While I wait for the new edition of Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas to drop this fall, I have been reading through some of her essays and zines. Today it was ‘Shit Happens,’ which first ran in Frieze in 2016.
While Sillman is primarily a painter, her essay, from its first line, announces broader intentions: “The first question confronting artists is, ‘What should I do’? And the next question is, ‘What would make it better’?” But rather than a straightforward answer, Sillman lingers on the very awkwardness produced by the searching and uncertainty that is art-making.
“That tension [between the ideal and the real] is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot, representation peeled away from realness. This ambivalent state is precisely the state of mind for making a painting …”
And what name does Sillman give to this way of working? Improvisation.
“Improvisation is about working between subject and object; the object is merely a place through which questions are addressed.”
Central to Sillman’s essay and the tension she writes about is the awkwardness and comedy inherent in having bodies, the embarrassment of the real. She says it better. Read the essay.
Sillman’s Untitled (lavender) from a recent show at Gladstone Gallery