Grids and Threads, Bastienne Schmidt

GRIDS AND THREADS
BASTIENNE SCHMIDT

Mapping with Grids and Threads
Terrie Sultan in Conversation
with Bastienne Schmidt
TS In looking over the course of your career, one of the many things
that stands out is your comfort with many different mediums and
approaches to artmaking—photographs, drawings, painting, collage,
and sculpture. Why do you work in so many disparate mediums?
BS I have always been interested in the concept of duality of process.
The idea of being boxed in to one medium, such as photography,
painting, or installation never appealed to me. By using different
mediums, I am speaking different languages and introducing new elements
to add meaning to the process itself.
TS You also move fairly seamlessly between representation and
abstraction. What is the connecting thread between these two artistic
approaches?
BS There are a few different things at play. One is my early fascination
with photography, which pushed me towards representation. I was
very interested in working to capture human emotions. But there was
always a very strong geometric component in terms of composing the
picture. I studied both painting and photography in Italy. When I came
to the States, photography took precedence as a way to make a living.
But I never made a clear distinction that one approach was artistically
more important to me than the other. Painting and photography call
for different languages, one is the language of abstraction and conceptualism,
and the other is a language of humanism.
TS That’s interesting because I find that even though the grid works
have a basis in geometric abstraction and minimalism, there is nothing
particularly austere about them. You have imbued them with a
warmer, more human approach to that particular structure.
BS For me, it is intriguing to look at the human touch within the grid.
A computer-generated grid would not be of interest to me, because
it is the little mistakes or imperfections that create that emotionality,
a kind of sub-context in the work that makes it alive for me.
TS Another element that strikes me here is your approach to what
has been traditionally thought of as women’s work, such as sewing,
weaving, and quilting, which you share with a number of artists, from
Alan Shields, Sheila Hicks, to Steven and William Ladd. Do you think
about that when you’re working?
BS I do think about it, but I also liberated myself very early on. I
don’t have to fit neatly into a box; I never did. Some of my approach
to materials is grounded in my having lived in so many different
countries—Greece, Italy, Germany, and the United States—and seeing
how these types of “making” are viewed differently in different
cultures. Growing up in Greece, I was always surrounded by poor
materials—peeling paint, material scraps. And later, I was drawn to
the Arte Povera movement for similar reasons. From all this I gained
a recognition of beauty in imperfection. I’m a wanderer in between
the mediums and between what artistic approach I use.
TS Can we talk a little bit about erotica? Because some of the materials
that you use here strike me as being very sensual.
BS It would have never crossed my mind to think of the work that
way. It’s certainly not conscious on my part. But I do care a lot about
the tactile feeling of materials. I have memories of my mother making
doll clothes and being comforted by the touch of the fabrics.
TS Me too, that touch is comforting in a certain kind of way, but
also a feeling of sensuality. And I have to say, I did find some of your
compositions to be pretty suggestively erotic. Maybe that says more
about the viewer than it does about the maker.
BS Now that you say it, that’s what attracts me a lot in Eva Hesse’s
work. Many of her shapes could be considered more female or erotic.
But on the other hand her images could be read also as archetypical
shapes that have been used for centuries.
TS In this case, I am specifically thinking of the Grids and Threads

Threading Space
Jacoba Urist
In the emblematic 1913 work, 3 Standard Stoppages, Marcel Duchamp
rethinks one of the most fundamental aspects of physical reality: the
distance between points on a line. Duchamp dropped three individual
strings one meter long, from a height of one meter onto a set of
horizontal planes. He then glued each piece of string to the canvas
below in the shape of their fall, creating a curved tool of reference.
If a thread, he said in the project’s instruction notes for replication,
“twisting as it pleases,” retains the length of a meter, a new image of
the unit exists. Both literal and ironic, the Standard Stoppages undermines
our rational assumptions of measurement and the world’s
sense of scale becomes a kind of riddle: what exactly is an interval of
space—if anything significant?
Of course, Duchamp is probably known best for the tenet: It is my
deed of making a selection that makes a work, a work of art. Surely,
the Duchampian meter is an abstraction about dimension—as well
perhaps, as the most readymade of readymades. The artwork, after
all, is really only the smallest strand of fiber, hundreds upon thousands
of which occupy a person’s everyday existence without much of our
thought or emotional energy. Blankets, sweaters, even the most
ornate of textiles, often make up the singular, quotidienne moments
of human existence. And thus, contemporary artists—particularly
in the face of modern atrocities—have adopted fabric to evoke
the universality of suffering. Piles of garments, whether the delicate
snowsuits in Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat to the bright saris in Patricia
Cronin’s Shrine for Girls, conjure a sense of collective responsibility and
personhood. And yet, the Standard Stoppages are a deliberate, aesthetic
reflection—beautiful, yes, in their concept as Duchamp would
say—but also in their ordinariness and humility, slivers of filament on
canvas, grand in a sense of pure visual simplicity.
So too is Bastienne Schmidt’s most recent series of conceptual photography
and geometric figures—captivating in their concept and
their aesthetic integrity. Here, in her new monograph, Schmidt constructs
a deceptively simple tableau of thread and string landscapes,
as well as a collection of systematic meditations on the power of
white space and delicate boundaries. Taken as a whole, she is asking
us to reflect on the arbitrariness of typology: how do artists and
architects bifurcate three-dimensional planes? Or as Schmidt once
posed the question to me: how do we confirm spaces?
Recently, William Eggleston reflected on the speed of his medium. A
photograph is made so quickly, he said, like in a one hundredth of a
second. Today, it is nearly impossible to view an image without a sense
of that split-second motion, where the artist has taken decisive and
irreversible action. Unlike a painter, there is no stepping back for the
photographer to possibly add looser, fuller brush strokes. More than
any other art form, we bear witness to the flicker of creativity and
insight. Even so, as curator Charlotte Cotton describes in her book,
the photograph as contemporary art challenges the particular notion
of the artist foraging daily life, in search of that precise moment when
a great visual appears in her frame. Instead, for the conceptual photographer,
the language is the intent, manifest in each handcrafted
effect and composition. As Schmidt put it once: the medium is the
thought.
In the first part of her book, Schmidt shows the world in both exaggerated
and reduced perspective, building her installations from
scraps of recycled fabric, twigs, and colored string, against the blank
canvas of snow—as though there is no true sense of scale. She has
captured the idea of space, rather than any of its tangible conditions.
In this context, there seems to be an inner dialogue with American

artist Fred Sandback. Although, because Schmidt’s thread installations
are photographic, there is an additional layer of process, and her original
artwork endures only a half-hour or so. Her images consider a
reality that purposely ceases to exist, conflating the “real” and the
manufactured world. But both artists, remarkably, delineate boundaries
through a porous approach. A minimalist sculptor, Sandback
worked with elastic cord and vaguely fuzzy acrylic yarn to pose his
own riddle in a sense: the illusion of volume without mass. Sandback
tightly secured thin lines of materials to the floors and walls
of galleries, defining—and redefining—three-dimensional form in
large indoor spaces. His work feels at once ephemeral and structural,
almost as if the work of a magician who has managed to reinvent
the depth of our physical universe. Interiors are elusive, Sandback
explained, you can’t ever see an interior.
Still, Schmidt’s art is deeply rooted in the legacy of raw materiality and
everyday life. There is an underlying pragmatism to each photograph.
One can’t engage her work without references to Arte Povera, the
group of mid-century Italian artists known for their use of found
objects and “poor man’s” materials, such as rope, rags, paper, and soil.
In Grids And Threads, for instance, strings are left undone, frayed to
achieve a sense of authenticity and transformation. For those associated
with Arte Povera, fabric is also indispensable, but has a different
role than it does for artists like Ai Weiwei and Patricia Cronin. At
base, there is a visceral, pre-industrial quality to Schmidt’s installations.
Like a painting or a sculpture, the maker’s hand is evident in each and
every photograph.
The second part of Schmidt’s project—a set of mixed media works
on Arches paper—focuses exclusively on a set of punched-out, 8 × 8
square grids, achieving a woven sculptural result. These are not only
quiet, monochromatic reflections on paper, rooted in the transcendent
traditions of Agnes Martin, Lucio Fontana, and Robert Ryman,
but also variations on minimalism and shape that become their own
kind of spirituality. And it would be a mistake to approach the two
halves of Grids And Threads separately: both reflect the delicate interplay
of perimeter and restriction. In this world of saturated ownership,
Schmidt has said, we stake a property, it is ours. While demarcations
can certainly be momentous—consider the various ways
people mark and honor the dead—they are fraught with problem-
atic implications. In this way, Schmidt’s string constellations become
reminders of the world’s fragility, of the national and private borders
we maintain, both as physical realities (see her previous work Home
Stills, about life’s domesticity) and as social constructs.
Schmidt has described how the physicality of white and the permeability
of paper allows shadows to “fall into the pieces.” As such, her
grids directly engage with Fontana’s legacy of spatial concepts. His
works—collectively known as ‘cuts’—blur our sense of a second and
third dimension, creating an illusion of depth. For his 1950s and 60s
masterpieces, the artist punctured surfaces of canvas, slashing deliberate
diagonal incisions with a sharp blade. I have constructed, he has
said, not destroyed. But if Fontana obscures the distinction between
painting and object, light and shadow, Grids And Threads presents a
kind of fourth dimensionality, carrying his use of perforation into the
realm of photography.
Ultimately, Schmidt is asking her viewers three monumental questions:
How do we keep space? How do we divide space? And how
do our partitions separate and unite us? As Good Fences Make Good
Neighbors, Ai Weiwei’s most ambitious public project to date, illustrates,
borders have particular resonance at this historic juncture. His
interventions—such as placing a gilded cage within the Washington
Square Arch—pondered the political and social impulses we have
to divide ourselves from one other. At the beginning of her career,
Schmidt says she was much more interested in social documentary.
But there is this ongoing dialogue now—a shared language, if you
will—between her painting and her photography, areas Schmidt masters
equally. White, Robert Ryman said in an interview, has a tendency
to make things visible; you can see more of a nuance. And it is through
this similar attention to color—and her bird’s-eye perspective—that
at last, as with Duchamp’s meter, once again we see the universe for
what it truly is: an exquisite, ironic riddle that can not be solved.

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Bridgehampton
Chromogenic print
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Mixed Media on Arches Paper
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Biographies
Bastienne Schmidt
is a multimedia artist working with photography, painting and largescale
drawings. She was born in Germany, raised in Greece and
Italy and has lived in New York and Bridgehampton for the past
25 years.
Through photography and mixed media, she explores concepts of
identity and place. Photography and art fall for Schmidt into the
realm of archeology, exploring layers of history and meaning, and
reassigning value to them.
Schmidt was born in Munich, Germany and moved at the age of
9 with her family to Greece. She spent her childhood surrounded
by her father’s archeological work, which instilled in her a desire
to organize, map, and attempt to understand systems through her
artwork.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in over 100
exhibitions among them at the Watermill Center, the International
Center of Photography in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the
New Museum, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg
and the Southeast Museum in Photography in Daytona Beach,
Florida.
Her artwork is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, the International Center of Photography, the
Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.,
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris among others. She has published 6 monographs,
among them Vivir la Muerte, American Dreams, Shadowhome, Home
Stills, Topography of Quiet, and Typology of Women. Grids and Threads is
her seventh monograph.
Public Collections
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY
The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY
International Center for Photography, New York, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany
Museet Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden
Margulies Collection, Miami, FL
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL
Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA
University of Texas, San Antonio, TX
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
www.bastienneschmidt.com

Terrie Sultan
is Director of the Parrish Art Museum. She has more than thirty
years of experience as a museum professional, serving in senior positions
at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Blaffer Art
Museum at the University of Houston. She has organized numerous
exhibitions featuring artists of national and international scope, and
authored some fifty books and exhibition catalogues. In 2003, she
was awarded a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Government
of France.
Jacoba Urist
is an art and culture journalist in New York City. A regular contributor
to The Atlantic, Jacoba covers long-form contemporary art and
architecture stories that often tackle larger social issues such as how
artists should address human rights and the ways that 21st-century
artwork can amend U.S. history. She has also published numerous
art features in The New York Times and New York Magazine, as well as
artist profiles and exhibition reviews for Cultured Magazine. In 2018,
Jacoba was hired by the Smithsonian and Smithsonian Magazine to
produce and write on the State Of The Arts, a series by the nation’s
institution of cultural record that looks at the role of art and artists
in a world that can feel perpetually in crisis.