A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky

WK: You know, I’ve often said that if I were forty years younger and was going to become a curator the first show I would want to do would be called “Support, Not Money.” And I would do a show about support, about what really is necessary to make a drawing, what is necessary to make a painting, and what is necessary to make a sculpture. What is the material? I guess that has always been part of my interest although I’ve never really expressed it that way until now because I’ve never really thought about it that way. But, yes, Sol also did not let structures of previous work interfere with his new work. They were not necessarily leaps, but the steps were very, very carefully expressed and you could always tell that it was his hand he was thinking about. Even in the sculptures, which were not necessarily fully made by him, if you have them in the original they were painted by him and you could tell that. You could see that he cared deeply about how something was made and how that care was communicated. Sol, for me, almost more then anybody, warms my heart. It’s a terrible loss. Since you’ve read some of the dog interview, the worst thing that happens to a pet owner is when a dog dies. When Sol died it was unspeakable for me for two or three days. I just couldn’t handle it. It’s a thing that communicates in a way that—Eva does, Cage does—these are people that communicate that way. Many of these younger people who are working from a different orientation are communicating in much the same way because they are taking a support and their medium and working it in such a way that it tells about the process and it tells about time. The one thing that I find difficult with a lot of very contemporary art is that the time component doesn’t speak to me. It’s a nasty thing to say, but I call a lot of it “plop art.” It doesn’t seem to have taken any deep commitment of thought or time. It is very communicative but it doesn't communicate a concept that includes time and effort.