James S i enaBIG FAST INK: DRAWINGS, 1996–2007

July 12 through September 30, 2007

1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222TELEPHONE: 518-442-4035 www.albany.edu/museum

SUMMER HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am–4 pmAFTER LABOR DAY: Tuesday through Friday, 10 am–5 pm;Saturday and Sunday, 12–4 pm

This exhibition and publication are supported by the Office of the President,the Office of the Provost, and University Auxiliary Services.

Artist Biography

Born in Oceanside, California, in 1957, James Siena lives and worksin New York City. He received his BFA from Cornell University inIthaca, New York. His work has been featured in numerous solo ex-hibitions and over 55 group exhibitions, including the 2004 WhitneyMuseum of American Art Biennial. He is the recipient of an Awardin Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the LouisComfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award; and TheNew York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. His workcan be found in the public collections of the Des Moines Art Centerin Iowa; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University inIthaca, New York; Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the WhitneyMuseum of American Art in New York among others.

Acknowledgements

The University Art Museum would like to extend itsgrateful thanks to James Siena and Geoffrey Young fortheir collaborative efforts in giving this exhibitionform. We would also like to acknowledge the gener-ous loans by Debbie August, A.G. Rosen, and Her-bert and Dorothy Vogel. Special thanks to OonaRatcliffe at James Siena Studio, and Betsy Beierly atPaceWildenstein, for assistance with loans, Jan Fleis-chner, editor, and Joelle Nadeau, the museum’s AveryArts Foundation intern.

James Siena would like to acknowledge the Cor-poration of Yaddo where eight of these drawingswere made.

Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Closed Heliopolis, 2007Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Connected Hooks, 2007Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Floppy Spaceless Comb,2007Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Nineteen Combs, 2007Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Non-Slice, 2007Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Sagging Lighthouse, 2007

Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Untitled Brown-White, 2007Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCourtesy of the artist andPaceWildenstein, New York

Crooked Lattice, 2005Ink on paper60 x 40 " inchesPrivate Collection

Two Nesting Forks, 2005Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of Debbie August

Global Key Variation,1999-2000Sepia ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of Herbert andDorothy Vogel

Base Three, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Bivalve, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Enter the Faces Variation,1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Four Spirals, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Global Key, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Global Key (Diagonal Varia-tion), 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Narrows Mantilla, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Pocket of Wheat (with JoeSiena on white), 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

The Wickets, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Vortex, 1996Ink on paper60 x 40 inchesCollection of A. G. Rosen

Exhibition Checklist

RIGHT:Global Key Variation,1999-2000

FAR RIGHT:Base Three, 1996

COVER:Sagging Lighthouse, 2007

BACK COVER:Global Key Variation (de-tail), 1999-2000

and they’ll come up with seriously different works using it. I remember seeing your number and letter chain works years ago,and not recognizing what they were. How often do you discover, or generate, another constraint, or procedure, to add to yourgrowing lexicon?

JS: These days I generate less, and synthesize more. Hybridization and distortion of procedures and motifs. Oddly, though,certain “formal constraints” persist in purer form. For example, when nesting shapes within shapes, an interval occurs thatcomes out of my general practice of organizing pictorial space. Lines not touching, line segments connect to each other onlyonce, continuous shape maintains continuity despite intricacy unverifiable by the gestalt hit of the human eyeball scan. Perec’sconstraints are dazzlingly carried out to be sure. Negation is a powerful force. I’m reminded of Doug Nufer’s book Never Again,a novel in which each word appears only once. Including such essentials as “the” and “and.” Monstrous. It must be said thatconstraints and rules and caveats only go so far, that is, the end result must have something to it beyond its devices, don’t youthink? So going back to the beginning of this reply: the morphing of my motifs is in the service of one, keeping me from beingbored, and two, slowly generating new procedures out of attempting to beat a motif to death.

GY: Over the last few years most of my short poems take the shape of free sonnets. Fourteen lines (three quatrains and acouplet), but no rhyme schemes, no syllable counts. I can pour any beverage into that container, and the fact of those four-teen lines will help me sharpen the taste. Couple years ago you asked Steve Di Benedetto how long he’ll stick with the octo-

pus and helicopter, and he said, famously, “Until they go away.” Of course! However, the poet Charles Olson wrote, “Whatdoes not change is the will to change.” Though you can’t fast-forward your emotional life, and one shouldn’t be too quick toleave a motif half explored, change is difficult, and crucial. Coltrane forced himself to practice complex intervals that woulddeprogram the glib, kinetic clichés of bop improvisation. Putting your well-stocked tabletop of workable motifs into the CanalStreet Hybrid Accelerator to see what they’ll yield should keep you busy for decades. Can you imagine a time, years hence,midst cherry blossoms and hot sake, when all you might do is glance at the ink, and acknowledge the whiteness of the paper,and not lift a finger, remaining motionless, and smile?

JS: While a thin stream of crystal-clear drool descends from the left side of my mouth…. Seriously, though, work is what makesme get up in the morning. Never will I leave the paper entirely blank, though I may go blonk! at any minute, leaving only theslightest evidence of being conscious and alive. All work is an affirmation of being human, of being in this particular containerwith locomotion and holes for in and out. You write about life: Love, Divorce, Sex, Power. It’s direct. I make flat things withfour corners that live in our architecture and, in this case, in a little book that fits in a pocket. Corners within corners: poet andartist, our functions are different, but complementary. We fit our work into the world, this world made by this species whoseabiding interest is to know something. When Montaigne said: “Que sais-je?” was he asking “what do I know?” or might he havemeant “what do I know?” We can’t compare notes with the ants, elephants, sequoias, or roses. We can, however, carry ona complex discourse whose only reward is its ability to generate more discourse. What the hell else are we going to do? So

motif and variation are placeholders, in part, for the architecture of my fershlugginer consciousness. And hopefully they areon a steadily rolling feedback loop.

GY: Yes, the reward is to be a source, to put things in play that further the looking, that body forth the self in words, thatjump-start the knowing. As a “transitional figure” (between the anonymous deep past and the relentless uncertain future),along what spectrum would you place yourself, in what world would you like your drawings to exist? Yeats had written on histombstone, “Horseman, pass by.” What phrase have you got cued up for your slab?

JS: Ah, the ever popular transition. This is the only world for these drawings. This world, where history is bunk, but it’s theonly thing we’ve got. So if they survive for ten, fifty, or seventy-two hundred years, they’ll be in that world too, and their mean-ing will no longer belong to us. I’m fine with that. “Out of my hands.”

GY: Here lies James Siena.

Guest curator Geoffrey Young is a poet, critic, and founder of Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, Massachusetts.Binary Global Key, 2007

Geoffrey Young: I remember 1996 because that was the year we put out the first edition of Pockets of Wheat. I was gath-ering lots of short poems, some as few as five words long, for what would be a small book, and I asked you if you‘d be inter-ested in doing some drawings for it. You said yes, and then proceeded to make a set of huge drawings in ink, many times largerthan anything I’d ever seen of yours. What was the impulse to do large drawings for a small book?

James Siena: In ‘96 I wasn’t drawing much, was very involved in maddeningly detailed smallish paintings and some gouaches,so the occasion called for something new. I thought it would be interesting to make large and fast drawings as opposed to smalland slow paintings. You may have forgotten, however, that I started, and abandoned, a group of micro-drawings (on the scaleof 1/4 x 3/16 inch) with the idea of enlarging those and seeing them in contrast to the reduced large drawings. Perhaps thatproject should be reconsidered if you have a book of longer poems in mind.

GY: Could it be that I never saw the miniscule works? I continue to be amazed that your 60” tall drawings remain legible,seem to lose nothing of their force, when reduced to four inches tall in the book. Each of the ten drawings for the first editionestablishes a different motif. Some are clearly rule-based (if you do thus and such consistently, a pattern will emerge), andsome are free-form (or apparently free-form). You seem to anchor your improvisations to contained operations. Do you re-call when you first started working this way?

JS: You never did see the mini drawings, because I only did a few and frankly, they were terrible. End of subject (until theyare no longer terrible). It’s true on the topic of motif and difference that each drawing in the book comes out of a differentprocedure for occupying space, but even in the apparently free-form works there are proscriptions that are more or less ob-served: i.e., “lines may not touch” or “grid must be made in ‘this’ way, then worked with white paint.” I’m not amazed at allabout the legibility of the reduced drawing—forgive me, but that was the idea, or one of the ideas, to take advantage of thepower inherent in compression. Your term “contained operations” refers to what I think of as constraints or caveats in the mak-ing of a work, and that’s been going on for at least twenty years, starting with simple loops that are puckered and knotted, mov-ing through perimeters made of number and letter chains, and on into a widening lexicon of procedural approaches.

GY: I remember the first time I heard the words “formal constraint,” only they were in French. It was 1982. I was at a pub-lisher’s house in Paris. He’d been making beautiful books by writers such as Georges Perec, who’d just died that year at a youngage. The ultimate formal constraint has got to be Perec’s novel in which he isn’t permitted to use the letter “e.” Hard to imag-ine writing a sentence without using the “e,” let alone a novel. Then I learned more about Oulipo, and constraint-based writ-ing, and it wasn’t unfamiliar territory after all because artists I knew had been doing similar things. And come to think of it, sohad certain adventurous poets. The great thing about a formal constraint is, you propose the same constraint to two artists,

A ConversationThe following interview took place between James Siena and guest curator Geoffery Young via emai in early June 2007.

Narrows Mantilla, 1996 Floppy Spaceless Comb, 2007 Closed Heliopolis, 2007 Non-Slice, 2007 Binary Global Key, 2007 Global Key (Diagonal Variation), 1996 Untitled Brown-White, 2007 Connected Hooks, 2007 Nineteen Combs, 2007