No. ONE

JOAN TANNER

Brooks I recently came across this quote from Erich Fromm: “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.” This reminded me of your work, and specifically of your 2021 solo exhibition FLAW at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center, of which I wrote a review entitled Definition is Not Necessarily Destiny. Your inventive use of materials, many of which—bird netting, plastic barrier fencing, cords, wood, polypropylene sheeting, zip ties, FlexTrac, and plywood—are meant for construction or have intended uses that are fairly specific, really fascinated me. You disregard and subvert the intended purpose of these materials, redefining the parameters which supposedly define their identities, essentially challenging their certainty. So, I wondered if we could start by talking about certainty.

Tanner Oh, God, did I use that term?

Brooks No. [laughs]

Tanner Good. [laughs]

Brooks I think it’s a concept that feels timely.

Tanner I think you're right.

Brooks There are people who are in positions of power who seem to be operating—not just in their official capacities but also just generally in their lives—with total certainty. And I’ve been thinking about the dangers of certainty and the difference between certainty and knowledge.

Tanner Oh…certainty and knowledge?

Brooks Yes. Your father was an ophthalmologist and an eye surgeon; he and his work were early influences on how you looked at the world, weren’t they?

Tanner Oh, yes.

Brooks So there is an obvious through line in your work that has some origin in observation and science. Some might think of science as being about the search for or the possession of certainty, but that seems incorrect. Certainty implies a kind of infallibility, a kind of unquestioning, but science is all about asking new questions, isn’t it? No matter how much you think you know about a subject…

Tanner There is always more to learn. I have always loved to read a lot about medicine and science from an amateur’s perspective. You get caught up in the mystery of it all. Certainty is the kind of word that I would challenge. The certainty is that we exist and that our human bodies  develop in unpredictable ways that generate uncertainties and congenital anomalies.

Brooks There are flaws at a cellular level.

Tanner Yes. What annoys me enormously are people who engage in kinds of certainties I would call bloat or bluffing. That insistence of who's right and who’s wrong—important work has to be done to challenge that certainty, and I think that's where I slide in to join that rank. Not that I'm a great doubter or a constantly negative person, but I wonder why change has so much blather around it? Change isn't just going right or left, this way or that way, it’s really what gathers along the way that then allows something else to happen, right?

Brooks Yes.

Tanner So, what I'm kind of battling, it seems, is this blather and these clichés. We are now living in a time when generalities are almost embraced, because they are easier to understand and therefore people don’t have to engage as much. People think they recognize or understand something quickly and that gives them comfort, which makes it understandable to them.

Brooks In many ways, people do seek comfort, and one way of finding comfort is to dismiss complexity or nuance and to latch onto simple solutions for complex problems, and there are other people who who are ready and willing to give those answers, whether or not they’re really right.

Tanner  So, confronting that certainty…it's not exactly in my work…but I've been thinking a lot about that in relationship to my early paintings. They had a lot of geometry in them, but then I would diffuse that by doing something that would deflect perfection.

Brooks That sounds like the title of your next exhibition.

Tanner Maybe so! [laughs] I was interested in seeing what would happen if you had painted one part precisely and then went right up to it and made the other part gooey. The surface was so important to me; it’s like when you’re ice skating, there is a smooth patch so the skater doesn’t trip and then there is a part where that perfection stops, where the surface gets back to how the ice actually froze.

Brooks You have consistently sought out complexity and contradiction in your work, haven’t you?

Tanner Yes. Perhaps it’s stimulating to endlessly misdirect yourself. I think about that so often when I work. If I’m making a drawing and decide, well, this all feels very familiar to me, then I just flip it over and do something new, and I often think about Paul Thek. Do you know him?

Brooks Oh, yes, I came across his work when I was living in London and then a couple of years ago I was part of a publication by Pilot Press where writers were asked to respond to his painting Untitled (eye with comet) [c.1985], and I wrote a poem. I’ll send it to you.

Tanner Oh, how fantastic.

Brooks He’s someone I really admire.

Tanner Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to continue what he was doing. In the late 1960s he shipped some work to Germany, but when he opened the crate it was all broken. He reworked it and painted it pink and showed it anyway. [A Procession in Honour of Aesthetic Progress: Objects to Theoretically Wear, Carry, Pull or Wave, Galerie M. E. Thelen, West Germany, 1968]

Brooks Fascinating, I don’t know that work. I am more familiar with the paintings.

Tanner Well, I am probably way off the topic, but your prompt of certainty put me on that path. [laughs]

Brooks It seems very on topic to me. [laughs] Thinking about the materials you use, some of them are more peculiar, like Flextrac, and then others are more prosaic, like plywood.

Tanner A lot of them have roles in manufacturing or building, and these materials have a specificity or a kind of guarantee. But plywood, for example, will do all kinds of things if you soak it. Some of these sculptures that I've made, where we've taken plywood and purposely got it very wet and then made a new shape out of it—this really goes back to what the Eames were doing and what Albers was doing in Vienna. Those furniture designers made these curving, wonderful shapes out of something that people would have never expected. I think that comes back to my interest to work on things from my own scale. That is my regret, but working with things I can handle has allowed me to continue working.

Brooks But was that a goal, to push things to their limit? Regret implies that it was something you were indeed interested in.

Tanner Well, it's a matter of saying that what you want to make would have to go to a fabricator if, for example, the model was eight feet high, but you wanted the final piece to be a twenty foot high sculpture. I don't see myself in any way doing that. I don't think of myself as running a many handed studio, though I do have parts of works that have been made by somebody else here in my studio.

Brooks Much of your work isn’t what one might call enormous, but it is big.

Tanner Yes. In my exhibition Out of Joint [Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2023], we made a plastic corrugated column that was only seven or eight inches in diameter but extended diagonally for twenty feet across almost the entire gallery. I made this so that a visitor had to go in another entrance to come in into the gallery. I wanted the column to extend from a giant bundle of net, which plugged one of the entries into the gallery, to what I call the transformer, which was another shape made out of that same net material. We put layers and layers of amber color inside the column, making the color deeper by swinging it and by pouring shellac back and forth. And I was pleased to see how the shellac would set up in a way that was kind of viscous and buttery, and that gradually hardened.

Brooks It sounds marvelous.

Tanner I knew I had to divide the space, and that I had to reckon with this extremely large gallery, and this seemed like the perfect way for me to handle the scale. It was exciting for me to tackle this large space with something that I had engineered myself.  The net that I use is interconnected, manufactured in a pattern that is rectilinear, and the tension in that work was how we forced the net to be something different. Stretching it and bundling it, we made it dense with many, many folds and overlays, building the whole piece outward, so that it grew, literally. And inside this mass, this complex bounty, we made an opening for the column, in a way that you could see its insertion.  A lot of the work looked mechanistic in a sense, but also circulatory. I was pointedly interested in a medical reference of fluids in the human body.

Brooks You are always changing the materials, asking—no, not asking—forcing them to do something different.

Tanner Yes. Manipulation and doing something that is unexpected is what I am after. But when I work, it isn’t that I go out that day and say, oh, today we're gonna make six bundles that are gonna be, you know, twenty inches by da da da. I would just say to the young people who help me just go and make a kidney. And then I’d spray it purple or something. What we made we included because I couldn't think of any other way to say how it should look other than how we made it.

Brooks That seems to align with your interest in mutation. The dictate was to make a kidney, but the specifics of how it looked were dependent upon interpretation and choices.

Tanner Yes. I am interested in variations in interpretation, even when it comes to how others see my own work. I am curious to have a dialogue about different takeaways…although if somebody told me they thought this was the dumbest show they ever saw, I would definitely give them my steely glance. [laughs]

Brooks I’ve seen glimpses of that glance, but thankfully never the full thing. [laughs] Your interest in complexity and contradiction is consistent in terms of how you think about the work, how you make the work, and how you’d like the work to be seen and experienced. It’s also consistent with the kind of work that inspires you.

Tanner Yes, I am reminded of artists like Max Beckmann, whose paintings are very important to me, and whose work is, in other words, the full show. It’s got everything. And we have talked before about Francis Bacon. You asked me about him, why I thought his work was so interesting, and I told you it was because of the intentional compression in the paintings. Martin Kippenberger has been an artist who also interested me, I think partly because there was so much amazing variety in his work.

Brooks When I interviewed you for BOMB a couple of years ago we talked about that painting of his with the man in the underwear. [Ohne Titel, 1988]

Tanner Yes, and it’s such a wonderful painting.

Brooks It is. It actually looks like a figure from one of my paintings is interacting with one of your sculptures. [laughs]

Tanner [laughs] Yeah. I think the reason why it’s so interesting and beguiling is there is that bloated body and then this horrible underwear. Another painter who has always interested me is Japanese-American Yasuo Kuniyoshi. I saw his work recently at The Whitney. There is a painting of his called The Twist Loaf with a loaf of bread on a table, and it’s slanted at such an angle. It’s very strange; it has this beautiful white drape and then there is sort of a student's table, and you don't see any other leg but the one that is in the front, curving down. There is this gorgeous wiping of the paint in vertical and horizontal lines. I think it's a superb painting. I stood there and looked at it for a long time.

Brooks Let’s talk a bit more about Beckmann, who is so important to me, too.

Tanner Yes. I’m at my computer and I'm pulling up images. One of my favorites is Adam and Eve, done in 1917.

Brooks I will look it up, too. I don’t think I know that painting.

Tanner Check out how strange it is.

Brooks [searches] Oh, wow.

Tanner In the whole painting, everything is contradictory. Adam’s face is in shadow, but he's got a red mustache and beard, and he's got something that looks like a tumor behind his neck connected to his body. And then there is the folklorish wolf who looks like a serpent. I know it is a serpent except that I see two ears. There’s such contradiction—it’s sort of stylized, and he is doing weird things with colors, like the green shadow, and then there’s a sort of corny or almost student-like way of bringing in what the sexual attitude is. We have the serpent, the naughtiness, the nudity, and yet the woman has her hand cupping her breast. Is she offering her breast sexually or is that talking about who she's supposed to be, the original woman. She looks a bit wasted, also; her eyes are cast down. Adam doesn't look too great either. And then he's got orangey-pink in his groin area, which would indicate fecundity, which is usually something an artist does with a female body. I’m not quite sure where this all leads, but the contradictions—boy oh boy—they’re there. And there’s also a Hans Holbein, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb [1520-1522], which stays in my mind.

Brooks Yes, I know that painting.

Tanner I mean, it could be made today, it is so contemporary.

Brooks Absolutely. These are both compelling paintings, the Beckmann and the Holbein. How do they affect your work?

Tanner I don't include any of these things immediately in my own work, but I think about them. You and I have also talked about Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man [1480-1485], the boy in a red cap, at the National Gallery in London. That portrait is incredible, a very sensuous presentation. At first glance, my first thought was, Oh, a perfect male head, then you notice that the eyes aren’t absolutely parallel.

Brooks Right. He looks like a real person because he’s slightly less than perfect, despite being perfect. I am sure, by the way, I have talked way too much about this painting. [laughs]

Tanner It is a spectacular painting. Its dark background follows the portrait tradition of the head being dominant. If I were teaching a class in portrait painting—which would not have been my first choice—I would try to lead students into thinking what they could do with nuanced brushstrokes to engage a viewer. Somehow, you need to let the viewer know that they should look at the painting from every angle, that if, for example, you glance at the painting from the side, the brushstrokes might be more obvious. I can’t quite say exactly how this influences my work, when I’m doing something so commonplace as to make forms out of flexible net that I then paint with many different colors of spray, done very rapidly without thinking about brushstrokes at all.

Brooks You do work quickly.

Tanner I enjoy the facility of being able to work so rapidly. The first thing I do is apply the paint to this material, which isn’t rare, and then I bring that part to a larger piece of material, tie it on and make it into a different shape. At this stage in life, I understand it is the disfigurement, the alteration, that interests me, and the parallel of admiring great handed work, like the Botticelli, is very contradictory. But who knows what will happen? I have even wondered what would happen if I went back to making very small paintings with a brush. No matter the medium, what matters is the intention of application, and the visual interaction that goes on, which is something so instinctive with me.

Brooks And now you are working on some new drawings.

Tanner Yes, I am working on some drawings now where I am doing very strange things.

Brooks In many of your drawings, there’s a kind of vortex where all of the marks and energy are sort of focused together, or they connect. Is this just a compositional choice or are these things individual entities—

Tanner Individual entitles floating in their vacuums…

Brooks Yeah, almost like mitochondria.

Tanner Oh, I do love that you used that word to describe my work. That is very satisfying.

Brooks In an earlier conversation, we spoke about your drawing entitled On Behalf Of.

Tanner On Behalf Of is a diptych on heavy paper. It’s a good example of the dilemma I’m working on; it’s sort of like a politician who is talking out of both sides of their mouth.

Brooks Because of the bifurcation, the break?

Tanner Yeah. There are these floating entities that are borrowed from all kinds of places, and they talk to each other, and they’re also in opposition, just even in the way they're presented. The pallete is the same between the two halves but the marks don’t really continue, other than the red part in the center. I saw that this raw wound, this gash, is significant.

Brooks The wound is what connects.

Tanner Yes. I do like that all this contradiction is persistently in my work; it seems particularly present in the spontaneity of making the drawings. Over the years, did I change things around and use different materials or switch my interest? Yes, and some of those changes were based on a lot of really unimportant or almost minor decisions, such as maybe the material I wanted to use wasn't readily available right then and there, and I made up a different way of doing something else. I have been asked a lot about why it is that so much of my work ended up looking very temporary. That was on purpose. I wanted it to look tenuous, and it was made with materials that weren't necessarily highly admired. People often want to know how did you decide to use all kinds of plastic netting and the answer is because it is malleable. It can be manipulated in so many ways. Why wouldn't you use it? You can attach it, you can tie it, et cetera. In contrast, the plywood is more rigid, but I have also manipulated that to hopefully have some change. I wanted the work to look jumbled and full of possibilities. I am not trying to make or to find agreements.

Other Swans Conversation No. Three

Born in 1935 in Indianapolis, Joan Tanner has lived in Southern California since the mid-1960s. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1957 and began her career as a painter. She has been consistently exhibiting her paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and site-specific installations since 1968.

Tanner maintains a vigorous studio practice somewhat akin to a laboratory and is inspired by spatial contradictions, archetypal geometric forms and raw materials.

Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections and in the following public collections: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Harvard University, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphics, Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, New York City, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. Over the years, Tanner has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California--Santa Barbara, Ohio University in Athens, Illinois State University at Normal, and most recently she was an artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.