Joan Tanner
American, 1935-
Yellow Mesh, 2020
Flex a Trac™, painted plastic mesh, painted plastic sheeting, wooden elements, metal rods, all-thread, rope, zip ties, hardware, painted sheet metal
81½ x 92 x 52 in.
Courtesy of the artist
COMMENTS
NW: A few of the elements, like Yellow Mesh, almost resemble animals or imaginary creatures of some sort.
JT: Yellow Mesh is essentially a bundled piece, with an armature made from Flex-C Trac, a common construction material. It’s incredibly useful because I can bend it and bunch it, twist it and tie it off. If you wanted to assign Yellow Mesh a category, most of us would call it a three-dimensional object sitting on the floor. A sculpture, right? I can go with that. I wouldn’t refer to it as an animal necessarily, but as some kind of indeterminate organism. It’s mutable. If I were to lift it up a little, for instance, it would hover. If I were to relax the ropes, it would collapse, hovering from below. So, again, there’s a tentative dialogue…
NW: To me, there’s something playfully defiant about your application of color. Does the fact that you were once a painter still influence how you approach your work?
JT: Color has always been part of my vocabulary. I use it and apply it in many different ways, not just with a brush. When I was painting in the 1960s and ’70s, I was interested in simple geometric forms, things like windows and boxes. I painted ropes that were coiled and twisted. Now, I am doing the same thing, one could say, with physical materials, which has to do with stuffing and bulging, and then twisting, inserting, screwing, and bolting.
NW: How did your transition to sculpture happen?
JT: I stopped painting around 1991 or 1992—not with any irritation, but from a desire to expand my vocabulary. Then, in 1995, I had an exhibition, “Close Scrutiny,” at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. I was working with apples, incising them and, in some cases, adding metal to them. In Der Apfelwerk Tablewerk, I arranged them on a table, along with other objects, placed in rows of linked metal gutters as if they were specimens…
NW: Your 2002 installation Standing Yellow at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, was another big shift.
JT: Around 1999, I started dipping and coating all the extraneous material hanging around my studio in Plasti Dip. It’s a colored coating that adheres and dries to a soft, fleshy surface. The way it disguises the murkiness of what’s underneath appealed to me. It was kind of casual, but the more I did it, the more I thought, “Oh, I really like this because I have converted something, but I haven’t really altered it except for dipping it.”
In many respects, it was not a new way to work, but it gave me a lot of satisfaction because I could almost erase myself, removing the direct hand. When I coated and disguised and combined unrelated things, it was like killing off things in my head that had never been resolved. It allowed me to expand how I could use shape and do it quickly and nonchalantly—an important contrast to agonizing over a large painting and trying to figure out every little thing.
I got very attached to this process, and I then began to blend colors. What really occurred was that I stepped away from brushes and paint and engaged with a spontaneous vocabulary. It didn’t end painting or mean that I was finished with color, but I was done with the handed part of mixing and with consciousness and deliberate ways of application. It allowed me to push ahead in a way that I don’t think I could have until I started working with fabricators.
NW: How has working with fabricators changed your practice?
JT: It means that I am constantly explaining verbally, or revealing in sketches, what I have in my head. I’m reluctant to make preliminary drawings because I work things out through direct contact with the objects. I need to be responsive to whatever strikes me when I’m in front of the materials. That said, at my age, I am totally dependent on people who can do the real physical fabrication work for me and have the skills and patience to interpret my directions…
NW: There’s a vigorousness in the way that you use common industrial materials like plywood, galvanized metal, and corrugated plastic.
JT: They’re very common materials, and that generic accessibility is terribly important. It’s all right there. All I’m doing is taking advantage of materials that give you a chance to experiment: you can ram them around, manipulate them, and change them. My choices are very deliberate because a material has to do what I need it to do. If I’ve used drop cloth, for instance, it’s because I can bunch it and insert it between parts of netting; I can spray it with layers of paint, and then it starts to get heavy and begins to sag under the weight of what I’ve just done…
NW: The connectivity of objects is also critical to how you work.
JT: The joinery is important to me because it’s incredibly informative about how you relate to space, size, and shape. And that’s part of the taxonomy. I’m interested in the connectivity of how things are wound or tied, or how we connect with bolts and screws. They’re like notations. I’m intrigued by how you go about piercing something and finding other methods of connecting things to make a construct.
I’ve always been interested in shapes and the desire to thrust things against each other that have logical relationships. As humans, we have smooth exteriors, but inside we’re a jumbled mess of tissue and shapes and forms and vessels and stringy things. As far as shape is concerned, I think it’s simply a matter of taking things apart to understand that the exterior surface, or the way something looks, does not necessarily reveal how it is formed. This interior-exterior relationship is not illogical. It might be that I’m seeking a way to integrate things that are unexpectedly related.
NW: That goes back to the idea of penetrating the surface and revealing the murkiness underneath.
JT: In a lot of work, I find that the imperfections reflect who we are as Homo sapiens. To insist on an enclosure that has no purpose other than to enclose, to wrap the bundle—those actions speak to how we think, how we are handed, how we work. I’m compulsive about the sequencing of the screws and the joinery; the positioning is extremely intentional. I love the mechanistic aspect of the visual presence. And with a site-specific installation, the dynamics of the viewer’s presence, as well as the architecture, affect the work and the relationships within the space. It is temporary, which is the way we are as human beings—we are not planted.
https://sculpturemagazine.art/the-persistence-of-inconsistency-a-conversation-with-joan-tanner/
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Tanner has a knack for taking unpromising materials and reworking them with simple gestures to create evocative artworks. Here, she has bound together metal tubes to form a bouquet whose flower petals are pieces of cut plywood. A length of Flex-C Trac snakes like a supporting spine. Zip ties hold the plastic mesh in place, as if it were fabric being draped on a dressmaker’s dummy.
- Out of Joint: Joan Tanner, 2023