"Interview with Allison Katz" by Frances Loeffler

With the desire to get to know an artist’s work comes the impulse to stick one’s nose in. The thought comes to me after spending a few hours snooping around Allison Katz’s studio, in part because noses are one of a number of motifs that recur in the artist’s paintings and sculptures, peering slyly from behind corners, forming elegant, outlined flourishes, or lining up in a row, a jostling herd of colourful protuberances.

Puns and word associations abound in Katz’s work. It is not that she includes words in her paintings per se (though she may), or that she draws from specific literary sources. Rather, her work mines the gaps between words and images, the verbal and visual, drawing on the arbitrary, sometimes humorous slippages that overturn the conventions of language and visual representation.

Our conversation took place between two meetings at the artist’s studio, and over number of emails, Skype and phone conversations, while Katz worked towards an exhibition of new work at Kunstverein Freiburg.

THE WHITE REVIEW — I’d like to start by talking about dialogue as a mode of communication. Can painting be a form of conversation? Or is it a monologue?

ALLISON KATZ — Painting is a conversation. I think of something I just read, a 1987 interview with Francesco Clemente, in which he says, ‘Art is the last oral tradition alive in the West; it is the only sort of oral tradition that is not lost.’ I completely agree. He was specifically referring to Alighiero Boetti, who exposed him to works and attitudes that he would never have had access to otherwise; but it was the conversational mode of transmission, his respect and love for this person, that allowed the exposures to transform him.

I’ve never believed in the purity of monologue, as in, self-contained expression. I’m preoccupied by the idea of ‘voice’ lately. Where it comes from, and how it’s a more apt qualifier for terms like sensibility, style, temper; because it implies dialogue, exchange and influence. I’m thinking of Virginia Woolf’s definition of poetry: ‘a voice answering a voice’.

I think I paint like I write, that is, I build around quotes, which is a conversation, in effect. It’s a way to bring the world in, as much as it is about getting an inner world out. Painting is for me one of the only actions where this interface exists.

Read full article at thewhitereview.org