Pat Steir
Published: September, 2019, Interview for "You, Me and Art. Artists in the 21st Century.", Skira 2019
Marta Gnyp: You were studying art during the ’60s, when the age of abstract expressionism in the USA had come to its end; conceptual and minimal art were taking shape, simultaneously with pop art.
Pat Steir: Painting was problematic but this didn’t mean anything to me. On the contrary, it got more interesting because it was less accepted.
MG: Was it difficult to survive in the art world then, when painting was out of fashion?
PS: So what? I’ve lived on my works since 1975, which means that people have always liked paintings. Many conceptual artists were my friends. I have always liked minimalism; they were my friends too. They were actually more popular in Europe than in the USA. In America, painting has never lost its audience.
MG: Did you have fights with the other artists about the direction of art?
PS: (laughs) I was living with the inventor of conceptual art (Sol LeWitt). It couldn’t bother me at all. He was very supportive of painting, by the way.
VIBRATING BLUE AND RED WATERFALL, 1993
MG: The term of ‘conceptual art’ is misleading because it implicates that the other art is not conceptual.
PS: Exactly. I wanted to do it all by myself. I was interested in ideas, not the limitations imposed from outside. A lot of my earlier works are conceptual art if, for example, you take the line as the concept. I think there is a misunderstanding as to what conceptual art was, especially in the second and third generation.
MG: There were two artists that you mentioned as essential for formulating your artistic thinking; one was John Cage, the other Agnes Martin.
PS: Yes, in two different ways. John Cage used the notion of chaos to make his work. Duchamp said anything could be art. John said everything is art. I thought I would use gravity as a very simple element to motor my work. What matters is not only the concept, but also the intention. I was making the concept as simple as possible.
MG: If everything is art how do you see yourself as artist?
PS: I was impressed by the ideas of John. They were very meaningful to me.
MG: The other person that was important for your artistic thinking was Agnes Martin. What was so interesting between the two of you?
PS: Everything. She was such a good artist. She had to make art, and she made art everyday until she died, with the exception of the last few months of her life. She made very simple, deep works. I admired her desire to make art and the way she did it.
MG: How did you meet?
PS: My friend Douglas Crimp (the curator and art critic) curated a Martin show and invited me to join him visiting Agnes. He knew Agnes because he did the show with her when her work was not well known. I think it was in 1971; since then, I visited her every year.
MG: She was much older than you were.
PS: Much older. She became my teacher, in a way. She didn’t teach me how to make work, but she did teach me how to make art from the heart. She was very special.
MG: You also knew Louise Bourgeois well — was she someone you could talk to about your art?
PS: I didn’t understand her work. I interviewed her three times, until I wrote about the parallels between her life and her work. We both loved the last interview. She had a caretaker reading it to her every night again and again. At last, I understood what she did. It didn’t attract me though; it turned me away. I can’t say she was my favorite artist in the world, but it has meaning.
MG: Who, then, is your favorite artist?
PS: Back to Agnes Martin. I can’t say exactly why. The work is so incredibly moving. There is something about hesitation and freedom.
MG: Emotions and freedom are values that are very hard to talk about nowadays without being cheesy.
PS: We are living in difficult times. Things always change; this will change too. It is better not to change yourself to fit in. Now I don’t know what the values are. I live in America; Trump makes me feel sick. What are our values among artists and art? The audience’s value, the critical value, the personal value – somehow they don’t fit together at all.
MG: You seem to like the concept of beauty, which is not so popular at this moment, either.
PS: I don’t do works that are popular and I don’t care. Yes, it is important to me that the work is beautiful. It is beautiful because I make it natural. I’ve never had the idea that I want to create beauty, not even now. I’m not manipulating the paint; when I’m painting, the gravity comes into action and sometimes they become beautiful. I allow nature to paint the painting.
