MA: My creative background is similar to a lot people our age: An early aptitude for the construction paper/ crayon combo, a preteen obsession with reading and drawing comic books, and then total immersion in skateboarding/ punk rock, hip hop/ graffiti writing subcultures. In high school, I had an incredible art teacher who would let me hide out in the supply closet to look at slides and old Art in Americas. That was kind of I found out that you could be an artist for a job. Not like a cartoonist or an architect, but someone who makes works of art, professionally… I’ve been trying to figure out how that actually works ever since.

MS: like most emerging artists, you’re balancing a day job and studio practice simultaneously. What’s your studio schedule like and when do you find yourself most productive?

On an average week, I do my best to allot around 25 hours a week to my creative practice. That’s one full work day in the studio and a few hours each day during the work week. Whether I like it or not, my brain starts moving around 7 am, so I generally try and get things done then. Other hours are spent in my own head; mulling over ideas, problem solving, and planning things out. That way, when I am physically in the studio, I am ready to work. Since the need for a day job has always been a part of my reality, I just do my best to maximize the time I have. Long train commutes are great for getting the stuff done that the Internet would otherwise distract you from.

MS: when we’ve spoke about your work in the past, much of the critique has revolved around your 2-d work. Most of this work ends up included in larger installation based projects. Do you feel that there’s a disjunction between 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional approaches in your practice? Are there distinct steps leading towards common goal, or is everything approached with the same attitude?

MA: I very rarely envision my work as singular, autonomous pieces of “art.” Instead, I see each thing I make as a part of a larger whole, so it’s no real leap for me to use an earlier work as raw material for a new work. In my mind everything remains connected. If those connections aren’t immediately apparent, that just makes the work all the more engaging for those who experience it. It’s a struggle enough to see a piece to completion, and I certainly don’t need to make it harder by limiting myself access to use/ reuse my own work. I am fascinated by the idea of a work becoming more layered and more complex because of its relationship with another. Within the bounds of my own process, I invite that natural evolution.

MS: The act of collecting seems important to many artists that I know. The objects are always different, but the process seems connected to their creative lives. Many of your installations and sculptural work seem to be archives of related objects. Do you feel that collecting applies at all to your studio life?

MA: After I finished art school, it quickly dawned on me that I would be the one solely in charge of sustaining my art making. I figured that if I could get my creative process as close to the other things that I enjoyed doing, it would be that much easier. I’ve always loved (every aspect) of collecting things, and over time I just found more and more ways to make art out of doing it. Now after combining these two habits for a while, I find it makes sense on a bunch of different levels. With collecting there’s the time equity that comes with the endless searching and the wow factor of “where the hell did he find that?”; both of which translate really well into the context of experiencing art. I’ve never been much of a fabricator, so using objects that already exist just makes that much more sense. And because so much of the stuff I work with comes from thrift stores and second hand shops, my material costs remain low and I don’t feel forced to make work that needs to sell to succeed… not that I’d mind a sale from time to time.

MS: How much weight does the found object play in what you’re trying to achieve? I know that this tradition is present in your work, but how do you exercise it specifically? Is there a Dadaist ethic at work here, or do you gather things based on a certain criteria? are you critical of the things you acquire, or does chance dictate what makes it’s way into your sculptures?

MA: My relationship with the objects I make art of is a tricky one. Certain things I use specifically because of my relationship to them. These are things that I value because of the experience surrounding them, and want a sense of that incorporated into my piece. Things like gifts, mementos, souvenirs and other stuff I choose to keep in my life, art or no art. Now obviously the term “found” seems to arbitrary to describe that. On the other hand, a big portion of the objects I incorporate into my work are much more anonymous. These are chance encounters with something on the rack at the thrift store or happening to walk down the right block on the right day. I’ve never been able to fully articulate why I am attracted to somethings over others, and its probably best left not analyzed. Honestly, somethings just catch my eye and seem to have the potential to be something bigger then itself. A lot of the time I have no immediate clue what it will be used for, but somehow (even if its years down the road) it will end up being the exact piece I need to complete the puzzle.

MS: I know improvisation is important to you. How do you prepare yourself and your materials before constructing a piece?

MA: I wrote a text piece a while in the middle of “A Future Memory” project a couple of years ago. I was trying to describe how I was relating to the world at the time, and somehow the line about improvisation came out of that.

“Things fall apart, perhaps into noise, perhaps not. Other times things are quite under control, only in a completely random way. There are circumstances when not caring about a lot of things is ok, because you focused a lot of attention on one thing. There are also circumstances when this is not ok. An improvised approach is only possible though a fully prepared approach.”

My ultimate goal is to maintain a state of preparation. I move through the world as an artist, so I have to continually be on point. There are no “on days” or “off days.”

MS: What were your early influences like and how have they changed in recent years?

MA: I remember the first time I saw an image of a Rauschenberg. I was in that supply closet in my high school that I mentioned earlier. I looked in the slide viewer (it wasn’t even projected) and it was like this secret world just opened up and let me in. It was foreign and scary and grimy and dangerous and looked like it could fall apart at any minute. I was just so shocked and wanted to be a pat of it so bad. Over the years, I studied his work so much that I actually began to internalize his way of problem solving. I am lucky enough to see his work in person from time to time now, and they just make sense to me. And its certainly not because I am that good; its because my moves were learned through his.

More recently, I have been trying to assess how my own personal tastes affect the art that I make. I used to be very “oh, I would never use that sort of line” or “no way, not that color,” but I am really trying to chip away at that. My goal is to see everything as an available tool, and it’s just my job to find a way to use it that’s authentic to my experience. I am not designing interiors or cooking meals for people, so my concoctions don’t always need to be in perfect harmony. Its allowed me to open me up, and discover things that I would have shut myself off to before because I didn’t “like” it.

MS: What outside the art world influences your practice?

MA: Talking over beers. Food culture- in both its professional form and shared amongst friends and family form. The alternate reality stylings of MF DOOM and Phillip K Dick. Sunlight filtering through tree leaves. Composed music. Jazz music. The skateboarding of Bobby Puleo. Interesting clothing ensembles. Watching movies. Having been raised Catholic. Electronic music. Everything about the ocean. The successes of those close to me

MS: Any last thoughts?

MA: Yes. Thanks To Katie for a life of collaboration; To my parents for accepting something that even I still don’t understand; To my friends who have supported me through words, patronage and a constant willingness to try something new; and to my brothers for never giving up.

Special to Matt Allison for taking the time to talk about his work and post on Volume. To see images and learn more about his work visit http://www.afuturememory.com/

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Last days

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Blinky Palermo

By David Duncan 8/27/11

View Slideshow Blinky Palermo: Untitled, 1970, synthetic paint on canvas on wood and fiberboard, four parts: 5 7/8 by 5 7/8 by 2 inches each. View at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen. Private collection. Photo Jens Ziehe. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York. All works © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.; Blinky Palermo at the counter of the bar Creamcheese in Düsseldorf, 1969. Photo Gerhard Richter. Courtesy Kunstmuseum St. Gallen.;

Annandale-on-Hudson IN 1964, A SHY, 21-YEAR-OLD German artist named Peter Heisterkamp enrolled in Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where a fellow student observed that he resembled an infamous American boxing promoter named Blinky Palermo. The name stuck, not only due to the slight physical resemblance, but also because a recent evolution in the young man’s paintings toward geometric abstraction required a nom de guerre, as later recounted by his teacher: “Heisterkamp might do for the old paintings, but this kind of art would have to involve a completely different name.”1 The significance of Palermo’s early artistic transformation—and by extension the impact of Beuys’s tutelage—is now readily apparent in an excellent traveling retrospective, which presents much of his work for the first time in the United States.

Organized by Lynne Cooke, curator-at-large of the Dia Art Foundation (and chief curator at the Reina Sofía in Madrid), “Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” features the four main bodies in Palermo’s oeuvre: the sculptural paintings known as the Objects; the stitched-together Stoffbilder (Cloth Pictures); the in situ wall drawings and paintings (seen here in photographs); and the acrylic-on-aluminum Metallbilder (Metal Pictures). The artist made the first three groups roughly concurrently before he turned to the final one, which he focused on from 1974 until his unexpected death, at 33, in 1977. As noted by Cooke, Beuys considered Palermo’s work to have a great “porosity,”2 by which he may have meant that it remained open to artistic influences. These influences are diverse;

Palermo’s familiarity with contemporary American art is frequently cited by scholars, and indeed the color chords and fields of Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly, for instance, are appreciable in the Stoffbilder. But the artists that Palermo most consistently and productively engaged with are the early pioneers of utopian, nonobjective painting—most notably, Kasimir Malevich.

Malevich believed that feeling was humanity’s most vital shared experience, and that it could not be conveyed sufficiently in representations of objective reality. Thus, he renounced the three-dimensional world and, beginning with his then-infamous Black Square (1915), pursued qualities of geometry, color and composition in flat pictures that were meant to evoke the “supreme” reality of pure feeling.3 While Suprematist principles appealed to Palermo, he also doubted the viability of such faith in the abstract. If there was a constant in his too-brief career, it was his desire to test and tease the redemptive abstraction of the past so as to reconcile it with (or to make sense of) a redemptive tendency in the art of the present, particularly Beuys’s sculptures and actions in the 1960s. This desire is demonstrated best by Palermo’s Objects, which he began creating while still studying at the Kunstakademie.

DURING HIS FIRST TWO YEARS in Beuys’s class, Palermo produced several oil paintings on canvas stretched over traditional wood supports. These works reveal the significance of his visit, in 1964, to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he viewed the institution’s impressive collection of paintings by Malevich. Despite having obvious stylistic parallels, however, Palermo’s compositions are no mere analogues. His 1964 version of Malevich’s 1915 painting 8 Red Rectangles, for example, eliminates the variety of shape and the diagonal motion of the composition, in which a geometric collective appears to have been launched toward the upper-right corner. Palermo’s quadrilaterals are rendered on a slightly downward horizontal axis, and in more equalized dimensions—they are only slightly more elongated than squares—giving the impression of having been chastened.

In humbling a Suprematist work designed to convey maximum feeling, Palermo recalls his teacher’s flat-footed 1962 painting Drei Wimpel (Three Pennants). Beuys’s pennants appear in a stuttering sequence, toward the top of an otherwise blank piece of cardboard. Each consists of two triangles: an isosceles standing, point to point, on a much smaller equilateral. The triangle would soon acquire three-dimensional mass and a more ritualistic tone in Beuys’s work, however, when he began incorporating wedges of fat in sculptures and performances, positioning them in the corner of a cardboard box and on the seat of a chair or using them to mark the boundaries of an action.

Palermo was, of course, familiar with his teacher’s usage of the triangle, and in 1965 he produced his own work, titled Tagtraum I (Daydream I), that renders the basic form in three dimensions, liberating it from the bonds of revolutionary painting. The shape appears twice in the wall-hung piece: painted on the surface of an object that, in its color and fabric quality, recalls a life jacket; and again in isolation just off to the right of this composition, as a shaped canvas. The two triangles—identical in their size and viridian color and positioned at the same height—are clearly meant to be duplicates, the right-hand one seeming as if it had been plucked from the flat composition beside it. That Palermo was performing an act of historical evocation with the triangle (as Beuys was doing in his own work) is likely, but it is hard to know whether he meant ultimately to “save” the nonobjective icon or—by casting it out from the canvas and turning its mystical geometry into something solid and tangible, not to mention a bit rough and ragged—to sink it.

IN 1968, PALERMO CREATED Blaue Scheibe und Stab (Blue Disk and Staff), two objects wrapped in blue fabric tape and leaned against the wall. The work touches upon a number of contemporaneous artistic approaches, including the employment of a wrapping technique (recalling Eva Hesse’s Hang Up, 1966), of shaped supports that integrate form and picture (as in Frank Stella’s paintings), and of self-effacing or provisional materiality (as in the work of Richard Tuttle, who that year had exhibited irregularly shaped pieces of dyed cloth at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf). It is also known that Palermo attended a number of Fluxus events at this time, as well as a musical performance by John Cage and a dance performance by Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer. Beuys later recalled that Palermo was “tremendously fascinated” by these performances, but he added, curiously, that the young man “despaired” over such actions because he fretted over the unlikely possibility “of getting things going again.”

The meaning of Beuys’s recollection (which, of course, is not Palermo’s own) is not entirely clear, but the despair he notes might suggest that Palermo lacked confidence in the contemporary avant-garde and its ability to make radical political and artistic progress. Gerhard Richter, a friend of Palermo’s at the Kunstakademie, later recalled that students found the 1963 Festum Fluxorum Fluxus sponsored by Beuys—one of several Fluxus festivals of Dada-esque events, actions and performances—“shocking absolutely shocking” and “very cynical and destructive.”4 Although Richter does not specify which works he and his peers found troubling, it is hard to imagine that the first movement of Beuys’s Siberian Symphony was not among them: during this action, the artist ripped the heart out of the body of a dead hare and ceremoniously hung it on a blackboard intersected by painted rods.

Against Beuys’s occultlike performative works Palermo’s Objects stand in relief, as if the artist were seeking a more concrete way of pursuing iconic forms and one that remained directly tied to the Suprematist past. His blue disk and staff were likely meant to be in dialogue with Beuys, who the year before had created the sculpture-prop Eurasienstab (Eurasian Staff) and the year before that had performed Manresa—a convoluted action in which he employed, among other items, a gold cardboard disk and half of a vertically bisected Latin cross. Palermo’s presentation of the primitive formal coupling of circle and line, however, is more firmly rooted in Suprematism—specifically, in Malevich’s Painterly Realism of a Football Player—Color Masses in the 4th Dimension (1915), which was on view at the Stedelijk during his 1964 visit. A green circle and a red line serve as the foundation of the composition, the latter appearing to balance precariously on top of the former. Palermo’s work equally evokes Malevich’s Suprematist Painting, Rectangle and Circle (1915), although if he knew the painting, it was through reproduction (since it was held then by the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University). Given Palermo’s concurrent experiences with Malevich and with Beuys, Blaue Scheibe und Stab can reasonably be interpreted as a Doubting Thomas’s investigation of those artists’ weighty iconography. Unlike the triangles of Tagtraum I, however, the circle and line seem to acquire an affirmative pageantry thanks to the artist’s uprighting of the forms and his giving them a bright uniform color (one that merges a Suprematist motif with a more contemporary precedent, since it was the trademark hue of Yves Klein, who was extremely influential in Düsseldorf during the early 1960s).

The stafflike object in Beuys’s Manresa was, again, half of a Latin cross, and thus it doubly conjured Malevich, who had also represented Latin, Greek and T-shaped crosses in his two-dimensional compositions. The same year Beuys performed this work, Palermo wrapped a large wooden T with ramie fiber, painted it red and hung it on the wall; and over the next seven years, he would return to this shape on at least four more occasions. He also drew from works by Russian avant-garde artists apart from Malevich and who were not being evoked contemporaneously by Beuys. The intersecting painted timbers comprising an untitled piece from 1967, for example, suggest a remnant of Vladimir Tatlin’s famous Constructivist tower Monument to the Third International, as if Palermo were giving form to a historical work known mostly in two dimensions. (The tower was never built, and is seen mainly through photographs of models for it.)

One of the earliest essays published on Palermo was written by the composer Henning Christiansen, who used the Objects to help cast the artist as a Romantic; in addition, the art historian Christine Mehring has traced these works to a Romantic concept of the fragment in a convincing fashion. But the artist’s most immediate influence, Beuys, may better explain the Objects’ engagement with nonobjective esthetics of the early 20th century. Palermo treated these works as a means of participating in an exchange between the redemptive abstract iconography of Beuys and the geometric remains of a lost revolution.

1 All quotes of Joseph Beuys are from Laszlo Glozer, “On Blinky Palermo: A Conversation with Joseph Beuys,” trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Arts Magazine 64, 1990; reprinted in Blinky Palermo: To the People of New York, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly with Barbara Schröder, New York, Dia Art Foundation, 2009, pp. 21-30.

2 Lynne Cooke, “Palermo’s Porosity,” in Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977, ed. Cooke, Karen Kelly and Barbara Schröder, New York, Dia Art Foundation, 2010, p. 15.

3 Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” in Malevich, The Non-Objective World, 1927; reprinted in Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert, Mineola, N.Y., Dover Publications, 2000, pp. 117-124.

4 Gerhard Richter, quoted in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 31. “Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” was on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Oct. 31, 2010-Jan. 16, 2011] and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. [Feb. 24-May 15].

“Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” was on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Oct. 31, 2010-Jan. 16, 2011] and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. [Feb. 24-May 15].

DAVID DUNCAN is an artist and doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center, City University
of New York.

You can see this article and more at Art in America