Judith Shea and John Ashbery

Abstract

Leslie Miller, and the author of the text, Bradford Morrow. Specifically, I had recently completed a cover for Conjunctions magazine #12, which Mr. Morrow edits. That project went well and the chemistry was such that I was asked to participate in this large multiple-artist collaboration. In simple terms, they approached me with a completed text and asked if I would be interested in responding to two of the thirty-six pieces written on various animals. As this was the first such opportunity I had for a formal collaboration, I was excited at the prospect of applying my sensibility to someone else's work. I saw the project as a chance to stretch my ideas and artistic identity, not simply to force my already established identity into another realm. In other words I took a totally open approach to how I would interpret the written material. If an artist is too intent on the preservation of his/her own identity, I could see no compelling reason for him or her to participate in any such collaboration. Given that approach, I read the various pieces and chose the elephant and the earthworm, both of which had both serious and playful elements in the text. Working in an abstract manner seemed irrelevant to the given text so I abandoned that mode immediately and set out to capture elements present in the sensibility of the author, Mr. Morrow. That is, I gave myself to his sensibility as a challenge to my own with no thought to whether or not the result looked like an Amenoff. Of course, the unstated truth in such a giving over of one's sensibility is that one cannot really operate outside of that sensibility anyway. In fact, that to me is what is interesting about such projects. It seems to me that they are worthwhile to help one understand that the visual means of an artist's ideas are just that-visual means. The larger point of view can be funneled into many forms. I think we all begin to believe that our sensibilities are the visual means when in fact they exist independently. At least that is true for those of us who are not involved in purely concrete