hube choice: STERLING RUBY

hube: In art, a form can be a statement, and a statement can be a form. Which way resonates most with you?

Sterling Ruby: To me, they are one in the same. It’s a unique quality of visual art, that form—without being illustrative or pictorial—can be translated into a statement and vice versa. Abstraction affords the artist undeniable slippage between the two. Form as formalism can be weightless, heavy, fast, slow, violent and/or peaceful, depending on who is standing in front of it and at what point in history it was made. Take Malevich’s Black Square, a painting that represents non-objectivity; a reinterpretation of an icon so blasphemous that it helped send the painter to prison. Black Square justifiably became what most art historians and critics deemed the “zero point of painting.”

h: In your art, colour and texture are used to relay feeling. How do you work with colour? Do you take an intuitive approach, or is your selection more deliberate?

SR: For the most part, I’m more intuitive with colour. I like creating combinations that aesthetically work well together, and ones that feel like oppositions. There are also many moments when a colour is meant to evoke a state or psychology: something hot, warm or cold, something ethereal or even earthy.

h: Given your passion for texts and semiotics, and your experience learning from Sylvère Lotringer, is it important for you that the audience understands the ideas and symbolism inherent in your work? Or is freedom of interpretation more important to you?

SR: My times with Sylvère, in class and during studio visits, were enlightening. He was brilliant. Sylvère would always make the distinction between what a theorist should be writing versus what an artist should be making. He was pretty adamant that they were different and that artists should not always feel the need to theorise their work—that it’s important to have moments of non-premeditated “making.” This premise was contrary to the rest of my education. Prior to anything being made or especially being finished, I often felt the expectation of research and written statements as mandatory. 

That pressure to define something feels even more like a drag now. Even in this conversation right now, I am revealing present thoughts and attempting to create meaning for work that has a tendency to change over time. As an artist, intentions shift and transitions happen. But what gets documented, the quotes that get extracted, will be fixed. It’s almost like a scripture, a text that is locked in permanence with words that may or may not have been said. This is an issue for me; that documentation can become a kind of barrier, a set of verbalisations that my art will always be associated with. 

I prefer freedom of interpretation. It’s liberating to know exactly what’s going through my mind in the studio, and to keep it to myself. The fact is that the meaning of an artwork inevitably changes over time and, for better or worse, is subject to constant reassessment.

It doesn’t even have to do with texts or semiotics anymore, it’s the opposite, it serves as a way to move among series, to see what was made in the past and how that might be reinterpreted in the future. As art today adheres to a narrower range of interests, ideologies, or market trends, the need to seek change becomes even more important.

This tension, to try to continuously change, is the best thing about being an artist.

With thanks to Sterling Ruby and Xavier Hufkens