The 2007 exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975at the National Academy Museum, New York brought to my attention some New York painters that were exploring new territories in abstract painting. These new discoveries — Alan Shields, Lynda Benglis, Baer — looked fresh and funny to my eyes, and got me thinking about new possibilities in painting. The 1970s isn’t a time that should hold any particular importance to me, since I was born five years after they ended, but I am attracted to its sun-soaked colors and idealism inherited from the 1960s.
What should we know about your practice today that may not be visible in the work?
I’m an intuitive painter and still view the painting surface as a performative space. I sometimes really have to build up and take down layers of paint, excavating and mining through multiple iterations before unearthing something that feels right. If a painting happens fast, it is usually one out of ten fast paintings I made in that sitting.
Can you explain what you mean by “painting surface as a performative space”?
When you make a painting, you set up a problem to solve. My favorite paintings tend to be the ones where the problem is slowly developed, but the solution is arrived at suddenly. If you leave part of the original problem visible, through the act of viewing, you can re-experience the arrival at the solution. A viewer gets to solve the painting along with you, and that is so incredibly satisfying.
The surfaces of my tents are more like the patina of a well-used chair. I wonder sometimes if, in a painting, the record of struggle, the visible “wear and tear” left on the canvas is an attempt to replicate the patina of age — the patina of meaning — acquired by a used object. The object was used and fulfilled its purpose. Paintings can’t do that! Eventually they go on a wall, and no one touches them anymore. A painting on the floor that’s three-dimensional, the size of a chair, is sort of begging to be touched, to be used, even though they’re still totally useless.
There is a certain “messiness” — imperfect shapes and lines, drips, unusual textures, and so forth — in your work that’s very appealing. How would you characterize your visual style?
I love painting, because even though it’s sort of romantic, it’s not a bloodless activity. It’s exhausting in a different way than the exhaustion I get from anything else. I think when it comes to the “messiness”, it’s the result of succumbing to a sort of indulgent painterly lust — pushing around the paint in a way that’s fun and seductive in the pursuit of capturing something joyful and fast. If my work appears casual, it is only because I learned to take myself seriously by not taking myself seriously at all. You just have to accept you’re going to fail sometimes and forge ahead. I might be making marks with abandon, but then I have to stop before it’s over. You want suspend closure, because you want to leave a painting “open”. If you force yourself to stop, you preserve that magical, mystical “freshness” we painters are always yammering about; you leave the window open, and you climb through it to the next painting. Forgive the metaphor, but it’s painting with the pull-out method.
Tatiana Berg (b. 1985, Washington, D.C.) has appeared in exhibitions at Freight+Volume, New York; Regina Rex, Queens; Nudashank, Baltimore; and has completed residencies at Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds a B.F.A. with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She is an online contributor to BOMB magazine. Berg has a studio in Ridgewood and lives in Brooklyn.
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