Gretta Johnson:
I haven't been interviewed in a long time. I think I've been asked to be on two podcasts made by friends.
Tessa Granowski:
Which ones?
GJ:
My friend Michael Olivo, who had a gallery called Harpy in New Rutherford, New Jersey. And then Jennifer Sullivan!
TG:
It’s a Process!
GJ:
I kept being like, I'm not going to be in any podcast until I'm like, 80. Because I feel like at that point, I'll know everything there is to know about myself.
TG:
Well, that's when I want to be a painter, or when I'm 70, because I'll have seen enough of the world.
GJ:
But isn't that so much about how we are and the way we see? It's like an idea of mastery or something. And reading or being exposed to yourself when you're learning, as a person who is learning all the time or likes to learn, it can be so humbling, and it's hard to see ourselves like that. I think that has something to do more with our personalities than other people who are a little bit more cavalier. I do think that's more the way to be because no one holds anyone to their word, especially artists. I think everyone just wants to hear someone say something interesting.
TG:
Yes. It doesn't have to be correct.
That’s a whole thing in Texas storytelling… There was a book that I had in my last show called Tolbert's Texas, and he prefaces the book with being like, sure, these stories might all be real. Maybe they're not. But they're going to be good, I'll guarantee you that.
GJ:
That's the classic storytelling thing. Maybe there was and maybe there wasn't. And that's how the story starts.
TG:
And isn't that our perception of reality anyways? And memory does some of that trickery…
GJ:
Absolutely. My memory is very attuned to certain things in my past and then there are complete gaps in my childhood. Or the sequence of things, that gets all messed up. But I always want to defend the mind's nature of doing that. Some things feel more real than others. Also, there are multiple timelines going on at once. Dream life is real life, and waking life is real life, too. But they coexist, and they both inform each other.
Oh, I’m getting a call from Andy. He’s wanting to get tickets to One Battle After Another, I’m going to see it again.
TG:
I've actually brought that film up a lot more than I would have expected in conversation recently. I really respect how that film framed the way that people ultimately have a hard time making decisions outside of their own shadow selves and things they hate about themselves. When someone is in a position of power, it is probably more likely that they're making personal decisions that have a greater effect rather than making decisions for the greater good.
GJ:
Yeah. It has that libidinal honesty where everyone just wants to get laid. Being in a very charged situation, it makes people feel alive. I think that is the reason that people get involved in politics - because they want to be around other people. As misguided as all things can be, I think people need to gather and I think, aesthetically, there's a lot of choices that people make that are just silly. But that film is really silly, too, because there are passwords and people being fucking nerds and like, let me speak to your manager. It really is veiled in all of the modern weenie-ness and futility, where most people don't act out of a sense of real virtue, but just in trying to get their needs met in some way.
TG:
Yeah, well it's hard to have authority over yourself in any discernible, non-sticky way.
GJ:
You mean stickiness as in ideologies being sticky or…?
TG:
Just energetically. You know, a dining room table that hasn't been cleaned sort of stickiness. Something that has residue energetically in relationships. Like how you talked recently about how we're all beads on a chain of a necklace. If you're really your own bead and tapped into that, that means that you're not a sticky bead. You don't stick to the other beads on that thread.
GJ:
I just thought about that the other day, and it was an image that I got when I was having a psychedelic experience, when I was just trying to conjure an image of my mom, and for some reason, I couldn't. But I then thought about all the women in my family altogether at once. I was just like, wow. You feel like sometimes you're alone and you just spend so much time trying to make meaning out of your life and for yourself. But then you realize that you are just the next iteration of everyone who has come before you. That both can be very healing and can make you feel less alone. Like how you think you have gotten away from your family or your context sometimes, but it's always there.
TG:
Inescapable.
GJ:
Yeah. I think about that, too, with my own family and how much I've wanted to be autonomous. Being an artist is so much about being an individual and having your own thoughts present, synthesizing an image or bringing an object into the world that only you could have thought of. But then you realize that you're part of a whole history of image-making. Now, more than ever, too, with the way that I work, it's like I'm working on imagery for so many different things—for commercial purposes and painting. It's like I'm always looking at references. I'm always thinking about the best painting I've ever seen and wanting to recreate that or wanting to make the thing that I want to see. That thing that I want to see is coming both from my dream space and my experience. But then it's also an amalgamation of all the things you've seen before and being in conversation with that lineage.
It's a weird feeling that you get now when you travel, you're like, “This reminds me of this and that place.” We have so much knowledge. We have so much information, for better or worse.
TG:
I mean, even in the film, 3 Women, there is a recurring line where the different characters say, “Sure does look like Texas!”
That’s also just a natural way of how we situate ourselves within a newer environment.
GJ:
We try to make points of reference and connection and also looking for connection.
TG:
Which is so interesting when considered with making a work of art, because you're almost at the same time trying to introduce something that creates uncertainty or doesn't have a direct reference or answer. But one can only help but work from your own reference points. And sometimes better things happen maybe when you can find a release or let go of what you know or what you're thinking about. Once you move beyond the idea into something that's almost more bodily or a shared mind space.
GJ:
I feel like the best art experiences that I can think of are when something surprises you, whether it's seeing something in a new context that's not supposed to be there, just in the everyday, or coming across something in the world that you've seen in a piece of art and then making that new connection. Someone's done that for you. Maybe it's fusing dream life with real life in some way. I think people in the best of times, they recognize something, maybe even nonverbal in paintings. A painting is so many moments distilled into one moment.
TG:
Yeah. Paintings, we also were talking about this today, are something that, depending on the situation, change entirely. You can have someone there looking at it with you and in the way that they look at it and respond, it seems like it's almost a completely new thing, where I feel like that just doesn't happen as much necessarily with a photograph. I find paintings to be more shapeshifters in a way.
GJ:
I guess there's so many things to contend with. I feel like whenever I look at a painting in any place, I always get up really close to it, and I look at the sides of it first. I get fingerprints all over the side of my paintings.
I went to see the Susan Rothenberg show last weekend. It was really moving because it was a span of time, the work. I think some of it was her very early work because it was still horse paintings, which was before she left New York. When she moved to New Mexico, she had started moving on to these other life paintings and also other ideas. Just still dealing with the body, which I really liked. I love her compositions, which are so heroic in a way because they're pushing the edges of things. And they relate to the body without really depicting full bodies. They're so much about paint and so much about scale and perspective, but they're weird mental perspectives.
There's this one painting that has hand marks on it, where you can imagine her picking up the painting and putting it down again. There's no paint where her hands would have been. I just feel like that she is referencing the painting field, which is a mental field, and it's a physical field. It's really looking at her paintings as such a physical experience. You can feel the work. You can feel the muscle behind them. They're also absorbing with the color and the marks and the way that she renders figures to me is so satisfying because they're not super resolved. They're sketchy and loose and messy. Also disembodied a lot of the time.
I feel like I do continually go back to that work because there's something about body resolution that is something that is really interesting to me that is a negotiation of, say, I know how to draw… from my mind, I can paint a body in the round. Even being an animator, I think that gave me some ability to see things in the round, just in my head, so I can rotate a body in my head and paint it. But obviously, I'm not the best figurative painter, but I can do it convincingly enough in a way. But then I'm also not I'm more interested in dissolving it and bringing it back in and out of resolution. There’s some energy exchange happening when you look at a painting. When you encounter a painting, it's a flat surface, so there's only a plane to engage with. But what you're engaging with is an energy field. I think Susan Rothenberg's paintings are really good with that.
TG:
Yeah. I feel like, I mean, not that the goal in making art is any truth seeking, but in a way, revealing a deeper spiritual or inner truth is not done necessarily by trying to just put into direct words or direct images. I feel like it's only achieved by imbuing it with something that doesn't make sense as direct truth, and it becomes more truthful, which is how I have always seen Les Blank’s documentaries because he didn't even see himself as a documentarian… he was conveying these greater human truths and beauty through his films that are made from real people and real images and are edited together in a way where there is no definite narrative arc, and that's not necessarily what happens with an image that feels powerful. I think it does have to do a lot with intersection of physical and mental energies, which is intuition, perhaps.
GJ:
Definitely. I think, at least, I do relate to that, framing my own process in that way, being very intuitive and allowing something to come forward over the span of time of working on something. Also, I think a lot about symbols and archetypes. Even in astrology, I'm really interested in the symbolism that's been generated that's very, very old.
I think I'm really interested in language and imagery and the way those things evolve together and thinking about how these symbols that even apply to planets or zodiac signs, they've existed for so long that our evolution of language evolved along with those symbols. We keep referencing those things over and over again. They do impact the way that we think about the world because we love to put things into categories. We love to think about the qualities of a person or the quality of time or the quality of a season.
Those symbols help us to become who we are. I think that those things obviously play a huge role in painting and image-making. It's like we're all just trying to find new ways of both reinstating our values or our identities and then also subverting those things through imagery or surprising yourself, even by coming up with a new weird tension between those things. Putting two things together in a painting that have an interesting tension.
TG:
Was the painting that you made, the imaginal discs, that says June… is that one of the only text paintings you've ever done?
GJ:
Not exactly. I've been thinking about including text more. Ever since I've been making these note drawings from the classes that I've been taking.
And I do have a writing practice. It's mostly writing dreams and just taking notes on things I read and diary-style writing. And I'm always doing calligraphy in my work for the Grimm Ales beer labels. I started actually including lines in my paintings that looked like letters and words but just weren't legible. They looked like calligraphy cursive. I'm very influenced by diagrams, and I'm always looking at diagrammatic drawings and old graphic design and lettering. I also like illuminated manuscripts. I like Shaker Gift drawings. You can't read all the writing in them because I think they were done under states of religious ecstasy. Actually, there's only a brief period in which those were produced, and mostly by women in the community. A lot of them have prayers embedded in them or just the different values of their lives.
There's just so many cross-cultural ways of making text into drawings and making the text be the scaffolding of the drawing. Right.
TG:
Like in the way religious narratives in Renaissance paintings or something acted as scaffolding.
GJ:
Yeah. I mean, even the word “cartoon” is basically just like a shorthand drawing that was a study for a larger painting. I like that being the work itself. I like seeing work. I like seeing the underpainting. I like seeing the thoughts. That's why I like drawing so much, because I think drawing is the most direct path to what you're thinking about. It's very alive. I like doing these drawings while I'm taking classes or listening to lectures because it's just a listening. You're just letting these words wash over you and letting yourself reassociate.
TG:
What are some of these classes that you've taken that result in these drawings?
GJ:
They are year-long classes with this poet and writer, an astrologer named Emmalea Russo. They're really interesting labyrinth-style classes on Zoom about the history of astrology, or they can be structured by the month. There's a lot of talk about myth and books and films and art and poetry. They allow for associations to be made in real-time. There's a group of people who are in the class, and everyone will talk about their relationship to the concepts.
You get this full spectrum of associations. Then it's hard to actually make sense of everything. Astrology has so many different facets to it. It's actually like you look at a birth chart and it looks completely like undecipherable because there are so many points. They look like a wheel with twelve sections, like a pie. There are twelve houses, and each house has planets in it that relate to the moment you were born. That's the picture. It's basically a snapshot. Your birth chart is just a snapshot of the sky when you were born.
TG:
Does the class itself and the topics align with the planetary positions at that moment, or does it go on a different cycle?
GJ:
Sometimes. I think the first year I did it, we went month to month. It was just about the Zodiac sign in each month. But this one is about the origins of psychoanalysis and the origins of astrology and just the relationship between those two practices and how they inform each. She always comes back to planets, which are really interesting because the planets are tied to ancient history. It's a lot of Greek myth and a lot of world myth. It basically relates to the Gods and how far away from the Earth or from the sun where the planet is. And then you go to alchemy, and alchemy can function as a metaphor for the creative process and also relates to planets and their chemical makeup. So you can be completely awash in so many different symbols, so many different associations all at once.
It's completely crazy. But I like repetition of words. I like repetition of symbols in paintings. I like reflections. I like just seeing a through line of a person repeating themselves and just how that is able to reflect back to you who you are through painting, but through the actual practice of doing something over and over again. I think learning about the planets and nature and stories and myth, it all deepens your experience of time in the experience of being an artist now, which feels very like someone's here one day and then they're gone the next. A fleeting experience of being an artist when I think it feels good to connect to ancient imagery.
I think that's how I relate to a lot of the work in the show is these eternal symbols, these really primal acts. And there's drawing. Helen's drawings are very, very automatic feeling. They're very close to her id and then also anciently connected to symbols. She seems very attuned to all that, the dream world, symbolism.
TG:
The dragon. She must have been aware of ancient symbolism and the ouroboros.
GJ:
I'm sure she was. Well, who knows? But there's very clear relationships in the drawings that would seem to indicate that she was thinking about this… She was also a dancer, and she engaged in spectacle theater, parades. I feel like there's a long history of parades being part of religious ceremonies or pagan ceremonies, and all that seems to be connected in her drawings. Then also being a dancer. Who was she studying with again?
TG:
It was in a school in the style of Isadora Duncan.
*looking up Isadora Duncan on Wikipedia* “Breaking with convention, Duncan imagined she had traced dance to its roots as a sacred art.” I just got chills! “She developed from this notion a style of free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts, folk dances, social dances, nature, and natural forces.” How did I not look this up before? This is insane! “As well as an approach to the new American athleticism, which included skipping, running, jumping, leaping, and tossing.”
“She I believe dance was meant to encircle all that life had to offer joy and sadness. Duncan took inspiration from ancient Greece and combined it with a passion for freedom of movement.”
GJ:
That does make me think about the Pagan parade. When I lived in Chicago, I made props for Spectacle Theater. I guess it was a job, I didn't really get paid. But I used a jigsaw and cut out giant things, they were big instruments. Chicago had this Theater called Redmoon Theater, which has a history of parades kind of related to Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. But I would imagine that these things all coalesce in the same time.
The symbolism of modern dance does come from breaking things down to shapes and more direct interpretation, interpretive dancing, interpretive symbol, symbolic dancing. To music, too. That's very elemental and used in ritual and celebration.
TG:
And then Gail's work, too, seems like it comes from something maybe even more Ancient.
GJ:
Yeah. Storytelling through pictograms and actual fetish objects, which are the earliest primal representations of female figures.
TG:
The fertility object.
GJ:
I feel like everybody in the show grappled with woman-ness. I also feel like I am always grappling with that. Trying to find it, I think, femininity. I think it's something that is a forever quest. For me, personally. Even painting the female figure… I used to really enjoy it. Actually, my earlier work was erotic, like cartoons, but they're all graphic depictions of the body. I loved drawing big, hearty, very sensual female bodies.
TG:
Like Star Fruit
GJ:
Yeah, Star Fruit, or my first animation for RISD was very about connection and sensuality. Then I think through traumatic events in my life, they caused me to need to break everything apart, break images apart, even to work bigger. It was almost this weird literal thing that had to happen. I had to just break everything apart and expand it. And now it’s congealing again. It's an interesting process of growing, too. It's like you think you know who you are when you're young. You have an identity. You have a breakdown. You're trying them on. You have a breakdown. It's going to happen. If you keep making work through those things, you'll see how you’ll fall apart and come together again. I feel like I'm always in the process of trying to put everything back together again.
TG:
I mean, it's so unusual how much work it takes to find connection with our own bodies. So weird.
GJ:
Right. It seems like it should be the most natural thing in the world.
TG:
But maybe it would be if we grew up in a primitive state. I don't know. I don't know if language actually even helps us connect to our body.
GJ:
Yeah. I was just reading that book that we both have, Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anais Nin. At the time when she was writing, there was so much about how she was analyzed. She went to different analysis, four different analysts.
She was trying to figure out, I think, what it means to be a female artist. There are so many different male analysts who are of the mind of the male-female dichotomy in society and the role of a woman and woman's relationship to aggression and destruction and how there are some iterations of some theories that males can be destructive, and females are nurturing. But then there's other lines of thought that are more connected to primitive religions and symbols that the female relationship to aggression and destruction is very prevalent. There are so many different deities and female archetypes that are a destroying force.
TG:
And I think Carl Jung brings up the shapeshifting woman with a trickster archetype.
GJ:
Like Ishtar? That story of the underworld? That one is definitely the dark feminine. That one's the woman has to travel to the underworld to save her sister. But yeah, I think Jungian thought is much more comfortable with the male and female aspects within each person.
TG:
But it is funny that the anima he saw as the feminine side of a male creative force, right?
GJ:
Yes, right. Well, that was his interpretation that ultimately serves the male in society. Also, a female is the muse to the male. He did not single-handedly come up with these theories. Actually, there are some women who actually came up with the theories that are both attributed to Freud and Jung. There's actually one woman who shares my birthday. Her name is Sabina Spielrein. She came up with the “Death Drive” idea. Instead of the will to life, it's the will to death… That we actually have an unconscious instinct to always to die.
TG:
A counter force to the life tribe.
GJ:
I believe that. And that would be the cause of a lot of continual visiting of our own shadow selves and our connection to the darker aspects of ourselves. But she coined that term, and she also had affairs with both Freud and Jung. She slept with both of them.