal tension that also exists in the work. The paintings tend to have an internal feeling, as if there was something behind what you see.

CC : The paintings are very lush and, at the same time, they're incredibly restrictive. That is a funny dichotomy.

VC : I'm always aware of the limits of painting, and have come to think that the limits are what give it more meaning. Of course, one has to find the limits. I painted so much between 1961 and 1964 that I probably went through five lifetimes of different sorts of painting: Matisse, Hoffman, Gorky, and de Kooning. I think you can also see quite a bit of a Morandi influence, as well.

CC : More in the early color work. It's a world of color but it's really approached monochromatically. Later, when you get color totally out of the picture, the viewer fills in the color in his/her mind. I always thought that black-and-white photographs of war, for instance, were far more scary that color photographs of war because color photographs of war always look wrong—the blood doesn't look like blood, it looks like ketchup or something. But in a black-and-white photograph of war you fill in the color in your mind and make blood blood-colored. In a way, it's sort of less artificial. By purging the work of color it actually makes them more naturalistic.

VC : Yeah, but naturally I didn't think of that either. What I know is that I didn't just wake up one day and say, I'm not going to use color. I slipped into it through drawing the photographs, which were black and white, because those were the only photographs available at the time. The second thing is that I do believe I wanted a more sombre not and I thought that color was an extra, as if I were decorating something.

CC : I understand that. I got rid of color because I felt I depended too much on it. I'd been told that I had a good sense of color and all that. It just occurred to me that the color I was using was learned color, was art color, it had something to do with other people's paintings. I could see wanting to get it out because it was reminiscent of a certain kind of art.

VC : That's right, though I often think that my thing of removing things was going too fast. Part of it was an intellectual series of decisions to remove stuff arrived at intuitively. Then I think it may just be my nature to throw stuff away.

CC : Let's talk about your nature. At one time, you described yourself as lazy. To look at your work, the last word to describe you as is lazy. When we started talking about compulsion you said that everyone would assume you're a very compulsive person. I don't think you're a very compulsive person, nor do I think I am. A compulsive person is driven to do things whether they want to do them or not. They have almost no control over themselves.

VC : Oh no, I'm not like that.

CC : I don't see you that way at all. I see that you force yourself to behave in a compulsive manner, that is, to sit there and keep doing it. But it doesn't come from some kind of compulsive drive.

VC : No, I don't think it's mindless compulsion.

CC : Do you think that people like your work for the wrong reasons?

VC : Who knows why people like work. At a certain point, you're very happy that people look at it at all; in that way it's good. My feeling is, however, that often people only look at the image. I feel that the image is just a sort of armature on which I hang my marks and make my art. The early imagery, especially the war things, had a more specific emotional tension, but most of my later imagery developed without choosing any specific kind of symbolic meaning. I don't use the ocean in any kind of symbolic way. These first broken-surface images were a way to articulate the surface of the drawing in a Cubist way: with individual marks that break up the surface and then build up into a whole.

CC : In your notebook you talk about building a painting: 'I build the work like a house, like a construction. Hah, all the materials pull together—When I was young I had a mechanical ability.' You could build whatever you wanted. I like to think the way I work is almost like knitting a painting, or something like that. I don't think of it as painting in layers, the way you talk about finding a way to get down to an armature for the individual marks to build upon. That's something that interests me a great deal.

VC : I have long been interested in building a form in the painting. It's hard to define the word form, but I wanted to make a work that was multidimensional and that went back and forth in space yet remained what it was: a small, concentrated area that was essentially flat. Who knows why you want to do this. So, in a way, I thought of painting as building a dense and multi-leveled structure. Now I tend to think of it only in physical terms, but you could say that it alludes to a denser experience of life. You have to re-imagine it in other terms, which is lead [graphite], paper, paint, and canvas. My feeling is that we all do essentially the same thing. I like to talk about it in terms of structuring because when I'm working, my instinct is to try to build and to fill. To fill something until it is really full.

CC : The last time we were together we were talking about how important the Abstract Expressionists had been for us—how we thought we learned from de Kooning, what we thought we learned from them. Now, most people looking at your work would not assume these people had played any seminal role in your deciding to make the kind of work that you make. Yet I see it as absolutely integral to what you do.

VC : Good, because I do too.

CC : Whether it's the all-overness of the American painting: doing away with foreground, middle distance, background, and making the whole surface...

VC : Right, although, I don't think that started with Abstract Expressionists. Another artist I look at carefully is Cézanne. Cézanne recognized and gave value to the space that is in front of you, here and now. It is not just an illustration of absent events, he did it self-consciously. The mark was a mark on the mountain; and that mark also indicated that atmosphere in which the mountain existed; and, finally, it is also a mark on the canvas. At a certain point I realized that this work, which can only allude to so much outside of itself, nevertheless remains comprehensible only through the organization of that flat arena. This is no limitation but an essential expressive element of painting. I think that the abstract expressionists, certainly de Kooning, knew that and used it. They added another subject, however, which was the unconscious—but, of course that's the subject you like to keep bringing up.

CC : I'm sorry, I'm the last person in the world to keep bringing this stuff up. I feel like I've really failed you. I hate it when people ask who my subjects are looking at, and what they are thinking, and who are these people. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a transcendent quality to your work and to all great art.

VC : What do you mean by transcendent?

CC : It's the magic of art that makes graphite more than just graphite. Look at her face, she'd going to ask for another interviewer! I don't see anything corny in that.

VC : So look at your work, maybe that's the nature of art. You do one thing and then something else always comes through.

CC : You stack up the bricks, and you build something that is more than just a pile of bricks. That’s what you’re doing; the approach is bricklaying. It is something that I respond to in your work.

VC : I would say that the work, beginning with the ocean drawings, is more like that. It really went into kind of rigorous building, and letting the material be the material. Letting the image be more and more like an armature. In some of these the image is almost nothing. It just holds you and it articulates the picture all over. See, I’m really interested in that. For some reason I’m able to do that over and over again without getting bored. 

Chuck Close in Conversation with Vija Celmins About Her Dense Yet Infinite Drawings. By Artspace Editors. Artspace,  April 19, 2017.


Also of interest :

The Artist Vija Celmins Conjures Sea and Sky With a Brush. By Randy Kennedy. The New YorkTimes , February 9, 2017.