SIGNS AND WONDERS: MARY HEILMANN CURATES
TIM GRIFFIN: We got the images you sent, but you’ll still probably have some conversations with our designer, Joseph Logan, in the next few days—just about how you see the different pictures sort of working with one another, how you want to see them laid out, what sorts of pairings you’d like to see. Even how many you imagine on a page.
MARY HEILMANN: OK, um, I’m good with that.
TG: And I might even ask you that right now, if you have any feelings about that.
MH: Uh, I haven’t thought about it too much, but I’m interested in doing that. I might even be able to . . . well, we’ll talk. And I’ve sent more images than we’re probably going to use.
TG: But, now, what was the arbiter, insofar as your selecting these particular images? What do you see as a common strand here?
MH: Well, the idea is still “signs and wonders.” And, um, I’m thinking about how images of things from high and low culture—and often from the culture of popular music—have, ever since I was little, set off my imagination to make me want to make artwork. And that the music, the structure of music, and the culture of music are really important to me. So, that explains why the Black Flag logo is in there, and uh, the Drifters, and like that. . . .
TG: By “structure,” you mean composition? Are there individual works that you would point to, or a compositional technique?
MH: Well, like, I mean that the way you can get an abstract feeling of emotion from the way music plays out is parallel to the way you can in non-image painting. That’s one thing. And then a song has a title, and my paintings have titles, so that they function as little poems to make the person have a thought about what the painting is about, even though it’s not a picture of something.
TG: Right. So how do you see titles inflecting your paintings? There’s Rude Boy, I know. And Hokusai, Game of Chance, Surfing on Acid . . . all of these are abstract works.
MH: I think that people read the title and they free-associate and come up with imaginings . . . like Rude Boy, they think of reggae and also of the Clash, and start channeling the ’80s. So that’s kind of like, not done in modernism, but is kind of postmodern.
TG: That’s interesting. How would you sort of distinguish what happens in modernism from your work?
MH: In modernism you weren’t supposed to have a subject matter like that. And now I’m thinking of Donald Judd and others, how [inaudible] they were about that. Their work wasn’t about anything but itself. And I totally don’t think that’s the case. I like to look at work—all work—from a lot of different perspectives, like, psychologically, when it comes to those guys.
TG: So you might say you offer sort of an abstraction steeped in reality. You begin to see something else in what’s before you.
MH: You could say that, yeah.
TG: OK, and I’m looking at this surf picture.
MH: I found that in a book about surf movie posters.
TG: And I guess, I mean, it might not have anything to do with the sprinkler.
MH: Oh, but it does. The wave and the sprinkler are both water and both opposites of the same shape.
TG: How do you see them working together?
MH: Well, in fact you can see the, um, the structure of lots of these images have that kind of splashing or pouring feeling to them. So what you would do, say, if you were writing about surf, or the sprinkler, is that you might start riffing on it the way you might talk about metaphors in a poem. And my practice, especially way back when Dave Hockney was my teacher, involved making sculpture that was poured or fell, or was a cutout of wood made into the image of a pour. And it tickled me when he first showed me that painting, where he was approximating the way a sprinkler looked, but in a very postmodern, clunky way.
TG: But, structurally, you’ve still got the surfer.
MH: Well, that little fellow, you see, he’s upside-down. But he’s not going to be in that position for long. Um, let’s see. Well, that sort of phases over to the, uh, the Hokusai wave. The culture of surfing is another big inspiration to me. I wasn’t doing the surfing—I was watching it and going to surf movies, where I was getting tons of pictures of waves that inspired my work.
Then I have Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown to relate to those things. And then there’s the Cory Arcangel “going into deep space” road related to video games. Actually, there’s a whole bunch of images here that have the “roads going into space” structure. When I was seven, we moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and got a car for the first time—road signs, neon signs, theater marquees, actually everything about the movies. And we often spotted movie and pop music stars on the street. All of that became symbolic of what was fabulous. And from then until now, it’s been the same. As it turns out, for me everything is a sign. My first love was writing . . . reading it and doing it. And then ceramics.
TG: And then there’s this Black Flag album cover.
MH: I like the little design, the tattoo design. I like that formally. I like the fact that the album cover is a sign representing the band. And then I like how the Black Flag culture percolated into the general culture, so every time you see a guy with that tattoo on his neck, or wherever, you are made to think about that band. That whole band culture—that kind of a noise-metal type of music—I like that for psychological reasons, for how in a fairly theatrical but also abstract way those kids, and men, too, show their developing emotions.
TG: They wear it on their sleeves, so to say.
MH: They wear it in a tribal way. They can identify each other. And I like that, just like art people separate themselves into groups or tribes.
TG: OK, my wheels are turning. Um, “Signs and Wonders,” your title, how do you see that figuring here?
MH: Well, the phrase “signs and wonders,” doesn’t that come from the Bible?
TG: Is that what happens at the end of the world or something?
MH: Is it? I think it’s someplace in either the New or the Old Testament. And then, the “signs and wonders” idea was in that show “Endgame.” Is that right?
TG: You know, it’s been a while for me.
MH: And then the other guy, Hal Foster, wrote a piece “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in which he’s saying it’s all hooey, that the “Pictures” guys, when they sort of . . . ugh. Anyway, on and on with signs and wonders. What it is for me is that I look at my pieces as linguistic signs. I put a sign out there, and it represents other things. And then you get the title, which kind of clues you in a little bit more. You get the context. Then you get a room full of work, which I really see as an installation or as a bit of dialogue, a sentence. When I put any piece of work out there—and this is one of my big things—I’m hoping to get a response, as if it’s a word. And that is what provoked me to be an artist way back—to join one or another group that I admired and wanted to be a part of.
TG: Great. I think we’ve got it.
MH: I’ll tell you one or two more things.
TG: OK.
MH: I came to New York expecting to align myself with the sculptors, like Smithson, and I came from Berkeley having done this, um, sort of post-Minimal sculpture, and I thought I would be part of that gang. Of course, that doesn’t happen so easily. I wasn’t invited into the Smithson/Serra gang. So I switched my practice rather vocally to painting, because they all hated painting. And so did I. And that was a kind of a linguistic gesture in a way.
TG: Yes.
MH: Because it was basically the same work, wall-based work, but I started calling it painting.
TG: But you started using paint.
MH: I had been dyeing the canvas and not stretching, but then I stretched one and got some paint.
TG: So, I’m going to ask you one more question because I can’t help myself: Millhouse?
MH: Yeah! Oh, I get a lot of my color inspiration from The Simpsons. I think those guys are just genius colorists. And, um, I shot that little picture off the TV set.
TG: I have to check the specs on that, to be sure we can actually use it.
MH: Legally or physically?
TG: Physically.
MH: Yeah, well, a lot of these pictures might be problematic to use.
TG: We’ll see.
MH: Now, can you do it really small?
TG: You want them small?
MH: Well, if a picture is really small, then we wouldn’t have to worry about the resolution so much.
TG: No, we’ll . . . I just haven’t checked into any of this stuff. I’ll check in with the folks here to see where we stand. You’ll definitely be hearing from Joseph.
MH: I’m going to be traveling, so he’ll use my cell phone.
TG: When do you hit the road?
MH: I go tomorrow and I come back Thursday. I’m going to Texas.
TG: Austin?
MH: No, I wish. I’m going to Houston to look at this museum, the CAM, because that’s the next place my show’s going. But that’ll be fun. Now, I wonder, do you have a folder from me with all the little pictures the way they look like on the computer screen?
TG: I’ve got a file here made by the photo editor and I just sort of clicked on them and opened them individually.
MH: And do they get bigger when you open them up in Photoshop? Or are they still little things like they always were, just about the size of postage stamps?
TG: Unfortunately, yes, they’re about the size of postage stamps, however I open them up, and they’re all JPEGS.
MH: So here’s the thing, and I’ll talk to Mister Joe, ah, Logan dude. It wouldn’t be so bad, you know, if we did it like a page off the computer. I don’t know. That could be kind of cute.
TG: Hmm.
