Sims, Patterson; An Interview With Patricia Lay, in catalog Myth, Memory and Android Dreams
AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA LAY (2016)
By Patterson Sims, Independent Art Curator, Writer and Consultant
Originally published in Pat Lay: Myth, Memory and Android Dreams
Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark New Jersey
This dialogue took place in 2015 over the course of several meetings at Lay’s home/studio in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Sims’ loft in New York, New York. Their initial conversations were transcribed and then expanded and refined in numerous email exchanges.
SIMS: What would be useful for others to know about your family and early life as it impacted on your wanting to be an artist and you art?
LAY: I come from a family of artists. Both of my parents, my father’s father, and my grandfather’s father were all painters. When I was a child my father built a new house for us from the foundations up. He did this evenings and weekends for about ten years. From him I learned how to build things. He would let my brother and me participate in the process.
I remember digging in the mud, wheeling a wheelbarrow filled with concrete, and learning how to use a hammer. Before he started building our house he designed and built sailboats. He loved working with his hands. He was also a painter, but he didn’t have time for it. He studied painting at Harvard, earned a BFA, went to Yale for graduate courses in painting, and took classes at the Art Students League in NYC. Then my brother and I were born. During World War II he had the choice of going to war or working at a job for the war effort. He worked at Remington Rand, a defense industry plant in Milford, Connecticut and studied engineering at night. This led him to a life-long career as a production engineer.
My mother was a role model on many levels. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut and studied painting at Yale University and received her BFA in 1936. After my parents married they moved to New York City and continued their study at the Art students League. When I was still very young in Connecticut my mother’s friends would commission her to paint their portraits. She would set up her easel in our living room, and they would come for sittings. This continued until I was in third grade. When I was nine my mother worked as a draftswomen for an electronics company, later she became a designer of solid-state circuits. I remember her showing me drawings with layers and layers of tracing paper with lines connecting the dots. They were plans for electronic circuitry. Recently a friend suggested that my mother ‘s rendering may have sparked my present interest in circuit boards.
The summer of 1962, between my junior and senior years at Pratt, my mother and I took a nine-week road trip to thirteen European countries. We drove from city to city visiting nearly every important art museum. The highlight of the trip was the Spoleto Festival in Italy. David Smith’s sculptures were installed in every square of the city. It was so thrilling to see his sculptures interact with the city and at this moment I realized that I identified more with sculpture than painting.
SIMS: When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?
LAY: From my family’s influences, it was clear to me that I would become an artist. I spent many hours on my own making drawings and paintings, and both my parents were very supportive of my passion for art. At ten years old I started painting lessons with a local artist, but I never felt successful. I felt that my parents were much more talented, and I was trying to live up to their achievements.
I knew I wanted to go to art school. My parents suggested Pratt Institute because it was highly respected. My grandparents knew the Pratt family in Brooklyn and my uncle had studied there. At Pratt I primarily studied painting and drawing, my professors included Phillip Pearlstein, Stephen Pace, Ernest Briggs, and Jacob Lawrence. I studied art history with the painter George McNeil and philosophy of art with the art critic and historian Dore Ashton. The painting that was going on then was dominated by Abstract Expressionism. Pratt offered very limited opportunities for women to study sculpture. It was a macho department. They didn’t allow female students to weld, so I worked in mostly clay and plaster. I was in my senior year when I realized that I was much more comfortable and successful working with three-dimensions and sculptural materials than with paint.
SIMS: What role did teaching and your later academic career play in your art? Was it help or a distraction?
LAY: Early on I realized that making art was not a secure way to make a living, and that I would have to have another profession to have a stable economic life. Teaching on the college level was the obvious choice because it’s not a nine-to-five job. As a teacher you are expected to actively pursue your specialty: art making is built into the job.
I always liked the give-and-take with students, a mutual questioning and conversation. I learned from the students and they learned from me, especially the MFA students. I started teaching at the college level when I was 27. I realized that the students saw me as a role model, and I worked hard at my career as an artist to earn their respect and trust. The academic environment also expanded my knowledge of art history, philosophy, the art world, technology and new processes.
But teaching had its distractions. It was difficult to carry through on a studio project. Many times experiments in new directions were left unresolved. The studio work would be sabotaged by an academic report that needed to be written or a grant that had to be submitted.
SIMS: How did your participation in the 1975 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial exhibition impact your career as an artist?
LAY: Well, I guess it didn’t, really, though I thought that it would open doors. This particular biennial was large and included many emerging artists, and I was one of them. Marcia Tucker was the specific curator of the five who choose my work. The show got some decidedly negative press, but that is pretty typical for a Whitney Biennial.
SIMS: Did you have a gallery going into the exhibition?
LAY: No, and I did not have a gallery as a result of the show. It may have led to other shows, but it was not instrumental in establishing gallery representation. I was ill prepared to deal with the business of art. It was not something that was discussed at Pratt or graduate school. We were all purists and idealistic and felt that it was the gallery’s responsibility to promote our work.
SIMS: Though the grid, immaculate execution, and formalist abstraction prevail in your art, your work has gone through several phases. How might you highlight its overriding characteristics and issues?
I look to art history for structure and content. In that sense I am a formalist. In the late sixties my fired clay works were geometric, abstract, and concerned with the repetition of form. The Primary Structures show in 1966 at the Jewish Museum was an important influence. In the 1970’s the grid gave to a more open structure. I became interested in the visual discourse between nature and geometry as manifested in the Earth Works movement and formal Japanese Zen gardens. In the 80’s I introduced welded steel in combination with fired clay and incorporated sculptural elements influenced by David Smith and Brancusi. These works were abstract yet suggest a figurative gesture and scale. In the 90’s African and Oceanic art were my primary inspirational sources. Starting in 2000, I combined and hybridized human elements and technology. This work incorporates fired clay, steel, mixed media and ready -made computer parts. In my 2014-15 scroll pieces the structure is formal and incorporates the designs of printed circuit boards. The content, processes, and materials are intrinsically post-modern with the infusion of Persian and Tibetan influences
SIMS: Initiated with that trip you took to Europe with your mother in 1962, you’ve traveled extensively, going in the last twenty years to China, Africa, India, and South America. How have these travels impacted on your work and ways of thinking?
LAY: My European trip with my mother made me realize that to be a good artist it is really important to know the history of art. Now I travel with my daughter. We have focused on visiting Asia, Africa, and South America. We primarily visit museums and historical sights. It is the art, architecture and differences between cultures that influence my work. In Thailand, Cambodia, and India I was struck by the impact and spiritual beauty of Buddha and Hindu deities and in the power emanating from idealized human form. As a result of these trips I started to use the human head as an androgynous, hybrid, post-human form.
Travels to Egypt, Istanbul, Rome, and Peru have added new resource materials to expand my ideas and imagery. The statuary of Pharaonic Egypt, the colors and patterns of the Turkish carpets and tile work, portrait sculptures from ancient Rome, and pre-Columbian clay figures in Peru have had a profound influence on my work.
SIMS: Your travels have clearly opened you to art history and what can be learned in museums. You have not traveled to Tibet, yet Tibetan thangkas have clearly been instrumental to your recent works on paper and larger wall works.
My foreign trips have made me more appreciative and motivated to visit NYC and other area museums. Visiting museums has become an important and integral part of my practice. The African Art wing at the Metropolitan Museum has been my go-to place for inspiration for many years. My embellished head sculptures from 2001 to 2011 were influenced by Nkisi n’kondi/Minkisi power figures of the Kongo peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DADA show at MOMA in 2006, occurring when I was making both sculptures and two-dimensional works, helped me question and better understand the paradoxical relationship between human consciousness and technology. Raoul Hausmann’s The Spirit of our Time, 1919, which was in the exhibit, encouraged me use readymade forms and mixed media.
Another new series of works were inspired by an exhibition of Persian miniatures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago. The miniatures’ patterning, border designs, and asymmetrical structure shifted my focus from sculpture back to works on paper.
At Rubin Museum in New York City I came to appreciate the power of Tibetan thangkas. I realized that I could work with paper in a much larger scale, up to 96 x 48 inches and turn a religious icon, the Tibetan thangka, into a contemporary aesthetic abstract composition that serenely captures our world of technological advancement. At the same time the scroll format was a practical way to make large works easily portable. Meditating on the past, present, and future, my scrolls and mixed media figurative sculptures question and critique our paradoxical relationship and obsession with technology and what it now means to be human.
SIMS: Many of the artists you mention as influential are men, are there artists who are women you have been influenced by?
LAY: Louise Nevelson was an important role model in the late 1960s when I was in graduate school, as were Eva Hesse, Beverly Pepper, and Barbara Hepworth. More recently, the bound leather mask heads made by Nancy Grossman from the 1960s through to the 1980s have intrigued me and influenced my work
SIMS: Let’s talk more about gender in your work and how that might have played into your artistic practice in the 1960s, 70s and ‘80s, and where you are now on some of those issues.
LAY: I was definitely in a different place in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I got married in 1963 when I was 21. My husband, the artist Kaare Rafoss, and I felt like we grew up together. We were at Pratt Institute at the same time. While he studied painting at Yale Graduate School, I had a teaching job, and then he taught while I did my graduate studies at Rochester Institute of Technology. We were equal in our relationship. We both had the same degrees, and we both took college teaching jobs after graduate school. We felt very independent and yet shared everything. So there was no gender issue or bias for us. Yet in the art world women and their art were considered less important and respected.
Kaare and I moved to a loft on Broome Street in SoHo in 1969. Soon after that I became a member of a women’s consciousness-raising group. While the women’s movement in New York in the 60’s and 70’s had a political agenda, my focus was on making art that was personal and less concerned with social issues.
SIMS: Are you conscious of aspects of your work that address your gender and address issues of sexuality? Do you think someone could look at your work and say a woman did this work?
LAY: I don’t think my work particularly addresses issues of gender or sexuality. I think it’s very formal. Due to their palette and delicacy, some of the recent scroll works might seem to some people more feminine. For most of my career I consciously tried to make work that was not gender specific or feminine, as I felt it would be dismissed. Now I see male artists whose work looks very “feminine.” It’s just not an issue any more: I and others do what each one of us wants.
SIMS: You talked about being married since you were 21, having a happy marriage, and never feeling in any way that your life is compromised in that relationship or in the bond of marriage. What is it like to not only have parents who are artists, but to have a husband who’s an artist?
Kaare’s artwork is very different from mine, but we’ve also come closer in terms of our art and its characteristics. I’ve learned and taken ideas from him. He’s taken ideas from me. For instance, I’ve been using the grid for many, many years. I went away from the grid for a while, and then I went back to it because Kaare began using it, and it became clear to me that it was a structure that I wanted to work with again. We try to stay out of each other’s studios while we are working. But sometimes I will ask him to critique the work. I also frequently ask him for technical help. We have had opportunities to show together in a two-person show, but Kaare is not interested in doing that.
Recently we have been sharing a studio assistant. Szilvia Revesz has worked for us for about 12 years. Originally she was Kaare’s assistant and in the past six years she has also been working with me on my works on paper. Szilvia is a talented artist with a high level of technical skill and knowledge. She is an essential component of my studio practice.
SIMS: You have lived, worked, and now are having a major career survey in New Jersey: does living and working in the state play any major role in your work?
LAY: I can’t say that New Jersey or its art world per se play a role in my work. We lived on Broome Street in SoHo for twelve years before moving to Jersey City in 1981. We moved to Jersey City when we realized we could afford to buy two connected buildings and an adjoining open lot. It gave us large living and workspaces. It is quiet and has lots of light. We have a garden, which is very important to me, and we can park our car in front of our house. My daughter and her family now live in their own apartment in our buildings. I can go sailing a few minutes away from where I live.
When we moved to New Jersey, I had already been teaching in at Montclair State University for almost a decade. The moment I started teaching and then assuming a more administrative role at Montclair State, where I worked from 1972 to 2014, I was thought of as a New Jersey artist. I had a solo show at the New Jersey State Museum in 1973. I was in a biennial exhibition at the Newark Museum in 1977. In the ‘70s I was submitting proposals for New Jersey’s very active public art commissions program. Forwarding my career was much easier in New Jersey than New York. That went on through the ‘80s, by then I felt I had shown in every museum in New Jersey, yet sold very little art and hadn’t achieved any lasting recognition. So I thought now what?
New York City is the place where things happen. Our friends are all artists, and everything that we do socially and professionally has to do with the art world. For us and others here, Jersey City is effectively NYC’s 6th borough. From our neighborhood in Jersey City it takes us literally five minutes to get to downtown Manhattan. If we have a reason to go to NYC more than once in a day, we do so. I don’t feel like I ever left Manhattan.
SIMS: You have been considering this survey of your work for some time; what have you learned about your art and yourself that you did not know or acknowledge before?
LAY: I have been working on my archives in preparation for this show. It is interesting to see the threads that carry through all of the work. The grid was important to me forty-five years ago, and it is still the structure that I choose to work within now. Another constant is art history, which I have continued to rely on for inspiration.
I have also learned more about my family history and the central role that art and creativity have played. It has all been like putting together the pieces of a puzzle.
SIMS: Given the distinct chapters of your art, as you look back with the organization of this survey, how has your attitude about your work and its developments changed? Do you see unity or disconnection? What has been the impact of having to look back when so often you’ve looked forward to the next chapter of your work?
LAY: Those are hard questions to answer, maybe I will know better when all the work installed at the gallery. I do know that when I get to a certain point with a body of work, that I’m finished with it, and I want to introduce something new. So I look out for what will be the next thing.
SIMS: You probably have had colleagues, artist friends in the New York art world, who have had significant success. It hasn’t seemed to discourage you that you haven’t had that much commercial success. Do you think that economic and critical success strengthens a person or an artist or is not really that important?
LAY: I am confident that I am doing good work, but it is important to me to get some art world recognition. Financial success from selling the work is not so important because teaching gave us a very secure living, we were able to buy in Jersey City the space we need to live and work.
I always thought the ideal situation would be to have one’s art support itself. But financial success can make artists turn their work into a business, and in the process they loose the freedom to change and evolve. People expect certain kinds of work and so you just keep making it. It’s hard to move ahead with new ideas because you can just keep producing and producing.
SIMS: Now that your teaching practice has ended, has more time and the full focus you can have freed or opened up your art making and thinking?
LAY: Yes, I can focus. I don’t feel pressure to rush the work. I have time to experiment. I have thought about working with paper pulp, but I have never had the time to experiment with it. While teaching I felt that I didn’t have the time to deal with the business side of being an artist: self-promotion and networking. I chose to go to the studio rather than promote the work. Family, teaching, and art making always came before self-promotion and socializing. Now I try to structure my time so that more time is allotted for the business of art.
SIMS: How does being older impact on the role that art has in your life and that you now are looking back on the whole span of your career?
LAY: I am not done yet. I will continue to make art as long as I am able. I am happiest when I am working in my studio.
It remains very hard to get a NY gallery, but it’s remains the best way for my work to be placed in collections and preserved.
I would love to say that I would have chosen not to teach and just be a full-time artist, but I know I could not have done that. We have so many artist friends that are in economic distress at this point. They can no longer afford to live in New York City. Many have no retirement income or health insurance. Basic good luck and the choices we made have allowed us to feel financially secure, which makes me feel good about how I have lived as an artist.
Wei, Lily; Myth, Memory & Android Dreams, catalog
Catalog Essay:
Pat Lay: Myth, Memory & Android Dreams
Essay by Lilly Wei, Guest Curator, 2016
From the beginning, it seems, Pat Lay had been fascinated by the unfamiliar, by cultures other than her own, especially from distant regions of the world. She was never dismissive of art that was free from European and American formulations, intrigued, instead, by its rich, often curious imagery and venerable histories, by its differences. That there were other criteria seems obvious today, the legacy of the many ideological battles fought during the turbulent 60s when she came of age, from civil rights to women’s liberation to the anti-war movement and the condemnation of cultural imperialism, long practiced by Western colonial powers as the indisputable order of things—as was a belief in First World and Third World. During this time, in the aftermath of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, empires fell, new nations arose and the map of the world was re-drawn, time and again.
Despite the new consciousness-raising, biases remained. For instance, it was not noticed until the early 1980s that H.W. Janson’s History of Art, the introductory survey used by most colleges and universities across the nation, was, in fact, only the history of European and American art (primarily European), with the most cursory of glances at the rest of the world and contemporary art. And, incredible as it might seem now, up to that point, there was a total absence of women artists in its hundreds of pages.
Nonetheless, the times they were a-changin’ and more radical, more inclusive artistic production emerged to express this more expansive worldview. Lay, as a contemporary artist, believed that her work should be responsive to present reality, which meant to her it should not be insular, bounded and defined by Europe as its farthest influence. By the 1960s and 1970s, Americans could no longer maintain a blinkered, isolationist stance regarding the non-Western world. Nor did most want to. How do you keep them down on the farm once they have seen Paree (and beyond) was a question from a popular World War I song; the answer is: you can’t. Our intertwined world continues to grow ever smaller, connected by air, land, sea and instantaneously, miraculously by intangible global networks of all kinds—for better or worse.
While Lay’s contemporaries might have been similarly curious about art from elsewhere—from Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, Australia—many were more interested in the traditional works from the periphery, as it was once designated, than they were in its contemporary art. And, to be fair, not so much contemporary art was readily available at the time. On the other hand, American artists seemed largely disinterested in the art of the past in general, perhaps because it was believed (erroneously, since there was, of course, a long history of indigenous art) that this country didn’t have much of a cultural past to be interested in. But more, perhaps, they realized they were the artists who would represent the 20th century, catapulting toward a triumphant future, no longer in thrall to the Old World.
Lay, however, embraced not only the present and its implications for what was to come, not only other cultures as well as her own, but also the art of the past. She believed that bodies of work, despite where and when they were made, also existed in the present and had enormous impact; an 18th dynasty sculpture of the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, a woman, is equivalent to a 17th century Benin altar head or a modernist figure by Brancusi as works of art, although not in a formalist or an essentialist way, stripped of their original context and meaning. Lay does not consider revered tribal objects to be merely artifacts to be appropriated, as the controversial 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Primitivism’ in 20th century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” was vociferously accused of doing. Eurocentrism was again under attack, as a notion that was as outmoded as a pre-Copernican universe. Lay’s exhibition, “Myth, Memory & Android Dreams,” a retrospective look at more than four decades of her career, taking all this into account, demonstrates the breadth and prescience of her vision. Its very expansiveness—including the combining of art and science—is a subject in itself, as is its tilt toward diverse forms, materials and content. She instinctively knew that flux, change and complexity defined reality.
It was an early beginning. Lay knew from the time she was a child of eight that she wanted to be an artist, taking lessons in oil painting and going on, eventually, to study art at Pratt Institute in New York and the Rochester Institute of Technology upstate. She came from a family of artists. Her great grandfather, Oliver Ingraham Lay, was an eminent New York portrait painter. Her grandfather, Charles Downing Lay, was a landscape architect and town planner, as well as an artist, and designed or contributed to the design of numerous parks in New York City and elsewhere, including Bryant Park, Marine Park, and Madison Square Park; he was also the consulting landscape architect for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Lay’s parents studied painting, one at Harvard, the other at Yale, but due to the economic exigencies of the post-war period, her father became an engineer and her mother a designer of solid-state circuitry, both working frequently for the space industry. All of this seems to have been encoded into her DNA.
Tracing the trajectory of her development from 1969 to the present, with the emphasis on more recent work, Lay’s commitment to the experimental, the multidisciplinary, and the hybridized is highlighted, as well as her interest in working with a wide range of materials. The earliest works in the show are abstract, at times brightly colored, three-dimensional wall pieces made from glazed fired clay, when clay was still generally discounted as a craft medium in this country; it would become one of her signature mediums. Primarily a sculptor, she was smitten by David Smith’s sculptures early on, in particular Large Circle (Voltri), 1962, which she first saw in Spoleto, Italy that same year. He remained an important force in her art for the next three decades. Smith’s works were abstract but also evoked figuration and landscape and his ability to draw with steel, to trace graceful lines in space with such an adamant substance–as he does in as Sentinel I, 1956, another piece she greatly admires—was a revelation.
Lay was captivated by the Earth Art movement and by artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer and their ambitious, large-scale interventions into nature. She also found the purity and serenity of Zen gardens–such as the one at Ryōan-ji, considered among the finest such gardens in the world, if not the finest—enormously sympathetic. From the convergence of these disparate sources came a series of imagined architectural landscapes in which she shifted from clay to sand and steel, glass and tile, culminating in an imposing untitled floor sculpture assembled from multiple parts, a breakthrough piece, that was shown at the 1975 Whitney Biennial. At the time that she made the series, she was also “looking at the Palace at 4 a.m.,” made by Giacometti in 1932, drawn to its enigmatic, oneiric spaces, its irrational, fantasized architecture. Lay, however, wanted to create a more meditative place, albeit with a touch of the uncanny, in which architecture (the measureable, reasonable) co-existed with more psychological elements (the intuitive), over which hovered the poetic, perhaps the ineffable.
Expanding her repertoire of materials again, Lay began to use welded steel in the 1980s. She said that one of the most satisfying works from this period for her was Untitled #6, 1986, a wall piece completed in the beginning of the series—Lay, as a rule, develops her ideas in series—in which she first combined fired clay with welded steel. Although it was a grouping that was much indebted to Brancusi, she had not forgotten Smith, as seen in lissome examples such as the freestanding Untitled #7, 1989, another key work in which both sculptors’ influences are visible, but in an interpretation that is distinctively her own. In it, the vertically oriented steel base shapes itself into a kind of spatial drawing, bold yet gracefully arced, in dynamic equipoise. An integral component of the sculpture, it is also connected conceptually to the arresting, innovative, custom-tailored bases of Brancusi. She has made other pedestals that are closer to his in appearance but the emphasis she places on them—pedestals are always an issue for sculptors–is Brancusian. The clay ovoid atop it, incised in this piece—the elegant pattern of thin stripes reminiscent of the fine parallel lines that are etched into Ife heads—colored an earthy rose (others might be a mottled blue or other shades), textured, as if it were a painting, is also a nod, however restated, to the Romanian and his clear, simple forms. They might suggest a streamlined torso or a head, say the demurely, yet coquettishly tilted head of Mlle Pogany. Pairing steel with the more yielding clay, and its expressive surfaces, Lay again adjusts the emotion/reason ratio of the works, creating a tension that is palpable and compelling. These freestanding works are more or less life-sized in height, their scale and pose underscoring their genesis in the figurative.
By the 1990s, Lay became more focused on the psychological and spiritual aspects of abstraction, on mythology, collective memory, subliminal content, and the interconnection of formal language and the human condition. The rattling of some of Western civilization’s fundamental beliefs that had begun in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, was further shaken at the end of the century by anthropologist J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a study in comparative mythology and religion first published in 1890. It influenced, among countless writers, artists, and thinkers, the poet T.S. Eliot and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of the seminal figures of the 20th century. To The Golden Bough was added the theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade’s concept of the eternal return, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s development of structural anthropology, Joseph Campbell’s studies in comparative mythologies and religions, Robert Farris Thompson’s writings on the art and culture of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic and the many others who challenged the Eurocentric perspective, providing a more extensive reading of art and its guises, contexts and functions. In 1989, “Les Magiciens de la Terre,” the pioneering, much-praised exhibition that many deemed the first truly large-scale international exhibition—it included artists from Asia, Africa and South America in numbers well beyond the usual tokenism—opened in Paris, curated by Jean- Hubert Martin. It became a standard for what a global exhibition should and could be, a model for innumerable exhibitions, including “All the World’s Futures,” this year’s Venice Biennale exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor from Nigeria.
Lay’s Spirit Poles, 1992 and Mythoi, 1996, the latter a site-specific work permanently installed in the sculpture park of the Henie-Onstad Museum in Oslo, are two other critical works in the artist’s evolution, evidence of her new direction. Mythoi, rising more than 11 feet high, like Spirit Poles, consist of a phalanx of slender vertical shafts, each unique in shape and pattern. The effect is imposing, incantatory in its repetition, suggesting totems and other ceremonial or architectural objects. When viewed from a closer vantage point, however, they are also wholly contemporary in their forms, some like smaller versions of Brancusi’s famous Endless Column. They are part of their site but also a disruption, an intervention into nature that demarcates and defines the space, creating an ambience, but perhaps more importantly, a presence that commemorates an act of human willfulness.
The shapes are geometric, some sharply edged, others rounded, verging on the organic, each pole marked by a design in red, blue or yellow that threads the dark surface, the whole a blend of the modernist, the industrialized and the indigenous, as if recapitulating and conflating, in a swiftly concise, non-hierarchical fashion, a history of sculpture from, as Lay noted, the Americas, Africa and Oceania. Intrigued by the processes of making art and material culture, she was also inspired by the many astonishingly talented, innovative women artists of the 60s and 70s whose work broke new ground, their work addressing the same divide between the handiwork of what might be called “feminized” pre-industrialized cultures and those of “masculine” industrialized nations, between what was considered low and high art. She began to create more installations that interacted with the space and its architecture, her forms—while abstract signs and symbols from the biomorphic to the geometric—are often fanciful syntheses of the formal and the more expressive.
Toward the end of the decade, Lay began to experiment with mixed-media constructions that were a cross between reliefs and paintings in the form of small mandalas composed of varying permutations of circles and squares enclosing each other, Albers-like, the image both formal and symbolic. Her Icon series from 1998, 12” squares, when installed in a grid, seems a visual equivalent to the repetitive chanting of a mantra. They were her first serious forays into the two-dimensional, although they have components that project from the surface plane, both actually and as a feat of pictorial illusion. Lay’s newest materials, ones that she was zealously exploring for their effects, included graphite, iron filings, rust and ilmenite, phlogopite and other kinds of mica, and acrylic paint, applied to board. They almost all radiated a sheen, from subtle to high-wattage, heralding her later use of silver, aluminum and gold leaf, their added light beautiful, invoking both the metallic gleam of machines and the auratic—as if the mechanical, after all, also had a soul.
Masks appeared in her repertoire a little later, in 1999, tipping toward the less human. She created a series of minimalist, rather disquieting fired clay visages, that conjure, say, those of alien creatures with just a semblance of human features: a red slit drilled with a row of tiny holes that spans the area where the eyes are located (Untitled Mask #1, 1999); a strange protuberance that suggests a mouth, snout or spout (Untitled Mask #5, 1999), covered in rust; one starkly white form with round black rings for eyes that also evokes a target or the face of a schematized owl (Untitled Mask #3, 1999) and another one that was glazed white, its surface punctured by a small holes in a regular pattern, with two round circles cut into it like eyes, empty holes that suggests the human but also cancelling that suggestion out (Untitled Mask #8, 2000). Hybridized, post-human objects that she continued to make into the new millennium, Lay said that they refer to the tradition of African masks. They are also some of her earliest forays into the nature of what it means to be human today. What that is seems more complicated, less cut-and-dried than in the past, as genetics and other scientific disciplines dismantle our enshrined definitions of our humanity. We are being created and altered in ways that are unpredictable and might easily spin out of our control. These are discoveries and processes that raise deeply troubling ethical questions with dangerous consequences for us as a species, delving into questions of mortality and immortality, although without doubt, there are also great benefits to be conferred. Lay comments on the increasingly complex role of technology in our lives, blurring the distinction between what is human and what is machine, as we are increasingly doing in our everyday life. One of the latest is a chatbot known as Xiaoice that has become the preferred confidante for millions of Chinese, making the 2013 movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a computer operating system, more like reality. As one young user put it, quoted in the New York Times (July 30, 2015), “Siri is like a secretary but Xiaoice is a ‘life partner’.”
From masks, Lay gravitated toward full-fledged heads in the round. She models them in clay, as she does in her next sculptural series, then makes a plaster mold from them in four sections, pressing clay into the mold. These clay heads are fired. She eventually will use five different heads for the molds and after the heads are cast in plaster, she alters them individually, she explained. Among the first is Altar Head #2: Seer, 2001, a gleaming, aluminum-leafed, fired clay head that suggests a multi-ethnic bionic androgyne. It is split, with a knob that seems to hold the halves together, a knob that recalls the usnisa of the Buddha, one of its 32 identifying maha-laksanas (great marks). There is also a component affixed to its eye like a bulky monocle (a prototype for Google glass?), signaling, perhaps, the head’s visual acuity as if it were android with superhuman powers of perception; with sight comes insight. She calls them “altar heads for a postmodern global village,” springing from her previous interest in the regal altar heads of the Ife and Benin, in Egyptian, Greek and Roman portrayals of their rulers and gods, and in the multitude of Buddha images and Hindu deities that she saw on trips she took to China, Cambodia, Thailand and India at that time.
These heads juxtapose the great civilizations of the past with that of today, represented by robots, and by artificial intelligence. In popular culture, from Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the robot who infamously went rogue to Blade Runner, based on a Philip K. Dick novel about androids to The Matrix and more recent Hollywood films such as Ex Machina and Terminator Genisys to multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s projects on the ethical implications of biogenetics and infinitely more instances, we have been dazzled by the systems of artificial intelligence that we have invented and their extraordinary, exciting promise. As these systems’ cognitive capacities becoming increasingly sophisticated and astute, they have already begun to surpass our own capabilities in vital areas. Aware that we might lose control of our creations, we are equally fearful, based on conjectures that may or may not remain fictive, that they will turn into Frankensteinian monsters, with a mind, and possibly even feelings, of their own.
Lay, intrigued, speculates on the impact of artificial intelligence in the future, from computers to cyborgs to the yet-to-be-imagined. Returning to two-dimensional work in 2003, she conceived the “Myth + Memory” series. Montage works on gesso board, they further explore human reason and the human need for the spiritual, the mythic, for what is beyond reason. These handsome works are structurally based on Tibetan mandalas, assembled from computer memory cards and motherboards as well as scanned and collaged images of her “Altar Heads.” Lay imagines a world where the human mind is a grid powered by electronic circuits, the new receptacle for myth and memory. Myth + Memory #6: Mec-2, 2003, for instance, is a nine-unit grid, the top row featuring three impassive golden heads, facing forward, similar to the Altar Head described above. There are two of the same images in profile on either side, facing each other, and the bottom row again presents three, this time turned away to show the back of their heads, the figure seen in the quasi- round, or like a mug shot, an ID, front, side, and back. The center unit is left pretty much as is, as command central for the controlling of the network. Lay equates two systems of knowledge, that of the mandala and that of the electronic. One is traditional and the other contemporary, one emotional and the other rational, one spiritual, the other empirical. But these categories blur where they intersect, both creations of the human psyche. In her iconography, the digital is a continuation of the artisanal and the artistic, of the ongoing search for knowledge that is perhaps the most definitive attribute of our humanity.
Two years later, “Altar Heads” was superseded by another mixed media series called “Transhuman Personae,” a body of work that engrossed her for more than six years, returning to it periodically during that period to add other iterations. Transhuman Personae #3, 2005: The Spirit of our Time, after Raoul Haussmann, 1919, was the first to use computer parts which became another important addition to her trove of essential materials. These heads retain the metallic luster of the “Altar Heads” but are actually deconstructed, taken apart and reconstructed with quantities of small gizmos, with cogs, wires, disks, cartridges, hard drives, tiny microphones and other gadgetry. The heads have been enhanced, retrofitted as a computer, such as the handsome Transhuman Personae #6, 2006 and the fierce Transhuman Personae #11, 2010, an example of how complicated they can become in composition, supported by a tripod, bristling with cables and cut wires, emphatically contemporary but with a similarity to tribal regalia. The bases are often sculptures in themselves, cubes alternating with sections of cylinders, like pristine designer blocks, often in shades of silver, grey and black, such as in Transhuman Personae #8, 2008-10, again reminding us of Brancusi’s example.
Cyber Double, 2013, an unsettling column composed of two android-like heads that have been disassembled, the parts stacked, facing several directions. The insides of the heads are crammed with wiring (their brains) and recall dismembered surrealist images from paintings by Magritte or updated poly-headed gods and goddesses from older cultures. They again pose questions about the nature of being and its relationship to technology that she has driven much of her work. Thinking of them as “post-human” power figures, they are not solely derived from non-Western sources but also deeply indebted to Dadaists like George Grosz. Haussmann and Francis Picabia, in particular the latter’s machinist period. Surrealism is another major influence, and in addition to Magritte, there are traces of Max Ernst and De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings throughout. She credits particular works that have had a profound effect on her such as De Chirico’s The Great Metaphysician, 1917; the Song of Love, 1914, The Disquieting Muses, 1917 and Ernst’s Oedipus Rex, 1922, and Women, Old Man, and Flower (1923-24) as well as Fritz Lang’s futuristic classic, Metropolis.
More recently, she has been researching the nkisi figure (minkisi in the plural), a type of power figure prevalent throughout the Congo Basin, the predecessors to her power figures. These ferocious minkisi are also made from various materials such as wood, metal, glass, fabric, fiber, cowrie shells, sometimes studded with nails, and more. The force of her own “power” sculptures is more scientifically based, represented by computer parts, symbolizing the data stored within them, comprising the sum of our accumulated knowledge, yet minkisi also are imbued with knowledge and protect their believers.
Increasingly dependent upon them, we rely less on memory and more on electronic, digitalized assistance. They serve as our surrogate memory, our surrogate brain, as we matter-of-factly download or outsource what we once would have stored in our own minds. The post-human might be a robot but it might also be partially human, altered by bionic prostheses for enhanced capabilities, illustrated by Lay’s striking, fanciful “Life Support” series begun in 2008, the head framed in a steel scaffold with the emblems of digitalized empowerment. The machine is no longer merely in the garden, the pastoral disrupted by technology and industrialization, it has attached itself to our very being. Artificial intelligence is ascendant, and how the machine, humans and the metaphysical will co-exist, if at all, is yet to be determined.
In 2010, Lay began to make digital collages, a series that is ongoing and a significant part of her present production. They are some of her most visually stunning works to date, often large scaled, like wall tapestries or scroll paintings. Made in an array of seductive colors as well as more muted, more monochromatic ventures, the images derive from computer circuit boards repeated multiple times to form an intricate pattern, sometimes including small images of her heads. She prints her digital images on archival paper using archival ink; the support is archival museum board with MDF backed by wood that she later changed to a TYVEK backing, making them virtually indestructible. The titles, such as CADAC CMV0-2 #2, 2009, the especially beautiful SFL40V0-#17 17, 2010, that simulates an opulent, finely woven Persian carpet, SFL40V0-94V00#19, 2012, inspired by Persian miniatures or KB095-3, 2014, inspired by Tibetan thangkas, are the numbers stamped onto the particular circuit board used but also seem to be part of an elaborate (and impossible to remember) encryption schema of a futuristic archive.
BA-E-V0-A #6, 2010, is cosmic, with images from the Hubble telescope–stars, moons, planets, the drift of galaxies—embedded into a ground of digital circuitry, from dim to incandescent, the fine lines like delicate wisps of filigree. Her recent wall hangings are remarkably vivid, the colors ramped up, the hues artificial, electrified—hot pinks, brilliant oranges, swimming pool turquoises –as if they had all been plugged in, charged up, the gleaming metal leaf in areas providing three orders of light: the artificial, the real and the metaphoric.
She also started a “Processor” series in 2012. Silvery in color, it loops back to the “Icons” of the late 90s and early aughts. These are also near squares, somewhat larger, and conflate formal geometric shapes with mandalas and schematized images of the cosmos, as well as with a processor, the key component of a computing device that permits it to function. With it, came a “Synaptics” series that re-examines the earlier “Myth + Memory” works. Lay addresses technological transformations speculatively, poetically, as propositions and narratives. They are harbingers of a future full of doubts, conflicts, but also possibilities, viewed with the trepidation of Mary Shelley recounting her dream of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the [monstrous] thing he had put together” but also with the glee of a Prospero, “enthralled by a brave new world that has such people in it,” the dystopian contending with the utopian, the virtual with the real. As Gauguin and Thoreau have both asked, as Lay also inquires: where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
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Goodman, Jonathan; Sculpture Magazine, September, Review of Aljira Exhibition
SCULPTURE MAGAZINE: PAT LAY (2016)
By Jonathan Goodman
Originally published in Sculpture magazine, September 2016, Vol. 35, No. 7
Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ
Pat Lay, who retired not long ago from the MFA program she founded at Montclair State University, recently mounted a major retrospective at Aljira, a prominent nonprofit space in downtown Newark. Curated by Lilly Wei, the show covered decades of work, from late-’60s clay pieces to works made as recently as 2015. There was a good mix of three-dimensional work, including archival prints whose exquisite symmetry is constructed from computer-parts imagery, but Lay has acknowledged that the true turn of her work is sculptural.
The show included a fine array of three-dimensional objects, ranging from a tile-work installation influenced by Noguchi to African-inspired totems, to gender-ambiguous cyborg heads, from whose crowns issue Medusa-like wires with variously colored wrappings. Lay’s art is endlessly various, which indicates a curious cast of mind. She combines the very old with the very new in ways that push contemporary art forward, toward a statement that covers art history as well as contemporary sensibilities.
An untitled 1975 work, shown in the Whitney Biennial that same year, recalls Noguchi’s sunken garden at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Like Noguchi’s garden, Lay’s (smaller) installation has images on top of a flat surface — in this case, a plane made of ceramic tile. A circle of brown cloth, a pyramid, and a translucent box embellish the exterior, complicating the plainness of the surface. Done some 40 years ago, it is strong and independent interpretation of the Japanese sculptor, yet it doesn’t presage the work that Lay would produce in the future.
Among her most interesting and strongest works is Mythoi (1996), a group of fired-clay totems, first shown outdoors in Oslo, Norway. Consisting of more than 10 tall, narrow forms composed of repeating elements, the installation looks like a combination of high Modernism and African art. The fusion is genuinely potent. Installed towards the back of the gallery, Mythoi established an atmosphere of ritual power not often found in Western sculpture.
Lay’s high-tech heads have a close precedent in Raoul Hausmann’s 1919 bust Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head), which is made of wood, leather, aluminum, brass, and cardboard with various objects. In a similar manner, Lay’s androgynous clay heads are adorned with colored wire and computer parts, as in Transhuman Personae No. 11 (2010). Supported by a computer tripod, the wires fall to the ground. In conversation, Lay has indicated the influence of African nkisi, sculptural objects inhabited by spirits. These nkisi are for spirits of our time. Lay, who began to travel later in life, looks to other cultures for inspiration, successfully transforming influence into resonant statements for contemporary African audiences.