Alma ALLEN - Artist - Perrotin

Alma Allen used to get around on a skateboard. He lived in a New York City squat at the time, along with other kids who had felt the need to escape the small rodeo towns where they’d grown up. Allen had found quite a few ways to make a living: bartending, cleaning gas-station bathrooms and furnace smokestacks, parking fancy cars, working construction. He also made small-scale sculptures out of whatever materials he could scrounge up.

In truth, the whole situation was pretty marginal by art-world standards. He had taught himself how to carve during his growing-up years and was also an autodidact with respect to the ideas in his work. They were extremely personal, just shapes that spoke to him: «something from the natural world, something from a log or an elbow.» As he processed such suggestive forms through his hands, they became something more: «There’s a great deal that’s from the feel of something else, that gets transmitted,» he has said. «I remember a curve, a shape, better with my hands than with my mind. I think that a curve can transmit so much information, so much.»

Allen is an artist who feels his way to a form rather than building on a previously established symbol or concept. An object may suggest a giant cup with a vestigial handle; or a hand twisted out of anatomical alignment; or a cloud brought down to earth. But those associations are never fixed, never determinate. You might bring them to the work, but you’ll never be sure that Allen put them there purposefully. This approach has a clear historical precedent in Surrealism, in which abstraction and figuration intermingle like wine and food in the mouth: Méret Oppenheim’s kinky-yet-poignant still-life objects; the violent internalization of Alberto Giacometti; or, closer to Allen, the suggestive, characterful forms of Joan Miró and Jean Arp, or especially Louise Bourgeois.

At one point in New York, not without desperation, Allen sold his little hand-held artworks on an ironing board set up to attract passersby. They went for $20 to $40 apiece. Some of his sculptures were made from fallen timber, sourced in city parks. Others were carved from marble, which he couldn’t have afforded to buy. Fortunately, Manhattan curbs used to be made from it — those were the days — and when they were rebuilt to improve handicapped accessibility, he would sometimes get lucky and score a piece. That’s the thing about traveling by skateboard — you know the lay of the land.

Those days aren’t so long ago, really, and Allen misses them sometimes. Despite his fringe status back then, the power and strangeness of his early works accrued a devoted following. Fashion insiders supported him first, among them Julio Espada, Issey Miyake, Todd Oldham, and Ted Muehling. Gallery owners may not have shown him yet, but they did buy his work. And he was happy to make it. Since his childhood in Utah, Allen has always been adept at performing manual work for extended periods. He says he finds it therapeutic, calming. In his tumultuous life, the sculpture was a solace, a proof of Constantin Brancusi’s insight that «simplicity is complexity resolved.» So, life was fairly simple.

In 2006, Allen moved out to Joshua Tree, and it got even simpler. He has always been a solitary person, and the desert suited him. It also yielded bigger material, sizable chunks of stone and timber that he sourced out in the landscape. But one of his strengths — his superhuman patience — proved to be a liability, for his bones were that of a normal mortal. Having spent years with a knife in his hands, he began to suffer from micro-fractures in his bones. He could no longer make art — at least not in the way he used to. So Allen did what any mechanically competent twenty-first-century person might do — he built himself a robot, with funding from a supportive collector. This allowed him to continue working with his hands, making models in soft clay or wax. These forms could then be scanned and carved at a much larger scale, without having to send the pieces out for external fabrication.

This process of translation is stil the basis of Allen’s work today. For all their impressive resolution and monumentality, Allen’s sculptures have the open-ended quality of living things. It is as if his forms have only recently taken up residence in this particular bit of tree or rock. They are still settling in. Even his way of naming them is about indeterminacy — he calls them all Not Yet Titled. His work has the quality — commonly seen in other sculptors who used direct carving, including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, and Alexandre Noll — of seeming almost self-evident once it is made. Yet no one else could have imagined it. His way of working, apparently so straightforward, must be one of the most demanding of all artistic pathways. In a way, Allen confirms this by abandoning eight out of every ten of his ideas right away. Achieving genuinely new forms, things never before seen (at least by him), is a constant struggle. And, of course, that includes his own previous work. It’s like trying to reinvent the wheel, but even worse, for sculpture predates the wheel by thousands of years. And it all must come from within.

All of which raises the question: Was it ever really simple for Allen? Allen doesn’t say much about his deep sources; if he could put his feelings into words fully, perhaps he wouldn’t need to sculpt at all. He gives an example from early in his career, when a much-loved dog was injured in a car crash. As Allen cared for the animal over the next few months, carrying it from place to place, he found that the contours of his pet — the soft convexities of the rib cage and haunch — were arising in his work. This place perhaps gives the flavor of his sculptural imagination, which is totally emotional and totally embodied. «I often throw things into a jumble, and cause as much chaos as I can and try to rearrange it while it’s happening,» he has said. «I mean, I’m not really that interested in what I can imagine easily. And what I can imagine is fleeting, things I see out of the corner of my eye, and I don’t think I can get there consciously.»

Like all the great Surrealists, while giving his imagination free rein, Allen also embraces difficulty, complexity, the non-obvious. An aspect of that friction comes from material, skill, and process — the artisanal dimension. He worked from found pieces of wood and stone in the early days, not just to save money but because they suggested something to him. Scale, directionality, figure, patterns of growth — all these are given to him by his materials, affording concrete opportunities for departure. As further attention has come to him — particularly after curator Michelle Grabner included him in the 2014 Whitney Biennial — he has scaled up his operation. Success hasn’t changed him much as a person, but it certainly has required him to change his methods. He now operates out of a studio about an hour outside of Mexico City, which, in addition to robotic carving, boasts a bronze-casting facility and growing studio team, most of whom are locals, and also designs furniture for high-end clients (when I interviewed him, he was making a coffee table for Beyoncé). These days there is more lateral movement from one material to another; a form first found in wax and ultimately expressed in bronze has gone on quite a journey. You’ll not find a sculptor working today, though, whose output is more palpable, more saturated with material intelligence.

Allen’s works are now shown in major galleries and museums. But they are just as much for a teenager living in a park, who dreams of being an artist: or a rural kid, who is sent to a charity shop to buy clothes for school, and instead picks up a pile of art magazines. Allen makes them for his past self, in other words, and also for anyone else whose life might open up as his did, into an intensely wrought world. This is ethics via aesthetics, with only one rule: Always leave space for something to happen. Somehow or other, it always does.

They say that seeing is believing. Touching, not so much. Vision has seemingly always held the top position within the so-called hierarchy of the senses. Aristotle, for example, valued vision as the most developed and cerebral of the senses, while he confined touch to the lowest and most ignoble position. Philosophers and writers took his lead for centuries and enshrined vision as the ultimate sense of rational thought. Touching was associated with the body and, therefore, the baser instincts of the human animal, while vision was thought to embody the highest and noblest creations of the mind. However, a number of poets, artists, and thinkers over the years have asked us to see things a little differently. Writing in his fifth Roman Elegy, the German Romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe invokes an inversion of the hierarchy of the senses with the phrase, "See with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand." Goethe's seemingly paradoxical admonition provokes a number of questions that bear some thought. Is it possible to converse through our sense of touch without recourse to words? In other words, can we think through our fingertips? More importantly, can a feeling be transmitted through the tactility of a sculptural object? Conversely, can sculptural forms think and feel, and if so, what do they have to say for themselves? These questions lie at the heart of Alma Allen's sculptural practice in which the artist produces objects that seem both animate and empathetic.

I first encountered Allen's work by accident. Visiting the homes of two different friends in Los Angeles around 2009, I began to notice groups of small objects—creatures almost—inhabiting shelves, mantles, and various nooks and crannies within the modernist architecture of these domestic spaces. These objects—a series of quirky, organic curvilinear forms, hand-carved from stone and reminiscent of single-cell organisms replete with pseudopod-like appendages—seemed to be caught somewhere in a netherworld between the functional and the aesthetic and the inanimate and the organic. Were they sculptures as such, design objects, petrified organisms, or oddly talismanic objects of unknown origin and function? It wasn't quite clear at the time, although their persistent formal ambiguity remained in the periphery of my consciousness for quite some time after our first encounters. All I knew was that these mute forms were obsessively compelling and embodied an appealingly productive kind of cognitive dissonance as objects that refused any kind of easy classification.

It became clearer to me why these objects seem to exist between different states of being after learning more about the trajectory of Alma Allen's life and work. After running away from home and a deeply religious upbringing, the artist finally made his way to New York, where he sold his hand-carved sculptures on the streets of SoHo, displayed on an ironing board. Lacking formal art world training and credentials and driven more by necessity than strategy, his works were serendipitously purchased by the gallerists, collectors, and designers who frequented the contemporary art galleries in SoHo. This origin story of his career is fitting for an artist who produces works that seem to exist slightly outside of space and time. It is as if the artist had injected his objects into the bloodstream of the worlds of art and design and waited for them to virally replicate. They reside both inside and outside of the art world, shimmering into resolution periodically as liminal objects caught in a Heisenbergian state of uncertainty. Both here and there, static and fluid, they function as sculptural, tactile interfaces between different planes of existence or levels of bodily consciousness. 

Allen works in a variety of materials ranging from stone and wood to bronze and silver. His aesthetic process is almost alchemical and might be thought of more as conjuring than sculpting as his forms seem to be drawn out of the particular materials with which he works rather than rationally constructed beforehand. Whatever his chosen material, however, his objects exude a tactility that almost demand that they be touched. It isn't simply their appealing abstract biomorphic forms that call out to the viewer but also the incredibly seductive physicality of their surfaces. In a sense, they are ghost objects that reach out physically across the threshold of our perceptual consciousness to touch us from a world beyond. Let me be clear here—I'm not talking about the kind of cliché "sexy" invocation of ghostly touch that we see put into play in the film Ghost, where the dead husband, played by Patrick Swayze, sensually caresses the hot ceramicist widow, played by Demi Moore, as she works her clay on the wheel. Far from it. I'm talking about something both more concrete and far more poetic. In Allen's work, his surfaces of wood, stone, and bronze seem to act as semi-permeable membranes that are as much a medium of physical communication between the object and a viewing (or feeling) subject as they are simply aesthetic forms. Carving from blocks of wood sometimes weighing in excess of 500 pounds, the artist creates globular organic forms that both follow and honor the living history of the life form, as evidenced in the grain patterns and knots created by the xylem and the phloem of the now inert plant matter. Casting in bronze, Allen creates lozenge-like proto-vessels whose polished reflective surfaces seem to move like quicksilver. His objects carved from stone can range from highly worked surfaces to sanded matte finishes. In many cases, the geological history of the specimen is accentuated, as in the case of his frequent use of marble in which he plays with the veins in the materials. In each of these types of work, abstract as they might be, a kind of communion is invoked with another entity not simply through a visual apprehension of the work but through a tactile proprioception. These objects clearly see with a feeling hand.   

Although Allen's sculptures each seem to be unique in their formal innovations, when looking across his oeuvre, it becomes clear that there is a distinct lexicon of organic shapes that the artist riffs on over and over again. For example, some of his earliest small-scale, hand-carved objects exhibit proboscis-like appendages, which are repeated in his works in a kind of evolutionary process. Caught somewhere between the functional design qualities of the handle on a cup or a cooking pot and some kind of vestigial limb, these protuberances find themselves migrating from work to work across the arc of Allen's career. Some of these appendages appear tentacle-like, while others have evolved into arms or even ears. The sculptor Mark Manders' observations on the design origin of the handle of the cup are illuminating when looking at the limbs of Allen's sculptures. In speaking about his sculpture A Place Where My Thoughts Are Frozen Together (2001)—a work consisting of a femur cast in epoxy, a porcelain cup with a handle sculpted by the artist, and a sugar cube—Manders meditates on the evolution of the design of the common teacup. As Manders suggests: "I thought it was interesting how the cup has gradually acquired a handle during its evolutionary process. If you think about the evolution of cups, it is a beautiful evolution. The first cups were human hands: folded together, you could take the water with your two hands out of the river. The next step was things like hollow pieces of wood or things with folded leaves, and so on. The last beautiful moment in the history of the cup was when it was given an ear. After that, nothing really interesting happened with cups, just small variations. Many generations worked on it, and now you can say that the cup is finished in terms of evolution." In this sculpture, Manders added a small bump to the bone that reaches out to touch the sugar cube, which is pressed against the handle of the teacup on the other side creating a circuit of sculptural communication through their contiguous proximity. Like this work of Manders, Alma Allen's sculptures attempt to reach out and make contact with the world through the sense of touch. If the teacup has reached the apex of its evolution with its handle, such is not the case with Allen's sculptures as the appendages of his forms—whether in wood, stone, or bronze—continue to morph as if they were disregarding simple functionality in search of a multiplicity of possible types of tactile communication. Tentacles, antennae, arms, and hands—there is no hierarchy here to the types of forms at play in these works. Each of them can reach out and establish a dialogue through the sense of touch.

In other works by Allen, globular clusters grow out of the sculpture's central bodies and replicate across different materials. Are these circular shapes embodying formal moves emanating from a deeply embedded muscle memory of modernist geometry, or are they somehow referring to the curvilinear design of some unknown organic entities? Are they sculptures or the fossilized remains of some unidentified species? It's always wonderfully unclear in Allen's work. We might take the example of another element of his formal lexicon, which I've referred to as "vessels." Whether in wood, bronze, or stone, Allen creates objects that seem to hover between organic entities and functional design objects. As the most basic innovation of material culture, the vessel has a foundational quality as a human tool but is also found as an evolutionary design element across the biological world. We can think of simple ceramic pots meant to carry water or the floral design of the pitcher plant in which the flower becomes a receptacle to capture insects. In both cases, a geometric plane is bent in order to create an enclosure. In Allen's work, we see him experiment with this form in bronze, stone, and wood. In a number of bronze works, the top of a curvilinear lozenge of material begins to sag into a depression, giving us the simple suggestion of the beginning of a recess that could hold water or anything whatsoever. The fascinating thing about these works is their seeming malleability as if they were some kind of organic liquid form rather than solid objects. In yet other works, wildly floating loops and ribbons of bronze erupt into the air, defying gravity and freezing into place a kind of molten fluid dynamics. A number of these works seem to be reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi's seminal study of modernist simplicity and elegance in his 1923 sculpture Bird in Space. Allen's rendition dispenses with the reified elegance of Modernism's rigid austerity in exchange for a rambunctious, humorous, and intrepid dynamism.

The question remains as to whether Alma Allen produces abstract objects, which some critics have claimed as the height of modernity. Clearly, his sculptures don't necessarily replicate things in the world around us. But does that make them abstract? It's interesting to think about the work of Ellsworth Kelly when approaching this question. Kelly spent a number of years in Paris as a young artist experimenting with abstraction. After seeing an exhibition of his photographs a few years ago, I was surprised to find out that the shapes of his now-iconic color canvases all derive from geometric forms found in the world. Windows, barn doors, etc., all became geometric sources of his floating color-saturated forms. As he's suggested: "Since birth, we get accustomed to seeing and thinking at the same time. If you can look at things only with your eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract." This might explain Kelly's obsession with Neolithic birdstones and bannerstones carved from quartz, slate, and granite by North American indigenous cultures, which he collected throughout his career. While birdstones exhibit the bare minimum suggestion of animals with heads and ears, bannerstones were carved into abstract curvilinear and rectilinear geometric forms. While archaeologists suggest that these were functional design objects used to provide ballast for spear-throwing devices, Kelly's interest in them stemmed from this oscillation between figuration and abstraction that seemed to collapse any kind of binary separation between these two modes of artistic production. Like that of Kelly, Allen's work refuses to come down on one side or the other of this gulf, preferring instead to create objects that resonate between the muteness of the world of abstraction and the vocal concrete forms of the natural and built environments in which we live our lives.   

A number of years ago, Allen had to stop carving by hand due to a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome. At that point, he turned his attention to producing sculptures with a giant robotic arm that could carve shapes that he would mold with clay. One would think that something would be lost between the hand and the machine and that the tactility of the resulting work would suffer. This is far from the case. Working with soft plasticine in his hands, Allen has continued to produce his sculptural forms that speak to us through their surfaces as much as we speak to them. If anything, his hand is even closer to his work as his fingers now manipulate the materials directly, often without the assistance of any tools. As with his earliest hand-carved stone objects, Allen's work continues to abide by Goethe's encouragement to feel with a seeing hand.

Su Wu: I just found an early note from you, about this Carl Jung quote we both love, and I don’t really want to talk about Jung but I bring it up because it seems as good place as any to start this conversation, to acknowledge a certain futility, the likelihood that we’ll try really hard to say the wrong things. This is the quote: “Loneliness does not come from being alone but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important.” But, one of the things that strikes me about you is that you’re an optimist. So there’s hope for this conversation yet! And I wondered if you think being an optimist is also what makes you so restless?   

Alma Allen: I’m definitely optimistic but I think it makes me more reckless than restless. In a situation where you don’t have resources, you have to be reckless. How I work is I often throw things into a jumble and cause as much chaos as I can and try to rearrange it while it’s happening. I can’t see things very clearly except for in the very quick and frenetic state of working. I mean, I’m not really that interested in what I can imagine easily. And what I can imagine is fleeting, things I see out of the corner of my eye, and I don’t think I can get there consciously, like a real cognitive plan won’t ever get me to the goal. I’m just not a planner, and I get really bored if I’m just working through something that I already see. I want to use the process of working.   

SW: You’ve mentioned that sometimes these visions of shapes come to you all at once, but that more often they come in the making, that your hands have their own knowledge and memory. And that to me seems sincerely confusing, I mean, I think that captures part of it . . .   

AA: I was thinking about it this morning. I made a small piece these last few days on purpose just to think and see the process, to analyze it, because I’ve never really done that when I’m working. There’s a great deal that’s from the feel of something else, that gets transmitted. It’s a little harder in the large scale, but in the smaller scale and in the models for the larger pieces, I remember a curve, a shape better with my hands than with my mind. I don’t really trust my mind. I trust my fingers a lot more. You hold a lot of information and a lot of knowledge in your senses, your sight or your hearing.   

SW: Right, the identifiable gestures, and the skill and also the impulse, maybe, but not the struggle. Your hand gets you part way there, but then there’s the stuff that gets left unsaid. I guess, in question form: how much of your work is intuitive and how much of it is deliberation?   

AA: It’s not even that I have an identifiable gesture, it’s that there’s an irregularity to something that I find attractive, something from the natural world, something from a log or an elbow. The more times it gets changed through the hand, it becomes designed, it becomes regularized. I think that a curve can transmit so much information, so much, but not one, necessarily, that’s a continuous exact radius. Working with your fingers and your hands you know that better than your eyes. Your hands are way more adept. I start deliberately but I don’t finish that way.   

SW: How have you gotten better?

AA: If anything you get better because you try not to be perfect. You get used to throwing things into unrest and grabbing at it, and then grabbing the worst of it–often the worst becomes the most important work, the ones that I’m the least comfortable with. The more I think about it, the more difficult it is for me.   

SW: It brings up for me that question of whether things need us to explain them, or if we should just revel in their presence, rather than trying to replace them with words that fall short. I mean, how do you think of the physical in your work? Like both the physical world as opposed to the biological world, these material choices in stone and wood in contrast to flesh, but also the physical as in physical activity, creating from something inanimate.   

AA: Natural material breaks, and it has cracks, and you have to change your direction all the time, and there are changes in the color of the material. Sometimes I work with clay where this never happens, it’s plastic. I mean it has its own elasticity and it has its own ways, but you can always go back. With reductive sculpture you can’t really go backwards, which, for me, is helpful. I don’t know what I would do with it. I’d become paralyzed if I could go backwards. I’d be at the same point always.   

SW: You’d mentioned earlier that there aren’t many reductive sculptors anymore. It’s hard work, but it’s also a counter to certain impulses, the stripping away instead of the building up.   

AA: And it’s not referential. I don’t really feel a part of popular culture so I don’t really feel comfortable making references from it. I’ve never really felt continuous enough with popular culture to comment on it. And I appreciate work that does, but it’s so far from my own. And I think that’s where it leaves me, because there’s no commenting in reduction.   

SW: What happens to your dust?   

AA: I hope I don’t breathe it. I breathe some of it. I eat some of it.   

SW: I want to go back a bit to the idea of not being contiguous, not fitting, or outside certain established readings and trajectories, that there’s not this whole enterprise around it already. But that also makes it, I think, a little bit lonely, that the work is somewhere beyond this conversation we’ve already figured out how to have. And you live in a pretty inhospitable climate, in relative isolation. Have you deliberately sought solitude? Or is it a byproduct to what you need to make your work?   

AA: I’m very noisy. And I do really like working. There are moments where making work allows me to be outside of myself. I think most people must have that in the things they like to do, and it’s made me sort of addicted to work. And it leads me to go live where nobody is around. But, I don’t know, I’m a person of the world.   

SW: “I’m a person of the world?” Did you just say that?   

AA: No, I mean I’m interested. I’m a little naive, but I think that’s also a bit protecting.   

SW: Do you want to talk about your childhood?

AA: Not really. I told you some.

SW: I don’t want to put words into your mouth but I did really love the imagery, the idea that there might someday be some child walking around the desert in the late afternoon delaying the hours before being elsewhere, finding one of your unsigned carvings sitting in a pile of rocks.   

AA: That’s quite important to me. I mean often my intention with my work is not something that I think will be important to the viewer; it’s very personal. But I’m trying to provide a vehicle for the viewer to have their own experience. I’ve often made work and left it in places or found funny ways to show it. The viewer doesn’t have an approved reality, an institutional reality–they really have to make a leap of their own. It lets them experience something to complete the artwork. And I think the more they know about me, or the more they try to interpret what I meant by the work, the less they’ll be able to do that. So I’ve often stayed pretty hidden. And it’s why I leave pieces. As a child I left pieces for the Indians because I was convinced they were still out there, they were just too smart to be seen, because they knew we were not up to any good.   

SW: Can you talk a little bit about the inadvertent poetry of leaving things behind?

AA: I don’t think there’s anything better for an artist, at all, than that your work gets lost, and then someone discovers it and creates in their own mind what it is, and what it was meant for, or even if it is art. They have to make that leap, and I really think that completes the artwork, in that instance. And for each new person it’s a new instance. I’m such a sap.   

SW: Also, not signing the works! Which is incredible to me. And this happens less often now, I know, for a whole host of practical reasons, but I’m fascinated with this thread of disappearance. Do you think people who know you have a different interaction with your work? I mean not just that they have the privilege of information and access, but what actually gets lost the more we know about the specifics of a piece or person?  

AA: It may not be as bad as I think, not quite so dire. That’s probably just my shyness. But not signing things, especially the smaller works that I made for many years: they’re really meant to be held in the hands and not sit somewhere. So they’re not objects that were meant to display at a certain angle, or in a certain way, and if I sign them it predetermines their orientation and their location, which I don’t want to do. They can continue to create something, because of interaction among the objects. I mean it’s not a very contemporary thing to say; most of my answers are not very good contemporary art answers. I’m a bit of a, a little bit of a . . .   

SW: A bit of a what?

AA: At this point I’m purposefully naive. I mean I’m not primitive; I’m self-taught but I haven’t willfully not read a book. I’m never entirely convinced that everything is always perfectly set to how it is. In a very slight way. I don’t mean that, oh no, we’re inside of a bubble on the eye of a whale, I don’t mean that at all. I just mean that I’m open to the sense of wonder, open to things changing.   

SW: Do you have a sense of what triggers those changes?   

AA: Something outside, some circumstance. This is strange. Don’t you worry?   

SW: Of course. I feel distrustful of people who don’t worry.   

AA: Right, but you make so many snap judgments, you seem so confident, you seem like it, but that’s the outside.   

SW: What I worry about is the other edge of that, where overvaluing discernment turns you into a deeply dissatisfied person or you forget how to be kind. I just think my personality type is a judger, just judging and complaining constantly.

AA: That’s what I find so fascinating about you. You think you will be happy?

SW: Who cares. What would you do with happiness? Seriously, what good is it? I don’t know; it doesn’t seem like the noblest pursuit, just something to the side of it. And you seem to often be in some sort of mishap.   

AA: I hurt myself all the time. [Holds up injured thumb]   

SW: Well I can add that to this list: a shattered leg from riding a motorcycle in the mountains . . .   

AA: I love to go fast.   

SW: . . . a truck hauling a piece of marble from Colorado that breaks down outside of Vegas, carving things so hard that your hands break down. What’s your relationship to injury, like, is there a swagger to working in a form that requires some physical strength?   

AA: I mean maybe when I was younger there was a bit of swagger. But it’s funny, I’ve always made small work. There’s really not much swagger in making small things. And I hide myself quite a bit. I’m not central, I don’t want to be central.

SW: When we first talked for this interview, you mentioned a few artists whose work you see as simpatico, and it surprised me–it was not at all how I would have categorized your work, if I had to. I thought it got at something that might be interesting, and the language of your work or the value system that you see in your work.   

[Silence]   

SW: Fine, okay: who are the artists with whom you share an affinity and why?   

AA: No, I knew that was the question. I’m just looking at the list I made. I mean, many people maybe haven’t even taken up stone sculpture because of Brancusi in the beginning of the century. He’s by far the most dominating creature of any sort of art form, music or otherwise. I can’t think of another giant that sort of bullies everything. It’s a bit unfair, and it’s probably driven a lot of people off sculpture. He wasn’t conflicted or crazy. He was very centered, the work was.  And I’ve been influenced as much by writing or music, as by art. I love the writing of Samuel Beckett; it’s like a fever dream. I have a really strong identification. It must be that the brain thinks in the same chaotic patterns and tries to make sense of the chaotic patterns. I find it kind of soothing. I think the idea of contemporary art is a pretty new fabrication and I don’t think the artists working in the past would have thought of themselves as contemporary as opposed to part of a long human flow, the continuation of art as opposed to the contemporariness. I’m going to get really good at art babble, though. I’ve never had once a review of my work, and I’ve never been challenged, at all. Since I didn’t go to school, I really have not had to defend my work, or even been placed in a position where it’s criticized. It’s going to be a very interesting new process for me. And that’s like the central thing that many artists go through–that experience–and work for and about, that feeds so much of what they do.

SW: What do you hope the criticism is?

AA: That’s part of what I miss, being on the outside. It’s all positive. I kind of hope they’re mean. A little bit.

SW: The right meanness is perfect. It’s just how much you believe your own myths.

AA: I can’t slough it off, I don’t give up completely. Maybe it’s this utter optimism. The last bit, that I can’t let go, is that there’s just momentum, and our physiology interacts with a really base sort of energy that propels humans forward, that we can sort of interact with, not in a purposeful way. It’s whatever causes animals to procreate and stars to keep drifting apart. As a kid I was convinced at times I could imagine it, when I was running really fast in a field and went into a sort of trance, and you could see the universe moving.

SW: I said I didn’t want to talk about Jung, but I have this note from you — the “psychomotor domains of understanding.” [laughs]

AA: That was my past, this attempt to make an artist statement. And that’s basically what it means: communicating through other senses and thinking with other senses. I don’t think it’s just communicating. I believe the hands and the eyes can think, they’re cognitive. Or maybe it’s just me and other people can just sit quietly and think. But I don’t very well. I actually like hard work and lots of continuous, repetitive carving to separate the mind away so you can actually think. Like too-fast motorcycle rides because if you have so much, so many things happening, maybe it’s like a lazy meditation, where you are able to have a meditation without having to go through just sitting there, quietly. You can have these sorts of meditative states through intensive action. I get addicted to work. I have something that I like to do and I’ll try to remind myself to look up to see if it’s going to rain, and another hour or two hours will go by working, when I’m outside, before I will rememberto look up, because I get really intensely involved in that state.

SW: Have you always been that way?

AA: I’ve always been that way since I was a little kid. It’s that restlessness. I’m sort of anxious. It’s embarrassing a little bit. I just think much, much better with a lot happening. But it’s not just things happening. When you’re working very intensely on something, through physical motions, at some point you can see clearly and your hands continue working. There’s a moment of transcendence your brain allows you by needing all of your senses to keep what you’re doing accurately, and that lets other parts of your brain open up. And that’s the state I’m addicted to, and I look for things to reach it.

SW: What keeps you from reaching it?

AA: I mean often I’ll think really clearly in those moments when I’m halfway awake. But as soon as you wake, it changes, and it changes your ability to have a fluid way to see things. Like, you’ve told me that the right word came to you in the morning; morning is an interesting time.

SW: It is. And I think of writing as a sort of paralysis in which you only get to move once in a while, like occasionally wiggle a big toe or something.

AA: Writing is hard. I sent you some things that are not what I intended. That’s what I meant, that language is cursed to me.

SW: It’s hilarious, trust me. But do you think that maybe what you think is your private language is actually more deeply felt than you know? Is that a more terrifying thought than being misunderstood, that everybody gets you?

AA: I don’t know. I have a language. I have things that mean something to me. But I don’t necessarily think that my own sort of fears and desires are what anybody wants to know about. What they’re interested in is their own. And having a vehicle to find their own. There’s that poem you recommended [by Szymborska] where she’s trying to get inside the mind of the rock.

SW: Oh god, that poem is so great.

AA: And it’s kind of trying so intensely to get inside the world and understand what you can’t understand and still wanting to and still always attempting, always asking, over and over, to try to understand something that you’ll never understand. Not even close.