TRACKING
by Julie Speed
Sometimes pictures come singly, sometimes in series, sometimes from a germ, sometimes from scratch, but always one thing leads to the next in a way that feels inevitable. Most people assume that an artist begins with a coherent thought or idea and then, if it's a figurative work, basically just illustrates that idea, and if she's really, really deep, then the illustration might not actually be a picture of what it's a picture of but instead symbolize some specific other thing and, if the viewer has the secret decoder ring or museum wall text, they will be able to figure out the "correct" interpretation.
A stranger wandered in off the street a couple of days ago, spent some time looking at a large drawing that I was working on of a bunch of old naked guys fighting each other with pink sticks, and asked, "What do they represent?" How do I answer that? Do I say, "Oh, they represent the fighting in Iraq or Thermopylae or the cock-up last night down at Joe's?" What's the point? They're not real, so my thoughts, even my really, really deep thoughts, about them carry no more weight than anyone else's. In addition, the elements that people usually interpret as narrative are more often the product of the composition than vice versa. If there is a spot of red in a certain place it is more likely there because I wanted red than because I wanted blood. Composition comes first.
The second most interesting part happens as the abstract skeleton gradually takes on its figurative flesh. In 2002 I bought the ruins of a set of beautiful smoke-damaged nineteenth-century leatherbound books: Reports of Explorations and Surveys, which had been salvaged from the last library fire of the legendary Texas antiquarian book dealer, John Jenkins, shortly before his violent murder/ suicide (still debated) in 1989. Inside the books were hundreds of odd and beautiful, off kilter and moldy lithographs of birds and fish, snakes and plants, rats, moles, and, best of all. . . black bird heads. No bodies, just heads, which leapt off the pages and attached themselves, instantly and quite sharply in my mind's eye, to curvilinear black bodies stuffed with geometric shapes on a white background. The images were so overwhelming that I became deaf for a minute or two. The man who was selling the books spoke as, one after another, he handed over the sooty volumes. His lips moved, but I literally couldn't hear.
The geometric shapes led me to study Russian constructivism and, from there, to make the paintings which collectively became The Murder of Kasimir Malevich. The title came from the black birds, a "murder of crows" being the same as a "pride of lions" or a "wake of buzzards." Starting with a pile of cut boards, a parallel ruler, and a handful of ancient plastic triangles found in the back of a drawer, I drew shapes endlessly until I dreamed geometry at night. During the day the background noise was continuous news of the anthrax attacks which had followed hard on the heels of 9/11. Fear and speculation were rampant as to all the possible ways in which various nightmarish biological agents could be weaponized and distributed.
In Texas death seemed most likely to be delivered by crop duster. Strangely these fears dovetailed with my reading at the time about Malevich's theory of the "additional element" (or "supplemental element"), which he came up with while he was director of the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad and teaching in what he called the "Department of Bacteriology of Art." According to his theory, there are specific shapes in art (which he and his students isolated and diagrammed) that he believed could, like a tuberculosis bacillus, literally "infect" an artist who uses them. At different times both he and his second wife contracted the "white death." She died of it.