In a world where the lines between image and reality, between perception and truth, are increasingly blurred, understanding reality feels more complex than ever.For centuries, artists and thinkers have pursued this question.
How can we represent the world in ways that get people to think and to feel?Today, we'll explore the idea of perception and truth. A theme that challenges us to examine the ways in which artists reflect and reveal society.
How do artists move their audiences to perceive the world and to experience truth?How do they mold how we think and how we feel through the paintings, the music, even the clothing they make?Is a common shared truth even attainable?
These are some of the questions we will encounter at the Edge of Reason.
A limited series podcast produced by Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio, in partnership with Hauser & Wirth, a home to visionary modern and contemporary artists.
This season, we explore the line where left brain meets right brain, where logic and reason end and creativity begins, and how personal and universally resonant themes, like perception and truth, connect art with the human experience.
Joining us on this episode are two visionary artists who embody this exploration.A pioneer in conceptual art, Charles Gaines uses systems and algorithms to challenge how we perceive reality.
Grace Wells Bonner, an acclaimed fashion designer and visual artist, blends Afro-Atlantic aesthetics with European tailoring traditions, crafting garments that tell deeper stories about identity, race, and culture.
Together they offer profound insights into how art can bridge the gap between perception and truth, leading us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
At 80 years old, Charles Gaines has had a long, storied, and multi-hyphenate career.
He has made paintings of palm trees, the faces of multiracial people, and other objects that layer images upon images upon grids as a way of showing us how we make order of points of data.But he is also an accomplished composer and drummer.
His work challenges us to think about how we individually and collectively create truth and beauty. Charles, welcome to Edge of Reason.Thank you for having me.
I wanted to start with a question, actually, about growing up in the 1950s in the black neighborhoods of Newark.You excelled at art and at music, but some of your teachers underestimated you.
And I'm wondering, how did this shape the artist you became and the way that you chose to make your art?
I was born in Charleston, South Carolina and moved to New York when I was five years old with my family.And we moved into a neighborhood that was almost all black, but it was the neighborhood in transition.
And there was a high school called Arts High School that you can say it was the first high school dedicated to music and art.
I got a really good education, but I had this feeling of being overlooked, which I understood later to be a general feeling that Black people have in an area or a neighborhood that they aren't dominant.
And one of the things that was with me from a very young age is a certain curiosity about the way things come to be. a certain interest in the values and meanings of the social and cultural situation around me.
Obviously, the most important of those questions was, why am I black and why is there racism?Why are white people privileged and black people aren't?And I think that they, reflecting back on the past, that got me to
to believe that my general interest in the critical assessment, the social political assessment about my environment was something that came out of that experience of first Jim Crow laws in the South and then the kind of de facto segregation that happened in the North.
and I read what those things meant and it didn't make sense to me.I thought it was completely unjust and unfair and I wondered about how those things got put into place.
I want to come back and ask you a lot more questions about how that drove you into conceptual art as opposed to other types of forms that your work might have taken.But let's bring in our guest right now, Grace Wales Bonner.
As one of the most exciting young designers in the world, Grace makes some of the most beautiful and desired clothes and fashion, which reveal an attention not just to detail and fit, but also to the storied history of Black art and art making.
The details are often subtle.A monogram here, a stitching there, a detail from a Kerry James Marshall painting, or an image by Saint-Lazare, or an inspiration from a poem by Ben Okri.Grace, welcome to Edge of Reason.
Thank you so much for having me.It's a pleasure.
Grace, I'm wondering, you grew up in London in the 2010s, a much different time, a much different place.
And as you're listening to Charles' story, I'm wondering how you reflect upon your own personal experiences and how that shaped your particular approach to making fashion and art that live in the world.
Yeah, it was interesting hearing Charles and there was definitely things that I could relate to in what he was saying in terms of certain questions around identity and also thinking about like systems and structures that can support or hinder expression.
So I grew up in London and I think it's quite a multicultural city.So I think that informs the way I think about
cultural and cultural expression and kind of questioning also having a white mother and a black Jamaican father I guess I was thinking a lot about representation as well but I think at a formative age then I started to kind of think about for example being black doesn't need to be fixed in any way like I think my work has been very guided by showing a sense of expansiveness and
possibility.And I think I've also been gravitated towards expressions of beauty and elegance, which I guess I've probably grown up around.
When I think about representation, a lot of what I think I do now is about connecting with history, connecting with a living archive and revealing threads that have always been there, really.
My work very much interacts with the past, but it's looking to create a future reality.And I think that something that guides me is this exploration of beauty.And if I think about what I did growing up, I was seeking images.
I was seeking images to confirm a sense of identity and belonging.Even if I was sometimes dislocated, say, from family in Jamaica, I think I use images as a way to connect to people.
Now, the two of you recently connected to collaborate on Grace's Spirit Movers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.And yet, you all, the two of you, have never really had a chance to sit down and talk.
So it's an honor for us to be able to be here and listen in on this conversation. We began talking a little bit about how perceptions have shaped your identity, and how in turn, these have shaped your approaches to making art.
And I'm wondering what you think of these words, perception and truth, and how they show up in your work.
Charles?When I started teaching, university teaching, I developed a class that didn't use those two terms but actually speculated on those two ideas and how they related together.The idea that truth is a fiction.
But I recognized the problem with resolving those two concepts appeared in my work almost immediately, because when I was in graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology as a painting major, I was immediately unhappy with the strategies and methods of making paintings.
And I queried that.It turns out that that was the first time this question of truth and meaning appeared for me in quite a meaningful way, because I saw that the idea of being a painter was a strategy and a methodology.
To everybody around me, it was a type of existence. It was a type of being in the world.It's not something that is strategic or political or structural, but something that actually is an identity as a painter.
And I thought that if I made paintings based upon the kinds of assumptions they had about what a painting is and how to make one, I won't be happy as a painter. because I didn't assume or absorb those assumptions.
And the first thing was the assumption that what you make as an image is a product of your subjectivity. that subjectivity, which is invisible, materializes in some process of making into a concrete object in the world.
And there was supposed to be a continuous relationship between that concrete object and the motives or intentions of its making, which are not observable.They're not empirical.They're just mental or psychological.
And I came to the conclusion quite early that the idea of being a painter is not a state of being, but it's something that you learn to be. And I thought then that you can change that.You can change the terms of what it is to make a work of art.
I thought simply that a system can be a substitute for my subjective imagination.
So that when people experience the object and experience the effects that the object produces, rather than saying those effects are somehow poetically a part of the creative imagination of the artist,
they would have to know that it was a product of a system that I invented, but yet have the same experiences that they would have had if I sat there heavily designing the work.
And I thought that strategy of using systems was in fact a critique and an analysis of the relationship between representation and truth.
In this case, the idea of truth being a continuing fiction that we create, that culture creates around us as we move through life.I'm not belittling that.
I think that's very important, but the idea of it being an absolutism is dangerous because I think these constructions of absolutism are a product of the colonial past.
Grace, working in the fashion world, you're constantly upsetting these notions of what a designer is supposed to be about and what a designer is supposed to be producing.How does perception and truth show up in the work that you do?
I think with the way that I create, I often like to put myself really in the background in terms of how I will communicate something.So I feel like I'm also resisting a sense of fixity in terms of how I would connect to a world.
And I think part of that is about inviting lots of other people into the process of creation.I think a lot about multiple perspectives or ways of seeing.
A lot of the time it's about inviting people in, whether it's photographers or writers, or connecting with something historical and revisiting it. It's never about my personal view of something.
I understand that creation can come around through shared experiences.So I think part of my attempt to complicate things in a way or just show complexity is also interacting and collaborating with other people.
And often in the process, I might have a theme I'm researching or a collection I'm thinking about.For example, I worked on an exhibition at the
Serpentine Gallery, 2090, called A Time for New Dreams, which the title came from a collection of essays by Ben Ochrie.I was really inspired by his writing of The Famish Road.
He wrote in the 90s, but then I reconnected with him and he was such in a different place.
So, you know, sometimes I idealize certain moments in time as well, but interacting with people, once you start to engage, everything becomes a lot more complex.And I think I'm
quite drawn to that, revealing the complications and revealing complexity through dialogue and collaboration.
Both of you strike me as artists who bring a lot of research and rigor to bear on your work.And I'm wondering, why does this matter to you?
Like when somebody sees a grid painting by you, Charles, or wears a piece of clothing by you, Grace, they might not understand all the references and philosophy and ideas that you've put into it.So what's the importance of research and rigor?
Well, I mean, this reflects on an issue that I've talked about in the past too, that as part of our colonial education, we've come to have an idea that the meaning of visual imagery speaks for itself.
The clear-cut impact of how limited that idea is, that as soon as you leave the history of Western European art, that as soon as you go into the history of the production of art in any other culture from the standpoint of Eurocentric or Western view, you don't have any idea of what you're looking at.
And so your immediate thing is to experience it based upon what you know, you're learning, but you know that you're inadequate.
And so the idea to me is that rather than saying that art is constituted by visual language that is outside of verbal language or critical thinking, you can say that the work of art is a combination of discourse and image. And it's always that.
So if you're involved in an art practice that you know is sort of bringing new ideas to the field, then that needs to be told.It's not going to come naturally from the image.
And the entire context of working with others becomes a discursive space that you have to understand in order to go beyond what you find most immediately when you're looking at a work.
And so it doesn't bother me to then insist on various levels that we need to have a conversation about what you think that's going on rather than just looking at the thing and being pleased.Grace, I see you smiling a lot.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of my process, even my research process which is kind of a grounding point to everything I do.I think actually I'm doing that more for myself.
I see the research practice as a spiritual practice in a way because it's very intuitive and pure.So I'm not necessarily doing that to even reveal it.There's a lot of work that I do that's very personal and part of an artistic practice.
There always has to be an outcome to that process as well.
But at the same time, you're doing what Charles talked about.I mean, I think of your collections and the way that you're using them as a way to pull people into looking at Amiri Baraka or Ishmael Reed's work.
That you, in your collaborations, are creating a space for people to be able to enter into a different kind of experience than one would normally get in the white art world.
I share a lot of my, I guess, thought process, research process, and it's to be transparent, it's to say that I'm not creating in a vacuum, like everything I do is very much related to what's come before.
And I just use that to be transparent about my points of reference.And I don't also think that someone that might want to buy a jacket that I design necessarily needs to know that, but I have that available there, I think.
that kind of interaction is what motivates me to actually want to design.So it's personal.I need a lot of that context and understanding and connection, emotional connection, to be motivated to design.
I couldn't be a designer that's purely focusing on aesthetics without a context to it.So I kind of understood that that's kind of what I need in order to create.
But at the same point, in terms of what I'm creating, that should really only be judged on the aesthetics.Like it needs to function in a way that's beautiful, it needs to be attractive and seductive.That's how it should be measured.
My way of getting there is different, you know, it's personal, but I want to be able to seduce and attract people through what I create purely on the merit of the design.
I'm struck by the fact of the generational difference here, right?The difference in time and place in which you both came up and the differences in the kind of work that you make, but you're also so similar in so many ways.
And that leads me to want to ask this question, which is, I'm wondering what each of you admires about each other's work.
What I admire about that work is that it's chosen for me, you know, and not being really sophisticated, the idea of history of fashion, that the forms and shapes that these fashion objects make when they're on and off the body reflects a certain social and cultural experience that I don't usually associate with fashion.
and do it so damn elegantly.I can't get over that, that these really, what I call large or structured shapes, when they fall on the body, they soften.You know, I think that's amazing.
Just completely astonishing that that kind of transformation can take place.
Wow.Thank you, Charles.Big compliment. I think I really admire your intelligence and very methodical approach to creation and a very complete ideology that is felt very holistically across it through everything you do.
I feel like I'm not the most articulate, I think I'm able to communicate much more through what I create, but I feel like there's a really amazing balance between your ideology and the consistency of the outfit as well, which I really admire.
Let's listen to a sample of the work that Charles created for Grace, reimagining a score by the Black Fluxus artist Ben Patterson.This is Manifestos 6.
I'm still curious, Grace, as to what you're thinking about bringing me into your project at MoMA, particularly in terms of my performative work.
Well, I think working on Spirit Movers, a lot of what I was thinking about was this translation of sound into other materials or artworks or experiences.
Your work and your manifestos were very much in mind throughout the whole research process and thinking about this act of translation from one thing to something else.
I think a lot of works that were in the exhibition had gone through multiple forms of evolution and had multiple lives.So I was really interested in your manifestos and your performances and how you get to the outcomes of the performance.
And also looking at being so connected with MoMA's history and photographic archive, a lot of what I was using to understand sound or performance was the photographic archive as well.
So I guess interested to understand the complexity of your work and the complications of it as well.
What I did for that was a work where I translated the text of Ben Patterson's music composition.So Ben, his compositions are written in words rather than musical notations.
And so I used the letters of that and translated those letters to musical notes and applied those notes to a system that arranged them in terms of melodies and harmonies.
The music is diatonic, so it has a very familiar aesthetic sound to Western ears, and it has a sense of organization.
That's different from what you would think of a musical composition that was put together by chance, because this is really taking what's given to you and organizing it.It's really an operating basis. of chance.
And so I kind of understand a little, Grace, that the application of research that goes on in my work, I can read in the way you dealt with that, your use of research and organizing the exhibition and the kinds of themes and associations.
connections that essentially you discovered through your research process.And it's interesting that Manifesto is sort of another example of something that was intrinsically a part of the installation itself.
Something that I found really powerful in the performance that you did at Loma of Manifestos was hearing the composition and seeing the score that Paterson had written.
Seeing those two things together gave me such a deeper understanding and connection to Ben Paterson's work as well.I had a very different perception and felt kind of understanding of it.
I think we talked a little bit about that as well, but I don't know if you had anything to share about that.
My work is based in systems, but one of the reasons why I like working this way is because I'm always surprised by the result.Things happen in the process of forming these relationships between unrelated things.
But in this case, it was the text, the series of letters and the formative space of sound and instruments that's produced by that.The connection is to make a relationship between language system and musical system.
and layering them together in this format.
Generally, when I work like that, the process brings me to experiences that I could never have imagined and thoughts that would never have occurred to me, because I think that our subjective judgments are limited by our experiences.
And we need to find some way of, let's say in the Olympics term, high jumping those experiences or pole vaulting over those limitations.
I used a system to do that and very much in the way that I think the Fluxus people used these kind of organized performative relationships to create this kind of authentic experiences that would be new to the viewer and often to the artist too.
So similarly, as I started to develop that work and getting engaged in the writing and getting engaged in the quite different experience of writing melodies,
That combination gave me a deeper insight to the work, but also it gave me interesting moments in the work itself.
Even this one section where Patterson in his musical scores told people to lay the bass on the side and to tap it with their hands like a drummer, like a drum.And while that was going on, there's some pizzicato going on in the score.
And, you know, of course there's this chance and an arbitrary coming together, but somehow it made a really interesting point of how, you know, things that happen by chance are just as meaningful as things that happen by intention.
And I think that the way Ben was telling people to use a bass in ways that you would never use a bass, it's the same kind of, you know, same kind of gesture.
We could talk all afternoon.I wanted to throw in one last question here and actually goes to a little bit of how you all think about the reception of your work.
We've been hearing you talk a lot about your processes, which has been really illuminating and brilliant.I'm curious how you all think about what you're trying to instill in the viewer or the listener or the person who is experiencing your work
in terms of perceptions, in terms of truth?
Yeah, I think, you know, methodologically, Grace and I are a little different.Not a lot different, but a little different.
So with respect to that, I'm very much interested in pulling out the things about art making that are part of our cultural language rather than our aesthetic language.
I think the aesthetic language is going to happen anyway, because we're working with visual forms.But there is this issue of taste, where we're determining whether that aesthetic language is interesting.And that goes on, and it's very important.
But I want to undermine as much as possible the notion that our discursive thoughts and our affective feelings and experiences are diametrically opposed to each other, that they are opposites.
I want to sort of undermine that to say that they're always working together, to greater or lesser degree, depending upon the artist.
It's an interesting conversation because I think we definitely come from very different perspectives and have a very different process.In terms of what I'm creating, I think that I'm trying to connect with some sense of soulfulness.
trying to think about how that could be embodied into clothing.So it's trying to create this translational, almost like a musical quality into what I'm creating, which is quite an impossible challenge, but it's something that motivates me.
So I think there's a lot of feeling and emotion and tenderness towards either people I'm representing or a sense of care that I want to transmit through what I'm creating in terms of clothing.
So as a designer, I feel like there's a real closeness and intimacy with people in terms of creating something that's worn so close to the body.
So I think that translation is quite emotional in terms of that translation into garments and this idea of almost devotion and craft and using hands, using repetition to create something.
I think I want this kind of intention to be embedded in what I create, but I have a way of getting to that point, which is also quite personal.
Well, this conversation has felt quite personal and intimate.Thank you both for allowing us all to listen in here on Edge of Reason.My pleasure.Thank you very much. I'm Jeff Chang, and you've been on a journey to the edge of reason.
Join us next week when we speak to Hauser & Wirth artist Mika Rottenberg and the author and theoretical physicist Felix Flickr to explore how the magic of the mundane drives their work.
If you've enjoyed what you've just heard, please like and review us on Apple Podcasts and help spread the word about our series to other listeners like you.
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