Halsey Rodman

Interview with Kristan Kennedy for "Evidence of Bricks" publication : 26 August 2012

KK: Our first conversation happened over the phone, it was a studio visit in voice only. I remember us talking about the sound of color, and I feel like I can "see" that in your work- how loud or how quiet a sculpture/painting is from it's movement between hot saturated brights and dull neutrals and subtle shades of white. You have such a specific color pallet, the painterly quality of your work makes it seem unfettered, but, now after knowing the work and you a bit more I realize how considered everything is. What are your thoughts about this sort of synesthetic relationship to color in your work, and where choice and chance come into play in your practice?

HR: The sound of color: this reminds me of the degree to which these two registers of sensory experience resist linguistic description. Sound and color refer to the present moment, the moment at hand with an urgency that is different from the memory trace of, say, an image or representation. Sound and color must happen in the present, in your body, your eye, your ear -- it’s not that they don’t leave an impression but rather that they are both deeply inflected by the moment of their reception, and to such a degree that recollection fails tremendously. Color and sound both speak to a moment of brute sensory perception -- something that is probably inaccessible to us in a direct way -- to the moment before sound and light are organized into and attached to “things”.

I have always been attracted to extreme color experiences both of intensity and contrast -- and though this interest began impulsively, through a kind of desire for the specific experiences offered by color, for experiences marked by this provisional thrill -- i.e. what happens when you are in front of “the thing” and can’t happen anywhere else -- I have come to think about the experience of color, and “chords” of color as both a spacial and temporal marker, a shared point of reference for beholder and author. There is a mysterious cloud that emanates from color in combination, a floating diffuse authorial cloud, something that emerges from the reflected light -- somewhere between when the color was applied and the present moment, the experience of color mediates between history and the present moment. And this immediate experience, which is accessible, superficial, provisional to current conditions, is present in a way that may, in the best of circumstances, forcefully defer power relations and hierarchies of knowledge.

KK: I am curious about your construct paintings, and the notion of a time-based painting, how did the pieces come to be, what was the process (formal) and informal or of the mind, as you were trying to reconstruct your gesture and in the end make three similar but distinct paintings.

HR: My intention with The Construct was to make a profoundly unstable object, to render this quasi-architectural sculptural object, very predictable in its formal construction, and quite fixed in space, unchanging, frozen -- to take this object and in covering it with a recording of its own making crystallized as micro-layers of paint on its various surfaces, render it unstable, stuttering, vaporous, mutable. But to say it is just the object is perhaps to limit the field -- of equal importance is to render the author (as perceived by the beholder in relation to the object) as equally unresolved, as in a similar state of dis-assembly.

The paintings were made in such a way that none of them is the original. They were built gesture by gesture, by repeating each gesture/color combination three times, once in each painting. But rather than returning to the same painting, I would always begin a new gesture/color combination on the painting I had last painted on. The cumulative outcome of this method is that the three paintings are woven together of equal parts 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation marks -- and therefore there is no original among the three but rather a series of near-identical copies all referring to the same sequence (or choreography) of gesture/color events.

The effect of this arrangement of near-identical (but very specifically not identical) paintings is that the three versions, taken as a whole, constitute an oscillating, shifting, unresolved field -- since there is no original instance, and no single originating moment to refer back to, all three present an equally viable “present. As one must move around the assembly to take in all sides, the shimmering action within this field is directly tied to the movement of the beholder.

KK: What about the relationship of the body to the sculptures, all of the yellow triangles were placed in the corners of the room as stand ins for a table, chair, shelf, were these present for the "audience" or are they evidence of you / the artist / ghost / maker in the installation?

HR: The yellow triangles were meant to address the body of their beholder -- this shouldn’t, though, preclude thinking of them as describing some other ghost body that placed them there. (This actually seems important: that their beholder perceives an intentionality in their placement, a proxy (the ghost author?) that allows one, as the beholder, to ascribe meaning to them.) But if the other sculptures in the room propose minimal formal difference as a primary experience (the tripled paintings of various kinds, the dots on the lamps, the light in the room as it changes throughout the day, for example), these triangles make a slightly different proposition about the experience of difference. The three triangles are formally identical, but the way they address the body changes each one dramatically: low, the triangle becomes a bench; at waist height, a desk; and above the head, a shelf. Though the object hasn’t changed at all, its placement in relation to both the architecture of the room and a theoretical body changes it completely.

KK: When you were here you spent many hours just sitting in the space, watching the way the light hit the room at different times of day, this in turn helped inform the placement of the lamp sculptures and the other objects in the room. Can you talk about the influence of the natural light on this particular installation and how it changed the work, and perhaps the viewers perception of it?

HR: One of the most frustrating things about sculpture can be its implicit resistance to temporality. It seems so fixed, so inert, just dumb weight and matter -- so different from us, our fleeting impressions and the glittering cloud of emotional mental life. But of course this is also what is great about sculpture -- its fixity in space moves the agency of change to its beholder -- in the most basic sense, rather than changing in time like almost everything else, it changes when you walk around it -- it continuously produces the new, the unexpected, pulling it out with every step from the invisible into the visible. Recently, i’ve been trying to find ways to mediate between these different temporal registers: the process of making something, the moment of encountering it (especially from a mobile perspective), the world as it changes around the thing.

So knowing that the classroom where the work would be installed had gigantic schoolroom windows along an entire wall suggested a good moment to make a sculpture that very specifically addressed these multiple temporalities.Wanderer (Under Changing Conditions), in addition to being a lop-sided, tripled arrangement of near-identical elements, contains three lamps with fluorescent light bulbs. One of the most important aspects of this piece was to turn off all the other lights in the room (we even went so far as to put a box around the light switch so it couldn’t be turned on!) so that the three lamps would be the only source of artificial light. The lamps are a constant, maintained by continuity of the electrical grid, in relation to the light coming through the windows as it shifts throughout the day and diminishes with the coming of evening. But in practice, though the lamps never change in intensity, their appearance appears to shift dramatically as the conditions around them change -- because our eyes dilate in relation to the whole scene before us, when the light coming into the room becomes dim the lamps appear to grow brighter. In effect, the electric lamps become a clock that inversely describes the degree to which surrounding conditions are in flux.

KK: Do you think making art is inherently "political", do you think art can change things, be radical or revolutionary?

HR: Yes! Though I want to begin by acknowledging the potential of art objects to engender moments of radical inter-subjectivity, the term that keeps insistently surfacing is minimal difference. Though not exclusively, this could refer to temporality, to the formal differences that separate instances of the near-identical, and/or to the formal variation brought forth with every step as one moves around an object considered in-the-round. An awareness of minimal difference, and setting up the conditions that allow for the minutia of a given condition to become part of one’s experience -- even in formal terms -- all of these point the way to a fraying of edges between object (a received object) and event, and towards a lowering of the sensory threshold, in a very direct sense, to dislodge objects from the appearance of stability. This dislodging, which is a kind of de-naturalization, allows the object to become historical and fragmentary rather than arriving seamlessly whole. The object considered as such becomes something closer to an event, arriving not as an assumption but as a thing with a past and a future. So, rather than embodying transhistorical concepts (beyond our understanding and influence), objects can be understood as the embodiment of a series of conditions and forces that can be affected.