On View

James Cohan
H2O
February 22–March 30, 2024
New York

Spencer Finch greets me at the door of his capacious Brooklyn studio alongside Ziggy, his affable golden retriever. Finch is busy, getting ready for H2O, an upcoming exhibition at James Cohan gallery, yet the energy in the studio is calm, industrious but quietly playful. He has been thinking about water, the way it catches the sunlight on the Gowanus Canal or freezes into elaborate crystals. Tiny stars cut from gold leaf glitter in a pile on a worktable. On the walls, layers of white chiffon hang from strings suspended between dowels. Finch invites me to touch the airy softness of the material and positions me in front of it so that I can see how the light coming through his studio windows on a February afternoon transforms the diaphanous fabric into an image of snow-covered hills. 

For more than thirty years, Finch has chased the evanescence of experience, deconstructing the physics of perception and rebuilding it into work that rebalances the way we see while underscoring the sheer delight of being. Equal parts poet, documentarian, and mad scientist, he traverses mediums, moving from installation to sculpture, painting, works on paper, prints, photographs, light works, public projects, and artist books. The work defies categorization, and yet it gathers comfortably under his singular mix of curiosity and humor. As we sit down to talk, I ask Finch how long he has been in this space.

Spencer Finch: I’ve been in this building since 1994, which is a long time. This neighborhood has changed a lot, and even more in the last year or two because of all the new buildings. Originally I shared the space across the hall with two friends. And then in 2004, the landlords put the building up for sale, so all the artists got together and bought it.

Ann C. Collins (Rail): You moved to New York in the late eighties, at a time when the downtown art scene hailed certain artists as celebrities, but only a chosen few. How did a young artist find footing in that?

Finch: I moved to New York in 1989, straight out of graduate school at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). A group of friends and I loaded up a U-Haul. We didn’t know what we were going to do, but we knew we wanted to come here. Some of our teachers at RISD were well established artists who knew their way around the art world and they were very nice to us. Roni Horn was a teacher of mine. Robert Storr taught at RISD. Tom Lawson, who was such a wonderful person as well as a great artist and a great writer, was living here at that time. And Ronald Jones was here. He was a total character but was also someone who had a sort of entree into the art world. It’s not like we moved to New York and we became their friends, that doesn’t happen, but we stayed in touch with them enough to learn what it was like to be an exhibiting artist. Then, in the early nineties, when there was an economic turndown, there were a lot of empty spaces where people could do temporary shows, and my friends from RISD and I started showing in small spaces in Brooklyn and alternative galleries.

Some of my friends worked at galleries or as artist assistants, but I knew I didn’t want to do that because I suspected I would be kind of repulsed by the whole underbelly of the art world. So I ended up working in educational publishing and did that for fifteen years. There were a lot of people who were working in educational publishing then who were also poets, artists, filmmakers, writers. I have a lot of friends from that time who continue to do interesting things. Educational publishing was cyclical, the summers were quieter, so I would take a month off without pay and would just work in the studio. I don’t think I could do that now, everything’s gotten so much more professionalized, but at that time my bosses were very supportive.

Rail: It’s interesting that you were drawn to publishing given the ways literature finds a place in your work. You’ve found titles for works from reading W. H. Auden; you did a residency at Emily Dickinson’s house. It seems like there is a parallel engagement with the written word and the work of making art. Why is that?

Finch: I was a comp lit major in college. That was a big part of my intellectual upbringing and is still the source of lots of ideas. I studied American and Japanese literature and I spent my junior year in Japan. In the early eighties, Marxist and feminist critiques were most dominant, and I was kind of a Marxist, so in Japan I started working with a potter. I was just taking pottery lessons, but I had this dream of controlling my means of production, becoming a village potter. And that’s how I got into art. I finished my degree in literature, applied to RISD in the graduate ceramics program, and then started doing lots of different things. I got kicked out of ceramics and reapplied to sculpture. And so that’s how it happened.

Rail: What role does poetry play?

Finch: I take the relationship between form and content from the model of poetry, probably more than from visual art: the relationship between what something is and what it says, which is always crucial in my work. It’s the analog in poetry specifically that is important for me. I’m good at reading and stealing things for my own purposes.

Rail: You’re a creative reader.

Finch: A larcenous reader, I guess.

Rail: Not something to be undervalued. How is your life as a reader intertwined with your life as an artist? For example, I’m wondering if your titles come first and the work follows or if you find your titles after?

Finch: Usually the work comes first and the title comes later, but that’s not always the case. For example—and this was a great thing about working in publishing—I came across an Arakida Moritake haiku while I was doing some research for my job, in which the poet sees a flower falling from a branch of a tree, and then it returns to the tree and he realizes it’s a butterfly. This idea of a visual mistake is something that’s really interesting to me as a concept for artwork. And so the haiku was actually a source for a number of bodies of work that I’ve done that are about misinterpreting things or mistaking things or seeing things wrong. In a sense we never see things totally clearly.

Another example is a scene from Yasunari Kawabata’s book, Snow Country, in which the protagonist is on a train that goes through a tunnel and the window in the train becomes a mirror, and he sees this woman’s eye. She’s sitting catty corner from him in the train car, and all of a sudden the outside view becomes a scene of the woman’s eye. That had an enormous effect on me; the play between the window as transparent and reflective is something that I’ve worked with a lot.

Rail: You’ve talked about reading Auden and carrying a book of his poems with you until it fell apart.

Finch: Yes, I was obsessed with Auden for about ten years. I think it was because of that relationship between the language and the meaning in his work, but also he was writing about things that I felt interested in. His great poem about Freud fascinated me, and after reading it, I made work about Freud, and the work really came from Auden, not from Freud. I also made a lot of work about ancient Troy because of Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” Auden was philosophical, he was a deeply intelligent person, but also an amazing craftsman, so he was able to deal with ideas in a way that was not academic. His poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” is really about the possibility of poetry and what poetry can do, and it spoke to me in a way I thought was just so powerful. Emily Dickinson said you know it’s a good poem when you feel like your head’s been blown off.

Rail: Your work is organizational in terms of pulling data from, or pulling from your experience of, a landscape or a lightscape. In the same way that clay or paint is transformed into a work of art, you’re transforming data into work that has a sort of magical presence.

Finch: The scientific method is another thing that runs through my work. Even though it would seem to be a kind of objectivity, the actual activity of scientific experimentation means basically repeating the same experiment many times and recording it in a subjective way, because it’s always going through our sensory apparatus. So it becomes subjective. That idea of repetition then connects to certain ideas in the art and literature of seriality. The idea of seriality links both to nineteenth century painting and also science.

Rail: Can you talk a little bit about the physicality of your process in terms of traveling to a site to experience it first hand? I’m thinking about you lying on the floor and looking at Freud’s ceiling for Ceiling (above Freud’s couch, noon effect, 19 Berggasse, Vienna, Austria, February 18, 1994), or visiting Emily Dickinson’s house before making 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year) in 2009.

Finch: I have a peculiar impulse to actually go myself to see what someone else saw. When Heinrich Schliemann found Troy as a site and found the layers of different cities, it became a real place. From Auden and from the Iliad, I became obsessed with Troy and I really wanted to go and have the experience of seeing what Achilles saw, which I know sounds ridiculous. I’m an Emily Dickinson groupie and I’ve been to her house many times just to try to see what she saw, hoping that some of it rubs off. I need that experience of being there to have the raw material to make something.

I don’t feel like I’m the kind of artist that just self generates work. I can’t just think about Emily Dickinson and make a work about Emily Dickinson. I can’t think about Troy and make a work about Troy. If I can go and have the experience of a place, then I then have the material that I can use. The connection between the world and the artwork and me and the viewer has a geometry that’s compelling to me.

Rail: And so the experience is a material?

Finch: In a way. It’s kind of connected to history painting, which I like, especially history painting that is weird or false or does not claim to be the truth. I think in an odd way, Warhol was a great history painter. He was a painter of history before his time and during his time, but in a very unconventional way, and I find that inspiring. He was taking images from current events and from recent history and from famous people. I think probably my favorite work of his is the camouflage work because all those camouflage patterns come from World War II, and it was something decorative that he just made deeply philosophical. Auden, too, in his poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” has a modern take on the Iliad and uses the story to talk about the horrors of the modern day. That way of thinking about history through the lens of the present day is something that interests me.

Rail: Speaking of history and historical painting, I’m wondering about Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning which you made for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in 2014. I was captivated by the idea of someone painting the sky, which everyone who remembers that day remembers as so perfect and cloudless, and also moved by the commitment to paint 2,983 individual tiles in shades of blue to remember each person who died in the attack. Similarly, in 2017, you circumnavigated the Great Salt Lake to make Great Salt Lake and Vicinity (Pantone Observations), which is made up of Pantone chips titled in pencil with each color you found along the journey. There are riddles hidden in the works, which delight a certain part of my brain, but then the work itself also allows for a deeper experience, maybe a more intuitive experience.

Finch: I think my approach also comes from looking at other work and deciding what kind of artist I wanted to be. My work was really conceptual and dry when I first got out of school, but then I realized that the work I enjoyed most was work that has a conceptual underpinning, and is interesting to look at and rewards repeated viewings. So I worked harder at making things that were engaging to look at. And I think that that’s something that came from looking a lot. I don’t look at as much art as I used to, but it was really important to look and see as many different things as possible. There’s a famous proposition by Susan Sontag, it’s in the essay called the Aesthetics of Silence, where she says, basically, the artist has the choice of either flattering or insulting the viewer.

And the argument is that if the work tends towards silence, you’re being hostile towards the viewer. It’s not that I wanted to flatter the viewer, but I realized that, well, you do want to engage the viewer. It’s a huge privilege to have people look at your artwork and that slow realization made me less of a hard ass. When someone spends time looking at your work, they’re giving you a real gift. I mean, it’s an honor. So I guess my desire is to put things out that are not gratuitous, but still generous and engaging and give people a chance to enter the work. It’s not that the viewers have to be art world insiders, on the contrary, but they’re people who share the spirit in which it is made, and who can come from all kinds of different backgrounds.

And at the same time, it’s a relief to not to have to be popular, not to have to please millions of people. You can have an engagement of people, a sort of deeper engagement of fewer people. I mean, I’m still amazed that people will have seen my shows. On one level, of course, I know I’ve been showing for a long time, but if I meet someone and they remember a work or they say, oh, I really like that show, I’m still touched and amazed and feel very, very lucky. Feeling lucky to have the work out in the world is something that comes with time.

But I also feel that the work can’t take itself too seriously. When there are so many big issues out there, I think it’s important—for my work, at least—to have a kind of lightness to it. I don’t believe I’m going to solve the big problems through my artwork. If I can contribute in some way, I do so as a citizen, not as an artist, but I feel that if my work can be something that engages someone a little differently, and that the work is out in the world, that is, for me, wonderful.

For example, taking an image of the reflection of water on the Gowanus Canal, which is a toxic, polluted, Superfund site, and representing it in gold leaf—there is a silliness to that, which I think is important.

Earlier we were talking about the eighties art world that had these heroic male artists all speaking some sort of Truth, which really was kind of the same as Abstract Expressionism thirty years earlier. That just was not anything that I felt at all connected to or interested in. I felt that the work that interested me was much more self-questioning and modest, much more full of self-doubt and much more intimate and minor. Minor in a really positive way.

Rail: Was there a moment when you noticed that the self-doubt had shifted into something else?

Finch: No. The self-doubt is still there. But I think ultimately it may be my secret sauce, this doubt where you think, well, what am I doing? What is the point of this? I understand when someone stops making art, and I used to see that as weakness or something, and now it seems like a totally logical response to the situation, it makes perfect sense. To say nothing often seems better than saying nothing. Because there have been times in the last thirty years—I mean about once a year, although it used to happen more—when I think, do I really want to go on with this? What’s the point of this? And sometimes that’s a result of seeing work by an artist that’s so incredible that I know that I’ll never be able to be that good, and then I think, well, why continue? Or sometimes I feel like the work just doesn’t do anything. Or sometimes it’s just the postpartum depression after an exhibition. But I feel like that self-doubt is just part of the process. Obviously, I’ve had it this long, I’m not going to get rid of it. And maybe someday I’ll just stop. I don’t want to fake it, I don’t want to just keep going on with the same thing, phoning it in. But there’s also this fear that the work is not going to get better, or that you run out of ideas or that they’re sort of drying up, you don’t have the energy, whatever. And then you’ll see an artist who’s in their eighties who’s doing fantastic work and you’ll be inspired, or people who have careers during which they take time off, or maybe things go up and down. I think that that’s normal. I mean, I know that there are artists who don’t have self-doubt, but I can’t imagine what that would be like. It’s a totally different animal.

Rail: What’s the flip side of the self-doubt?

Finch: Well, I love making art. It’s always been hugely important to me. It still is incredibly important to me. There’s an Auden line where he talks about silence being turned into objects, and this experience of being in the studio in the morning and having nothing and then at the end of the day there being something, it’s almost alchemical in a way. That transformation is so fantastic. And sometimes you come back the next day, and it’s not so good, but just to have the idea that something can happen. Working on something new is especially great, having an idea that then develops into something and suddenly there’s something where there was nothing. I mean, the other side of that is that there’s no shortage of objects in the world, I’ve made dumpsters full of art, and it sometimes feels like I’m just sort of making a lot of stuff, so it’s also incredibly selfish. Being an artist is a very selfish occupation, so I feel guilty about that too.

Rail: I would not dare try to generalize what your medium is, but I would like to talk a little bit about how you choose materials. Are you drawn to a material or are you drawn to a thought?

Finch: I remember vividly when I was in ceramics at RISD, when I was in graduate school. In graduate school, you’re supposed to know what you’re doing. You should have it all figured out, and I did not. I had very little experience, I was what? Twenty-four years old? But I was in this milieu with artists who were working in other departments as well. And I remember in an early critique, there was this woman in the sculpture department who was super smart, and I was just doing things in clay, and I thought, oh, you can express anything you want in clay. And she said, “Well, the material has meaning too.” And I said, “Oh, really?” I think I was probably embarrassed that I never thought about that before, because I believed anything could be said or expressed in a ceramic vessel. And she said, “Well, if you use a brick, the brick has meaning as a clay object, but also as a brick.” And that was an epiphany for me.

And so my approach to material comes from a sculptural idea of the material having meaning. For example, I’ve been making drawings in which I follow the flight pattern of a bee makes as it travels across a garden of flowers. For me, it makes sense to use pastel not only for the color of the flowers, but also because soft pastel refers to pollen in a material powdery way, there’s this deeper connection. It’s necessary and sufficient.

I used to be totally anti-photography, and now I use it a bit in situations where the camera makes sense because of its indexical quality of recording light. Some materials I’ll use specifically for one project and never use again. But I also love learning how to use materials. I’ve done work in fresco and with encaustic and acrylic, I’ve done work in concrete, ice cream, candy. And then there’s material like watercolor, which I’ve been using for twenty years or more, and I feel like I’ve gotten better at it. There’s a tradition with that material which I feel that I can work within. And working within that tradition allows a certain kind of freedom because people understand how to read the material. And you can refer to the history within it. Also, the tradition of drawing and works on paper allows me to caption. Because my work often needs some help making clear what it’s about, often it looks abstract; but you can caption it, to help the viewer see more.

So for example, I’m making gold leaf drawings of the Gowanus Canal on a grayish blue paper, and they’re captioned in a very light blue pencil that says, “Sunlight on the Gowanus.” So someone can look at the image and might not know what it is, but then they see the caption and that connection is made. I think that’s probably a reason why drawing is such a huge part of my practice. There’s this tradition in which text can be part of the work without looking tacked on.

Rail: And again, there’s a sort of interesting way in which text or language comes into your work in ways that don’t necessarily happen in other art making practices. There is this sort of reader and writer in you for whom language almost becomes another material.

Finch: Well, I love language. I love the weirdness of language. It’s so alive, human. English is such a mongrel language, and there’s so much vocabulary, so much subtlety that there is always all this possibility for expression. That’s why it’s so good for poetry. It’s so rich.

Rail: Light seems to be very central to your work as well, particularly the way light affects color. I’m thinking specifically about A Certain Slant of Light, in which you mapped colored filters onto the glass windows in the Morgan Library’s Gilbert Court in 2014, and how the movement of the sun impacted the filters at different times of day. But throughout your practice, whether in works on paper, or painting, installation, certainly in the light works you’ve been making across twenty years, light has been an essential component.

Finch: I think it’s just this idea of energy, light being energy. And you can think of Turner and his apocryphal last words, “sun is God,” and this idea of light being the source of all of our energy and of life, really. But also it’s something that I’ve thought about as a way of approaching landscape in an unconventional way and thinking about landscape in a non-Western, non-perspectival way. That’s why I do these works that are based on the light of a place rather than a picture.

I use the colorimeter, a scientific instrument, a very Western instrument for measuring the light. And then I take the light apart and put it back together by filtering lamps to recreate the light of that place. And for me, that’s a way of experiencing landscape, which is different from an oil painting, the landscape and something that is maybe more sort of physical and maybe even atavistic in some way. It’s a way that our body experiences light.

Rail: You’re preparing for your new show at James Cohan Gallery. Can you tell me about the work you’ve been making?

Finch: The show is called H2O. And the main work is a grouping of H2O molecules made out of lightbulbs. So we have one larger light bulb, which stands for oxygen, and two smaller light bulbs that stand for hydrogen. And there will be eighty-three of them suspended in the gallery space, creating a cloud. It’s a little bit of a joke to make a cloud out of H2O, but it is this idea of taking something microscopic and making it bigger, and then making it into a form that is recognizable as a landscape form, as a sky form. It’s a cloud, and yet it’s something you would only see looking under a microscope, and that play on scale is something that excites me.

There will also be two smaller bodies of work. One is new drawings of the reflection of the sun on the Gowanus Canal, which is right by my studio here, which are gold leaf on paper. The other is a series of works that I’m remaking from a couple of years ago that were never really seen because of the pandemic. They’re fabric works that are hung in a way that recreates very minimalist landscape conditions, either fog or snow or rain. They’re almost pictures of nothing, but as you spend time with them, they reveal an image, and they’re about water in some form as well.

During the pandemic, I was not very productive. I was too much of a nervous twit to get much work done. But I read a lot and I was looking at a lot of Jasper Johns’s work because his show at the Whitney was coming up. Johns has great titles, and I saw the work called Usuyuki (1981), meaning “thin snow,” and the idea of disappearance or erasure when snow covers something. And so I began thinking about something being veiled, and I just started playing around with different fabrics. It was like a wedding dress factory in here with all this tulle and organza and chiffon. It was kind of fun playing with this material and thinking about its optical qualities and how you can use it in a very simple way to create a complex image, which is something that I really love when I see it in work by other people, when there’s something that’s done very simply with a light touch that creates something that’s really evocative. I mean, you can see how simple they are. It’s just fabric hanging over a string.

Rail: There’s such a lightness to it. And as the light from your windows changes, the color of the fabric is changing as well.

Finch: I mean, this can be filed under, “not for everyone.”

Rail: You’re making an object, but you’re taking away as much “objectness” as you can. It’s conceptual, but then how you articulate that into a material form is fascinating.

Finch: It’s not using a smoke machine and it’s not using oil paint. I’m trying to find another way. And it is fun. And I think that’s something I didn’t talk about earlier, the joy and the fun of making art. It can be really fun. I mean, sometimes it’s maddening, but it’s also fun. And I think that’s important. I mean, I have to remind myself sometimes how lucky I am to have a job that I love and that’s fun and that I continue learning things. So I hope that joy of making comes through in the work. The world is weird and wonderful, and I hope that’s in my work too.