Grand allusion: James Meyer talks with Anne Truitt - Interview

ArtForum, May, 2002 by James Meyer

ANNE TRUITT: The question implies that I did it on purpose, which is not true. What happened is that I began to see how I could make exactly what I wanted to make in a new way. It was a complete volte-face from my previous work. At the time I was making life-size figures of steel pipes with chicken wire and plastic and cloth. They were gothic figures and sort of bestial; I was also making casts of clay heads in very dark, colored cement, very ugly and very primitive. They had nothing to do with art in a way; they had to do with self-expression. In November 1961 I began to make the things I am making now.

JM: It all began with First, that modest little sculpture in the Baltimore Museum that resembles, but isn't, a white picket fence.

AT: It went in a rather literal progression. I did First, which is a perfectly straight picket fence that I put together myself. And then I did Southern Elegy, which is a perfectly straight tombstone structure, and then Two, and made a jump: I realized that changes in color induced, or implied, changes in shape. That though color and structure retained individuality, they could join forces rather as independent melodies can combine into a harmonic whole. And that when I combined them in a particular way, they had a particular content--particular to me, that is, a meaning that was important to me. Once it had occurred to me that I could use color metaphorically for content, I realized that I could go ahead with new freedom. What I was doing dawned on me as the works got bigger: strange-looking objects that just stood there in the studio for almost a year, where no one came but me.

JM: Why were you dissatisfied with the figurative work?

AT: It was nowhere near broad or wide or deep or open enough. With abstraction you can go as far as you can go. But with the figure you are stuck because you're dealing with actuality.

JM: What was it about these simple shapes and fields of color that was going to be the language of your work?

AT: I'm sorry, I just don't think that way. It's as if you're asking me to put the cart in front of the horse when I have neither horse nor cart. I just thought, I must make these things.

JM: But why this form and that color to express a particular content?

AT: I never thought about it. The objects came in with their intrinsic subject matter--like baseballs thrown on a curve. I don't know how to put it into words.

JM: Well, I'm suggesting the forms you used weren't arbitrary. Your early work is mostly large, bulky shapes.

AT: I think you'd have to say that what I've been about is being alone in the world, looking around at it, and trying to absorb it, at first with extremely nearsighted eyes. I didn't see a damn thing until I was in fifth grade. Nobody knew I couldn't see. So when you talk about the big things that I made, I think what it may have been is this person going around through the world, either on her legs or on her bicycle, in a place confettied by large, anonymous structures--just big blocks of white or gray. I couldn't see anything except these big blocks. And I had to go on smell and sound.