Rebecca Morris ON:PTG Panel lecture text The College Art Association Annual Conference 2010, Chicago, IL

Making a good painting is one of hardest things you’ll do. When I see a really really good one I am reminded of this in a way that hurts, like a punch. At DIA Beacon there is a Robert Ryman room that stands as visual testimony to this fact: Painting: hard as hell. Specifically it’s the small Ryman canvas with the drawn charcoal grid that causes me this acute pain. Simple, smart, easy, brilliant. What’s nutty is how different the Ryman collection is at the Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen Switzerland. This museum is the Swiss doppelganger to DIA Beacon: both have their 1960s/ 70s art installed in converted industrial buildings near rivers. Where the DIA’s Ryman collection is all minimalism and purity hung in one un-modulated row, Schauffhausen’s Ryman collection is freaky-deaky. It’s about every whack-ass exception Ryman and then showing them salon style.

Where happiness holds a bad reputation in contributing towards good art-making, I believe that “joy”--a totally different experience--is the real secret to good painting. One of my most joyous experiences of 2009 involved a trip via the Evelyn Car Service from Clinton Hill Brooklyn to Penn Station. The immaculate, all-black Lincoln Town Car arrived at 7 am sharp and the driver, a man in his mid 50s, was equally sharp: sweater vest, tie, driving cap. I sat in the soft cushy leather upholstery of the backseat, rolling along on the floating suspension system of this big American car, while George Benson’s “Give me the Night” played on the radio. The flow of the car, the music, and NYC became one and I literally felt a tear of joy run down my cheek. These days, all I have to do is play that song and I can channel that moment and feel invincible.

In Manhattan, there is a Trump Building somewhere on the lower west side whose lobby displays several insane Frank Stella wall reliefs. These works alone cause me panic and admiration. They break away from any decent and cogent sense of aesthetics and out do the eighties before the 80s even existed. This particular lobby space is a mausoleum of marble—I believe five different varieties are present. Laid down in stripes of cream and veiny bog green squares on the floor, there are sheets of marble lining the walls, each with a Stella mounted firmly in its center. The space is vast and ugly, the architecture ridiculous alone and even more so in combination with the paintings. Everything is a total mess. A completely horrible, fantastic and wonderful mess.

Intention. This is a tricky thing in painting. You spend the first part of your life as an artist trying to develop it. However, once you grow up a bit, get out of school, live some life, stop talking and just do, you hopefully catch on to what your work is supposed to be.

But soon enough you know too much. You know how you think, what you’re likely to do, and, if it’s a really bad case, you’ll even know how you’ll erase and undo. So how do you catch a break from your own intention? This is the problem for the mid-career artist. You need to figure out how to approach things in new ways, working against yourself and possibly without letting yourself know this is your plan.

The work you make during the brief period of getting close to fully understanding your intention while still not having it down all the way are those amazing early moments of ones “work”. These can never be replayed or redone, which is why they are filled with so much magic and potential. The struggle is visible and it looks great! You can feel the thinking. An example of this might be Eva Hesse’s sculptural wall pieces, which she made in Germany in 1964-65 right as she segwayed into sculpture officially. The work vibrates.

In my most recent work I have been concerned with the elemental, forms that are significantly earth bound. I am building a language through intuitive marks, shapes and colors. I don’t know if it’s a kind of hieroglyphics or symbolism: it is not clear to me right now and at this point, I am not so sure that it needs a name or category. I am just aware of being involved in some sort of searching, a separating out of forms. In my mind I see these forms as being pulled out of a hulking mass and then dispersed once again, in fact sprinkled. This act of sprinkling is a kind of new compositional format. I am still in the thick of it, so it’s all very nerve wracking. I take this as a good sign.

I started by saying that making a good painting is the hardest thing. The trick, of course is to make more than one good one—or at least to go down trying. And in my thinking here, the opposite of good isn’t bad, or even failure, but mediocrity: the darkest of categories, the evil lord—who is always lurking. Failure, it should be noted, is a kind of progress and, in the best case scenario, it’s an educated step backwards or sideways. So Smother me with failure so I can charge back up and out again!! Oh, the high. But the challenges keep coming. So you’ve done a few shows, worked for 20 years. How do you pull off a 9th solo show? Or 15th? These are the issues dealt with in the life-long practice—the one I’ve signed up for. Please wish me luck.