Frances Stark - Greengrassi

Frances Stark
My Best Thing
Alvin Balkind Gallery
February 3 to April 15, 2012
Frances Stark was born in 1967, Newport
Beach, California. She studied at San
Francisco State University, San Francisco
and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena,
California. She now lives and works in Los
Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include
the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge,
Massachusetts and Centre for Contemporary
Art, Glasgow (both 2010); Nottingham
Contemporary (2009); Portikus, Frankfurt/
Main and Wiener Secession, Vienna (both
2008); FRAC – Bourgogne, Dijon (2007);
Artspace, San Antonio (2006). Recent group
exhibitions include Restless Empathy, Aspen
Art Museum, The Page, Kimmerich, New York;
For the blind man in the dark room looking
for the black cat that isn’t there, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Detroit (all 2010); Picturing
the Studio, School of the Art Institute of
Chicago; Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., Institute
of Contemporary Arts, London; The Space
of Words, MUDAM: Musée d’Art Moderne
Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2009);
Pretty Ugly, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New
York; Word Event, Kunsthalle Basel and the
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York
(2008). My Best Thing was presented at the
54 th Venice Biennale and has subsequently
been screened at Walter Phillips Gallery,
The Banff Centre, Alberta, The Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London and Marc Foxx
Gallery, Los Angeles.
To accompany the exhibition a publication
with a major new text by Mark Godfrey,
Curator, Tate Modern, London, has been
produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery in
collaboration with the Walter Phillips Gallery,
The Banff Centre, dedicated exclusively to My
Best Thing. Please see reception for details.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents My Best Thing (2011),
Frances Stark’s first feature-length animation. Initially presented
in ILLUMInations at the 54 th Venice Biennale, this recent work
has rapidly gained critical attention. Using transcripts of an
on-line relationship between Stark and two random strangers,
the video unfolds to build an intimate portrait of the artist and
her creative process. It continues Stark’s ongoing concerns with
expectation and gender infused with notions of doubt, anxiety
and musings on the general state of things. While arguably
best known for her works on paper, where such issues are seen
through the lens of writing, drawing and collage, her videos and
performance pieces likewise comprise a forceful component in
her overall artistic proposition.
In My Best Thing two naked online avatars are pictured, a
man and a woman, playmobil-like figures wearing discrete fig
leaves for modesty. The video traces the development of their
relationship beginning as a series of discussions revolving around
standard chat-room flirtatiousness. These encounters then give
way to talk about film, art and subjectivity, touching on ideas
surrounding history, politics and the very act of art-making itself.
As the work progresses between two people initially unfamiliar
to each other, the sexually oriented chat evolves into talk of
them becoming potential collaborators. However, at this point of
heightened acquaintance their relationship comes to an abrupt
halt and conversation with a second person ensues. The artist’s
exchange with each of her on-line counterparts is poignant
and oen comic, enhanced by the animation itself where Stark
used Xtranormal, freely available 3D movie-making soware, to
render herself and her opposite number as cartoons, speaking in
computer-generated accents transferred from actual dialogue.
This is a compelling work that humorously and touchingly
reflects on our changing world; a place where relationships
mediated by technology challenge the usual understanding
of how we interact with each other and allows new forms
of behaviour to emerge. Stark continues to remind us of
the complexity inherent in everyday encounters. Ideas of
performance and role-playing, the anonymity versus intimacy
implicit within the artist’s animation, are examined and brought
into the wider philosophical discourse of subjectivity where
strangers can so easily transform into confidantes.
Opposite
Frances Stark My Best Thing (2011)
Digital video, duration 99 minutes
Courtesy the artist, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles;
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City;
Greengassi, London; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne

Yablonsky, Linda, Frances Stark’s Best Thing, The New York Times Style Magazine,
NYC, October 26, 2011.
Artifacts | Frances Stark’s Best Thing
Nadya Wasylko, courtesy of the artistThe artist Frances Stark, at right, with Skerrit Bwoy, from “Put a Song in
Your Thing,” a work in progress to be performed at the Abrons Art Center on Nov. 4.
Some people like to talk during sex. Others get their kicks by talking about it. And
then there are those who would rather just watch.
The Los Angeles artist Frances Stark has something for everyone in “My Best
Thing,” a compulsively watchable, feature-length digital animation now playing
at MoMA P.S. 1that goes well beyond the whisper of sweet nothings. Clad either
in fig leaves or briefs, the wide-eyed, stock C.G.I. dolls on screen re-enact the
flirtations that Stark, 44, carried on with two 20-something Italian men whom
she met at different times last year while taking random strolls through a video
sex chat site.
Though they often talk dirty, the characters’ spoken and texted exchanges
constantly digress into other channels of their very different lives, taking the film
deep into the heart of intimate human relationships. Nietzsche, Fellini, Glenn

Gould, Picasso, political protest and the suicides of writers like David Foster
Wallace all become part of each pair’s ardent, LOL–infused “post-coital” banter,
as do their families, careers and Stark’s responsibilities as both the mother of an
8-year-old boy and a professor at the University of Southern California.
“Show me more,” says Marcello, her first suitor, once the two have repaired to the
privacy of Skype. “Wow,” he says, though in his accent it comes out as, “Whoa.”
“I’m old,” she replies. “So you have to be forgiving.”
“Heh-heh,” he says. “I like mature women.”
And so it goes, as the minimal small talk and virtual fondling escalate over 10
episodes into a poignant, funny and revealing narrative of desire and self-doubt.
Though the computer-generated voices lack emotion, the figures’ flashing eyes,
pregnant pauses and twisting dance movements convey a remarkable depth of
feeling.
Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown Enterprise
A scene from the Frances Stark video “My Best Thing.”
Stark is a writer as well as a visual artist, and much of her work to date involves a
struggle for words as well as meaning. “Why is it I always want to explain to you
everything?” Stark asks Marcello, occasionally resorting to Google’s translator to
make sure she understands him, while he apologizes for his awkward English. But
the two speak volumes through their bodies.
“I got fascinated by feeling so intensely for people I didn’t know,” Stark said in a
Skype conversation the other day. “I was never into Internet sex, but because it’s
a form of seduction that took place through typing and interacting visually, I got
hooked.”

So do many viewers of “My Best Thing” — to my mind, Stark’s best thing yet. In
an early episode, she tells her young suitor that she is in “a heavy dancehall
phase,” and shows him a music video of the high-speed, violently sexual
Jamaican dance style called daggering. Her obsession with it led to “Put a Song in
Your Thing,” a live show that Stark will stage next week in New York as a
commission from the Performa 11 biennial of performance art.
Skerrit Bwoy, a “hype man” and D.J. for the dancehall band Major Lazer
distinguished by his yellow mohawk, will join her onstage with a “BigBox” sound
system rigged by the British artist Mark Leckey, who won the Turner Prize in
2008. Mostly, though, the show will take place on a screen, where Stark’s Skype
chats will again appear, along with projections from her current show at the Mills
College Art Museum. This time, the performers will read the texts aloud as lyrics
for the dozen songs in the show, which Stark says brings it close to a silent movie
experience. “It’s a way of throwing my voice,” she said. “I’m there, but not really.”
One tune is a piano piece composed by her second Italian discovery in “My Best
Thing.” Stark made the video as her contribution to the current Venice Biennale,
a decision played out in the course of the piece, when she asks Marcello, a
filmmaker, to collaborate with her on the project. “I was willing to do whatever it
took to get him here,” Stark said. “We had an interesting story, and I wanted to
tell it but didn’t know how.”
At that point, she discovered Xtranormal.com, a Web site supplying animators
with characters, voices and music, and went to work, despite Marcello’s
subsequent disappearance after he was badly beaten in a Roman political protest.
Her biggest problem then was what to tell her boyfriend, Stuart Bailey, who is one
half of Dexter Sinister, a design and publishing collaborative. “I told him that
Chat Roulette had become part of my thinking,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s
his favorite thing in the world.”
Frances Stark’s “My Best Thing” is on view through January 2012 at MoMA P.S.
1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City. She will perform “Put a Song in Your
Thing” on Nov. 4 at the Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand Street. “The Whole of All
the Parts as Well as the Parts of All the Parts” continues through Dec. 11 at Mills
College Art Museum, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, Calif.

Princenthal, Nancy, Frances Stark, Art in America, NYC, January 4, 2011.
FRANCES STARK
by Nancy Princenthal
The Internet Age is widely unde the apogee of image culture, but the medium in which we
swim, buoyed by waves of chat, posts and tweets, seems increasingly to be the written word.
Or so it appears in the company of Frances Stark.
Frances Stark: Portrait of the Artist as Full-on Bird, 2004, collage on casein on canvas board, 20 by 24 inches.
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin.
Like more than a few artists of her generation, Stark (born 1967 in Newport Beach) often
incorporates writing in her work, which was surveyed recently at the MIT List Visual Arts
Center in Cambridge. She has also published her texts independently in various magazines,
catalogues and freestanding books, and has penned the odd exhibition review. A cross
between fluidly interdisciplinary commentary and wry interior monologue, Starkʼs prose
showed up at the List Center not only as content in her drawings and collages but also in the
worksʼ titles; in wall labels, which were generally restricted to the usual identifying information
but sometimes digressed rather freely; and, most prominently, in the exhibition catalogue,
which is not a conventional document (there are no illustrations) but an anthology of her
essays, graced very occasionally with exceedingly terse marginal notations by the surveyʼs
curator, João Ribas. Starkʼs relish for marginalia is confirmed by the title of both book and
exhibition, This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the
mind, which derives from a comment written in the margin of a used copy of Alain Robbe-
Grilletʼs 1955 novel The Voyeur. Stark transcribed the annotated page of this lucky find into a
drawing in 1995.
As this titular work suggests, there was a bounty of odd references on offer in the exhibition
and its accompanying book. But above all, we got to know Stark—and generally felt fortunate
to be in her company. The show opened with several biographical notes, among
them Untitled (Self-portrait/Autobiography), 1992, a red carbon copy of her college transcripts
(good grades predominate; there is one less successful semester). There were also a couple
of nearly blank pieces of paper in the first room, variously enhanced (hand-ruled lines, a one-

line note from a friend), suggesting the outset of any routinely terrifying effort at writing, or artmaking.
Bookishness was instated as a theme with a handful of found and altered volumes.
The transcribed page of Robbe-Grillet shared a wall with altered copies of Henry
Millerʼs Sexus (1992) andTropic of Cancer (1993), and with illegible drawings of two pages
from John Deweyʼs Art as Experience(Having an Experience, 1995).
Among other signature motifs introduced early on are birds; Portrait of the Artist as a Full-On
Bird (2004) includes a collaged photo of a cockatoo. Stark explained to me in an interview
that she favors birds because, like marginalia, they perch lightly on the edges of things,
serving as points of entry—or, more to the point, re-entry. (In The Old In and Out, 2002, a
collage/drawing of two birds mating, this function serves a simple joke.) Peacocks, which
variously flaunt and modestly fold their feathers in several works, need no explanation as
metaphor.
Many artists depict birds, none of them evoked by Stark with any specificity. But often,
interartist connections are freely acknowledged. One label explained that a red-painted
wooden dining chair of vaguely Asian design traces its history to what is said to be the oldest
Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, the city where Stark lives; in recent decades the
restaurant became an art bar, and then Jorge Pardoʼs studio. It was Pardo (whom Stark has
known for 20 years) who provided her with the chair, which he dismembered; Evan Holloway
helped her see that sheʼd need wooden splints to put it back together, duct tape not being up
to the job. Its feet propped on plaster blocks, the chair (2001) is part of a series called “The
Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable Work of Art,” a title borrowed from an essay by
Daniel Buren published inOctober in 1971. (This last bit of information comes not from the
label, but from Starkʼs 1999 book of essays,The Architect & The Housewife.) Other
friendships attested to include Olafur Elíassonʼs, in the form of a note he sent Stark
proclaiming that a blank piece of paper is not enough (It is not enouff, 1998).
Stark cautions against reading all this collegiality as a testament to the special community
spirit of the L.A. art scene. While she confirms a sense of “invisible connectedness,” and
there is an undeniable tendency toward promiscuity in the matter of social as well as textual
and visual allusions in her work, she is also at pains to demonstrate how much of her time is
taken up with perfectly chaste domesticity. Starkʼs home life can be glimpsed in Cat
Videos (1999-2002), which features feline antics in alternation with those of two little boys—
her son and a friend of his. The kids watch David Bowie on a laptop and groove, four-yearoldishly,
to the music. Stark says she didnʼt intend to make an artwork when she turned on
the camera, but was delighted to find it had recorded what she describes as a “perfect essay
on cultural reproduction”—i.e., small boys acting out the pop-cultural myth of Bowie as Ziggy
Stardust, touching down to greet the planet.
The sense of hominess in these videos is expanded in several large collages featuring
cabinets, mirrors and flowers. Foyer Furnishing (2006) is a large (more than 7-foot-high)
drawing/collage that features all three: the mirror (made of Mylar) reflects potted flowers
drawn in gouache; a collaged bag slumped by the cabinetʼs side holds actual printed matter
(student papers, bills). In To a Selected Theme (Fit to Print), 2007, a long-stemmed
chrysanthemum, in a vase on a table, leans its head toward the cover of a David Hockney
catalogue on which the artist is seen lounging with trademark insouciance.
Most of the work that was shown is on paper, occasionally mounted on canvas and/or panel.
Scale varies widely, and while a few compositions are offhand, the majority are executed with
considerable care; text is sometimes cut out and set into its support letter by letter, and the
drawing is deft throughout. But self-doubt always threatens. Oh god, Iʼm so
embarrassed (2007) makes use of a poster for a 1994 Sean Landers exhibition on which that
irremediably self-demeaning artist wrote, “I regret to inform you that I could not come up with
an idea for the invitation card. . . . Something is terribly wrong with me. . . . Oh god Iʼm so
embarrassed.” Stark helps demonstrate the perfect ordinariness of his mortification by pairing

the poster with a mundane accessory: an umbrella parked in a stand (though that could allow
Surrealist or sexual readings as well).
Speaking for herself, Stark asks, in the title of a work of 2008, Why should you not be able to
assemble yourself and write? The question also appears on a piece of paper held in the
subjectʼs lap, which we view from above; in this drawing, the seated figureʼs feet drift upward
and her head anchors the drawingʼs bottom. In I must explain, specify, rationalize, classify,
etc. (2007), the subject—again, it is presumably the artist—stands on a chair on casters, not
the steadiest of supports. Her back to us, she substantially obscures a long text, holding a
builderʼs level under the word “nose” in the passage, “I must explain, enabling the reader to
find the workʼs head, nose, fingers, legs, . . .” There will also be things that I donʼt like (2007)
finds the subject standing on the same chair, struggling to hang a garland of big Mylar
sequins; the titular declaration, printed in yellow vinyl letters, blares beside her.
The text in I must explain (again), 2009, covers a big sheet of paper that extends to the floor;
it is held by the outstretched hands of a silhouetted woman drawn on the ground sheet—a
figure nearly concealed by her own lengthy declamation. This drawing shared the showʼs final
room with works that are, in one way or another, nearly all time-based. The four examples
shown from the series “Wisdom, Stupidity, Ugliness” (2008) each features the actual moving
hands of a working clock, along with the image of a book and the profile of a progressively
dejected woman, who proceeds from upright but leaning to slumped and then bent double: a
day in the life. Toward a score for “Load every rift with ore” (2010) is a very large (nearly 80by-90-inch)
collage that centers on an image of a music stand and features several printed
fragments that could serve, in a pinch, as scores. This work faced a freestanding black dress,
its skirt adorned with a massive dial modeled on an old-fashioned rotary phone. Stark wore
this costume in a 2009 performance, about which no information was given. As shown, it is
among the least accessible works in a survey that otherwise mostly manages to avoid the
annoying trait common in much strenuously casual, neo-conceptual work, of talking over the
audienceʼs head.
Another time-based medium in Starkʼs repertory is PowerPoint, which she uses to wickedly
funny effect in the nearly half-hour-long presentation Structures that Fit My Opening (2006).
Shown on a laptop, it offers, as in some loopy version of off-site higher ed, a rambling
monologue, given in title frames, and a range of imagery dominated by photographs of the
artistʼs home. The intermittent soundtrack features a typewriter clacking in use, a ticking
clock, a ringing phone and cymbals striking to note the occasional punch line. One droll
anecdote concerns an exchange of letters between Stark and an editor requesting a text; the
artist declines, but her (written) refusal is accepted as a contribution, for which she is paid
before she can explain the misunderstanding.
In Starkʼs boundary-less working life, such incidents seem to occur with some regularity. Mild
confusion reigns, untidiness is accepted, things spill. Efforts are made to straighten out the
mess, and duly documented: witness, perhaps, an otherwise hard to explain image of a
vacuum cleaner, Hoover in a Corner (2006). But it remains a struggle, really, to keep it all
straight—to maintain distinct professional and personal identities; to project a voice
distinguished by its candor while protecting the speakerʼs privacy and integrity; and to be sure
that what is said matches what is meant.
The buzzing intertextuality of Starkʼs work is more closely related to the densely referential
installations of such artists as Rachel Harrison and Carol Bove than to drawings or paintings
by other wordsmiths like Graham Gilmore and Raymond Pettibon. Starkʼs kinship with rogue
theorists/historians becomes most apparent in the writings collected in This could become a
gimick [sic]. Ribasʼs exceedingly spare and recondite interventions, none more than a few
words long, make for an amusing contrast with Starkʼs voluble and often diffident prose. In
one essay she acknowledges being flummoxed when people ask me ʻWhat is your work like?ʼ
upon my foolishly having revealed to them that Iʼm an artist. I feel like my non-answer is often

misinterpreted as ʻIʼm too deep to tell you,ʼ but usually Iʼm just thinking a description of what I
do is going to make what I do sound really un-worth doing.
In the margin, Ribas writes, “A literature of refusal” and names the writers Robert Musil and
Robert Walser; below, he adds, “Malevich and laziness.” But then Stark herself is just as likely
to quote Musil (a touchstone), Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, Avital Ronell, Paul de Man and
dozens of highbrow others.
Strikingly, the bookʼs last essay ends with a little meditation about the shaky hold our minds
have on the information delivered by our senses. Starkʼs friend Sharon Lockhart, who made a
well-known series of photographic portraits of young adolescents at Pine Flat, Calif., mistook
a suicidal teen who appears in a film by Larry Clark for one of her subjects. Lockhart “had to
rewatch the scene many times before she realized, with some sense of relief I suppose, she
was mistaken.” Stark concludes, “It is this double take, this impossibly unfavorable crossover
between two worlds seemingly so far from each other that moved me to write what you just
read the way that I did.” It is a conclusion of considerable ambiguity.
Robbe-Grilletʼs The Voyeur (whence the marginal note from which the book and exhibition
took its title) is, typically for the author, a shifty novel. Its protagonist is short on affect and
lacks any grasp of temporal reality, but he has the visual acuity of a raptor. His experiences
are described in hypnotic detail, an account that is repetitious, inconsistent and altogether
untrustworthy. Stark, by contrast, invites our faith in her emotional and intellectual honesty.
But she also lets us know that sheʼs not a completely reliable narrator either. And if, as
readers of her prose—or viewers of her art—we are tempted to add our second guesses and
interpretive digressions to Ribasʼs and her own, we find ourselves in a peculiarly unstable
position. Itʼs a very odd place from which to write criticism—which may be part of Starkʼs
exceptionally canny strategy.
“Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of
the mind” was on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 22, 2010-
Jan. 2, 2011.
NANCY PRINCENTHAL is a writer who lives in New York.

Martin Herbert, David Hockney & Frances Stark, Frieze, #128,
London, Jan / Feb 2010.
David Hockney & Frances Stark -­‐ Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK
David Hockney, A Lawn Sprinker (1967)
You’re opening a kunsthalle in the UK’s seventh-­‐largest city, two hours from London.
You have several publics to please: your institution needs to speak to the locals, but
without being provincial. So you imprint the façade of your striking, green and gold,
Caruso St John-­‐designed building in the city’s Lace Market area with a filigree pattern

sourced from lace found in a 19th-­‐century time-­‐capsule dug up on the site – but you also
get Matthew Brannon in to decorate the café. And then, having remembered not to fill
the place with Scandinavian abstraction, you launch with a crafty, diversely intersecting
double-­‐header. A youngish, art-­‐world-­‐approved (but not over-­‐exposed) Californian who
specializes in expressing assured anxiety and febrile joys through spacious, funky
collage; and the UK’s most beloved living artist, seen here – in a show focusing tightly on
1960–8, when he lived variously in England and California – at his edgiest and, arguably,
most fulsomely inventive.
Assembled by Nottingham Contemporary director Alex Farquharson and curator Jim
Waters, the David Hockney show (‘A Marriage of Styles’) plays in reverse: beginning
with the bright, familiar, sun-­‐dazzled expat in California, it backtracks to trace the
Yorkshireman’s scuffling route towards this easeful world of male bodies in Beverly
Hills showers and blue, blue pools. In 1960, while a student at London’s Royal College of
Art, Hockney made his first painting about homosexuality: the small, mustard-­‐toned
semi-­‐abstraction Queer, its primary elements a black star and the barely legible titular
epithet. It would be seven more years before gay relations were legal in the UK, and six
before Hockney was lithely sketching men sharing beds for his series of etchings
‘Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy’ (1966). In this installation, those
years reflect a steady emboldening in both subject matter and form.
In the dual figure composition We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), Hockney adapts
the physiognomic deformations and sensuously feral paintwork of 1950s De Kooning
into cartoonish tenderness, and stitches the composition together with the title phrase
(in a child’s handwriting), a wry homoerotic repurposing of a Walt Whitman line. By
1962 Hockney had spent time in America, as documented in the comic cautionary tale of
his Hogarth-­‐updating etchings suite, ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (1961–3). The First Marriage (A
Marriage of Styles I) (1962), with its reshaped image of a friend beside an Egyptian
statue, roomy composition and attendant palm tree, anticipates the warm-­‐climate ease
and stylistic intransigence of his later Los Angeles paintings. It’s a little sad to say
farewell to the giddy mélanges of Hockney’s early style, and his exuberant obsessions
with the young Cliff Richard and beefcake models. As he evolves into the deceptively
serene architect of A Bigger Splash (1967) and its beautiful, lesser-­‐known cousin A
Lawn Sprinkler (1967) – LA gardens in perpetual mid-­‐afternoon, subtended by a
constant need to cool hot bodies, and hot earth – it’s underlined that Hockney is,
essentially, a tenacious problem-­‐solver. How to paint the dynamics of water and to talk
about homosexuality in art are problems of different magnitudes, of course. What
matters is that Hockney, boldly and satisfyingly, solves them.
‘But what’ – to quote the full title of the exhibition that complements Hockney’s – ‘of
Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like
to lend a sheet?’ Looking at A Bigger Splash, one can imagine one of Joan Didion’s
frazzled rich housewives standing motionless inside the bungalow with a fistful of
tranquilizers; and Stark’s persona in her art sometimes suggests an equivalent to the
self-­‐image Didion presents in her journalism and fictional manquées: the sort of highly-­‐
strung, hyper-­‐aware woman who used to get called ‘neurasthenic’. Underneath, though,
both writer and artist are likely tough as old boots.
Here, in a Farquharson-­‐helmed array that underlines correspondences between Stark
and Hockney (beyond the latter featuring on a private view invitation in Stark’s To a
Selected Theme (Fit to Print), 2007) – LA, self-­‐exposure, theatricality, the invention or
leveraging of an artistic persona, reverence for literature – we get a meld of recap and
recent work. From the outset, Stark has twisted the Modernist permission to flaunt
subjectivity, exposing thought’s fraying edges, its quicksilver succours. Momentarily

Lifted (2001) features the repeated handwritten phrase ‘momentarily lifted out of a
tangle of rational intentions’, and it’s these paradoxical transcendences that Stark seems
to chase and celebrate, finding them most obviously in literature: And brrrptzzap* the
subject (2005) features a peacock whose tail is made up of pages of repeated letters and,
it appears, pages from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–42). In the
painting/collage A Woman and a Peacock (2008), a graphical Stark doppelgänger
encounters another specimen on a ledge or precipice: the bodies of both artist and bird
are made up of collaged scraps of exhibition flyers and art works. Peacocks are a double-­‐
edged Stark motif, speaking of self-­‐display and the sin of pride; of what it means to
parade one’s mental workings as art.
Even when it features no text, Stark’s art is partly one of offhandedly elegant and airy
compositional instinct, but mostly one of deftly judged voice. It risks, however,
becoming all intonation, all twitchy character. Seemingly she recognizes this: Stupidity
(Pink) (2009), a painted silhouette of a hand appearing to hold a clutch of real fabrics
and obscure papers on a pink background, and The Inchoate Incarnate (2009), a trio of
black costumes in the shape of giant, old-­‐fashioned dial telephones, open onto
ambiguous emotional territory. One of the phone-­‐dresses is pointedly subtitled
‘Summon Me and I’ll Probably Come’. The key word, sustaining Stark’s delicate balance
of light-­‐headedness and grit, is ‘probably’.

Called upon (Same thing over and over), 2007.
Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Marcus Leith
Mousse 26 ~ Frances Stark
LOS ANGELES
The Letter Writer, Frances Stark
by Andrew berArdini
What is a love letter? The delicious agony of laboriously searching for just the right words,
using the subtlest precision, though language will never be able to express the scent or the
gestures of a loved one. To Andrew Berardini, the work of Frances Stark is an enormous,
beautiful love poem in three dimensions, and she is a writer who writes in space…
124

writers Mentioned in the Frances Stark’s Collected Writings: 1993-2003
Oscar Wilde
Friedrich Nietzsche
Robert Musil
P.D. Ouspenskij
G.I. Gurdjieff
Virginia Woolf
E.H. Gombrich
Gaston Bachelard
Emily Dickinson
Howard Singerman
John Keats (non IL John
Keats)
Dorothy Parker
Pierre Bourdieu
Rudolf Steiner
(alcuni sono ufficialmente artisti, altri sono storici, critici, seguaci della new
Age; per i nostri scopi sono tutti scrittori)
Other writers She Mentioned to Me as being important to Her not Listed
Above:
Witold Gombrowicz
Ingeborg Bachmann
Jonathan Pylypchuk
Lane Relyea
J.D. Salinger
Gustave Flaubert
David Foster Wallace
Curtis White
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Jürgen Habermas
Jimmie Durham
Raymond Pettibon
Novalis
Joan Didion
Goethe
Thomas Bernhard
Henry Miller
...the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. but this simply means
that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
Ludwig wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
in place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
A Single Paragraph on the Work of Frances Stark Before We Start Talking About
Other Things:
Los Angeles-based artist Frances Stark marks in her work the complex and
beautiful struggle of how to clearly express the exact dimensions of thought
and emotion. realized primarily through texts and fragile line drawings (as
well as performance, collage, and paintings). Stark’s intensely personal practice
reveals an artist engaging with literature, philosophy, and art history and how
these effect the process of making art and the practice of everyday life. The
effect of seeing an exhibition by her is similar to reading a novel of ideas all at
once. To Stark, a thousand words is worth a picture.
Chorus member in special position, 2008.
Courtesy: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin.
Los Angeles ~ Frances Stark
125
Chorus girl folding self in half, 2008.
Courtesy: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin.
§ § §
All writing to be read by someone else is a kind of a letter. One person writing
to another. From me to you.
This essay that i’m writing and you’re reading, and most writing found in magazines,
is usually of the more impersonal variety. re: Subject. dear Sirs. To
whom it may concern. Some writing published in the world are actual letters,
from one single person to another. The epistolary novel. Love poetry.
Though i’m sure some poets sit down and conjure an ideal beauty, as (to me,
boring and sort of weird) exercise in formal strategy of love, but love (except
for the naive) isn’t an ideal, it’s a specific. we love the grace of our lover’s long
hands as they fold in weave in a conversation. we love the way they stand on
their toes, naked body leaning forward, arched as the arms stretch up to close
a window. we love their smell, wholly unique, and always difficult to articulate
in words, but worth trying: the mix of cloves and motor oil, or like if a ship carrying
cinnamon sank off the coast of a Caribbean sugar plantation just as they
began to burn the cane, or freshly mown grass and old books. i could go on.
we know our lover’s smell as only a lover can, even if it’s impossible to describe
it accurately. it’s really specific though and us, writers of love letters, minor
poets all, try and fail to put it into words. The poems get printed and reprinted,
and sometimes centuries later we learn what a horny englishman quill penned
to his desired woman in english 201a in an anthology with pages as thin as tissue
paper. Perhaps we imagine ourselves the lover, memorizing lines to recite
to the Literature major we’re trying to seduce sitting next to us in class – her
blouse open showing the smooth, dark skin of her chest, his sensual lips pursed
in thought. Or we image ourselves the object of affection, the surge of being
desired, the look of lust. A little displaced, but poetry is meaningful when we
make it meaningful for each of us, individually.
i’m going to quote a bit of writing from Frances Stark. i hate performing these
kinds of minute vivisections on language, but i think if i take it apart i can show
you something perhaps beautiful, i promise, the words will return unharmed
from whence they came.
“One hundred years ago, my favorite artist, author Rubert Musil, wrote this in a
letter friend: ‘Art’ for me is only a means of reaching a higher level of ‘self.’”
“One hundred years ago”
A simple time stamp but it’s exactitude implies a parallel, Musil then, Stark
now.
“my favorite artist, author Robert Musil”
robert Musil (november 6, 1880 – April 15, 1942), an Austrian writer who’s
most famous book, The Man Without Qualities, is a hyperobsessive detailing of
the Viennese ruling class right before the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed,
widely considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century. To see a
writer described as a favorite artist is telling, though we’ll get to that more
later.

I must explain,
specify, rationalize,
classify, etc.,
2007. Courtesy: Thea
Westreich and Ethan
Wagner, New York.
Toward a score for
“Load every rift with
ore”, 2010. Courtesy:
the artist and Marc
Foxx Gallery, Los
Angeles.
Mousse 26 ~ Frances Stark
126
The New Vision, 2008.
Courtesy: Galerie Daniel
Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin.
The Inchoate Incarnate:
Bespoke costume for the
artist, 2009. Courtesy:
Galerie Daniel Buchholz,
Cologne/Berlin.

129 Surface Screen
Projection Production
Still (Screen), 2006.
Courtesy: Overduin and
Kite, Los Angeles.
Los Angeles ~ Frances
Stark
Los Angeles ~ Frances Stark
127

“wrote this in a letter to a friend”
A letter! And to a friend, an intimate correspondence.
“‘Art’ for me is only a means of reaching a higher level of ‘self.’”
Musil’s book describes things with the exactitude of engineer, as if here were
trying to capture the exact thing that he meant, rather than an approximation,
a loose synonym, a flat cliche that conveyed little. To say the thing that you exactly
mean to say is almost impossible, to find the precise shade of nuance makes
communication almost impossible. The Man Without Qualities at some 7,000
pages was never completed. Through the book, in the face of all this precision,
there’s a yearning for the mysterious and mystical qualities of art.
it’s a simple sentence, containing within its nouns (years, letter, artist, Musil,
friend, art, self ) a miniature of a whole complex and brilliant career stretching
and circling itself for twenty years, that of Frances Stark.
Frances Stark is an artist, the kind of artist (i’m going to go ahead and declare)
that Frances Stark describes robert Musil to be.
There was a moment in the ’60s where artist Marcel broodthaers the poet became
Marcel broodthaers the artist. He took a raft of unsold books of his poems
(forty-four to be exact) and encased them in plaster, making a sculpture (Pense-
Bête [reminder,] 1964).
i used to think about this as literature failing to accommodate a visionary writer.
That the community of readers and the practice of literature could hardly
support (partly intellectually and more truly financially) someone as great as
broodthaers, but that the art world, with its gobs of money, could. (One doesn’t
here even known russian oligarchs or Saudi princes throwing money at literature).
i felt like maybe we were losing some of our best writers to visual art.
After talking to Frances in her studio, i had this moment of epiphany, a flash of
astonishing awareness, that it was not so. writing had colonized art. Literature
had burst its boundaries. The country of Literature had invaded the country of
Art and claimed some of its territory. but when the US purchased Louisiana
from napoleon, it didn’t stop being Louisiana, it went right on being Louisiana,
just under the rubric and rules of a different domain.
Lee Lozano’s piece of notebook paper on a pedestal as a piece of writing may
have easily gotten lost, but here on the pedestal the writing has a presence, the
action she describes on the notebook paper is a stand-in for a performance going
on in the world, not only hers but ours.
There was a moment in the Sixties when painters wanted to break free of the
canvas, eve Hesse and Lee bontecou created works where the flat terrain of
painting was insufficient to contain their ideas about what painting could be,
they forced painting into the third dimension. Perhaps broodthaers did the
same for writing. Though there were others to be sure putting text (and poetical
writing) into art before or at about the same time, broodthaers’ gesture is a
resonating one, a legend of art.
what does it mean to be a writer writing in space? Look at the work of Frances
Stark. Though emerging from a literary tradition, she still wrestles with the
problems of art history, visuality, and space, but through the potency of poetry
and writing, a self realized with words.
i call Frances Stark the letter writer because all of her works feel like a letter,
perhaps even a love letter. She told me that once in school, she collected all her
lover letters from an ex-boyfriend and then sent them to her professors. Using
the raw material of life to deal with the problems of art history (her professors
at the time were all very influential artists).
when composing a love letter, one can agonize over the slightest turn of phrase,
and the agony is a delicious one. Of all the writing i’ve done in my life, of which
there has been a lot, i’ve never put as much energy, emotion, and care as i put
into my love letters. in a love letter you have that agony which derives from the
yearning to be as precise as possible, using the humbling materials of beautiful
language. The best love letters have embedded in them the physical, sexual
yearning of being apart from the object of your desire and in that you’ll use in
their intimate composition everything you have to make yourself felt, to bridge
the divide. As i describe it, i understand it may sound like sentimental drivel,
but if you are as bright and engaged as Frances Stark, the letter grows in size
and shape, it grows to encompass drawing and painting, performance and collage,
all of the media that feel right to express clearly the exact dimensions of
her thought and emotion.
As writing has expanded its domain into the realm of art, Frances Stark’s love
Mousse 26 ~ Frances Stark
128
Above – A Torment Of Follies,
installation view at Secession,
Wien, 2008. Photo: Pez Hejduk.
Down – Oh god, I’m so
embarrassed, 2007. Courtesy:
the artist and greengrassi,
London.

Backside of the Performance, 2007.
Courtesy: the artist. Photo Marcus Leith.
letter to literature to philosophy to art to people
in her life has expanded beyond the confines of a
simple page with words scratched with a pen and
into a lifetime of artmaking. Her exhibition at the
Secession in Vienna in 2008, A Torment of Follies,
dealt primarily with realizing a libretto derived
from witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (another
great novel of the twentieth century) through her
own visual and textual practice as an artist, even in
its realization as an exhibition, Frances Stark appears
as a character giving asides and doubts as she
brings the process of art into realization. its installation
looks like a dress rehearsal for a folly, a theatrical
revue, one in which the agents and armature
of production, the playwright, the director, the
sets, are all still there for the audience to see.
even now her love letter expands, Stark’s most recent
work involves a complex opera (“I’ve Had It!
And i’ve Also Had it!”) realized with musicians
Los Angeles ~ Frances Stark
and a vaudevillian backdrop that changes with
the clarity of a Powerpoint presentation (another
medium she’s used before), drawing from letters
written to her and letters she’s written as well as
life and literature. First realized at the Aspen Art
Museum and to be performed this spring at the
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the opera is performed
by the artist standing on stage in a dress,
designed by her, gauzy and black, and on the front
are the white circle of numbers found on a rotary
phone. The finale involves Frances removing the
dress and standing in black shirt and pants, leaning
over computer and doing a live transcription of
Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”.
And i leave off this essay, my letter to you, with
Lady Gaga’s lines from her song. (How many
of us have leaned on lyrics, and mixed tapes, to
speak our feelings for us?) even in love however,
we still need a break from the work of it some-
di Andrew berArdini
129
times, not to overthink Lady Gaga or Frances
Stark’s referencing Lady Gaga too much, or love
in general perhaps; talking about life and love is
ever always going to be a shadow of physically
and actually being alive. between talking and
dancing, though it doesn’t always happen like
this, i’d rather dance. And when we can’t dance,
the words all there, nearly always ready for us to
use them.
Stop callin’, stop callin’,
I don’t wanna think anymore!
I left my head and my heart on the
dance floor.
Stop callin’, stop callin’,
I don’t wanna talk anymore!
I left my head and my heart on the
dance floor.
Cos’è una lettera d’amore? La sofferenza piacevolissima di rintracciare faticosamente le parole
più adatte, applicare la precisione più sottile nell’uso di una lingua comunque insufficiente a
esprimere l’odore della persona amata o il movimento delle sue mani. L’opera di Frances Stark
è per Andrew Berardini un’enorme, bellissima poesia d’amore in tre dimensioni, e lei
una scrittrice che scrive nello spazio...

Scrittori citati in Collected writings: 1993-2003 di
Oscar Wilde
Friedrich Nietzsche
Robert Musil
P.D. Ouspenskij
G.I. Gurdjieff
Virginia Woolf
E.H. Gombrich
Gaston Bachelard
Emily Dickinson
Howard Singerman
John Keats (non IL John
Keats)
Dorothy Parker
Pierre Bourdieu
Rudolf Steiner
(alcuni sono ufficialmente artisti, altri sono storici, critici, seguaci della new
Age; per i nostri scopi sono tutti scrittori)
Altri scrittori che mi ha detto essere importanti per lei, ma che non sono citati
nell’elenco precedente:
Witold Gombrowicz
Ingeborg Bachmann
...La chiarezza cui aspiriamo è certo una chiarezza completa. Ma questo vuol
dire soltanto che i problemi filosofici devono svanire completamente.
Ludwig wittgenstein, Ricerche filosofiche
Anziché di un’ermeneutica, abbiamo bisogno di un’erotica dell’arte.
Susan Sontag, Contro l’interpretazione
Un singolo paragrafo sull’opera di Frances Stark prima di cominciare a parlare di
altre cose:
L’artista losangelina Frances Stark rappresenta, nella sua opera, il complesso e
bellissimo sforzo richiesto per esprimere in modo chiaro e preciso le dimensioni
del pensiero e dell’emozione. Fatta principalmente di testi e di delicati disegni
al tratto (ma anche di performance, collage e dipinti), la pratica artistica personalissima
di Frances Stark ce la rivela come artista intenta a cimentarsi con la
letteratura, la filosofia e la storia dell’arte e con i modi in cui queste influenzano
il processo di produzione dell’arte e la vita quotidiana. Vedere una sua mostra è
un po’ come leggere un romanzo di idee tutto d’un fiato. Per Stark mille parole
valgono quanto un’immagine.
Compunction’s Work, 2002.
Courtesy: the artist and greengrassi, London.
Jonathan Pylypchuk
Lane Relyea
J.D. Salinger
Gustave Flaubert
David Foster Wallace
Curtis White
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Jürgen Habermas
Jimmie Durham
Raymond Pettibon
Novalis
Joan Didion
Goethe
Thomas Bernhard
Henry Miller
Mousse 26 ~ Frances Stark
130
§ § §
Tutto ciò che viene scritto e che deve essere letto da altri è una sorta di lettera.
Una persona che scrive ad un’altra. da me a te.
il saggio che sto scrivendo e che voi state leggendo, così come la maggior parte
degli scritti che si trovano nelle riviste appartengono, solitamente, alla varietà
più impersonale. re: Oggetto. egregi signori. A chi di competenza. Alcuni
scritti pubblicati nel mondo sono vere lettere, indirizzate da una persona ad
un’altra. il romanzo epistolare. La poesia d’amore.
Sebbene io sia certo che alcuni poeti si siedano e creino dal nulla una bellezza
ideale come esercizio (per me noioso e piuttosto bizzarro) che fa parte di una
strategia formale dell’amore, l’amore stesso (tranne quello ingenuo) non è un
ideale, ma qualcosa di specifico. Amiamo la grazia delle lunghe mani della persona
amata quando gesticolano durante una conversazione. Amiamo quando
lui o lei sta in punta di piedi, il corpo nudo proteso in avanti e le braccia allungate
per chiudere una finestra. Amiamo il suo odore, unico e inconfondibile,
quell’odore così difficile da spiegare a parole, anche se vale la pena di provarci:
un miscuglio di chiodi di garofano e di olio per motori, oppure l’odore di una
nave che portava un carico di cannella e che è affondata nei pressi di una piantagione
caraibica di canna da zucchero proprio mentre cominciavano a bruciare le
canne, oppure ancora il profumo di erba appena falciata e di vecchi libri. Potrei
continuare all’infinito.
Conosciamo l’odore del nostro amato come solo un amante può conoscerlo,
anche se è impossibile descriverlo in modo preciso. Per noi è qualcosa di veramente
specifico e, da scrittori di lettere d’amore, poeti minori, proviamo a dirlo
a parole, ma falliamo miseramente. Le poesie vengono stampate e ristampate,
così capita che, secoli dopo, in un’antologia dalle pagine sottili quanto carta
velina, veniamo a scoprire quel che aveva scritto un inglese arrapato alla donna
da lui desiderata. Magari ci immedesimiamo nell’amante, imparando a memoria
versi da recitare alla laureanda in letteratura che siede accanto a noi in classe – la
camicetta slacciata che lascia intravedere la pelle liscia e bruna del suo petto, le
labbra increspate mentre riflette. O ci immedesimiamo nell’oggetto del desiderio,
nella sensazione impetuosa dell’essere desiderati, nell’immagine della lussuria.
Scostandosi un po’, la poesia acquista significato quando ha un significato
per ciascuno di noi, presi singolarmente.
Voglio citare alcuni passi dei testi di Frances Stark. detesto questo genere di
minuziose vivisezioni del linguaggio, ma penso che, smontandolo, forse potrò
mostrarvi qualcosa di bellissimo. Lo prometto, le parole torneranno illese là da
dove sono venute.
Cent’anni fa, il mio artista preferito, l’autore Rubert Musil, scrisse in una lettera ad
un amico: “L’‘arte’ per me è solo un modo per elevare il ‘sé’”
“Cent’anni fa”
Una semplice indicazione temporale, ma la sua precisione implica un parallelismo
tra Musil allora e Stark oggi.
“il mio artista preferito, l’autore Robert Musil”
robert Musil (6 novembre 1880 – 15 aprile 1942), uno scrittore austriaco, il cui
libro più famoso, L’uomo senza qualità, è una descrizione dettagliata e iperossessiva
della classe dirigente viennese appena prima del collasso dell’impero
Austro-Ungarico, da molti considerato uno dei grandi romanzi del novecento.
Vedere uno scrittore descritto come l’artista preferito è indicativo, anche se di
questo si parlerà più avanti.
“scrisse in una lettera ad un amico”
Una lettera! e ad un amico: una corrispondenza intima.
“L’‘arte’ per me è solo un modo per elevare il ‘sé’”
il libro di Musil descrive le cose con la precisione di un ingegnere, come se
cercasse di catturare proprio ciò che lui aveva in mente anziché un’approssimazione,
un vago sinonimo, un piatto cliché capace di trasmettere ben poco.
dire esattamente la cosa che si aveva in mente è quasi impossibile. La ricerca
della giusta sfumatura rende la comunicazione quasi impossibile. L’uomo senza
qualità, nonostante le sue circa 7.000 pagine non fu mai completato. nel libro, a
dispetto di tutta questa precisione, vi è il desiderio e la ricerca di qualità misteriose
e mistiche nell’arte.
È una frase semplice, che contiene, nei suoi sostantivi (anni, lettera, artista, Musil,
amico, arte, sé), la miniatura di un’intera carriera, complessa e brillante, che
si è estesa e ha girato in tondo per vent’anni: la carriera di Frances Stark.

Surface Screen
Projection Production
Still (Screen), 2006.
Courtesy: Overduin and
Kite, Los Angeles.
Los Angeles ~ Frances Stark
131
Frances Stark è un’artista, il genere d’artista che (sto per spingermi a dichiarare)
lei riconosce in Musil.
C’è stato un momento, negli anni Sessanta, in cui Marcel broodthaers il poeta è
diventato Marcel broodthaers l’artista. Ha comprato una gran quantità di volumi
invenduti delle sue poesie (quarantaquattro per l’esattezza) e li ha racchiusi
nel gesso, creando una scultura (Pense-Bête [Promemoria], 1964).
Pensavo che questo fosse il sintomo di un’incapacità della letteratura di accogliere
uno scrittore visionario, che la comunità dei lettori e l’attività letteraria
avessero difficoltà a sostenere (in parte da un punto di vista intellettuale, ma più
verosimilmente da un punto di vista economico) un grande come broodthaers,
mentre il mondo dell’arte, con tutto il suo denaro, era in grado di farlo.
(del resto non si sente nemmeno di oligarchi russi o di principi sauditi che
spendano fiumi di soldi per la letteratura.) Ho avuto la sensazione che forse
stessimo perdendo alcuni dei nostri migliori scrittori in favore delle arti visive.
dopo aver parlato con Frances nel suo studio, ho avuto un’epifania, un lampo
di stupefacente consapevolezza, e ho capito che non era così. La scrittura aveva
colonizzato l’arte. La Letteratura aveva fatto saltare i muri di separazione e valicato
i propri confini. il paese della Letteratura aveva invaso il paese dell’Arte e
rivendicato una parte del suo territorio. Ma quando gli Stati Uniti acquistarono
la Louisiana da napoleone, quella non smise di essere Louisiana, ma continuò
ad essere Louisiana, semplicemente sottostando alle regole di un diverso dominatore.
il pezzo di carta di quaderno su un piedistallo di Lee Lozano, in quanto brano
di scrittura, avrebbe potuto facilmente andar perso, ma qui, sul piedistallo, la
scrittura possiede una presenza: l’azione che Lee Lozano descrive sulla carta da
quaderno sta a simboleggiare una performance che ha luogo nel mondo, non
solo il suo ma anche il nostro.
C’è stato un momento negli anni Sessanta in cui i pittori hanno voluto liberarsi
dalla tela. eve Hesse e Lee bontecou hanno creato opere dove il piatto terreno
della pittura non era sufficiente per contenere le loro idee sulle possibilità
della pittura stessa. Così hanno forzato la pittura affinché entrasse nella terza
dimensione. Forse broodthaers ha fatto lo stesso con la scrittura. Sebbene vi
siano stati certamente altri che, prima di lui o pressappoco nello stesso periodo,
hanno trasferito testi (e scrittura poetica) nell’arte, il gesto di broodthaers ha
una risonanza particolare, è una leggenda dell’arte.
Che cosa significa essere uno scrittore che scrive nello spazio? Guardate il lavoro
di Frances Stark che, sebbene emerga da una tradizione letteraria, vede la
sua autrice ancora alle prese con i problemi della storia dell’arte – la visualità, lo
spazio – ma attraverso la potenza della poesia e della scrittura, un sé realizzato
con le parole.
Chiamo Frances Stark la scrittrice di lettere perché tutte le sue opere sembrano
una lettera, forse persino una lettera d’amore. Mi ha raccontato che una volta,
quando andava ancora a scuola, ha raccolto tutte le lettere d’amore che un ex
fidanzato le aveva scritto, e le ha spedite ai suoi professori. Usando il materiale
grezzo della vita per discutere dei problemi della storia dell’arte (i suoi professori,
all’epoca, erano tutti artisti influenti).
Quando si scrive una lettera d’amore si possono passare ore ad arrovellarsi su
un giro di frase, e quel rovello risulta delizioso. non ho mai messo tanta energia,
emozione e attenzione nelle cose che ho scritto nella mia vita – e di cose ne
ho scritte parecchie – quanto nelle mie lettere d’amore. in una lettera d’amore
c’è quel tormento che deriva dal desiderio di essere il più precisi possibile,
servendosi degli avvilenti materiali di una lingua pur bellissima. Le migliori
lettere d’amore hanno dentro di sé il desiderio fisico, sessuale, di essere separate
dall’oggetto del proprio desiderio affinché nella composizione si possa usare
tutto ciò che è necessario per farsi percepire, per colmare la distanza. Mentre
descrivo tutto questo mi rendo conto che potrebbero sembrare solo stupidaggini
sentimentali, ma se si è brillanti e impegnati come lo è Frances Stark, la lettera
cresce in grandezza e cambia forma, racchiudendo dentro di sé il disegno e la
pittura, la performance e il collage, tutti media che appaiono adatti ad esprimere
in modo chiaro le esatte dimensioni del suo pensiero e della sua emozione.
Poiché la scrittura ha allargato il suo dominio al reame dell’arte, la lettera
d’amore di Frances Stark alla letteratura, alla filosofia, all’arte e alle persone
della sua vita si è allargata oltre i confini di una singola pagina ricoperta di parole
tracciate a penna, fino ad abbracciare una vita intera di lavoro come artista. La
sua mostra al Palazzo della Secessione a Vienna nel 2008, A Torment of Follies,
trattava essenzialmente della realizzazione di un libretto a partire da Ferdydurke
di witold Gombrowicz (un altro grande romanzo del novecento) servendo-

si della propria pratica artistica, visiva e testuale.
Anche nella realizzazione della mostra, Frances
Stark appare come un personaggio che si lancia in
digressioni e avanza dubbi nel momento stesso in
cui porta a compimento il processo artistico. L’installazione
si presenta come una prova costumi per
uno spettacolo di varietà, di teatro di rivista, in cui
gli agenti e l’armatura della produzione, il drammaturgo,
il regista, le scenografie sono ancora lì
per essere viste dal pubblico.
Anche adesso la sua lettera d’amore si sta espandendo.
il suo lavoro più recente consiste in una
complessa opera (“I’ve Had It! And i’ve Also Had
it!”) realizzata con musicisti e con un fondale da
vaudeville che cambia con la chiarezza di una presentazione
Powerpoint (un altro medium da lei già
utilizzato in precedenza), attingendo da lettere che
le sono state scritte e che lei ha scritto, così come
dalla vita e dalla letteratura. Messa per la prima volta
in scena all’Aspen Art Museum e in programma
per la prossima primavera all’Hammer Museum di
Mousse 26 ~ Frances Stark
Another Chorus Individual (On Aspiration),
2007. Courtesy: the artist.
Los Angeles, l’opera è performata dalla stessa artista,
che sta in piedi in scena, con indosso un abito
nero e trasparente che ha disegnato, mentre di
fronte a lei vi sono i cerchi bianchi dei numeri di un
telefono a disco. nel finale Frances si toglie l’abito,
rimane in pantaloni e maglietta neri, si china su un
computer e comincia a trascrivere dal vivo le parole
della canzone “Telephone” di Lady Gaga.
Concludo questo mio saggio – la mia lettera per
voi – con alcuni versi della canzone di Lady Gaga.
(Quanti di noi si sono affidati ai testi delle canzoni
e alle compilation musicali per esprimere i propri
sentimenti?) Perfino in amore qualche volta abbiamo
bisogno di prenderci una pausa dalle fatiche
che lui stesso richiede – tanto per non cadere in
un eccesso di analisi su Lady Gaga o sul fatto che
Frances Stark la citi. O forse dobbiamo prenderci
una pausa dall’amore in generale. Parlare di vita
e di amore sarà sempre e solo un’ombra dell’esistenza
fisica e reale. Tra parlare e ballare, anche
se non è sempre così, preferisco ballare. e quando
132
non possiamo ballare, le parole sono tutte lì, quasi
sempre pronte per essere usate.
Stop callin’, stop callin’,
I don’t wanna think anymore!
I left my head and my heart on the
dance floor.
Stop callin’, stop callin’,
I don’t wanna talk anymore!
I left my head and my heart on the
dance floor.
[Smetti di chiamare,smetti di chiamare,
non voglio più pensare!
Ho lasciato mente e cuore sulla pista da ballo.
Smetti di chiamare, smetti di chiamare,
non voglio più parlare!
Ho lasciato mente e cuore sulla pista da ballo.]

133

Michael Ned Holte: Frances Stark, www.artforum.com, NYC, Sept 1, 2010
Frances Stark, Oh God I'm So Embarrassed, 2007,
collage on paper, 81 x 52 1/2".
Frances Stark
MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
CAMBRIDGE
Through January 2 2011
Curated by João Ribas
The title of Frances Stark’s first US museum survey, “This could become a gimick [sic] or an
honest articulation of the workings of the mind,” not only confirms the Los Angeles–based artist’s
ongoing investment in language but also gamely foregrounds the self-­‐critical deliberation that
frequently emerges as the subject of her work. Comprising more than fifty works made between
1992 and the present, this exhibition will highlight the full range of Stark’s nimble practice—
elegant works on paper incorporating found text (from Emily Dickinson’s to Robert Musil’s),
collages repurposing junk mail (including gallery postcards),and a PowerPoint piece (Structures
That Fit My Opening and Other Parts Considered in Relation to Their Whole, 2006) that uses the
drily corporate format to unexpectedly moving effect by addressing the everyday convolutions of
raising a child and teaching while attending to the difficulties of making art in fleeting moments.

Stewart Oksenhorn, She's got it! Stark gives Aspen musical a spin, The Aspen Times,
Aspen, CO, June 30, 2010.
“The Inchoate Incarnate: After a Drawing, Toward an Opera, but before a Libretto Even Exists”, by Frances
Stark, is featured in Stark's theater piece, “I've Had It! and I've Also Had It!” showing Wednesday at Aspen's
Wheeler Opera House.
Jason Dewey

ASPEN — In “I've Had It!”, a musical that debuted at the Wheeler Opera House in
1951, a Hotel Jerome bellhop watches as his girlfriend falls for an Aspen Music
Festival composer, who is in Aspen working on a new piece of music. With the
help of his bartending friend, the bellhop exposes the pomposity and
pretentiousness of the composer by demonstrating, for a room full of critics, that
the new composition is actually a familiar pop song, played backward.
It's a simple, screwball comedy of class warfare. But as Los Angeles artist
Frances Stark revisits the work Wednesday at the Wheeler, as part of the Aspen
Art Museum's Restless Empathy group exhibition, simplicity doesn't seem to be
part of the formula. Retitled “I've Had It! And I've Also Had It!”, the reworked
version introduces Stark's thoughts on art criticism, symmetry, the divide
between high and low art, opera, and the frustrations the artist has encountered
in her career.
The production, presented in collaboration with the Aspen Music Festival,
features two string trios and back-­‐up dancers; a costume — titled “The Inchoate
Incarnate: After a Drawing, Toward an Opera, but before a Libretto Even Exists,”
and created by Stark before she conceived of “I've Had It! And I've Also Had It!”
— and Stark herself in her first performance piece.
When she visited Aspen last November to begin work on her Restless Empathy
project, Stark, who had made two trips here earlier in her life to visit family
friends, zeroed in on the 121-­‐year-­‐old Wheeler. “Because in the Wheeler, you get
the whole history of Aspen,” she said.
Stark, a 43-­‐year-­‐old Southern California native who lives in Los Angeles and
often uses text in her visual work, went to the Pitkin County Library and quickly
found an out-­‐of-­‐date brochure detailing the history of the Wheeler. When she
saw a mention of “I've Had It!” she knew the old, forgotten musical would be the
foundation of her own piece.
Stark was aware that several prominent visual artists — including Denmark's
Olafur Eliasson, who has exhibited work in Aspen — had recently ventured into
opera. And a friend of Stark's, looking at Stark's recent series of large-­‐scale
drawings, likened the work to a libretto, and gave the series the alternate title,
“Notes to a Pedagogical Opera.” Stark had already made a costume that looked
like an outfit you'd find in a modernist stage production. And when she read the
title of the 1951 musical, she saw the stars align.
“I couldn't believe the title,” Stark said. “‘I've Had It!' — I've said that over and
over.” She also noted that tweaking the title, making it “I've Had It! And I've Also
Had It!” is a neat play on the “empathy” theme. (The Restless Empathy exhibition,
which runs through July 18, also features benches around Aspen inscribed with
quotes by the late Hunter S. Thompson, an installation near the Aspen Center for
Physics, a large-­‐scale photograph at the base of Aspen Mountain, and works at
the Aspen Art Museum.)

Stark said the high art/low art divide spotlighted in the original “I've Had It!” has
been a theme in her past work. “In my writing, I definitely address that. It's the
issue of pomposity and fraudulence.”
Criticism, too, is an idea raised in the 1951 musical that interests her. “It's about
a work's reception: The bellhop thinks [the composition] is crap; the critics are
supposedly duped by hype,” Stark said. “So the reception — and production — of
work is a big theme that runs through my practice.”
Stark also engages in a narrative of self-­‐reflection. The performance has her
showing slides, commenting on them, and looking at her own career and her
work: “Why I've had it, and what I've had it with,” she said. “A subtheme is, ‘Why
can't I write?” Part of her libretto is a quote from the Polish writer Witold
Gombrowicz: “Instead of marching forward and erect like the great writers of all
time, I'm revolving ridiculously on my own heels.”
Perhaps the most obvious, and prescient angle of the original “I've Had It!”, the
theme of class warfare in Aspen, gets underplayed in the new production. Stark
said she doesn't want to ignore the theme, but notes, “I'm really walking on
eggshells about that.”
Instead, Stark has a perspective that reveals the visual artist in her. The heart of
her interpretation is the various layers of symmetry. “Really, the most
compelling aspect of the play is the formal symmetry of it,” she said. “There's the
song, and it's played backward and forward. There's the two string trios. There's
a complete binary aspect to understand.
“I think what I'm trying to do is set them spinning so you don't know what's front
and back. Spinning is definitely the subtle motif in this work.”

Jessica Lack, Artist of the week 46: Frances Stark, guardian.co.uk, London, June 24, 2009.
Through a narrative that charts the frustrations of combining motherhood and
art, Frances Stark captures the poignancy of the human condition
Well-­‐articulated personal anxiety ... Frances Stark's I must explain, specify, rationalize, classify, etc (2008) at
the ICA. Photograph: Marcus J Leith
An artist and a writer, Frances Stark can transform even a dreary corporate tool into a
compelling visual essay. Her PowerPoint presentation Structures That Fit My Opening
and Other Parts Considered to the Whole (2006), intertwines anecdotal text with
photographs of her home in Echo Park, Los Angeles. It's a semi-­‐autobiographical ramble
through the creative chaos of Stark's life, focusing on the difficulties of combining
motherhood with being an artist. Written with a self-­‐deprecating wit that pricks with
honesty, she tries to square the circle of her differing roles. Unlike Tracey Emin, who
bares her soul publicly for us to pick at like vultures over a carcass, Stark's confessional
manner is intimate and inclusive; she presents her dilemmas in a shaggy dog story that
crescendos and diminishes like the chapters of a book.
Born in Newport Beach, California, in 1967, Stark studied at San Francisco State
University before attending the Art Centre College of Design. She says she had been
obsessed with language from an early age so it isn't surprising to find that many of her
influences are literary and that she has published a series of collected writings. She
wrote recently: "I am envious of those who can deliver nuggets in tightly wrapped
packages. The economy of Emily Dickinson is a huge inspiration."

Stark's practice – whether it is drawn, written, painted or filmed – is about the laborious
process of making art, detailing its frustrations with a wry humour. It is possibly best
summed up in the collage Still Life with IBM Cards and Violin (1999), a parody of a
Picasso cubist collage, in which she sends up the limitations of being an artist, unable to
compete visually with the emotional impact of music. This issue has also led her to use
soundtracks from Throbbing Gristle to accompany home videos that are as banal as the
rock band is outlandish.
Stark's well-­‐articulated personal anxiety encompasses George Orwell's statement that
"each life viewed from the inside is a series of small defeats". In her quiet yet persistent
inquiry into the human condition, she delivers, with devastating candour, the poignancy
of human failure.
Why we like her: For her needy, obsessive fan letters written to Jason Loewenstein of
the rock band Sebadoh.
Femme fatale: She starred as Yoko Ono in the film The Holes in Your Feet, directed by
LA artist Raymond Pettitbon.
Rock credentials: She and her ex-­‐husband Steve Hanson used to be the art rock band
Layer Cake.
Where can I see her? Frances Stark is exhibiting in the group show
Poor.Old.Tired.Horse at the ICA, SW1, until 23 August 2009.

Lauren O’Neill-­‐Butler, Frances Stark, Artforum, NYC, Nov 11, 2008.
Frances Stark
11.21.08
Left: Frances Stark, The New Vision, 2008, collage on paper, 29 x 24". Right: View of Frances Stark, “The
New Vision,” 2008, Portikus, Frankfurt. Photo: Katrin Schilling.
Los Angeles–based artist Frances Stark is widely known for combining text, image, and
literary sources in her collages, which often include thoughtful though tenuous self-­‐
referential links to her roles as artist, mother, woman, and professor. “The New Vision,”
an exhibition of new work, opens on November 22 at Portikus in Frankfurt.
THIS EXHIBITION WAS quite a surprise. Although I had been planning to do it for at
least a year, before I was able to start on my original plans an opportunity arose for
another show, which took up a tremendous amount of energy. That large-­‐scale
exhibition, at the Secession [“A Torment of Follies,” April 26–June 22, 2008], was
organized around an excerpt from a novel that I was “putting to music,” so to speak.
There I used text in a rhythmic way and choreographed graphic figures around the room
almost as if they were performing the text. This show is nearly the opposite of that one.
I had a conversation with a curator from the Hammer Museum, which has an extensive
print collection, about the form of “the folly” and more specifically about Goya’s follies,
or Caprichos [caprices]. I began to look at these more, and one image in particular really
hit me, a print titled They Already Have a Seat [1799]. It depicts two women with chairs
on their heads and skirts pulled up to their faces. This particularly ridiculous image
struck me.
There were a few other Caprichos that inspired some of the pieces in this new body of
work. I did a version of the most famous, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
[1797], with the flurry of bats and monsters behind the figure, as an exhibition poster

for a gigantic summer group show I was in, “Pretty Ugly” at Gavin Brown and
Maccarone. Instead of Goya’s slumping, somewhat gentle figure, mine is more
exasperated. Each of these Caprichos has a text that Goya has written, a little snippet or
a comment that isn’t part of the title but is somehow associated with that particular
print. I liked how this text exists in a no-­‐man’s-­‐land. About the image of the women and
chairs, Goya writes, “If conceited girls want to show they have a seat, the best thing is for
them to put it on their head.” That really egged me on.
I really felt, when I started to make this show, that it would end up being an exhibition of
paintings—despite the fact that I really don’t make paintings per se. I hate that I keep
having to offer this caveat, but honestly, one could actually call this a figurative painting
show—but not entirely, of course.
In a way, the work has more of a “trashy collage” aesthetic. But the images are also more
solid and singular and depict bodies in subtly ridiculous, exhausted, or slightly
compromising positions, and there is a lot of play with black-­‐and-­‐white versus color.
One of my favorites is a foreshortened figure seen from above with a kind of giant head
weighing down the image, and her feet kind of just floating at the top of the canvas. In
her hands is a sheet of paper, which reads: “Why should you not be able to assemble
yourself and write?” This text comes from a letter I received from a very smart and
sympathetic friend, who, in asking me for a contribution to a publication, lamented the
fact that I have been writing less and less to focus on making “work.” It asks a lot of
difficult questions about appropriating text in artworks versus producing original texts
for publication. An abridged version of this letter appears in the exhibition in one of the
few nonfigurative works, on a painted music stand, next to another letter received from
an artist friend who strikes a completely different tone. The juxtaposition becomes a
kind of score for the possibility of what I can or will perform.
— As told to Lauren O’Neill-­‐Butler

Champion, Miles, Frances Stark, Art Monthly, London, January, 2008

a m y yao
a n d Fr a n ces
s ta r k
On Jul 13, 2007, at 8:29 AM:
a m y: Now, let’s talk about cats. What’s up with the
Black Flag cat videos? Oh, well they’re not all Black Flag
cat videos.
F r a n c e s : They are pre-YouTube, of course. I started
just making unedited videos of my cats—well, I mean,
they are edited from less watchable footage but there
are never cuts within each video. They’re all the length
of a song which plays live in the background while I’m
taping. This was perhaps the precursor to the introduction
of the semi-comic bird figures. It was also a form of
domestic self-portraiture about the time when I started
trying to write the book, Architect & The Housewife. I
was thinking about the cats doing nothing, or having no
plans and about putting a recognizable frame (a song)
around that nothingness. As a viewer you know that a
song doesn’t go on TOO long so you can deal with the
action/non-action within that not-too-demanding period
of time. Sometimes the cat’s action synchs with the lyrics
or the music. My grandmother was a cat lady with tons
of feral cats in the yard and pie tins full of crusty cat
food swarming with flies—so growing up we didn’t have
cats and my father always expressed a great animosity
toward them. There’s something about living with cats
that is very visual, that is so much about just observing
them, being able to stare at them, which I never experienced
until adulthood. And so then I think that the love
affair with a cat roommate was also inspiration for this,
that visual aspect of it. I think I was constantly having a
crisis about being bored by art, or wondering why I didn’t
like looking at more art more than I did at the time. So I
think I was also trying to observe what did give me visual
pleasure; and for sure just lying around doing nothing
staring at my cats was a big source of it.
a m y: What do you think about word vs. image? I think of
your work as being a dialectic, where in viewing your work
the two end up combining into a whole.
F r a n c e s : I guess the ‘versus’ plays a big part for me
as an artist. I think I always felt tyrannized by images and
never felt like images were something I could control or
even understand, even as a very young person, whether
this had to do with not knowing how to “get the look”
I wanted with hair or make-up (ha!) or not being able
to draw, or have any kind of decorating or designing
capacity whatsoever growing up. My family is still
shocked that I make my living as a visual artist, but in
some ways the visual has only been a result of this ‘vs.’,
this battle between word and image.
a m y: Gertrude Stein and the ex-patriot modernists
working out of Paris come to mind with your earlier works,
as well as with your writing—your epistolary style, your
references to your circle of artist friends, and your use of
repetition. Are you influenced by them?
F r a n c e s : That is not something I ever studied or made
a concerted effort to emulate, if you know what I mean.
But having said that, I do recall that when I was about
sixteen I had this idea that I wanted to be like Gertrude
Stein. But at that young age this particular momentary
aspiration had probably more to do with being seduced
by the idea of an important and intelligent (and not-sopretty)
woman—this is not a model readily available as
a teenager in southern California. And in high school at
that time, Stein was taught as a figure, not an author or an
artist. So the formal aspects of her writing and her thought
were only things I came to much later but I wouldn’t even
say they were consciously influential.
I sort of wished I was more into reading her than
I am, to be honest. It comes across as very schticky
so it’s not that I ever had the desire to keep reading
her. I don’t really like admitting that, but I’m a bit of a
philistine, the kind of person who finds Scott Walker
annoying for being so “difficult” or “special.” And just
today someone was playing Arthur Russell in my studio
and I was very annoyed by it and all I could hear was
how unusual or special it was and it was making my
skin crawl. I said to Stuart, “Babe, this is so arty” and he
said, “Babe, you’re arty.” But then when Mayo Thomson
does ironic or atonal, somehow there’s some dirtiness
to it or humor so I can enjoy that.
What do you think of this apparent habit of always
making music analogies? Steve Hanson and I used to
do that ALL THE TIME and I imagine that’s how you two
connected. I think I was so naïve—or maybe narrow
minded is a better way of putting it—that when I started
Art Center I remember having this sense of vague disappointment
discovering none of my fellow students were
punk. I mean now everyone’s “punk” because everyone
from toddlers to grannies are wearing skull and cross
a m y ya o & F r a n c e s s ta r k

ones, with a sense of “I’m not shocked by anything,” but
somehow I really felt that as artists they were supposed
to have been hardcore at some point, and people seemed
quite straight to me. And so when I met Steve (as the
librarian), we bonded over some kind of nostalgic appre-
ciation of Black Flag, or of having been at the same PIL
concert/riot ten years prior without having known each
other. This is really petty and cliquey but that was my
mentality at the time, and I think it’s a weakness. And so
I guess that the kind of us-versus-them mentality that I
had in the early ‘80s as a teenager, where the boundaries
of mainstream and subculture were very clearly delin-
eated, is a paradigm that’s hard to kick.
On Aug 8, 2007, at 5:49 PM:
A m y: The punk clique thing is hard to get away from,
even now, but I think it is also the reason I met Steve.
Back then I was nineteen and just starting Art Center as
an undergrad and everyone at school was so much older
than me and much more professional. I always felt like I
had this crazy kooky teen antagonistic attitude. I know he
thought I was obnoxious, but maybe he also thought it was
funny? He was one of the few who put up with me and hired
me as a student librarian probably because of the music
thing. We realized we were at the same Melvins show four
years before at Jabberjaw, where the power went out in
the middle of the show and everyone was in the dark for
like four minutes. It was one of the first punk shows I had
ever gone to. But about making music analogies, I think
it taps into an intuitive, almost animal, opinion-shaping
mechanism. And punk as a look is so weird because it
messes with your mind! Who can you trust nowadays!?
What’s that image saying to me!? My signal is crossed!
On Jul 13, 2007, at 8:29 AM:
A m y: I remember when you lectured at Yale, I saw this
great drawing you made with Marc Leccy’s name on it. I
think you commented that you thought of him as almost
a futurist, maybe because of Donateller, his band. That
cover of Maurice Lemaitre’s Lettriste march song.
F r a n c e s : See, I didn’t even know it is Maurice
Lemaitre. I must admit I don’t know much about
this. I heard some Lettriste recordings when I just
started doing art when I was a Humanities major at
San Francisco State and was blown away but I never
followed through with it. (That kind of stuff was not so
easy to get a hold of, pre-ubu.com). Already a bit of
a fan of Leckey, when I heard Donateller’s “March of
n D P # 4 2 0 0 7
the White Barbarians” I was absolutely beside myself
with joy. It was the best thing I heard in ages and it still
makes me crazy to listen to it. Regarding Futurism—or
perhaps, more importantly, the idea of “future”—I don’t
know how to continue responding to this question,
to be honest, because whenever it comes to art his-
torical self-consciousness, or the deliberate employ-
ment of certain motifs which call out certain -isms, it
makes me uneasy. It starts off this psychological tic
whereby I imagine that everyone else learned art in
some orderly linear fashion: this came after this which
couldn’t have come unless this came before etc etc ad
infinitum…as if everybody must arrive in the present
by way of some chronological art historical entry hall.
The question also makes me very self-conscious about
being unfashionable, in the sense of recognizing that
certain contemporary artists are very adept at resusci-
tating certain stylistic gestures (whether it’s the cut of
a dress or a quotation of tapestry design or homage to
under-recognized artists). You know, I can think of a few
women artists who somehow utilize their own special
taste in the forefront of their practice in an interest-
ing way, and because I enjoy and admire the work of
these artists, I sometimes envy that ability. However, I
don’t think I employ or quote art historical codes very
well, I don’t create anything very stylish—the Leccy
collage is (despite its erectness) a kind of lame homage
to Marinetti. I’m actually on the verge of collaborating
with Mark, which is kind of crazy, because I’m more
like a fan. And the whole possibility of us doing a per-
formance together has really forced me to question
my own desire or need to want to cross the line from
elated/adoring receiver to collaborator. But one of the
sparks of the collaboration was a discussion we had
about Mark E Smith and how Leckey doesn’t even like
The Fall (too Beefheart!!) but admires MES as the model
of a great artist. And I can see that the both of us have a
kind of desire to be like MES in our own way.
A m y: Your artwork started out more text-based, using
repetition, and in that sense abstracting the word. I
remember Giovanni (Intra) compared it to white noise
in a review of your work from the mid- ’90s. Currently,
you use words and letters more so as objects that fill
spaces of representational pictures that describe simple
objects we know—a flower, a chair, a bird, grasses.
Could you talk about this transition, what led you to
work in these ways?
F r a n c e s : A simple or superficial response to this
question would have to address the problem of getting

tired of doing the same thing over and over again. (Doing
the same thing over and over specifically refers to how
the work was made—but generally refers to accretion,
or to what it means to have a “practice”). So it has to
do with why we value change or development and also
the problem posed by repetition itself. And I think this
aspect of the general question is completely tied up with
the specifics of it.
So, I used repetition to create a mass, to make a mark
or fill a ground or page. But my ultimate purpose was
never to abstract (as in hiding, or reducing) the word
because the word(s)—and by extension, letters—were
so central to the construction of the image (or fields,
really) that the words or phrases, along with their
potential meaning, were never intended to be obliterated.
Sometimes repetition is employed in language as
a way to allow something familiar to become strange
again, you know, saying the same thing over and over
until you don’t recognize it anymore, or to the point
where you recognize it precisely as a set of arbitrary
noises. In that early work you mention, the repetition
brings the authored bit, then its meaning—however
slippery or paradoxical—slowly into view. When this
happens, its shape and tone are evident as authored,
intentional, and one can have an aesthetic response to
the text which lies outside of my drawing. We can say, “I
understand that,” or, “I love what was written, what was
stated.” Whether that has to do with something along
the lines of “oh that is true” is another tangent... ie. “the
desolation of acting a part, the desperation of imitation,
the brutalizing torment of brutalization and of saying
the same thing over and over again.”
We perceive a voice, a mind, and we experience that
voice/mind and…well, it’s almost too corny to say but
the white noise that Giovanni refers to (created by the
repetition of the letters) sort of speaks to the backdrop
of the alphabet as a basic tool box that is all-purpose
and anonymous.
Funny, I think the noise aspect (white or not) is
important in following the line of your question because
this earlier work had a certain quietness to it, and
maybe even closer to the effect of a mantra than white
noise. At a certain point I felt that it was either misleading
or it couldn’t accommodate the rougher, darker, or
even potentially humorous aspects of my own voice.
And I guess that’s about the time when I introduced
the simple collage elements into the fields…generally
birds that were shamelessly anthropomorphic components
tacked on to turn the text field into a text bubble.
Think of Woodstock from the Peanuts cartoon with his
little language of repeated lines...
On Aug 7, 2007, at 11:46 AM:
A m y: I like thinking about Woodstock, the bird, in
relation to some of your work. I definitely see that
in the work, not only conceptually, but also aesthetically.
In many of the early works, the drawings/text are
made of traced carbon copies of the sentences. The
ac t itself emphasizes the material and formal qualities
of the word. It also reminds me of the ephemeral,
passing nature of words. Now, with the collaged works
that incorporate par ts of older works, the words are
fused together as an image, less so as decipherable
text, as cut pieces of papers, each paper piece being
both an image and par t of an image. Images replace
images in the same way as text replace images in
earlier works, instead of representing. Do you think
about the word as an image? Do you think that this
world we live in is becoming more and more imageas
opposed to word-oriented? I think of T V and news
repor ting, the internet and interac tivit y, the new Mac
computers with video chat, etc.
On Aug 8, 2007, at 5:49 PM:
F r a n c e s : Well, absolutely. Image is very dominant
and I think that language just takes a lot of time and
complex language doesn’t translate well into mainstream
media, especially language that is uncertain
or even language that is carefully certain. I often
feel sad about not having much eloquence in my own
speech, and I think that it has become increasingly
rare to find people who are very eloquent speakers.
Amercian English is so incredibly informal, and so I
think that the standards and rules are just morphing
so rapidly that it seems to be evaporating. I feel it
myself, losing the ability to speak complexly, directly.
I can’t finish sentences half the time. It’s like they
don’t even matter. Maybe because there’s so much
media out there that you just know is hot air and every
sign or ad or fine print is just something you know
is meaningless or wrong (and things that seem convincing
and true are proven time and again to be, in
our media culture, inconsequential). But by the same
token, I believe you can have an extremely valuable
or relevant conversation between people even if it
is inarticulate and clumsy. This is what amazes me,
and as I continue to teach in the mentor fashion of
one-on-one studio visits, I marvel at the fact that we
can be as productive as we are sometimes (me and
the student), despite our apparent clumsiness and
shrinking vocabulary.
a m y ya o & F r a n c e s s ta r k

On Jul 14, 2007, at 8:29 AM:
A m y: Why is letter writing important to you?
F r a n c e s : First, putting aside why it would be important
to ANYONE, I would have to say it’s important to me
because I suppose the act of writing letters has shaped
my understanding of what it means to be an artist. That
sounds a bit pat. I wrote lots of letters as a teenager to
all types of friends that I had met in different schools
from moving back and forth between parents between
southern and northern California. And I got really almost
addicted to it when I started writing to a guy named Kevin
Sullivan, who was an artist and a surfer who knew all
about art and punk and Marxism etc. I was of course
smitten, but he kind of gave me an education about
everything from Picabia to critique of advertising;
from The Fall to the band Savage Republic (he started
attending art school at UCLA about the same time they
were there). I asked for the letters back (not sure why)
and then I started incorporating them into work—work
that was bad or stupid but the point was that it was at
this intersection of trying to make art in grad school
(being untrained as I am fond of confessing), this inter-
section between post-studio quasi-conceptual/perfor-
mative practice and writing. I was taking a writing class
with Dennis Cooper outside of school through Beyond
Baroque. So anyway, it was the letter writer in me that
felt “real,” if you will, and not like I was trying too hard
to become an artist. Once I got to art school I had to face
the fact that most, but of course not all, of my fellow
students were “talented” in the sense of being the kind
of people who were artistically inclined, and headed to
art school without question. You know, they could draw,
print photos, do lithos, silkscreen, whatever. I guess I
just felt like my letter writing—my ability to commu-
nicate or the voice which was manifest in that part of
my life (which predated my education in postmodern
theory)—was my talent, my line, as I had minimal expe-
rience with any other media. BUT that’s all just to point
out how it is important to the formation of a practice.
I see your next question is about writer’s block, and
I guess the thing with writing letters (as long as it’s
not a cover letter!!) is that they usually just flow out
like crazy. And the reason they make writing easy is
because you know exactly who your audience is. For
example, I got some e-mail from a venue where I’ll be
exhibiting and it asked very point blank about getting
information about my work. I was so turned off by this
because I felt that because the inquiry was so general
there was simply no motivation to begin a discussion.
n D P # 4 2 0 0 7
They hadn’t taken the time to ask specific questions.
So in the case of me answering your questions, I have
the opposite of writer’s block because I know who’s on
the other end, and all the things I know about you can
inspire me to want to tell you more…and believe me
I probably am only getting out half of what’s actually
coursing through my mind…and that’s mostly because
I’m totally out of practice. So I guess knowing I’ll have
to go back and edit this later may make me stutter or
not bother trying to articulate some minor or unrelated
point etc. But ultimately I’m writing TO YOU and so I
want to communicate to you. With an exhibition venue
they just want something to put in a press release and
that is the type of writing that I used to be really good
at but now it just makes me want to run in horror. I think
much more clearly when I know what’s at stake when the
initiator of a response has a stake in the matter. There’s
one letter that was really brilliant, a kind of form letter
from Scorched Earth—do you know that? Well I had it
up on my wall for a while and it was really begging for
a response and one day I just felt totally compelled to
respond even though Scorched Earth was by then just
wrapping up or maybe already complete. But the point
is, despite having actually finished composing the
letter, the succinctness of my response, though unsent,
brought on by the direct address was very special.
A m y: Have you ever had writer’s block?
F r a n c e s : Yes, I guess. But maybe that is something
that applies to someone who has a daily practice of
writing, which I don’t. But I struggle to write, of course…
probably more writer’s procrastination than block,
because while sometimes getting a simple sentence
right takes ages, it’s getting to the point that’s hard. And
getting to the point is, as I said, always easier when you
have one reader in mind.
A m y: Any favorite authors?
F r a n c e s : Thomas Bernhard, Emily Dickinson, Robert
Musil, J.D. Salinger, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann.
I guess Mark E Smith. Is that fair to add him to the list?
Well, because of the way he so often writes about reading
or browsing or stumbling across something…to me that
is one of the persistent aspects of his voice. As someone
who writes things down or repeats what he has seen or
read—oh nevermind…
A m y: With your writing, what is interesting to me
about it is the tone. Simultaneously it gives off a real

sense of vulnerability as well as being strong and hard.
Many female friends I have who identify themselves as
feminist relate to your tone. Did you develop this tone
consciously, or did it evolve organically? How did this
distinct voice come about?
F r a n c e s : I think I developed this tone from my early
letter writing. I think I edit for sound and rhythm, of
course, but I don’t think I ever tried to achieve a tone.
This is where I have to admit that I’m pretty unskilled,
in the sense that I just am what I am and I don’t mind
refining that. But as a strategist I’m much too lazy or
undisciplined to really cultivate a desired effect, if
you know what I mean. I think I was kind of precocious
as a young person but also very insecure and exces-
sively self-reflective. However, I feel that I may have
just allowed that reflexivity and effusiveness to evolve
into something a bit more tempered, or I’ve figured
out how to focus it. The funny thing is I don’t generally
write the things that I end up publishing as fast as I
am writing this. Usually those things are very slow and
excruciatingly painful to get out. So maybe it’s wrong
to say I don’t have what it takes to cultivate a desired
effect because I think often this writing comes across
as stream of consciousness, or very casual when in fact
it is very labored over, which is not to say it’s so extra
crafty, just that there is really a difference between
the kind of linear spasms that come out with joy and
an apparent clarity and the finished pieces which are
produced with one part writing, three parts walking
away from the computer and crying about not being
able to write.
a m y: In your new book, you included a source photo for
the painting of the Hoover. It just looks like an advert,
but then it takes on poetic sense through the description
of its place, title, action. Could you talk about that
a little? How did you find it and is the source photo
important to you?
F r a n c e s : That actually came from a photo I took in
my bedroom. I became very attached to the photo. I
had to wonder why I should bother making a collage or
painting of the image, couldn’t I just exhibit a photo…
and my automatic response was no, I couldn’t just
exhibit a photo. And that really bothered me, but that’s a
completely different conversation. I then decided that I
wanted to just do a painting of my vacuum cleaner, also
a weird homage to the Koons Hoover Convertible made
specifically for a show that Matthew Higgs put together
called “dereconstruction.”
a m y: I heard a rumor that you used to be roommates
with someone in Flipper when you lived in SF…
F r a n c e s : Yes, I lived with both Bruce Lose and Will
Shatter, both of whom I totally looked up to (Flipper
was by then defunct circa ‘86) and both of whom
turned me onto some interesting things, some of which
were unsavory and unhealthy. Will died several years
before I left SF to go to art school. I’ve been thinking
about Bruce lately. But to be honest I haven’t followed
the latest Flipper incarnation. I saw them a lot when I
was pretty young (before meeting them) and they were
really a big deal, but I hate to say the records don’t
translate how special they were to someone who is not
going to automatically buy the California Punk story,
if you know what I mean.
On Aug 16, 2007, at 6:56 AM:
a m y: That’s sad to hear about Will Shatter, I didn’t
know he passed away back then. I have to say I really
love Flipper! When I used to work in the Kill Rock Stars
mailroom in Olympia, WA, we listened to only Flipper
endlessly all-winter-long. And between the few different
bands I’ve been in, we’ve covered Sex Bomb and
Earthworm. Bingo! Well thanks for the interview Frances!
Hope to see you soon!
Editors’ note: This interview is a slightly-edited and excerpted
version of a sprawling email exchange between Stark and Yao
that took place during the Summer of 2007. This casual conversation,
focused primarily on Stark’s work, continually comes
back to exchanges about a California music landscape with
which both artists are familiar. The product is a nice reminder
that North Drive Press is committed to presenting artists in their
own words.
a m y ya o & F r a n c e s s ta r k

Kirsty Bell, Frances Stark, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL,
Frieze, #109, Sept 2007.
Frances Stark -­‐ Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Thoughts and Dust Collecting (detail), 2006
While you could say that language is Frances Stark’s primary medium, Frances herself is
Stark’s primary subject matter. Taken individually, most of her works are self-­‐portraits
of some kind; put together, they fan out into full-­‐blown autobio-­‐graphy, featuring not
just the central protagonist (in her various roles, professional, intellectual or domestic)
but also a supporting cast of favourite authors, friends and collaborators, gallerists and
curators, musicians, cats and kids. Invariably riddled with self-­‐doubt and well-­‐
articulated anxiety, their cumulative effect is an oscillating image of what it means to be
a practising artist (or, for that matter, a woman or person) today.
The first works you encounter in this exhibition, which gathers together more than 50
works from the past 15 years or so, are a small group of early pieces that introduce the
various themes that Stark revisits throughout her oeuvre. Stick figures on a large sheet
of paper, labelled ‘Me’ and ‘You’ (You & Me, 1991), show Frances among her peer group,
while Untitled (Self-­‐portrait/Autobiography) (1992) carbon-­‐copies her college grade
sheets, semester by semester. Untitled (Sexus) (1992), an original edition of Henry

Miller’s 1949 novel Sexus, placed next to a handmade carbon-­‐copied version of it, is a
mind-­‐boggling endeavour of transcription, which raises the recurring issue of quotation
and influence within her work. Meanwhile, a drawing of a blank sheet of notebook paper
(with horizontal and vertical reversed so the lines are red and the margin black), made
on a large sheet of drawing paper (Untitled (Piece of Paper), 1992), addresses the
dichotomy between writing (reading) and drawing (looking) and the conceptual
flexibility of two dimensions.
This see-­‐sawing between conceptual inquiry into the nature of an art work and its
production, and attention to the mass of details that constitute daily life, is at the heart
of Stark’s practice and is well demonstrated in the show’s dense, a-­‐chronological hang.
Avoiding the easy elegance that a sparse and spacious installation of her largely white,
often delicate, mostly paper-­‐based works would offer, the artist has opted instead for
the concentrated effect of many works, hung close together. The blank expanses of her
earlier works begin, over time, to accommodate more text, imagery and pictorial
elements until we reach recent collages such as Foyer Furnishing (2006), in which large
Mylar and paper cut-­‐outs form a two-­‐dimensional interior with dresser, mirror and
handbag. The role of language modulates from subject matter to means of
representation; a favoured effect is to compose words or sentences vertically, stacking
carbon-­‐copied typed-­‐out letters while repeating them horizontally, drawing lines from
letters to form undulating landscapes or endless horizons while scrambling the viewer’s
usual means of deciphering both text and image. Much peering, squinting and head-­‐
cocking are required to make out the tiny, faint, dislocated, rotated and repeated words
in her works. In every case, however, the textual elements act like a thought bubble, as a
cerebral way out of the two-­‐dimensional picture plane.
The looping circles and tangential swoops that typify Stark’s writings, which rarely
touch on their subject directly, take a different form in her art works, but the self-­‐
referentiality remains. Here it is in a concentrated intertextuality and cross-­‐reference,
where almost every work refers to another. The compositions, which at first appear so
calm and elegant, on closer inspection buzz with frantic textual snippets. Collaged
details are invariably made up of texts copied from previous works, exhibition posters
or invitations. Motifs such as birds and flowers recur. Everything appears tightly tied
together. Even quotations from authors (Robert Musil, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Beckett)
remain anchored to Stark through her designation of them as her ‘favourites’. A tinny
soundtrack, which jangles throughout the exhibition, turns out to belong to a video
projection, a compilation of Stark’s ‘Cat Videos’ (1999–2002), which are, clearly, home
movies of her cats lounging around at home, each with a different theme, from
Throbbing Gristle to Rossini. The piece acts like a mix-­‐tape of favourite tracks while
providing a voyeuristic glimpse of the artist’s domestic set-­‐up. Another wall projection,
in the final room, extends this insight in certainly the most evocative use of a
PowerPoint presentation I have ever seen. A wonderfully paced visual essay, which
interleaves text with photographs of art works and Stark’s home, is a profound
reflection on the struggle to summon some creativity from the clutter of the everyday
and her overlapping roles as ‘a woman, artist, teacher, mother, ex-­‐wife’.
In a typical spot of pre-­‐emptive self-­‐deprecation Stark titled this, her first retrospective,
‘The Fall of Frances Stark’. Given the assuredness of this exhibition (not to mention the
exhaustive accompanying ‘artist’s book’, which deserves a whole review to itself), such a
prediction seems highly unlikely.

Brian Sholis, Frances Stark, www.artforum.com, NYC, April 27, 2005.
Frances Stark
04.02.05-05.14.05
CRG Gallery, New York
Frances Stark’s new exhibition, the Los Angeles-­‐based artist’s third in New York,
possesses a jouissance born of a complete grasp of materials, process, and
intentions. Her non-­‐narrative collages (and three “soft secretaries,” filled with
mass mailers and other desktop detritus) offer a peek at Stark’s studio
inspirations and, perhaps, an oblique portrait of her “office life” as a writer (a
book collecting ten years of her criticism was published two years ago). Some
works are delicate, comprised of exhibition announcement cards cut into tiny
fragments and taped onto rice paper in surprisingly recognizable arrangements
(Shaggy Headed and Showy Headed, both 2005, are schematic renderings of
chrysanthemums that look like ‘70s Prince Valiant haircuts seen from behind).
Others, abstract, deploy her signature typewritten fragments in dynamic
compositions (like Carl Andre’s typewritten pieces sent unsteadily in every
direction) that sprout from the bottom edge of canvas boards. And a showy
peacock, depicted in head-­‐on and rear views, is an apt metaphor for an artist so
obviously delighting in her powers.

Frances Stark
UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA
Eve Meltzer, Frances Stark, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles, USA, Frieze, #72, London, Jan / Feb 2003.
In 1971, when Daniel Buren wrote The Function of the Studio, he predicated the work of
art on a double bind. When the artwork leaves the studio and enters the public sphere of
the museum, it suffers alienation from its origin; but if it remains cloistered in the
studio, it suffers ‘total oblivion’ and the artist ‘death ... from starvation’. For Buren, the
work of art born of the studio is always already compromised because, since it is seen
out of place, it never really takes place. So, it was in addressing an entrenched model of
artistic production that relied on the ‘idealizing and ossifying function’ of the studio, that
Buren penned the phrase ‘the unspeakable compromise of the portable work of art’.
Frances Stark has borrowed Buren’s phrase as the title and organizing principle for a
series of 16 works produced between 1998 and 2002, recently exhibited together for
the first time. Stark, like Buren, took the studio as her point of departure: she made the
first piece on moving her place of work from home to a studio. But under Stark’s hand
‘unspeakability’, ‘compromise’ and ‘portability’ take on different meanings. First of all,
Stark insists that the studio, hers at least, is not an ‘ossifying’ place, but one where
mishandling and de-­‐idealization reign, and damage and dirt are as much at home as
anything else. And if, 30 years later, there is something unspeakable about the work of
art, it pertains to the inordinate sum of money that Stark owes to the Department of
Education for having sold her the privilege of going to a good art school and, eventually,
showing in impressive venues -­‐ or so Stark’s work tells us. And what’s yet more
unspeakable -­‐ she further hints -­‐ is that all the high-­‐falutin knowledge for which she
carries that debt, has also bought Stark an unfair share of critical misunderstanding

ased on her so-­‐called ‘overly academic tendencies’. Such are the lived compromises of
the work behind Stark’s art.
But this is to speak indirectly of what Stark’s ‘Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable
Work of Art’ (1998-­‐ 2002) actually looks like. With several of the works assembled and
mounted with tape and tacks, the series is wrought with transience. Such appearances
can be off-­‐putting at first. One has to wade through a fog of initial reactions and a lot of
paperwork in order to grasp how conceptual this work is, not in spite of its complex
materiality, but because of it. The series consists mostly of works on paper with type-­‐
formed texts -­‐ usually reworkings of the titular phrase -­‐ inscribed not horizontally but
vertically, and not actually with a typewriter but by hand, as Stark carefully retraces
typographic letters through carbon paper onto her work. ‘Look here, this is already the
unspeakable compromise’ Number 7 of 16 (1998) alerts in a repeating striation of
letters. Stark favours tissue and rice paper, yet not for their delicacy and grace but for
their susceptibility and suggestibility -­‐ the way they register touch unwittingly, making
it hard for us to discern between a pleat and a crumple, a charming touch or an
inadvertent blemish. Indeed, these nuances must also be the locus of her artworks’
compromise. A pleat, for example, does double duty as both design element and memory
trace of transport. Like-­‐minded details reappear in the rather substantial
documentation included with the exhibition. Stark provides equivocating instructions
(themselves littered with typos, cross-­‐outs and hesitations) for the preservation,
transportation and installation of her work. For Number 6 of 16, she notes: ‘This piece
can hang or sit or lean etc.’ For Number 7 of 16 (1998) she explains: ‘hang rice paper
with red text over the orange so that the row of commas is just [and the next line is
obscured with a row of Xs] right above the line of the orange sheet ... I mean just a hair
above it’ [sic]. Stark runs out of room, runs out of film, runs out of patience, and explains
that even ‘fadeless’ paper fades.
Above all, this exhibition confirmed that Stark is an artist of the letter. Where her work
turns pictorial -­‐ as in the most recent additions to the series -­‐ the wonderful
complications in practices of reading imposed by her hand-­‐typed phrases simply
become overburdened. The series culminates in a book that refers to the whole series
and has been produced as a limited edition of 50 copies. Contrary to Buren’s
admonitions, Stark endeavours to ensure the portability of her work, and at a
reasonable cost.

Frances Stark
Daniel Buchholz Gallery, Cologne, Germany
Tom Holert, Frances Stark, Daniel Buchholz Gallery,
Cologne, Germany, Frieze, #54, London, Sept /Oct 2000.
‘I am a writer and an artist’, declared Frances Stark, ‘and that is not such an
exciting thing to announce but I think this exhibition has something to do with
being both’. The materiality of books and the written word is a theme of her
texts, and, in turn, their materiality -­‐ the layout of words on a page -­‐ becomes the
‘stuff’ of her visual work. Stark’s collages and tracings on paper, which look
fragile, even diaphanous, resist robust interpretation. Some of the pieces are

framed while others are taped directly to the walls of the gallery. Although they
appear hesitant, they’re also, perhaps, a little coquettish in the way they tread
the fine line between decor and conceptualism, images and writing.
Stark studied post-­‐Structural theory and post-­‐Conceptualism in Pasadena before
joining, in the 1990s, various lo-­‐fi bands. For a while she surrendered herself to
intensive fan relationships with such indie starlets as Lou Barlow from Sebadoh
and Steve Malkmus from Pavement. She later used these experiences to better
understand the implications of being a groupie, describing it, for example, as
‘some sort of mutant nihilistic sentimentalisation of the anti-­‐hero’.
An exploration of Feminist models in subcultures, as well as in the worlds of art
and theory, is a subtext of Stark’s work. For the text accompanying her exhibition
in Cologne she wrote ‘first of all this show has no title, which is unusual for me
because I generally like to come up with a nice phrase which sticks in the head
and helps to serve as a folder to hold a bunch of separate works. This time I am
feeling a little bit reticent and hope that you, the viewer, are not put out by this
nameless display.’ It’s a typical statement from Stark, one which oscillates
between being ironic and apologetic. Nonetheless, the namelessness of the
display -­‐ which included design, architecture, botany and growth -­‐ did not
prevent themes and motifs from becoming apparent.
Stark produces word/image games, such as Gravity, Levity, Brown and Green (all
works 2000) in which she uses an icon from Now Up-­‐to-­‐Date, a popular calendar
software programme. In these games, the ‘w’ from ‘now’ vanishes, and a small
computer desktop icon which looks like a dog-­‐eared piece of paper lives on as a
module for architectural and botanical drawings. For the series ‘Ecce Homo’
(2000), Stark made collages by pressing pansy blossoms onto images of famous
men in history: for instance, onto Caspar David Friedrich’s hiker from his
Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer across the Sea of Fog, 1818), which
was reproduced on a Penguin paperback edition of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo
(1908). The blossoms have a unique, sly expressiveness, but verge on being a
little too gimmicky.
For My Earth, Stark spent weeks using carbon paper to transfer a passage from
Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) to white paper and (in the tradition of concrete
poetry, or Robert Smithson’s piles of language), transformed words into
typographic allegories. Stark appropriated the masterly idiosyncrasies of Beckett
for her own system of reference, despite the fact that she understands all too
well the limits of her private world to ever be persuaded by the success of such a
symbolic transaction. The mulch for this work is called doubt.
Translated by Allison Plath-­‐Moseley.