The word made image - collaboration of John Ashbery and painter Jane Hammond

Art in America, May, 1995 by Judith E. Stein

In June 1993, Jane Hammond phoned John Ashbery and asked if he would draft titles for a series of her paintings--in advance of their creation. A week later, he faxed her a list of 44 candidates. For an artist to begin the creative process with a title will seem to many to put the cart before the horse. But to Hammond, Ashbery's image-laden names became the vehicle that pulled her paintings into being. The first results of their collaboration were on view in two recent exhibitions. New York's Jose Freire Fine Art, Inc. exhibited seven of these canvases, and two others from the series were included in the solo show of Hammond's work organized by Sue Scott for the Orlando Museum of Art.

Hammond is a painter who enjoys delegating decisions that others prefer to keep under their own control. In 1988 she decided to create paintings derived solely from a private inventory of 276 images culled from different historical periods, high and low cultures, and the realms of science and art. She voluntarily imposed limitations on her freedom of choice, circumscribing the universe of visual possibilities. But within months, she began to dream in this vocabulary and to get ideas for new compositions entirely in the terms of her readymade repertoire.

Poetic juxtapositions abound in her canvases. The images derive from exotic and fanciful sources such as magic, puppetry, knot-tying diagrams, alchemy, erotica, palmistry and phrenology, and include commonplace items such as flowers, dancers, games, children's drawings, furniture, animals and the alphabet. When she assembled her image stock, Hammond was not aware of a 1970 poem in which Ashbery, referring to ut pictura poesis, a classical esthetic doctrine declaring "as is painting, so is poetry," seemed to have foretold her method. In "And Ut Pictura Poesis is her name," Ashbery had counseled an unnamed artist: "...Now,/About what to put in your poempainting:/ Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium./ Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,/ skyrockets are good--do they still exist?/ There are a lot of other things of the same quality/ As those I've mentioned. Now one must/ Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, /Dull-sounding ones."(1) Quite coincidentally, Hammond had incorporated many of Ashbery's prescriptions.

Language has always been important to Hammond, who was the editor of her high school literary magazine and studied poetry in college. When she was devising her system in the late '80s, she read villanelles, a verse form with regularly recurring lines. Each appearance has a fresh context which may offer new meanings. Similarly, in Hammond's recombinative pictorial matrix, an image is affected by its setting. She thinks of her stock as being like a deck of Tarot cards, which tells a different tale each time it's dealt.

The turn-of-the-century French novelist Raymond Roussel is one of Hammond's favorite authors, and his translator, Trevor Winkfield, is a friend of hers and of Ashbery's as well. When Ashbery delivered a 1989 Norton lecture on Roussel at Harvard, she flew from New York to Boston to hear him. In late 1990, in a short catalogue essay on Hammond's work commissioned by Sweden's Wetterling Gallery, Ashbery likened her resourcefulness to that of the castaway theatrical troupe in Roussel's Impressions of Africa.

The alphabet is a constituent of Hammond's visual world. She has previously used language as an aid for devising compositions. For example, in an untitled work from 1990, she made the found phrase "a prudent man shuns hyenas" her starting point. She teased anagrams out of it, then derived images from those words. But titles did not play a part in her invention: all her paintings executed before 1993 were untitled. For clarity's sake, they were often identified by combinations of numbers that correspond to the counting system she devised for her image stockpile.

The full roster of potential titles that Ashbery drafted for Hammond was printed in the catalogue that accompanied her show at Jose Freire.(2) As of December 1994 she had engaged 13 of them, reusing one four times and another twice. Ashbery's appellations resound with his surrealist wit and reflect his ear for colloquial speech. The provocative "Do Husbands Matter?" resembles a headline spied from a supermarket checkout lane. "Heavenly Days," "Kibosh," "Freezer Burn" and "The Peace Plan" are Ashbery's readymades, given a fresh start by the absence of context. By making slight alterations, he nudged cliches into novelty, as in "The Stocking Market," "Bread and Butter Machine" and "Forests of Fire." Some titles adopt the snappy boasts of advertisements, for example, "Prevents Furring" and "You Saw It First Here." This latter, like "Dumb Show" and "The Mush Stage," evokes aspects of sight and spectacle, salient issues for contemporary painting in general and Hammond's work in particular.

Hammond read Ashbery's list and set it aside, trusting that pictorial ideas would begin to associate themselves with each phrase. She likened the process of formulating these compositions to a student science project she once did, in which crystals slowly took shape along a string suspended in a clear solution.