Reading Artists

In which Susan Swenson finds inspiration from the reading lists of ten local artists

If BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com aren’t where you go for tips on what to read next, a better place to start might be to find out what some artists are reading these days. A look at what’s on the top of their stacks might offer a window into their thoughts and the direction of their interests. If nothing else, it’s sure to provide an idiosyncratic collection of volumes.

Bruce Pearson, always an avid reader, had a pile of books at hand when I called to chat and ask what he’d been reading. He launched into a list of titles, some of which he’d just read and others he’d just begun.

First was The Journalist, by Harry Mathews which, according to the sleeve copy is a "blend of post modern meta fiction and old style bedroom farce." According to Pearson, Mathews is involved in the Oulipo movement. (Oulipo is the French acronym for Oeuvres’ of Potential Literature—a French movement begun in the 1970s by a group of writers and mathematicians who incorporated mathematical formulations as a construct for writing. One example would be Brecht’s novel in which there are no words containing the letter ‘e.’) Mathews divides his time between Paris and New York and writes poetry and short fiction, among other things. "With his Oulipean thing he’s sort of a conceptual writer."

Saint Glinglin, a novel by Raymond Queneau, was next up. Pearson described Queneau as an important French writer who was one of the co-founders of the Oulipo group.

Pearson, being an admirer of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, picked up Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation, by William Gass. This is a non-fiction book on, yes, the problems inherent in the translation of text from one language into another. Reading this book led Pearson to a new translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, by Edward Snow "that totally rocks."

On a recent trip to Mexico to visit his partner Mónica de la Torre’s family, Pearson finished Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. "A gorgeous book" of poetry.

On the lighter side Pearson has been reading The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. This book recounts the history of the making of The Oxford English Dictionary. One of the main contributors to the dictionary was a man who spent most of his life in jail for murder, and wrote his contributions while in prison. Although this book "is not in the same league as the others" Pearson found it very funny.

Pearson has just started Elipse Fever, a new novel by Walter Abish, and by the sound of things he needs to finish it soon so he can start on the next pile.

"I'm reading [Marcel] Proust, the book that no one finishes," says Greg Stone. He's referring to Swann's Way, the first of Proust's eight-book, continuous novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Reason: "To fill a gap in my education." Stone is also reading the Koran and the Torah as part of ongoing research for his paintings.

Amy Sillman’s just returned from a Summer teaching-residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and her studio is full of drawings in various stages of completion that she worked on there. Beautiful and odd colors and images jostle on the sheets which are lined up along the wall; a sort of non-linear set of highly fragmented ‘stories’ and cast of characters. Multiple heads sprout from one, figures float sideways and patches of color vibrate. These are, of course, works in progress and so may resolve themselves very differently from how they appear now.

In addition to teaching, critiquing students, and doing her own work, Sillman participated in a reading group, so she has a full list. The reading group focused on ‘classics’ from the Western ‘canon,’ fundamental philosophical works: Hannah Arrendt, The Human Condition; Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art; and Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations and The Birth of Tragedy. According to Sillman, The Birth of Tragedy lays out the differences between Appolinarian and Dionysian ideas, a theory "which gets used later in some accounts of art history."

"I was reading Nietzsche because I was sort of catching up on the classics, then I got sidetracked by Lacan" and started reading some of his essays. Sillman then began looking at psychoanalytic theory after realizing that it relates to her work. "I always thought that theory was theory. I didn’t think of my work as an intellectual undertaking, rather as an intelligent undertaking. Psychoanalytic theory is relevant if your work is kind of stream of consciousness." Lacan’s essays relate patients’ personal experiences elicited during psychoanalysis sessions—these include "fragmented body parts, memories of things...everything merging and broken." Reading something like this "reinforces your experience as an image-maker" when it reverberates with your work. This led Sillman to essays by Luce Iragaray, a French post-Lacanian feminist theorist.

Apart from the philosophical classics and psychoanalytic studies, Sillman is intrigued with fiction by "marginalized writers," in particular "obscure Eastern Europeans," who were working at an anxious time in history and who were very private individuals. She’s especially fond of the works of Bruno Schulz, and has recently read The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Schulz lived all his life in Drohobycz, Poland, where he wrote and did copious drawings, as well as taught arts and crafts. He wrote "stories, like sketches of a town, that make up a novel"—a very non-linear novel. His drawings were sometimes of unrelated, imagined characters, and other times were images related to the stories. Schulz was shot and killed by the SS in 1942 when he left his ghetto to buy a loaf of bread.

Sillman also highly recommended Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, edited by Jerzy Ficowski. And, after telling artist Bruce Pearson that she liked Schulz, he recommended Robert Walser’s The Walk to her.

Next on Sillman’s list is an autobiography of Alfred Kubin, who was tied to the Symbolists at the turn of the last century. He did only drawings and his work has been related to that of Schulz. According to Sillman, both had "gloomy, overactive imaginations."

A mix of high and low could characterize James Siena’s current reading. He just finished Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson; a hefty novel about code breakers and writers, and modern encryption. The "complicated plot" oscillates back and forth between the present and WWII. "It’s a little pulpy, with the adventure side about the war in the Philippines."

Siena also recently finished Naked, by David Sedaris (playwright and NPR commentator) — a collection of essays which are "wittily drawn portraits of characters from his life." And A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers, which Siena recommended for its "irreverence. The footnotes, asides, run on sentences...the guy just keeps going with it and doesn’t give up," which is what makes it work for Siena.

Just begun is Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. It’s "wild. The first scene is great."

To prepare for a graduate painting seminar at the Virginia Commonwealth University, which Sienna will be teaching this Fall, he’s reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. "It’s interesting. Artists should read it because they need to understand how sociologists see the use-value of art."

At the moment, Steven Charles is interested in artists’ biographies. He’s in the middle of Larry Rivers’ What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers, which is mainly about Rivers’ childhood and jazz; and Mark Rothko: A Biography, by James E.B. Breslin. These aren’t Charles’ favorite artists, or even artists that he’s especially interested in, but he is intrigued by their lives—"where they came from, what happened to them...love, drink and all that."

Chris Johanson, a mostly San Francisco, sometimes New York artist has just read Grand Central Winter: Stories From the Street, by Lee Stringer. Stringer is "this homeless, crackhead dude. He was totally educated, doing well, then his brother died of aids. Stringer became a crackhead, lost his apartment, then started writing for Streetnews and sort of pulled himself out."

Johanson is now reading Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, by William Finnegan. This book is comprised of four stories about teenagers growing up poor in America, one of whom sells drugs in New Haven, CT. He’s also reading The Pat Hobby Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. These are the last stories Fitzgerald wrote and were published posthumously. "They’re about a down-and-out screenplay writer and his problems. I think that’s how [Fitzgerald] must have felt about himself then."

Continental Drift, by Russell Banks is Stacy Greene’s current companion. Banks is an "amazing writer who goes from the most personal to the most universal. His stories are so sad, my heart is almost breaking when I read his work."

I caught up with David Brody on his weekend hiking in the Catskills where, among other things, he said he was "finally reading" Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace; "re-reading" Douglas Hofstaeder’s Göedl Escher Bach — a "science-aesthetic book, really original," which Brody is reading more thoroughly this time around; and copies of National Geographic lying around the cabin.

An all-time favorite of Eve Sussman’s is Richard Feynman, author of Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher — a book of general lectures about physics and philosophy, and connecting it all to life." She’s now reading The Meaning of It All. "Feynman was one of the greatest teachers of physics. He was a great Physicist and a Nobel Prize winner; but he was a pre-eminent teacher as well as scientist because he had an amazing charisma and personality. The administration of Cal Tech managed to convince him to teach physics there for a time. They were afraid they were losing the best young students because the way the science was being taught was not engaging enough."

In doing research for some new projects Sussman is re-reading John LeCarre’s A Perfect Spy, which she finds "a beautiful book...beautiful and minute language." Next she "want[s] to read some biographies of the Rosenbergs, who were executed for selling secrets to the Russians."

Fred Tomaselli also spent the Summer teaching and residing in Skowhegan, Maine. His studio here is already, or still, buzzing with activity. There are boards and boards covered with cut-outs ready for use as the collage elements of his paintings, a few new items he collected in Maine which will be incorporated into the new work, and paintings in various stages of completion for his upcoming show at the James Cohan Gallery on 57th Street, opening in December, 2000.

Tomaselli reads constantly and had a lot to say about what he’s been up to. "All of the books I’ve been reading have something to do with sociology, specifically with ideas of utopia-dystopia — the slippery quality of reality. ‘Utopia’ in Greek means no place." And all utopias seem to end up dystopic, or dysfunctional. Tomaselli reminds me that our original Utopia is Eden—the notion that there was once a perfect, ideal place. For him this relates to Thoreauean Transcendentalism, transcending one’s imperfect reality. A few of the books specifically relate to the 60s, ‘back-to-nature’ idea of communal living. "I’m interested in the more personal, cult and marginal accounts in American history."

Specifically, these include: Drop City by Peter Rabbit. The author was one of the founders of a commune (c. 1966-71) where all of the members lived in a giant geodesic city made out of car tops. The domes popped out of the tops of the cars. It was an "off the grid, back-to-the-land movement. A bunch of abject, fucked-up hippies. In a sense it was an imposed ideology on the landscape; white’s going ‘back to nature,’ involving a simplistic view of the ‘noble savage.’" There are pictures of commune members "shitting, pissing, having sex with each other...."

Also in the utopia/dystopia theme is Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visit and Observation (1875). During the mid- to late-eighteen hundreds in America there were "scores of communal religious groups — Shakers, Rabites, Perfectionists, and the Social Freedom Group. Nordhoff visited and interviewed all of them around the country, and then presented them in a non-judgmental way."

Tomaselli visited the last Shaker community this Summer, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine and got from them The Gift to Be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers, by Edward Deming Andrews. Andrews lived with the Shakers and created a compendium of their songs, dances and rituals. For Tomaselli this was an interesting time in history, the Era of Manifestation. "The Shakers closed their [communities] to the outside world and began to be possessed by demons and spirits, and to speak in tongues." The spoken tongues were then written down as hymns which became an official part of the group’s practice for decades. They were known as vision songs—one example is "From the Moon," a song which was spoken by one of the sisters from Sabbathday Lake while she was on the moon, according to the group. "The first two words are ‘Selei askana...’ and it goes on from there like that. There was a lot of purging going on." Tomaselli said the Sabbathday group now believe that they may have been misled in their beliefs. Some believe that the spirits got loose from the Shaker community during this time and that those spirits formed the origins of the Spiritualist movement in the United States around the turn of the last century.

Tomaselli is also a fan of Ian Frazier and considers him a great writer on history and social-cultural relations. He’s read On the Rez and Great Plains. On The Rez is a "cultural, multi-faceted history of the great plains, dealing with the conflict between the settlers and the Indians." Great Plains is about "living on the reservation of the Sioux; contemporary reservation life."

And finally, The Yage Letters which includes the correspondence between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in the late 1950s. In it are their letters to each other "about Yage, a hallucinogenic plant found in South America and their attempts to find and use the plant." The last letter by Burroughs in the series contains the earliest example of his ‘cut-up’ technique that later became Naked Lunch. "This was a first attempt at his word sequences about what the visions under the influence of Yage were like."