Fact & Fiction: Sheila Heti & Amy Sillman

0:03Only connect, urged the novelist Anne Foster. He wrote this more than a century ago. Today, those words resonate more powerfully than ever. Artists and creatives collaborating across disciplines, geographies, and perceptions are truly leading the way. So join us. Let's connect.

0:27Welcome to the third season of Chanel Connects. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. In this series, we bring together global changemakers from the worlds of food, film, art, architecture and beyond. Some are old friends and collaborators. Others are meeting for the first time. All are focused on what matters most and what happens next. And now we get to listen in.

1:06Artist Amy Silman is renowned for her oil paintings that defy categorization. She has been at the helm of a new wave of artists, most of them women, who over the last decade have reinvigorated abstraction. Amy connects with celebrated writer Sheila Hetty, whose work blurs the lines between fiction and memoir, creating new and original ways to understand lived experiences. In this episode, they discuss how they each embrace ambiguity with purpose.

1:42Hi, Amy. Hi, Sheila. It's been so great to read all these interviews with you and look at all your paintings and your work. And there's so many things that I wrote down that you'd said. It's hard to know where to start, but there's actually something that Art News wrote about you that I really loved that I thought would be a fun place to start because we're both, I think, interested in ugliness. Yes. They said, her work has more in common with an ugly duckling than a graceful white swan. And I loved that. And I think probably some people would consider that an insult, but I know that in your case, and it would be in my case, also a compliment.

2:22And I'm sort of curious what ugliness means to you in the context of evaluating a painting. Yeah, amazing question. I think all the things are ugly. I mean, I think that it's not a quality that comes and goes, but it's more a quality of its being. I mean, I think ugliness is something that started to be an issue to me probably back in the 90s when I came into the art world. I went to art school in the 70s, And I wasn't really that involved in a way in the art world in the 80s. But in the 90s, I started to show my work and be involved in conversations and stuff. And at that moment, there was this hangover of critique against painting that had been going on for years, decades, you know.

3:16and one of the ways that I think people, and in particular maybe certain women, were rescuing painting or maybe explaining, in a sense, like why they were painting, was to reclaim the idea of pleasure as a kind of aesthetic position or a goal or a kind of place from which you could work. and somehow very quickly the idea of aesthetic pleasure seemed to collect together and kind of glue itself onto the idea of beauty so there were all these conversations that I was invited to you know critical conversations on beauty or poetic you know discussions about you know aesthetic pleasure and stuff and I would be on a panel and I would like burst out with some you know, angry thing, like, I don't care about beauty.

4:10I'm interested in ugliness. And I think it was at first, like, sort of an emotional reaction. And then it, it actually happened so much. And it was a part of the discourse that I was in, you know, around so often that it worked its way into an actual conversation in my mind, and it became something I could articulate better. This idea that you're not trying to make something until it looks beautiful, and then you stop, that that has nothing to do, that's not the goal, that's, in fact, could even be the thing that you're trying to dismantle. Does that sound recognizable to you? Yeah, I feel a little bit, when I'm writing a book, like I am going for a certain kind of beauty, but it's not a beauty that I've seen before.

4:58And I think the confusing thing about beauty, that word for me, is that a lot of things are beautiful just because we recognize them. And I also, I think like you, don't want to make something that looks like something I've seen before. I want to, I'm always, I sort of have, with a book, I have this sort of shape in my head or this feeling in my body. There's something that can't actually be translated into words. but it's like it feels like some kind of platonic form that I'm moving towards um so yeah I guess it's not beautiful but there is a shape inside me that I'm trying to sort of edit and write close to to make it come close to that and it becomes more and more clear as time goes on like I would think when I start a book there's there's very little of that idea of what it's going to look like in the end or what the shape should be.

5:53Or I guess I think with painting, it's more a word that comes up in the conversation than with novels. People don't really talk about it being a beautiful novel. I think maybe the corollary is like a good story or something, like the thing that you're supposed to do that's sort of unquestioning or like unquestionable. Of course, you're trying to tell a story. Of course, you're trying to make something beautiful. I mean, I think for painting, it partly arises because of the question that you have to ask at some point, if you're working in a kind of post-post-modern way, where you have to say, what will make this better?

6:31And what will drive this forward? And what principles would make me attach myself to it and try to change it or, you know, get to a different thing? I think for me, it just started to become clear that I was making paintings over a long period of time. I was changing them a lot. I was scraping them out. I was negating them. I was cutting holes in them. I was turning them upside down. I was doing this really intensely physical and process-based thing to them. I mean, I think that makes sense to me most about what you said or what I would think the result would be is if you're not going for grace or beauty or even ugliness, you're more interested in freedom, the freedom in the process, perhaps, than in the result.

7:22I mean, the result, there has to be a result. Like there is something that you're moving towards, but somehow that's not the point. Yeah, I mean, I think as I feel also, when I read your books, that I'm going for complexity. And I'm trying to create a kind of mesh where layers of thought can be transparent enough to like, build their own connections and make sense in a kind of 3D chess kind of way. when I read motherhood, for instance. In a funny way, like first I read pure color, then I read how should a person be, then I read some articles, and then I got to motherhood. And I think I actually thought in the beginning, why would I need to read this book about motherhood?

8:11It's not my subject. And I found that it unfolded into incredibly intricate questions, both affirmative and negational kinds of questions about yourself, about what you might want to do with your future, about the past, about life itself. And so like in all of the works, there was this quality of multiplicity. But I guess I was sort of talking just now about this refusal to boil down and make something that feels totally clean and clear and simple and direct. Yeah, I mean, I guess with motherhood, you know, the back cover sort of says this is a book about a woman trying to decide whether or not to have a child.

8:57But even if you do start with a question like, or in my case, you know, to have or to not have a child, where does that question lead? I mean, that question leads to 100 ,000 other questions like, what is a person? Like, what is a person's duty? What do we owe our ancestors? What is an ancestor? You know, what is making? What does it mean not to make something? How do you define yourself as somebody who didn't make something and must you? It's just like there's no end to the questions. So to me, it's such a profound question. I mean, it was interesting because when I started working on the book in my early 30s, you know, that question, whether to or whether or not to, felt so trivial.

9:43And like it was something that would kind of come up into my mind and I would do everything I could not to think about it. I was just trying to think about more serious things, more important things. And then suddenly there was this turn, I guess, where I sort of was like, if this is the thing you don't want to think about, if this seems trivial, if this seems unimportant. And, you know, what happens if you actually look at it and make it the center? So I think, you know, connected to the beauty question, it's like, well, what happens if you do the ugly thing? Like to me, asking that question in the form of a novel or starting with that question was so ugly.

10:19It felt so trivial. It felt embarrassing. The exact thing I didn't want to be doing. And it always sort of ends up with my novels that at a certain point, I just have to do the thing that I absolutely don't want to do. that's going to embarrass me or that's going to make me feel like I'm doing something bad. I think there's always this feeling when I'm making a book that I'm doing something wrong or I'm doing something bad or I'm going to get in trouble. I guess I must like that feeling in some way because it's always there. Do you feel that same way? Oh, totally. I mean, I always say that I feel like I start the painting and then I push it until it gets into trouble.

10:58And then getting the painting out of trouble is the painting. and bringing it back from, you know, series of terrible accidents and paths that shouldn't go down. And I've thought about embarrassment a lot because I think that I started making art on purpose because it seemed embarrassingly like something you shouldn't do, especially, you know, like I was saying earlier, during the 70s and during the moment of a very profound critique of painting. So I relate to that completely. And I also think that in my case, I ended up calling it awkwardness more than embarrassment, because I think it's partly about sort of stumbling forward, allowing yourself to manifest a kind of visual experience that it's not there to be admired.

11:52It's there to reveal. Yeah, I mean, I feel like exactly what you're saying there to be admired, like, I really, you know, there's an idea of the novel as this kind of diorama that you're looking at. And you're outside it, and it's almost like a little stage that you're watching. And that's not at all the kind of novel that I want to write, or that I'm interested in writing is I want the novel to sort of repattern the brain of the reader as they're reading and for the reader to take new thoughts that always turn back to themselves and their own thoughts and their own questions. Like in some way, the reader is always the subject of the book.

12:32And so, yeah, that's really different from beholding something beautiful. Beholding something beautiful on the one hand and on the other hand, sort of going through some kind of experience. Like when I was writing How Should a Person Be, a book that sort of – I had to sort of force myself to think in all completely new ways about art and novel making and everything. I was like in my late 20s. I was thinking a lot about Rika Tiravanija and Richard Serra and certain artists that were really interested in the space in which you are in as a viewer. Like that somehow you are – you're not looking at something on a wall.

13:10You're in the space of the art. And that's kind of what I'm always trying to do with the novel. Like how do you put the person in the space of the novel rather than looking at it? That's understandable to me as sort of in a material way with painting that I think part of the reason that I'm not interested in traditional forms of representation or mimesis is that I don't want to recreate that space where there's a figure and there's a ground and we're in it and we're moving around inside that or having those people in our lives or objects, I'm trying to make it very clear on a material level that when you come up to it, there's rubbing, there's sanding, there's layering, there's this struggle.

14:00And the struggle is manifest in the material disarray, like the sort of strangeness that sort of reconsiders, you know, like what a painting surface might be like. And it gives you sort of nothing of what you wanted maybe. And all of it seems familiar because everyone has, you know, made marks and tried to write something that was a letter and crossed it out and ripped it up and thrown it away and then taken the ball that they threw away back out of the garbage and, you know, put tape around it and then rolled it across the room. But what I was wondering is what kind of writing spurs you on? Like, it seems like obviously you're a wide reader and a deep reader.

14:47Yeah, I think that I, I mean, I love reading, you know, the great novels, you know, Crime and Punishment and, you know, Anna Karenina. And And I love reading things where I can't understand how they did it. Like, I just don't understand how they wrote those books. You know, the great 19th century novels. And I guess I also love reading regular people's speech. Like, I feel that, like, if I'm going to go read an article on the internet, I always read the comments first. Like, I'm just so interested in how regular people write and what regular people have to say. Non-writers. I like the language.

15:26I like spoken language. I'm always buying those books. You know, when I was writing Motherhood, I bought all these books by these great thinkers. And I just ended up, again, like reading the comment section of the Guardian article in which a woman said she wasn't having children. And everyone got, you know, said, you know, you're going to, you're going to regret it. And you're going to, you're end up loveless and alone. And I just, I guess I'm just drawn to the emotional power of that, that kind of writing. Yeah, I get my inspiration from everywhere. I mean, I think it's funny because it's noticeable that when you mention Rick Red and Richard Serra, they're performative artists.

16:02And it's partly about the enactment, you know, and what happens to your own body when you enter that, you know, kind of performativity. And I think that performance of making yourself into both the questioner and the answerer is the break in your work that makes it actually very theoretical because it complicates subjectivity and it complicates any kind of answer, so-called. My background's in theater, and still I miss being in a theater. I miss having other people to make art with. I miss being part of a cast and part of that family that grows, and just the space of the theater. And novel writing is not a good substitute for that, but if in some sense there's a sense of dialogue, at least, in the books, then I feel like I still get to capture something of the theater.

17:03Well, I think the way I'm looking at it, your books are little theaters where you're the audience. So it's a kind of embrace of the spectacle of authorship, but it's not necessarily occupying the place of the writer. and I think that makes total sense to me as like kind of a technique in a way to foil a certain kind of self-inhibition I think in terms of I relate to it in terms of painting as being not so much about naivete I don't think of myself in any naive or innocent way but I do think of myself as wanting to connect painting making to a place that's deeply split between a kind of instinctual physical urge and a very, very cognitive measured kind of a series of refusals.

18:07And so the performance that you're engaged in as a maker is a private one that you do in your studio and you're going from A to B to C to D all the way to Z and keeping on going. And you have to, that's why I'm very obsessed with negation and refusal because it's the only way to go backwards. I'm often going back to drafts three months earlier. And then what, it's not that those three months of work are exactly lost because I've made some decisions that I'm going to use going forward, but there's a way in which you are constantly erasing your work. Like there's a kind of neuroticism in writing and editing a piece of writing that I don't think there can be in painting because you do have to go forward in time and you can't undo.

18:53Well, you can, and I do, but at some point the materiality itself sort of says enough. And you can make a painting extend pretty damn far if you're kind of clever about like like knowing how to not totally destroy the surface every single time out. But you can't unfurl that time as you can with a lot of other forms. And my tension, the tension and the joy of the last few years of my work has been all in trying to figure out how to reveal all of that and still kind of embed that information into a traditional painting show so that the paintings themselves still have their sovereignty and their way of being, but that the person is kind of peeking behind the curtain and understanding what all is in there and how it's compressed, and to sort of uncompress.

19:52And I feel like that's the part of your novels, all of the ones that I read, including Pure Color, which I should say, maybe it's a nice thing to say, this was about maybe two years ago, And I went to the Strand, and on the recommended shelf was Pure Color. And it was all about your father and or you kind of going into a leaf. The whole thing was kind of mystical. I mean, from that moment on, I thought, something's going on here with me and Sheila Hattie. And I think what it is, is it's about, funnily enough, I think it's about something to do with time. Yeah. And I'm glad you bring up that idea of time because, you know, when I was saying, like, I want to be naive, I don't think that it's naive.

20:39I think that's a dangerous word maybe, especially for a woman to use. But I don't mean naive in that sense. I mean naive in like Adam and Eve. Like, what if you were the first person? How would you think about these problems? that's the kind of naivety I'm interested in like the earliest philosophers just sort of I don't know why I don't like references I don't like in writing when people are referring to other writers I just I want them to do all the thinking themselves and I think maybe there's something about the body in that and there's something about time and I mean you as a painter I love in your essay about color saying like cadmium red is heavier than this violet, like that all the paint tubes have a different weight and you can sort of almost be in the dark and know which color you're holding because the colors have a different weight.

21:32I had no idea. That's so interesting. And I think that what, you know, my best friend, Margo Williamson's a painter. I spent a lot of time working in her painting studio. You know, I see her doing it, but I've never lifted the the tubes of paint. And I think there's something so physical about being a painter that, that is not that as much as I try to make writing a physical practice, it can't be like you're just sitting at a, well, in my case, sitting in bed. How does that change the way, like what effect does that have? Just having your body be such a huge part of this making? It gives you limits.

22:08I think it strips you back down to the closest I can come to what you're calling a certain kind of innocence, because I'm kind of stuck doing what I can do. But what are you working on now that will happen in the coming, let's say, year? This week I've got to go over the second pass proofs of this book, Alphabetical Diaries, which I just finished after. it took 13 years to get to the stage. It's the longest project I've ever worked on, but it's basically 10 years of diaries with the sentences sort of, I put the diaries into Excel and then like ordered them from A to Z rather than like the chronology in which I wrote the diaries.

22:52And I'm also working on a new book that's sort of, I don't know, I can't even talk about it. It's just so weird, but it was the kind of project where I was like picking it up and throwing it out and picking it up and saying, I'm not doing this for the last two or three years. And I think I finally realized, like, I'm actually writing it. Can you say what the question is? Yeah, it's also just about, like, being inhabited by other voices, I guess. That's where it is right now. What about you? Well, I'm trying to make new paintings. I have a show called Temporary Object, and it's about embedding this sequence of diagrams with a bunch of paintings.

23:29And so I'm working on an iteration of that show for a little space in Sao Paulo that I'm excited to show in Brazil, where I've never shown in my work ever. And I'm very excited to, I've been there once, but I've not put work in that dialogue that they have down there. So I'm very excited to see how a completely different set of people deal with the kinds of paintings that I make, which I think are related to the constructs that I grew up with in New York. I'm writing about Robert Rauschenberg right now also, a long essay that's a consideration of Rauschenberg and television. It's definitely born of one of those argument questions that I came to after immersing myself in reading about Rauschenberg.

24:20I realized that a lot of older art historians never watched television and certainly not dumb comedies, which I love. So there's not a lot of written stuff about the relationship between what television is like as a medium and how it relates to his work. I'm not sure if that's going to end up being the essay, but I've just been reading about the history of television for about six months, which is fascinating. Oh, it's so interesting. And I'm trying to make big new paintings, and it's very hard. And hopefully by next May, they'll be something. But right now, there is nothing. I guess the question, the old Jewish question, or the old philosophical question, why is there something instead of nothing?

25:06Or how can there be something instead of nothing? Is the summer question for me. Yeah, seems like a good summer question. I like working in the summer. Yeah, I love working in the summer, too. I was just going to say, like, to close up, it was so great to actually get to talk. And I was feeling kind of like jealous that when I read your book and noticed that you came to visit your friends and stayed in their apartments when they weren't there. and I was thinking, please, please call me when you come to New York. I'll be there and I hopefully won't be out of town when your friends are out of town, when you can stay in their house and I hope I get to meet you and we get to have conversation in real life and I'd love to keep reading your work and I would love to anytime invite you to my studio.

25:53Oh, I'd love that. Thanks. This has been such a great conversation and yeah, I just want to continue it and keep talking. yeah I'll see you in New York then great

26:11this was Chanel Connect season 3 it's been great having you with us don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts revisit conversations from the first two seasons with guests including Tilda Swinton, Kehinde Wiley, G-Dragon, Keira Knightley, and Grimes.