 Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Welcome. I'm Elizabeth Sackler. I am the proud chair of the board of the Brooklyn Museum and also have had the pleasure of opening the Beale Space Actors Center for Feminist Art in 2007. It has been wonderful working with the Brooklyn Museum. It's been wonderful working with Katherine Morris, who's our curator of the Sackler Center. And it's been wonderful having programs such as these regularly and with audiences as enthusiastic as I think you will be receiving. And tonight is very special. It's marking the fifth anniversary of the Helene Zuckersiemann Memorial Exhibition Fund. And it will be with the conversation, as you probably know, with Arlene Scheket and Katherine Morris, who is the Sackler family curator. And Katherine is very modest, but she is a wonderful, wonderful interviewer. So I suspect that we are in for a treat. And Arlene will be very interesting and fun for you, I think, to be in conversation with Katherine. Helene Zuckersiemann was a curator, an archivist, an artist, an art historian, an author, a mentor, a wife, a mother, and a friend. This list describes the very roles she played, but only hints at who she was, what she achieved, and how deeply she affected the many people whose lives she touched before hers ended so tragically in June of 2010. And I'd like to recognize Marilyn Greenberg. Marilyn, would you please stand up? She is the current chair. Thank you. I'd like to recognize Marilyn. She is the current chair of the Council for Feminist Art. And she is a member of the Brooklyn Museum Advisory Board. But mainly, Marilyn is the person who came to me and said that she felt having a memorial exhibition fund in her very good friend's name would be an honor to Helene and that it would be something that would be remembered always and forevermore. And it is a beautiful fund. You do accomplish a lot. It supports women artists. It promotes the connection of people to art and to each other through the exhibition of art, which I'm understanding was so very important to Helene. The Endowment Fund was launched in 2011. I don't know how many of you were there at a reception. It raised, in the first year, the fund raised $50,000. And it's now over $100,000. And over 100, almost 120 people have contributed to it. And so the fund has supported, thus far, in part, Eva Haas-Espectres, which was a 2011 old at Sackler Center, materializing six years Lucille LaParde in the emergence of conceptual art. And that was in 2012. In 2013, Wengechi Mutu, a fantastic journey in 2014, Judith Scott. And it will be also a contributing supporter to our exhibition opening on December 10th, Adjud Prop. And I hope that you will all be here for the opening of that. And I thank the fund very much for its participation in all these wonderful shows. I would like to say thank you to the Helene Zucker Seaman Memorial Fund Committee. And I'm going to ask you to please stand, because today is a celebration of the fifth anniversary. And without all of your work, it would not have happened. Reverend Blumenfeld, please stand. Maggie Colon, Claudia DeMonte, Judy Fryer, Jane Goldblum, Marilyn Greenberg again, Anna Grosskine, Gracie Manchin are you here, and Rothstein, and Jane Cirrus. And thank you all very, very much. Thank you. Helene's family is here. I would like you also please to stand. Her beloved Fred Seaman, please. I just saw you earlier. Ford and Lindsay Seaman, her son and daughter-in-law, her son Curtis, are you here? Yes, wonderful. Herbert and Cynthia Zucker, Helene's brother and sister-in-law are here, and sister Michelle Cantor. And last but first, Helene's mother, Marcia Zucker. Thank you to the family, thank you to the fund, and thank you all for being here this evening. When you checked in, you received information about how to become a partner in the fund. And I hope you will join all of us by contributing to it. And tonight's special program, as I said earlier, we are in for a treat. And it is my pleasure to introduce you to Catherine Morris, who is a Sackler family curator of the Elizabethan Sackler Center for Feminist Art. She is a good friend, a great scholar, and a fabulous curator. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not embarrassed to introduce Arlene, which is important to be here tonight. It's a thrill to be able to have this conversation and to have Arlene here and to have everybody from Helene's family and the fund and the supporters here this evening to celebrate with us five years of great work and looking forward to lots of future projects as well. Arlene. Arlene Shackett lives and works in New York City and upstate New York, critically acclaimed 20-year survey after work all at once, which the New York Times called some of the most imaginative American sculpture for the past 20 years and some of the most radically personal. Was on the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from June to September of this year. It just closed. In addition to the exhibition catalog, Greg Miller has published a book that focuses on Arlene's porcelain work at the MySan factory in Berlin. Both of these books are available in our bookstore, if you'd like to acquire them. Arlene's work has included many distinguished public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum. And she has upcoming exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, the Phillips Collection of Washington and the Jewish Museum here in New York. She's represented by Sycamore Jenkins, a company in New York City and was featured in the latest season of Art 21 on PBS. So that's the biographical outline, but we are all thrilled now to have the actual person. So thank you Arlene. And we will have a conversation after we have Arlene speak for 20 minutes or so. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you all for coming out. I'm glad the whole art world is not at freeze. Because we're having a multi-part evening, what I'm going to do is I'm going to very quickly go through about 20 minutes of my work, mostly centered on the ceramics. And, but it's going to be contextualized within the exhibition at the ICA. So there'll be flashes of seeing that show. And we will begin, let's see, maybe should we begin by lowering the legs a little? That sounds better. Thank you. So we're starting, I just wanted to show this piece from about 22 years ago, which was in this recent show. Because this work in plaster and paint was, this body work is where the show started and the whole notion of Eastern thought and Western sculpture are combined very dynamically in the things that I'm making now. They still are very present. And right before I started making the clay work, I did some glass pieces. And the thing about the glass, aside from just that the glass is molten in beauty, is that all I kept on thinking about was how glass blowing was just about the closing breath that it was about that idea of hollowness. I didn't want to continue to work within a team. I wanted to work more in a solitary fashion as a studio artist. And so clay became part of the answer for that because the thing about working in clay was that it requires hollowness. So it's very, very similar in many different ways to working in glass. In fact, many materials are similar, but these are some of the first clay things that I did and started out being shown in this exhibition at the ICA. This was in the first room of ceramic works. And so these are from about 2006, 2007. So in a certain way, these are, I think of them like breathing machines and lungs, and that was where I started with the whole idea of enclosed air. This is a view of the one part of the exhibition, the long gallery that had the ceramic works, beginning with things that had little color, but had a lot of shine and flash and gold and silver. And then later on adopting color, and I'll show some of that, just to get inside of the other, for those of you who are less familiar with how one builds in clay and to really describe what I mean by something being hollow, I have some process shots from the studio where you can see some of the silly props that I have to use to make these things stand up and not fall down. And then the inside, and that I wanted to work with this hollowness and then the strange thing was the insides of the pieces actually started to look like lungs. Here is the outside of piece again, 2007 law. So these extensions and sense of both balance, dirtiness and imbalance and kind of precariousness was what I was and still am seeking in the work. And I'm not gonna show, I'm only showing this one piece as a reference, but there's my own woman following, but falling but not falling, that has always been a kind of touchstone piece for me and there's so many things about this that I love. This is in front of the Lou, but there's one in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art that is almost dunking into the water, but this use of that kind of psychological, physical, philosophical tension that is happening with those pieces, with that piece, and then also the kind of stability within imbalance. So here, my own really didn't dictate what the stand was, how these pieces were going to be displayed, but looking at that work, and I, of course, I wasn't conscious when I was making this, but that use of the pedestals is another thing that has come up around my work, so I'm going to just touch on some of the things that people have mentioned about the work, and then I'm very, very happy to take questions afterwards. So this layering of materials and form, working in ceramics involves taking something, making it, drying it, and then putting it in a machine, sort of a large toaster oven, kiln, and heating it to 2,000 degrees, and all bets are sort of off, but this is a piece as it's about to come out, but one of the reasons I'm showing this is, so you can see what the inside of the kiln looks like, and you can see that the material that the kiln is constructed from is fire brick, and these bricks migrated from the kiln to become part of my work, part of the finished pieces over time, and so this piece that you're looking at is sleepless color, and the ceramic part of the work is unglazed, but the bricks are glazed, so I began to invert the whole relationship of what is outside and what is inside, and what is glazed and what is not glazed, and in fact, how to use glaze, which having come from doing a lot of work as a painter or being a painter, I had a big appreciation and desire to use a material that had color, surface possibilities as integral to the material, and ceramics is one of those materials because applied color again gets fired in and becomes actually part of the structure of the finished piece, because of the wind, try to remember the names, tattletail, and so here then the bricks are completely built within the piece, within the sculpture, so they're migrating again from the kiln to the studio to get painted and then inset into the coils of the piece, and here's several different views, this idea of the works having many multiple views and looking different from various points of view is another just huge theme in what I'm doing, and I'll talk a little bit more about that, but first I'm gonna mention glaze, glazing is the fabulous thing that ceramics can do, but also the very painful thing that can happen, and one of the weird things is that when glazes applied, at least the homemade glazes that I use, they're mostly in this gray powder form, and then this is the same piece once it's fired, so while you're putting this stuff on, you're actually not seeing what you're doing, which is both thrilling and frightening and clearly I like being on that edge, but it does require crazy amounts of technical time with glaze testing, and this is a little part of my glaze laboratory at my studio of state where I have these cones of glaze tests, and so it's strictly the scientific method, let's try this, let's label it, let's put it in a book, it's laborious and boring, but it does yield results. Another glaze surface with lots of different ways to think about glaze, best behavior, that's the name of this piece, lots of ways to think about how to have a sculpture that is also a painting, idle, idle in the front and out and out, so there's out and out again, and you can see there's a layer of kiln break there, there is, some people have called this a riff on the kiss, Rancousie's the kiss, I don't know, but I'll go from, anything is okay is long, as it has wonderful art historical associations like that, but I also really appreciate making work that has multiple associations, and so one of the things that I am constantly aiming for is having things that ride the rail between being representational and recognizable and unrecognizable and non-representational, but then becoming knowable, because you can put all that together and know something without being able to identify it. So in terms of, I'm gonna show a few images of maybe just walking around a piece and it's almost an old fashioned sculptural conceit of mine that I require that the works have an evolving story as the viewer walks around, or for me as the maker that I walk around, I make all of the works in the studio on a turntable. So just think, you know, wrote down a studio, just age old method of working so that I'm always walking around the pieces and seeing that and we're getting six or seven sculptures at the same time and seeing them from various points of view and I require of my work that it continue to give back from all angles. For all views and then viewed as up close that it has another layer of visual interest, meaning and maybe put to another emotional piece of information over the whole thing. So this is an image from the last room, meaning the latest works, the last room of the show. This work is called Now Playing. Here again, just to make it incredibly explicit, what happens with this work and how it can be both centered and uncentered and standing upright and tilting over. So that's the purpose of that slide and this one as well, but a whole other way of working. I try, I work in a family of forms, but I try to have each one be its own separate experience which is what happens when you work on something for six months to a year. It just develops its own language and that it's like they become personages in my life and in my studio and I listen to them and speak to them. But more importantly, they speak to me, they tell me what's gotta happen. So that's that section of the slide show. I'm just gonna give you a brief overview of the show and a view of the ICA Boston, which is spectacular building, Dillard's Confidio building, cantilevering out over the Boston Harbor. And this is the model I worked on, I worked just in this tiny little model form for almost two years and trying to figure it out because when I was asked to do the show it was just given the open space. So no rooms were defined. So defining how the story would be told and what would be shown was the conversation that I had continually with Janelle Porter who was the curator. So this is the opening room and this room, I wanted to do it, it was sort of a little bit frightening thinking about doing a show where 20 years, worked from 20 years ago was gonna just show up and I would need to own it and feel good about it and what would it look like? And after I got over those anxieties I realized that what I really wanted to do was do a whole other installation with that work so that the thing wouldn't just be about the past, that it would be about the present and the future. So the installation is I had showed, that's why I've showed that second image in the beginning of the slideshow of all those plaster figures lined up. This became the installation at the ICA and so it also created a language of walking around so that the idea of the works telling a story by creating movement in the viewer, it was set, that stage was set, that story was told right off the bat in the first room because in order to see these works, one had to walk around so these were involved paperworks and those blue and white structures that you see those vase forms which made me look sort of prescient with the later work but it wasn't really until years later that I even understood that I had done those and that they were resonating with what I was doing now. So anyway, those blue and white paper vessels were cast paper, not porcelain. The second room, walking into the second gallery, this installation called Building from around 2003, four based on walking across the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan every day and creating a cycle that I made as a healing cycle after 9-11. And so it's a cycle of the works going from black to white and it's sort of done with a printmaking process using molds which we'll go into now but that was within the second room and along with some of these glass pieces which are glass parts just stacked and one on top of one another it's called The Balance Series. So nothing is joined but another version of speaking about fragility and stability that was the mission in these pieces and were the works that I did right before I started to do ceramics. The series of paperworks that I have for almost 20 years I've been working at Judenay paper mill working with paper as liquid. So instead of color on the material the color is in the material and I think it's possible or very easy to see how the glaze, the idea of glaze really overlaps with this notion very well. The final part of what I'll show is an installation from my work at the Meissen porcelain factory where I worked 2012 to 2013 going back and forth and in this installation the whole room has meaning in terms of shape and forms that came up but also I worked in conjunction with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Harvard Museums to use some historic material within my mixed in with my own work. This is one of my pieces but clearly I'm using both this historical language and contemporary language. Here you see that overlap again. Taking the idea of the base and using a stack of plates for the pedestal. We're visiting Meissen 18th century idea of the Buddha, one of my works, Dancing Girl with Two Left Feet and then this final image. Thank you. So about 10 days ago, Arlene and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk for an hour and a half or so and it was longer than it did and when I sat down to look up my notes and think about asking questions, I hope you're gonna forgive me for this. I found myself not wanting to write my own questions so much as wanting to quote you and the things that you said. So I'm hoping that if I just throw out some of the things you said if you could maybe talk about, expand on them a bit because it felt like such a great part of our conversation. And I should preface this by saying that what I felt like when we were talking was I could see and I told you this, I could see very much how you would, as a teacher, talk about your practice and also expand on it to sort of engage a listener. So I'm hoping to sort of maybe recapture a bit of that with no pressure. Okay. So again, I'm just gonna throw out some of the paraphrase, so correct me if I get them wrong. And the first one I wanna just read was you said, the story gets told through the process of paying attention. And we were talking about, we were talking about time. We were talking about what time means to you in your practice and in your life and how you came to make ceramics, I believe, through an interest or a need for you to find time to make work. Great. I think maybe we were talking, I mean of course time, we can riff on that forever. But I do think that probably we were talking about this early, the early revelation I had in the studio more than 20 years ago this moment when I decided to basically discard everything I had done and re-examine what, from the ground up, what my life was about, what I wanted my studio life to be about, what I thought was really important and within that thought process, I was thinking about how there was, as being a sculptor, can often be about postponement, can often be about preparation, can be about I'm gonna do this and then I have to do this process and that process and this is gonna line up and it's very much about a future orientation and that the idea of a future orientation was something that I wanted to discard because at that point my kids were babies or maybe I didn't even have one of my kids and I was also, had just recently experienced an untimely death of my best friend and I could feel in a very big way how my time was limited and that a daily basis and in the big picture, the elephant in the room kind of picture and so I wanted to redefine how I would be in the studio and do work that really was in the moment, really that instead of planning it, I would be finding it, I would be in there working with an immediate experience and so that's why I was working with plaster. I came up with working with plaster and paint skins and the plaster is an amazing timekeeper as a material because it goes from powder to liquid to mush to something hard as a rock within moments so you can literally see time passing and so that idea and that way of working suited very much what I was trying to do and how I would be and I think I have maintained that insistence on being very present and paying attention in the studio to actually what is happening and not get involved too much in future processes but have within my grasp things that I could actually manage so I'm pretty sure that's what we were talking about. It also was in the context, I remember of being in New York where people are always talking about not having enough time and that idea of listening, the thing of listening to people talk about not having enough time was really rubbing me the wrong way at that particular moment when it felt that people's lives could come to a quick end or that my time in the studio could be very limited so I actually also made work that embraced the idea of if I had a lot of time in the studio I'd make a large plaster piece if I had a small amount of time I would make a small plaster piece but it went from beginning to end in that time so each piece became a measure of that day in the studio and the improvisational nature of that you describe the improvisational relationship you feel like you have to that material. Yes, yeah, yeah and I think improvisation also required that not having an armature and armatures, the skeletal structure that sculptors can often rely on or that is the thing in beginning sculpture or you're taught right off the bat how to hold something up what is the structure of things that not having an armature so I actually worked with plaster not with no armature at all so it was really sort of this wishing mess but I worked to find the form so working to discover something working with that improvisational vocabulary that was necessary. And the precarity that you see in some of the pieces that you described that sort of leaned over that instability that appeared in stability is reflective of that conversation and the idea of time. Right, right. Another quote, nine years ago when I started craft seemed so marginalized it was an interesting choice to make non-representational sculpture out of clay and what we talked about which was interesting was this idea of craft material as being marginalized and how that felt then and I'm wondering if you could describe that a little bit and also say how it feels now all these years later when it seems to be in a very different place in the art world. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. I'm not a thousand percent sure that it's a very different place in the art world we'll see how that washes out but there's a possibility. Okay, so craft is a big topic and I have thought about craft a lot and for me it has a lot to do with time also that if one is going to become a craftsman it really involves a kind of practice and to make perfect. And the enterprise of being an artist doesn't necessarily align with that and my interest in using that craft material is to rub up against this idea of possible perfection and loads of information technical information and not be ruled by it. To keep it open or to open it up and to see what's inside of it because I think that the art world can be just incredibly conservative place where there's rights and wrongs and things you can't do this and you can't do that and many artists have spoken about that but I came up against that myself at some point when I started to do glass I said oh god I'm like a walking craft fair but just trying to work in these materials like there must be something wherever something is marginalized there's so much opportunity to develop a new language and so much overlooked potential and that is how I felt about Clay I looked at it and I said why is it so on the margins when it's just this very basic thing that people can work with and maybe it's approachability like it has mystery but maybe it doesn't maybe there's something about childhood embedded in it that makes it less than a serious thing and all of that information less than a serious thing is very exciting to me I like that because again how to turn that around how to say yeah this can be less than serious but let's see if something exciting can happen did you have any problems with reception of the work as craft since you were presenting it it was obviously not within the context of the craft well I think it was in that in 2007 when I showed that body of work I was lucky because Roberta Smith I think and I didn't know this before but had a love of that material and came to the show and said it was very good so that got me over that hump but I have to say that there are still lots of humps because it's still a weird language where people worry about it for instance oh it's fragile like that whole line of thinking when people are making things out of face powder and lipstick and you know dust and I don't understand that so what and you can walk over to a painting and put your hand on it and ruin it so what are we talking about what are we requiring of this of these things that made people continue to talk about it like that and so I do think there is still a desire to have a bias against it and the schools, art schools are complicit in that because art schools are still broken down into departments that don't necessarily reflect the way art is made and I understand it being an organization and having organizational issues with how departments are run but that kind of organizational question it creates meaning, it creates meaning in the same way that departments and museums create meaning by how things are presented so people now are way more sensitive to it but it's gonna take a while for it to break down well that's also interesting in relationship to the process you were talking about the way the material changes and that attraction to you and the making of it in a museum Clay, ceramics, porcelain is interesting because it's fragile and can break if you drop it but on the other hand it's the thing you can hose it down you can hose it down you can clean it out for a long time it's not the first thing the conservators say it has to go and weapon to storage and rest for six months you can put it in the bright light you can put it in the bright light for a long time it is the thing that usually one finds of all your cultures that somehow exists even if it is broken it's the multi kind of, the two sides of that point it's interesting which is also interesting because we there's a great interview in the ICA catalog that you did with Jeanine and Tony and you talk about in a very funny way about the idea of slackness and I think there's something we can hear about that as well and the way that maybe I should let you describe the way you talk about it but it's in relationship to it's a little bit about objection and it's about this idea Jeanine talks about performing a dance work in which she's with a partner and they're holding a piece of string and everybody's sort of interested in the talkness of the string but what she found herself interested in was the slackness of the string the moment at which that material is sort of loose and not formed and she was asking you about that relationship to this particular material I think Actually, I haven't read that interview in a long time but I do think we partially got on that because of the conversation about being a woman sculptor Yes, starting with a woman sculptor and ended up about sex Yeah Oh well So being a I think it was of being a woman sculptor and that was one of the reasons why we were gonna have the conversation because maybe there aren't so many women sculptors and the sculpture has this whole heroic standing up straight being tall and powerful maybe bronze, maybe on the horse and so that idea of sturdiness and uprightness which has a phallic subtext so that whole idea was what brought up slackness and and that she was talking about playing with yeah, a rope that would go slagging and I think did talk about whether this made it into the finished interview or not talk about the material of clay as being slightly vulgar you know that it has a kind of vulgarity and in its mushiness could be, could be abject and could be but also can turn into something gorgeous so the idea of this mushy material than standing up me making these structures over a long period of time being in this dance with the sculptures in order to make something that it merges on being almost impossible and then actually making something that slumps over which is much harder than making something that's just stands up so we were comparing this slackness and wanting to slump over and wanting to make that a new kind of heroic you know a heroic vocabulary only have to be about being sturdy and straight and strong or can it be a mirror of the entire vocabulary of human experience and so that much broader addressing of human experience as you know being malleable and broad was sort of where I think that conversation was going that's hard to follow up on oh we can just be over it I love this way that you describe working so you said that you work on sculptures as you mentioned you talk for six months at least oh it just takes a long time six months sometimes a year well because there's drying and sometimes I have to put them away and I keep them swaddled in plastic forever yeah and there's the glazing process and so on I let them grow just what I love as I watch them out of the corner of my eye in a combined active and passive gestation so again it speaks to that improvisational or definitely the sense of relationship that you have with them even when you were talking about them here in your talk there's a very strong sense of an individual personality with each of the pieces so I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about I mean do you continue to even in the very large pieces of thinking about the multi-part pieces they have these kind of ongoing relationships you feel like they are conversing with you and telling you what to do next? well I feel that the art making process overlaps with music in a way there's a call and response vocabulary where it's about making a move and then make a gesture within the piece and then that has a transformational quality that then speaks back to you then you have to respond again and often it's outside of thought it's more into knowing it so well that you don't have to know it so in that way it's like a relationship also where you're not newly examining what does this mean you know from the ground up you're just having it's not, it doesn't have a not working on things that are easy to describe if something doesn't have a contradiction within it and doesn't have, I'm not interested in it you know if it's too pure if it's too easy to explain if it's too one dimensional and what its meaning is if it has that punchline it's not right for me and so sometimes that happens but that kind of, because I can't control you're in control but you're sort of not in control you're just there making moves with the thing and paying attention to what it's becoming and then I think of it and maybe this is why it overlaps again with music as listening to it so it's maybe obviously not on on the level of hearing but it is hearing it, it is listening it is embracing what is happening rather than trying to muscle through it so we have even given the signal that down to just a minute or two so yeah, okay okay I just want to close, I don't know if you want to make a response to this but I think it's such a lovely quote one of the functions of art is that it disturbs the piece in the most productive way possible I like it you said that I said that good I'll go with that if anybody would like to ask a question do we want to ask people to come to the mic if that's possible or I think there are two mics, one on either side I enjoyed hearing this presentation but it was also interested in your relationship to the mice and the factory partly how you could work with it's a rather perfect material in a way so how did you develop relationship to it and how did you work within the factory context yeah that was a special situation because I wasn't so much I was in the factory but they gave me my own studio that was separate within the buildings and let me just say it was hundreds of thousands of square feet of buildings so it's just an enormous factory and I think that their initial idea was that they would show me how to do it because I had not worked in porcelain and so mice in porcelain and all of these factories that follow an 18th century model everybody does just one thing or part of one thing so people are painters or they're painters of flowers or they are mold makers or they're like cup mold makers so very, very, very, very specialized and the fact that I could make molds, cast, paint that was just so outside and then I wanted to do all of those things so outside of what they could even understand that we developed a different kind of relationship so they would just give me material and they gave me huge support and freedom I did not have to make anything to be produced I just could do whatever I wanted and try to mess around with their materials and every once in a while the head of painting would come up and see what I was doing with their 300 year old glazes and take some notes and leave or if I had a technical question I could ask them but basically they're very, very rule bound and very traditional on every level so it was sort of like a parallel play situation but they fired this stuff and they were gracious and entertained by me so in many ways I was the local entertainment so much for showing your work I have a question about a process one of the things that I'm very intrigued with Stratx is about its sort of failure whether it's in the process of making with the air bubbles in the kiln or even in dropping something that could break the fragility do you ever, and in keeping with sort of like the body what I see is that sort of body analogy in your work do you ever resurrect things that have been broken all the time I mean just reuse parts I mean technically how do I do so there's no rectifying anything ever there's only reinvention so I would just mourn it for five minutes and then put it away and then see in a few months if any part of that looked interesting and then starts sometimes I get out the saws any tool I have lots of tools and lots of toys and so I just feel free to use anything but there's no going back let me say that going back is just hell maybe you try to go backwards I had an interesting experience with my assistant who has here and Joshua Clark and he had to remake part of a piece that was going to some show and it was just horrible having to do he just kept every day he was just depressed doing it and because if you're going backwards and you're trying to recreate something you're stuck in some other time some other you're so not a curator oh no so that's just very very hard but there is something about breaking something failing that I love and that I believe in because it's even when you don't want it to happen as soon as it happens you know that that is an opportunity that kind of ugliness that kind of destruction creates an opening so when I was saying call and response before I was meaning things happen but you're always looking for little openings you're always looking for places that you can just sneak in and start something new start having a new thought make a new gesture so I do think that you know that breaking of things is a blessing and an opportunity the microphone now where are you? oh ok hi in the mid 80's I got my master's degree at the University of California in Davis kind of the epicenter of surrounding sculpture and studied with Robert Arneson who was a descendant of Peter Volkis and the whole Bay Area the guys yeah and it's just unbelievable to me that it's now 40 years later that we on the east coast are now having this discussion that I thought was already settled by the west coast it's never going to be settled and so I just didn't know if you had anything more to offer there because I'm still sitting here thinking about this and just being remarkably puzzled by all of this well what exactly are you puzzled by? well I thought this was already settled that ceramics had reached this level of being a fine art material and that it was no longer considered truly crafty wait a minute wait a minute I I gave opening remarks at the Ken Price show at the Nasher Sculpture Center and during that at that opening I was surrounded by people who had collect who owned his work who had collected his work buying it from his studio these very same pieces that are being sold now at Matthew Marx for a few hundred dollars when he was desperate he had to go back to teaching this was never settled it was not settled and I don't think people felt it was settled then on his deathbed he said he would not do the show at Lachman if it didn't come to New York and if it didn't come to New York and it wasn't in a show in the arts department it was not settled it was not settled three years ago what's it going to take to settle this I think it's not going to be it's not going to be settled it's going to just be boring and and it is boring but it's also interesting because what is it I mean I'm pawing around trying to figure it out but I think there's a lot of ways that the art market the final arbiter along with museums the art market meaning collectors, trustees people putting real attention and money on it and museums exhibiting it that they that will be a big change and that that's where things will start to move around a little bit but I know like I can't remember maybe 2012 or 2011 I was on the cover of art in America and I remember during that time people were saying oh now it's really different well there are no ceramic collectors and there is a big booming version of ceramic collectors who have ever bought my work that's how separate the worlds are like there's a craft world a craft collector world a ceramic collector world and they have no idea who I am or what's going on and they're not looking at art so same with the art world you know not looking over there I'll say one more thing I was at PCU which they invited me to come they have an incredible sculpture department upstairs they have a craft studies department and they put together their money to fund my visit and I gave a talk and I gave critiques a day on each floor but as students they didn't travel between the floors very easily very specifically the craft people were not allowed to go partake in the sculpture department's classes the sculpture department students could occasionally go to the craft department so it's bizarre it's medieval sort of entertaining but it also is boring for showing us your fabulous love and talking about it so so wonderfully and Catherine as always you always interview artists with great insight and if this is just a great evening you know this is the kind of event that you can expect from the Elizabeth A. Sattler Center for Feminist Art and this is the kind of event that we want to continue to bring you as Elizabeth introduced me on Marilyn Greenberg I'm very proud to be the chair of the council of the Sattler Center I'm very proud to be on the advisory board of the Brooklyn Museum but tonight I'm most proud of being a friend of Haline Siemens for 27 years and Haline so admired your work body she showed it to me way back when and she would have been absolutely fascinated to see her show at the ICA so this is a really wonderful event because it so mills our respect for Haline's wishes with an excitement of an artist that we all really really admire and are excited to have here I'd like you to take a look at the flyer that you got that tells you about Haline and I'd ask you to please make a donation so that we can continue with these amazing events that we do here at the Sattler Center I hope that you will do the following after you make that donation first how many have seen the show up at the Sattler Gallery oh my gosh you have, the rest of you have to go see the fabulous show that we have there they're the remarkable photographs of a fabulous artist South African artist Zunelli Mahali she is a brilliant photographer and a very very famous activist in the LGBTQ community in South Africa it's a shocking exhibit it's a beautiful exhibit and an annoying exhibit I guarantee you'll never forget it I know that you'll come back for our next exhibit after that and I'll tell you a little bit about that it's called Adjet Prop Adjet meaning agitation Prop meaning propaganda and it will have such artists as Jenny Holzer Yoko Ono Martha Rossner all working in all different kinds of mediums as a call to action to create political and social change and the opening is December 11th but after that opening the artists in the exhibit will choose other artists and that opening will take place February 17th and then those artists will choose other artists to increase is that correct to increase the exhibit and I hope you will not miss that because that's going to be a barely controlled bit of chaos that you won't want to miss and that will be on April 6th so you have three choices of openings for that bring your friends bring your family bring people that you want to impress so thank you so much for coming this has been a very special evening I think for all of us and I hope to see you all again soon