Ann Preston Interviews Lynne Henkel
AP: One of the things that's always interested me about your work is the level of conviction that's present. For me everything is always very provisional. For you it seems like you almost have no choice. These images are engraved in you somehow.
LH: What a flattering way of saying that I get fixed and I'm very stubborn.
AP: Most people don't have the ability to fix, to become stubborn in quite the same way. It's really a profound difference.
LH: Well, I notice with images that there are very specific things that need to happen with them and I'm usually not up to that so I have to keep at it.
AP: That's exactly what I'm talking about. Most people would not talk about their images in terms of very specific things that have to happen and their being just in service to that particular image. That's the framework you discuss.
LH: I have specific feelings about images and what their presence is like physically. This has forced me to become a better sculptor which, as you know, is a real pain in the ass. Images seem to have particular characteristics which I try to actualize, sometimes at the risk of being quite literal when I'm unclear about what I'm dealing with, like the tantra drawings for instance: this horrible thing that happens in the woods between a leopard and a cow.
AP: Was there a deer in there too?
LH: The deer is a witness. The deer with the veil is so naive and uncomprehending. After the attack the cow's face is literally sliced off and speared to a tree. It's horrible and tragic. The deer says n Oh, look. She's laughed her face off." and the other creatures around her are saying, " No, Tantra did it. you idiot." The leopard is called Tantra. Now, there's something called tantric yoga. There's all this material that has some kind of real context and history into which I stumble roughshod and uncaring. I become involved with an image, the making of it as an object, and my interest becomes keen. The process feels like a research but not an academic one nor a therapeutic one. The cow and the fox (in Beloved Fox) have something in common. To me, the fox abides and transcends the violence of the dogs. I'm not sure the same is true for the cow. Also, my feelings of identification flicker between fox and dogs, leopard and cow.
AP: So what is happening then is the work is not therapeutic, is not academic. It's approaching some sort of subcontext of reality?
LH: That's a good way of putting it. You and I have talked a lot about making sculpture, making things. There's a way of dragging something that is a mental possession into the physical world. With sculpture that is a screaming, kicking process.
AP: There's a whole series of problems about realizing something in sculpture. Everything is so much more difficult.
LH: One gets into some weird territory making objects that deal with issues of representation and specificity. You end up feeling like you're making a very strange piece of kitsch.
AP: Well, its odd. Certainly in the territory of writing for example, specificity is God. Somehow when we get over to visual art everything in the 20th century has become so conceptualized, driven by a concept, driven by some sort of goal. What about the finished product? The specifics and details have somehow come to be a thin kindred to beauty.
LH: I think the reasons for specificity have changed so radically over time. There's confusion about that. I'm working on a large figure. It's not heavily stylized or reduced to a more abstract form. It requires more specificity and more skill from me which is why it takes so long and why I'm in a bad mood a lot.
AP: Tell me about the dog.
LH: My motivation for that piece was simple. I wanted protection.
AP: From?
LH: From the world.
AP: I love that dog with his big floppy jowls.
LH: Those silky jowls. That's a good example of what we were talking about, the formal acquiescence to specificity. I can't tell you how important it was to make those jowls and that mouth.
AP: There's more going on than pure aggression. Obviously that mouth has a lascivious quality to it as well as a biting quality.
LH: Yes, it's a sensuous creature. It's aggressive.
AP: But that's almost inevitable with sculpture. People wonder why everything comes out being sexual in sculpture.
LH: Because it's present and tactile. It comes from hands to hands.
AP: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Our lasciviousness made it sculpture or it's lascivious because it's sculpture?
LH: I think there's a lot of things that aren't sculpture that achieve lasciviousness.
AP: I just always noticed a concentration of lasciviousness in sculpture. Particularly in our work.
LH: I think it has a lot to do with process, of our touching. I know that my hands tell me a lot about what I want.
AP: When this gets imbedded in some extraordinary moral structure of our puritanical upbringing...
LH: Which makes me think of art school.
AP: I mean the entire art context has been about thou shalt not. Our moral structure is always about tightening up and perfecting things. For me making sculpture is a bit of a morality play. How hard are we going to work on it? How lascivious is it going to get? How bad are we to do it?
(pause)
Just to backtrack a bit, at one point somebody was talking to me about my work and they said u you don't have to worry about issues because your work is emotional."
LH: Wow.
AP: I ran into the same kind of implicit comment about formalism, as if emotionality and visuality were not issues. As if those were not things of importance, worthy of a critical context.
LH: I disagree with that statement so much. It's ten times more critical how you deal with formal issues when you have content that is about some kind of emotional experience or psychological state and you're not working in an expressionist vein.
AP: Which you certainly are not.
LH: And neither are you. One has to exist in a dichotomy of being truly calculating without closing down.
AP: What do you mean by truly calculating?
LH: You calculate when you decide the medium. You calculate when you decide on the drawing. You make decisions that are not spontaneous. The execution is not spontaneous.
AP: It's not ~I feel it n
LH: This is not improvisational dance.
AP: No. Usually when people are coming at me about what has a psychological, emotional...human platform, they're setting this up as some kind of opposition to an intellectual life which examines what we're doing. As if somehow one gets off scot free from the requirements of an examined life because we're working emotionally and physically and formally. Pisses me off.
LH: Well, isn't that a case of the grass is always greener.
AP: Or students come up to you and they go " It's so nice to see someone who's working like that. I just want to do what I feel." This word gets used as justification for all kinds of riot. Like the precision in this work was not carefully earned every step of the way.
LH: Or that there is no self questioning.
AP: How can there be a intellectual structure which is self motivated as opposed to being found in Foucault? There seems to be some doubt of that.
LH: You get into these discussions where somehow against your will you feel like you're somebody representing creationist science and you're not.
AP: Exactly.
LH: I wish I felt like that much of a visionary, that all I had to say was " I work for God. Shut up." No such luck.
AP: There are three pieces that I've always kind of grouped together: the Dodo, The Elephant and the Camel, not all of which are in the show. Seems to me they have some sort of common territory.
LH: They're all animals.
AP: But there's more than that to them. I have the sense that those animals are a surrogate
you.
The Dodo, just for general description, is marching forth emblazoned with hearts and a helmet. One has a sense that they stand in for you in a way that the big mouthy dog doesn't. But the dodo I have a sense, has a portion of you, humorously.
LH: I'm not speaking for the animal kingdom.
AP: Nor are you being allegorical. These pieces are almost funny. The Dodo is certainly funny. I expect the camel is going to be funny.
LH: It's hard to step around the humor of a camel's physiognomy. They're bewildering pieces for me because this cross species transference means I can't really command and control their psychology. They're already something, being a certain kind of animal. I furiously concentrate on some kind of
aesthetic training of them. It all gets really quite physical. I don't feel connected to any particular allegorical treatment which is funny since something like a camel has so much baggage and the dodo...
AP: God help that dodo. Just to fill in a couple of corner's, what's this camel going to turn out to be like, ideally?
LH: Well, this is the first camel. You know me, I won't be happy.
AP: Five camels later...
LH: It's the head and neck projecting from the wall in that, dare we say, sexually assertive way that sculptures can. So it's an inverted arc, a bust with an attractive chain around it's neck. It's decorative, quirky and sullen.
AP: A mean camel?
LH: Originally it was supposed to be u The Angry Camel." Camels have wildly complicated faces. Their lips and noses are quite something. Because we don't live in part of the world where camels are a common sight we tend to view them in a mediated, stylized way..like Joe Camel, cartoons. They've already been so reduced to something else that to transpose human expression and emotion onto them would result in a lugubrious, almost idiotic appearance. I couldn't go there. Believe me, a camel in stasis looks pretty pissed off anyway.
AP: Tell me about the elephant. It has some of these characteristics.
LH: I had a strong sense of what I was feeling about it. More impassioned and virile.
AP: How appropriate.
LH: Maybe surly. God, a lot of these things are sullen and dissatisfied, temperamental. The elephant is so beautiful. The making of it had aspects of joy and pleasure as opposed to the camel which feels foreign. I'm sort of alienated from some of these images. I think of somebody who's suffered a kind of brain trauma and can't recognize things, not knowing what you're looking at and no longer able to transpose provisional meaning over it. Where as I could transpose a lot onto the Elephant or Dog or Beloved Fox.
AP: Tell me about the coffin:
LH: A strange piece. Not as close to me as Beloved Fox or the dog. I can only appreciate it out of the corner of my eye. It was a specific image from a dream, one of those things that just turned up in my net and I wanted to see what it was. I wanted a closer look.
AP: But why a coffin?
LH: I'm not even sure what it is. It's a lozenge shape. Though ultimately, I suppose it is. How can it be anything else?
AP: How can the winding cloth man be anything but a crucifix...
LH: The winding cloth man can be a lot of things. However, images definitely have their lineage in already fixed meanings. A leaf covered coffin... I guess that could refer to some life/death duality. I never wanted consciously to make such a lead footed allegorical comment about life and death. In fact I had to suppress that anything like that was there in order to make the piece.
AP: Yeah, I always rejected thinking about that piece that way.
LH: Thank God for that. Compared to other work this one seems more abstract despite the very literally represented leaves.
AP: And the leaves are always everywhere. They're adorning the body, they're on the walls. You've
been doing leaves for so many years now.
LH: They're similar to the diamond shapes and the snakes in past work. Any of this multiplicity of
things, this nervous energy of repeated forms. There's something about that that's at once a nervous
tic and a sense of grace and beauty. Yet this obsessive, labor intensive work is not easy in terms of
reward.
AP: Ah, but it's so moral, we work so hard.
LH: Yeah, that might be one of the instances where I am insisting on a task as opposed to working on the winding cloth man which is insisting on..
AP: The result?
LH: Insisting on a presence.
AP: The winding cloth man has gone through such interesting stages. When you first started on him you could almost see those Hellenistic drawing lines and now it's sort of melting into itself.
LH: Finally. Again, what we so often have talked about, trying to make things and having to learn along the way. The improbability of making a sculpture like that given my background at times has felt very insane. But it has to go through my brain. In an age of fabrication you can't possibly find support for that decision, or it's hard to anyway.
AP: When I'm working in public art people don't know what to do with me when I want to actually make something with my own two hands. It's just inconceivable.
LH: There's a range of responses to that. At one end there's awe of it while at the other there's awe of your stupidity. With technologies now, craft is hardly dead, there's all kinds of people in the movie industry who spit out figures and what not and are probably paid good wages for it. So the idea of doing it yourself, mediating the idea through your own perceptions and mistakes...
AP: People don't know what to do with that anymore. When I finished the sculptures of the heads people assumed...
LH: They were done by computer, right? That apparatus they have now that you can feed the program an image. They use it in car design too.
AP: But those heads aren't photo realism. I think almost the vocabulary for dealing with handmade objects is...
LH: You wonder if people know how to look at objects, there's so much a priori...
AP: Conceptual framework around...
LH: What a thing or image
is...
AP: That the specifics are completely gone.
LH: And to be able to look at one of your heads and think that you fed a photograph of yourself into a device that could three dimensionally replicate it is nuts because it's obvious that they're not realistic. They're specific..
AP: They mimic a kind of realism without being photo realism at all.
LH: They refer to the real figure. They're not direct casts of the human body. There's a very different feeling to those kinds of sculptures.
AP: That's what I'm talking about. We're both doing something very similar here when we're permitting the actual specifications of everyday life to go through our hands and brains and have it come out changed and that is to a large extent the content of the work. But that's not a content that people seem to know how to read very much, or want to.
LH: We have a strong purpose in our being emphatic. As in: no, this isn't a paper about, this isn't a notation about, this isn't a reference to...
AP: This isn't something I just tossed off...
LH: This is it.
AP: This was absolutely the most precise way I could possibly have made this.
LH: This isn't the definition of it, this is it, and that's what I mean by specificity. It's so much more than representation.