Name: Laura Letinsky
Age: 50
Occupation: Artist and Professor at the University of Chicago
City/Neighborhood: Chicago/Hyde Park
Current Exhibition: “Still Life Photographs” at the Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, Colorado, through March 24, 2013.
Your current exhibition, “Still Life Photographs” at the Denver Art Museum, charts your career over a 15-year period. How did your interests and style change over that period of time?
I’ve shifted from an earlier interest, belief really, in the notion of origin. I mean the idea that what is before the lens is a point of origin. Instead, I have come to understand that which is pictured as a set of ideas about how to see.
Your subjects are half-empty glasses, tableclothes dirty with crumbs, and unwashed dishes. What interests you about the refuse of our meals? Is every meal a potential still life?
Yes, every meal is a potential still life, but only so far as anything and everything is fodder for the camera.
In terms of my interest in photographing after the meal, I was interested in the photograph as an event always in the past, only as the past. These ideas have been beautifully articulated by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Photographing this scene after meals were eaten was a way to think about remains, stains, and what resists, including what resists photography.
In your most recent work, you photograph cut-out photographs of food and objects arranged like still lifes, rather than the objects themselves. Why add this layer of separation from your subjects?
It’s less as a separation from reality and more of an actuality in that the way we come to know the world is largely through photographic media. A tomato has less to do with an aesthetic interaction and more about the idea of tomato, hence the red flavorless pulp we call “tomato” that gets used to adorn salads.
If you didn’t photograph food or domestic spaces, what would you photograph?
It’s easier to answer what I’d do if I didn’t photograph or make art. Private eye? Farming is similarly appealing, as I’m uncertain of results instead beguiled by process.
Your work recalls the Dennis Severs House in London, where the late artist carefully arranged chaos out of objects as a living, highly atmospheric still life. Have you ever been there?
No, it sounds amazing. I’ll be in London in January and will go see it. I love the Gardner in Boston. I wish I could claim that highly-atmospheric and controlled arrangements typified my space, but instead I have to settle with chaos, despite my best efforts!
What project are you working on now?
I’m continuing with my photographic work, building on what I’ve begun with the “Ill Form Void Full” work. I’m hoping to do some travelling, particularly in Istanbul as I’m interested in its place as a juncture between pictorial conventions of Islamic decorative practice and Western European narrative depictions. I don’t want to be simplistic in my observations, and so want to do more research about this as it relates to gender, architecture, domesticity, and psychology.
Describe a typical day in your life as an artist.
Wake up too early because of kids and daily demands; think about what to make for dinner; take a run while I mentally organize my day; grab a breakfast with my family of my homemade sourdough bread, strong coffee, and fruit; everyone off to work and school; the suck of email, or class prep and if I’m lucky; off to the studio by mid-morning where I’ll work til I pick up my sons; if summer, the garden, if winter, the grocery store; an hour or so of cooking, dinner (lately fixated on learning about various Asian cuisines); kids’ bath and bed; another email foray; an hour of relatively mindless, but pretty decent, television, or if I’m extra lucky, a movie; a bit of reading, usually the “New Yorker” even if several years old; bed. Repeat with variations due to teaching, administration, exhibition, grant application, holiday, etc.
What’s the last show that you saw?
“Danh Vo” at The Renaissance Society.
What’s the last show that surprised you? Why?
Chen Yujun at Boers Li Gallery in Beijing. They are incredible paintings and the installation of the work set up a strange narrative structure.
What’s your favorite place to see art?
Definitely The Renaissance Society here in Chicago. Also the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Galleria Accademia in Venice, the Cluny Museum in Paris, the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall … so many!
What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?
Light. Then, scissors.
Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?
I’ve become a bit more of a recluse with the writers Gertrude Stein, Diane Williams, Lynne Tillman, Lauren Berlant, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, and Wisława Szymborska. And then a mix of music from Rodney Graham to Arvo Pärt to Sigur Rós to Nick Cave to Danger Mouse to Nina Simone. In terms of artists, I have my go-to’s, including and especially Giorgio Morandi and E. J. Bellocq, as well as trying to pay attention to “naïve” historical photography, interested in what was “accidentally” included in the picture frame and how these tropes have become endemic to our current predilection for ambiguity.
Also delving into long-term, cyclical interest in decoration and ornamentation with Loos, of course, and Derrida, and others.
Do you collect anything?
I try not to have anything so valuable that it hurts if it’s lost. It’s not possible, and I do have objects that although not of marketable value, have great sentimental value. I’m not methodical in my collecting, rather it’s things I adore. I’ve amassed sets of dishes that are different whites and ivory, but similar because of a gold line around the rim which has extended into other not-quite-matching-but-related porcelain and glassware. I love books and covet them. My grandmother was a seamstress and I grew up loving fabric; I’m ecstatically excited in fabric stores and have yards and yards of fabric with big, big plans. Clothes are a bad, bad habit, with the Belgians a big, and expensive, favorite along with Rick Owens and Watanabe.
What’s the last artwork you purchased?
Valerie Snobeck is actually the only art I’ve purchased. A drunken auction night. I prefer to do trades with artist friends. Bartering is the way to go!
What’s the first artwork you ever sold?
A “Venus Inferred” print to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, bless Anne Tucker.
What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery?
I think I read, what happens in the art world stays in the art world.
What’s your art-world pet peeve?
Taking art too seriously. Taking art too flippantly.
What’s your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?
In Chicago, Maria’s, Avec, Publican, or Big Star, if food is involved. My house. In New York, more of a pre-watering hole, Tía Pol in Chelsea or The Standard.
Do you have a museum/gallery going routine?
It’s different at home than when traveling. At home it’s more frenetic, dipping in here and there, when and where I’m able, whereas when I travel, I’m more likely to make days of art-seeing along with other forms of cultural tourism including, or rather, especially, food.
What’s the last great book you read?
Anne Carson, “Autobiography of Red.” A re-read actually.
What work of art do you wish you owned?
Garry Winogrand’s “Hollywood Boulevard, 1969” and Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled (Perfect Lovers),” with the two clocks.
What would you do to get it?
The longing is part of the pleasure, no?
What international art destination do you most want to visit?
Istanbul is on the top of my list right now, along with Mexico City, but India is the ultimate destination that I feel I’m saving myself for, or maybe working up for. Art is a part of it, but really, it’s the entire culture of these places that interests me.
What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about?
Can we play “marry kill fuck” instead?
Click here for a slideshow of Laura Letinsky’s work