Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe chats with David Shapiro in a 1987 Bomb Magazine interview

DS I guess the usual question asked of you, and we should hear your answer again, is why you intransigently keep to the idea of “good painting,” in an era of bad manners, Warholism, and absurdism. Since you have praised Smithson and Joel Shapiro, you are not dogmatically “about” abstract painting, but your response to abstraction is perhaps the C major of your work, or how would you deal with this topic?

JG-R I am of course pleased that you should ask me this question although at the same time I must say you’ve put it in a form which seems to me to be a little odd. I mean I make abstract paintings so my work is at that level not “about” abstract painting at all, it is abstract painting. As to my critical work, I hope I have by now made it reasonably clear that I don’t write about things from a point of view which, intentionally at least, seeks to valorize or privilege other things. I think I am mostly interested in thought, and seek to treat it properly with regards to its context and address wherever I might encounter it in an interesting form. As to abstraction, the questions which interest me are those having to do with the space of painting. Space as an invisibility made visible. That seems to me to be the province of abstract painting and, in my case, for the possibility of articulating relationships of non-relationship. I am interested in complexity, and it seems to me that abstract painting is an art in which one can have complexity as opposed to invoking it. {Read More…}