A Studio Visit With Jillian Conrad

HOUSTON — Donald Judd, as a university student of artwork record and philosophy at Columbia College, did not contact himself a sculptor. He favored to say he was a maker of precise objects. An innovator and inadvertent trendsetter, he utilised prefabricated components to produce box-like sorts produced by some others, offering increase to what has develop into commonplace: outsourcing. Richard Serra’s signature products are lead and Cor-Ten steel he is regarded for exploiting the latter’s behavioral qualities to impose his architectural sculptures in a landscape. Carl Andre has mentioned he preferred his pared-down operate “close to zero.” 

Judd admired Lee Bontecou, who worked devoid of assistants. In 1965, he wrote that Bontecou’s artwork, neither portray nor sculpture, “asserts its personal existence, type and ability. It becomes an object in its have appropriate.” Is that sculpture’s objective? And what might that imply? With what artwork historic reference factors could possibly a contemporary sculptor engage? Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Julio González, Louise Bourgeois, or David Hammons the handmade, fabricated, or discovered? These divisions look much too neat, as well intended for a textbook, especially as all of these artists produced signature operates. Is a signature type a essential hallmark of sculpture and the “specific item,” or has it turn out to be a limitation? What are the other terms other than “specific objects” that need to be thought of?

My latest studio take a look at with Jillian Conrad prompted these inquiries. Sculptors from Jeff Koons to Nari Ward to Sarah Sze can be observed as entangled with a certain lineage, even a hybrid 1. This feeling of an artwork historical relationship is not so obvious with Conrad’s divergent bodies of perform and just one-off pieces, her integration of points she’s made with detritus and points identified in character. Opposite to lots of of her contemporaries, she has established a number of just one-off items, these as “a adhere or a sleep” (2020) and “Rootball” (2022), whose electrical power would come to be diluted if a lot more than one particular perform in this vein existed.

Also opposite to several modern sculptors — who appear to be afflicted with what I phone the “Marfa Syndrome,” a wish for permanence — is Conrad’s solution to the pressure concerning material kind and time passing. Philosophically speaking, she is additional aligned with Heraclitus, who considered that every thing is frequently switching, than with Plato, who thought in the existence of best types. What does it imply to reject the celebrated versions of timelessness we come across in museums and remote controls destinations — these types of as the island of Videy in Iceland, the place Serra erected “Áfangar” (Standing Stones, 1990), a site-certain installation of 9 pairs of basalt columns achieving up to 13 feet tall that will outlast us all? What does it imply to subvert this aesthetic illustration of “empire thinking”?

In is effective like Serra’s, character is not element of the equation, apart from as a place to occupy and even subjugate. Lots of familiar aesthetic guideposts appeared mainly irrelevant when I started considering about Conrad’s perform, which was each unsettling and reassuring — a actual and rare satisfaction. It created me realize that I was on the lookout at factors that had been as opposed to other certain objects in the expanded subject of sculpture. 

What arrives right after particular objects? One particular desires to imagine about Judd’s unique use of the time period “object” because it would seem to be about outsourcing and utilizing manufactured products. In its place of objects, what about “things”? Jillian Conrad is a maker of distinct things that underscore in expansive ways the particulars of their id. 

Conrad’s certain factor “a adhere or a sleep” is ostensibly a 21-foot-prolonged sculpture composed of branches of pomegranate wood, hackberry, crepe myrtle, and oak, joined to type a solitary linear form, which is suspended from the ceiling by brass rings hooked up to nylon. She has used diverse pigments, together with blue and yellow, in a couple discrete places. 

I first noticed an picture of “a stick or a sleep” on the online soon following Conrad and I achieved, and we started corresponding about the Museum of Mummies in Guanajuato, Mexico the Paracelsian occultist Robert Fludd the connection among art and magic (Conrad has taught lessons on it at the University of Houston) An Stock of Losses and other writings by Judith Schalansky César Aira’s novels Robert Creeley’s poetry and Thomas Nozkowski’s artwork. Much more importantly, I was perplexed by what I saw, which produced me preserve looking. 

All of our exchanges linked to Conrad’s artwork, but I just can’t say how precisely, especially due to the fact I do not want to be reductive or literal. I know that she analyzed philosophy, the history of math, and Ancient Greek at St. John’s Higher education in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and she originally desired to be an architect. Immediately after faculty, she investigated the architecture of intentional communities all over the entire world, traveling broadly. In her mid-20s, she edited Eco-Villages & Sustainable Communities: Designs for 21st Century Dwelling (1996), revealed by the Findhorn Foundation, which, according to its site, is a “Community […] guided by three simple techniques: Internal Listening, Co-generation with the intelligence of mother nature, and Work as appreciate in motion.” When she was around 30 she entered graduate college to go after her MFA. 

A disturbance is embedded in the expertise of observing “a stick or a rest.” The tree department that Conrad has suspended are unable to probably be 21 ft long. A branch of that size and circumference could not assist its individual pounds. Only by going for walks about the get the job done are its subtly distinct and distinctive sections evident. From a distance it looks like a solitary department that in some way grew to be extra than 20 ft. 

At some issue, Conrad questioned me: “Did you know that the phrase ‘tree branch’ refers to the dwelling section of a tree, although ‘stick’ refers to a department that has dropped to the ground?” What does it necessarily mean to acquire fallen branches from unique forms of trees, join them jointly, and suspend the result in the air? By employing joinery to connect the sections, she attracts a line in house. Suspended in the air, its shadow becomes an additional line.

Paul Klee famously stated, “A drawing is only a line going for a stroll.” One particular could also assume of a drawing as the history of a fluid line transferring across a flat floor. From a distance, a group of Conrad’s is effective on paper appear like drawings created with very straight strains, but that is not the scenario. Begun in 2014, and now consisting of 4 series (a few of which are ongoing), she takes advantage of pencil lead, glue, and paper to build what seems to be a drawing, but is technically a pretty shallow sculptural relief. 

Richard Serra said, “Drawing is a verb.” In his “Verb List” (1967), he commenced with these directives: “to roll, to crease, to fold, to shop […].” I was reminded of Serra’s checklist when Conrad wrote to me about the pencil direct drawings:

Setting up, erecting, developing. These are verbs I’m wondering by way of all the time in my sculptures and will work on paper. […] I believe of these pencil direct items as quite slender sculptures, hardly still resolutely dimensional.

Serra folded, creased, crumpled, and twisted sheets of lead. It is a pliable product. Conrad does anything various: she accepts the rigidity of the pencil guide and utilizes it to make “very slender sculptures.” The inspirations appear from a large selection of sources, starting with her desire in architecture. In the sequence Sites and Settlements (2014-16), are we hunting at an aerial perspective of an archaeological website or a portion of an architectural facade? Isn’t Conrad’s perform ecologically minded in the sense that she is performing with the offered, relatively than hoping to manipulate it into a thing monumental and long term? What does she attain in the dance she initiates amongst the rigid linearity of the pencil qualified prospects and the kinds and textures of the drawing? 

As Conrad wrote to me, the performs in her series Diamonds (2019-ongoing) “were inspired by mountains and streets on the Navajo reservation around Farmington, New Mexico, in which I was born. They also remind me of Navajo sand paintings I grew up with.” Once more, Conrad is disengaging from permanence and the imposition of one’s will, as taken up by sculptors from Michelangelo to Serra, and all that this record indicates. 

Produced of a rootball, brass rods, string, putty, and bread, “Rootball” (2022) appears to right announce that disengagement. Conrad did not obtain or fabricate the rootball she observed it and additional the brass rods, putty, and bread, which altered the context, but not the detail alone. 

In her work, likelihood and decision coexist. Is the rootball a pedestal and the rods that branch out of it the sculpture? If so, why is the piece lying on its side? The configuration of rods reminds me of an previous tv antenna. The putty seen at the joints underscores the existence of the artist’s hand. Is “Rootball” a receiver translating what it picks up from the cosmos? Is its resistance to common groups element of its that means? With this this one particular-off piece, it appears to be to me that Conrad is hoping to develop our comprehension of sculpture.