BOMB Magazine (talks)
Rita McBride
(04/16/2018)
John Reed: I’m wondering if you can talk about how Particulates relates to Portals?
Rita McBride: The lasers are the same. The geometric structure is the same. It is a hyperboloid which I started using in 1990 for load-bearing works of mine, simply because it’s thought to be the most stable structure for buildings and for towers. But with lasers I don’t have to worry about gravity, and in both these cases I am happy to use the straight beams of light to make variable curves in variable dimensions. The shape grows in every direction. The geometry is the same, but the dimensions are determined by the space. I tried to incorporate what I learned in Liverpool.
JR: What did you learn?
RM: I was approaching Portals from the point of view of the Liverpool Biennial, which was event-driven and city-specific. As a science-fiction enthusiast, I was attracted to two wormhole events reported on Bold Street, something I learned about while touring Liverpool with the other biennial invitees. We had visited several war museums, a slave trade museum, and a neighborhood suffering the effects of the “managed ruin” policies of Thatcher; I had to go back to the hotel. I couldn’t continue the tour. I thought to myself, “The people of Liverpool need a way out of this cruel dark history.” I reacted intuitively and proposed a “wormhole.” When I finally spent time with the piece, it wasn’t the shape or the politically charged historic water-reservoir venue that impressed me: the interesting thing was what I could see with the lasers. A kind of universal goo that I didn’t really anticipate, and which became mesmerizing as it collided with the wet environment of the cistern. Particulates was approached with actual particulates in mind. The emphasis was much more on trying to profile the universal goo I had seen. Luckily, the Chelsea:Dia venue had quite a lot of its own marble dust floating around. The building was formerly a marble-cutting facility. So there is a baseline of highly reflective marble dust there. And that worked with the water element I introduced, which was something I learned from Liverpool…
Barnaby Furnas
(01/23/2016)
…John Reed: It’s fun to look at these giant paintings, because when I wrote that TimeOut review about you they were all works on paper.
Barnaby Furnas: Yeah, watercolors. The paintings are basically watercolors, they still are watercolors. With watercolors every paper takes the color differently, and so, for this group of works I started putting on these thick layers of absorbent gesso and then it’s combed with a pattern texture. They’re made flat, or the paint would all run off. I have planks so I can get to the middle of the canvas, and then the paint’s supplied in puddle form, and because of the lines in the ground, everything spreads out along the combing line, like rows in a field, or sort of like corduroy. I’ve always been interested in capturing movement. Like the battle scenes in water, they’re always about lots of things moving around. What I like about painting is it’s so still, so static, so the more things that are moving, the stiller it gets.
JR: It seems like, looking at your work, there’s a kind of tension between—how do I say it? On the one hand there’s a lot of movement and freedom, and then on the other it feels more like storytelling.
BF: Yeah. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to make landscapes for a long time, and it was frustrating because I couldn’t have my figures—like, how do you tell a story with a tree? And so I’m drawing with my five-year-old son and for him, he’s in that phase where everything is fighting everything else. So he and I, we start drawing landscapes, and I would draw the sun and he would draw the sky, and the sky would attack the sun, and then I would draw a tree, and the dirt would try to eat the tree. I was like, “That’s it, that’s what landscape is.” Really it is like this epic battle, and its timeline is just more stretched out.
JR: Right, right.
BF: I was like: Oh, it’s a battle. A flower is a tiny explosion. And a mountain is growing, or shrinking…
Charlie Smith
(12/10/10)
…John Reed: All right, so I was hoping you’d sign this book?
Charlie Smith: Why don’t we do it at the end after we see how this goes?
JR: Okay. Let’s see, my first question for you: the relation of poetry and novels. There seems to be some kind of mystical connection, poets as novelists—apropos here, James Dickey, E. E. Cummings, Jessica Hagedorn. Insights?
CS: I don’t see that very often—novelists writing poems that have any kind of power and authority particularly, and vice versa. Many of the poets I know don’t read novels at all; they don’t read any fiction. And my close friends who are novelists don’t read any poems; they are not even interested in reading mine. So I don’t know if there is that kind of crossover. It’s not necessary, in fiction, to concentrate in the same way—to bring the same intensity, spirit, language, into the line—as it is in writing a poem.
In my case, I just happened to write both right at the beginning. I was exposed to both as a youngster and then, in boarding school, we were required in ordinary assignments to write short stories and poems. I fell in love with both, and began to write both on my own. What I began to see was that the two disciplines could cross over to a certain extent. Poems can cross over to fiction, but I haven’t seen fiction cross over to poems much. A fiction line in a poem—I mean, you sometimes run into what passes as poetry, which is often just prose chopped up into lines, but it doesn’t have intensity. Real poems can’t exist anywhere but in the lines of the poem. If you try to take a fiction line and insert it into a poem, it’ll sag like a swayback mare. I found that to be pretty strictly true, at least in my case. But it’s possible to take poems and shift them into fiction; I used to take poems and de-line them like you debone a trout. Then, I’d just lay them into a page of fiction and they would pass perfectly well. I did it in most of my earlier novels: Canaan (1984), Shine Hawk (1988), The Lives of the Dead (1990) . . . There may have been others. Before poetry broke loose from the continental shelf, it was the easiest thing to haul lines over to the fiction side.
I try to bring as much energy and penetration into my fiction as possible…
Ann Lauterbach
(04/19/2010)
...John Reed: So here we are on Crosby Street; you grew up in New York and lived downtown as an adult. Do you remember anything in particular about this building or this block?
Ann Lauterbach: I was thinking as I was walking here: was my old friend Jan Hashey’s loft on this block? Then there’s that wonderful restaurant on two floors that’s still here, Savoy. Joe Brainard lived on this block on Greene Street. Why are you asking me about Crosby Street?
JR: Just setting the scene. (laughter) In your poem “Ants in the Sugar,” who is that man walking along the road?
AL: Every morning where I now live, in Germantown, New York, a gentleman walks by. He walks down to the river and then he walks back. I think he lives around the corner. I don’t know who he is, but he’s become familiar. So, I don’t know the answer to who that man is.
JR: And who is that young girl in a pink dress?
AL: I think the young girl in the pink dress is, in a literal sense, the daughter of a woman I know named Ivy. But the man and the girl are ubiquitous figures in the work, especially the girl. And she moves around; now for several books there’s been a girl. She came into the poems around the time of my sister Jennifer’s death in the mid-’80s, and carries ideas of both loss and possibility. I think of her as an avatar.
JR: I wanted to ask about undead zombies and the newborn dead.