Composer, Musician, Photographer, Artist
Einstein on the Beach, it's a masterpiece. America, in 1976, was to be celebrating its 200th year of existence, and Michel Guy, the French Minister of Culture, came to New York to offer a commission to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson to write an opera. This was the gift that France would give for America's two-hundredth anniversary. That was the first time I met Robert Wilson.
Artist
I just feel there is already a connection, something I have to come to, but that I'm trying to search it out or see what's already there. I feel that we are truly connected as a world. And I'm just trying to make people aware of an existing connection we already have, to send that message out there. And I like to do it in the form of...I guess you'd call it a mundane image, where it's not really about bells and whistles, but it's about something in it makes you want to look, and you want to know why. And it's because you've been there before, regardless of whether you are a dancer or that particular guy in the subway, you know you've been in his head in that mood that he's experiencing.
Artist
I just feel there is already a connection, something I have to come to, but that I'm trying to search it out or see what's already there. I feel that we are truly connected as a world. And I'm just trying to make people aware of an existing connection we already have, to send that message out there. And I like to do it in the form of...I guess you'd call it a mundane image, where it's not really about bells and whistles, but it's about something in it makes you want to look, and you want to know why. And it's because you've been there before, regardless of whether you are a dancer or that particular guy in the subway, you know you've been in his head in that mood that he's experiencing.
Author of Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
Co-author of Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Professor of Molecular Genetics & Assoc. Dean (Int’l) · University of Surrey
I think that's what art is all about is communicating these big, complex objects, which are ideas inside our head, but in a non-dissected way in which the object isn't completely dissected, or it's dissected in such a way it can be reassembled in somebody else's mind. So you get a full experience of what the artist had or as close as he or she can make it. So I think that to me is what art does. It's a way of communicating these wonderful ideas and feelings that we have inside our heads. And they're trapped there, and art allows you - by playing music or painting, or writing poetry... - it allows you to communicate this in this holistic kind of way.
Author of Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
Co-author of Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Professor of Molecular Genetics & Assoc. Dean (Int’l) · University of Surrey
I think that's what art is all about is communicating these big, complex objects, which are ideas inside our head, but in a non-dissected way in which the object isn't completely dissected, or it's dissected in such a way it can be reassembled in somebody else's mind. So you get a full experience of what the artist had or as close as he or she can make it. So I think that to me is what art does. It's a way of communicating these wonderful ideas and feelings that we have inside our heads. And they're trapped there, and art allows you - by playing music or painting, or writing poetry... - it allows you to communicate this in this holistic kind of way.
Artist, Musician, Poet
Author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads
Jean-Michel Basquiat's combination of words and images, this visual poetry, just from a cultural standpoint has been so important. When I met him in 1983, black people were not allowed in the art market, pretty much. And you see that he broke down this barrier, which opened the door for all this multiculturalism within the art market. And you can't diminish the importance of that at all. It's helped to give a voice and an audience to all these incredible artists that might not have had that.
Artist, Musician, Poet
Author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads
Jean-Michel Basquiat's combination of words and images, this visual poetry, just from a cultural standpoint has been so important. When I met him in 1983, black people were not allowed in the art market, pretty much. And you see that he broke down this barrier, which opened the door for all this multiculturalism within the art market. And you can't diminish the importance of that at all. It's helped to give a voice and an audience to all these incredible artists that might not have had that.
Artist
I always feel that you can never fail if you don't know what you're doing. The best work is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing…A lot of the images that have struck me, that I get drawn to, a lot of them were from painting. Some of them were from early movies. Some of them were from places I visited, but mostly gardens or wild gardens that had things in them I’d never seen before, and then learning what that was when I'd been working on it. Generally speaking most of what I do had to do with my feelings about other artists work that I admired. A lot of the industrial materials that are use, floor tiling and things like that came from site specific artists, sculptors, people who built into the buildings, Arte Povera. Using works that were just found, the poor materials, that kind of thing. Tar I kind of got from working in my fathers tire shop with the grinding of the rubber and so on. Things come together and I wasn’t even aware of it until people start asking me about it. I remember telling them about this man, being in black room with all this rubber, smoking Camels. It was a very cool image. I’ll never forget the guy, but when I was doing it myself, that’s not what I was thinking. I was really thinking about the materials I was using and inverting them.
Sculptor
The figure in my work is me. The figure in my work is you. It's me placing objects. It’s me putting things together. It’s you standing near it. It’s you in proximity moving back and forth, moving around it. It’s us. One of the reasons I make the things I do the way I make them is because I can't imagine them. I make things that I couldn't draw or even think about clearly. I can only look at them. I enjoy the complexity that I make because I'm striving to see it.
Sculptor
The figure in my work is me. The figure in my work is you. It's me placing objects. It’s me putting things together. It’s you standing near it. It’s you in proximity moving back and forth, moving around it. It’s us. One of the reasons I make the things I do the way I make them is because I can't imagine them. I make things that I couldn't draw or even think about clearly. I can only look at them. I enjoy the complexity that I make because I'm striving to see it.
Art and Theater Director, Costume Designer
Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator.
Art and Theater Director, Costume Designer
Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator.
Author of NYTimes bestseller All of the Marvels, Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics
Host of the Voice of Latveria podcast
I like the idea that your actions in the world can be motivated by both idealism and realism about how to achieve those ideals. I like the idea that morality is not simple. There is this idea that there are the heroes and there's the villains and you can easily tell who's who, and that's not so true as it used to be in comics and that's meaningful. One thing that is interesting about the Marvel story is there’s basically nobody who's just a bad guy to be a bad guy. Everyone has their reasons. Almost everyone is capable of redemption in some way, even the worst of the worst are capable of tremendous heroism and tremendous idealism and genuinely wanting to heal the world make it a better place.
Author of NYTimes bestseller All of the Marvels, Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics
Host of the Voice of Latveria podcast
I like the idea that your actions in the world can be motivated by both idealism and realism about how to achieve those ideals. I like the idea that morality is not simple. There is this idea that there are the heroes and there's the villains and you can easily tell who's who, and that's not so true as it used to be in comics and that's meaningful. One thing that is interesting about the Marvel story is there’s basically nobody who's just a bad guy to be a bad guy. Everyone has their reasons. Almost everyone is capable of redemption in some way, even the worst of the worst are capable of tremendous heroism and tremendous idealism and genuinely wanting to heal the world make it a better place.
We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected.
We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected.
Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and other performances. In the late 60s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite applied to paper and chipboard. Her “visual equations” based on set theory were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Her later paintings draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia:Beacon, and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting. Of course, he gave you these books, but it's interesting how those walks you took together with the mathematician Max Dehn also illustrated what he was teaching you about abstraction.
DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that. I don't know. Ever since the chip entered the universe, I don't know electronics now.
But when I was a kid, when I was even living in New York on Chambers Street with my daughter, we had a TV set which broke down periodically, and I would take out all the tubes, test them at the local store. I just was interested in how things tick. Always. In nature and in mechanics and so on. So, math just kind of was a natural for me the way Max taught it because what he was really teaching was astronomy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And you can see that sense of wonder everywhere in your early artworks to the ones that you just shared with us today with the beautiful copper over paper and all these textures. They're just a wonderful meditation. I think the expression you used was on the nature of nature.
ROCKBURNE
Yes. There's something about this life I have, and I've had since I was a child, about studying the creativity of the arcane. I studied Egypt since I was six. That's where I go every day.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You were talking about time and your experience of time. And you said you don't experience it as...it's not linear. I don't know. How would you say?
ROCKBURNE
It's hard for me, for myself, to define what the past is. So when I was doing the work at DIA, I felt like I had found about this work and formed it yesterday. Then, as I said, I have extensive diary notes on it. So, it was easy to go back to '80. I have 73 diaries. And look at it and then share it with all the people that were working with me at DIA.
Of course, you know, like they have only seen this in reproduction. They don't know what the work behind the work was like. And so, once we were talking about, and we had to track it. The big reason it took three years is that none of the materials exist. We had to substitute and test new materials to substitute for the old materials. Nothing. You know, it's like Rauschenberg once lost one of the Coke bottles of his work, and he finally found one in a mountain in India or something like that.
It's that kind of thing. The stuff that was so ordinary. Paper that was so ordinary. We had a special paper made in it. So that's what really took the time. But in terms of the sequential time, I experience very little difference between yesterday and today in my work.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Benjamin Appel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Elena Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and other performances. In the late 60s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite applied to paper and chipboard. Her “visual equations” based on set theory were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Her later paintings draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia:Beacon, and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's interesting. Of course, he gave you these books, but it's interesting how those walks you took together with the mathematician Max Dehn also illustrated what he was teaching you about abstraction.
DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that. I don't know. Ever since the chip entered the universe, I don't know electronics now.
But when I was a kid, when I was even living in New York on Chambers Street with my daughter, we had a TV set which broke down periodically, and I would take out all the tubes, test them at the local store. I just was interested in how things tick. Always. In nature and in mechanics and so on. So, math just kind of was a natural for me the way Max taught it because what he was really teaching was astronomy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And you can see that sense of wonder everywhere in your early artworks to the ones that you just shared with us today with the beautiful copper over paper and all these textures. They're just a wonderful meditation. I think the expression you used was on the nature of nature.
ROCKBURNE
Yes. There's something about this life I have, and I've had since I was a child, about studying the creativity of the arcane. I studied Egypt since I was six. That's where I go every day.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You were talking about time and your experience of time. And you said you don't experience it as...it's not linear. I don't know. How would you say?
ROCKBURNE
It's hard for me, for myself, to define what the past is. So when I was doing the work at DIA, I felt like I had found about this work and formed it yesterday. Then, as I said, I have extensive diary notes on it. So, it was easy to go back to '80. I have 73 diaries. And look at it and then share it with all the people that were working with me at DIA.
Of course, you know, like they have only seen this in reproduction. They don't know what the work behind the work was like. And so, once we were talking about, and we had to track it. The big reason it took three years is that none of the materials exist. We had to substitute and test new materials to substitute for the old materials. Nothing. You know, it's like Rauschenberg once lost one of the Coke bottles of his work, and he finally found one in a mountain in India or something like that.
It's that kind of thing. The stuff that was so ordinary. Paper that was so ordinary. We had a special paper made in it. So that's what really took the time. But in terms of the sequential time, I experience very little difference between yesterday and today in my work.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Benjamin Appel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Elena Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.
The New Museum
When you're looking, really look very, very hard at the new. Look very, very hard at what challenges you. If you're bothered by it, go deeper. So it was "Don't take the easy way out and say 'I love that'. 'Why do you love it?' 'I just feel it.' No, unacceptable. Just feeling it is not enough, if you're a responsible party. If you're a member of the public, fine, have whatever kind of experience you want, but if you're a professional, know why you're doing it.
Novelist and Essayist
The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.
