aRchitectuRe, DISPATCHES aRt, music, aRchitectuRe, Film, shoPPinG, news and thinGs to make and do… aRt, music, aRchitectuRe, Film, shoPPinG, news and thinGs to make and do…
undeR the inFluence
Rodney GRaham on moRRis louis
portrait dennis schoenbeRG
I never had any partIcular Interest In the work
of morris louis until i read my friend shep
steiner’s Phd thesis on the late abstract
expressionist painter. i was particularly struck
by shep’s description of louis’s way of painting –
he worked on his large unprimed canvases in a small
room (a dining alcove just off the kitchen, as i
recall) that didn’t measure more than 10 by 12 feet,
and the paintings were often much larger than that.
also i liked the fact that after his first really
successful showing of the Veil paintings, he spent
all his profits on hundreds of yards of canvas,
some bocur acrylics and a thunderbird convertible –
a touch of automotive dandyism that is the american
equivalent of Jean Fautrier’s lizard-skin shoes.
when i started thinking about making a work devoted
to louis and his home studio, i intended to play the
artist in a short film. this must have been ten
years ago. slowly i changed the subject from louis
himself to an amateur, an absolute beginner artist,
who is a vancouver professional, perhaps a dentist
or a lawyer of my age (fifty eight), who, in the
midst of a late-midlife crisis, and having returned
from new york, where he saw louis’s last show at
the andré emmerich Gallery in 1962, became inspired
to take up painting and to learn more about art.
he thinks, ‘shit, i can do that – it looks easy’.
the recently divorced guy returns to his bachelor
pad, a spacious west vancouver modernist house with
an absolutely state-of-the-art sound system, where,
surrounded by hundreds of coffee-table art books he
has recently acquired, and after putting some martin
denny on the turntable, laying down some newspaper
on the living room floor and lighting another
chesterfield, he just goes for it. the piece i made
in the end is not a film but a large backlit
photograph in triptych form après Jeff wall (the
master of the format). i show the guy (played by me)
in his pyjamas. i previously did a work in pyjamas
around 1994 (Halcion Sleep) and i wanted to make a
reference to hugh hefner, who famously wore pyjamas
all day long, and the stereo system (this was the
golden age of hi-fi) is kind of a scaled-down
version of the one in the Playboy mansion at the
time. the newspapers, which cover the floor in the
lower portion of the picture, serve to date the
piece (10 november 1962). the painter is caught in
the act of dripping some brilliant yellow paint out
of a tupperware bowl. here i was really inspired by
the gouache by adolph menzel in which he renders
(with his right hand) a paint-filled ceramic bowl
that he is tipping in his left hand. i read michael
Fried’s book on menzel with great fascination – an
amazing close reading of this underrated realist
master’s work. and of course it is Fried’s work on
painters such as morris louis that first made him
well-known during the 1960s.
Rodney GRaham is an aRtist livinG and woRkinG in vancouveR. his Recent solo shows
include Wet On Wet – My Late earLy StyLeS, at lisson GalleRy, london
ArTrEvIEw 34
Dispatches_Rodney Graham.indd 34 2/11/07 12:45:44
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