'While you could say that language is Frances Stark’s primary medium, Frances herself is Stark’s primary subject matter. Taken individually, most of her works are self-portraits of some kind; put together, they fan out into full-blown autobio-graphy, featuring not just the central protagonist (in her various roles, professional, intellectual or domestic) but also a supporting cast of favourite authors, friends and collaborators, gallerists and curators, musicians, cats and kids. Invariably riddled with self-doubt and well-articulated anxiety, their cumulative effect is an oscillating image of what it means to be a practising artist (or, for that matter, a woman or person) today.
'Born in Newport Beach, California, in 1967, Stark studied at San Francisco State University before attending the Art Centre College of Design. She says she had been obsessed with language from an early age so it isn't surprising to find that many of her influences are literary and that she has published a series of collected writings. She wrote recently: "I am envious of those who can deliver nuggets in tightly wrapped packages. The economy of Emily Dickinson is a huge inspiration."
'Stark's practice – whether it is drawn, written, painted or filmed – is about the laborious process of making art, detailing its frustrations with a wry humour. It is possibly best summed up in the collage Still Life with IBM Cards and Violin (1999), a parody of a Picasso cubist collage, in which she sends up the limitations of being an artist, unable to compete visually with the emotional impact of music. This issue has also led her to use soundtracks from Throbbing Gristle to accompany home videos that are as banal as the rock band is outlandish.
'A see-sawing between conceptual inquiry into the nature of an art work and its production, and attention to the mass of details that constitute daily life, is at the heart of Stark’s practice and is well demonstrated in the show’s dense, a-chronological hang. Avoiding the easy elegance that a sparse and spacious installation of her largely white, often delicate, mostly paper-based works would offer, the artist has opted instead for the concentrated effect of many works, hung close together. The blank expanses of her earlier works begin, over time, to accommodate more text, imagery and pictorial elements until we reach recent collages such as Foyer Furnishing (2006), in which large Mylar and paper cut-outs form a two-dimensional interior with dresser, mirror and handbag. The role of language modulates from subject matter to means of representation; a favoured effect is to compose words or sentences vertically, stacking carbon-copied typed-out letters while repeating them horizontally, drawing lines from letters to form undulating landscapes or endless horizons while scrambling the viewer’s usual means of deciphering both text and image. Much peering, squinting and head-cocking are required to make out the tiny, faint, dislocated, rotated and repeated words in her works. In every case, however, the textual elements act like a thought bubble, as a cerebral way out of the two-dimensional picture plane.
'Stark's well-articulated personal anxiety encompasses George Orwell's statement that "each life viewed from the inside is a series of small defeats". In her quiet yet persistent inquiry into the human condition, she delivers, with devastating candour, the poignancy of human failure.' -- collaged
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Extras
One Question: Frances Stark
FS: CalArts, School of Art visiting artist lecture (excerpt)
In conversation: Frances Stark, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Jimmy Raskin
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Further
Frances Stark Website
Audio: 'Trapped in the VIP and/or In Mr. Martin’s Inoperable Cadillac'
FS @ Marc Foxx Gallery, LA
FS @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise, NYC
Frances Stark @ greengrassi, London
'On Frances Stark' @ Art in America
'Structures That Fit My Opening and Other Parts Considered in Relation to Their Whole'
'Frances Stark's Best Thing' @ T Magazine
'THE LETTER WRITER, FRANCES STARK'
'Frances Stark: Artist uses her personal life'
Video: 'Frances Stark in Her Studio'
Buy books by and about Frances Stark
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Interview
from Blouin
Banal household tasks and high-minded ruminations are twinned in your work. To this end, what did you do today? And also, what are you reading?
Today I avoided the studio, the excuse being that some long-overdue personal paperwork that is overflowing out of my handbag needed attention. I have recently dipped into In Praise of Folly by Erasmus; an old Richard Hamilton catalogue; also On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf; and an interview with Malcolm McLaren. And I’ve been voraciously reading about all things related to the upcoming US presidential election. It’s an ugly addiction at this point. But I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a recent eBay purchase, A Happy Death, by Albert Camus. I am hoping this book that I loved 25 years ago (gasp) will be just the thing to wean me off the politics.
You once wrote about someone who, when he asked Dorothy Parker if he could see her manuscript, was presented with a box containing a pile of unanswered letters and unpaid bills. In the collages that present the detritus of your daily life, how do you decide what goes in and what stays out?
I’ve used mostly studio and art-related promotional printed matter that I receive in the mail. My use of printed matter that comes through my mailbox isn’t interesting because it’s mine, but because there are a lot of other people who receive that same stuff. It ends up being just material, like paint.
You show your work in galleries as well as publish books. Can you talk about how preparing for each is different?
I haven’t published that many books, but I am often shocked at how increasingly intuitive the process is for making work for exhibitions, and that seems to also be the case for the books. Only writing is just very, very different in the sense that I can’t hire an assistant to help me move or glue down some unwieldy scrap.
You’ve quoted Thomas Bernhard’s novel Old Masters, in which the main character, Reger, is chastised for being neither a philosopher nor an author but accused of having “sneaked” into both. What do you think one gains by straddling two disciplines, as you do with art and writing?
Because I am a complete pessimist, it’s hard for me to admit I do gain anything besides anxiety and perpetual self-doubt. At the same time, I am not so naive to acknowledge that without my writing, my artwork might not have an audience, and vice versa. I see my own straddling as very specific to the support structures of the artworld and not nearly as impressive or significant as the kind of cross-discipline straddling (and waffling) that occurs in Bernhard’s characters. But I identify with the process of deferral at play in these characters who are never able to complete that pure text on music, or philosophy, or whatever, and this is not about a kind of interdisciplinary utopia, but psychological despair and human failure. In fact, that Dorothy Parker reference above is a perfect metaphor for my own straddling technique.
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Show
Videos
My Best Thing, 2011
Frances Stark transcribes Gaga's 'Telephone', 2010
Nothing is enough, 2012
Writings
'Notes Towards the Eroticism of Pedagogy'
'Always the Same, Always Different'
'At the Rim of the Fucking Paradigm'
'A Craft Too Small'
'I’m taking this opportunity to feel some holes in addition to filling them: On Raymond Pettibon'
'The Architect & the Housewife'
'Professional Me'
'Knowledge Evanescent'
'Pull Quotable'
Drawings, paintings, collage, sculpture
A woman and a peacock, 2006
The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2004
The old in and out, 2002
Underliner, 2002
Understater, 2002
The Golden Auditors, 2004
Prefiguration, or something to happen with this eventually, 2010
Bird and Bricks, 2009
By way of digression, 2007
Foyer Furnishing, 2006
Get on the fucking block and fuck, 2005
Image Proof, 2002
In and in, 2005
Phone, 2011
Poinsetta Tree, 2004
The New Vision, 2009
Underdeveloped Development, 2008
Who's on the other side, 2006
Wisdom, Stupidity, Ugliness, 2008
*
p.s. Hey. ** Wolf, Hey. Cool, flashback. Speaking of, I had my first deja vu in years yesterday. I forgot how weird that feels. Anyway, you, chuffed in London! I knew it. Nothing is ever fully a fuck up, pal. Or else fuck ups are as rich a source of wisdom as anything or something. Wow, profound, ha ha. Mm, the Buches might be a little less wild in form this year. I sort of felt that, but I think the fancy is still happening maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I think the Marcolini is rising to the top. But it's definitely a matter of how it looks in person, and I guess what it's made of. Gonna go peruse. Fully and utterly enjoy London while it's still fresh and replete with possibilities galore in theory! And welcome sort of home! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! I saved my macaron trip for today. It was too rainy. I guess they're slightly less expensive here maybe. I need to use my currency converter. I do like Tennessee Williams, yes, although I haven't read him in ages for no good reason. I'm not as into his fiction as his plays, but I guess that's the general thought. Ed White is good at directing one to interesting writers, for the most part. He does like some pretty bourgeois stuff sometimes, though. Yes, the 'TtO' post will be appearing here tomorrow! It's a beautiful thing, no worries, and thank you again so much! ** Billy Lloyd, Oh, right, of course, it's making the CDs look cool. I spaced out on that part. I agree about the physicality of the zine, yeah. And physical zines seem to making kind of a comeback. So, I guess you could do that thing where buying the eMusic entitles you to a zine in the mail? It's too bad that the technology that allows there to be playable music files embedded in greeting cards, i.e. so that when you open them they play music or say 'happy birthday' aloud or whatever, isn't better, unless it is. I haven't opened a greeting card in years. It would be cool to have a zine whose pages double as, like, stereo speakers or something. I don't know. I'm just mentally riffing. Yeah, the fetishes on those slave/master sites can get pretty unrealistic. That's why it has to be mostly just guys parrying their fantasies back and forth. Like it's extremely common for slaves to want to disappear from the world forever and live isolated in some master's basement, which, you know, would, if it actually happened, lead to all kinds of missing person reports filed by family and friends and cops searching and stuff, not to mention how living blindfolded in chains in some guy's basement would be way, way boring after even a day or two. Lust sure has an interesting effect on the imagination. A Buche eating video? Hm, I haven't done that before. Maybe if I can figure out how to upload iPhone videos onto the net/blog. I'm much more analog about the internet than I probably appear. I'll try. Is it okay to say that it's nice that the blog obsesses you? Is that too selfish of me? Maybe. Is it cold and dreary where you are as it is here? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. I love Book Soup, but sparse attendance is a real problem there in general, I think because 7 pm is an intimidating time to think about getting there through all the traffic around and leading up that place. I'm glad and completely not surprised that those lucky ones in attendance enjoyed themselves. And yay about the brisk sakes, natch! ** Pisy caca, That's so weird about Blogger forcing you to split your name in half. Blogger is getting weirder and weirder, I must say. Middle to late month for the buche eating slideshow, I think. Yes, Yury's still working at the salon, but, of course, he's hoping his fashion line is enough of a success that he can quit. Me too, obviously, for all kinds of reasons, one of them being that he wouldn't be tied down to Paris, assuming he's granted French citizenship and could finally enter the US for even long lengths. I know that name Al Filreis. I don't remember from where, though. I'll google him. There's so, so, so much better American poetry than that produced by the Beats. But I'm not a big fan of the Beats. The New York School, see, now you're talking! The New York School was the Alt Lit of its time. I hope your class went super well. Love, me. ** Steevee, Ha, yes, at least 'Lincoln' didn't win, definitely. Hugs about the therapist transference stress. Obviously, just try not to get too stressed before you actually talk to her and find out what the possibilities are, if you can. ** Grant Scicluna, Hi, Grant. I will watch that Haneke. I think it's probably watchable on mubi. I'll go check. Oh, well, of course I'm very, very happy that you like 'Au Hazard Balthazar' so much, Bresson being my ultimate god and all. Maybe you found it, but Bresson's book 'Notes on Cinematography' is a total revelation, or it was for me. His notion of 'acting' and about how emotion should be conveyed was the most important influence on my work of anything ever. Very wise, and, yeah, absolutely true what you say about 'finding a way to make the emotion take place outside of yourself'. You do that just wonderfully in 'The Wilding'. I think that's a big reason why I, who am rarely actually physically moved by films, was moved by yours. Thank you for your belief in me about this George book. I'm trying very hard, but I don't know yet. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Oh, the three punk albums thing, right. Interesting picks, of course. If I was going to just do a top of my head three, which I guess I will since I didn't dwell on the question as I should have, uh ... 'Entertainment!" (GoF), 'Chairs Missing' (Wire), and, uh, boring choice, I guess, but 'Bollocks' (Pistols). I think my favorite punk album ever, and an album that would be in the running for the greatest rock album of all time, in my opinion, is the first Ramones album, but that was '76. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Nice picks. Yeah, as soon as I saw yours, I started questioning my three. Way too many to edit down to three. Btw, your email was a wonderful big boost to wake up to this morning, man! Thanks for the good thoughts re: my novel. Well, yes, Malick, and 'ToL' in particular, is a big instructor re: that tone/style problem. Ozu, Bresson. The novel is very dialogue heavy and talky, at least in this early draft, so I'm thinking a lot about Rohmer in that regard. I've written a lot of things/fiction/poems that have been elegies to George, whether directly by name or not, but they overly bury him in my emotional ruminating, for better or worse, and I want to cut through that overlay somehow. Not sure I can do it, though. Gotta try, though. ** Paul Curran, Yes, there was a label-mate of yours in there! Wow, that novel idea you have is pretty amazing and fascinating. Wow. It kind of made my mouth water, actually. You have something coming out in Cityscapes? Cityscapes is a really terrific new project. I've been really poring over it. That's fantastic! That's a very, very interesting mag/site. Heads up, of course, when it appears, okay? ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. I don't anticipate George's brother and I becoming friends again. I'm imagining he would allow me one conversation/ interview at best, but you never know, I guess. Thanks much about 'Period' and 'TMS', but, unfortunately, whatever skills I developed to make those books are no help whatsoever with this one. I don't know. I just have to try. But thank you. Interesting, I see, about how your thing is progressing. Yeah, that's quite intriguing, and I think I do understand about the duality you're going for. Thinking about the possible advance while working on a book must be really confusing. I've never done that. But then the nature of what I do makes a big advance out of the question. I think I probably told you that Grove Press wanted to pay me a bunch of money for 'Try', but I refused that and made them pay me less because I didn't want the novel to lose them a lot of money and thereby harm my relationship with them, and not just with them but with publishers in general 'cos publishers look into stuff like that when they're considering whether to buy a book by a known writer, and there are many writers out there who took big advances for books that didn't do that well and had their publishing trajectories really fucked up by that. Not to scare you, though, ha ha. Also, I knew 'Try' wouldn't be a big commercial hit. It's just kind of weird that Grove didn't know that too, I guess. Re: 'God Jr.', I decided while writing the novel that it would be better if I didn't head too far off in the direction of the father's obsession. It just became clear for whatever reason, so I just discarded the plans very easily, I guess. This weekend? Nothing in particular other than working, I don't think. So I think a Skype confab would be cool ** 5STRINGS, You're a country boy at heart, eh? See, I don't know if I would have guessed that. I guess I see you as a kind of 'all things to all situations' kind of guy. Yeah, Paris is the big French shebang. It's NYC/LA/SF/DC, etc. rolled into one. I mean there's Marseilles. People want to move there sometimes. Not really to Lyon. Lyon is kind of in between small and big. Lyon is kind of pleasant. I wouldn't want to live there. I have to give a lecture there in a week and a half. That's it of the TV goods? I usually just turn on/leave on SyFy in LA, but I like that kind of crap. What about 'Hoarders'? I liked 'Hoarders' when I saw it. Butor's kind of a weirdo, I guess, and kind of really not a weirdo too. Or he's sort of one of the least weird of the Nouveau Roman guys. But he's great, though. I don't know. ** Misanthrope, Curses on your car. Nice that you get to do the NYC Xmas thing again. You're always inspired, you just don't know it. I think if you know you're inspired, you're not inspired? I think maybe you only know that afterwards? I don't know. ** Bill P. in Chicago, Hi, Bill! Yes, I understand completely, I think, about the offense and fear. My bones felt your words. Oh, actually, our Steevee is the other Steve Erickson. There's the novelist and the critic, and I'm sure they're always getting mistaken for one another, which must be odd. People still sometimes think I'm the Dennis Cooper who wrote and sometimes directed TV shows like 'Miami Vice' and 'Chicago Hope'. Glad you liked the Mirov. It's a wonderful book, yes. A very fine morning to you! ** Pilgarlic, Great food made you sick? Sorry, man. Well, rich not great food, is what you said. Different, presumably. Yikes, about your tremulous state at the show. Yes, I think it would quite freak me out if Beryl swallowed a mouse whole in front of me. Jesus. Talented creature, that creature. That I will fully admit. What a character. I hope I get to met him someday in a context without cute little, catchable creatures in the vicinity. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! Yes, I woke up to an email from Luke, and I will hit him back as soon as I launch this thing. It's real good that he got the foreign data plan, as you know. Even that can make the difference a great trip and one where you're rudderless and spooked. I've heard of 'Fun House', yes, but I don't know much about it. I'll peek at it, at least. Or peek at some scanned pages online or something. Awesome that you get to be at Art Basel and see all your artist comrade dudes. Hug Scott for me. Love love love right back at 'ya. I'll do my best to see that Luke has a good time. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, the Kremlin is like whatever the opposite would be of what they offered the Pavlov dog for Yury. You and length, man, ha ha. Someone ought to write their Phd thesis on 'Bill and the epiphany of concision'. Not a bad band name either. Well, you could vote for 'Singles Going Steady'. Is that too easy? Top of the morning to you! ** Okay. Today my galerie shows off the doings of one of my very fave artists, and, lucky for me, an old pal and comrade, Frances Stark. Dig it. See you tomorrow.