Renowned artist Jenny Saville, also a Senior Critic at the Academy, shared her wisdom and advice for the emerging artists as the Keynote speaker at the 2011 Commencement.
Jenny Saville —Commencement Address
May 20, 2011
Firstly I would like to thank Eileen Guggenheim and the entire Board of Trustees, David Kratz, Peter Drake, professors, alumni and especially graduates, their family and friends.
This is the first commencement address I have given. I didn't actually know what one was until Eileen Guggenheim asked to give this one. I remember virtually nothing of my own graduation ceremony - apart from receiving £1000 for a prize. Something I remember vividly because I was so broke at the time and needed the money.
Thank you all for inviting me here to this great vertical city, and congratulations to all of you, and to all you proud and smiling parents who have nurtured you from infancy to accepting the crazy notion of you becoming artists rather than lawyers and doctors.
So I thought - what would I have liked to know upon graduation from art school?
At that time in my arrogant youthful exuberance of 22 years old I thought I knew everything there was to know about painting, and that I was going to paint a woman like she had never been painted before.
Of course I was going to do that. That's the brilliance of painting. Every mark you make, every mix of colour has never actually been done before in that exact combination, each painting with its unique surface.
For me this is paintings relationship to the human body and mind.
Each one of you has a unique combination of biology, memories, knowledge, experiences, diet, language - your emotional, intellectual and physical hard drives are all unique.
It has taken the whole of humankind to get you here - from your ancestors in the valley of the Omo in East Africa when your brains weighed around 1lb and your thumbs were short - to here - 2011- downtown New York, where your brains weigh around 3lbs and you have evolved enough dexterity in your hands to oppose the thumb precisely to the forefinger - a specifically human gesture - as Durer showed us.
"More grey matter of your brain is spent manipulating your thumbs than in the total control of your chest and abdomen." (J. Bronowski)
The flexibility of mind and dexterity of hand is what marks us out from other animals.
What made humans ride a horse? Build an arch, combine and heat metals in alchemy, carve a mother and child from a block of marble, create number systems and reason with numbers - through which pictorial harmonies and the use of perspective developed. A system that could analyze the changing movement of an object, like the brilliance of the animators of Pixar today, the designers of the latest aerodynamic car, or the spaceship that will eventually take us to Mars, can be traced back to Uccello's perspective analysis of a chalice - the eye of the painter and the logic of the mathematician.
It all starts in childhood.
Children build with bricks, scribble with crayons, asks odd inquiring questions when looking up at the night sky.
Our collective ability to sustain the longest childhood we can, is our future.
As the brilliant Polish scientist Dr. Jacob Bronowski published in 1973, “Man is not unique because he does science, and he is not unique because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind. And the Mona Lisa is a very good example, because after all what did Leonardo do for much of his life? He drew anatomical pictures such as the baby in the womb in the Royal Collection at Winsor. And the brain and the baby is exactly where the plasticity of human behavior begins.”
Last week I was in my studio on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean trying to piece together some thoughts to share with you. What are the most important attributes that make an artist? What values should you value, do I value?
Imagination, self-belief, curiosity, perseverance and hard work, a good measure of tenacity, urgency, patience, the willingness to fail, self-discipline, courage, trust in your own instinct and flexibility. Forget the word talent. That's not a helpful term.
Even Michelangelo, one of the brightest lights in Western art said "if people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all'.
I'm not here to offer any kind of treatise on contemporary painting - on art for that matter. I paint because I don't know and I'm curious about that. Art is the greatest game I know, and it has always fascinated me.
I have never been able to write any comprehensive statement about art that I wholeheartedly believe in. I have notebooks with numerous quotes from philosophers, poets and artists that seem to bracket my beliefs, but nothing definitive. If I say to myself, painting is the purest of the arts, the word music immediately drops into my mind. On making a spoken declaration, I immediately want to contradict myself - but I have an urge to paint. Painting is a holder of reality; it accepts the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in being human.
Theory can get in the way and try to rationalize an activity that comes out of instinct and sensation, especially when you are in the process of painting. It's a synaptic game of cognition between the eye, the brain and the hand.
Philosophical hints and literary nudges are useful, but I've never found a written stone on which to stand.
When I look at the painted chin and buildup of realism by Velazquez in Pope Innocent X, or a looping passage of paint in a 1976/77 de Kooning, or the bottom of the dress in Rembrandts Woman bathing in a stream......and the scrawled text on the temple of Unas in ancient Egypt, to the beautiful inky black screeched tyre marks made by planes landing on a runway - it's electric. I'm in my personal visual library and I feel compelled to work.
Making art is the most precise way for me to communicate. I'm interested in the language of the in-betweeness of things, the mutational, the contradictions - the state of becoming visible. In science there is a term called the 'area of uncertainty' that physicists use to explain what amounts to a sort of guesswork- and that seems accurate.
Today you are all graduating from an Academy of figurative art. Some might say you are swimming against the tide of contemporary art by being here - but that is for you to decide. Figurative painting and sculpture is as relevant and alive as you make it - and the term figurative art is not very helpful in the first place. In painting it implies an inherent conservatism, a polishing of outdated ideas and values.
When you look at the history of humankind, most cultures represent the human form - through fertility goddesses to death masks. We have an inching urge and necessity to do it. It's part of our survival - in the face of the inevitability of death and the unknown. Even religious Islamic art, where the representation of living forms are resisted, has a script and calligraphy that seems so bodily in the flow of its forms that word shapes feel like the drawings of Matisse.
The passion of your curiosity and imagination are the keys to motivated learning, finding solutions and adapting to your environment and needs.
I was not as lucky as you graduates here to formally study anatomy - I have picked it up along the way. My journey to understand and paint contemporary flesh has not only taken me to art galleries and museums. It's also taken me inside plastic surgery operations, pathology lectures, convincing the doorman at The Royal College of surgeons in London to let me take a look at bodies being dissected, to brothels in Belgrade and Tokyo, to transvestites in a wig shop in Rome, to study meat in a slaughter house and the labour ward of a hospital in Oxford to witness the birth of my daughter as she moved from my flesh to her own.
If you keep your windows open, images will flood in. Like Fra Angelico's windows of contemplation for the friar's cells in Florence.
What's thrilling about being an artist is that you can wander like a child in a grand room of objects, turning them inside out and exploring them.
As an artist you take in the world and spit it out anew - like in the Egyptian creation myth where the sun God Atum spat out his son and vomited his daughter - and creation begins.
It was Albert Einstein who said “There are two ways to live your life: you can live as if nothing is a miracle: you can live as if everything is a miracle.”
With Albert Einstein's words in mind - how do we consider culture?
To you and I, it's probably collections of artifacts and paintings, music and literature, but to a biologist it's a collection of microorganisms and bacteria.
Whatever it is - it's not static. Languages, laws, beliefs and customs are constantly mutating and migrating - more so now than that at any time in human history.
I was reading an article written by the head teacher of my children's school who said “It is estimated that a week's worth of The Times today contains more information than an educated person was likely to come across in their whole lifetime in the 18th century. It is estimated that more unique, new information will be generated worldwide this year than the whole of the last 5000 years and that amount of new technical information is doubling every two years.” I felt a mixture of paralysis and excitement when I first read that.
Less than 10 years ago, I used to prowl, almost trespass, around obscure medical bookshops and libraries looking for visual triggers that I can use in my paintings. It took a lot of commitment, was expensive and took time away from painting in my studio.
Now, with little effort, I can have these images instantly delivered to a tablet in the palm of my hand thanks to the imagination of Steve Jobs - and with some manipulation of my thumb and forefinger. My children ask me a question about a certain tree as we walk in the park, and I have an encyclopedia at my fingertips.
When my son was born, a Brazilian nanny helped me care for him. Her boyfriend worked in a bank in Sao Paolo in Brazil. Most days he sat at his desk on his computer, with a tiny camera facing his head.
On my kitchen work surface over five and a half thousand miles away from Sao Paolo sat my nanny’s computer screen on which this young man sat smiling and waving.
My son knew his face well and would be excited to see him, giggling and waving back. We were all human flags waving to each other. Neither my son nor I have ever physically met him, but he was part of our everyday lives and we interacted with his image on the screen like he was sitting next to us - he was our virtual lodger. I strongly felt the distinction between the two realities as I'm an internet immigrant, but my son is a native.
Our realities of time and space, of fact and fiction, of public and private intimacy, are rapidly shifting - and so what does this mean for painting? My arm and wrist doesn't move any faster than Leonardo's did, but the courier who delivers my letters to collectors is virtual and instant, not in person and on horseback.
Does this mean the end of painting as a serious mode of communication?- that as painters we are the last blacksmiths or hardware store still operating in a town that buys everything on ebay?
Of course not. As humans we eat, defecate and delight in the detritus of our lives as we have for centuries.
But painting must adapt, respond and excite in these technological changes. Without the arrival of photography, maybe we would never have had the same Picasso. He and Braque responded to this technology, and found a language to articulate our human natures in paint. Their imaginations helped us understand the structures of nature and the subconscious.
In the 1950s de Kooning in this very city raised the bar of what painting can do, at the same time that Hollywood was delivering celluloid narratives to the parking lots of modern America, and commercial airlines and automobiles were moving humans around this planet faster than they could have dreamt of 50 years before - and Picasso and de Kooning came out of an Academic training, just like this one.
An Academy is a place where you exchange knowledge and learn and most of it you will store away until you need it. Knowledge accumulates on a need to know basis, through practical inquiry and curiosity. If you want to know something, seek it out - follow your instinct as it's your compass and guidance system.
An art academy, any place of learning, should not be a place where you worship the past, but to question it, learn from it, steal from it, be reverent and irreverent towards it. Don't fall into the trap of polishing the veneer of art history as that will not make you into an artist like Velazquez, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Manet, Picasso, de Kooning or Bacon - or artists like Cecily Brown, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and Anselm Kiefer in our time. Most of these artists worked with the human figure as their central subject, but they made art of their time, with distinctive and individual voices.
What it is that makes an artist’s work have a sense of the universal - that also transcends the time it was made and its relevance lives on either in the actual work, or in the influence it has on others work? You only have to look at the new Frank Gehry skyscraper here in New York, to see the influence of Michelangelo’s studies of folds and drapery.
Work comes out of work. Like a good athlete, you have to stay nimble and fit.
If you have a responsibility as artists - it is to continue working, and to work with passion and self belief, as you are one of the lucky ones. You live in a time and culture that affords all of you - both male and female - the relative freedom to express yourselves, fly with your imaginations, and be taken seriously. Not every woman or man on this planet has that opportunity, and you should not take it for granted. Civilizations eventually retreat and others rise and dominate. Grasp what this evolution has offered you, as it was hard won, and has taken centuries to develop.
Civilization is human knowledge in process, it ebbs and flows, mutates, hybridizes, changes colour and geography.
From the caves of Lascaux, to Babylonian mathematics, to the utterances of the pyramid texts, to Pythagorus listening to musical harmonies at the edge of Greece and Asia Minor, to the libraries of Alexandria to Wikipedia, to the lost city of Machu Picchu, to Michelangelo’s St. Peters Dome and his pieta within it, to Velazquez’s Pope, Picassos Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses.
Human beings have been driven to develop their skills - to relish in the magnificence of what we can make with our hands and our brains. And when we've made it, we want to develop it, improve it - to lurch into the unknown and bring it into being.
And so, given all this history of study and preparation, what will you make?
You are this generation’s makers and markers - I wish you luck, long and very vivid lives.
Thank you