1000 words: Paul Sietsema; Talks about Figure 3, 2008

ArtForum, March, 2008 by Ali Subotnick

WHILE DOING PRIMARY research for his most recent film, Empire, 2002, which took Clement Greenberg's library as its thematic starting point, the Los Angeles-based artist Paul Sietsema started to collect scholarly books steeped in the milieu of midcentury modernism. As a result, he soon found himself amassing a vast bank of images from various disciplines, but what particularly piqued his interest were the numerous pictures of cultural artifacts he discovered. Indeed, seeking after a time to organize this trove of material--and establish his own relationship to it--he privately began comparing himself to those Western explorers centuries ago who visited island cultures hitherto isolated from the outside world (and who inevitably altered those societies, as they transformed, for instance, utilitarian tools into objects of study). With this comparison in mind, Sietsema decided to remake various precolonial articles--a fishing net, a cape, coins--as they appeared in his image bank, specifically so that he could represent them on film. In so re-creating and recontextualizing these old forms, the artist sought to highlight the necessarily fragmented, or incomplete, nature of history as manifested in objects, as well as the ways in which cultures may be so embedded in objects that the objects obtain mythological stature. The final project, titled Figure 3, debuts this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Walking into Sietsema's studio in January, when he was preparing for the exhibition, was akin to entering an alternate reality where time moves more slowly, or a future made from the stuff of yesterday. Perhaps this quality was to be expected, since, as Sietsema admitted in conversation, Figure 3 began merely with the tentative conceit of an imaginary explorer who, operating in a timeless zone, amassed the items represented in the artist's film. (On a more theoretical note, he cited Alois Riegl's "The Modern Cult of Monuments," a 1903 essay that inspired him to think of "objects being reborn each time they are reperformed or remade," thus allowing for a perpetual "presentness.") Scattered around the space were newly made sculptures with a decaying, weathered patina, invoking both island civilizations and, seen in the context of the studio, a post-Minimalist aesthetic. Here the objects themselves (the results of a process that is clearly painstaking, tedious, and obsessive) become artifacts of the artist--evidence of a hands-on, mesmeric approach to making art.

FOR MY LAST MAJOR WORK, Empire, 2002, I made a film that basically offered a conception of modern art history using the objects in Clement Greenberg's apartment. I had come across a photograph of his place, taken in 1964, that I particularly liked: The room was filled with a mix of furniture, minor antiquities, and paintings of the period. In fact, the place seemed to perfectly display Greenberg's construction of himself as a white, quasi-academic intellectual. But to tell this story of art, I eventually turned to his library, imagining what books Greenberg might have actually had on his shelf, using them as a kind of armature for the project. In my research, I soon found that many of the texts coming out at that time revolved, as they looked at art from the Enlightenment through Cubism, around the "truth to materials" argument--which was, of course, a crucial underpinning for Greenberg's idea that a painting defines itself more fully by retrenching itself in its constituent parts.

So, from there, I took a familiar approach from avant-garde film, employing a simple idea and extending it formally as I investigated the modernist perspective on an artwork's relationship to its own structure. In addition to showing the postcard image of Greenberg's apartment, I started to cut across 1964, first constructing, and then filming, individual objects based on artworks that had been made that year--taking up in particular the organic forms that were then appearing in the work of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, and, in a utopian architectural vein, Frederick Kiesler. Privately, in fact, I was thinking of my own film as a kind of hard-edged sculpture, appropriating a number of avant-garde aesthetics steeped in different materials.

After finishing Empire, however, I found myself interested in a relationship that I felt the project had left unresolved: the relationship between the phenomenological experience of objects in space and that of objects on film. Perhaps because I hadn't been able to use the actual objects in Greenberg's living room, I wanted to look more closely at what it would mean to present a simple, discrete, three-dimensional object that would be experienced on film alone. I started thinking back to when I was first looking at Le Corbusier, some fifteen years ago, and understood why he would make these ramps running through a building's interior: You'd enter a room and cross it, say, and then you'd move up along a wall before the ramp would turn and you'd finally exit. Throughout this movement inside and outside, there would be these different viewpoints created, where you were intended to look out over the room. In the end, Le Corbusier was giving you these specific vantages within a kind of sculptural architecture--presenting not just the structure or form of the building but also an experience of that building. It's an approach in which the encounter is more orchestrated and where one's sense of the physical context is clearly heightened by the way you're led in: It was an early sort of virtuality. In a similar way, film, I began to think, adds another layer to an object and to our encounter with it. There is the object and then the representation of the object, and I would try to create a third category, where what you encounter is not simply either material or image but somehow both.