Introduction: The following conversation with Ron Gorchov was initiated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2017 and took place in Gorchov’s Brooklyn studio. It has been minimally edited.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) and The Athens Dialogues (2018).

(HUO) = Hans Ulrich Obrist; (RG) = Ron Gorchov

HUO: I am very happy that we can finally meet, because I've known your work for such a long time. I wanted to begin with the beginning, as I was curious about how you came to art, and how it all began. Was there an epiphany or what brought you to art?

RG: My mother was a painter. As a matter of fact there's a painting of hers that you can look at right now. My mother did this when she was 18, six or seven years before I was born.

HUO: That's amazing. So she was a painter?

RG: Is it dusty?

HUO: No, we can see it here, it's trees, no?

RG: No, you have to look at it, I don't think ... Pick it up so Hans can see it.

HUO: Ok. So that was before you were born.

RG: Yeah, she did that when she was 18. It's the farm she grew up on. She went to the Art Institute and began to give me ideas about art pretty early. And my father, if we go back that early, left the shirt factory his father owned, because he didn't get along with his older brother, and he became a street gambler. So my father became a very interesting Depression entrepreneur. He did many, many things and learned how to do a lot of things.

HUO: So he was an entrepreneur during the years of the Depression?

He reacted to that.

RG: Yeah. And then, as soon as things got better, and there was more capital around, he died of a heart attack.

HUO: Oh no.

RG: He was 46. But I learned a lot from him that would help an artist.

HUO: Like what?

RG: The main thing was how to find money. Because when I got my first job I said, 'Dad, I got a job'.

He said, 'Forget the job, you've found some money.' I don't know if this translates well.

HUO: Yes, I hear; that's good advice. [laughs]

RG: [laughs] Don't take 'job'. And he told me very early on, don't take 'boss', think 'client'. No one is your boss, you have clients.

HUO: So that was more good advice. An artist never has a boss.

RG: That's right.

HUO: Never. Unthinkable

[both laugh]

RG: The reason I noticed your book [A Brief History of Curating] was because I remember my mother taught me very early, when I was a child, constantly to look for images in clouds. So that's what interested me about the title of your book.

HUO: How interesting, so your mother talked about reading the clouds.

RG: Right.

HUO: There's a great art history book by this French art historian, he's in his eighties now, he's an old friend of mine called Hubert Damisch. It would be of interest to you, that book. It's called, it exists in English now, it's called Theorie du Nuage, The Theory of Clouds. He wrote about clouds in art history.

RG: From their appearance?

HUO: Yes, and [John] Constable and …

RG: Not about the physics of clouds.

HUO: He talks about clouds in all their elements. It's an interesting book.

RG: Interesting.

HUO: Hubert Damisch.

RG: My dad went to a barber every morning, and on Saturdays and Sundays—you know, when I could—I would go with him, for him to get his shave. So the first thing I wanted to be was a barber.

HUO: Interesting ... So that remained an unrealized project?

RG: Well, I started cutting hair in high school, you know, because I liked the idea of cutting it, I cut my own hair. And I learned-the truth is I'm an amateur—how to do all the stuff. So in high school I cut friends' hairs, and I did cut my girlfriends' hairs. That was early on.

And then in college I used to do before and after portraits—what it would look like before I would cut their hair. So I did profiles of what their hair would look.

HUO: So you would cut the hair of the models?

RG: No, of friends.

HUO: Of friends, yes.

RG: And I got really good at cutting people with Asian hair which is very, very straight, even barbers don't know how to do that too well.

HUO: That's interesting. My friend Douglas Coupland—the Canadian novelist who wrote Generation X and many other books—has this theory that a hairdo is a highway into history. Because if you look at a lot of ... You know, Elvis and so on.

RG: Yeah, hair is a big deal.

HUO: A big deal, yes.

RG: So where was I? The second thing I wanted to do was be a fireman. When I was 3, I remember that. When I was 2 and a half or 3, my dad took me early to where he got a shave, I was just barely talking.

So, to skip a little bit, I drew in grammar school all the time, and was a very poor student because I was drawing. They would send these pictures home to my parents and say, 'He's not doing other work.' I was drawing.

In general, they were interested but not pleased that I drew. And when there was homework that had to be turned in I would decorate all my friends' homework and do portraits of Lincoln or something for them and never turn anything in. So I didn't do well in school until I started drinking coffee!

We were living in Los Angeles at the time.

HUO: Yes, I wanted to ask which city this was. So was the beginning all in Los Angles, what you've been telling us so far?

RG: No, no. We moved all the time. My dad, in order to do things …

HUO: So part of that Depression entrepreneurship was to move.

RG: Every two or three months. We always made Chicago a base, but I went to [sixteen] grammar schools. You know, the common thing that I did, or could do, was draw, so that seemed to be a social fact of my life, that I drew. I never thought about this, that the main thing that I was known for, early, was that I drew a lot. Mostly cartoons and caricatures.

A friend of my mom and dad—he was my mother's boyfriend from before my dad, and his name was Joe Metzger—was a political cartoonist for the Philadelphia Bulletin, when he left Chicago, because they knew him in Chicago. He went to art school with my mom, and he did caricatures, so I was interested in that from a very early age, like 7 or 8, in him and the fact that he was an artist, and I really got interested in caricature. So early I could do caricatures of people.

HUO: And are some of those preserved?

RG: My mother preserved everything I did, but it was all lost, I have nothing that I did. Really, every six months or so I couldn't stand what I had done before, and this went on through my whole life until I did this work. In other words, although there is interest in the work that I did before I worked on curved canvases, I still can't stand it. I wouldn't want to live with it now. And when it's come up, I'm not interested enough to buy it. There are a couple of paintings I did.

HUO: Before the curved canvases?

RG: Yeah, early, from the fifties, a couple of paintings I did.

HUO: Do you have photos here of those paintings?

RG: Nothing from my past. I didn't keep anything. I hate images, I'm afraid of them, I don't like images at all.

HUO: How fascinating. So all of these were destroyed?

RG: Or sold. I mean, I sold a lot of work in the fifties, early on, because ... Well, even in college I was always able to find patrons and people that would buy my work. I mean, I didn't ... There was no market, but early on I knew the value of calling something by a nominal price, which is just, when people say, 'What do you want to sell this for?'

I say, 'Well, let's figure out a nominal price.' Something that we can just call it a price, but who knows what my work is worth?

HUO: But that's interesting, because that leads to my next question which I wanted to ask, which is, very often when there is a catalogue raisonne—like Zervos did for Picasso—there is a decision: what's the number one in the catalogue raisonne? Like, with Gerhard Richter it's the table, when he came to photo painting.

RG: I think that would be somewhat impossible to do for me.

HUO: Yes, I just realized that from your answer, but I was still wondering, for example when you do books on your exhibitions, what's the earliest work you're comfortable to publish?

RG: I'm not interested, and I really don't want a retrospective, ever. I mean, there's nothing I can do about it after I'm gone, but a retrospective doesn't interest me. A survey of the years that ... I mean, if somebody puts my work together and wants to exhibit it, I can't do anything about it, they're free to do it. I don't even get involved with my exhibitions, everyone does my exhibitions. John [Cheim] puts my work up. I mean, I love gallery shows, and I love that they're done well, but I don't want to have to do them.

HUO: Yes. No, that's interesting. You said there were a couple of earlier paintings you were comfortable with, retrospectively?

RG: Not comfortable, I thought that they were beyond how I was directed at the time. To me, there are a couple of aspects of an artist. There's how much they know, how much they can do, and how much talent in themselves they've discovered. Because none of us have found all we can do. I don't think anyone has ever exhausted what they're able to do. I think people can always do better, but you have to be very, very lucky to discover something new for yourself.

So I was looking for something that I could do that would shock myself.

HUO: Shock?

RG: Yeah. I would be shocked by what I could do.

HUO: So you succeeded in some of these earlier paintings, to shock yourself.

RG: Yes.

HUO: As there are no images of them, because they are not reproduced, can you ... ?

RG: They were sold. Those two paintings were sold by a good friend of mine who brought very wealthy people into his studio to sell them for me.

HUO: So also you don't know where they are?

RG: I remember the names. One of them was brought by Jeannette Rockefeller, Winthrop Rockefeller's wife, in 1955. And one of them was bought by a man named ... I don't know his first name, [Rioje]. He's an architect in New York.

HUO: Interesting … So more than sixty years ago.

RG: Yeah. These were both sold in '55 or '56, I don't remember exactly.

HUO: But there are no reproductions, there are no images of those?

RG: No documents, nothing.

HUO: That's interesting. And were they abstract expressionistic, or how can one imagine them?

RG: No. The one that Jeannette Rockefeller bought ... She bought several, she bought four or five, but it's very interesting, the man who sold them told Jeannette Rockefeller—because she's an old friend of his—she said, 'I like that one', which is one of the newer abstract paintings I had started to do, and these were not abstract, and John felt that I should sell the earlier works first and keep these later abstract works. And the man who helped me was John Graham. The painter who I became close with.

HUO: Was he your teacher?

RG: No, he was a close friend. I wrote to him when I first came to New York, and didn't get an answer, he never answered. No, he did answer me and said, 'Perhaps we'll meet in cooler weather.' And then he showed up next, unannounced, in 1956. Actually, none of this happened before 1956. He saw my work, gave some criticism and wanted to buy another, but what I had told him, I wrote him saying, after seeing his work, I saw him earlier when I first came to New York, because of luck, I ran into his biggest collector and I saw The Two Sisters (1944) the famous two cross-eyed sisters, and the famous horse painting, all those early paintings.

But meeting these people ... You know, when I came to New York, I got the idea from my father that the most important thing would be to be an artist and meet people who are doing things. My dad warned me, never chase them, find a way they have to come to you. He gave me incredibly good advice.

HUO: It sounds like he gave you the best advice on every level, this is amazing.

RG: I know. So, you're asking me how I began to be an artist, and I can't just say that it's because my mother was an artist. A great advantage I had was that my father was very good with the philosophy of how to do business, but he could never find the capital he needed. He made a lot of money several times and lost it, and I don't know if you know what the Depression is like in the United States, but you'd probably understand that it was pretty hard all over the world. 

HUO: No, extreme, it was extreme.

RG: It was very bad times. And for someone that is very good with capital, if it isn't around, it's very hard to prove yourself.

HUO: And then you come to New York, and you say you met these people who were important for you. Who would be the people who inspired you, who were these early encounters?

RG: We moved to New York on a Sunday in August, 1953. In the middle of August. And on the Monday I had to find a job. I was a professional lifeguard from Chicago, and the main thing I had done was to work as a lifeguard. I had just finished working, because I'd had a job off and on since I was a kid in Chicago.

So, we left Chicago, where I was working the beach, and we flew to New York and I thought, 'OK, I'll find a job in a pool or at the beach in New York City.' So, I had learned in Chicago, someone who had worked […] who was the head of the lifeguards. He was an ex-boxer, he trained boxers, but he tested the lifeguards and kind of ran how lifeguards got their job. So, Monday I saw him, he was an amazing guy. I was not in great condition but I passed the test. And he said, 'So OK, we'll take your name and we'll call you.' I said, 'I have to have a job tomorrow.' He looked at me, and he said, 'So, where do you live?' I said, 'In a hotel, I just got here.' He said, 'No, no, you've been here a year. Do you understand me? You've been here a year. You have to be here a year, or you can't get a job here.'

So he told me the next day, 'Go and see Frank Senior at the Arsenal in Central Park. Which is behind the zoo. And he did these phone calls for me then Frank gave me a bag with my uniform, and on Wednesday I was on the beach. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday … I would call that pretty lucky, wouldn't you?

HUO: That's extraordinary. And when you came from Chicago, did you already have connections to the art scene then in Chicago?

RG: Sure.

HUO: Because it was the beginning of Monster Roster and all of that.

RG: Now, to go back. After I took the test on Monday, I went to Dillon’s Bar [80 University Place], which is the overflow bar from the Cedar ... Because I went to the Cedar bar and it was empty […] I went in there to look for artists, this is the second day after I was looking for a job. I didn't see many people there, a few people but I didn't ... I thought, 'Oh, I'm probably going to see one of the abstract expressionists or something.' So I walked over to Dillion’s and there was Mark Rothko.

So that was that … the second day I was here. In between looking for a job.

HUO: And did you talk to him?

RG: Oh yeah, I went over and said, 'Mr Rothko, I'm Ron Gorchov, I just got to New York.' And he said, 'Sit down, are you an artist?' [laughs] So we had a lovely talk, and believe me it was so wonderful that I can only remember some highlights but I kept saying to myself, all the way through, 'Do not ask him about materials. Do not ask him about materials!' because I had this intuition that Mark would not want to talk shop.

I asked if I could call him Mark, and he said, 'Yeah, of course, Ron.' And he immediately started saying, 'What are you doing, what's happening?' And I said, 'Well, there was interest in my work in Chicago, and all my friends there argued with me and said "Stay in Chicago", but I couldn't, it was too small for me. I wanted to come to a bigger place. And my dad always said that Chicago was safer than New York, that you had to be a crazy dreamer to go to New York for anything. My father was from Philadelphia. He said, ‘You can always make a buck in Chicago, but in New York you have to be a dreamer.'

So when I insisted that I was going to New York, my father said, 'Well, you have to decide to be lucky.'

HUO: And again he was right.

RG: He was right.

HUO: The oracle. No, this is incredible. What did Rothko give you as advice, did he give you advice?

RG: Oh, not really. He didn't give me any advice, and I cut it short because I didn't think it was a good thing to impose on him, so I said, 'So Mark, when can I see you again?' and he looked at me and said, 'Have some shows, and we'll see.’ Can you believe that?

HUO: It's brilliant. And when was your first show?

RG: 1960. My first one person show was 1960 […] Tibor de Nagy, Johnny Myers was my dealer, Tibor was my dealer and Johnny was the director. You know, I didn't know at the time that they were as nice and kind as they were. I didn't have anything to compare it with.

HUO: And what did you show in that first exhibition?

RG: Early abstractions that I was doing. From my association with John Graham. John had left town and I never saw him, six months before I had my first show, so I had a very short period where I was very close to John, and he was a tremendous advisor.

HUO: So it was early abstraction inspired by John Graham. And who were your heroes at the time? Did you have heroes, like from art history? Did you connect, in terms of abstraction, to early twentieth century abstraction? Were there heroes, like Mondrian for instance?

RG: One thing that I've said before is that when you admire something very much, that's the only time to be critical. I mean, why criticize something you don't admire? So early on I was very critical of the heroes that I thought were doing something that I could never do, or would never do. So, of course I loved Matisse, and Giacometti. Now, first of all, whether he's my favourite artist or he isn't, I've never found any way to criticize Giacometti.

HUO: He's the reason I came into art, you know. Because when I was a kid in Switzerland, when I was 10 or something, I went with my parents to the Museum in Zurich, the Kunsthaus, which has the biggest Giacometti collection in the world, and that was the reason I came into art.

RG: Interesting. Well, from the beginning when I saw his work I couldn't tell if I liked his painting better than his sculpture. To me, maybe his painting thrilled me more than his sculpture. He was the artist that I never thought there was anything wrong with anything he did, except one thing-it wasn't a criticism, it was the one thing I couldn't do, or I didn't want to do-was he obviously had a great deal of angst.

HUO: Yes, it was- 

But I couldn't stand the way both he and Matisse would do wonderful forms, put down great colours, and then put lines on top of it to separate the forms.

HUO: So that was again critique out of admiration.

RG: Right. Right. I mean, to me, their forms would have stood very well without that dividing mark. And very early, I mean, I was thinking this when I was 19 or 20, looking at reproductions of their work, and then when I saw their work, I had to study it, to be sure I was right that it was put on afterwards.

HUO: And obviously in New York you could verify it in the Museums, you could go to MoMA.

RG: Right. And one other thing happened to me. Of course I had loved [Giorgio] de Chirico, the old work, and then I think in 1947 or' 48, at the Museum of Modern Art they started showing his new work, which was this very loose ... Classical horses, and people running around.

HUO: And sometimes copies of his early work.

RG: Well, he went to jail for that. Not for copying it, there's nothing wrong with a rendition of early work if you date it properly, he dated it improperly.

So, I was very curious about that and with the new work, I said to myself, 'Well, he's a very famous artist.'RG: Which he put into his work.

HUO: It was existentialism, it was the moment of Sartre, there was his whole show at MoMA with Leon Golub and him, and Germaine Richier, and it was kind of the existentialist paradigm of the fifties, right? Jean Dubuffet came separately out of that, he was obviously much earlier and he had nothing to do with that, but it was read, as he came from much further back in history, that he was sort of connected to that fashion of existentialism, in a way, of the human condition.

RG: Yes, my mother actually had a great deal of angst and was, like all artists probably, bipolar and all that stuff, but I decided early that I didn't want to be that kind of artist. But I didn't believe in grim, professional art.

HUO: But these are great sentences. When you admire something, you have to be critical. And you didn't believe in grim, professional art. These are great quotes!

RG: Thanks. They just came to me.

HUO: It's super brilliant. So Giacometti, and who else?

RG: OK. I loved de Kooning and Picasso. But let me tell you my first criticism of both Matisse and Pollock. I loved their colours, I loved the way Picasso seemed to be very random, and you got the feeling his paint was arbitrary, but always right nevertheless. Now, I'm sure I was wrong. I want to go back and really look at that work, but I was young, I was like 18 years old, and I said, this is what gave me the most confidence as an artist. When I saw that work I said, 'I can do much better than that.' Because I never felt, with the heroes that you suggest, that in the way they're working I can do better. But with what he was trying to do, I thought I could do much better, or I could help. I would say, 'I could help that guy.' You know: de Chirico!

HUO: So that was a confidence boost.

RG: It was a confidence boost, yes.

HUO: And in terms of abstraction, were there any kind of heroes in terms of the history of early twentieth century abstraction?

RG: Mies van der Rohe. Or, you know, the great abstractionists that knew Mies van der Rohe.

HUO: [Theo] Van Doesburg.

RG: Right.

HUO: Mondrian.

RG: Yeah. I began to think, or I felt, that he was really finishing rectangles and squares. I didn't see a need for rectangles and squares, with what Mondrian was doing. I began to think that the rectangle was an unfortunate given, and it shouldn't be considered just a given that we use, without thinking about it. If people want to really be conscious, why not make it 92 degrees and make it a degree trapezoid, just as a little hint of going against the grain? I thought that the rectangle was worshipped too much. But what, in the history of art, gives rectangles so much cachet?

HUO: That, of course, then leads you into curved canvases.

RG: Yes, but I thought about it for many, many years before I was able to do it; I didn't know how to do it.

HUO: So then you had all these years where you still worked with the flat surface, it was pre-curved.

RG: Yes, because my feeling was that I didn't really believe in it anymore, but I wanted to do, to some extent, what people expected. I didn't want to let people down, so I tried to do all my commitments. In other words, if I had commitments for paintings, if I promised a show, or did this, or if I promised people paintings, then I would keep doing it. Even though I was really engaged in thinking in a different way.

HUO: You already were thinking of where to go next. And that was in the sixties, seventies?

RG: I was thinking vaguely about it, early. I was really thinking vaguely about it in' 49 or '50. I remember telling John Foote, who was an early friend of mine, an artist. You wouldn't know him but he was one of the first artist friends of mine. He was ten years older than me. In Chicago, while I was going to the Art Institute, I remember telling him, ‘I’m thinking of ways to put dimension in painting.'

Because I would put tennis balls against the back to give a little bulge from the back. And then, just because of the way the structures were built, it wasn't right, I realized I had to do it from the ground up. And I didn't know how to do it from the ground up, so I would really invent a structure that was my own, until I started looking at Buckminster Fuller.

HUO: Oh, so Buckminster Fuller gave you the epiphany.

RG: For the curve, right.

HUO: And which year was that?

RG: That was early, it would be '49. Whenever his book Nine Chains to the Moon came out. And the idea that a tension device saves energy, because anything ... This table is always working too hard and it keeps getting looser and looser. It's not a tension device.

[Both laugh]

HUO: But how fascinating. So Buckminster Fuller already early on hinted that to you. But what was the first curved canvas you did, in which year was it?

RG: 1968. It took me until 1968.

HUO: So you had the epiphany but then you had to solve it, in a way.

RG: Right.

HUO: That's fascinating.

RG: The first one I did, Mine, which Vito Schnabel bought, his father bought and then they sold it.

HUO: Do you have a photo of that here?

RG: It's around, yes. We may have it.

HUO: Sixty-eight, that's the year I was born.

RG: Sixty-eight, really?

HUO: Yes, I was born in May, '68.

RG: So ... May I call you Hans?

HUO: Yes, of course.

RG: Or Hans Ulrich.

HUO: Of course, either way.

RG: Hans, you're still a kid!

[both laugh]

HUO: So in '68 you had the epiphany for the first ...

RG: No. Oh the epiphany, no.

HUO: Oh, the epiphany was in the fifties, but in '68 you managed to realize it.

RG: Whenever Nine Chains to the Moon came out. I was looking at him when he wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, when was that? [edit: first edition 1938, reprinted 1968, 1971, 1973]

HUO: We can check that.

RG: And of course his geodesics idea. I was also looking at his friend, who was around I bet, actually. He came to my studio one time, with [Leo] Castelli. The very short architect. I'll think of it. Someone's selling his work now.

HUO: Philip Johnson? No.

RG: No, no, he's an architect and a kind of visionary architect. He did very organic buildings. Kiesler.

HUO: Oh yes, Frederick Kiesler, he's having a rediscovery moment, yes.

RG: I didn't know him well but he came to my studio.

HUO: Oh yes, amazing, I saw a reproduction of this. This is so fascinating: why do you think it took such a long time from you having the epiphany to you being able to realize that painting, Mine?

RG: I didn't know woodwork well enough. Because my idea about being ... OK, one thing is that I also felt that if you're born in any century, you at least have to be going for the next century, where your work will really be seen.

HUO: Yes, of course.

RG: Like Picasso, all of them were born in the nineteenth century but they were going for the twentieth century. So early on I thought, I was born pretty early in the twentieth century but I had to be going for the twenty-first century.

HUO: That is such a brilliant idea.

RG: But it's so logical and so easy, I mean anybody should feel that way.

HUO: Yes, but probably most people don't. It's a super interesting idea that you think early in this century already about the next century. At the moment, because of all the ecological crises in the world, it's actually very scary that no one thinks about the twenty-second century. We are already in 2017.

HUO: So then with Mine you solved it for the first time. Can you tell me about this work?

RG: What I didn't like about it, I was trying to soften ... Because I thought a rectangle was too sharp, so what I got was even sharper corners, and the way I did it was very loose. I was playing just with gravity and no, I didn't have any rods, I let gravity do it. It wasn't enough. Also, it had an inner curve and a straight line here. I decided, because of the angles in which you want to see this, it had to be curved, as you look at it, from the outside.

HUO: And then when you solved it, with this painting Mine, it was a Eureka moment? You knew ...

RG: I knew that it interested me, I thought I was onto something, I loved painting it which was the big thing. And it worked, in other words the idea works, and if you see the way that's built you'll see that my woodworking skill is really poor. So then it took me two more years to get these structures. And I started with Entrance, which was the biggest one. I started very big so that if there was anything wrong with it I'd see it easily.

HUO: As Roberta Smith said, you combined colour field painting with abstract expressionism. It made the impossible possible. It's like an oxymoron.

RG: Yeah, I hope so. I'd like to have done that.

HUO: And what about the titles, because they all seem to have titles, I saw that in the exhibition, and that one's called Mine. How do you find the titles?

RG: Well, to me, the thing about artwork is you're trying to tread ... I don't like the word 'communication' for this. You're trying to evoke feeling. To me 'evoke' is better than to 'communicate'.

HUO: So the title is an evocation of a feeling?

RG: Right. But it isn't easy, it takes work to do it. So what happens is, when I do a painting and I look at it, I have to ask myself, well how did I feel when I did that? Because I was involved with making it, I don't know how I felt. So then I study the painting to figure it out. Not always, sometimes I know. But sometimes I'll look at the painting and I'll not know how I felt when I did it. 

So I began to look for stories, and I found the Old Testament, and sometimes the New Testament, then I go to all the other mythologies: Greek, Norse, Mexican. I look for names that interest me, that feel right. And I work on this, and I try to find a story to read that, after the fact, feels like how I felt.

HUO: And they are often very short titles, it's usually only one, two or three words. They're very laconic, short titles.

RG: I hope so. But sometimes ... I mean, I have made long titles. I titled one painting because of the Barnett Newman story; Barnett Newman did a painting called Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? And so I did a painting which I called, [Palais Jamais] Who's Afraid of Violet and Green? Which was violet and green. [laughs]

HUO: This is brilliant. When was that?

RG: Oh, it's in the [Nelson-Atkins Museum]. I did it in 2005.

HUO: And how is then the process? It's here in the introduction but I read it also in an interview you gave to Phong Bui and Robert Storr from the Brooklyn Rail. When you talk about the process, you say that it's not about producing constantly, but that it has more to do with painting that comes out of leisure. Can you explain that? Whistler said, 'Art happens.’ And maybe it has to do with that idea that one cannot really force it, it has to arrive?

RG: It's reducing stress as much as possible, and being in a mood where you would feel like doing anything.

OK, I'm just thinking of this now. There were some great, professional singers. I don't know who said this, but they came from a place-I don't know whether it was in Austria, or somewhere-and when people would say, 'You sing so well,’ they would say, 'Well, I came from this town, everybody there sings well.' And what I would like to feel is that I could be part of a community where everybody painted well. And not to feel that it was a high place or something, but that it was just something that everybody did well. So to do that, it's like making coffee or something.

 I don't know if that makes any sense.

HUO: No, it makes total sense. I was also just thinking, when I arrived here you were making coffee. [laughs)

RG: Right.

HUO: That's how the conversation started. But it's also got to do with the subconscious, probably.

RG: Oh, I think that art is all about that.

HUO: Or with this idea that it's such an important part of our lives.

RG: I mean, art is about trying to find out who we are. How do we know ... ? I feel I'm very lucky to be able to control the stress level in my body, in myself, and that's incredible, it has to do with many things, like ...

I mean, I think that in the past, Americans had a tremendous advantage in it being such a big place, and such a new place, that we didn't have the stress that Europeans have. In other words, we didn't have to worry so much about land, or [?push for] neighbours and stuff, you know. And, of course, I think that's changing now, where Americans are starting to feel similar stresses that Europeans have felt for centuries.

HUO: So there's less space. 

RG: Less space. In terms of feeling lucky, I think that if you're born and live in tough times, where you never feel that's going to change, it must be much different from my dad, because he would tell me every now and then, 'We'll never be poor, but we're broke now.' Which is a lot different.

HUO: Yes, very different.

And then you found the solution of the curved canvas in '68, and ever since then it continued to evolve. Would you say there were other epiphanies or did it just gradually evolve? 

RG: You know, my wife and I differ on this a great deal, because before I met her, she had an epiphany that triggered a need to make work that can only chase after her inner vision, or, though it’s always there, play hookie from the urgent quest, or refer to it extremely elliptically. It’s like her epiphany wanted to and was made to materialize, but it didn’t originate in material. She’s a kind of warped platonist.

HUO: Really? 

RG: Yes. it came from seeing Giotto. In a different way, and she’s reinventing her ideas around Giotto.

HUO: Is she an artist? 

RG: She's an artist, yes, but she didn't know it for a long time.

HUO: What is her name?

RG: Veronika Sheer. I haven't until now been able to tell her, and it's something that I have to tell her sometime…. but so far, she doesn’t know how to navigate the art world, but everything she touches she's brilliant at. She's one of the most brilliant “amateurs” — in the sense of Olympic athletes, not incompetents — I've ever met, and it's one of the reasons I love her so much.

HUO: How beautiful. So she rejects the idea of being a professional?

RG: … not rejects, avoids, to date…but I too don’t think of it as a career. though I've been a career lifeguard, I've been a career professor, but not really, they were just professions that from my dad's advice, I never even thought of as a job; they were though a way to find some money.

HUO: So at the beginning, when you did in '68 the Mine painting …

RG: M-I-N-E, yeah. It has a double meaning, like, it's mine, and also it's like a mine ...

HUO: Like a source?

RG: Like a silver mine, or something. I knew that it would lead to something but I have to go further, it's just a mine, we haven't produced anything yet.

HUO: And what was then the second painting, in that curved canvas idea, after Mine?

RG: The second one, believe it or not, is Entrance. That took me until '71. From '68 to '71. I was already working on Entrance, in a rough way, but I didn't know how to do it.

HUO: Is Entrance here?

RG: While we talk, I'll make some coffee. I think I can answer your questions while I make some coffee.

HUO: Great! 

RG: Is that OK?

HUO: It would be fantastic, yes, I'd love some coffee. This is such a great interview.

RG: So this is the one I did after Mine. In it I was designing and learning how to do it, but I had a great deal of help. I had a naval engineer-who also understood Buckminster Fuller—help me with the design.

HUO: Yes, I was thinking about engineering, when I saw the fantastic piece in the gallery which one can move. I love that piece. It's an invention.

RG: Yes, it's an invention. 

HUO: It's so powerful, the idea that you can move it. And that you see the engineering behind. Is that the Rooms exhibition of Alanna Heiss?

RG: No, that was in 1976. This is the show, Entrance. And those two portions are actually right over there, to give you a sense of scale.

HUO: And do you write sometimes? Because I found some great quotes on the Internet, and you are saying such amazing things now also, so I was wondering whether you've written on painting?

RG: The thing is, I've never written anything that, when I've looked at it, I've thought was very good. I think I write great text messages. [laughs] But they're just useful to me.

HUO: SMS? Like texts on the telephone?

RG: I can write very good ones, I try to make them grammatically, I try to punctuate them right, and I try to make them punchy and not be like art. I want them to be just useful.

HUO: Yes, I found some really punchy quotes from you. 'Part of the difficulty in painting is the glut of images. I've come to fear images, they are randomly used.' So that's good, the idea of fearing images. 

RG: I didn't write that, it's a quote.

HUO: It's a quote from an interview, or something. You also said, 'Something can be really good and nothing's right about it. It's irrationally good.' 

RG: Right, I believe that, yeah. 

HUO: 'What strikes me as art is when something's much better than it should be, when you just can't figure out why it's so good.' 

RG: Correct. 

HUO: Do you have a definition of art? Because Gerhard Richter says, 'Art is the highest form of hope.'

RG: That's better than anything I've said. He said it's the highest ... ?

HUO: The highest form of hope. It's pretty good, no?

RG: I would say that's the best. I would say that's great. 

HUO: Do you have any definitions?

RG: You know, to me, if you do a little reading and you're thinking all the time, it's really not good to hold onto fixed definitions. I think we always have to keep changing our definition of things. 

HUO: So not to freeze a definition.

RG: Yeah, I mean, I think we can always redefine something. I wouldn't want to have a fixed definition of art. l'd like to keep it freer. Also, art is one of those things that, if you expect art to keep growing, you have to believe that people will keep doing art. I mean, don't you believe that art in the future will be a big surprise to us now? I don't know what it could be. I don't think we can predict it.

HUO: Can you tell me more about Entrance? That is the beginning of a move more into engineering, as you said, and I've seen your piece in [Contemporary Art Museum] St Louis [titled Serapis (2014)] which is like a stack, in a way. LINK: https://camstl.org/exhibitions/ron-gorchov-serapis/

RG: These are meant to be freestanding, the idea of freestanding work. For this, I did write something. No, I didn't write something. Well, John Graham ... I have to find this now. This is going to be hard to find, but I think I should show it to you. It's in my notes, and it's kind of buried I think, but we'll find it.

HUO: But I'm intrigued by your SMS idea. The SMSs are like Haikus then, they're text messages you said?

RG: No. I don't want to overrate them, but I spend more time than most people spend on a text, to get it right. You know that. It's stupid.

HUO: Like a tweet. But they've not been published. They're unpublished tweets.

RG: So, I think I'll have to go over it again, I mean, I'll have to remember what I said. But in John Graham's book, System and Dialectics, there's a question, sort of at the end: ‘What is the future of music?’ If you could go back and look for that: ‘What is the future of music?’ So he's talking about another field. I read this before I met John, I read this at the Museum of Modern Art because I was trying to figure out ... Because I had first seen his paintings and I hadn't met him yet. And I read this book, System and Dialectics, which I would say has influenced me a lot. And the reason it influenced me is because it's so dictatorial and absolutely what I don't like about teaching.

In it he says that the old way of being a professor—where you don't collude with the students, you're an enemy of the students, something like that-is better. But also in this he said that the future of music will be sounds that he thought of as a striped sweater. 

RG: I’ve found it, if you want to read it?

HUO: That quote?

RG: From 1926 to 1936: 'What is the future of music? Music does not consist of tune, melody, tone, or even sound. Music consists of a series of silences, pauses, that is, spaces tightly bound by sound into an organic pattern. Small silences opposed by large silences, curved silences to angular silences, et cetera. Silence is a portion of space measured by time. Music in the future will begin with an inventory of sounds, at first it will consist by layers of horizontal sounds that will look like a striped sweater. Great architectonic music, free of incidentals, will be evolved.'

And that haunted me, so I wanted to make a freestanding painting where coloors would be presented in the same way that he's saying sounds would be presented. So this painting was in the back of my mind for twenty years before I was able to do it.

HUO: And then you did it for the MoMA PS1 show.

RG: I did it in '71. Do you know Jim Harithas?

HUO: No.

RG: He gave me a show at the Everson Museum.

HUO: That was your first museum show, right, in '72? 

RG: Yes, Jim Harithas gave it to me based on seeing Mine; he saw Mine, and I didn't have anything else to show him. And he said, 'This painting changes my ideas about painting, I have to give you a show.' I just knocked myself out to find the money to build this, based on the museum show, and then I additionally did Strand, and the one you saw, and another version of the one you saw in St Louis.

HUO: There's another one, I was told, in another museum.

RG: Yes, Strand. Do you have a picture of Strand? I did them at the same time. So, after Mine, to learn how to make my stretcher, I did these big pieces.

HUO: So it became almost architectural, it goes back to your interest in architecture.

RG: Yeah. One thing I want to point out, that you'll understand, is in thinking this thing through ... Also, I'm very interested in Palladio and his idea of asymmetry, or where symmetry and asymmetry play. And all these spaces have relations, in other words, and none of these are equal. They have, what in music they call 'rubato', give and take, so you don't have too accurate a beat. So I keep changing the intervals. All these intervals have to change in order to look the same.

HUO: It's also connected to Brancusi's Endless Column, in a way, no? 

RG: Oh, I'm a great lover of Brancusi. 

HUO: Yes, I thought so.

RG: You know, the thing about Brancusi is, one could say, easily, that his greatest sculptures are the pedestals. You know, because in a way, what goes on the pedestals, like Bird in Space, after he's done the pedestals, they're wonderful, but they're kind of irrelevant.

I mean, to get to the basics of it, he is another artist besides, and I have a feeling that he worked completely from leisure, I'm pretty sure he worked from leisure. I don't think he was a stressed artist the way Giacometti was.

HUO: No, he wasn't part of that existentialist angst.

RG: No, and also the way they're done is like his little town in Romania, with Endless Column, and everything, you could think that anyone could have done those. He didn't do them ... You know, they weren't ... They had a feeling of perfection, but they weren't at all perfect.

HUO: And when you then went so big, with Entrance at the Everson Museum, I was wondering, did you then imagine even more monumental works? Because I'm very interested in unrealized projects, utopias, unrealized projects.

RG: Have I told you that I have unrealized projects?

HUO: No, but I always wanted to ask you, because I always think we don't know enough about artists' unrealized projects so I wanted to know if you have any.

RG: I have a lot. I would like to make a city of these.  

HUO: Wow. Like Entrance as a city.

RG: Well, many of them, yeah. But I would like to make a city of these and the idea is to reverse myself and make a very shallow city where it's spread out for a mile but that their intervals go back and forth.

Like here, look at this.

HUO: Like rhythmic?

RG: Rhythmic, yeah. Where it's set out on a curve, a whole curve, matching the sphere of the Earth, that kind of curve.

HUO: Like a wave, with highs and lows?

RG: Like a wave, yeah.

HUO: Intervals, pauses, silences.

RG: Now, for instance: these edges, the top edge here, correspond to the edge here. So, because this is wider than this, thicker, it has to be set forward. And this has to be set back, and slightly[? inner] penetrate that. And that little edge there has to be done like a finessed sculpture. Because it has to finesse itself into there.

HUO: So that could then become the architecture of a city.

RG: It's very shallow architecture.

HUO: And did you draw this city? Are there drawings of your unrealized cities?

RG: Only vague ... I've always hired architects to do the detailed drawing, because I don't want to get involved with so much mathematics and geometry, but I like to draw, I like to sketch it freely. [There is the] first sketch I did for this. I framed it to preserve it, I can get it.

HUO: It would be great to see it.

RG: Well I'll do that, I can get it.

HUO: I saw in the exhibition that you do sketches also, so I was wondering, in terms of your paintings, what's the role of drawing and sketching?

RG: I have this, that I'm working on, I haven't worked on it, but I did this just before I did this last painting that you saw.

HUO: Wow.

RG: I'm going to use casein paint to paint it. So it's a study of that work. 

HUO: So you prepare the sketch on this material?

RG: Yeah.

HUO: What is the material?

RG: It's paper.

HUO: Very thick paper, no? It's amazing.

RG: I have watercolour paper made very thick because it has a little dimension to it. You know, it's a play between fiat and rough, you know. 

HUO: 2D, 3D.

RG: Right.

HUO: Do you make sketches in preparation for all of your paintings?

RG: Not every one, but a lot of them.

[…]

HUO: Yes, they are actually exhibited, I saw them. They're very nice.

RG: Oh, you saw them, so you know them. That's OK. 

HUO: Because they are different. These are like sketched sketches, and the other ones are like painted sketches. Colour is added.

RG: Yeah. I'm painting this tonight. 

HUO: You'll add colour to that.

RG: I'm going to this belly dance thing so I won't be able to paint it tonight, but I want to paint this.

HUO: What is your routine in terms of painting? From when to when do you work? Do you paint every day, seven days a week?

RG: I try to have fun every day. You know, I've had some injuries recently. I broke my legs a year and a half ago, it's almost been two years, and I'm recovering, I had a lot of therapy. Through this I have to have some help, and so Sophie and I tend to work early evening and she's always willing to help me work late in the evening if we have to go that far.

[Section off the record from 1:11:51 -1:13:14]

HUO: Can you tell me more about your unrealized projects, there is the city ...

RG: Yeah. To me, Entrance is a twenty-first century temple and I'm pretty interested in the neoclassical movement, where they made these unadorned classical buildings, utopian buildings. I don't like them the way they are because they don't have enough invention in them, but I believe that if ...

What I would like, Hans, is to start a city like this, and to find other people that ... I can't do it alone, because I wouldn't want any city to have just one architect who made the whole city, and I don't like city planning, but the idea of starting something ... For instance, I've never talked to him about it, but I love Frank ...

HUO: Frank Gehry.

RG: No. I love Frank Gehry, but I was thinking of Frank Stella. He's done some architectural pieces. Do you know Frank Stella's architectural pieces?

HUO: Very well. He was supposed to design a museum for a collector in Dresden, so they did an exhibition there that I saw, and then I saw the show that the Met staged.

RG: Its made out of wood and it's very ... I like it better than his paintings now. Now, to do something with him, because I really ... When I was unhappy with my work, very unhappy with my work in 1959, his work was coming out and I admired it but I criticized it because, as I said, if you cut notches in a rectangle, it's still a rectangle! He's not going anywhere with it.

And then when I started making curves and dimensions I'm pleased to feel that he emulated that. I mean, I don't care whether I did it first, that doesn't matter to me, but I was pleased that he joined me with curves. And I would love to work with him on an architectural project.

HUO: And of course Gehry is all about curves.

RG: I'm talking about Frank Stella. 

HUO: For the moment, yes.

RG: Not Gehry. No, he's a professional architect, I don't want to meddle with that. And I have mixed feelings about Frank Gehry. I think they're wonderful, beautiful, but I don't know enough architecture to really ... It isn't my field, and I don't want to put my critical... You see, he has the problem of having to deal with too much gravity, too much plumbing, too much socio-political stuff. I wouldn't have to deal with that. I don't need plumbing.

[both laugh]

HUO: That's another great quote. That's so good. [laughs] That's so good. That is absolutely brilliant. That's a great definition of the difference between art and architecture.

RG: Well, to me, I do have a fixed definition of the three major fields. Music: well actually John's definition of music is better than mine, but let's just say: sculpture, painting, and architecture. The three visuals.

To me, the essence of sculpture is mass. You feel mass in sculpture. In architecture, you feel volume. And painting stresses surface. And I wanted to have some volume suggested, and some mass, but I don't like either one, and I don't want to work with either one. I want volume and mass in there, and I want it reduced to the least volume and the least mass, but to feel that it's there. So it's all for the purpose of surface.

HUO: But that means if it's least mass and least volume, and it's all about surface ...

RG: And the most surface.

HUO: And the most surface, then that leads, by necessity, to a kind of a paradoxical oscillation between 2D and 3D? 

RG: Yes.

HUO: A sort of an in-between-ness.

RG: I've always believed that no one understands 3D, let alone 40 or 2D. I don't think we really understand dimension. It's weird …

HUO: So it's maybe 2 ½ D, in your case. I was thinking today in the exhibition about 2 ½ D. 

RG: Exactly, that's how I thought of it.

HUO: Something which is written about here, and also you talk about it in the interview with Phong Bui, is this idea that your images have always been painted from both the inside and the outside. Lina Bo Bardi, the architect, also talked about that idea that one can actually work from the inside and the outside. Could you talk more about that?

RG: Well, when you think about structure, you have to think very much about under-structure. Let me ask you: how many people ever think about what kind of structures Van Gogh used?  

HUO: Yes, that is very neglected, as a field. 

RG: What happened to that?

HUO: People don't talk about that.

RG: Right. I think it's a shame. And why shouldn't anything be just as interesting from the back as it is from the front, in a different way?

HUO: Like in your piece that I saw today, where you can suddenly look behind, by moving it.

RG: Yes. But I didn't invent this, I think there are other people who are very interested in this idea. It's a philosophic idea about making anything, that there's no reason to make the back. 

And, you know, we haven't gone into this, but I did do some sets for theatre in the mid-fifties while I was painting. I worked with Steve Zacharias, who ran one of the earliest off-Broadway theatres. I did a set a month for him, and we had modular elements to make trompe l'oeil tables, and trompe l'oeil chairs, where we could refit them with cut-outs and paint them with trompe l'oeil. I used flags or drops, where I would paint trompe l'oeil doors.

HUO: Wow. And have these been published? 

RG: No. People would just push the door aside, but it would be like a Louis XVI door. So, I did that. I gave these things away because it wasn't any profession that I wanted to do. 

HUO: And you haven't done any stage sets in recent times?

RG: No. Well anyway, stage sets have a beauty about them when you get behind the scenes, the ropes and everything have a whole other world.

Actually a person who gave me a very negative review noticed that. In a review of the first show that Vito gave me in Hudson Street, I'll think of the reviewer sometime. He gave me a negative review, but he looked at everything and noticed everything, and he kept saying that it wasn't good or right, but I could tell, secretly, he loved it. Even though he gave me a negative review. I'll think of who he is. 

Whenever I see him, I'm going to tell him. [laughs] I think he tried to write a negative review, but I think he liked the work.

HUO: That's amusing. I have a few last questions. With the piece in '71, Entrance, and then with these other big pieces like in St Louis, it goes into a multitude of different elements, and then if one looks at the more singular paintings …

RG: I call these paintings, and I call the others stack paintings.

HUO: That's it, so there are the stack paintings and then the paintings. And in the paintings, there is very often the double, in a way. The Swiss writer, Durrenrnatt, wrote a play where everything comes twice, and I was wondering when this double idea entered the work. Was there a specific moment when that began?

RG: There's a deep answer to that, that I'd be glad to tell you but it would take too long. [laughs] But in general, I've come to realize that when I first started painting, which was two marks symmetrical, reversed, one reversed, you know, that was the first thing I thought of when I had to figure out what was I going to do, with the full canvas, not the half.

The others are half saddles; half saddles are for the stack pieces. For the full saddle paintings, I had to figure out what I was going to do, and I figured that out in 1972, and I thought, two marks, that would be fine. I stayed all night drawing in a coffee shop, figuring it out, and I just had two marks.

So I did the first one in the seventies, which Vito [Schnabel] showed in 2000. 

HUO: Yes, it's this amazing piece called Ulysses, right?

RG: Yes.

HUO: Which is an amazing piece.

RG: So I still do those. There's one of each there. So they have two colours, and the ones with two marks that are different, if the marks are different they're coloured differently, so there's three colours.

HUO: And the colours drip into each other?

RG: Yes. 

HUO: But Ulysses was the first one?

RG: It's not the first painting.

HUO: The first double? No.

RG: No, it's not the first one, I did many before that. That was, I think, 1978. In '72 and '73, I did many more. The earliest one I did I called Way (1972), which Vito and his father owned. I don't think it's in there, it hasn't been sold. It's kind of orange and green.

HUO: So there are the two and there are the three. In English there is this saying, 'Two is company, three is a crowd,’ no?

RG: [laughs] That's right.

HUO: And what about this painting, [Joseph Brandt] That's so unusual. Is that a one off?

RG: I did a bunch of those in the eighties. When I started with Marlborough. Marlborough took me on, I said to myself, 'They're not the right gallery for me, so why don't I go back to what I was doing before. Why don't I go back and see if I can do paintings that I did before [that weren't] paintings.' And I knew that they couldn't sell my work anyhow, so I started doing these crazy paintings.

HUO: So you went behind your invention with the curved ...

RG: Yeah. 

HUO: But they are obviously curved as well, but they are much more organic.

RG: Yes. If I had a lot of time to play around, I would do them, but I feel I don't have that much time. You can see that they would take more time than what we're doing now.

[section off the record]

Many drying times, many changes, reworking, and also-which goes against my major problem, that I don't want any stress. They're stressful.

HUO: And maybe two very last questions; I don't want you to be late for the dancing, music event. Do you have a favourite colour? Because Etel Adnan says, 'Red always wins.'

RG: Who said that?

HUO: Etel Adnan, my friend, the Lebanese painter, she's in her nineties now. She has a show right now at The FLAG Art Foundation, and it's very interesting.

RG: No, I'm aware of colours that are very hard to use.

HUO: Like?

RG: Orange. I find I can use orange, but it's very hard to use.

HUO: Here we have some orange.

RG: Yeah, I know. Well, you have to be very careful.

HUO: Why is orange difficult?

RG: And this is orange, here. But I have to have a really clear inspiration, it has to really come to me, it can only be orange.

HUO: So you don't have a favourite colour, but you have what you call an awareness of colours that are difficult to use. Orange, and any other difficult colours?

RG: I do have one favourite colour.

HUO: Which is?

RG: And it's a blue that we can't get our hands on, we've been trying to buy it. It's called Yin Min blue. 

HUO: And why?

RG: It's a newly discovered pigment, and I can tell from the photographs that it's such a great blue, and we can't get it yet.

HUO: Wow.

RG: So we're going to need to ... I'm thinking of going to the inventor at the University and investing. Because they got that by accident. It's crazy that they can't tell us the minimum order yet, can they? They're acting crazy. 

RG: I know, Shepherd Color ...

HUO: So you tried. 

RG: Yes, we're trying to get this colour. Look it up. YlnMn. Write it down. Y-I-N, capital M-n. It's the elemental symbols from the periodic table.

HUO: And where did they invent it, at which school?

RG: Oregon. Oregon State University. So that's my favourite colour.

HUO: And that's an unrealized project, also?

RG: Yes. 

HUO: Amazing.

RG: And because of that, we're going to make paint. We're going to make it and sell it!

HUO: And a very last question. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this little book, which is an advice to a young poet. In 2017, with all your incredible experience, what would be your advice to a young artist?

RG: Be desperate and patient.

HUO: Amazing. [writes] Be desperate and patient.

RG: Which don't usually go together. [laughs]

HUO: Yes, it's an oxymoron. Beautiful. But thank you so much. It was an amazing interview, truly amazing. Yes, absolutely! No, it was extraordinary.

RG: This was the best audience I ever had in my life!

[laughter]

Transcript ends 1:31:10