Module 4 - An Interview with artist David Hornung

Michael James Author

10/25/2018 Added

179 Plays

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In the early 1980s, David Hornung made visionary nontraditional quilts that set a very high bar for achievement in the domain of the so-called "art quilt." This conversation explores his thinking about quilts and quilt art, and touches on why he abandoned quilts to return to painting as his studio practice.

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[00:00:00.364](contemporary music)
[00:00:14.770]My interview guest today is David Hornung,
[00:00:17.140]a painter and an art educator
[00:00:19.050]who currently serves as associate professor and chair
[00:00:22.160]in the Department of Art and Art History
[00:00:24.740]at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York.
[00:00:27.640]David received his Master of Fine Arts degree
[00:00:30.550]from the University of Wisconsin Madison,
[00:00:33.020]where he also earned a Master of Arts degree in art
[00:00:35.950]after completing his undergraduate studies
[00:00:37.910]at the University of Delaware.
[00:00:39.592]David also spent an undergraduate year abroad,
[00:00:42.880]studying at St. Martin's School of Art in London.
[00:00:45.581]David Hornung has taught subjects
[00:00:48.260]ranging from foundation design and color
[00:00:50.400]to print to drawing and painting
[00:00:52.730]in numerous institutions, including Brooklyn College,
[00:00:55.413]the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence,
[00:00:58.210]the New York Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute,
[00:01:01.438]Parsons School of Design,
[00:01:03.096]Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York,
[00:01:05.940]and Indiana University in Bloomington.
[00:01:08.160]He has worked as a colorist for Time Warner DC Comics
[00:01:11.337]in New York City, as a freelance textile designer,
[00:01:15.400]and as an art reviewer for Art News Magazine.
[00:01:18.253]For a number of years in the early 1980s,
[00:01:21.340]David worked as a quilt maker, fabricating studio quilts
[00:01:25.030]that took the basic form of the traditional quilt
[00:01:28.090]and translated its conventional imagery
[00:01:30.520]into new and provocative works.
[00:01:32.970]These pieced, appliqued, and quilted panels
[00:01:36.100]fused the vocabularies of modernist surface organization
[00:01:39.789]and expression with the humble materials and techniques
[00:01:43.280]of the patchwork quilt.
[00:01:45.097]In my opinion, these were among the most adventurous
[00:01:48.080]and authoritative of the so called art quilts
[00:01:50.950]of that period.
[00:01:52.270]David has written numerous articles and catalog essays
[00:01:55.560]about the nontraditional quilt,
[00:01:57.660]including the main essay in Nancy Crow at Crossroads,
[00:02:01.880]published in 2007 by the Breckling Press,
[00:02:04.446]and an article about my own work,
[00:02:06.890]Michael James, the Dematerialized Quilt,
[00:02:09.590]that appeared in Fiber Arts Magazine in 1990.
[00:02:13.160]His interest in quilts and their aesthetics,
[00:02:15.840]their making, and in the cultures
[00:02:17.720]from which quilt-making practices have developed
[00:02:21.060]has informed his teaching throughout more
[00:02:23.260]than the 30 years that he's worked as an art educator.
[00:02:27.351]So David, in the early 1980s, you were making quilts
[00:02:30.930]of a very different kind than had been made
[00:02:32.760]up to that point.
[00:02:34.440]Can you tell us first a little bit
[00:02:36.290]about how you came to that medium and how that work
[00:02:39.950]progressed during the time that you were involved with it?
[00:02:42.691]Sure, I started, well, from the age of 20
[00:02:48.390]to the age of 30, I was an abstract painter,
[00:02:50.550]and I was doing large scale process based abstract painting,
[00:02:54.645]where I would pour the paint out on plastic sheets,
[00:02:59.378]and when it dried, it's acrylic paint.
[00:03:02.669]And I would be able to pick up pieces of paint
[00:03:05.260]and glue them, collage, in a collage manner to the canvases.
[00:03:09.380]So there was an integration visually
[00:03:11.330]of the applied shape and the given ground,
[00:03:15.430]which was actually usually a brushed grid.
[00:03:18.987]When I was 30, I started to wonder about
[00:03:21.850]making abstraction more accessible
[00:03:23.400]by placing it in a more,
[00:03:24.930]a warmer, more accessible context.
[00:03:27.405]And actually I had seen, about that time,
[00:03:31.500]I was teaching art at a small summer arts school
[00:03:34.750]in Naples, New York.
[00:03:36.100]It was run by a guy called Ken Pool.
[00:03:38.595]And during the course of my time there
[00:03:41.600]I saw a presentation by Beth Gutcheon
[00:03:43.410]about the burgeoning studio quilt movement,
[00:03:46.940]which was really at its inception in those days.
[00:03:49.095]And in fact, one of the people I saw on that show was you,
[00:03:53.860]and I saw, I mean not you personally, but I saw your work.
[00:03:56.650]And I came away from that slideshow
[00:03:58.530]feeling that this would be,
[00:04:01.010]I could see how what I was doing
[00:04:02.390]in painting really would translate very well to this medium.
[00:04:05.910]And of course I didn't know anything about sewing,
[00:04:07.870]so that was a bit of a setback.
[00:04:10.490]And I suspected if I had the same idea at age 58,
[00:04:13.290]I probably would have just said no, never mind.
[00:04:15.570]But when you're young, you're willing to try anything.
[00:04:18.261]So I just threw myself into it.
[00:04:21.268]I basically just tried to duplicate
[00:04:23.750]the process I used in painting.
[00:04:26.961]There's a little difference because
[00:04:29.140]I actually pieced the basic picture plane together,
[00:04:32.690]the background picture plane,
[00:04:34.370]out of large pieces of fabric,
[00:04:37.200]sort of in a traditional piecing style,
[00:04:39.460]but very simple, very rudimentary.
[00:04:41.280]And then I appliqued most of the other shapes on top of it,
[00:04:44.598]trying as much as I could to integrate visually
[00:04:48.320]the applique with the background piecing.
[00:04:50.690]I also looked at a lot of
[00:04:54.318]traditional quilts at that time.
[00:04:56.720]And that opened a whole new world to me.
[00:04:58.680]And I was just totally seduced
[00:05:01.368]by the visual richness of those things,
[00:05:03.560]and the visual,
[00:05:06.210]the beauty at the top and the designs at the top
[00:05:09.430]and then the second level of payload,
[00:05:11.380]which is the quilt pattern itself,
[00:05:13.360]and the way those things were integrated.
[00:05:14.970]I mean it was really
[00:05:16.777]a revolutionary visual experience for me.
[00:05:19.388]Do you think that
[00:05:21.011]it was successful in providing an entree
[00:05:24.760]for people who didn't have
[00:05:26.840]a depth of familiarity or knowledge of
[00:05:31.492]20th century modernist art?
[00:05:34.944]Do you think the fact of it being this
[00:05:40.260]sort of vernacular form,
[00:05:42.090]did that help them understand better
[00:05:44.680]or accept better the type of imagery
[00:05:46.895]on your surfaces?
[00:05:48.720]In other words, did my plan work?
[00:05:49.980]Yeah, (laughs) exactly.
[00:05:51.308]Actually, it's very curious because
[00:05:55.030]once I started doing that, I got drawn into this debate
[00:05:58.070]I was completely unaware of,
[00:05:59.290]which was the debate about craft versus art.
[00:06:01.810]And once I made, in fact, some of my painting friends,
[00:06:05.180]when I showed them the quilts,
[00:06:06.270]they said oh, you're making rags now?
[00:06:07.941](laughs)
[00:06:09.890]And I don't think they meant that
[00:06:10.950]in the best sense of the word.
[00:06:13.850]In fact, it gave me a different audience in a way.
[00:06:17.230]But I don't think it solved the problem per se,
[00:06:20.932]yeah, it's an interesting thing and it's a question
[00:06:24.600]that still plagues the medium.
[00:06:27.215]And it may be one reason why
[00:06:28.830]I ultimately stopped making quilts in 85.
[00:06:30.880]I just felt it had been ghettoized so much.
[00:06:33.564]So I guess the answer is it didn't really work,
[00:06:37.900]but the pieces that I made, I felt were successful
[00:06:41.160]in terms of my goals and I actually evolved
[00:06:44.410]within my quilting sensibility in a way that I wouldn't have
[00:06:47.250]had I only done it in painting.
[00:06:49.097]Sure, sure.
[00:06:50.800]You've described in an unpublished paper
[00:06:53.290]a classification you called art in the third category,
[00:06:57.110]in which objects like non-traditional quilts
[00:06:59.770]could be placed.
[00:07:01.210]Can you talk a little bit about this notion?
[00:07:03.820]Yeah, this has a lot to do with what
[00:07:05.030]I was just talking about.
[00:07:06.780]It's very clear,
[00:07:09.918]it's very interesting 'cause I was heavily influenced
[00:07:12.730]by the Bauhaus, and my great heroes, I mean,
[00:07:15.450]in addition to the abstract expressionists
[00:07:16.860]when I was a young man, were people
[00:07:18.230]like Paul Clay and Anni Albers.
[00:07:20.267]And one thing I always loved about the Bauhaus was
[00:07:22.565]that there was this flattening of hierarchies
[00:07:25.140]between the applied and the fine arts.
[00:07:27.045]And to be honest with you, I think I was innocent
[00:07:30.240]of the realities of the art world of my own time.
[00:07:33.050]I was just sort of going along with the rather
[00:07:36.260]innocent idea that everyone accepted this
[00:07:38.920]free flow between fine art and design.
[00:07:41.349]So I came apart against it when I started doing the quilts
[00:07:44.950]and I liked to write and I used to like to formulate
[00:07:49.330]my thinking through writing essays,
[00:07:51.417]and I gave it a lot of thought
[00:07:53.600]and I came up with the conclusion that the problem
[00:07:56.880]with the kinds of things I was doing
[00:07:59.310]and the kind of things that famous weaving artists
[00:08:01.760]were doing and in fact you were doing,
[00:08:03.880]was that even though we were working as fine artist work,
[00:08:08.105]for example, we were working in a very experimental way
[00:08:11.140]vis a vis the idiom and we were working for
[00:08:16.860]not just decorative purposes, we were trying to embody
[00:08:19.312]larger issues and sort of in a way
[00:08:25.270]embody the spirit of our time
[00:08:27.140]in the things we were making.
[00:08:28.670]Even though that was the case, there was always
[00:08:31.410]with any object that has a craft history,
[00:08:33.871]the history itself present in the work.
[00:08:36.923]So no matter what a quilted wall hanging looks like,
[00:08:41.549]part of its content is always gonna be
[00:08:44.220]the history of quiltmaking and particularly
[00:08:46.430]its domestic overtones and its gender specific history.
[00:08:49.916]It carries a lot of baggage with it.
[00:08:51.885]There are strategies people have used and can use,
[00:08:55.223]subvert that, like for example,
[00:08:56.990]you can make quilts out of rubber.
[00:08:59.276]You can try to do it that way,
[00:09:01.390]or you could make something that doesn't really look
[00:09:04.370]like a quilt but is only a quilt
[00:09:05.657]and that it's a three layer object that's held together
[00:09:08.300]by some, could be safety pins.
[00:09:10.988]Or, beg your pardon?
[00:09:13.290]It's been done. It's been done, of course.
[00:09:14.180]I didn't even know that.
[00:09:15.761]Another thing you can do is to
[00:09:17.360]radically alter the shape of the quilt.
[00:09:19.070]So you frustrate that immediate association of bed covers.
[00:09:22.538]Hanging on a wall of course is a step in that direction.
[00:09:25.820]But there's something different about the way,
[00:09:27.840]no matter how beautiful a traditional quilt is,
[00:09:30.955]its home is on top of a bed.
[00:09:33.240]And that's where it really lives,
[00:09:34.530]and a studio quilt's home is really on the wall,
[00:09:38.250]like a painting.
[00:09:39.595]But because of its associations with the bed cover,
[00:09:43.404]it presents problems for people in the art world who,
[00:09:48.199]you have to remember about the art world,
[00:09:50.580]there's a lot of money involved.
[00:09:52.670]A lot of money, and the keepers of the gates
[00:09:56.530]are very careful about what can be promoted
[00:09:59.290]as culturally significant enough to be worth
[00:10:02.330]so much more than the labor power that went into
[00:10:04.980]its making or the cost of the materials.
[00:10:07.598]It's sort of a Marxist analysis but
[00:10:09.802]and they were unwilling, I mean they're always unwilling
[00:10:12.490]to admit new things.
[00:10:14.160]And if they can categorically relegate
[00:10:17.194]this other category of objects to the ghetto of craft,
[00:10:22.770]then they'll do that.
[00:10:23.810]My idea about the third category was
[00:10:25.440]I was proposing again with a kind of absurd innocence
[00:10:28.690]the idea that well, why don't we
[00:10:30.500]just declare a third category?
[00:10:32.560]Artists that are hybrids or amalgams
[00:10:34.760]that sort of use the domestic content
[00:10:37.300]as part of the content, but riff off of that
[00:10:41.100]and kind of bounce off of that.
[00:10:42.930]And it's interesting because nowadays,
[00:10:45.499]artists like Mike Kelly are using craft associations
[00:10:50.340]in a similarly self conscious way
[00:10:53.276]but they're using it ironically
[00:10:55.717]and parenthetically, and in some ways,
[00:10:58.030]even in a derogatory way.
[00:11:02.440]And that's the difference between I think the
[00:11:05.330]artists who are making pseudo quilts
[00:11:06.710]back in the 70s and 80s and people who were doing
[00:11:09.033]quote unquote craft like objects
[00:11:11.390]under the age of post modernism today.
[00:11:13.720]We were sincere but we weren't ironic.
[00:11:16.590]Yeah, we were ironic procedurally possible.
[00:11:19.370]There was irony and real self awareness
[00:11:23.470]but we took what we did seriously and we believed,
[00:11:26.250]there was almost like a moral imperative there
[00:11:28.930]that is clearly out of fashion today.
[00:11:31.239]Beauty is another contested notion
[00:11:36.130]in this pluralistic age when so much
[00:11:38.810]of our cultural perspectives are seen as relative.
[00:11:41.623]What does your own concept of beauty look like?
[00:11:46.729]And let me add also that if we think of perception
[00:11:51.390]as a reciprocal act, the thing, whatever it is
[00:11:55.530]sending out signals, the eye in the mind
[00:11:57.900]receiving the signals, they eye in the mind in turn
[00:12:00.380]sending back reactions or responses,
[00:12:02.999]what degree do you think of beauty
[00:12:05.520]as perceived or contrived?
[00:12:07.438]Well, there are all kinds of beauty.
[00:12:09.180]I mean, there's the cultural standards.
[00:12:11.188]And everybody is shaped to some degree by that.
[00:12:14.523]And then there are personal standards
[00:12:16.949]and traditionally, artists especially the 20th century,
[00:12:22.852]their styles to some extent
[00:12:26.290]depended upon the eccentricity of the definition.
[00:12:29.148]Someone like Paul Clay taught us to appreciate
[00:12:33.689]the beauty of reducing referential imagery
[00:12:38.782]down to simple geometric shapes.
[00:12:41.364]He taught us how to appreciate the inherent beauty
[00:12:44.270]in the drawing of children, for example.
[00:12:46.326]So to some extent, it used to be said that
[00:12:48.560]art teaches us about beauty and teaches us
[00:12:52.050]to find beauty in unexpected places.
[00:12:53.831]Today there is, there are a million reasons
[00:13:00.050]and we don't have time to get into this
[00:13:01.860]but there's a fashion, it's very hard to talk about beauty
[00:13:05.340]with contemporary students.
[00:13:07.300]It's considered shallow and trivial and self indulgent.
[00:13:10.474]I think like words like morality and spirituality
[00:13:14.210]are also in that category.
[00:13:16.300]It's too embarrassing,
[00:13:17.590]maybe there's too many people on the planet.
[00:13:19.330]Maybe we're a little reluctant to let ourselves
[00:13:21.280]be as vulnerable as we used to be.
[00:13:22.921]We're less trusting in a weird way.
[00:13:25.476]But to answer the bigger macrocosmic question,
[00:13:31.930]I wonder how you can use any other measure,
[00:13:35.642]when you're in the studio making art.
[00:13:37.971]I mean even if you're a person,
[00:13:39.750]even if you're a grunge sort of, and this really dates me,
[00:13:42.860]I sound like a dinosaur talking about mammals but,
[00:13:45.241](laughs)
[00:13:46.270]even if you're like a goth person and your idea of beauty
[00:13:49.120]is a safety pin through your nose
[00:13:50.500]and spiky orange hair and one eyebrow,
[00:13:52.714]it's still an idea of beauty.
[00:13:56.330]It's like I really do believe that young people today
[00:13:59.050]that do body alterations, for the most part,
[00:14:01.779]they don't think it's ugly.
[00:14:03.900]They think it actually is an aesthetic.
[00:14:06.380]It's not an anti-aesthetic.
[00:14:07.733]And I know that because when we were young
[00:14:09.890]and we were growing our hair long,
[00:14:11.130]our parents all felt we were growing it long to annoy them
[00:14:13.970]when in fact we just thought it looked really cool.
[00:14:16.770]It was an aesthetic.
[00:14:17.670]So I personally can't understand a person
[00:14:20.070]going to the studio and saying I'm gonna make something
[00:14:21.920]that I think is just revolting.
[00:14:23.996]Now I'm not saying people don't do this.
[00:14:26.117]I think Damian Hurst is an artist that
[00:14:29.070]trades in that, and very profitably so.
[00:14:32.219]There's even a kind of beauty in--
[00:14:34.157]Well, the beauty of the gesture.
[00:14:36.400]A lot of his work. The beauty of the gesture.
[00:14:38.325]It's like his anarchy is something
[00:14:39.690]that has an aesthetic basis perhaps.
[00:14:41.620]Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:42.453]But in the end, we may be getting down to semantics here,
[00:14:45.010]but I just think that artists make art
[00:14:48.310]out of a positive incentive.
[00:14:49.970]And it's somewhat unreachable incentive,
[00:14:51.730]I think that you can't sustain yourself
[00:14:54.087]aiming at something that's immediately obtainable.
[00:14:57.578]The idea of beauty was always a good one
[00:14:59.780]because it had with it the kind of idea that
[00:15:02.180]it would be unobtainable, perpetually unobtainable.
[00:15:04.610]Perfection's another one.
[00:15:06.160]But I wanna throw out something else about beauty.
[00:15:08.133]I think of beauty as a metaphor for other more nourishing
[00:15:14.780]abstractions like justice
[00:15:17.260]and truth
[00:15:20.110]and just like a rightness,
[00:15:22.550]a rightness in the world and in the cosmos.
[00:15:25.060]I don't mean this in a religious sense,
[00:15:27.560]I mean it more in a philosophical sense.
[00:15:29.040]I think that the reason beautiful people
[00:15:32.420]startle us and get somewhat of a free pass
[00:15:36.730]through life as long as they remain so,
[00:15:38.710]and that's a known fact, people have written about that.
[00:15:40.370]We all know that.
[00:15:41.890]There's just something disarming
[00:15:43.000]about extraordinary physical beauty.
[00:15:45.083]I don't think it's beauty per se that unhorses us.
[00:15:49.470]I think there's something about beauty that reminds us
[00:15:52.220]of our own failure or our own longing for a sense of
[00:15:57.990]perfection or not even perfection but rightness
[00:16:00.387]and judgment and being judged in a fair way,
[00:16:05.290]fairness, so I really see beauty as a very powerful idea
[00:16:09.642]that's very human, very elemental,
[00:16:12.070]probably as old as the sticks, and it's out of fashion now
[00:16:16.250]but it'll probably come back in fashion.
[00:16:17.620]What about the notion of integrity?
[00:16:19.160]Is that linked--
[00:16:20.150]Integrity's another abstraction,
[00:16:21.810]like truth and justice.
[00:16:23.877]And integrity is--
[00:16:25.580]But in a sense, I think of integrity as a place
[00:16:27.950]where truth and justice kind of embed themselves.
[00:16:30.710]Well, integrity is something you can practice.
[00:16:33.731]You can practice justice if you're a judge.
[00:16:36.554]And integrity is something an artist can practice.
[00:16:39.336]So artists, a lot of artists form ideas
[00:16:41.870]about the integrity of their process, of the integrity
[00:16:44.330]of the way they handle themselves professionally.
[00:16:46.636]Yeah, integrity is a personal guideline.
[00:16:50.732]Since we live in a society of interconnectedness,
[00:16:54.568]integrity turns out to be a very practical rule of life.
[00:16:58.774]Even if you think we're all completely Machiavellian,
[00:17:01.115]it's probably a good idea.
[00:17:03.066]But I think integrity is an art idea too.
[00:17:05.269]And it's something that's very persuasive in a work of art.
[00:17:08.415]Martin Puryear is an artist too I would use
[00:17:11.000]as an extraordinary example of that.
[00:17:12.700]I think his work is a lifelong achievement
[00:17:15.546]based on a kind of titanic personal
[00:17:19.783]and intellectual integrity.
[00:17:21.867]Okay.
[00:17:24.470]In a recent article entitled Discovering the Quilts
[00:17:29.270]of Gee's Bend, spelled with a slash to separate
[00:17:32.791]and emphasize the covering function of quilts,
[00:17:36.127]Discovering the Quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama
[00:17:39.110]that appeared in the Journal of Modern Craft,
[00:17:41.605]the art historian Anna Chave's lengthy analysis
[00:17:46.530]of this phenomenon, the rise of the Gee's Bend adulation,
[00:17:50.637]it ended with this paragraph, I wanna quote
[00:17:53.460]the whole paragraph 'cause I think it's significant
[00:17:56.890]and it was really the summation of her argument.
[00:17:59.205]She wrote, none of this is to say that Gee's Bend
[00:18:03.530]finest quilts are not every bit as visually sophisticated
[00:18:06.907]as art critics say, much less that they do not deserve to be
[00:18:12.310]valued financially and otherwise as much as high art.
[00:18:17.830]Of course the quilt makers' works ought to be collected,
[00:18:20.710]preserved, displayed, and acclaimed,
[00:18:22.983]but acclaimed for what they really represent.
[00:18:26.628]Among the destabilizing tidings that these poignant
[00:18:30.800]textiles finally bring is that craft
[00:18:33.588]no longer be presumed to be mere relative to art
[00:18:39.950]in the difference between what it is to choose to realize
[00:18:43.260]an artwork and what it is to proceed to
[00:18:46.820]or to have to assemble and sew a bed cover
[00:18:50.488]in that undiscovered place lies much
[00:18:54.550]of the quilt's particularity and character.
[00:18:58.034]Gee's Bend's songs are as compelling, as layered,
[00:19:02.670]as moving, and as exciting as art can be, or more so.
[00:19:07.975]But they do not amount to art because they amount to
[00:19:12.070]something else just as complex and complexly aesthetic.
[00:19:17.670]That something else warrants less knowing into
[00:19:21.864]and more inquiry.
[00:19:25.270]So my question I guess is to what extent
[00:19:28.154]do you think this argument could be applied to
[00:19:31.470]all traditional quilts?
[00:19:34.090]Well, first of all, I read the article
[00:19:35.260]and there are other paragraphs you didn't read
[00:19:37.560]that were very revealing.
[00:19:38.980]There's two things,
[00:19:41.273]I mean, it's a wonderful article and Anne--
[00:19:44.856]Chaves. Anne Chaves
[00:19:47.080]is a very intelligent writer.
[00:19:49.070]And in the end, it is a semantic argument,
[00:19:51.070]because we're talking about what we can call art,
[00:19:53.239]what objects can we attach this word to.
[00:19:56.264]I would say that academic writers
[00:20:01.799]tend to favor the intellectual over the emotional.
[00:20:05.560]I always say what they're trying to do is akin to the left
[00:20:08.500]brain trying to understand what the right brain does
[00:20:10.950]and how it does it.
[00:20:12.735]And naturally, the left brain will honor the constructs
[00:20:16.730]that it understands and disavow the importance of constructs
[00:20:20.790]that are on the other hemisphere.
[00:20:22.477]I think that,
[00:20:26.402]and it's no way to prove,
[00:20:27.830]there's no way that either of us are right,
[00:20:30.270]but I would rather be generous with the term art.
[00:20:32.890]And the reason I would call what the Gee's Bend quilters do
[00:20:36.570]and what traditional artists and vernacular artists
[00:20:39.480]and self taught artists do, the reason I would call it art
[00:20:43.741]is two things, one is it functions as art in their world
[00:20:47.630]in a sense the Gee's Bend quilters for example
[00:20:49.899]visit each other's houses and show each other
[00:20:53.310]the latest things they're making.
[00:20:54.950]Now they make other things besides quilts.
[00:20:57.780]They make clothes, and they probably
[00:21:01.550]do a little rude carpentry.
[00:21:03.070]But that's not what they show each other,
[00:21:05.350]the quilts really are a subject of aesthetic discussion.
[00:21:10.635]However untrained the discussion is,
[00:21:15.315]and the second thing is, these objects when they're
[00:21:20.190]taken out of context actually feel like art to me.
[00:21:24.110]Now I'm a person, I'm more like the writer of this article,
[00:21:27.130]I'm a person who works in and lives in academia
[00:21:29.680]and I've done some art writing, I know her,
[00:21:32.310]I know where her arguments are coming from.
[00:21:34.200]And I respect it.
[00:21:35.848]But I also, and I would like to think that
[00:21:39.070]this writer also has this kind of experience,
[00:21:41.511]I'm also capable of going to a show
[00:21:43.740]like the Gee's Bend Quilt Show, which I did go to,
[00:21:45.990]and having a completely visceral reaction.
[00:21:48.760]I really believe that if I had seen that quilt unannounced,
[00:21:52.834]in another context, I would have had the same
[00:21:56.430]visceral response to it that I have to a Rothko.
[00:22:00.260]And I know this from my own experience
[00:22:03.480]that there are people who are capable of having,
[00:22:06.530]many people, having aesthetic experiences with objects
[00:22:10.180]without the verbal trust that the literature provides
[00:22:14.330]or the pedigree that the art market seems to demand.
[00:22:18.782]So it was something else I was gonna say about that.
[00:22:22.090]But that's okay.
[00:22:23.080]I wanted, you just made me think of something.
[00:22:25.640]Yesterday we walked through an exhibition that
[00:22:28.354]has been hanging in a gallery on campus
[00:22:32.620]for the last couple of months.
[00:22:35.213]And it's soon to be history.
[00:22:39.610]A show called Visual Systems, the Quilter's Eye,
[00:22:42.660]which was curated by Peggy Derick,
[00:22:44.710]one of our textile history quilt studies graduate students.
[00:22:48.750]And in that exhibition is a large piece by Dorothy Caldwell
[00:22:54.300]called A Lake A Bowl, it's part of the collection
[00:22:56.960]of the International Quilt Studies Center,
[00:22:58.290]and it was the first time that you encountered
[00:23:01.120]Dorothy's work in the cloth and
[00:23:04.120]I would discover your reaction as very visceral.
[00:23:06.704]Can you comment on that?
[00:23:08.899]Yeah. Especially in light
[00:23:10.600]of what we've just been talking about.
[00:23:12.170]Yeah, and it's interesting, for my own part,
[00:23:14.623]I tend to be attracted to art that's both,
[00:23:17.610]that has some sort of intellectual appeal
[00:23:19.940]and visceral appeal.
[00:23:21.480]Those are the things I often respond to.
[00:23:23.696]I like jazz for example.
[00:23:25.826]Bur I think academia in general
[00:23:29.020]we put too much emphasis on the intellectual
[00:23:30.940]at the complete expense of the emotional
[00:23:33.700]and psychological, I guess you would say.
[00:23:36.120]Caldwell's piece, I've been thinking
[00:23:39.310]about it a lot since then.
[00:23:40.700]It just kind of pulled the rug out from under me,
[00:23:42.747]and it felt like that.
[00:23:43.780]I was unprepared for the scale,
[00:23:45.940]I was unprepared for really the details
[00:23:49.150]'cause I'd only seen it reproduced at a very small scale.
[00:23:51.727]The way she uses the whole piece as an arena
[00:23:56.564]of sort of discovery and activity and performance,
[00:24:00.242]sort of like, a little like abstract expressionism,
[00:24:03.080]but also in this somewhat, the distance quality
[00:24:07.350]of quilt making is sort of like,
[00:24:09.510]it's not like making it more directly.
[00:24:10.910]There's an indirectness to it.
[00:24:12.960]So the more spontaneity and indirect object like this has,
[00:24:17.010]the more paradoxical it becomes.
[00:24:18.800]And sometimes the larger it is,
[00:24:20.220]the more paradoxical that spontaneity is.
[00:24:22.650]Sure, sure,
[00:24:24.130]and that's definitely the defining character of that piece,
[00:24:26.547]it seems instantaneous, it seems totally spontaneous.
[00:24:31.084]And yet at the same time,
[00:24:32.310]it's exquisitely and almost painfully worked
[00:24:35.391]in terms of the techniques that she's used
[00:24:38.870]and all of the various kinds of textile manipulations
[00:24:42.140]that she's done.
[00:24:43.360]Well, I wanna thank you for
[00:24:45.570]sharing your thoughts and insights with us.
[00:24:48.035]We really appreciate it.
[00:24:49.610]Thank you.

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Module 4 - An Interview with artist David Hornung

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