Interview with Virginia Maksymowicz
by Tracy Guajardo
What inspires you to work with forms of the human body?
My goal as a visual artist, based in-but not limited to-the discipline of sculpture, is to create iconographies that can communicate ideas to a range of audiences. The imagery usually incorporates the human figure, most often the female figure. The ideas revolve primarily around social issues and are presented through narrative or metaphor.
Coming to an understanding of what one is doing on a creative level requires a dialogue with an audience, since the communication that happens in fine art-the generation of "meaning"-only completes itself in the exhibition space. Audience reactions to my exhibits, critical and contextual writing about my work, my participation in conferences and my own published articles continue to help clarify my attraction to the body as a carrier of meaning
Eleanor Heartney, a respected critic who writes frequently for Art in America , has been researching something that is coming to be called "The Catholic Imagination." (Sociologist Andrew Greeley at the University of Chicago has also used this term.) Considering the various controversies surrounding the work of artists like Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, Kiki Smith and Robert Gober, she points out that they were all raised as Roman Catholics. She asks: "Is there something about the Catholic perspective that pushes certain artists toward the corporeal . . .?" She believes there is and references art historians like Leo Steinberg, whose book, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion , posits an undeniable connection between Catholic doctrine and a focus on the physical body of Christ.
As a Roman Catholic, I can attest to my own deep-seated operating assumption that the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul are one and the same. This unity was emphasized throughout my religious education as a child, and reinforced by the stories, the rituals and the dogma of the Catholic Church. Dualistic beliefs like Manichaeism, which separated the physical and the spiritual, and elevated the latter over the former, are not part of my world view.
On a very basic level, I can't think without my body . . . so it makes sense that I can't make art without it. It might also make sense-in a metaphorical way-that linking the body to the hard physicality of a building emphasizes even more the connections between us humans and the material world.
Are there any experiences that have significantly influenced your art?
In a way, all of my experiences, not any one in particular, significantly influence my art.
Besides my education and local environments, my work has always drawn on aspects of my own life. My disintegrating clay body casts in graduate school were definitely tied to ideas of mortality and the passage of time, probably spurred on by my father's death when I was in the 8th grade as well as a certain amount of homesickness (a 3,000-mile move for a kid from Brooklyn whose family never traveled was quite stressful).
My years back in New York during the mid-1980s to the early-1990s involved lots of office temping to supplement my meager art salaries as gallery director and then articles editor for the newspaper. These positions came on the heels of having been laid off from my Wayne State teaching position and having collected unemployment insurance (and having volunteered at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen) in Detroit. It was also the heyday of Reaganomics. This found its way into my art as installations about economics. I was in a show at the Franklin Furnace called, "Power/Money," and had several solo shows with titles like "Insider Information" and "Situational Ethics." I was also involved with other artists working on social and political issues: Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Art Against Apartheid, Political Arts Distribution/ Documentation and Artists' Call to Stop Intervention in Central America.
Since I've been in a tenure-track teaching position with its myriad of responsibilities and now that I've reached middle age and parents have reached old age, my work has become a bit more metaphorical. Feelings of being hemmed in by life circumstances and feelings of being in support positions that often go unnoticed have emerged in pieces like Peripheral Vision and The Physical Boundaries of This World.
I read that you sometimes cast your own body for your sculptures. Why do you choose to use your own body?
I try to use my own body whenever it is feasible (when I can cast the parts myself or when the process is simple enough, i.e. just plasterized gauze, that an assistant can do it) for two main reasons:
1) I'm readily available and I work "cheap." It is often difficult to find models who are willing to be slathered up with mucky moldmaking material.
2) I like being able to tie my work and the stories it tells back to me. Since my experience of the world is my experience (and I cannot be sure that other people's experience is identical), I like putting my own figure into the work as a sort of anchor.
Have you always worked with sculpture rather than other mediums?
Since my medium is really sculptural installation, it tends towards mixed-media in that a work might require me to paint or draw. For example, The History of Art series lies somewhere between sculpture and painting.
My first love was drawing. My father was a bartender. He would bring home Rheingold Beer letterhead given to him by his distributor-really high-quality rag bond. I would cut off the heading (I can still remember it distinctly . . . it was in full color and ran across the top of the page: a full beer mug slowly turning around as the level of beer went down!) and draw on the crisp, white sheets.
I became more interested in sculpture at Brooklyn College, both because of two very inspiring teachers, and because I became fascinated with casting and modeling the figure. I went on to study figurative clay sculpture with another great teacher at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, which, unfortunately, closed its doors years ago.
I was also interested to read that you make paper. How did you come to use this process?
When I was a CETA artist, one of my assignments was at the New York Botanical Gardens. Not only was I surrounded by plants, but I was allowed to take courses for free. I signed up for papermaking and was immediately hooked.
At the time my husband and I were living in TriBeCa, on the fourth floor of a loft building with no elevator. Carrying clay up and down those stairs, and having to find places to fire it, was rather difficult. Shortly afterwards, we went to Oberlin for my first teaching position and then to Wayne State. I raised money at both schools to buy kilns, only to have to leave and move on.
I discovered that I could make paper look like almost anything: put clay dust in the pulp or coat it with a clay and matte-medium mixture and it becomes "clay"; paint it with bronze paint boosted with a little bronze powder and it becomes "bronze." Paper is lightweight, unbreakable and easy to ship. Deciding to use it instead of clay was a "no brainer"!
Does it hold any meaning or do you simply like the technical qualities of the paper?
Yes. All materials hold meaning. It's unavoidable. Paper not only embodies the material qualities of but also conveys the connotations of fragility and flexibility, both of which I've used to complement my subject matter.
The same is true when I use Hydrocal FGR. Since it is a material originally developed for structural applications (cornice moldings, domes, etc.), it seems particularly appropriate for the works that juxtapose the female body with architecture.
You deal a lot with feminist issues, such as the "recognized role of women in the social architecture." Could you talk a little bit about how you address this in your work?
I try to address feminist issues, and other issues of social and political concern, in a way that encourages dialogue. That might be why college and university galleries tend to like showing my work: it crosses over into multiple subject areas, bringing up topics for discussion.
Although I am sympathetic to the directness of political artists like Martha Rosler or Barbara Kruger, I find a more oblique approach to such issues more interesting and more representative of my personality.
I came of age as an artist during the 1970s, when what is now called the "second wave" of feminism was occurring. It was a time when flagrant incidences of sexism were the norm. In my own experience at Brooklyn College I encountered one professor who had never given a female student an "A" because they "wasted their degrees by getting married and having babies." In another instance, a drawing professor from whom I did receive an "A," would not write me a letter of reference for a certain grant because he thought it a waste of time because "they would never award it to a woman." Because I was the first female lector in my Catholic parish, a visiting priest refused me the kiss of piece; during another Mass (in Italy), a priest refused to let me receive Communion under both species (bread and wine) because I was female.
Although times have changed, discrimination has not gone away; it's just gone underground. When I was an adjunct professor at the Moore College of Art and Design, the only all-women's art school in the country, I pointed out to my students that there were only three, full-time female faculty members in the entire fine arts department (all painters). Almost all of the adjuncts (who were paid an average of $3,000 a course) were women. The students were unaware of the difference in salary, benefits, security and voting rights between full-timers and part-timers.
As an artist, I can only reflect my experience. As a woman artist, I can only reflect my experience.
I am really interested in your installation works because this approach calls attention to issues that sculpture displayed on a pedestal might not address. For instance, I found it interesting that the installation The Physical Boundaries of This World was interactive in that viewers were invited to step over and walk around the figures. Why do you choose to work in installation rather than other methods of displaying sculpture?
Pedestal sculpture just doesn't allow enough physical and conceptual space for what I want to say as an artist. Installation allows me to incorporate multiple images, words, sounds and smells.
Perhaps because of having put my clay figures in the landscape in San Diego or perhaps because of having been involved in gallery work since graduate school, I am always paying attention to what surrounds an artwork as much as the artwork itself. In The Physical Boundaries not only did the viewers have to step over and around the bodies, they had to remove their shoes first. By moving through the space, the viewers' visual and spatial perception of the space changed, and by removing shoes, their psychological perception of the space was altered as well (it became, in a sense, "holy ground"). There was architectural stuff on the ceiling that mirrored the boxes I built for the floor, and I painted the floor blue. The entire room became the artwork.
One of your pieces that I really enjoyed is Lily of the Mohawks . Can you talk a little bit about why you chose to use Kateri Tekakwitha as inspiration for this piece?
I began work on Lily of the Mohawks at the end of 1991, thinking about the upcoming 500th anniversary of "Columbus Discovering America" celebration and hoping that I would be invited to participate in one of the many exhibitions planned to take place during 1992. Well, I'm obviously not Native American, but I am Catholic and I am a woman (two out of three wasn't bad) and Kateri had just made it through the beatification process (one of the steps towards full sainthood in the Catholic Church).
I had remembered reading Kateri's "biography" in elementary school but I didn't remember much about her. I tried researching her and the facts are few: she was born of an Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father (her mother had been kidnapped and forcibly married to a Mohawk); her mother had been baptized Catholic; Kateri survived a bout with smallpox but was permanently disfigured; at some point after her mother's death she decided to become Catholic; she was ridiculed and ostracized for her decision; life became so unbearable that she fled the Mohawks; when she died, it is said, that her physical disfigurement vanished.
I began to consider how all of us look at history through our own cultural and religious "lenses." The resulting layers imposed by all of these different lenses naturally distort the reality . . . a reality that we can never actually know.
So, I decided to make a "jury" of sightless (no eyes) female figures in poses where they are protecting their vulnerable parts (their genitals and their hearts) hovering in judgment over a cross. The cross itself is "layered": constructed of flower petals (in this case, silk, not real), which is an Italian and Spanish tradition; designed in a traditional Algonquin pattern; shaped like a Roman cross; ringed with the barest facts of Kateri's life.
Is there ever any difficulty that arises between your art and the religious questions that are part of your work?
Yes, in the sense that many of my fellow artists are surprised (sometimes, horrified) to find out that I am an observant Roman Catholic. Being part of a church that can still be seen as the "whore of Babylon" can be difficult to defend in rational terms!
Unfortunately, I think our Christian faith has been hijacked by both our current political administration in Washington and by large segments of the media. Being a believing Christian has become synonymous with right-wing politics in even the minds of otherwise, well-educated Americans.
Thankfully, folks like Jim Wallis have come to the rescue; his most recent book has helped immensely.
Interestingly, I've had equal difficulty as an artist in religious circles, where some very well-meaning Christians cannot get beyond understanding that art can encompass more than oil paintings of sunsets.
Is there any advice that you can give an art student?
Yes. Develop a good work ethic. Don't get yourself too much in debt. Finally, don't give up.