Accumulations

Circling HomeWork #19

Recently, I was fortunate enough to tour the Soho loft of late Finnish-American artist Iria Leino. She lived there for decades, refusing a million-dollar buyout and innumerable other landlord attempts at getting her out of the rent-stabilized loft. The quantity of work in the space left the greatest impression on me. There was so much of it — in spite of some which had already been removed for exhibitions that were on view at the time. She was an archivist, not a minimalist; paintings were labeled with titles, her name, and the year they were made. She lived there too, but space overtaken by artmaking and storage dominated the apartment. Just one small room remained for non-artmaking living, though even that space was stacked with materials.

The gallerist guiding our tour talked about the proportion of work in the apartment that was showable — paintings that were not just finished but also representative of the higher quality of her creative prowess. (That is, paintings that are sellable to discerning collectors and exhibitable at institutions of a certain stature.)

Seeing all the rest in spite of this reassured me. What a relief, the idea that one can be so prolific and that 30%, or whatever he said, of your work is all that needs to rise to the level of professional consideration. It’s a helpful reframe to see that most of the work you make could be mostly about getting to the next thing — about continuity of ideas — and that’s not a bad or depressing. 

After the tour, I was chatting with a friend, herself a painter, who said, “You have to make all the paintings.” When taking the long view, or the perspective of art as vocation, there’s no shortcut to being better or more accomplished. You will make things that are better and worse than others along the way but you can’t remove this connective tissue.