Mart Engelen: Why is the exhibition called ‘Rock Paper Scissors’? And could you tell me more about the works in this show?
Amy Sillman: ‘Rock Paper Scissors’ is the name of a game played with a system of hand gestures as signs—a game of chance—and that struck me as somehow completely analogous to my methodology for the paintings I made for Berlin.
ME: I love this exhibition and was immediately and intuitively drawn to the beauty of the colours and, at the same time, the order/disorder especially in your ‘South Street 2021’, ‘Friend 2021’ and ‘Untitled 2021’ paintings. What role do colours play in your work, also thinking about the many layers you place on the canvas?
AS: Well, colour plays a starring role, I hope! It’s a key component of how I decide what’s going on in the work, what has to change and what’s wrong or feels right, how space is working and how the layers are working.
ME: When do you know that a painting is finished?
AS: You don’t know. You declare it. That’s the exact philosophical edge of painting.
ME: You seem to be able to move easily between abstract and figurative and back again. Drawings become paintings and paintings look like drawings. What is the relationship between your paintings and your drawings?
AS: I think they’re basically the same thing, honestly. I really think I’m a drawer—drawing is the most fundamental thing I do. But my paintings are expanded drawings: in all ways, not just in terms of scale. ME: In what way do these exceptional times play a role in the works you have currently created?
AS: The Covid months were eighteen months of retreat: working from home, having no social life, a kind of free pass to not feeling like one was missing anything. On the other hand, the same period in America was one of political upheaval and reckoning, so I spent the bulk of my time reading history—more than I had ever done—which was great. But I watched a lot of TV too. It was lonely, but productive.
ME: What role does Berlin play or has played in your life?
AS: I have always loved Berlin from the moment I first lived here in 2009 on a residency at the American Academy in Berlin. It was almost strange how familiar and comfortable and welcoming and productive and generative it was to be here. I wasn’t expecting that! I have had great luck in Berlin from the get-go—I can’t really explain it! It’s a kind of lucky city for me.
ME: I really liked your work on paper called ‘Seating Chart (Dinner for Juliet) 2009’ in the book ‘Amy Sillman’ by Valerie Smith. It demonstrates an incredibly good sense of humour but also observation. How did this come about? Please tell me more.
AS: It was originally a joke to amuse my friends at the American Academy in Berlin, which I just mentioned. We attended nightly dinners with our colleagues there and they were seated dinners with seating charts posted outside the dining room. It made me laugh. What an antiquated formality! So, to amuse my friends there (like Juliet!), I would pass around these fictitious seating charts with fictional people written in, and we would all laugh. But the charts got more and more elaborate. I started spending hours each day making up fake seating charts with fake people: composites made up from the people I actually sat next to at various dinners all year. This thing that started as a joke ended up leading me to years of thinking about how diagrams work and how paintings themselves might be diagrams. A very fruitful joke!
ME: In many interviews with you, the interviewer pops up with the word ‘feminist’. What does ‘feminism’ mean to you in 2021, compared to the 1970s and later?
AS: Feminism in the 1970s meant to me that I could imagine my life differently from how it was described within my family. And it still does. The writers I read back in the seventies, before I even went to art school, scholars like Simone de Beauvoir and Linda Nochlin, poet/thinkers like Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig, to mention only a few. Plus artist/heroes I met in art school in the seventies like Harmony Hammond and Ida Applebroog, to name two, plus friends just living their lives, trying to expand what was possible for them, working all the time to find a place for themselves even when marginalised by the patriarchal world we all live in. All of that is still fundamental to my thinking in 2021. But my ideas have in the past decades been radically critiqued and expanded by the idea of intersectionality, so I would give a huge bow and gratitude for the work of bell hooks, who just passed away this week, for radically expanding and critiquing my thinking, for bringing the term intersectionality alive. And to newer thinkers like Maggie Nelson and Paul Preciado, who keep feeding my soul, not to mention the artwork of countless contemporary writers and artists I engage with.

—Copyright 2022 Mart Engelen