Interview

FEINSTEIN: Yeah, I can totally see that. The problem that I have with architecture is when architects are out to make their point, but they do it to the detriment of the art inside—or the people who live there. I’ve had my issues with MoMA. I think it is a little bit too much about the architecture, that you don’t look at the art like you used to. I could just be an old-fashioned person who got used to the old buildings . . . I think that one great thing about making a sculpture is that it’s a self-contained thing. All it’s about is how you walk around it and how it relates to your body. It’s not about you having to live inside of it. That seems pretty aggressive.

O’BRIEN: I have never really liked gigantic-scale painting. That’s something I like about John. His work is on a human scale. I think that so many artists are seduced by scale—“Well, if I make it that big then it has to go in a museum.”

FEINSTEIN: I agree.

O’BRIEN: But then it winds up in storage . . .

FEINSTEIN: That’s true. I keep wanting to make sculpture that’s smaller for that very reason, but it’s bizarre because I’ll start off with, like, something smaller but then it just gets bigger. It’s very strange. I think that John just made his biggest painting yet. It’s like seven feet tall. It’s enormous. He says it drives him crazy because he can’t move it around himself in his studio. And that’s exactly what I hate about making big sculptures. They’re overpowering. How do you drag them? But there’s this odd aspect, and I don’t understand why it happens, but you start making things bigger . . .

O’BRIEN: I think it’s the dealers whispering in your ear.

FEINSTEIN: I know. Now, of course, they’re saying, “Make ’em smaller.” [laughs]

O’BRIEN: John Chamberlain made these beautiful huge sculptures for years, but then he started making the same sort of things much smaller, and they don’t lose anything, really.

FEINSTEIN: You’re right. I think a lot of times there are people who make amazingly beautiful paintings on an apartment-size scale, and then they also make the big paintings, and there’s just no comparison. But then Julian Schnabel makes these enormous paintings like billboards, and it works for him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a small painting by him. Does he make them?

O’BRIEN: I don’t know. But now that you mention Julian, I think he’s somebody who is known as a painter, but I much prefer his sculpture. I think he’s really gifted in that way.

FEINSTEIN: I’m the same way about Cy Twombly. I like his paintings, but I’m not an enormous fan of them. But with Julian’s personality—barely knowing him—he seems in a lot of ways like he’s a sculptor more than a painter . . . Painters are very meticulous, and they don’t actually like to get their clothes dirty. They like to be in a room sitting on a chair listening to some mellow kind of music. I used to make fun of the painters at Yale because they were all, like, born-again Christians, and they would play, like, Pachelbel, [laughs] and get up really early in the morning. John was making abstract paintings in those days—and he wanted to be Schnabel. He said he would wear clothes that had paint all over them, but secretly he wasn’t that person, and you ultimately have to own up to who you are and what your personality is. All the guys I knew in
college who were sculptors were more like Julian Schnabel—big guys who would just be loud and assertive. I kind of fit more into that type of personality myself, I think.

O’BRIEN: Did you start out trying to be something you weren’t, or did you come out fully formed?

FEINSTEIN: I think in some ways I’m trying to change now. In the beginning, I was more violently messy and spontaneous in terms of making my sculpture. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become obsessed with the longevity of pieces, and so I’ve gotten more into the craft of making them—which is not entirely true to my personality, but you do change as you get older. You start to think about death and life and history . . . Before, I would make something, and it would take, like, a day to make it. Then the work had this great energy that has become very popular in sculpture these days—kind of like the “Unmonumental” show at the New Museum. That was work that I made 15 years ago. And I got tired of having the male movers—like the shipping guys, who are all failed sculptors—coming over to my studio and picking up something that would fall apart and looking at me like, “Stupid girl.” I decided I was going to get my shit together and make these things really well. But when you do that, you lose the spontaneity. You become a slave to the stupid process of it. You lose an aspect of real freshness. But that’s also about getting older. I mean, every artist I know who’s approaching 40, or is past 40, thinks about their paint cracking...

O’BRIEN: Andy Warhol said, My work won’t last anyway. I use cheap paint. And now it’s turning out to be true.

FEINSTEIN: Eva Hesse . . . Supposedly, none of her sculptures are original. Someone who was dealing with her estate years ago told me . . . I don’t know if it’s true, but latex doesn’t last. It gets sticky and then completely falls apart. I don’t have that big of a problem with it. If you cast the original, then I’d imagine it’s pretty much the same as having the first thing.

O’BRIEN: It’s the same with photographers and C-prints. It won’t last. That’s why conceptual artists came up with the certificate as the work. The old ladies that you draw—are these a meditation on mortality?

FEINSTEIN: No. I think they came about naturally when I turned 30. When I first met John, I had just graduated from Columbia, and I was making this kind of fairy-tale based performance art–type sculpture. It was weird because I had never been in love with anybody before, and it was a huge change to be with an artist. He was almost 10 years older than me, and we would go to parties, and people would know who he was and then they’d be like, “Oh, well, what do you do?” I would be like, “I’m an artist, too.” [laughs] And so I stopped making sculpture for maybe a year or two—a pretty long time. And then I had to do something with myself to get that creativity bug out, so I started drawing little story‑boards for movies. I had this dream that I was an old woman in Maine. We’d go to Maine every summer, and we had gone to visit this island where this woman had lived for her entire life in this really tiny, completely fairyland-looking place in the middle of the ocean. She built her own little cottage in a grove with tons of moss and shaded trees and bugs flying around. It was so beautiful. It has a crazy name—Placenta Island or something like that. I had dreams about it for so long, and I had this idea that I became the old woman. I imagined wearing a big, black shawl and carrying wood in the forest. So I decided to make a Super-8 film with me as this old woman. My best friend was a video editor, and we spliced it together on weekends. That was a precursor to the old ladies. I must have always had a thing about imagining myself as an old lady. I had a very old grandmother who was an artist, and she was very eccentric. She had my mother when she was in her mid-forties, so she was quite old even when I was a little girl. She was almost 100 years old when she died. And I just saw the fabulousness of being a very primped-up old lady and having these insane wrinkles, but you’re wearing huge jewelry and wigs. And there’s something about old women whose husbands died when they were very young, and they have basically become like little children again . . . I think there’s an aspect of it that I see in myself. So when I turned 30, I started doing drawings of these women from these Strand books—big, full, life-size drawings with pencil and pastels. And then I had a mirror just lying around the studio, and I tried to put gesso on the mirror and do a drawing on top of that. John said, “Just make a painting.” And I said, “I don’t wanna make a painting. I’m not a painter.” It was a big thing for me because that’s his territory and because of my feelings about how you are one thing or the other.

O’BRIEN: Identity crisis!