By Maggie Feng
Nancy Brachman Davidson is an American feminist artist working in sculpture, installation art, photography and video.
1. What inspired you to become an artist? and What does art mean to you?
As long as I remember I made art, experimental art. I played with plaster and made sculptures in my basement without adult supervision or direction. Dipping aluminum foil in wet plaster was very exciting. My father was a weekend painter. He would do watercolors on site in the woods surrounding Chicago where we lived. I would go with him with my own pad of paper and maybe paints. I don’t remember any paintings I did so perhaps they were drawings in my sketchbook. When I turned 11 I was allowed to go to the Saturday school at the Art Institute of Chicago. My favorite time and place every week. The Junior School was the basement of the Art Institute, so I had to walk through the galleries to reach the school. We lived in a close suburb to Chicago and my father worked downtown so on Saturday mornings I would ride with him into the “loop” and then I would go to the school and get home on my own later in the day or sometimes ride home with him. The class I took included drawing, painting and sculpture. Later when I was an MFA student at the Art Institute I met artist/students who were also enrolled in the classes. We would discuss our favorite teachers One drawing teacher was a proponent of “The Natural Way to Draw” by Kimon Nicolaides. The instructor would pose moving constantly moving. He used a broom or large stick to show the movements of his body in space. Nothing has replaced my love for gesture drawings and the freedom of his teaching. My other favorite class was clay modeling. We had a new model every week. At the end of the day we tossed our pieces back into the large clay bin unless we were exceptionally excited with our work. Another kind of training I still believe in, discard what doesn’t excite you and keep working. The process is where the learning takes place! My entire life is filled with art, memories of art, making art, thinking about art, reading about art, dreaming about art, fantasies about being an artist and the art I would make past and present. So it is everything! There is no outside for me. Every act of looking is involved in art; I cannot help but see art in everything and everywhere. Language is difficult to use in this regard because the metaphor that closely approximates my explanation sounds like the description of a religion or divine spirit, yet this is not at all what I mean. A closer comparison perhaps would be to compare the ideas of a musician or singer where every aspect of their life is involved with music and song, an all-encompassing environment. There is no objectivity in my perspective and no need for one. It is a life immersed in art.
2. Who are your influences
and why? Do you have a favorite artist?
Eva Hesse was an amazing artist. She has influenced me in so many
ways. Her use of materials and the nature of the forms she worked with are extremely important. Eva really opened up an area of materials that were not being used before her time. She rarely used metal, lead or other traditional materials like stone. Her materials were soft and her forms were more reminiscent of the female body. She used rubber, latex, nets, plastic and other materials that were not acceptable and unfortunately are deteriorating. Hesse also spoke about absurdity and repetition. These are both very important to me. Some of her pieces seemed almost sublime…so beautiful and I also loved the awkwardness of others. She constantly questioned herself, but didn’t retreat. Her work with systems that led to visual chaos was also very new and intriguing to me. Hesse’s final works, the ropes and wires dipped in latex and hung from hooks on the ceiling were most inspirational. They seem to breakthrough many barriers. They were not grounded, did not have a set form, seemed chaotic and yet extremely graceful. Visually they represent a brief moment in time.
3.A series of large scale inflated balloon sculptures is your icon artwork, what inspired you to have this idea?
I didn’t always make work about humor and female power. I began to work in the early seventies. At the time I was making wall installation drawings. The work was related in several key ways. I made work that was involved with touch, actually rubbings from the floor. They were always very large and often bilaterally symmetrical. At the time I was
thinking about very simple forms (continuing today) and the gestalt of the work. That is how it translated as a whole image. In graduate school I had become fascinated with two very diverse subjects. Scarification and its meaning in relationship to female beauty and an image of female power used in many civilizations that abstractly showed a woman with her legs spread. At times this was used as a symbol for fertility and it was also used as a decorative, repeatable form. It was mostly bilaterally symmetrical.
Fast forward to 1992. I wanted to work larger, take up space in a 3D way, be able to manage the weight by myself, and was always attracted to humor but I did not express it in my work. I read a book titled Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson. The lead character was an enormous woman who had enormous appetites….food, sex dogs and more. I was also always very intrigued with carnival and the place of the viewer. The passive audience doesn’t exist in carnival. I was also reading Bakhtin the Russian theorist who wrote about the grotesque. The grotesque also interested me, including Arbus. Because I grew up in Chicago I also had an attraction repulsion relationship to the group formed in Chicago called the Hairy Who. So,…it wasn’t anything I saw, but one day I had a thought. It was about weather balloons. How would it be if I worked with a balloon as a form, for all the conceptual reasons I just stated. I sent for one, the minute it came I blew it up and knew immediately it was the perfect material. Funny, grotesque, huge, erotic, absurd, attractive and a body with flesh and very importantly, a body of parts, male female…we all have these bulbous parts. With this work I invented a form that allowed me to bring together notions of bodily pleasure in relationship to eroticism, carnival and the absurd.
4. Both Chicago and New York City are amazing and artsy. What is the difference of living in the two cities?
My life is in New York. I have lived here since 1979 and made it my home. I depend on friends for support and friendship. My work has been shown in NY and it is a constant source for inspiration. By this I mean the theater, music, public events and street life always. This city is so complicated it presents unexpected opportunities that inspire me by just walking out the door and making a different turn on the street.
Is NY still the place-to-be? This is such a personal question. For me it is, for other friends it is not. I have friends in Chicago, Los Angeles, Vienna, Germany …so many places. Each friend feels their environment is supportive to their art and their personal life. Many New York artists leave New York for extended periods of time each year. Why? They have many reasons. Some enjoy a quieter life. Others work better in the country. Many have larger studios outside the city.
5.What advice would you give
to art students seeking careers in art? What essential skills do colleges need to provide art students?
I prefer to answer the question Can art give answers? It always depends on the questions. Who is looking? What is the context? What kind of answers? I like work that opens audiences to new thoughts, questions preconceived notions, produces new questions and challenges
questions about the nature of art. Is art permanent? Does it reflect only a moment in time? Can it be understood in other cultures? These are only a few of my questions for art. The longer I make art the more questions I have.
commitment to daily studio practice
pleasure in being an artist/ it will rarely be easy