Ralph Humphrey, Great Jones, 1989. Casein on canvas, wood, 42×52”. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

Ralph Humphrey asked me about 10 times what I thought of his last show. I said something different each time he asked. My characterization of the paintings as Protestant Philip Gustons amused him the most. I think I was referring, in a short-hand fashion, to a combination of the blunt and poetic in the same painting which Guston and Humphrey’s work share. The Protestant relates to the plain American, almost Hopperesque mise-en-scène situation. But rather than the sense of something which has already happened, as in the Guston KKK paintings, or the sense that something may occur, as in Hopper, Humphrey’s paintings themselves are virtual.

I met Ralph Humphrey when I was 19, and I knew him until his death in 1990. From the beginning, Ralph’s work was individualistic. It did not adhere to the reigning dogmas but reflected his particular way of seeing. It withstood separately at a time (the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—Minimalism, Greenbergian formalism) when the pressure to forge a consensus exerted enormous power in the art world. His paintings, often outward-projecting and object-like, operated in a complex way—the more they shared (invaded) the viewer’s space, the greater was the role of their illusionism. Ralph’s art never eliminated the tentative, emotive or idiosyncratic. He followed his own natural poieses: he felt his way through.

The paintings in his show in March 1990 were his last completed works. The shapes in the paintings, painted, cut and pasted on have personas, are individual, have constrained poignancy. Often in the isolation of each shape a restive bleakness is apparent.

These shapes are not figural to me yet I identify with them. Apprehending them and their fugitive movements enables me to sense my connection to a living organism which is not I, to that part of the world and perhaps even the universe which is isolated yet related to the rest, as I am. All the paintings but one from this show take their titles from SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels on the upper west side where Ralph had lived in the 1960s and are also, except for that one, the same titles he used for a group of his paintings in the ‘60s. Great Jones, after Bill Jones, is the exception. Those hotels had long been demolished by the time Ralph titled his paintings for his 1990 show. Bill Jones was dead.

What is left of one’s past when it’s physically gone? Had all those people who had lived on the edge (of society) disappeared? Is shelter impossible? Was the significance of these transient shelters dual in that they performed a temporary task and then disappeared?

I think the paintings are about the transience of the physical world, even when it is their own substance: their object-like quality diminishes as one looks at them. More than most paintings they change as one looks at them. What had appeared as visually static and absorbent begins to oscillate; a pulsating flicker caused by a slight chromatic transposition occurs where the shapes meet the ground. As the dynamic aspect of the painting affects one’s perception, the shapes seem to dissolve. In a constant alternating interplay, seeming certainty is relinquished by the most concrete elements as the rest becomes activated, the paintings take on depth. Through color—glowing color, saturated yet crepuscular color—these paintings assert their vitality.

Through color the paintings operate simultaneously as illusionistic and inverse illusion, moving towards the viewer and returning to their own boundaries. As followed by our gaze, color acts as the amplification of our motor being. During the long gaze the material nature of these acutely scaled paintings fades almost completely as the penumbral color activates a response to depth and its limits. Not to that of the space around one but to the limits of depth within oneself through one’s body. From the painting to the eye we know it must be but it feels like it touches the inside of the body first.

When Ralph died I became conscious of everything I might have asked him and hadn’t. I had taken for granted that the ideas behind the work of the people I knew would reveal themselves over time, without my directly inquiring; there is no substitute for an understanding gained during the course of seeing work and the subsequent spontaneous attenuated exchanges which have no purpose outside of themselves. But after Ralph’s death it began to seem possible that the thoughts of the artists I knew, what those artists regarded as their motivating forces, might remain unknown to me if I didn’t ask about them specifically even though direct examination risks changing the thing examined. I am now more inclined toward the notion that an artist’s verbal communication may bring the outsider closer to the meaning of that artist’s work. Connected to this is my belief (which forms the basis for some of my questioning) that how people live—their politics, how they have accepted or rejected their own backgrounds—has an effect on the art they make.

My natural inclination is toward apprehending work sensually; toward art which is optically complex; toward art which is generous, inclusive, not worked over toward a signature style, towards artists who have more ideas than they know what to do with; towards vision, not the adjustments thereof; and an art which goes all over the place, sometimes literally.

I have resisted the Modernist authoritarian canon, which is essentially a stylistic approach requiring a compositional a priori, and its tacit insistence on oneness. I am interested in heterogeneity rather than formal unity; in allowing a painting distinctive and particular parts, permitting the varying operations of those differing parts to retain individual character and qualities. There isn’t a hierarchy within the painting. The mode of apprehension which follows is one in which the viewer puts the painting together herself. There is no agreed on “ideal” interpretation. Hierarchies in other areas have seemed equally misguided to me.

The artists I’ve questioned here are at different levels of development and exposure. During the past year and a half I have learned and borrowed from all of them. Although they communicate with varying degrees of fluidity, acuity, and success, all have a steadfast resistance to being cast into systems of speaking about their work, to jargon.

All speak about their work in ways which are reflective of their work, using words as ways of communicating about what they believe they’ve made. The realm of ideas isn’t utilized as conspicuous display, nor are concepts advanced for the sake of invidious comparison.

Though these people were familiar to me, the underlying ideas behind their work and their motivating forces for making work were frequently surprising.

Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Leonard Bullock from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Craig Fisher from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Louise Fishman from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Dona Nelson from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Saul Ostrow from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with John Zinsser from this issue.

 

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Cora Cohen Do you feel that the materials and process you use determine the painting?

Carl Ostendarp No, but I pick ‘em ‘cause I want the paintings to be about gravity and weight, sort of obvious, literal kind of stuff. That’s why I use the materials I do. If the stuff you usually put on a surface is paint, then the foam is the paint, pretty much. I couldn’t get the clarity of the material and the all-at-once quality with whatever else I tried. I didn’t want it to look like it was about building it up really slowly.

 

Carl Ostendarp, Still Farther South, 1990. Oil and insulation foam on linen 60×60”. Courtesy John Post Lee Gallery.

CC Is there a blind part of working with the foam?

CO Yes, ‘cause it’s about one-fifth or one-tenth of its volume when it’s in liquid form. There’s a catalyst and when you mix it together you have 30 or 40 seconds before it starts setting up and, like, growing. So I have to do everything really fast and depending on how I do it, like the big drippy paintings are poured on top of the thing and I let it drip down so if I put too much it’s on the floor and if I don’t…I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to look. I can make it look like a pancake, or I can make it look like a big drip, or I can find ways to make it look like a big brush stroke or something but it’s not like a drawn image. It’s a malleable thing. It becomes a thing as much as it becomes an image. Plus with this stuff, it grows. And it ends up giving the painting a weird terrain that looks self made, that doesn’t look determined, that doesn’t look like a picture.

CC There are parameters.

CO It’s more the format choices and how I’m going to deploy it that determines how it looks, or how much it looks, or what kind of changes happen.

It’s like a goofy image, or a floating. You have to do them on the ground and put them up on the wall. Like those Pollock paintings done on the ground and then put up on the wall. All that stuff about abstract painting…like the Malevich paintings are outer space paintings, like this weird idea that the place to be is in outer space with nothing else around, and that’s what’s really great and abstract.

CC If you kept wanting the paintings to be about gravity and weight would you think about making that happen in another way, besides the foam?

CO I’ve got these drawings for paintings that aren’t on the wall the same way; they lean against the wall, and some are on the ground. And I could probably do these with just paint instead of foam. The work I’m interested in most is always work that’s about traditional painting but isn’t necessarily painting. It’s all that processy stuff, scattery stuff. Or sculpture that’s more about pictorial issues than form. Mostly it’s the look that’s really impressive. Like big blank looking things. And how they’re dumb and serious at the same time.

CC Your work is a funny combination, there’s austerity and sensuality. One wonders if there’s an emotional content to the whole thing. If there is and there probably is, what is it? Do you think of your art as psychological?

CO It’s more like a place than a picture. I like the idea of something frozen so that instead of looking at it as though you’ve made it, or as though you never could make it—which is one big way you get trained to look at art (you always get put in a certain place) I want it to look like: you know it’s art because since it’s painting it’s got this privileged quality to it; but your experience of looking is more noticing and responding to this real thing: what physically happened or what looks like is happening.