Terry in his Studio at Stove Works. Photo by Saria Smith.
Terry Thacker is an artist born and raised in Nashville,Tennessee. He received his BFA from Austin Peay and his MFA from UT Knoxville. He has taught Painting, drawing and seminar classes for forty years, retiring two years ago to spend more time in the studio. He came to this residency to enjoy the exchange and conversation that you miss being an artist away from academic settings. It was great to sit down with Terry and hear more about art from his perspective.
Saria: Why do you make art?
Terry: My earliest memory is of drawing. For children it becomes a pre-verbal language. It becomes a marking of your world and a language that names you and your relationships in the world. At first it's a personal language and then it begins to mature as a social language. It becomes increasingly subtle, challenging and rigorous as it attaches itself to other points of view and languages. Children often leave drawing finding other interactions and languages that are more sustaining for them. Sustaining languages begin to find their viability and vitality as they effect historical, social and political conditions. The word art means to make with intention, the word aesthetic is the opposite of anesthetic. So, to get back to your question, I make art to build a self that desires liveliness in sustainable communities.
Saria: What is it that intrigues you about collage?
Terry: It's a way to use imagery, you move through the world, things trigger your thoughts or your imagination including mechanically reproduced images. So I have file folders full of things like spatial constructions, color relationships, or trigger images. Sometimes the images are interesting formally at other times they can hint at metaphoric content. Occasionally I will simply paint the found image, at other times it is easier to collage or print the image. There’s one nine foot painting I’m currently working on where I am superimposing graffitied numbers on a collage made from two vintage Bible illustrations. With collage you are fragmenting and stacking images montage-like which, for me, alludes to cinematography, television, and computer screens. Additionally, I often doodle and collage the doodle directly onto the painting. Sometimes the drawing may be a quick five-minute blind contour drawing that I'll enlarge and attach, or screen print onto a painting. So there are all kinds of ways of suggesting the interaction, translation, and hybridizations of images.
Saria: What do you think about the idea that everything is a collage, for instance, personalities being a collage of influences throughout our lives?
Terry: I think you're exactly right. Every person is a set of biological and physiological conditions; genetic things, but then there are environmental conditions that determine identity (nature/nurture). The fact that you were born in the United States in the twenty-first century determines a lot of who you are: race, gender, sex, economic status all determine identity. Basically, you're layering and editing things to build a self. One of my favorite essays is by Walter Benjamin, titled, Unpacking My Library, where he's writing about building a self. He writes, “I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.” We have the possibility of collaging and editing incomplete selves and communities. I can arrange them in multiple ways, add new texts, take away other texts and so on. Benjamin’s essay suggest the broader possibility of the reanimation of categories and systems that have become calcified. Benjamin is proposing the possibility of building more functional societal, political, and economic systems . All systems are cobbling together fragments of previous ideas and previous systems to come up with better ones. At the heart of what I'm doing is attempting to make sure that no single thing or structure presents itself as a singular, codified system.
Saria: Dealing with abstraction, what are your thoughts or attractions to abstracting objects in work?
Terry: The word abstract simply means to draw away from. There are all kinds of reasons to pull away from something. For example, you’re looking at a tree and you abstract it because you're trying to emphasize certain conditions of it. I started off as a figurative painter which was an important learning process for me. Trying to respond to and mimic a physical object was and is a powerful discipline, it teaches you how to slowly and specifically listen to the world. The idea of abstraction is that you're starting to move the objective world into language, you begin to admit that what you are doing is not purely objective. Our names for things are incomplete and sometimes misguided. To judge the painting of the tree is to judge the artist’s translation of the tree not the tree itself. The “truthfulness” of the painting lives in its formal, metaphoric, metonymic, and historical constructions - its abstractions. All kinds of figurative devices or tropes are being used, stacked and erased. I cobble these materials and figurative devices together to form loose, hybrid, narrative structures in an attempt to privilege allegorical readings over formal readings. Allegory means to speak other, that the materials and forms are not ends in themselves, but are used to speak outside themselves.
I grew up in a fundamentalist church with stories like Adam and Eve in Eden, for instance. You could take the story literally as an objective historical event, or you can think of it allegorically as it represents other things. Abstraction is not trying to trick you into believing it's of nature. It's trying to speak other; it's trying to point metaphorically to essential conditions that run beside or transcend the limitations of the incomplete names we call facts. Allegory has the advantage of translating multiple histories - we may not have TRUTH, but maybe together we can build useful “truths” (truth collages).
A Theory Cloud, a 13-part series
Saria: You mentioned in your webinar that you plan to move your abstractions toward more narrative and figurative ideas, how do you plan to do that?
Terry: Modernist abstraction arrived at its end game with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and maybe Robert Ryman. The endgame was to reduce art to its singular, essential nature (i.e., its distinct objectivity). So to return figuration or the possibility of allegory to painting was to restore a condition that had been severely critiqued in Modernist discussions. Surrealism and Dada did preserve some of the conditions of allegory but with some suspicion in that those modes lacked the scientific objectivity that Greenberg insisted on. The idea of contaminating the reductionism and high purity of Modernism was something I am hoping to do. Painting is allowed to display doubt, to equivocate, to hybridize.
Saria: You often work from photography to create your ideas, what is that process like for you?
Terry: My father passed down a camera to me when I was probably 11 or 12 so I've shot a lot of films. I also keep a sketchbook but some things you just can't sketch so I record things with a camera. After a few years, I realized I was limiting my experiences by habitually looking through my camera’s lens and framing. But photography remains a powerful medium especially with the speed and informality of digital imaging. I shoot and download hundreds of pictures and then edit and organize the few that seem useful at any given time. Going through my files I’ll find five or six images that hold my attention either visually, or because they evoke narrative or psychological possibilities. Within painting, photographs can function as an intruding voice suggesting the necessity of multiple voices. Photography humbles painting’s autonomy and its historical privilege setting up debased theatrical and historical tensions. The theatrical and allegorical elements suggest a reciprocity between multiple times, hierarchies, and processes. I’m usually doing something to the photograph like collaging or hybridizing. I’m “unpacking my library, yes I am.”
Saria: You have a teaching background. How does that inform your work now?
Terry: I initially had no idea that I would teach, but after my first few classes I was hooked. I loved the humbling interactions. After a few years of teaching, I realized, good teachers probably listen more than teach. They're listening to what students are thinking, looking at, and listening to. The marks they make or the odd ways they put things together is exciting. The things that excite them begin to excite and motivate me as well as expose my own limitations and narrow views. After several years you find yourself working collaboratively with your students and colleagues. In my last few years of teaching, there would be five or six of us that would get together in each other’s studios where teaching dissolves into collegial relationships. I do believe teachers have a necessary role in the maturation of students. Teachers can be experienced, proactive builders of art communities. They can build a sound grammatical base within a useful, logical curriculum. They can help navigate the historical and theoretical arenas necessary for art practices today. Teachers in collaboration with institutions can help expand community resources, spaces, processes, and tools. However, the “art” part has to be professed and cultivated and not prescriptively taught. The goal then becomes overcoming the limitations of the grammatical and structural codes you’ve worked so hard to instill. You can't resist and overcome systemic limitations and deficiencies without knowing how they systemically work.
Saria: What have you enjoyed about being a resident at Stove Works?
Terry: Well I have a family and so I miss them, but I get up every morning and there's no television, and there are no real distractions. What I was hoping to do is find a rhythm that I was missing at home. The other thing is that there are some interesting people here, and so you have conversations about what they're doing. I'm hoping maybe this week I'll prop the door open and put a sign up so they can come in and see what's going on or what I'm thinking. It’s good to see how people react to your work.
ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER:
My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA student currently working as a Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. I decided to start these artist interviews as a way for the public to connect more with the residents who flow through Stove Works perhaps unseen, especially during this pandemic.