31 August 2010

Rachel Thern


1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Wow, I feel like I should come up with a creative answer, like "on a wooded hillside, hung on the sides of trees", but I don't actually make site-specific work so really a plain wall without too much distraction is fine.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
This is a really interesting question - I like to think that art reminds us there are things not describable in words, hence the difficulty of writing an artist statement. If the purpose of an artist's art were easily put into words, the artist would have become a writer. But our senses take place before words, and emotions do, and our thoughts form in a preverbal way before we put them into words. So there's a whole range of stuff in internal and external reality that art is a direct expression and communication of; its purpose being is therefore very broad but also hard to pin down.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I don't ask anything except to take the time to look, and if it doesn't interest you, not even that. I put a lot into it, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily owed anything.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
In my interpretation this was a rebellion against most previous art which had been focused predominantly on visual depiction as the be-all and end-all. Especially in the academic art where there was an emphasis on depicting certain things a correct way, and if you followed all the rules, you would get a certain result. For example, if you look at certain paintings in a museum the leaves on the trees are all painted a certain way regardless of how far away the tree is, and the painting has an overall sameness to it,  so it's a case where the artist will have a bag of tricks and if they use them right they'll get the desired result, the painting will look decent. And if they're a talented artist, all these visual tricks/methods will be well-integrated and will add up to more than the sum of the parts. But some of the point of modernity is that we're free to think of  the whole first, consider the whole work of art and its purpose, your own process and desired end result. We're freed from having to depend solely on recreating a preplanned visual experience. 

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
While everything looks pluralistic to us, there are probably a set of similarities among works made currently that will make people in the future think "that looks so 2010". A future art historian will make up terms for art with these characteristics, and if we're alive, we might be puzzled - artists don't always get to name their own movements, or they may not pick the name that sticks.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
You already asked all the hard questions so I wish you'd ask an easy one, like why I love oil pastels.  They can do a lot of things like oil paint or soft pastels. Since they don't dry, I can continue working on my different pieces at any rate I feel like, as time and mood allow.  Some people only remember cray-pas and are tempted to use oil pastels like crayons. Don't do this -  think of them as you would paint.

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