So you are going to interview me, Anna?

Yeah. So, why are we going to the airport, Radek? I want you to tell me about your project.

The whole project started when I was going traveling and I was sitting in the airport looking for things to draw, and looking up on these light beacons, or communication devices that look like a cross between speakers and lampposts...they?re kind of ubiquitous.

Whatever airport you started off at to whatever airport you got to they?re always there, so they are a bridge between all of these different places. I also always liked doing stuff with airports because they?re anonymous; they all look the same. At JFK there?s a bunch of different terminals, and it?s like they?re trying to be space age, but the immediate area and the space around the airport are all the same no matter what country you go to. They?re all similar--those chain hotels and non-descript and odd businesses just standing there with these weird rolling hills of green around them and then all the flatness of the airport itself. I remember driving to airports here at JFK, and in Florence, and in all these different places and, by some weird kink of memory, the light and the terrain always felt really similar. Like the airport itself is a sort of a home, a familiar place.



So you see the airport as this portal to other places that is generic?

It?s not really generic to me, but it serves as a connection to all these different places. Traveling is weird - you know, you go for a ride on a plane for eight hours and then you show up in a different place and you lag behind. Everything else is catching up. Leaving my country (Poland) kind of felt like that. I have this weird history with tracing my roots now. I feel like my roots have been lagging behind me seven fold by now. It?s all these trips back and forth, and every time, there is a little more disconnect. I never really, since I left my country, thought hard about it but in some way I?ve tried to make connections--you go into one airport and you come out through another and it all still looks the same. It?s not like you had some epic journey across the oceans, the airport makes you feel kind of connected, like you?ve never left, actually.

I feel like the airport itself implies all of these infinite possibilities in the way that it represents and symbolizes the notion of air and travel. You can just be going to Kalamazoo, or Cleveland, but the airport itself and its posters and layout suggest all of these other exotic and far-out places. You can imagine that you?re going to the Caribbean, or Europe, instead.

Especially when you?re on layovers and you just sit in this non-descript space that?s set up for this mass movement of people. I think that they design a lot of these terminals so that you can rest or you can do things, but it?s not anything particularly specific. So, you self-organize the time there. Anytime you have a layover you sort of sit there like a parcel. You can go in here, or go in there. I like that mixed state of suspense and confinement, where you can all of a sudden take direction, change your direction...

I had a 6-hour layover in St. Louis, and there were smoking areas enclosed in Plexiglas, and you?d walk into a cloud of smoke. I spent almost the entire time in there. But you?d meet all these people in the smoking area -

Socializing?

Yeah. All of these people by themselves, it?s easy to make up stories about these other people in the airports... where they are from, where they?re going...

Yeah... another thing with the airports (that interests me) is the idea of landscape, some sort of territory. I really like maps and their relation to the actual physical landscape.

The idea that the map is supposed to be this abstracted picture while simultaneously it has reference to an actual, physical space. And changes in scale?I love changes in scale! So, the map thing, is somewhat abstracted but at the same time real. It feeds this physical relationship we have between different points in our lives, and the airports are an extension, or a metaphor, of that, they?re connected. They?re connected by straight lines. So you have these central points, nodes, and everything in between just fans out from there. I like to be methodical in my work, so I need these definite points to start from, and when I think of all this history that I have had here, then why not start of at the airport?

At the same time, I like to start in few separate places simultaneously, and see how these different parts interact with each other. The work that I?m doing now is like that: it has a few different sectors...and the beacons project is really about weaving a narrative through all these different pieces of my work...It?s a way of getting a perspective on my own work...



Your work often deals with perspective in a formal sense. But are you also toying with perspective in a larger sense of what perspective is and how it changes in regards to travel?

Yeah, how it collapses and flattens out... a lot of the drawings are built out of pins of pins, construction paper, and vellum and are architectural in the sense of their subject matter, and the fact that they occupy a 3D space. So, it?s almost like a kids pop-up book, a kind of most rudimentary trick to register a space. And I like rudimentary. Some of the other drawings are more like specimen samples: They are stripped down to the bare necessities--those blue backgrounds?with just enough detail to provide a composition, and then maybe a kind of quiet narrative. Initially, I started to make these drawings to see what happens when you remove all of the physical referents that create a sense of perspective in the old-fashioned sense, like in the Renaissance. I wanted to find out how much of whatever the artist could leave in the drawing for the work to still read like an actual space and not an abstract picture.

So with the blue background, like a blue special-effects screen, you get this possibility that the viewer gets to deal with those drawings, and decide what kind of space they are. What I like about this blue, other than it has a certain beatific air about it, is that it?s neutral, right between transparency and obstruction. It?s interesting how much I can do with it, to see what other central elements are in it--how a little information set down on paper can give a viewer the sense of indefinite space. I like these drawing being open and ambiguous, because it gives other people a way of interacting with them.



Some of your work is 2D, some of it isn?t, but in both there is a sense of visual movement. For example, the satellite painting that you were going to put in your last show (@ Open Ground in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) -and when I was at your studio I said: "Oh, don?t do anything else to this"

and I did and ruined it?

Yeah, that one. (laugh) Well I?m wondering if that?s like what you?re talking about. I told you not to do anything to it. I was getting to be like Clement Greenberg, all prescriptive in my criticism: "No, no, no - don?t do this" and then you did anyway, you see, and that sucks. You could?ve been the new Pollock, Radek. (laugh) But then that one for me, in particular, moves the viewer into the canvas.

Well, that to me is going back to the Renaissance and that part of painting (history) that deals with the surface of the canvas as a window into another world and then I want to flatten and expand that at the same time. The way I?ve been painting lately with all of these transparent layers, almost screens of different color adding up to an image. And it?s such a funny thing, because originally the perspective puts you in a specific relation to the painting, at a certain distance, or up, down, something like that. And then there was this perspective of the painting medium itself--you know, when you look at a lot of modern paintings, with some of the really good painters, you could almost perceptually feel where the focal point of the painting is.

Like, in Frank Auerbach?s paintings you see this mass of squiggles and dashes , and if you stand at the right distance from the surface of the canvas, it all clicks and coalesces into a really vivid painting. So, for my work, with the sheets of color and transparencies, and bending some of the perspective rules, and what not, I?m really trying to get people to be perceptually part of the painting. And that also goes back to the subject matter of these paintings. In the pool and bed paintings you want to feel and be a part of that - the essential part of experiencing a pool is that you?re IN the water, and I want to do everything, short of putting a bucket of water next to the painting, to make you have that experience...

I think it was Lawrence Weiner who did the "Chair" thing, like chair, chair, chair... There was an actual chair, and I think a photograph of a chair and then some text with the definition of the word chair and they?re all shown next to each other ...

It?s like the languages are synonymous - the words, and the language, and then there?s the real thing. The interesting thing with that kind of conceptual art it was it tried to give a really physical response to all of these different intellectual ideas--and then it comes down to they?re not really that intellectual. Not that it was stupid, but it generated an empirical response or relation to the viewer. I?ve been trying to make my art really conceptual

...and I think we?re lost...



Ah, the possibilities of travel (laugh) are infinite. We?re definitely at the bottom of the Verrazanno bridge - we?re in Bay Ridge, I know that.

I guess my thing is that it?s hard to think of making paintings conceptually, because the main thing about paintings is that their appeal rests on their material substance. I started painting for this show about a year ago, so I?ve spent a lot of time with these panels, and it?s a dialogue with the material that?s not really conceptual in the sense that can you lay out a grid-like: I?m going to do this and this and this.

The conceptual part of this project comes down to the fact that I want to do all of these different things and then I try to organize them and work on them with a unified logic. And I came up with these grand structures that put everything neatly into the fold and that?s how the whole beacon project started. I felt I could use the central narrative of these beacon-like figures, moving around in the world that was at once theirs and ours, all these different parts of the project cross-referencing: between all of the airport stuff, and the pools, and the beds, and planes, I could include everything and because of the narrative, the whole would have an integrity to it.

The more I work on this project, though, I realize that the structure itself is superfluous. The paintings are going to be what they are. They have somewhat of an organic relationship to the project as a whole, but each part is really independent of it. And I guess that?s what I?m talking about: how it?s hard to have paintings be "conceptual" because the empirical always takes over the conceptual in a painting. And I?m fine with that.