Laura Owens

Scott Rothkopf: Laura Owens is an artist who's based in Los Angeles, where she's lived since the early 1990's. 

Narrator: Scott Rothkopf is the Deputy Director for Programs, and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, and organized this exhibition. 

Scott Rothkopf: Since that time she's been, I think, one of the most important figures in discussions around contemporary painting, and art more generally. She's had this remarkable approach to making work that seems big, ambitious, abstract, intellectual on the one hand, and also extremely personal, funny, witty, involved with pop culture, music, cartooning, things that you wouldn't necessarily associate with advanced art. The way that she's brought these two strands together, to me, is one of the key aspects of what's made her such a challenging and relevant artist today. 

We started thinking about the exhibition as a series of four discrete cabins or rooms that people could move in and out of. Each of these galleries is a kind of free-floating space that almost acts like a portal in time. Then you leave those galleries, and you're back in the space of the Whitney today. And this play with time and place, with art and architecture, with the notion of the past and the present colliding in the work was something that we really wanted to bring forward in this exhibition.

Scott Rothkopf: This painting from 1996 really captures a lot of Owens' interests at the start of her career. At first glance it looks sort of like a big abstract painting. But when you pull in closely, you see that these strange drops—are they water, are they tears?—are actually very thickly painted on the surface. 

You see this tension between the staining of the canvas on the one hand, and this almost vulgar, gross, icing-like treatment in the drops. Then, as you zoom in even closer, you find that there are little doodlings inside these drops. Little worlds that are hidden at first view. This relationship between cartooning on the one hand and ambitious painting on the other is a kind of unusual tension in the history of contemporary painting. 

It shows Owens trying to draw together different strands, different conversations, and make a work that, I think, pushes against accepted good taste, but at the same time draws us in. That notion of something being both appealing and a little repellent, something that questions what good art is supposed to look like, is really central to the way that she thinks about her work.

Narrator: Spatially, this large painting is dominated by a slanting floor.

Scott Rothkopf: It's hard to know where you are in the room. Are you lying on the floor? Are you a little child? Are you an ant? Are you in a sci-fi movie? I think that the fact that she's forcing this sense of distance from the back wall and really engaging with the idea of how a painting invents a space, how that space connects to the space that we're standing in, is one of the big questions that appears throughout her work.

Narrator: On the back wall of the room, there’s a salon-style installation of paintings.

Scott Rothkopf: She would have people who came by her studio actually collaborate and draw and paint some of the images that you see here. A few of them she made, some her friends and family did. If you look in the right corner, you see a kind of black image with pink, white, and brown. That painting, which she sometimes jokingly calls a “Neapolitan” after the ice cream sandwich, which maybe looks to be melting, is in fact hanging nearby on the wall.

And so you get this sense of her creating dialogues between paintings. That a painting is not just a discrete window onto another world, but has a life in a place, and a life in relation to the paintings around it and to all of us.

Charline von Heyl: That painting still is blowing my mind. I just love that seagull painting.

Narrator: Charline von Heyl is a painter. She’s friends with Laura Owens.

Charline von Heyl: It really illustrates everything that she is about, in a certain way. How can she only paint two seagulls in there and not twelve? Just the fact that you have the seagulls and you feel this immense space, and this feeling of freedom, seagull space. The next thing that your brain tells you is, “but it has shadow, and the shadow of the seagull is three inches away from the seagull.” That was also the first time, I think, that she introduced this weird thing that her paintings now have, which is they almost...what happens to you when you look at one of her paintings is very similar to what happens when you look at a pond, where you, at first, see the surface, and something’s floating on the surface. It’s crystal clear and just maybe two or three leaves. Then, you realize that it is just the surface, and that there’s a whole weight of depth under it.

Narrator: Owens first showed this seascape alongside other works in this room. If you look closely, you’ll see they’re all subtly interrelated. Find the dark still life that’s hanging nearby. It pictures flowers, and above them, a tiny mirror. If you look in that mirror, you’ll find a reflection of the painting with the seagulls.

Scott Rothkopf: Then, if you look at the white interior, you see sort of subtle images and perspectives of two other paintings. The one on the right is in fact a depiction of the black painting also hanging in this space. I think the way that she sets up a conversation about the room, about painting, and about our relationship to both those things in these three works is a really interesting, important aspect of her work.

Narrator: This painting is based on an image that Owens made in an early computer-drawing program called Kid Pix.

Scott Rothkopf: She worked hard to recreate those kinds of strokes, like a spray or a dob, that you could make in these programs in paint. So they had a different kind of thickness and life.

Narrator: Take a moment to focus on the lower-left hand portion of the painting. There’s a red-and-yellow upside-down arc, surrounded by free-flowing abstract forms. With that area in your mind’s eye, go through the door and look for a smaller painting, made in the same style. It’s like a blown-up detail of the area we were just looking at, although Owens made this smaller painting first.

Scott Rothkopf: This gallery approximates a space in London where Owens had an exhibition in 1999. She often approached her exhibitions thinking very specifically about the architecture of a given gallery, and this is a perfect example of the way that she thought. Here, she was thinking not only about the gallery space, but also about the idea of a diptych, which is, of course, a work of art that includes two parts as part of a larger whole.

On one wall you see a diptych of two monkeys facing each other across a blank space.

Narrator: These paintings were in the same exhibition as the ones based on the digital drawing. They look completely different, but they explore similar ideas about the relationships between paintings and architecture.

Scott Rothkopf: She thought of the blank space between the two panels as being as important as the part where the painting was. You see their eyes locking across this great divide, and the edges of the canvas reach from wall to wall, and ceiling nearly to floor.

Jorge Pardo: You and I decided to do an exhibition together. You made the paintings about the birds and the bees, I made beds. It was an eccentric, kind of dopey collaboration between two people who were going out.

Narrator: While working on the oral history for this exhibition’s catalog, Owens interviewed Pardo about this work.

Scott Rothkopf: Artistic communities and collaboration have always been important to Owens and the way that she approaches her work. Sometimes she's made paintings with a friend. Other times she's curated exhibitions of their art, and sometimes they've curated exhibitions with her. In this case you see a gallery that evokes a show that Owens had in 1999 with the artist Jorge Pardo, who was at the time her boyfriend and also living in Los Angeles.

Jorge Pardo: You were making images of nature that were pretty straight up. I saw this as an extension of that. I always like your work because it grounds itself in something very eccentrically site-specific, like a bedroom set.

I thought the work was interesting because it was very eccentric, personal, intimate notion was driving the relationship between these two things. And then these other relationships they sort of reverberated with other things; there were these other relationships. It’s a sappy thing to say, but it was kind of a nice image of love or something.

Narrator: Owens painted this canvas in 2002.

Scott Rothkopf: I love that Owens was so free to bring into painting ideas of cuteness, of cuddliness, of things maybe that you would remember from a children's book, or a fairy tale that often, I would say, have been excluded from ideas about important contemporary art, at least in America, or the West. On the other hand, she is dealing with a lot of complicated notions about painting in itself. You see so many creative, surprising ways that she's touching the canvas. Whether she's dyeing with thin washes, color directly into the linen. At other times she's putting down a very hard ground, like in the tree trunks and then smearing paint very thinly on the surface. Sometimes dobs, like you find in the flowers or the leaves push off the surface in a way that almost seems to contradict the receding space of the water and the sky.

Owens and her friend, the artist Scott Reeder, used to joke about the idea of maximalism, which of course is the opposite of minimalism in art, but in this case it was a kind of maxanimalism. How many animals could you fit into a painting for it to still work, for it to be taken seriously, for it not to become too goofy or go over the edge.

Narrator: As you look around this room, you’ll see that it’s full of figures—human and animal. For much of her early career, Owens avoided depicting any kind of figure. But as you look around the room, you’ll see that she eventually took on everything from love scenes and pirates to magical creatures.

Kirsty Bell: For me, it's quite important in this body of work that these paintings were made shortly after she had first baby.

Narrator: Kirsty Bell is a Berlin-based writer, and friends with the artist.

Kirsty Bell: That real fact and change of her own life and her personal situation was then brought into the paintings. And there's these wonderful bucolic scenes of naked men and women and babies frolicking amongst falling leaves.

At this time, female artists are not actually really supposed to talk about their family. It was still kind of a taboo and I felt like it was really admirable that she actually chose to make this the center, this experience that she was having in her life, to make this the central subject matter for her body of work.

I think it is a feminist gesture because it has to do with the real facts of life and how you can bring these things that are supposedly peripheral. But why should having a baby be peripheral, be peripheral to your life as an artist?

But I have to say at the time when she made those paintings and showed them, a lot of people had problems with them and were wishing that she was making conceptual abstraction again because it's more difficult to find a critical position with that kind of emotionally-laden subject matter.

Narrator: These paintings are quite large, but it’s worth getting up close to their surfaces and looking at them carefully. Writer Kirsty Bell describes seeing them when Owens first showed them.

Kirsty Bell: It was like several different layers going on at the same time and one of them was this very thick three-dimensional daubs of paint on the surface. She then painted these drop shadows beneath them. So, they became this kind of super smart and witty description of the act of painting itself.

And this gesture then became a signature gesture for her, but then they'd also used screen-printing. She developed this method of screen-printing with charcoal and used the basis of these classified ads into this one layer that goes throughout all of the works, also bringing in many references to the history of painting but also the content was working on this kind of witty, funny level.

Narrator: Owens nicknamed the series Pavement Karaoke. It was a kind of joke, stemming from the fact that Owens loved the idea of doing karaoke to songs by the band Pavement.

Calvin Marcus: Such a thing as “Pavement karaoke” was too emo to actually exist; the irony is funny to her.

Narrator: Calvin Marcus is an artist who worked as one of Owens’ studio assistants during this time.

Calvin Marcus: It was supposed to coincide with an actual event where people would get together and do cringey karaoke that was music that didn’t sound so good—it wasn’t hits, it wasn’t hits, it wasn’t “Tears for Fears” or whatever.

Narrator: Asha Schechter conducted oral histories that are transcribed for the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. This recording is drawn from his interviews.

[The song “GOLD SOUNDZ” by Pavement plays.]

Narrator: Like many of Owens’s paintings, this one has an energy that comes from a tension between the images on the surface and those that seem to exist a bit deeper in space. Here, the surface is loose and swirly—and there are a few kiss marks in the lower right. By contrast, the background largely consists of a regular, silkscreened grid, which Owens produced digitally. As you look at the paintings nearby, you’ll notice that Owens uses the same grid in paintings that otherwise look nothing like this one.

Ann Temkin: I think in all cases the background grids that are taken from a computer screen are always intersecting with completely improvised imagery and also hand-painted components.

Narrator: Ann Temkin is Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ann Temkin: It's never a straight ready-made and it's never straight painting. They're all getting in each others’ ways. The way that it might occur to somebody that some of it is ready-made imagery is that when you look from painting to painting and see things recurring as in a print. This crisscross between silk screening, say, and painting goes back to [Robert] Rauschenberg and [Andy] Warhol who in the early sixties lifted from magazines, newspapers, elevated it to oils on canvas and mixed the idea of a ready-made image with their own whatever.

I think fifty, sixty years later, that same impulse is here upgraded to the newspaper and magazines of our time which are digital and the technologies of our time.

Scott Rothkopf: One of the things I love about this painting from 2013 is the way that Owens is really pushing her thinking about abstract painting, at the same time as she's making us feel sensations of curiosity, wonder, joy, exuberance. On the abstract side, you see this incredibly complex approach to the surface, the way that she's mixing together silk screens with painting on top of the canvas, with collage elements. In this case, actual bicycle wheels that push into our space. She thought so much about these bicycle wheels and their color, that she even custom painted some of the rims, and picked the tires very carefully so that they would be actual elements in terms of the pallet of the work.

The painting sort of invites us to reach out and touch it, to spin the wheels, and although we're not able to do that in the context of the museum, even this imaginative suggestion opens the possibility of how people might engage with work, both with their eyes, or with their hands, or perhaps in this case a bridge that they would connect with their minds. That sense of the way that a painting or a work of art is an invitation to play, to think, to look, and to experience is really one of the qualities of her work that she's always pushing to the fore.

Scott Rothkopf: Owens made this painting when she was invited to be in the Whitney Biennial in 2014. She wanted to make a painting that in fact had a secret story behind it. So that this painting that you see in front of you is in fact just one of five elements that make a larger whole the other four elements are hidden behind the canvas. If you could look around the back you would find three more paintings and even a little book, all related to the image that you see in front of you. Owens has said that if this painting where ever exhibited on its own, it would have a little exhibition within it, and we could take these four other parts out and hang or display them nearby this individual canvas.

One of the essential aspects of this painting for me, is the way it walks this line between something that's kind of cute and charming on the one hand, and also a little bit anxious or scary on the other. I think that as much as Owens is interested in qualities of play, of joy, of exuberance, she's also interested in the inverse. The times that people are anxious, or sad. The times when we face conundrums in our lives, and in fact, she's looking for ways, in her paintings, whether through abstraction or the way she treats the surface, to also deal with some of those predicaments.

Narrator: These three paintings were originally part of a continuous expanse of wallpaper. Owens first installed them at the Wattis Institute of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. They’re hung in their original spatial configuration. But the experience of the works is quite different here. David Berezin, an artist who assisted Owens during this time, explains.

David Berezin: On the wallpaper, there were eight phone numbers or other things that said, “text a question to.” You could text any question, and it would get routed through custom computer hardware and software that we made that had a SIM card associated with that number. The computer would choose from around a thousand responses that we had pre-programmed into the computer, that would be played from a speaker that was embedded in the wall behind the wallpaper where the phone number was written. I think Laura wanted to be able to have someone talk to a painting.

The show was called Ten Paintings, but you walked in and it was a wallpaper installation. There were no paintings in the gallery. Before we hung the wallpaper, 9’ x 7’ pieces of the drywall were removed, and in its place we inlayed these panels. When the show came down, the wallpaper got torn off the wall in a very brutish way. But for these ten panels that were inlayed in the wall, they would get cut out, so they would continue to live and have an exhibition life of their own.

Narrator: Asha Schechter conducted oral histories that are transcribed for the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. This recording is drawn from his interviews.

Scott Rothkopf: This gallery features an installation by the artist Laura Owens, which is the culmination of her survey exhibition on the museum's fifth floor. In it, you get a sense of an artist who's very involved with painting on the one hand because you see five canvases bolted directly to the floor, and also an artist who's interested in sculpture and installation art. And this work really shows how she crosses the wires between the two. Are we looking at five paintings? Are we looking at a sculpture, an installation, or all of the above? We're invited to walk between these canvases, to explore the space of the gallery, and both the front and back side of each panel.

At first, we find fragments of images, or stories, but when we move to particular points at either side of the gallery, the image actually coheres in our eyes in perspective. From one side, we find a text that's actually written by Owens' son, Henry Bryan, when he was nine years old. It's a sort of fantastical tale about an alien in Antarctica, and you get the sense of curiosity, of imagination that this boy had in approaching his story.

She's making a work that is meant to be seen in the round, and from both sides. So when we move to the other end of the gallery, we see the back of the stretcher bars actually as part of the painting. We see the raw linen, on which she's added additional details like her son's drawings of fruit flavors from scented markers.

All of these notions about playfulness, childhood, maybe being a mom, are combined with extremely rigorous and virtuosic ideas about painting. How would we bridge those worlds, I think, is part of the meaning of Owens' work, and I think the way that she engages all of us into her journey.