May 29, 2014
Artist Judy Pfaff has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, and now, 10 years after the MacArthur, she has yet another feather to put in her cap: the International Sculpture Center’s 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award. Pfaff, a longtime professor of the arts at Bard and co-director of the college’s Studio Arts Program, has the added pleasure of sharing the honor with her close friend and fellow sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, who also is being recognized by the ISC (stay tuned for an upcoming article about von Rydingsvard). “We have both known each other since I started teaching at Yale in 1980 or 1981,” said Pfaff. “We shared a studio in Brooklyn for 26 years.” While she characterized von Rydingsvard “as the quintessential sculptor,” Pfaff noted that her own installations and assemblages evolved out of painting. Hence the award points to the cross-over tendencies of sculpture in recent years, especially evident in the “much more hybrid” sculptures of the younger generation, who are deploying video, performance and other nontraditional approaches, she noted.
The ISC calls Pfaff “a pioneer of site-specific installation art in the 1970s.” It further noted in a press release that she “combines painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and architecture to create works that are equally dependent on intense planning and improvisation,” pieces in which “space seems to expand and collapse.” For many years, Pfaff was something of an iconoclast: her work didn’t fit into any one school and defied the tidy categorization that was an underpinning of success in the art world. Yet as it turned out, her pieces are peculiarly attuned to the chaotic, genre-crossing, environmentally aware yet technologically advanced and globalizing culture of contemporary life. Pfaff’s installations and prints have been aptly described by critic Roberta Smith as “elaborately impure, implicitly narrative environments.” Forms inspired by nature and natural materials are juxtaposed with the garish and manmade. Exquisitely wrought details emerge from a chaos suggesting combustion, evisceration, decay, implosion, growth and other elemental processes. Space expands and contracts, through the combination of sculptural forms and grids of photographic images as well as through her Hans Hoffmann-like color juxtapositions.
In her latest work, Pfaff deploys paper, foam, melted plastic, shellac and natural materials such as branches, sunflowers, and tree fungus for her kaleidoscopic creations, which are both biomorphic and cosmological, fragile and tough, gross and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Her assemblages are like snatches of symphonic music simultaneously melodic and atonal, harmonic and harshly dissonant. They hide nothing but are imbued with a mysterious reserve, as if they are still in the process of becoming or revealing; they are self contained but also fragmentary, like a beating heart torn from a body. Some are illuminated, which lightens their mass, suggesting floating marine organisms.
Born in England in 1946, Pfaff received a BFA from Washington University and an MFA from Yale. Outside of those bare facts, her life defies the trajectory of a conventional art career. She was married at age 16, traveling back and forth to a military installation in Newfoundland, where her husband was based, from her hometown of Detroit. She briefly attended Wayne State and Southern Illinois University and spent a year in Sweden before earning her degree at Washington University. As a struggling artist in New York, she chose materials based on what she could afford, such as aluminum foil and wire. Pfaff moved to the mid Hudson Valley in 1992, after joining the faculty at Bard, eventually settling in Kingston. She was close friends with another Kingston-based artist of international renown, the late Nancy Graves, and has consistently shown her work in galleries around the nation and world, with two upcoming shows scheduled this fall at the Pavel Zoubok and Loretta Howard galleries in New York’s Chelsea.
Pfaff recently spoke by phone to Almanac’s Lynn Woods from her Tivoli studio:
LW: What initially attracted you to sculpture?
JP: Because I graduated from Yale with a degree in painting, there was always this feeling that sculpture was backwards. You had to be compared to this huge history of painting, and sculpture seemed free from that. The work was just about the materials. By the time I got out of Yale [in 1973], sculpture was more a part of the formal conversation than painting. What I didn’t realize at the time was I was an anathema. [My work was described by one critic] as an “explosion in a glitter factory.” It was like when that painting by Duchamp [Nude Descending a Staircase] was called “an explosion in a shingle factory”; maybe it wasn’t so bad. “Explosion” suggests things going outward, not inward. At the time I was mortified. The art world was quite small when I was in Soho in the early 1970s and in Tribeca a little bit later. There were only three or four bars and three or four conversations you’d bump into.
LW: At the time Minimalism was all the rage. What was your reaction?
JP: Good sculpture was invisible. It was highly thoughtful, and thoughts looked gray and white and black and solid. My private rationale was that thoughts could be transparent, have color and illusion, which came from painting. Because initially this was an argument I had with things that were solid and opaque, I started using basket weaving and rattan, materials that were useful for making everything in cultures that didn’t have metal and carving. Plus these things were cheap, and I could manipulate them without a lot of tools. They were mutable and could take color. They were really light. Also I used rubber bands. I was living in Soho one block from Canal Street, which was a hardware center, the place for electronics, plastics, little fans…it was fantastic.
I had a lot of airplay and yet I was somebody considered not to know what she was doing, someone who had run amok.
LW: What materials are you using now?
JP: Obviously money is not an issue, as it was then. There are so many resins and foams, many in iridescent colors. There are all kinds of new materials. You can get paint in all kinds of pigments and some has pumice in it. I might use soot from an oxyacetylene torch without the oxygen on: it burns dirty and this incredible black carbon comes out.
Today there are more lights [in my work]. I’m almost afraid of the dark and I have the TV on 24/7. I just installed something from a piece from 1987. It was kind of a still life and had a lampshade three feet in diameter with two light bulbs in it. I used light bulbs to light the work because I couldn’t get the gallery lights to work right.
LW: How did your discovery of new materials and tools affect your work?
JP: Always a new tool could generate a new language. When I would get stuck, without even realizing it I’d just pick something new up and it would yield a surprise.
LW: Some of your installations were enormous. Tell us about your process of construction.
JP: The first show I had I had built these pieces on the roof of my five-story building in Brooklyn. When I brought the work into the gallery it looked terrible, because it didn’t have the light and the wind and wasn’t related to the trees. I fixed it in there. The gallery became the studio.
I would improvise a lot. Even if you make a model, there’s a lot of surprises [in the gallery space]. Some specs feel too big, some too small, some are claustrophobic, and there’s a hum in your ear you didn’t expect. You didn’t realize the most basic thing about it. If I’m good at anything it’s making really fast decisions. I can remake or rethink a thing I’ve been working on in my mind and change it up pretty darn fast when I realize I was wrong.
Even with printing, everyone comes in with a solid idea, but I start from scratch. I do a lot of prints at Tandem Press, which works with hundreds of artists. When they saw me, they panicked, because I can’t tell them what it’s going to be. It gets misconstrued that I don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s that I really don’t like to communicate, it feels pretentious. What comes next is so reliant on what comes first. I can’t remember anyone telling me what to wear to school, how to cash a check, save money. It’s funny when I teach students how to weld, I teach them the way I learned, which is I bought a welder and figured it out. I’m so glad OSHA doesn’t look at videotapes of me doing this. I don’t wear a helmet because it gives me a headache and I don’t like outfits for things. I’m a little bit feral.
LW: What’s the particular appeal of prints versus painting?
JP: I’m very dyslexic, and printing is full of reversals and surprises. You’re working with people, and when I tell them let’s print this a certain way, sometimes they misunderstand me and it comes back better.
LW: Are you still making large installations?
JP: Today the world is different. Installations are more conceptual. An artist can hire 50 people to make something. It’s numerical. There are people who are more professional than me, people so young and bright who do remarkable things and manage to do them all over Europe and Asia. I keep thinking I didn’t read the fine print. I was raised in that time of being sort of anti gallery and anti commodity.
For big installations, you have to be invited and you also have to have people willing to travel with you and work 24/7 on it. That doesn’t really exist anymore, the way it used to; everyone has their own life. In the last five years no one’s in the studio except me, unless I’m having something crated or framed. The next two shows in New York will be in smaller gallery spaces not really suitable for installations.
LW: You grew up in postwar London without your parents. What were the circumstances?
JP: My mother left for Canada right after I was born. At that time, right after the war, there was a huge immigration to Canada. I met her when I was about 12 and never met my father because he was Irish and in the Royal Air Force. My brother was the firstborn of this Irish family, and my father kidnapped him and took him to Ireland where he was raised until he was five. My mother went to get him and got pregnant with me.
My grandmother was a seamstress who was really kind. She was in the Women’s Royal Air Force in charge of a group of women who sewed dirigibles filled with helium. When the German Messerschmitts would fly over London these dirigibles, which were silver and at different heights and invisible to the planes, would explode.
LW: Did you live with her as a young child?
JP: No, I just brought up myself when I was little. My brother was taken care of in a different way and had an upper class accent, but I was cockney. I was rough. Where I lived wasn’t an orphanage, it was a group home. Families had lost their homes and with no home to go to, a lot of children got brought to these group homes. I was there until I was nine. It was fun because there were no parents.
My good friend Ursula wanted to find my family and we went to Ireland. On the way back from Dublin to Shannon, we stopped in a small town and within 20 minutes Ursula (who had planned this out) found my father’s family, the Baldwins. My father was dead but she found my uncle, who was a welder and had nine dogs. He lived in a three-room flat with the male dogs in one room, the female dogs in another and he’d take them out separately. He was an interesting person. He died yesterday at age 97.
LW: In one interview you compared your time at Yale to being in prison. Especially considering the prestige of the school, that’s an interesting comment. Could you elaborate?
JP: I arrived at Yale with my dog and car cut up in back and made into a tent, where I lived while driving across the country. I had been married and divorced and was a little older. I walk into this place where you think you’re going to the world’s best school, not because of the quality of teaching but because it’s so competitive. They get the cream of the crop. They can choose the best and then abandon them. The conversation was a lot about working by yourself, hoping you’re doing okay. You go to the first crit of the season by bringing your painting down to this pit between the third and fourth floors. You weren’t allowed to say anything. Seven men in a row who had been arguing for 30 years about figuration and abstraction would start and it wasn’t applicable to what they were looking at. I decided not to make paintings so I wouldn’t have to bring them down there and be told what was wrong with them. Not only can I not win this but I don’t even know the language they’re speaking.
LW: But you became very close to one of your teachers, Al Held, and have credited some of your success to him.
JP: Al was fantastic. He was self-taught. He was a Brooklyn Jew who sold pickles on Delancey Street and went to the Village to get laid because there were beatniks. On the GI bill he got himself to France. This is a guy who didn’t finish high school but was one of the smartest guys I knew. He pissed you off like you couldn’t believe, but I liked that. I liked arguing with him and we left friends. He doesn’t have a reputation for respecting women, but he did. Also he looked like Marlon Brandon. What’s there not to like?
LW: What did you learn from him?
JP: He used to say to me, ‘you are very intelligent with your hand but don’t know much. I need you to go to the Met to look at this. Everything is an idea’—he’d say ‘idear’—‘what are your idears?’ I made things that looked okay and there was no one who ever questioned that, but he said ‘who cares if you are talented?’ Thinking about it now, Al in his own way had a rough hand. The one thing that came easy to me was difficult for him. Without Al and without Yale and without that document behind my name, I don’t think I could have done anything.
LW: What prompted you to leave New York and take the job at Bard?
JP: [Bard president] Leon Botstein called me and wanted me to take this job as chair of the art department back in 1992. I was teaching at Columbia University where I was head of the sculpture department and it was a great job, plus I was on 125th Street and being close to Harlem was my dream. Leon said I could make the whole department, this will be your baby. I liked him and I liked the school, and his offer was so intriguing. Al was upstate and the first year at Bard I stayed in a room in his house.
LW: You have said you were a terrible student, so it seems ironic you’ve had such a flourishing teaching career.
JP: Teaching has always paid the rent. It is stability, and I used to be pretty good at it! My first teaching job was at Queens College. Most of my students had never been to Manhattan. It was a design class, and the girls looked fantastic, they had on eye makeup and little outfits. I had the idea to bring in some clown makeup. I had them put it on their faces like a Picasso portrait. They were so clever with makeup I got them to learn things and it was fun, because it was stuff they knew. We can do fauvism and cubism through makeup. Some of the students were doing really good work.
LW: How would you characterize the students at Bard?
JP: Bard students are like no others because of the quality and openness of the school. I’ve been there 20 years now, and when I first went there lots of people had been there way too long. I stocked the school with new people and brought in a lot of women and real talent. It wasn’t based on one strong teacher, and that’s what’s really worked. I think it’s the best undergraduate studio art program in the country. My last class was yesterday and we went to Dia Beacon, then to Rosendale where one of the technicians at Bard had a show and then a big dinner at my house that ended at 10 pm. It’s a different kind of bonding, so bright and open. There’s a kind of privilege, but they kind of get over that pretty fast.
Last year I spent six months teaching in Laramie, Wyoming, where there’s a different kind of student. They’re all rancher’s kids. Knowing they were working kids I found these old barracks where we sheet-rocked everything. Everyone in my class got a private studio for the first time and we did an installation and a book. Within a short period of time they became as sophisticated as my students on the East Coast. They had real skills in learning how to draw and paint, but this other thing about ideas was harder, and that’s what I could teach them.
LW: For some years you rented a studio in Kingston. What was that like?
JP: I had just done a huge piece for the Philadelphia Convention Center and had been looking for a barn in Pennsylvania or upstate New York for storage. I found space in the tugboat factory in Kingston on the river, which was the most beautiful building. I had 7,000 to 8,000 square feet, and you could throw a stone five feet and it’d go into the river. There were sturgeon, sculls, rowboats and tour boats, and I’d look out in the morning and see herons; in the winter I’d see icebergs. It was a child’s fantasy of the river, and you could walk up the street and get a great cup of coffee. I was evicted in 2001 when the building was sold. I was in contract to try to buy it for five years and was going to bring my MFA program to the building [before it was sold to someone else]. We had a biennial sculpture show there with di Suvero and other great artists.
My first big piece after landing in that space was called Round Hole Square Peg. There was a big storm and half of the trees fell into the river. I collected those for the piece, which for me had very little color, steel that was like the river, it looked zen-ny. I formed plaster stupas and mandalas, it was very river related. It was shown in a gallery on 57th Street, which is the major river in New York City and almost had the same relationship to the gallery as the Rondout Creek did to my studio. When I looked out and saw the flow of cars it made sense.
LW: Did the sewage plant across the street from the Cornell Building bother you?
JP: Every place I lived for the last 30 years had a sewage plant across the street. I’m totally insensitive to smells.
LW: I’ve heard you often patronized P&T Surplus, located on Abeel Street, not far from your studio.
JP: At P&T Surplus I used to get tons of sinks, things from chemistry labs made of slate, and also a lot of steel and aluminum and shelving materials. [Owner] Tim [Smythe] is a remarkable fellow who is so helpful to my students.
LW: Where do you live and work now?
JP: I have a beautiful home in Kingston that used to be owned by Father Divine. My studio is in Tivoli, where I bought five acres to protect my space from development. I’m a fierce gardener wannabe. I try to grow things like crazy and when they die there’s the advantage that I can use them. I have students come in and help archive or pick weeds in the yard.
LW: Many of your pieces are experiential and relate to specific experiences and places. Which places have influenced you? What about the country of your childhood?
JP: I reference nothing in England. I was thrown out of school there, and I’m not an anglophile. I reference not so much places where I’ve been but places I’d imagine I’d like. I have an ensemble sensibility. I don’t like looking at one object but at lots of things. When you look at a Japanese or Chinese landscape, you see through a frame to a view of Mount Fuji or something, and I like that long view, rather than the close up. Every time I go to another country I go into shock. India has a strange organic way of being totally messy and yet working at the same time. It has a wonderful way of assimilating lots of random events and not making too much of a fuss about it. I like that instead of holding onto the way things are supposed to be. My first entry into this culture was Japan, Korea, China and then India, which feels right.
I’m drawing on paper from there, and I’m in touch with a couple of people over there. I have ideas about things that probably aren’t true at all, but that doesn’t stop me from looking at things and reading about things to be more open.
LW: I imagine your favorite place to be is in the studio.
JP: I don’t hike, fish, have never been on a horse, and I don’t ski. I’m pretty constant. A workaholic sounds like what I am. My dog just died after 14 years, my ex student just fell dead at age 38, and school for the last month has been intense beyond what I can remember. This winter, I tried to work, but I was just drawing blanks. I’ve been recovering from these last few months, which are the most difficult I can remember. I don’t have children or family, and I don’t know how people who have complicated lives get things done. I have outbuildings that keep me busy. Other lives have different joys.
LW: Do video and other electronic media have any appeal to you?
JP: I don’t get new media in the same way people do who grew up with it. It has this level of cleverness and finesse, which for me makes it hard to keep it raw and interesting.
LW: Tell us about your two upcoming shows this fall in New York.
JP: Pavel Zoubok Gallery is oriented towards collage and outsider artists, so I’ve been making collages, small pieces with lots of new drawing materials. Loretta Howard, who used to be the director at Andre Emmerich, is in the same building upstairs. The gallery is so white, it makes you want to wear those snow glasses. I was thinking of making it whiter. It’ll open in October and because it’s in the middle of the season I have a short installation time, there’s logistics I’ve got to think about. I got a phone call from both of them asking what I was going to put in the show, and I thought, perhaps you don’t know who you’re talking to.
LW: You’ve been quoted as saying you were an emerging artist for 30 years, before winning the MacArthur Fellowship. How did that grant change your life?
JP: There was a time from 1987 to 1992 when I started making pretty large and bulky wall pieces instead of installations, thinking there might be a market for it. A few sold but most I still have in my basement. With the MacArthur grant I managed to build a space on my property here in Tivoli to find and repair those pieces and put them together. My very best friends, Elizabeth Murray and Al Held, had died and they had both taken care of their work so that it wasn’t a burden to the people around them. I realized my life was a mess. I had just been busy making things and not protecting what I had made. Every installation, and there were over 100 of then, had been thrown away, though I might keep part of a stick or other detail and if it was neutral enough, make a table and chair out of it. I thought, ‘it’s time for me to grow up and value that work.’
The MacArthur freed me. All of a sudden I thought, ‘they like me,’ like I was Sally Field or something. I’ve always been a fighter and belligerent and trying to buck the system. I wondered, how did I get this support, given I’m a little irascible? It changed how I thought about myself.