The Meaning of it All

This comes from Harriet Shore in conversation with Robert Berlind in this month’s Brooklyn Rail.

Dreaming of meaning
I wake to find the sky
Framed in a window pane.

—HS

Rail: There was a discussion recorded some place between Alex [Katz] and Paul Taylor, in which Alex said something about wanting to get rid of content and Paul Taylor said, “Yeah, I’m trying to get rid of form too.” (laughter)

Shorr: Well I really do think that it’s dumb, semantically dumb, as a way to put things: form and meaning. But I like the idea of meaning, because obviously things do have meaning, and they have meanings to you, and then they have other meanings to other people. And I had some very strange moments. I made two paintings that used these bricks, and one of them was painted in 2001 before September 11. It included bricks in water and a reflection of a statue. My friend Erica Kramer was in the studio, and I told her that after a while these paintings had come to mean ruined, in some way. And she said “Oh, this place Robert [Robert Kramer, the filmmaker who died in 2000] and I had in the country, it was a brick factory.” That kind of personal thing, and just the fact that people respond that way: I think that’s how paintings communicate. The meaning is… {Read More…}