An Interview with Ruth Weisberg

Fabrik in dialogue with Ruth Weisberg, artist, historian, pedagogue, and Dean of USC’s Gayle Garner Roski School of Fine Arts at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, February 15, 2009, during the run of her Norton Simon exhibitions “Guido Cagnacci and the Resonant Image” and “Ruth Weisberg: Selected Works” at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

“I think the thing that… is part of my permanent mental furniture is that I am so interested in emulation.  A few years back I wrote the first chapter of The Ancient Art of Emulation, a book mostly about classical art and the debate over the question of how imitative Roman art really was of Greek… I discussed two things in a lot of depth. One is the idea that for whatever reason, people in the 20th century, and now in the 21st, have needed an ironic distance from the past, and how that has been enforced in various ways in the art world, this privileging of originality.

I talk about the fact that emulation has a very honorable tradition and a whole vocabulary that we’ve lost. The Roman emulatio doesn’t quite mean what it means in English when we say “emulation”… In general, we tend to see the past so much through the lens of our own vocabulary and concepts that we sometimes miss something really important that was there that we literally don’t see.  Part of my chapter is a defense of emulation and doing art that stands on the shoulders of giants, and part of it is a discussion of how much the present colors our view of the past.  So I simply came into doing this exhibition with those two or three or four very strong preoccupations.”

— Ruth Weisberg

SOTTO L' AQUA, 1999; Mixed Media on Paper • 35 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Ruth Weisberg and Jack Rutberg Fine Arts.

Fabrik’s Anna Meliksetian (AM): You use the word emulation.  How is this different from appropriation? How do you define it?

RW: Appropriation means you’re borrowing something, you’re draining it of meaning…you’re leveling it. It’s some of the contemporary work I most dislike, frankly.  Emulation wasn’t imitation, ever. It was inspiration.  You looked at other artists.  You weren’t supposed to copy them. Copying was a discipline for students. That was fine but then you were supposed to go beyond in some way.  So emulation didn’t tend to privilege originality over everything. Your originality came out of being deeply rooted and deeply knowledgeable.

Fabrik’s Peter Frank (PF): How much of emulation is dependent on the audience’s recognition of your sources? Appropriation depends entirely on that.

RW: It’s a good question. And I think often my sources are lost. But it still has to work. What makes me do something is not always what the viewers are going to take away from it.  What’s my motivating force? They’re going to feel the force but not necessarily my specific motive. I think art historians looking at my work sometime in the future will be able to reconstruct a lot of the sources. Yet I do think it works without knowing the original.

PF: If the show is understood in that context, it almost seems to be an exercise in education about the past.

RW: Right, it’s a way of revitalizing the museum’s collection, getting people to re-see it. But I hope that the artwork itself is of enough concentrated power to stand on its own.

PF: There’s more and more of this bringing living artists into the historical museum… the Jim Dine show at the Getty Villa, for instance. I worry that the artists worry, as you seem not to have, that they can maintain a sufficient distance from the source.

RW: You know, what is sad for the artist is both the distance and the non-distance. In other words, where do the distances dissolve?  But it’s miraculous… to feel in such communication…  Everything that I do is based on a certain amount of study.  In other words, I re-examine historical subject matter, biblical subject matter.

AM:  How much is the Baroque an influence?

RW: The sense of captured emotion, the sense of narrative… the Carracci in particular, were really searching for something that they called carne vive – “living flesh,” as opposed to statuine, the “little statues” of Mannerism. They had a lot of respect for some of their predecessors and a lot of scorn for others. The Italians did not hold back… Late Mannerism was full of those “little statues,” very polished, and the Baroque painters wanted something alive and vibrant.

AM: Wasn’t the Baroque a way of seducing viewers back into the Catholic faith?

RW: I don’t think that was the artists’ motivation so much.  It was the Catholic Church’s.  The artists knew they had a moralizing subject manner.  The Church in its wisdom decided not to be iconoclastic, to embrace art as a tool.  They didn’t really care about the style. But you have artists, for instance Guido Reni, who wanted to do nudes, and he found a way.  He found subject matter that allowed him over and over again to strip women down to the waist…whether it was Cleopatra or Mary Magdalene, over and over and over.  He found a way to use the Church’s proscription to his advantage.  He was working for the Church at times, but he was mostly a court painter and he did a lot of portraits.  He uses the same model very often; you’ll see in the painting, it’s almost like animation.  There is a Cleopatra where you see the same woman four times, for God’s sake, in the background.  It’s almost like stop motion. I am also fascinated by that idea of trading personae, again re-enacting, depicting multiple moments.  All those things are delicious.

AM:  So even in this body of work, it looks like the same person in one image.  It’s a reflection of another aspect of what they’re thinking or who they are or what they’re feeling.

PF:  It’s more than a re-enacting, it’s sort of a re-inhabiting of the subject and the approach to it.

RW: Yes, although there are refusals. I am not interested in “sin.” I can take sin out or I can stick him in only as a figure to be re-enacting his role.  It’s not like I am afraid to disagree with the original. I find the differences as interesting as the similarities, but it’s… done with more respect.

AM:  It’s not irreverent in any way. It’s more taking the subject and reworking it and exploring it.  It’s saying, why can’t I create my own meaning?

RW: It’s commentary.  You get to elaborate.

AM: But from a very personal perspective.  Well, you are inserting yourself in there somewhere.

RW: It’s cultural. Sometimes it’s Feminist, sometimes it’s Jewish, sometimes it’s even Angelena.

AM:   But that is all personal.  It makes it more interesting.

RW: In the painting at Rutberg, called Time and Time Again,…  there is that serene Titian, and I darken it and then I interrupt it with those dancers who are certainly 20th century, but they float a little in terms of, are they from the ’20’s, the 30’s, the 50’s, the ’80’s, the present?  I don’t show their faces in that particular painting because I really want that sense of mystery and projection. I want everybody to be them to some extent.  You too can enter the painting, the art-historical space.

PF:  The theatre of the painting starts to become participatory… Are there particular models of practice for doing similar things, that is, artists who you look to as forbears?

RW: Years ago R. B. Kitaj gave a lecture at LACMA where he pronounced his lineage, artist after artist, which I found thrilling.  He was a person who really shared a lot of my feelings about these things and his lineage is very similar to mine.  It’s a very overlapping list:  Greek and Roman art… I need a certain amount of timeless depiction of the figure.  So, Masaccio is very important to me, and then da Vinci because of the ephemerality, the sfumato.  Well, a lot of Renaissance artists.

PF:  In purely technical terms this seems to be a hallmark of your style, the visibility of almost every source.

AM:  And that’s what I was initially drawn to when I was walking through your gallery show. Besides all the narrative and mythology, I was just mesmerized by the abstract quality of the texture and the paint.  It’s not just, oh it’s beautiful to look at, but it also puts you into a context.

RW: We’re part of a material world and these other images are ephemeral.  I can make them come but they might disappear again. I always want to let you know that I know in my heart of hearts that it’s not real, but the canvas is real.  For a long time I resisted the fact that I am very influenced by the Abstract Expressionists because I had all this nonsense in my head: if you’re Abstract Expressionist, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t have subject matter, you can’t have narrative, but I knew these were things I wanted. What I didn’t realize is how much I was carrying over from my student days in the ’60’s.  Donald Kuspit is one of the people who wrote about my use of those kinds of surfaces and insisted that that was a major part of what made the paintings work.

PF:  Also what made the paintings yours.

RW: When I compare myself to other figurative painters like Jon Swihart or Randall Lavender, they’re much more finished.  They’re not acknowledging nearly as much the actual painting of the painting as I am.  So I don’t quite fit with them.  I see some commonalities, but…

PF: You’re more Modernist than they are. You’re a process painter, in fact.

RW: One other thing is that I really emphasize my interest in drapery and folds, which I think is a constant throughout my work.  This also relates very much to my wanting to have this double sense of cloth, the depicted cloth and the cloth of the canvas… My mother’s father and his father and his father’s father and back generations, were all weavers of talit (prayer shawls)….and they specifically designed collars.  At Auschwitz I saw a sparse case with a few talit.  I stood in front of that case and I thought, these could have been made by my great grandfathers. And I began to sob. I just totally lost it. It was so moving to me that I had found them. I found a trace of all these people…. It made me more aware of my attachment to cloth.  Something that I come by in this more historical way.

PF:  Also, your sensibility intersects concept with tangibility.  In other words, something there that is imbued with a coded meaning.

RW: A historical accumulation of meaning.

AM: I was teaching “The Oath of the Horatii and my students and I were discussing art criticism and how we are constantly taking different angles on the same image.  I was thinking about your work and that you are interpreting these paintings as a visual artist, in the sense that you’re looking back at all that and you’re getting to interpret without words.  Is that what drives you in your work?

RW: My own work combines the intellectual, the moral, the human, and the spiritual. All of those things come together. Most people think that when you’re spiritual, you leave your intellect behind. No. No, no, no. It’s very important to me that paintings work on all those levels. It is part of a commentary about a previous period or a historical period or an artist from another time or a style from another time. Yes, it is all that. But, if I can’t make a human connection, it’s not worth doing.  And that’s maybe part of why I put all these people I know in my paintings, because I need an effective entrance into the image. I am not distanced. When other work affects me it’s for the same reason: I can admire something very skilled or if it occupies a certain theoretical position, but if it makes the human connection, it moves me. Those Baroque paintings, at the Getty or here, are supposed to elicit an empathetic reaction. If the empathy is not there, no matter how brilliant the idea, it’s not going to work. It’s not really successful as art.

Following is a sampling of Ruth’s work:

Words Anna Meliksetian and Peter Frank
Images courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts and the Norton Simon Museum