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What artists are doing now. American artist Alice Attie in New York

Arterritory.com

06.05.2020

An inspiration and mutual solidarity project for the creative industries

In the current situation, clearly our top priority is to take care of our families, friends and fellow citizens. Nevertheless, while public life is paralyzed and museums, galleries and cultural institutions are closed, in many of us neither the urge to work nor the creative spark have disappeared. In fact, quite the opposite is happening in what is turning out to be a time that befits self-reflection and the generation of new ideas for the future. Although we are at home and self-isolating, we all – artists, creatives and Arterritory.com – continue to work, think and feel. As a sort of gesture of inspiration and ‘remote’ mutual solidarity, we have launched the project titled What Artists Are Doing Now, with the aim of showing and affirming that neither life nor creative energy are coming to a stop during this crisis. We have invited artists from all over the world to send us a short video or photo story illustrating what they are doing, what they are thinking, and how they are feeling during this time of crisis and self-isolation. All artist stories will be published on Arterritory.com and on our Instagram and Facebook accounts. We at Arterritory.com are convinced that creativity and positive emotions are good for the immune system and just might help us better navigate through these difficult times.

From her studio in New York, American visual artist and poet Alice Attie answers a short questionnaire by Arterritory.com:

Are you working on any projects right now in your studio? If so, could you briefly describe them?

I am working on three bodies of work at the current time. One is a group of small square gouache paintings. I began these as the Covid lockdown began to take hold where I live and work, in New York. While I was uncertain if my artwork would, or could, address this pandemic, these gouache paintings, at least in theory, do. The colours shift in incremental ways and cluster into channels of various hues and densities. Because each painted panel, in what I hope will be [a total of] 19, as in C19, takes quite a bit of time to complete, they seem to mirror visually the temporal suspension, the shifts of mood and meditation within which we find ourselves.

Simultaneous with this work I continue to work on a series of large ink drawings composed of minuscule numbers or letters tumbling in space and coalescing into loosely formed spheres.
At times I think of the drawings as planetary maps which contain all the possible ciphers of our potential communications.

The last group of drawings I call ‘portraits of anonymity’. These are abstracted heads painted with gouache or drawn in ink and coloured pencil. The heads sit side by side on the page, as if in conversation, dialogue or debate. The solitary figures, in unusual shapes and laden with indiscernible words, are mysterious, much as figures real or imagined are.

What is your recipe for survival in a time of almost only bad news?

How we survive challenging times. We do. We must. We find ways. We dig deeper. I find that I continue to notice small, seemingly insignificant things, things that at other times may have passed my notice – perhaps the labours of a single ant shuffling here and there in search of something. The bare trees are so stately in their naked shapes. Trees, in their bare indifference, signify endurance and majesty. How we survive these times. Being attentive. Noticing.

I am working steadily in a way that pushes past my sense of dread and the latent fear that surely lurks below the surface. Conversations with others have a depth, a thoughtfulness, that I cherish. My work grows from that depth, from a sense of fullness but also a sense of loss. A few weeks ago, my mother passed away. She could not fight Covid and died suffering in its grip as we, her family, watched and sent our love virtually. The world, now mournful, is filled both with absence and with abundance.

How we survive these times. We do. We find ways. We create. We write. We do so ‘in the name of’, we mourn though our works, which may often become elegiac. If we are fortunate, they will be beautiful in new ways, even transcendent. As we feel the pulse of something excruciating to contemplate, we also sense something transformative, something that lifts us out of our singularity, bringing us into the commons where we reside as one organism.

I make art. I draw, paint, write, think. Each endeavour pushes out of the known world into a more tenuous, fragile, precarious one. Art may be about the tenuous, the problematic, the unknown, mirroring our interior lives.

What is something that we all (each of us, personally) could do to make the world a better place when this disaster comes to an end? It is clear that the world will no longer be the same again, but at the same time... there is a kind of magic in every new beginning.

Making the world a better place. Is that not what our responsibility is on this earth? This is a time of crisis and we are forced to pull the curtain back as we become, all of us, vulnerable.

It is that vulnerability that I think urges us to think in new ways, to feel a sense of urgency with regard to the health of ourselves, our brethren and our planet. We do whatever it is that we can do, in small or large ways.

Making art is, in many ways, a privileged act. It is, in many ways, tangential to the immediacy and the enormity of these human and global needs. Yet we labour within it to lift ourselves into something, call it universal, call it essential. We create because we have to, and we create because this is what tethers us to beauty, to possibility, to our deepest philosophical selves and to others, those we know and those we may never know.

The art world and the culture sector are some of the most affected. What is the main lesson the art world should learn from all this? How do you imagine the post-apocalyptic art scene?

The ‘art world’ (a strange term in itself) had gone astray before Covid pummeled its ranks and brought the business of art to its knees. What can we look forward to? Perhaps art will no longer be only considered a commodity to be bartered for, and we will instead understand art and artists in more expansive and more humbling ways. I am dubious about this prospect. Money has been the driving force of much that we call the ‘art world’ for a long time, and it has sadly seeped into what motivates even the most sincere and distancing artists.

Yet I have to be hopeful. I have to imagine a better world for artists, that they will grow to count themselves among the less frenetic, less capital-driven inhabitants of the world. We all have a steep hill to climb, be we artists or not.

We are thinkers and doers, and from the vantage point of our lives now being lived in a very changed landscape, we will struggle together to resist the crassness of a world driven by greed and profit. We may find ourselves instead working, each in our own way, for the betterment of the planet at large. We need to do this while we still have time. I think we can. I believe that because we are in the midst of a tragedy, because our eyes are open now to new and difficult realities, there are also new possibilities to contemplate and work towards, in art and outside of art. We are all in this together.

***

Alice Attie (b.1950), an artist and published poet, lives and works in New York City. Intimate views of meadows form the basis of Attie’s series of photographs started four years ago in Iceland. Using a 1937 Rolleiflex camera that belonged to her father, Attie has also traversed fields in New Hampshire, upstate New York, and Central Park to ponder nature as visual poetry. Weeds, wildflowers, trees, grass and leaves, fill her lens and immerse the viewer.

Attie’s ink drawings involve the miniscule, and explore the territory between writing and drawing and where the two overlap. Engaging repetition, rhythm and gradual change, she allows tiny words, figures, numbers and images to accrue and grow on the paper. Whether presenting a landscape of numbers or a language that is not real, she is inspired to trespass over a threshold where language becomes something visual.

Her photographs and works on paper are in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, among others.

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