Oral history interview with Susan Rothenberg, 1987 May 22-June 2

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Susan Rothenberg on May 22 and June 2, 1987. The interview took place in New York City, and was conducted by Cynthia Nadelman for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 

The original transcript was edited. In 2024 the Archives retranscribed the original audio and attempted to create a verbatim transcript. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Additional information from the original transcript has been added in brackets and given an –Ed. attribution. The sound quality for this interview is poor, particularly the May 22 interview, leading to an abnormally high number of inaudible sections. The original transcript was used to clarify passages when possible.

Interview

[00:00:05.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  This is Cynthia Nadelman interviewing Susan Rothenberg on May 22, 1987. I can say where you live, yeah? 

[00:00:14.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. 

[00:00:15.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  We're at her loft, at Susan's loft, at 138 Watts Street. You have switched galleries recently, but you were at Willard for how many years? 

[00:00:38.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  1975 to 1986. I went in December '86. So that's eleven years. 

[00:00:46.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, okay. And you've just gone to Sperone Westwater. Are you feeling sort of retrospective about your career and things like that? Does that enter in? 

[00:00:57.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Not yet, although that's become a bit of an issue, whether to do one of those shows, in which case I'd be forced to look back. But it happened a little bit with this painting show that the Gagosian Gallery did that I had nothing to do with, but I was forced to look back, and it wasn't so bad. I'm usually hypercritical of earlier work, but enough time had passed that I could see it for what it was. And no, my greatest concern and fear is for my next show, always. 

[00:01:24.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is what? Your next—

[00:01:25.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  My next show, much more than I'm involved. In fact, it's been kind of tedious to go through my past. And then I'm helping Angela Westwater assemble proper records and help them get them into her computer, and she has lots of questions. So I've been looking back last month more than I would think I have time for it, really, but I do it because it's important. 

[00:01:49.19]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. You said the Gagosian thing wasn't—you had nothing to do with it? 

[00:01:52.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, he just assembled that show and told me about it about two weeks before it was going to open. 

[00:01:58.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? That's interesting. 

[00:02:01.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and Larry, and that gallery being what it was, I was concerned about what the resale business going on was and how many people were playing poker games with my paintings and stuff. 

[00:02:15.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. 

[00:02:15.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But he assembled a fairly decent group, and in fact, he did sell a few paintings from that show. But that's really none of my business. [Laughs.]

[00:02:24.48]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, it was sort of an interesting, critical watershed, too, maybe to sort of stop and look back at those. 

[00:02:30.51]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was pretty strange to see—well, you just saw what I'm doing in here, these spinning figures. I'm doing something totally static and basically monochromatic, to be working with all of the elements that I'm working with now, color, light, motion, illusionism. It's pretty amazing. It was a shock to walk from that room, into this room where you can see it. [Laughs.]

[00:02:55.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Huh. 

[00:02:56.93]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But it just felt like that was the beginning. Now is the middle. And it made me a little bit nostalgic for painting simply again. But you can't do that until your thoughts are simple, your concepts are simple. 

[00:03:15.37]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Right. I'm just going to shift now, because I want to work up to the horses later, but sort of then we can sort of go chronologically now, I guess, to set this interview kind of in time. So now we get to talk about—"I was born." So say the year and where, if you just sort of—

[00:03:35.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. 

[00:03:38.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  All right, okay. Do you have brothers and sisters? 

[00:03:41.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  One brother, a year and a half older. I'm 42. I guess he's 44. 

[00:03:50.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is he in the arts as well?

[00:03:52.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He ought to be. But actually, he's a kind of—he drives a taxi at night, and he plays a Japanese flute and lives alone and in Mill Valley. And he's quite interesting and strange and probably has much more artistic temperament, although I don't know if he has any talent because he never tried to do anything. But yes, I mean, for my parents, we are two strange children. [Laughs.]

[00:04:20.02]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Well, that's interesting. But you were sort of—you weren't discouraged from—

[00:04:26.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, but encouraged in the way kids are. Also, I was given piano lessons, and I liked painting from the time I was a kid, so I was given art lessons from the neighborhood lady [Ruth Harris –Ed.], and later, with the more formal [inaudible] kind of Buffalo classic artist Lazlo Szabo drew plaster noses while I was in high school. It wasn't discouraged, but it was never thought by me or them that it would be anything other than teaching, of course—that it would be teaching. 

[00:04:57.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Your parents—what did they do? 

[00:05:01.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  My mother was president of the Red Cross Buffalo for a while and was a mayor's assistant. Father worked his way up from—well, grandfather was a fruit peddler. Then there was a wholesale fruit and produce exchange. And by the time I was in high school, my father was part of a mini supermarket empire and a millionaire, and then he lost it all. And now he's middle—what is that? Middle-class. [They laugh.] We were upper middle-class for most of my growing up years. 

[00:05:36.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. When he lost it all, was that sort of that pivotal time that the painting illustrates—the one about—

[00:05:42.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He lost it all around the time I had the baby, which is—yes. Well, actually, the kid was born in '72. I think he lost it on the trip that they made to New York to see me in the hospital when I had her. He trusted some boy wonder of Wall Street on the commodities market and bet a whole lot of money on pork bellies and wheat futures and lost just about all of it then. So that was fourteen years ago. And I guess the horses, or the beginning of my public art career happened about three years later. But I hadn't been living in Buffalo for a long time. 

[00:06:21.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You had not been? 

[00:06:22.11]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I had moved out when I was a freshman in college at eighteen. 

[00:06:25.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. But up 'til then, you had lived in Buffalo, spent your whole childhood there? 

[00:06:29.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, zero to eighteen. Yeah. 

[00:06:33.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What was that like growing up in Buffalo? I mean, did you at the time feel isolated or anything like that? 

[00:06:42.93]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I was a very average, outgoing little girl, not at all the recluse that I've become. And—[Laughs.]

[00:06:50.71]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  In New York. 

[00:06:52.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In New York. And my mother's one of eight—has four brothers and sisters—was one of four sisters and four brothers, and they all had several children. And my father was one of three, and it was cousins, relatives, neighborhood friends, lots of winter sports, summers on Lake Erie, later camp. Absolutely very healthy little childhood.

[00:07:20.25]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  All right. Well, that's interesting. And you went to a public school? 

[00:07:26.94]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, public schools. They tried to send me to a private school for high school and I didn't go. And I—yeah, public schools all the way through. I was a high school cheerleader. [They laugh.] Star of my school play my senior year. 

[00:07:42.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Which was? 

[00:07:44.28]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I played Corliss Archer. 

[00:07:46.92]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What's that? 

[00:07:47.67]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I can't—not Kiss Me, Kate. 

[00:07:51.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Some popular kind of play like that? 

[00:07:53.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. It's a real old Ozzie and Harriet kind of kids' play. 

[00:07:57.02]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you really were—you were involved in the theater and that kind of thing also. 

[00:08:00.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was outgoing enough to be on stage and adored. But that was—except for being a go-go dancer in college, that's the only time I was on stage. [Laughs.]

[00:08:13.24]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting. And the art lessons that were the private type ones, did they start when you were fairly young? 

[00:08:21.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I mean, all the way up from paint by numbers kits through—the neighborhood lady who gave Wednesday afternoon art lessons, you know, charcoal still lifes, and portraits of each other and whatnot, to slightly more professional. This guy, Laszlo Szabo, who was this—he had an atelier in the artsy section of Buffalo. 

[00:08:45.65]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did he do his own art also? 

[00:08:47.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yes, Yes. 

[00:08:47.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  He showed? 

[00:08:48.45]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. I mean, he's the one that taught you how to make a bronze platter, how to paint a bronze platter with red, yellow, blue, and umber paint. And you only could use four colors. Unfortunately, I went to college by the time I made it to graduated to—oil paint instead of charcoal. And I wish I'd learned a little bit more from him, just that basic color mixing, color theory. I left him a little early. 

[00:09:15.41]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You left him— 

[00:09:16.51]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In terms of what he had to offer me. Yeah, my senior year of college. But high school was just when he allowed me to start using oil paints. I'd been there about two and a half years. 

[00:09:25.79]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting. And he would have had—it was sort of—

[00:09:27.84]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I could have learned it—

[00:09:29.12]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Classic. 

[00:09:30.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. Yes. I mean, it's very important to me now that I—I mean, not to paint a brass platter and make it look like a brass platter and stuff like that. 

[00:09:39.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean painting. You were painting an image of a brass platter. 

[00:09:42.47]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, he would set up an apple and a brass platter. That was our first project. 

[00:09:46.55]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, I see. To get reflection. 

[00:09:47.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And he gave us these four or five basic colors: red, yellow, blue, and some of the earth tones, and white. And you learned to mix colors and how to make red, yellow, and blue into a brass platter. It was pretty cool. I mean, I wish—

[00:10:05.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You did do that much, but then you did go on to the next stage. 

[00:10:08.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I went on to college and became a radical modernist monster. This man hated modern art, hated it. 

[00:10:19.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  He did? And did he did he teach other people, kids your age? 

[00:10:27.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative], and older and younger. We were a mixed class because it was an evening class. 

[00:10:34.07]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. So it wasn't probably attached to the Albright-Knox or anything like that. 

[00:10:37.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, it wasn't. 

[00:10:42.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Let's see. If anything else occurs to you about that period, you can stop. We can always go back. 

[00:10:55.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, you know, it's funny, as far as the art, my mind remembers—I remember Szabo; I remember Ruth Harris, the neighborhood lady. I remember the doctor across the street [Dr. Joseph Rosenberg –Ed.] that was an avid Saturday and Sunday painter that I mentioned before. And that's where, as they say, the smell of grease paint, for theater people—the smell of oil paint for me was in that guy's basement. 

[00:11:18.36]

And he was educating my father, who was—neither of my parents finished high school, and this was his best friend. And he was my father was very, very curious to know why his best friend loved to paint, how he figured out what to paint, how he did it. He used to stand there and watch him, and I tagged along, of course. 

[00:11:36.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting.

[00:11:37.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, so it was interesting. But all my later training is empty, nothing in college, nothing in graduate school, the one semester I spent. I never learned another thing as far as being useful to you. I never had another great teacher. 

[00:11:56.05]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, a lot of times it seems, especially if you haven't come from New York, if you've come from some other place, and there was always some teacher like that, or at least in many people's backgrounds, some foreign person or something. I don't know if he was actually foreign, but—

[00:12:15.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Szabo, yes, he was very, very—

[00:12:17.37]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  From the old country. 

[00:12:18.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Pinched our asses, too. [Laughs.]

[00:12:22.02]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And there always seemed to be somebody in some much more obscure towns than Buffalo, too. [Inaudible]

[00:12:29.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But by the time my training got on a formal level—Fine Arts at Cornell, I wasn't fortunate enough to—

[00:12:37.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  To use it. 

[00:12:39.99]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I mean, I just did what I did. 

[00:12:43.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You said that he and your father had been in school together? 

[00:12:47.71]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, no, they were just best friends. 

[00:12:50.37]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They were—by being neighbors. 

[00:12:52.23]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, right. 

[00:12:53.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  He was a doctor, right? 

[00:12:54.31]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He was—yeah, an ear, nose, and throat man. 

[00:12:57.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But he really—painting was his love. 

[00:13:02.13]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  His love and his life. And the whole basement was converted into two studios. That's the first thing you did when you walked in the house. "Come on down," he'd say. "Come on down. Let me show you what I did." 

[00:13:15.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And your father was interested in that? 

[00:13:17.06]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:13:18.49]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So did they look at other art, too? 

[00:13:22.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, this guy collected. I mean, he took a trip to Italy and brought back some sculpture. He had even had a Lipchitz, and it was all kind of Expressionist, but figurative work that he liked, kind of very touchy work. And he was—you would call him—he wasn't an Abstract Expressionist, but he was a kind of a—oh, God, he did everything. He did plaster. He did plastic, I mean, any material. 

[00:13:50.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Sculpture, then, too. 

[00:13:51.78]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He made that little piece right there. Then he started going to [inaudible]. He was just a mad enthusiast for making things. 

[00:14:02.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And obviously he wasn't an—had nothing against modernism. He was sort of—

[00:14:07.49]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, no, he wasn't. He was—absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:14:12.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did he have lots of books and things like that, that you got to look at? 

[00:14:16.28]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah. Matisse, Picasso. All the regulars. 

[00:14:20.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And you'd go over there on your own, too? 

[00:14:23.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I did. Yeah, I even painted [inaudible]. 

[00:14:27.71]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did he have kids of his own? 

[00:14:29.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  All of his were older. He was fond of me. 

[00:14:34.55]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And do you remember—did you and your brother kind of share—

[00:14:43.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, no. [Laughs.] No, my brother wasn't interested in that. My brother was doing things like perfecting slingshots and building a dog skeleton from scratch and working with a camera and a tripod. He'd get various passions. 

[00:15:11.91]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  [Inaudible.] And by the time when you were applying to colleges and that kind of thing, had you sort of focused on art yet? 

[00:15:19.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's what I've gotten most praise for and approval for. And also I was not academically sharp enough to probably get into anything else. My art portfolio was better than my grades. My grades were in the 80s, pretty much. 

[00:15:32.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So had you been doing—was there art also in the high school? 

[00:15:36.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't take it at all. 

[00:15:38.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So where did you—you got approval from family and these other people? 

[00:15:43.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I got patted on the head for it. 

[00:15:46.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Did you do other public, you know, things like set design or something like that, to go along with the—

[00:15:53.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In school? No, the only thing I did was win third prize on the SPCA dog poster. I got to go on television. [Laughs.]

[00:16:02.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's great. A poster of a dog? 

[00:16:05.05]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, it was kind of a basset hound. 

[00:16:08.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That was interesting. Did you have animals? 

[00:16:12.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I've always had a dog. Yeah. 

[00:16:15.21]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But the dog wasn't yours. 

[00:16:16.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, it was just this sad dog. 

[00:16:19.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Do you still have that somewhere? 

[00:16:21.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, my father gave it to a cousin. But I ran into him at a lecture in Washington, and he said—he got tears in his eyes. He said, "I'm so proud of you. And I still have that painting." 

[00:16:32.16]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's great. 

[00:16:33.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So it's somewhere. He held onto it. 

[00:16:43.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. So let's see. Okay, I'm trying to get this transition. Well, then once you were in college, you sort of—

[00:16:52.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Took all the fine arts courses. Well, I started out as a sculpture major. The third year, I was very influenced by Lucas Samaras. I started meeting people that lived in New York, of course, and I started coming into New York and seeing an occasional show on the weekend from Ithaca. Saw the Samaras show and flipped out—the birds, the stuffed birds, the needles, the hypodermics, the pins, the yarn, the chairs. And I just realized how incredibly personal—or remembered how personal art could be, how it could be about your own obsessions and fetishes and weirdness, rather than rendering and capturing and whatnot. 

[00:17:32.71]

So I went back to school and I started making these Baby Ben cement alarm clocks with little nails and spikes coming out of it, a la Samaras. And I was also a party girl. I wasn't a very good at or serious student. I was very good at dancing and beer more than I was working in the studios. And anyway, the guy flunked me, and he went so far as to flunk me out of the sculpture department since he was the head of the sculpture department. It was a little outrageous and I still don't understand it. So I left school and went to Europe. I'm rushing this piece. It deserves to be rushed because—

[00:18:06.75]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay, well, then some of it, I might go back and—

[00:18:08.81]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  All right. 

[00:18:09.56]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But go ahead. 

[00:18:10.34]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He wouldn't let me back. My parents were distressed that I was not going to get a degree, and I decided that I was—floating around this island in Greece was not doing any good at all. 

[00:18:20.54]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  This was just—let's see, what year—

[00:18:23.93]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  1965. This was '65.

[00:18:25.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That was toward the end of the college period. 

[00:18:27.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was supposed to be a second-term junior, but he flunked me at the end of the first term, I guess, in January, and I quit school. I took a leave, whatever it is. Then I went to Greece and lived on this island Hydra for five months, came back, and went back to Cornell in the fall because, first of all, my parents were not going to support this, although I kicked in some money from waitressing, which I didn't need to do, but I did so that I could feel like what it meant to work for a living. 

[00:19:01.94]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Waitressing, you mean at Cornell? 

[00:19:04.13]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And the guy would not let me back in the sculpture department. He said, "You have no talent whatsoever." Even though I'd taken a summer course in sculpture, done bronze in Buffalo one summer, and got an A and so on and so forth. I told him that, and he said, "Go back to Buffalo. You're not coming in my department." 

[00:19:25.38]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Who?

[00:19:26.63]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Victor Colby. [Laughs.]

[00:19:29.16]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And all your eggs were sort of in the sculpture basket, as it were. 

[00:19:32.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I mean—

[00:19:32.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You weren't also doing stuff in the painting department. 

[00:19:35.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I was a sculpture major. And they let me in the painting department. And what they let me do when they saw what I could do, which was average, but certainly adequate, is they let me do a year each semester. So I had to start out as a first-term sophomore in painting in what would have been my second-term junior year, and finished my sophomore year in that year. And then anyway, so it resulted in my graduating a year late. 

[00:20:07.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Were there any—there weren't any people there in the department there who were either famous in some way or an influence on you? 

[00:20:17.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  There were, but I was not in their classes. Jim Dine came up and taught there. I had no contact with him. I wasn't assigned to him. And I wasn't eager, I mean, or ambitious enough or aggressive enough to go and find him, although I admired his work. A sculptor named Richard Tomsuden was there. 

Chuck Ross was there in the sculpture department. The one teacher that I did have that everybody adored and was a turn on, but he was so kind and courteous and encouraging to everybody, it didn't quite matter if he was also that way to you because you didn't believe it, was a man named Robert Richenburg, who was an Abstract Expressionist painter, pretty good one. But no, I can't—I can't say much about any other teacher. 

[00:21:06.63]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And the sculpture, the guy who was sort of the prime mover there, was he a sort of traditional type sculptor? 

[00:21:16.08]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He did Marini—what was it? Yeah, Mario Marini type. He did figures on horses, very bland. He was a very bland man. 

[00:21:22.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, [inaudible]. 

[00:21:25.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, kind of primitive, well-crafted. Toy-like little—yeah. 

[00:21:33.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you didn't do—I think somewhere you did spend some time tearing things up, doing—I mean, I have a whole theory kind of about that. A lot of people—

[00:21:46.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Tearing canvases?

[00:21:46.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Tearing up canvases, and doing, you know, that went on. A lot of that went on. 

[00:21:50.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Absolutely, but not until I moved to New York, which was '69. 

[00:21:53.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So it wasn't going on in the school there, or at least not with him. 

[00:21:56.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was doing things like painting through chicken wire, to make patterns and various meshes. And I started using big pots of house paint, enamel paint on masonry, and doing big, gloopy, droopy Expressionist, figurative Expressionism. Very colorful. And then I tried to get very formal and minimalist for—

[00:22:24.75]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  This is once you were painting. 

[00:22:25.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  A whole bunch of phases—yeah, within the art department of Cornell. 

[00:22:29.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And while you were doing the sculpture, was there any part of it that was that you felt was interesting, or at least in retrospect or anything? 

[00:22:43.49]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I did like clay. We didn't really use clay. We used plaster. I didn't like it when it got to plaster. We always had to cast the plaster. But I like touch. I like touch. I did a tiny bit of wood carving. The obdurateness of cement appeal to me as being sort of unamenable to taking much of any shape. Did not like welding at all. It's too much gravity in sculpture. Basically, I'm a real fantasist, and it's just too many rules in sculpture. 

[00:23:30.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Did you take other courses, too? Or are they pretty much a blur? 

[00:23:34.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, you had to. You had to do everything. 

[00:23:36.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did any of those especially sort of interest you? 

[00:23:38.81]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I had a wonderful course on Proust with the expert on Proust, this guy named Professor Grossvogel. He was the only person I know. And did pretty badly in creative writing, which I didn't like at that time. 

[00:23:54.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. I was wondering if you—had you been reading? Or now do you read, for instance? 

[00:24:00.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I'm a voracious reader now. I'm reduced, finally to mystery. I always disdained them. Give me any old Hollywood novel. I'm a kind of reader that remembers nothing. The worst kind of reader. I read only to slip away, to escape from a painting, from a problem, from—I don't like TV, but I read like people overeat. I'm not a good reader or retainer. 

[00:24:29.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What, as a sort of relaxation thing from painting? 

[00:24:31.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:24:33.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But you've—let's see. Well, you've done an illustration or a cover or something for that book of Peter Schjeldahl poems, I guess. 

[00:24:44.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:24:45.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And you also—there was a quote in the front of the Larry Gagosian Gallery, I think, catalog of Charles Bukowski that—

[00:24:54.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't do it. 

[00:24:54.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay. 

[00:24:55.34]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, he chose that. I heard there was just an article that I had chosen, but I didn't. 

[00:25:00.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I think it was. 

[00:25:01.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, Joan just told me. But I didn't. I had nothing to do with any part of that show, except to come and see it. 

[00:25:07.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:25:10.52]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And painted it. [Inaudible]

[00:25:20.09]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. [They laugh.] Let's see. We skipped all over. Oh, yeah. Classmates and stuff like that. Were there people doing art who you were interested in or have kept up, kept in touch with, or anything like that? 

[00:25:38.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Of course, there were. 

[00:25:39.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Friends? 

[00:25:40.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, lots of people that were better than me that I don't really know where they are now. There's a guy named Peter Solomon and Michael Meltora, Paul Laird. Alan Saret was a classmate, although he was in the College of Architecture. 

[00:25:53.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:25:54.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He was always painting and doing stuff, and he was one of the best in the entire department. I mean, he was better than most of the Fine Arts people and better than—the architects all had to take some art courses. Yeah, he was incredible. And Gordon Matta was there, although I didn't know him that well. That's another one. 

[00:26:12.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You did know Alan Saret? 

[00:26:14.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, yeah. Dropped in his studio and all that. I remember one painting that he was doing that was so great at every stage that I couldn't believe that he kept changing it. I don't know what he—of course, he knew what he was looking for, but anything Alan Saret touched was—in paint was amazing. 

[00:26:34.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Have you kind of kept up all along in the years? 

[00:26:36.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  With Alan? I see him every so often. I mean, he's gone off on many, many tangents, some of which I find incredibly interesting and some not. I believe he's engaged in illustrating and translating I Ching right now and has been for the last three years. So he isolates a lot with that. 

[00:27:08.50]

What else? Other classmates? Mary Woronov is a Warhol—was a Warhol actress and is now an actress in Hollywood, has been a best friend for twenty-odd years. She was in sculpture, but she quit school to join the Warhol scene. There weren't too many others that I really recall. I'm not very much in touch with many people from Cornell. 

[00:27:36.91]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Had some people gone with you from high school to there? Or was it—

[00:27:39.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  One girlfriend, who I'm still very much in touch with. We played together from the time I was seven years old. She was my roommate at Cornell for several years. She still paints, but basically she's a wife, mother. 

[00:28:06.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, yeah, social life. You said you were sort of—that you didn't enjoy the social life in those days. 

[00:28:11.87]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. [Inaudible]

[00:28:13.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The social—yeah, go ahead. Well, in those days, it was kind of heavy, wasn't it? Social—I always think of it that way. 

[00:28:22.11]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't remember college that well. I remember I lost a whole pile of friends to the flower children. I simply could not be a flower child and walk around handing anybody a flower. It just wasn't in me to do, and yet I was jealous because they seemed like peaceful, good people, which made me think maybe I was a grumpy, bad person, or cynical, probably. [They laugh.]

[00:28:46.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Except that you hadn't been—doesn't sound like you were a grumpy, bad person at all. 

[00:28:50.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I was a good-time Charlie. Anything for a laugh. Another thing I lost many people to was Est [Erhard Seminars Training –Ed.]. And then L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology. I mean, it was—what years were these? These were '60—yeah, late '60s, when all kinds of cult—Unfortunately, I had no friends with any political tensions. I was barely aware of Woodstock, aware of Vietnam, but not in—I've since read as many novels and stuff as I can about Vietnam. But at the time it was all going down, I don't know where I was.

[00:29:35.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting. Was that campus affected by it?

[00:29:38.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Partly campus, partly the artist colony in Greece, partly a very peculiar year in Washington, somewhere around '68. 

[00:29:49.90]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I was going to—that was after—

[00:29:51.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, between '65 and—between the trip to Greece and '69 when I arrived here, it's very confused, very confused. 

[00:30:04.57]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The thing in Greece, you just said it was an artist colony. I didn't realize that. So were you doing art, or just mostly soaking things in? 

[00:30:14.47]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mostly that. Yes, I did a lot of watercolors, but mostly this young American girl meeting strange, weird foreigners, first experiments with drugs, LSD, grass, and occult stuff. I never even heard of any Aldous Huxley or all of this occult stuff that was going on. 

[00:30:35.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's where you were introduced to it, you say, over there? Rather than—

[00:30:37.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, in Greece. And it didn't sit much better than Est or any of the things that I heard about previously. None of those things have taken. But it was an experience that changed me totally. I did not come back to the States the same person. 

[00:30:58.13]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  How so? I mean, if it didn't—

[00:30:59.71]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was very happy go lucky. And when I came back, I was very estranged, both from where I'd come from, people on the island in Greece, and from my college students. Plus, I wasn't even in the right class anymore. 

[00:31:16.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. So is that—

[00:31:17.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  [Inaudible] people in a different department, and a year younger than I was, or two years younger.

[00:31:22.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:31:23.91]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you became sort of more solitary at that point? 

[00:31:27.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. The trip to Greece is the absolute cut off between what I was and what I am still becoming. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. 

[00:31:41.31]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Have you been back?

[00:31:43.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. I went back there once and it was just—you don't go back to places that are so—they're better in memory. 

[00:31:54.00]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean it was a good memory? 

[00:31:55.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mixed. Yeah. 

[00:31:56.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Mixed, but strong. 

[00:31:59.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Strong memory. Love affairs, just exposure to a world that I hadn't even dreamed of, the protected kid that I was. And I never wanted to be protected again. But I wasn't happy anymore, either. 

[00:32:23.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It was radical. 

[00:32:24.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was radical, yes.

[00:32:30.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And so then you came and you finished up. You had to finish—two more years then to finish up. 

[00:32:35.21]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:32:36.89]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And then there was this—I have read, and you just mentioned that you went to Washington for a year. 

[00:32:42.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I back to Europe when I graduated, to a different island. 

[00:32:46.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You went back to Greece? 

[00:32:48.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, not to Greece, to Spain, to Formentera, a little island near Ibiza. And that was also—that was not a good trip. It was about three or four months. And then I went back to the States again, and it was about August, I think, and I hadn't made any plans for the future whatsoever. Family, friends, and somehow I don't even know when I got accepted into George Washington University. Somebody got me in—I knew somebody—to study at the Corcoran School of Art. And that was a disaster. 

[00:33:23.25]

I got an apartment. Didn't know a soul. Took courses for about a month. They wanted me to paint in a big room with an easel. I hadn't done that since I was a freshman in college at Cornell. So I worked at home. Teacher came once, and I just dropped out, but continued to live in Washington. Painted a little, but mostly read books for—

[00:33:46.10]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The whole year? 

[00:33:46.91]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, just sat around reading. 

[00:33:48.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, that's interesting. 

[00:33:49.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Wandering. 

[00:33:50.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I lived in Washington in those years while remembering the Washington art scenes and stuff. That was kind of—well, it was kind of provincial. Well, it sort of was and it wasn't. It had different elements, too, I guess. 

[00:34:03.55]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  One teacher was doing foam—you know, that stuff that [inaudible] and the other and make funny, big sculptures. He's a good artist, actually, Ed McGowin. The other guy was hard edge, Tom Downey. Couldn't relate to either of them. 

[00:34:19.97]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They were the ones who were teaching at Corcoran?

[00:34:22.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and I just dropped out. 

[00:34:28.91]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Was there a person that attracted you to Washington, or something like that? 

[00:34:33.11]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was just somehow through family connections, it was a place to stick Susan, who was kind of becoming a wandering Jew. [They laugh.] It was like, get her back into school 'til she figures it out. 

[00:34:48.26]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you read and stuff like that? 

[00:34:50.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it was just kind of a lost year. And I'm not sure what year it was. It was either '60—it was probably '68. Yeah, it was probably '68. 

[00:35:08.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you feel like a wandering Jew yourself at that point? 

[00:35:13.12]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I'm pretty vague about it all. I'm really vague about '65 to '69, and part of those years were back at Cornell doing paintings. One of them was a semester in New York. They sent Cornell students down, I think in was their junior year. And that was very strange. That, again, involved freakish scenes and drugs and part Warhol scene and part Max's Kansas City. And I was lucky enough to have Alan Solomon as a partial teacher. And I had some wonderful talks. He sent us to galleries and basically sat in there two hours talking about what we've seen. That was excellent. 

[00:35:57.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you sort of did have a sense of what was going on, at least, in—

[00:36:00.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:36:03.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —in the art world. 

[00:36:04.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Went and tried to meet with Samaras. Stood outside his building for two hours, finally got the courage to cross the street and ring the bell. I had a romantic fantasy about him, artist to artist, but also girl to boy, not knowing he was gay. And then finally went to ring his bell. 

[00:36:23.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is that on the Upper West Side or something? 

[00:36:25.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And when I went—it took so long to get the courage to do this. And when I went to put my finger on it, it had been torn out and wires were all stuck together. [They laugh.] Red, yellow, green, a knot of massive wires with exposed tips, like electrocution time. I know. [They laugh.] I was so relieved. I ran home. I laughed. 

[00:36:49.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Sounds like a Samaras artwork. 

[00:36:51.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I know. And I did meet him about two years ago, finally. 

[00:36:56.05]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  [inaudible] doing. Did you tell him that story? 

[00:36:58.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, he was very nasty and rude about that time. [Laughs.]

[00:37:05.33]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Where were you staying at that point? 

[00:37:07.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I had an apartment on St. March with Mary Woronov, the actress. But mostly party time. 

[00:37:18.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And all those years you weren't having—you had sort of broken with your parents. I mean, they were just sort of tolerating what you were—

[00:37:24.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I think I spent summers there. I remember working in a mental institution one summer. That was not good. 

[00:37:32.10]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It was not? [They laugh.]

[00:37:32.75]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I was frightened. 

[00:37:35.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What kind of thing? What did you do? 

[00:37:37.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was supposed to be teaching, helping in the crafts room for the women, for the crazy women. It was just terrible. [Laughs.] I think I quit after about a week. One woman thought she knew me. She thought I was somebody. She [inaudible] me. Every time I would come in through the locked doors, she'd get on me and just [inaudible].

[00:38:10.33]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? Have you ever done that at any other point, taught either little kids or, whatever—deranged people? 

[00:38:20.08]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  [Laughs.] No. I mean, college kids are becoming little kids as I grow older, and I do visiting lectures. And I've done a little bit of teaching, but I'm not very good at it and I'm not real keen on it, either. So you can sort of say between Laszlo Szabo when I was seventeen, and coming in on a night train to New York in September '69, it was pretty much wanderings. 

[00:39:01.31]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. When you were twenty-four then, isn't that right? 

[00:39:03.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I was—I guess I was twenty-four or twenty-five. 

[00:39:09.38]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. I guess sometimes it works that way. I mean, those really formative, important things do finally come back to roost. 

[00:39:23.35]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:39:23.92]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you—well, there is sort of a story about how you got here, too. You were heading somewhere else. 

[00:39:30.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:39:30.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Do you want to tell the audience? [Laughs.]

[00:39:32.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  All right. I guess. I spent some time in Buffalo. I was pretty depressed, didn't know where to go or what to do. Decided to go teach English in Nova Scotia. Got a ticket to Halifax. I mean, there's no reason why. I don't know. I thought I had to leave the States again. I don't know where I got that idea, but I couldn't think of a city in the States, and Halifax, I liked the name. And it was near the sea, and I thought there would be poor peasants there and I could find a little hut and teach English and have a quiet, muted existence all by myself. 

[00:40:11.17]

So I got on a train with a suitcase tied to a skateboard. Stopped in Toronto, called my family to tell them I was okay. And they said, "Come home. Your mother's in the hospital." Went back home, saw her through that. Tied my suitcase onto my skateboard again. Got to Montreal this time. I had a change of train, an eight-hour stopover to wait for the Halifax train. Wandered around McGill University. 

Met a woman, started talking. Told her I was waiting for a train. She was kind of a hippie, invited me home for dinner. Had a nice dinner. Her husband came home and he played the guitar. And at midnight, I went back to the station to catch the Halifax train, and for some reason walked up to the counter and asked if there was anything going to New York. And they said yes. And I cashed in a Halifax ticket, bought a ticket for New York. 

[00:41:05.60]

Got on the Halifax—got on the New York train full of Hasidic Jews. Got off at seven in the morning. Got a box at the station. Put the suitcase and the skateboard in the box. Started walking downtown, and at 14th Street, ran into an architect from Cornell, called my name from his truck. He was on his way to work. He gave me the keys to his house, which was a little wooden shack perched on top of a roof of a building on 28th Street in the plant district. He was in touch with [inaudible] and a few other people from Cornell. And within two weeks, I had a loft. 

[00:41:47.43]

I found a loft and helping this woman, Mary Heilmann, an artist, painter, move out of her loft and into a building in Chinatown. I met everybody that I became involved with the next—well, still many. Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Richard Serra, Tina Girourard, Dicky Landry, Debra Hay, Trisha Brown, this whole matrix of—Yvonne Rouner, numerous people. 

[00:42:13.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And so that was all really quickly it happened with you. 

[00:42:16.11]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Absolutely. And I had seen one person from Cornell who also had a big exhibition in Buffalo, and encouraged me to come. And I did find him and stay in his [loft –Ed.], and that was Michael Singer, who shows at [inaudible]. So that was the only kind of person that I knew. Mary Woronov wasn't in the city at that time. 

[00:42:37.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You had known him back—

[00:42:39.34]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. When I got demoted to a sophomore painter, he was then a classmate.

[00:42:46.41]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting, because then he became a sculptor. 

[00:42:48.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:42:53.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you didn't spend any much period of time, at least not in the beginning, when you got to New York, sort of lonely or looking for—

[00:43:00.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was like magic. I tell you, from that seven o'clock, dropping off the suitcase, to that guy calling my name. 

[00:43:05.75]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, wow. 

[00:43:07.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But he introduced me to this one, to that one, and then I had a whole new world. It was like a miracle. As I said, I was pretty lonely and depressed and disengaged. So it was a very strange experience to have your life turned around like that, kind of magical. I don't know why I made that change in the station. Yeah, that was—I'm awfully glad I did. 

[00:43:33.89]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So it's not—I thought maybe you were heading for that school that's in Nova Scotia. 

[00:43:38.78]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't even know it existed. 

[00:43:40.07]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It wasn't that. 

[00:43:41.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, it's funny because I probably would have met a lot of people that I know now, had I done that. I didn't even know that wasn't [inaudible]. 

[00:43:54.25]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And when you got here and you met all those people, did you sort of already know that there was—you can tell there's a difference happening in your life? 

[00:44:07.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I was so open and so receptive that all this good stuff just poured right in. I mean, I came like, a waif to the city. I didn't come here aggressively. I came here very humbly and quite confused. And it was just wonderful to me that that whole chain of events—I mean, it's amazing. And I'd seen Michael Singer, and I saw Alan Saret and Gordon, and "I'll come to your party" sort of thing. And then this loft turned up. 

[00:44:45.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. The loft—did you move in? 

[00:44:49.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, I moved—it was 134 West Broadway, and Mary Heilmann was living in it. And Richard Serra had been living in it. Nancy Graves had been living in it, and Richard Lippold had lived in it. 

[00:44:59.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So there's a sort of rotating—

[00:45:01.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, yeah. It's a funny little loft down this way. And I lived there thirteen years. 

[00:45:07.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:45:08.84]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Then I moved to this place about six years ago—seven years ago. 

[00:45:23.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So that sort of starts up a whole—kind of a new era begins then. 

[00:45:29.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. 

[00:45:37.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You have to spend a little bit of time when you first get somewhere, sort of getting used to the place. I mean, you didn't just jump into work probably at that point. 

[00:45:45.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I had a bunch of odd jobs. I remember I worked as a receptionist at Moon River Hand Prints. Somebody—the person that lived below Michael Singer was doing handmade wall—something wallpaper, hand-painted wallpaper. And I worked there for a while. I waitressed a little bit. I must have been getting money from my parents at that point. I was. I was. And then I would get odd jobs for as much as I could. But at a certain point, I realized that I was there to make art. Meeting all these people was very, very, very much of a turnaround. 

[00:46:24.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Right. That's what I meant, too. I mean, you probably didn't just jump into doing that, either, making art things. 

[00:46:29.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Started just going places, and I realized that when everybody wasn't all together doing something or going to Steve Reich's rehearsals or Joan Jonas' performances, they were working. [They laugh.] And my first boyfriend in New York was very committed and fierce. His name was John Duff, the sculptor. And I got a tremendous amount of information from him [inaudible] and Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse. John's work is of that nature. And I was working, so that was a brand new—I think nothing felt that right. 

[00:47:09.33]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But that kind of work going on. 

[00:47:10.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and Richard was doing his lead pieces and [Robert] Morris was doing his felt pieces, and Smithson, and all of these people were doing work was completely mind-boggling and eye-opening. 

[END OF TRACK AAA_rothen87_6512_m]

[00:00:03.07]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I think so. It's good. And—[Cross talk.] Yeah, well, if things occur to either of us, we'll just go back to them and stuff. 

[00:00:19.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. So all of that, all of this—you know, this was nothing that—I learned about Rauschenberg, and Johns, and Oldenburg and everybody in school. That, I was familiar with. 

[00:00:29.97]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Did you read the magazines and all that stuff, too? 

[00:00:34.02]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. Yes, at Cornell. I did. I did. Irregularly, but yes, I did. But this other work—process art, anti-illusionist art—all of these were brand-new. I mean, Mary Heilmann's loft, because she was an artist, and as I said, I slept on the floor because she needed to move out at the time, and I wished to move in. So she let me sleep there, and I helped her move, actually. And she was doing work that I loved. And what it consisted of was little skinny cigars of clay in a little piece of dirty string, kind of slung up in a little row on the walls, and little pieces of cotton batting and silver. Kind of like air, clouds, pieces of earth. 

[00:01:22.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:01:23.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I went out and got some clay and started trying to copy her. 

[00:01:26.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah? [They laugh.]

[00:01:28.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  For about a month. Clay, and straw, and mud. Because I realized art could be that, like a bird's nest, or—you know, it could be anything. 

[00:01:36.19]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:01:36.97]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And that was very exciting. Very exciting time. And John was making sculptures, just tying, sewing together, and fiber ties and then stretched [cross talk] and beautiful fibers. 

[00:01:47.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  [Inaudible]

[00:01:48.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Sewn together, and then stretching them out so they made these incredible fans, but always following logic, or a thought, or something. Yeah, it was just so rich and so personal and so eccentric, what everybody was doing. 

[00:02:05.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. And they weren't—I guess they weren't all necessarily showing at that point, were they? 

[00:02:10.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No. No. Lots of them weren't. I guess one of the first galleries was when Holly Solomon had 98 Greene Street. And then there was the Green Gallery that Paula Cooper used to be, and Dick Bellamy. 

[00:02:24.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:02:24.52]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And there was Goldowsky, where you could see [inaudible] and a couple—I can't remember who else was there. And there was 112 Greene Street. And that became the base for this crowd I was with— painters. By the time 112 Greene Street was in real focus and flows, all sculptors and performance artists were there.  

[00:02:48.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And they were all doing work that was quite different from one another, it sounds like. 

[00:02:54.87]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:02:58.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did people talk about stuff as much as earlier generations? I think [inaudible] or at least [inaudible].

[00:03:07.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No. No. This was not an intellectual [crowd –Ed.] I'm sure Smithson did. And Serra. Richard Serra and Smithson did. It's almost personality to personality, whether it got talked about. 

[00:03:17.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:03:18.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I'm sure Mel Bochner would get in with measuring [inaudible]. Gordon talked endlessly, but you could never really understand what he was saying. But his mind and his—I mean, he's a very strange, weirdly psychically interesting guy. But it was almost a stream of consciousness, and it was usually about art. My ex-husband, [George] Trakas, was very personal. Most of his talk went into notebooks—his notebooks, his connections, his thoughts. It wasn't conversation kind of stuff. 

[00:03:51.65]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean, he would write down his thoughts or something? 

[00:03:54.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. He wasn't a sculpture talker. 

[00:03:58.38]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:03:58.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He was a maker, and thinker, and doer. At Performances, the dancers wouldn’t talk. 

[00:04:05.21]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And where does [cross talk]—

[00:04:08.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He was a talker—Steve Reich. I'm trying to remember. But everybody was very interested in everybody else's stuff. That was great. I think the young people now [inaudible] too. I'm not very much—

[00:04:20.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I think [inaudible] makes a lot of visits and stuff. 

[00:04:23.68]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But in my peer group, nobody talks. Except—

[00:04:27.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean now? 

[00:04:28.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Oh, it's horrible. [Inaudible] one person, I think, one or two people who got out. Something happens. 

[00:04:35.94]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean once things start happening for you, [inaudible]? 

[00:04:39.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. It happens to everybody. 

[00:04:41.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I think so. 

[00:04:43.51]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's just some isolating thing that happens. 

[00:04:46.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting. Well, it'd be interesting to talk about that some more. Where did you sort of see yourself in that group, at the time? I mean, like, did you feel like you had stuff to say, or were you sort of, you know, wide-eyed and kind of taking everything in?

[00:05:07.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. I was the ingenue.

[00:05:09.37]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:05:15.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Once again. [They laugh.] Second time. Third time. I don't know. As often as I could get away with it. [They laugh.] It's kind of hard now. Lately, the last ten years, I used to call it my Little Orphan Annie. Yeah. I'm good at it. It is part of me now. No, I was soaking it up. I was sitting, wide-eyed, everywhere. 

[00:05:38.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:05:38.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  With the dance performances, with the rehearsals, with the lead pourings, the exhibitions. 

[00:05:46.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Was there also—I mean, the other side of it must be that you're also looking at some things, and sometimes and think this idea is full of whatever. I mean, wasn't there that, too? I mean, I know that goes on now with the younger artists looking at each other's stuff. I mean, some of it's very exciting, and you approve of it. Other stuff, you know, you can be also equally critical of things going on around you. 

[00:06:10.82]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. At that point, my critical faculty was nonexistent. I approved of everything I saw. [They laugh.] I thought it was all just great. And it was very supportive. I mean, everybody was incredibly supportive of everybody else's work. 

[00:06:26.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Interesting. So SoHo was, at that point, becoming—I mean, that's where the stuff was already pretty well-centered—

[00:06:32.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:06:33.04]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —as far as the place to show work, and be, and live, and stuff like that. 

[00:06:37.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah. I mean, it was amazing to me. The first time I was in SoHo, I went to Alan Smith's loft, which was on Spring and Greene, I think. And I couldn't believe anybody lived in these metal warehouses. 

[00:06:49.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Right. 

[00:06:50.57]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I mean, it was shocking. And then you open this door, and there's this cavernous space. And Alan had a nine-by-nine-foot pit in the middle of his floor that went down to the basement that was always open. So it was this huge well, cavern. It was just absolutely astonishing to me. 

[00:07:10.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:07:10.87]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I loved it. 

[00:07:16.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you get involved with some of the performance stuff? 

[00:07:19.47]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Very much so. Actually, I just ran into Debra Hay last night, for the first time in at least ten years. 

[00:07:27.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:07:28.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And she was the first one I took dance classes with, the movement classes. They were almost like meditation and movement classes, anyway. And they were wonderful. Very, very spiritual, in a funny way, but with great rock music. 

[00:07:43.16]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh. 

[00:07:43.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And lots of the artists did it, just because it was so much fun to be there. 

[00:07:48.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:07:48.75]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And her spirit was so lovely. And then I got to know Joan Jonas, and I performed with her for about a year and a half or two years in many, many pieces. 

[00:07:59.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah? 

[00:08:00.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:08:00.57]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did those involve art things, too? I mean, one of the things I know of her is she was involved in paintings and stuff like that. 

[00:08:08.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  We did things like get naked under glass, and people rolled potatoes over us in Alan's loft with mirrors reflecting us. 

[00:08:15.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Huh. 

[00:08:15.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And then we did a piece where we put a piece of plate glass between our bodies, naked, and rolled, where at any moment, it could have broken and cut us. [They laugh.] Joan always has an interesting edge to her work based on fear, danger, humiliation. [They laugh.]

[00:08:31.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. So she was based in New York then? Because—

[00:08:36.39]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:08:36.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is she in California now, or—

[00:08:38.68]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  She's all over. I just saw a piece of hers two nights ago, at the Performing Garage. She travels a lot, wherever she can get financing and an audience.

[00:08:50.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:08:50.68]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But she always spends a lot of time—

[00:08:53.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But you were kind of—you were part of an actual group—or not group, but you were concentrated as a—

[00:09:03.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  She just gathered together anybody who could kind of get into what she was doing. And, you know, she always needed people around her to execute and perform and help. You know, we collaborated. I just did what she told me. And then my ego got too large, and I stopped. I realized that I would never be a part of choreographing or thinking out these pieces, and I got tired of carrying these props on, and being—you know, essentially, in a Joan Jonas piece, you are a prop. The people are props. 

[00:09:33.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:09:34.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I knew I wasn't going to be a dancer, although I loved it. I wasn't [inaudible]. So I just started intensifying my own painting by that time. When I started in New York, I was working with screens and pieces of metal and the straw, the clay. I was trying to make this kind of process art. 

[00:09:59.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you were making actual sort of objects, though? 

[00:10:02.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah. Out of hanging pieces of plastic, and taking holes out of them and gluing the holes next to where I tore them out, and then sandwiching polyethylene and screen. All this funky work that I was finding around me was very appealing to me. 

[00:10:17.26]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So both natural materials and things, and also—

[00:10:22.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Plaster. Because then, I wanted to do—I wanted to hang it in the middle of the room so you could see through it and walk around it. Paintings as objects. Anything but a stretched canvas. Anything. 

[00:10:35.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Which nobody was doing much with it. 

[00:10:38.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Only Neil Jenney. 

[00:10:39.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:10:40.05]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And the only ones I'd seen of his were those ones at the Whitney that had a bowl of dog food in front of them. You ever see those palm tree paintings that he exhibited with newspaper on the floor and a bowl of dog food? 

[00:10:50.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, you mean real newspaper and real—

[00:10:52.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Uh-huh [affirmative].

[00:10:52.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  No, I never saw those. 

[00:10:54.08]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That was Neil's show. Oh, it was wonderful. 

[00:10:55.22]

NADELMAN:  You mean before New Image, he had something there? 

[00:10:59.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah. think it was called the "Anti-Illusionists." John Duff was in it. Joel Shapiro was in it. Neil was in it. And Joel Fisher was in it. 

[00:11:07.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Here? 

[00:11:09.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, that was probably, oh, 1970, or '71, or '72. 

[00:11:17.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:11:18.20]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:11:18.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Huh, okay. 

[00:11:19.20]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I might even have the catalog. Shall I look? Not now. 

[00:11:25.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, maybe later. [Laughs.] I won't [inaudible]. 

[00:11:29.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, and the other painter I knew of then was Susan Hall. 

[00:11:33.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Uh-huh [affirmative], right. 

[00:11:33.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  —who was doing these kind of strange California figurative, a very interesting woman. 

[00:11:38.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, hmm. 

[00:11:41.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I was just meeting Elizabeth Murray through the old Drawing Center. 

[00:11:47.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And was she—she would have been doing some other kind of work at that time.

[00:11:49.70]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, but I didn’t know her paintings until much, much later. But I saw some drawings. But I didn't know what she was doing with [inaudible] because my friends—none of my friends were painters. 

[00:11:59.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:12:00.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Except Mary Heilmann started painting shortly after. She stopped doing the clay pieces. 

[00:12:07.57]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. She paints now, right? 

[00:12:09.50]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:12:09.64]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I don’t know the work very well. So the Neil Jenney things were pretty much some of the ones that you took seriously, at least as painting. 

[00:12:21.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, you couldn't take them seriously. They were so funny. 

[00:12:25.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, they were—but—

[00:12:26.52]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  They were another—to me, everything I saw was like, you mean you're allowed to do this? You can do this? 

[00:12:34.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:12:34.78]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was like, this is allowed in art? [Laughs.] It's like, wow! [Laughs.]

[00:12:41.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, so as you were—when you were doing the work, the things that would stand in the middle of the room and [inaudible] with plastic [inaudible] things, was that work that you thought was resolved? And, you know, did you want to show it or—

[00:12:56.12]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, anybody that came to—my house and my studio were all one room. So anybody who came through saw it. And I don't remember much commentary. But Duff was encouraging. 

[00:13:08.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And were you still involved with him at that time? 

[00:13:10.55]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  For about a year. I met George in 1970. So John was probably in '69 and part of '70. Then George I married in '71, yeah. 

[00:13:29.06]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And what kind of sculpture was he doing at that point? 

[00:13:34.34]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  George was doing site work, site pieces in the studio as well. But they involve glass, stone, rock, sand. Always kind of geologically informed, and all the elements and materials were unlike anything I'd seen. And I really didn't know what to make of his sculpture, except it was beautiful. He was making his own mirrors. He was almost like a scientist with it. 

[00:13:59.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And he was very disciplined about working—

[00:14:01.52]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Very. He was a carpenter all day, and sculpture all evening. 

[00:14:05.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Hmm, right. 

[00:14:06.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Absolute workaholic; still is. 

[00:14:09.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. Do you think that, of the group—I mean, it was pretty well divided among men and women, right? I mean, there weren't—there wasn't sort of—

[00:14:22.11]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  The men were the—no, the women were the dancers and the performance artists. And the men were the artists. 

[00:14:27.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Do you think they had more discipline sort of instilled in them as far as, like, just getting down to work and producing and things and stuff like that? 

[00:14:34.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, of course. And the women were—year by year, you can almost see that they got more conviction and independence and self-image. 

[00:14:46.09]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:14:46.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But, I mean, never this is never an issue that pops into my mind to decipher what's going on in terms of, you know—

[00:14:59.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:15:00.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I've had trouble with feminists and stuff because I'm so—again, I'm so lacking in political conscience—

[00:15:06.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well—

[00:15:06.84]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Consciousness, I should say. But I wasn't even aware—I mean, women were all—Trisha Brown, Debra Hay, Joan Jonas, Tina Girouard, Barbara Dillinger, Yvonne—they were all working. Hardly any of them were painting or sculpting. And I guess, now we've seen that they were doing more theatrical, more feminine-oriented kind of production. 

[00:15:33.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But I guess some of the men were involved in stuff like that, too. 

[00:15:37.66]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, but I just happened to run into a whole pile of sculptors in 112 Greene Street's inception with Jeffrey Greene, Bob Grosvenor, Richard Nonas, George Trakas, Gordon Matta, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Keith Sonnier. 

[00:15:55.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So—and they were all 112 Greene?

[00:15:58.47]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  All did show after show after show, and then the women would always perform within these spaces or take over the spaces for an evening or an installation. But all of these heavy shows, these powerful shows, were maybe Nancy Holt or Jackie Winsor did something. Susie Harris later became a sculptor. 

[00:16:19.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Were there other galleries you'd go to expecting to see something different? Like Paula Cooper was starting to show things at that point—

[00:16:29.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't remember Paula then. 

[00:16:30.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Maybe she wasn't. 

[00:16:32.35]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, she's always been in business. No, not so much, no, I think it was very narrow focused, this gallery. I think people used to go to Dwan's, and Castelli, always because, you know, you're always going to look at Rauschenberg, Johns, Kelly, Lichtenstein, all those guys. 

[00:16:50.54]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, was someone like Judd showing there already? I guess he would have. 

[00:16:53.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative], sure, Don Judd was nearer to our generation [inaudible] than the pop artists. And who else—well, Morris, of course. 

[00:17:01.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:17:02.23]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And who else goes with Judd [inaudible]? 

[00:17:05.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, and then Andre of course—

[00:17:07.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Carl Andre. So I mean, I didn't know him [inaudible]. And Serra was—he was part of this—

[00:17:16.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  He was part of your—

[00:17:17.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, he and Smithson, yeah. 

[00:17:20.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, maybe one of the reasons—another thing about it, you never had to go through some kind of—this thing about you're not being too involved or consciously feminist—

[00:17:33.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't experience it. 

[00:17:34.55]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I mean, it seems like it was always, you did what you did. And it wasn't something you had to really overcome or an inability to—

[00:17:40.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I frankly, wasn't even aware of it. 

[00:17:42.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:17:43.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I mean, that it was hard to do something as a woman. 

[00:17:45.64]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:17:46.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was very aware of being the only painter in this whole group. 

[00:17:49.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, when—how did that first sort of start to happen? 

[00:17:53.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, the paintings, the paintings evolved from ripping up the metal to realizing it wasn't quite satisfying. And I gradually worked my way to canvas. I can't recall how I did that. I was, all right, I'll use canvas. But I won't stretch it. I'll rip it, and I'll weave it. And I'll make the surface into something other. So we'll still be painting this object. And it won't be old fashioned, conventional, and stupid. An illusionist was the dirty word. 

[00:18:20.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, might not even involve paint, right? 

[00:18:23.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, but it did. Quickly, I mean, it quickly did. And the first paintings were taking a piece of canvas, sticking it on the wall, and painting a thick band of gold, say, across it. And paint that over and over and over and over. So it was like the bare canvas got all wrinkled. The canvas tightened up where you'd been painting. That was my painting. But it was just a very abstract band of gold paint. 

[00:18:50.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Like vertical, or could it be either way? 

[00:18:52.46]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I think I only did one of those. And then I did one of a band of clay. And that didn't go anywhere. And I started doing these patterned paintings with squares within squares, which was kind of a rip-off of the Alan Saret painting that I remembered from Cornell. But I drew a line down the middle, so that I could make the patterns off. So I just drew a pencil line. And I suddenly saw a pencil line was better than a rip because it did the visual break. But then you still had a whole piece of cloth. 

[00:19:23.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. You mean the rip—

[00:19:24.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I used to rip things and then weave them in, then paint them. 

[00:19:29.25]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay, right. I see.

[00:19:30.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  At some point, I drew a line down the middle of this painting, so I could get the squares off square from the left side to the right. And I realized that pencil line functioned visually just the same as the rip did. But it wasn't physical. And it didn't make real space. It just made this kind of thin space that was kind of allowed, like Robert Ryman's paintings. 

[00:19:50.06]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:19:50.57]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Just touch the space on top. And then, we did those squares in different colors, eight paintings. 

[00:20:00.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, I mean, the squares would be—then you would sort of draw the squares off center?

[00:20:03.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, then I paint a gray square and put a green middle in it on one side and a green square with the gray middle on the other side. And make them not mesh properly with that central. And somebody said, why don't you stretch those? So I stretched them. And they were as boring as they sound. 

[00:20:21.31]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Stretched them after you had painted them?

[00:20:23.71]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't even remember. But those were the first paintings that were stretched. 

[00:20:29.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Was there a kind of hard-edged squareness? 

[00:20:32.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Soft edge, but like handmade wallpaper stuff, you know, just a pattern, very uninteresting. 

[00:20:43.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  [Inaudible], right?

[00:20:44.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I don't remember, somewhere in there, the baby got born. And I know the horses didn't come 'til after she was around. And they did come from a doodle. 

[00:21:00.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They did? 

[00:21:00.97]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I mean, I just drew—

[00:21:02.66]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  For her? I mean, sort of like a thing you do for a child?

[00:21:05.71]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I love my center line. Anything I did to get a central, I could do it right away. And then I would conceive the paintings as two flat halves. 

[00:21:13.49]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Had you done anything else representational with the central line before? 

[00:21:20.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Not with the center line, but, you know, the two paintings that I did in Washington, one of them was trying to paint a hundred red and blue rubber balls thrown up in the air. 

[00:21:29.10]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:21:29.85]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Uh-huh [affirmative]. Yeah, just trying to make a big blue surface with balls in the air. And the other painting was of a stork, a screen door, kind of my comment on suburbia, a pink stork, whatever they put in the lawn. 

[00:21:44.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, right, yeah. 

[00:21:46.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And a green and white screen door, and then one of those filters from an air conditioner for a cloud, just a square piece of—

[00:21:54.63]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Like a real one? 

[00:21:55.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I think that's all I accomplished in that year in Washington. [Laughs.]

[00:22:03.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But there was a real sort of pattern going on there. 

[00:22:05.63]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, and I realized that I was not an abstract artist. By the time I'd finished eight of these stupid square paintings, I realized that those were all Saret's paintings. And he didn't even like them. And why was I doing them? 

[00:22:15.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. I mean, that's why you bring up Washington, because then you sort of realize that that's what you had been doing in Washington? 

[00:22:21.67]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And then I needed an image. Also, I worked for Nancy Graves for a while as a camel bone-builder. And I'll never know how much that influenced—I mean, I know the horse came up after working for her. But I don't know—actually, I'd have to trace the years. I think it did. Yes, I know it did. That was my first year in New York, though, with Nancy. 

[00:22:45.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And so you mean you helped build—

[00:22:47.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Construct the camel bones, not when she was doing the real realistic camels, by the time she was doing, like, "Twenty-four Legs." I worked on that piece. 

[00:22:55.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. 

[00:22:56.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  With marble dust and wax and stuff. She had about ten of us working for her. 

[00:23:00.61]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is that what those bones are made of? 

[00:23:01.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, marble dust and wax and, you know, armature. 

[00:23:07.24]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:23:07.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But yeah, we had piles of wax all over her kitchen, melting and melting on her bed, and pots of it. I remember, the fridge was full of beer and organ meat. That's all she ate.

[00:23:21.64]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What? [Laughs.]

[00:23:22.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Organ meat—liver, heart, kidney. She was working so much that she just ate protein and drank beer. 

[00:23:29.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That was like, not by preference, but by some design or—

[00:23:34.12]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I think she was—

[00:23:35.31]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Vitamin food? 

[00:23:35.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  She was proteining herself. 

[00:23:37.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:23:38.71]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:23:39.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Was that fun? I mean, did you or—

[00:23:41.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Wonderful time, absolutely great. [Telephone rings.]

[00:23:44.71]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Can we put this off for a second? I wonder if any of these calls are for my daughter. 

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

Okay, we were talking about the Nancy—the bones, I think. 

[00:23:53.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah, well, yes, I mean, that was another thing. Is this allowed, to make the camels? All of this is so— 

[00:23:59.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. Well, I was thinking about as far as bones go and stuff like that, that the connection—there's a connection with her. But then I was sort of among—you mentioned—one of the few things mentioned your brother did was skeletons. 

[00:24:15.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, he did do that. That was the thing that made the family the proudest of him. And he stuck to it, because he was fickle with his hobbies. 

[00:24:23.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? So there could be something more sort of—

[00:24:29.00]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I haven't thought about it. I mean, I have a very formalized rationale about the bones. 

[00:24:32.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You do? 

[00:24:33.41]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I mean, well, that the—all the geometry of lines in the early paintings became, again, tiresome and abstract, and yet, what do I know about an abstract painter? And also, there's not that many variations. 

[00:24:51.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  In bones? 

[00:24:52.61]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, no. In lines. When I got to the horse, I drew a line down the center. Then I drew a thick line down the center. Then I drew an X across the canvas. Then I drew an X across the canvas and two horizontal measurements. You know, I did whatever I could with literal geometry. And then, it became a painting where I used a bone for the geometry. And to me, it's about hard and soft. 

[00:25:16.43]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:25:17.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Lacks you know, soft contours and a fleshly image, but still needing a snap to it. 

[00:25:23.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:25:23.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Every painting needing a tension point. And the bone became an organic, stupidly organic geometry. And it also took something from the inside of that image and put it out, like an exoskeleton. And it's just something—

[00:25:40.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, it's responsible—I mean, the bone is responsible for the form of the animal anyway. 

[00:25:45.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:25:45.73]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So it's sort of—in a way, it it's like—I don't know if you were thinking this at all, but do you think of it as being sort of a way of making the content a little more, you know—prominent? 

[00:25:59.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Definitely. Drawing a line around or under or through or over or across the horse became redundant. And yet I still needed what a line did. And I thought, why not take this hard thing that's in the horse, and pull it out of it, and make it perform a different function for me. But it's integral to the image. 

[00:26:24.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:26:25.23]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That's as far as I was able to think of it. 

[00:26:28.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, and then it added a whole—it adds a whole other level or layer. 

[00:26:35.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, the—the operation, now it was performing an operation on this image of the horse. Yeah, kind of formalist operation, an anti-illusionist operation, keeping it flat and all this stuff. To be able to, well, to just work through that to the point where I didn't want to figure out another configuration. I'm sorry. I lost—I was going to come at this from another angle that I lost of what [inaudible]. Maybe it'll come back. 

[00:27:15.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Let's just backtrack for just a tiny bit, back to about the horses. So you didn't do one of those until, what, Maggie was born? That's [inaudible]. 

[00:27:29.51]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, she was born in '72. I think the earliest one is '73, '74, but mostly '74. I can't remember what I was working on the first year she was born. But I know I was changing. I had been mixing clay with oil and working with various oil-based kind of pigments. And I changed to acrylics when she was born, and tempera, actually tempera mixed with a matte medium, [inaudible] medium, so that my hands would be free to clean quickly when I picked her up to breastfeed or whatever. 

[00:28:08.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, that's interesting. 

[00:28:10.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So but, I don't remember exactly what I was making just prior to the horses. I know there was a lapse of nonwork. And then as soon as I was able to—

[00:28:25.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You didn't spend too much time not working, though, it sounds like. 

[00:28:28.35]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I don't think so. Although it's a little unclear. But while we were living at George's studio, and then we moved over—we moved the domestic situation to my studio. We always had separate places. But then, we had to keep putting coal in the fireplace. When the baby was born, it was too hard. It wasn't heated properly there. And I had a heater. So we moved our home to my place. 

[00:28:50.57]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:28:51.05]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I began working there as soon as I could. But I don't remember what I first did. I don't remember exactly. I mean, I have the first horse doodle right here. 

[00:29:03.56]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You do? 

[00:29:04.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:29:04.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Like on a piece of paper or—

[00:29:06.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, a real canvas. [Cross talk.] Yeah, I wonder if I dated it. That would tell me whether it was '73 or—

[00:29:15.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is that the one—it wasn't in the living room when I walked in? 

[00:29:18.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, that's an early one that never got shown. 

[00:29:20.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I—[Cross talk]. 

[00:29:23.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, no, this one's a little one-foot canvas that started to kick the whole thing off. 

[00:29:30.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And was it—

[00:29:31.31]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That's my doodle. 

[00:29:32.31]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right, and was it an entire horse in profile? 

[00:29:36.41]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. I'll show it to you. 

[00:29:37.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay, good. [Cross talk.] And that one, that one had a line right down the middle? 

[00:29:44.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And it also had Frank Stella's corners. 

[00:29:48.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, that's interesting. Well, I was going to ask you about Frank Stella when you were talking about the off-center squares, too, and stuff. Were you—was he—were you looking at his work much, or—

[00:29:59.75]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was. I wasn't responding a whole lot. I like them much better now than I did when [inaudible].

[00:30:05.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What was he doing around then? I mean, do you remember specifically? 

[00:30:08.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  With the black pinstripes, copper pinstripes. Yeah, I just like that given this minimalist mode of dealing with painting on canvas, how well he took care of his corners. 

[00:30:20.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. 

[00:30:22.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He worked out—he didn't neglect his corners. Corners are always a giant problem. 

[00:30:28.12]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's true. And so, you were thinking about that earlier. 

[00:30:30.94]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So I, again, went back to unstretched canvas. But I whited out the corners and made a white thin band around the corner on unstretched canvas. But that didn't continue. It became—I realized that it was contrivance—in my case, not in his. 

[00:30:51.73]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Were you at that point also limiting your palette to—I mean, did you start out with sort of—

[00:30:57.04]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I thought—I mean, it took me to a couple of years ago to really deal with color at all. And I was afraid of black and white. I thought black and white really meant it was cold. So I found sienna and black almost as a—sienna and white mixed together became a flesh tone. So I thought I would paint them flesh and dark. 

[00:31:17.61]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. 

[00:31:19.23]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Just started to match my need for some kind of sensuality with my—you know, I've always needed some sensuality with materials. And the clay, I want—I guess, it was something like a clay color. 

[00:31:30.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, right. Where you had actually been painting—the thing you'd been mixing before, you said clay and oil mixed? 

[00:31:37.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I was just trying to work with natural, you know, back to earth. 

[00:31:41.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. Well, you'd bring in more colors. I mean, you did the horses in quite a few, at least, variations on colors.

[00:31:50.00]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I found a range of mix from hot sienna to very kind of pale almost like pale pink. 

[00:31:55.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, and did you sort of work on them—did it kind of progress slowly? I mean, you'd work on one color, and then another color would be just slightly different or something? 

[00:32:06.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was almost an accident. It depended on how my arm moved when I poured the sienna and the white together. 

[00:32:11.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Huh. Right. 

[00:32:12.58]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And then you'd want to differentiate an edge or get a little texture, so you dip your brush. Sometimes I have two mixes, a white one and a dark one. And then, I learned a dirty brush technique, you know, how great it looks when you've got black on your sienna brush by accident. 

[00:32:27.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. [They laugh.]

[00:32:30.04]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Use that to the max. 

[00:32:32.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, right, and the blacks—the black would be used either for the line or for the outlines. 

[00:32:39.83]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, the dirty brush thing is something that I can't even shake. [Telephone rings.] Should I [inaudible]?

[00:32:47.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  If you want. 

[00:32:48.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I do. It's time to [inaudible].

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:32:50.89]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You were saying something about the leaving—getting black left on your brush, which you sort of—

[00:32:55.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yes. I realized that when you paint white paint on raw canvas, it's really boring. It's like nothing. Robert Ryman does it wonderfully. I don't. But if you get, like, black, and then it dries, and then you paint white over it, and you paint it thicker in places and thinner in places, or you draw on the bare—you're bold enough to draw black paint on your bare canvas, and then you cover it up, and then some of that black line reads through, and then you make another line next to it, and then paint that out too, because it's wrong, suddenly, you're getting echoes. 

[00:33:26.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, in your surface traces.

[00:33:27.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So all of my knowledge of white paint is about what's under it. I mean, all my response—what am I trying to say? White paint exists because of what it's on top of, or what's underneath it, or what's hiding or partially hiding. 

[00:33:46.09]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, that's—

[00:33:46.99]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It has to be resonant for me. 

[00:33:49.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What are your paintings usually backed up by, you know, what's in the back? 

[00:33:55.90]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It used to be gesso, just gesso. And now it's usually matte medium, like matte medium without the gesso, which is basically just an acrylic seal. 

[00:34:06.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, and the canvas itself is a sort of—

[00:34:10.57]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's duck. 

[00:34:14.98]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Nothing special? 

[00:34:16.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No. I'd like to try linen sometime. It still seems a little precious to me. 

[00:34:21.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Huh. Well, as long as you're talking about that white stroke and stuff and the backgrounds, which I guess that's what that refers to largely—

[00:34:35.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, not really, because it was always important that the background and the image, or the image and the ground have the same weight. If I painted hard on the horse, I went over to the ground three or four times to bring it up in density and strength to what the image was. 

[00:34:54.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:34:54.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't want the background to fall back. 

[00:35:01.98]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Huh. [Telephone rings.] You needed to have a sense of what's happening. 

[00:35:04.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:35:05.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, a lot of your later paintings at least had a lot of white in the background. I mean, the thing that's interesting about them, I think—well, one thing anyway, is that there's a sense of quantity and sort of vastness of just—you can read the strokes so well. You can sort of see that—I mean, it's sort of to—so that it makes you say, sort of ask, well, what is this? What is paint doing on a big canvas—like the "Ten Men" kind of, that series and stuff. 

[00:35:34.93]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:35:38.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It seems—well, anyway, maybe I can get off on a tangent sort of. But I was just wondering about—that what you do with the part where the image isn't—the ground—

[00:35:54.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, the ground. 

[00:35:55.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did—I mean, it's usually, you never try to sort of flatten it or make it not seem as if there were strokes going on there? 

[00:36:05.45]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Right, no, yeah. It gets more attention than the image. 

[00:36:10.21]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. Was that happening, pretty much—maybe not quite so much early on? 

[00:36:18.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You mean with the early horses? 

[00:36:21.12]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  With the early horses, yeah, horses. 

[00:36:22.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah there's always a sense of all-overness, and that all of it needed the same attention. I don't like that background to be there, just be. I mean—

[00:36:36.90]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:36:37.68]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's a dilemma. I've tried to call it "weather" in recent years, and "times of day." And I tried to invest it with some presence. 

[00:36:51.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, maybe it's that thinking about it that you do, that—

[00:36:54.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:36:54.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —is what shows up, you know. 

[00:36:56.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I touch it a lot. And then, I use small brushes so that everything, especially with oil paint, looks incremental. 

[00:37:02.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. 

[00:37:03.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  We paint basically with paint right out of the tube. I don't mix it with anything, probably stupid. I've tried to change that habit, and I can't. I can't. 

[00:37:14.12]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, do you sort of mix colors—

[00:37:18.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  On the brush or on the canvas? 

[00:37:21.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Wait, are you asking me? [They laugh.] Either one or the other. 

[00:37:25.72]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, basically, if I want to get some gray and get some red in, I take two tubes, squeeze them on the brush. Most of the time, it falls off on the floor. [Laughs.] Scoop it off the floor, by which time it's somewhat blended, and then brush it out. And it gets all together. 

[00:37:42.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, yeah. And you sort of—well, what's the acrylic? Actually, the reason, I guess, what I'm talking about is sort of the change—it was before, you were dealing with oil paint. That's why it seems flatter. 

[00:37:56.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  All the horses and up to the "Five Heads" are acrylic. 

[00:38:00.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, okay. 

[00:38:01.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And after that was some boat paintings. 

[00:38:05.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:38:06.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And swan paintings and "Ten Men." A whole bunch [inaudible]—and it's been oil ever since, except I just went out and bought some Flashe—some water-based paints. 

[00:38:18.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. You can mix that with—you can use that—

[00:38:20.82]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, you can't. You absolutely have to be underpainting. It's water and oil. 

[00:38:27.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:38:27.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You can't use them. You can use Flashe or a water-based paint under oil, but not over. 

[00:38:33.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But not the same. Okay. So when you started to do the horses, did you sort of know you were on to something?

[00:38:43.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, because I couldn't—each one had this nice, quiet, dense, warm presence. And each one didn't quite—each one bespoke another one. And I would just draw them on the backs of envelopes in ballpoint pen, and go. 

[00:39:04.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:39:05.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You finish about four, and then over to stretchers. At that time I built my own stretchers. 

[00:39:09.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Finish about four, and were they happening pretty quickly—

[00:39:13.82]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Because I only had one good long one wall, and one not so good wall in that studio.

[00:39:23.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And at first, they were mostly in that lengthwise profile? 

[00:39:27.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, almost all for the first. Up 'til '78 or so. 

[00:39:34.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, the different—first they'd be standing. And then they'd be running or doing something.

[00:39:39.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, they were all the side profile. And then some were running. Some were mostly standing still. Some were doubled. 

[00:39:44.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:39:44.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So they were all divided differently. A couple were red. And each painting had to have a new geometry. Or if it was an X in one painting, it was a pencil X in the next painting, it was an inch wide X, and in the next painting it was a four-inch-wide X. 

[00:40:02.92]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Huh. 

[00:40:03.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You know, so it still had to change, so there'd be no repetitions. 

[00:40:07.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you draw those beforehand? 

[00:40:09.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, just scribble. Hardly ever in real charcoal, just a diagram. 

[00:40:16.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:40:18.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Because everything else felt right—the black and the sienna and the pencil and the—

[00:40:22.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, and doing the horse sort of without too much pre-consultation was probably very much what it was about. 

[00:40:30.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, just dividing it. 

[00:40:37.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Uh-huh [affirmative.] And you do things like leave out the tail and stuff like that because—

[00:40:40.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It never was a tail on any one. I only wanted the body. I didn't want any, you know, features—hair and stuff. Just the form. 

[00:40:54.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. And did they start—when was the first time you showed one? Like, in a group show or something at 112 Greene? 

[00:41:00.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I think we showed—there's some confusion. At some point, I sent some paintings to Toronto, to the Gerald Stable Gallery. I don't remember whether—I think it was after 112 Greene. But I'm not positive. And at some point, there were a few of them on paper the Holly Solomon bought. And I know whether she showed them or not. She bought the first horse painting. 

[00:41:24.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:41:25.57]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and that was kind of important. 

[00:41:28.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:41:28.39]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  First show was Jeffrey Lew. I was in a New Talent show in '74. And there was some horse paintings there. Holly Solomon bought a painting on the recommendation of John Duff; had a party for me and several other people at her house. A lot of the art world was there. And it was also the kind of, you know, the hanging of the hanging in her house, plus some other things. Jeffrey saw the painting there, and then and there asked me to have a show at 112, which I was tremendously excited and flattered about, because it was sculptors situation anyway. 

[00:42:04.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:42:04.72]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I thought everybody thought I was George's wife and Maggie's mother. 

[00:42:08.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:42:09.66]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Not really an artist at all. So I was thrilled—

[00:42:13.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  [Inaudible] different. [Laughs.]

[00:42:15.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So I realized that the horses that I had were all five by seven, six by eight, something like that. And they would look like postage stamps in 112. It was a cavernous space.

[00:42:24.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Wow. 

[00:42:25.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So I spent the summer doing three paintings—a 10 by 24, a 10 by 15, and a 10 by 10— three paintings. That was my show. 

[00:42:35.28]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Those must have been the biggest, biggest of the horse painting. 

[00:42:38.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I still have the 10 by 10. And part of it was the Saatchi collection. One is at Ed Broida. 

[00:42:46.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  At where? 

[00:42:47.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Ed Broida. I forget who bought it. Broida bought it, and Saatchi bought one. So that was the first show. And just before I had that show as well, Miani Johnson from the Willard—came down with John Duff to see my studio and offered me a show instantly. She liked those. 

[00:43:12.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So that was—and that was about 1974? 

[00:43:15.90]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Jeffrey's show was, I think, in the fall of 1974. And Miani's show was in the spring of 1975. That's the way they fall.

[00:43:29.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Uh-huh [affirmative]. Right. And [Marian Willard –Ed.] still had that—they had that small gallery on 72nd? Is that right? 

[00:43:32.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  They had it up until—

[00:43:34.02]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's the one, I mean, that's the one they had then, too. 

[00:43:36.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it was a little smaller because she renovated a few years ago, made it a little bit larger. But yeah, that was my second one person show. So it's the New Talent show, then the 112 Greene Street show, then the one-person show at Willard. 

[00:43:52.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. So you were still at that point, pretty much—and you started doing—you were painting. And nobody—not that many other people were painting either. So you must have been sort of standing out among people who you were friendly with and—

[00:44:15.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't remember getting very much feedback on that 112 Greene Street show from other artists, except that they thought it showed a lot of chutzpah. [Laughs.]

[00:44:25.19]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, right. 

[00:44:25.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  To do big paintings, and I think they were liked. I mean, I've heard more in the later years than I did at that time. But I wasn't expecting much. I didn't even know if they were any good. [Laughs.]

[00:44:42.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But you liked them? I mean, you like those presences and everything? 

[00:44:45.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and I loved being part of 112 Greene Street, you know, in an active, professional way. I liked it. 

[00:44:52.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:44:53.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:44:55.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And let's see, was Richard—I mean, first I came in contact with those paintings, I guess, was New Image painting show. 

[00:45:03.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:45:03.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That was pretty late, I guess. That was '79, I guess. And so it was Richard Marshall and/or other curators had been looking at the work? Had they been looking at it for a while, or—

[00:45:15.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Was that in '79? 

[00:45:17.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Maybe it was in '78. A lot of things were written about—

[00:45:20.47]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I can't remember. I don't remember how that happened. But it must have happened through Willard. 

[00:45:26.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Huh, I mean, I was wondering—It was sort of a revelatory show for me. And I was always sort of wondering whether he had been keeping an eye on things, or not necessarily—

[00:45:38.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't really remember. I remember being absolutely thrilled to be in it. But I didn't know what it all meant, either. 

[00:45:47.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You didn't? And so those people, the people in that show, weren't necessarily all friends with each other or anything like that at all? 

[00:45:54.31]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Uh-uh [negative.] David True, Denise Greene, Lois Lane, I knew. Neil [Jenney] I knew very slightly. He was a friend of John Duff's. [Inaudible]

[00:46:07.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, even some of those people, now, there's been a kind of dispersion, too. I think Jennifer Bartlett was in it. And—

[00:46:14.87]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, was she? 

[00:46:15.71]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, and Michael Hurson.

[00:46:18.84]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah? 

[00:46:19.41]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:46:20.87]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't remember those two. 

[00:46:22.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It's maybe [inaudible]. Nicolas Africano, I think. 

[00:46:29.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That's right. I remember. [Cross talk.] Yeah, but it went right over my head, kind of. 

[00:46:37.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:46:38.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:46:38.71]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, by that time, you were probably almost ready—you were almost on to the next thing, kind of, I guess. Is that what you mean? Or—

[00:46:46.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't know what it meant to be all of us put together, except that we used images. But we were all so different. None of us could—we were not a group. We were not a gang. We were not, most of us, friends. Stylistically, we were tremendously different. And yet, of course, it was a tremendous honor to be shown at the Whitney. But I mean, I remember my other—I remember—

[00:47:13.10]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Other shows meant more. 

[00:47:14.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I mean, not even shows. Selling a painting to the Museum of Modern Art just before my second show was and will always remain the pinnacle. 

[END OF TRACK AAA_rothen87_6513_m]

[00:00:09.55]

Okay, let's see. This is tape two, side one, Cynthia Nadelman interviewing Susan Rothenberg on June 2. I meant to play it back.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:00:20.83]

Okay, so we're talking about the piece, the painting selling to the Museum of Modern Art. Which one was that? And do you remember where it was first seen by someone, and how that came about? 

[00:00:37.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  William Rubin, the owner [inaudible], came to my studio. And as best as I can recall, it was just before my second show at Willard, which would probably mean 1976. And he—I remember he came, and I was used to showing people one painting at a time. And, you know, not that many people were in the studio. But I used to pull them out and put them and face—so people would basically look at one painting at a time. And I was just stunned that he came. I believe Barbara Rose had something to do with it. She had seen my work and directed him to it. 

[00:01:12.22]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  When had she seen it? 

[00:01:13.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That I don't know, whether it had been the first show or—I'm not quite sure about that, because I don't know her very well at all, just barely. But I think Miani Johnson told me that it was Barbara Rose who was instrumental. And perhaps—she bought a painting at some point. But I'm not that good on dates. But I was amazed and stunned and shocked that the director of the Museum of Modern Art was coming to my studio before my second show. But it did happen that way. 

[00:01:42.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Curator of Painting, I guess it was. 

[00:01:44.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Curator of Painting, right. Yeah, that's right, always mixed up my titles. And he came in. And he was kind of stern and quite amazing. And I was just—my mouth was wide open. And he wanted to see all the paintings at once. He made me—I had to pull out furniture, and tables, and my bed, and just put all these horse paintings all over the studio so he could—and he just revolved slowly, looked at one and one and one. And then he went into conference quietly with Maggie. And the studio was, you know, my home was my studio, my bed, my kitchen. It was all in one space. 

[00:02:20.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  He went to conference with Maggie? 

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He went into a conference with Miani. Did I say Maggie? 

[00:02:25.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You know, that was really—she was about three at the time. [They laugh.]

[00:02:31.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's cute. 

[00:02:32.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, it was Miani, the dealer. And then he left. And she told me he wanted, I believe, two, possibly three paintings sent up there, sent to the Modern, for their next acquisitions meeting. So we told each other not to be too excited. 

[00:02:51.54]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. So when he was there, did he say anything? Or was it sort of—

[00:02:55.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No. 

[00:02:56.34]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —a scary time, kind of? 

[00:02:57.49]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. He said very little. He thanked me. He was very cordial, but very silent. But of course, my memory could play—maybe he spoke a little bit or asked me some questions. But I was so agog. 

[00:03:11.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. And he had singled out the two or three that he wanted. 

[00:03:14.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, he pointed his cane at them. That I remember. 

[00:03:17.07]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:03:19.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's a very strong image I have, still. He pointed his cane at them when he was talking with Miani. And she told me afterwards what he'd said. It was not for my ears, exactly what he said. 

[00:03:33.73]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean specifically? 

[00:03:35.08]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  He didn't say to me, "I would like to have these paintings." And he went over to Miani and went into sort of a corner of the room. And I shuffled my feet. [They laugh.] Looked out the window. And then she told me after he'd left that that was what he'd asked for. And of course, we sent them. They bought the white one—"Axes."

[00:03:58.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  "Axes?" 

[00:03:59.31]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative], and the other one, I don't know if it was two or three [inaudible] a red one called "Ixi," I-X-I, which was the configuration of the painting, actually, a line, an X and a line. And Don Marron, who was on the board, was taken with the work, I guess. And he bought that one. 

[00:04:20.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  For himself? 

[00:04:21.66]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  For himself. 

[00:04:21.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Isn't he also—this is one of those—He's the—

[00:04:26.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Paine—in Paine Webber, yeah. 

[00:04:29.16]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But he did it. 

[00:04:29.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But he bought it as a private client. But he did see it up at the acquisitions committee. 

[00:04:38.22]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, how wonderful. 

[00:04:39.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it was pretty exciting. 

[00:04:41.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, how—was there a period of time that went by between, I mean, between when they were set up and when it all happened? It was sort of suspenseful? 

[00:04:49.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I don't remember if it was a couple of weeks or a couple of months. But certainly, it didn't happen instantly. 

[00:04:56.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And when was that? Did they have a New Acquisitions show or something like that that it appeared in? 

[00:05:06.67]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Eventually, yeah, yeah. 

[00:05:09.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Because I think—

[00:05:10.91]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's been up a couple of times, I think. 

[00:05:13.64]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, and the Donald Marron one, was that—

[00:05:17.75]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That was shown somewhere, too. 

[00:05:19.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's not the one that was borrowed by the Whitney, maybe, was it, by any chance? 

[00:05:22.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was hanging—it probably was in the Whitney show. 

[00:05:27.66]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Because I think it was red. 

[00:05:28.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And it also was hanging in the Paine Webber hallways. But he sold it last year. 

[00:05:33.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:05:37.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't know if I know to who or not. But he did have it for quite a while. 

[00:05:49.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you say that—[Inaudible]

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:05:58.07]

—the "Red Horse" and where it was shown. And that still remains for you, as you said, the sort of point—I can imagine. 

[00:06:09.50]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, that was the moment that it really got beyond my imagination. I mean, what I had imagined. 

[00:06:18.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You knew it was real then. 

[00:06:20.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was being recognized in a way that I—I thought it happened at 50 or 60 or 70 years old, if you painted that long. It was a very astonishing moment. And, no, I never felt that—that was a thrill through and through. I've been pleased and proud and whatnot. That was—

[00:06:44.63]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And in your case, I mean, in the meantime, you probably never had occasion to feel as if they didn't just take something and leave you high and dry. I have the feeling sometimes a museum might just buy something of somebody's at some point, and then they either don't show it anymore, or they don't continue by buying, by sort of watching, you know, drawings and print output and stuff like that. 

[00:07:07.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative.] They have bought prints, always. They have it there. And they own a few drawings, I believe. I'm not too sure what they own. And now they own one other painting that they just bought two years ago. 

[00:07:18.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:07:18.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. it was nothing else in between. But I don't think they do buy too much in depth anymore. 

[00:07:26.66]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, they probably can't, especially not paintings. I mean, I think the other departments can a little bit more. And what did they buy two years ago? 

[00:07:35.36]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  A painting called "The Biker." 

[00:07:37.73]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, right. 

[00:07:37.91]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's a very colorful painting of a tree and a figure on a bike, red and blue. 

[00:07:41.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. That's the one that's on the cover of the Phillips catalog. 

[00:07:44.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Exactly. 

[00:07:45.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's neat. 

[00:07:46.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:07:46.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Nice to see that. 

[00:07:47.13]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was pleased. Two very different works from very different periods. 

[00:07:59.55]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Okay, let's see. So then you had your second show at Willard. And from then on—it was after that you started to be in some group shows. I guess we're going backward a little bit, because I already mentioned the New Image painting show. But you were in that. 

[00:08:15.72]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That was later. 

[00:08:16.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Three years later. 

[00:08:17.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I'm not sure. I mean, I had a show in '75, and then I had another show in '76 And then I had a gallery show every other year after that. Not every year, but it's been procedure for all these years. 

[00:08:33.61]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:08:34.02]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But, sure, there were things in between. 

[00:08:37.14]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Were there times when some people were pushing you to show more or more often, or anything like that? 

[00:08:44.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Sure. Miani and I turned just about everything down. 

[00:08:50.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, other places. 

[00:08:51.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I depended on her a lot. And we usually knew the list. And I would take a lot of her guidance about what she felt was important, and worth doing, and how professionally it was being organized. And, I mean, she knew her way around the art world pretty well. Granted, we learned an awful lot together. 

[00:09:09.17]

But she was concerned and I was concerned that there would be no pushing machinery going on. Let my paintings develop. And we were comfortable. We were doing well right from the start. And don't let anybody tell us that I should be doing more paintings, or I should be in Europe. Or, I mean, we tried Europe. And it was sort of a disaster, that one occasion, really [Cross talk.] And we thought, the hell with Europe. 

[00:09:36.48]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The Stedelijk show?

[00:09:36.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, no, not that. It was a gallery—we consigned paintings to Europe, four to the James Mayor Gallery and four to the Rudolf Zwirner Gallery. It went for a few weeks in London and a few weeks in Cologne. And we didn't feel comfortable with what happened there, how they were treated. They were lies told about who bought them. They turned up in resale market very quickly. 

[00:09:59.19]

And Miani always tried to place the paintings with either collectors—with people that she hoped and felt were serious, that weren't in it to turn them over and resell them. And she did awfully well. I mean, now, of course, it's a different story. But they did have good homes. And many of them still do, for ten years or more. 

[00:10:24.10]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting. And while all that was this whirlwind of success happening fairly quickly, how did you [inaudible]? Yeah, I guess sort of in solid stepping stones? 

[00:10:39.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It never felt—because, probably my personality, it never felt like a whirlwind. 

[00:10:45.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, okay. Or overwhelming. 

[00:10:47.28]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I got very anxious, very stressed out that it was a fluke. And for several shows, I guess, maybe the first three or four shows, I thought, well, it's all over now. Wait 'til they see what I've done now. 

[00:11:02.76]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The next time, right. 

[00:11:03.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So it was that kind of attitude that perhaps saved me from getting too big of a head, was this kind of—

[00:11:09.48]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. 

[00:11:10.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  —wanting to take a ornery position about it all. 

[00:11:14.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And were you always able to sort of shut that out fairly well and go back to the studio and do your work when you needed to? 

[00:11:23.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, because the praise didn't really feel that good. I didn't quite understand in my gut level what the praise meant. And the criticism also got my hide up. So I realized that they sort of canceled each other out—the criticism and the praise. 

[00:11:43.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting.

[00:11:44.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So I decided that nobody knew much more about I was doing than me. And I didn't know all that much, either. [Laughs.] [Cross talk.]

[00:11:51.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you might as well keep going. Right, yeah. I keep seeing in all the material, the first written thing ever done, I guess, was by Hayden Herrera. 

[00:12:03.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:12:03.92]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I haven't read it. I guess it was a review, a short review? 

[00:12:06.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, it was. I think the very first thing was in Hayden Herrera in The Village Voice. And the second thing I remember was a one or two-line praise by Hilton Kramer, just a couple of lines of newsprint. But I think Hayden's was the first. I think it's the first time I saw my name in the newspaper. 

[00:12:25.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that was nice. [They laugh.]

[00:12:27.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was great. And I don't remember what she said. But I remember it was nice. 

[00:12:36.41]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Let's see. About how many horse paintings do you think you did? Not to sort of quantify other things, but do you have an idea numerically? 

[00:12:48.02]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I guessed last year. The horse paintings were basically between '75, and they ended with some very odd—I mean, are you talking about the profile horse paintings, or—the real end of the image of the horse was quite abstract. [Cross talk.]

[00:13:02.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And you think of those as being quite different. 

[00:13:04.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, that was about the image. But they were circles and—

[00:13:07.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's right.

[00:13:10.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was all taken apart. But I guess if you figure I did eight to ten paintings a year for five or six years, [inaudible] about 50 to 60 paintings with that image. I've never counted myself. Angela could. She's got me all computerized now. [They laugh.]

[00:13:35.28]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And when the when the horse did start sort of breaking up, or you started breaking it up, you were still doing all that in acrylic, right? 

[00:13:46.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:13:46.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Do you remember when the first time was that it stopped being a lengthwise profile-type horse, and what motivated that? When you isolated a bone, or something like that. 

[00:14:02.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I'm not sure. I'd have to look at my own documentation. I seem to remember it was a bunch of paintings "Tattoo," "Squeeze," "Toward the Light." I think those were some of the first frontal ones. I think it was around '78. 

[00:14:24.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So it was fairly kind of seamless. I mean, you weren't stuck for a time or something like that? 

[00:14:32.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I remember it was interrupted at some point by my first teaching job. I went out to Cal Arts to teach. And it was dreadful. And I ended up throwing everything away. But I decided not to do the horse there. So I tried to do these very geometric kind of profile heads. And they were not good paintings. And I was not comfortable. 

[00:14:55.00]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Profile heads of horses or—

[00:14:56.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, human heads, human heads. I wanted to just get off horses. But whatever happened there, it was about three months. I came home, and I started the horses again from frontal horse and the parts of horses—the legs, the heads, but separated in space. I just hadn't finished with it. I had to really naturally, in some way, get dismantled and dissolved. 

[00:15:26.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah. So the teaching thing wasn't good—

[00:15:34.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, you could call those three months pretty much of a bust in terms of trying to direct myself. You know, using an arbitrary change in location and situation is a way to try and change. And it didn't work. It didn't feed me at all. 

[00:15:52.48]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Were you able to soak in much of the atmosphere of Cal Arts? 

[00:15:56.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, I was miserable. I had a five-year-old daughter and a cat. And I didn't have proper housing. 

[00:16:02.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They were with you.

[00:16:03.58]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In the fluorescent studio, we covered part of this fluorescent studio with blankets and mattresses. And I lived in the place, in the Cal Arts building. Maggie and I snuck to the bathroom every morning. 

[00:16:18.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean, like the lavatory? [Laughs.]

[00:16:20.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and the showers, The dance department had these showers. We were not supposed to be living there. And they overlooked it for a while. And then we got reported. And we had to go live at someplace else. My husband came out for a while. And we stayed in Ellen Zimmerman's loft for a while, her place in Venice. And then I went back. I got kicked out again. I can't really understand. It was ridiculous. 

[00:16:43.48]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, also, I don't think of them—not that what you were doing was strictly painting in the sense of painting. Like it was sort of—

[00:16:53.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I had been. 

[00:16:54.00]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But I don't think of it as a place that's all that conducive to painting. 

[00:16:56.66]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, and it was all conceptual artists. And, no, the only person that was really, really friendly to me was Jon Borofsky. But he was never there. We actually shared a studio side-by-side. But he worked mostly in Venice and only came up one day a week, I think. And people were perfectly pleasant. But there was no interest in painting out there. It was Doug Hubler, and John Baldessari, and Michael Asher, and some video guy. 

[00:17:24.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And maybe David Salle in school. [Laughs.]

[00:17:26.75]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I never met him. I don't know, the age gap must be too large. I'm 42. I don't know how old David is. 

[00:17:37.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  About 35, I think. 

[00:17:39.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  If he overlapped, I certainly never ran into him. But it was—it was creepy. 

[00:17:46.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, it wasn't so great. And you said you have done some teaching since then here. 

[00:17:54.61]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Here, I've never taken a job. 

[00:17:56.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  No. Just, like, short—

[00:17:58.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I'll do visiting lectures, and did a couple of weekends in Syracuse and a day, and go see—I did a couple of days in Chicago last year at the Art Institute, and slide lectures. But I've never taken a teaching job. 

[00:18:20.92]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Let's see. I don't want to get off discussing the paintings. But there are some other things too. I should strike this. Yeah, well, let's just keep sort of—if you can't talk about the—that middle period where the horses became frontal and all that sort of what—you did quite a few of those kinds of things. And that went on for a couple of years. 

[00:18:47.10]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it became very interesting. It became about composition. I remember getting into a very shallow first conception of getting spatial, which was, if you draw an outline and you use the same color for the foreground and the background, you have your edges to deal with, which I dealt with before. But I got into trying to make the paint different where white paint in the head meant it was solid, and a different characteristic to the white paint in the ground meant it was empty. 

[00:19:19.33]

And then I got into making the line thicker. So it was a band describing the space within the field and inside the figure. So then the head was hollow, too. In other words, the ground showed through in my mind. So in a way, it's a harbinger of what I'm still trying to do. I'm trying to make things dissolve. Parts of the body get dissolved with light, kind of lasered out or whited out, but leave enough there so that the—and it's distorting. And it was a surgical procedure in a certain way, the same as the geometry in the early paintings was. 

[00:20:02.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative.] Right. Well, the geometry and the lines dividing the painting had disappeared by then. 

[00:20:07.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, there was no reason to try to keep it flat and keep calling attention to the edges of the canvas. It had been said and said. And I'd said it. Many people said it better than I. So I let it be. 

[00:20:25.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And the things that you were doing—what you just described as the laser effect is sort of beams of—

[00:20:31.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, that image didn't come until later, that thought about it. But whiting large sections of the image out, leaving them blank was—but leaving enough there that your imagination could fill in. 

[00:20:46.41]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. But it is sort of—that's what it is still. It's always about imagination sort of, isn't it? Not really about observed reality or—

[00:20:54.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Always, yeah. Even now, when I ought to be looking at dancers, then, to see how the air looks around them or something. I don't. I just imagine it. I mean, I have. But it's not helpful. 

[00:21:06.75]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? And even with—how about the boats, which would seem like the most real? 

[00:21:10.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  A little bit, a little bit. But very shortly I was working in the barn. The barn was behind the house. The house faced this little creek. So I'd run out of the barn and look at a boat, and go back in the barn and turn my back to the boat. I didn't draw boats. I knew it had a pointed bow and a square stern. And it probably had some reflections. [Laughs.]

[00:21:38.06]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Triangular sail. But it's interesting because they do have a real—they have the look a lot of times of being pulled along by the wind or something like that, which is interesting. 

[00:21:44.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That was oil paint. That was the adventure of oil paint. 

[00:21:50.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting to go back to that. 

[00:21:52.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That happened, I think, 1981. 

[00:21:55.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  When? 

[00:21:55.94]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Summer of '80 or '81. I think the summer of '81. 

[00:21:59.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That you switched to oil. 

[00:22:00.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and then I lived on that creek and took up oil painting. 

[00:22:03.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is that where you live now still? I mean, it's the same? 

[00:22:05.41]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, it was on the North Fork of Long Island. 

[00:22:08.21]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And when did you go out there first? 

[00:22:11.45]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I've been renting houses out there for one month every summer for years and years, in one of those little towns. And I lived with this fellow that summer. And we found a junky old house on a creek. 

[00:22:29.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  This is around '80?

[00:22:30.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  This was the summer of '81. 

[00:22:31.15]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay, so this is after you've been married and—

[00:22:33.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yes. And we just lived in that house with Maggie part of the time, part time with her father. And there was boats parked in it. I didn't know what I was going to do. I knew the horse was finished. I'd done those heads, too. 

[00:22:49.22]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. I wanted to ask you that.

[00:22:50.62]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That whole year, or about nine months, I rented. What happened was, I did the last two horse paintings at my small studio on West Broadway. And I decided I'd done the little sketches of these heads in crayon—heads and hands. It's kind of an intuitive thing in the same way the horses came along. 

[00:23:11.09]

And, also, it seemed like, what on earth is my image going to be while I have these two things? So I did some drawings. And they looked interesting, so I took a flying leap. And I wondered what they—I did one intermediate size, one about almost the size of a door. And it was still interesting. So I took a flying leap and thought, I don't know what else to do. I'm going to do these paintings ten feet by ten feet. 

[00:23:39.50]

So I rented somebody else's studio. Bruce Robbins had part of an unfinished studio, rented one quarter of it, about 1,000 square feet. And for all of '80/'81, the September to June part, I painted, one, two—four paintings, four heads, big heads. And that was the end of the horse. And it also the end of the heads in that—

[00:24:05.19]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, heads and hands. They were also—

[00:24:07.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Right. Heads and hands, right. 

[00:24:08.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You did those. When did the print set come out? Pinks? I know that's the one time I've written about you, actually. I wrote a review of that. 

[00:24:15.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I think before. 

[00:24:17.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? Would that have possibly been the first time? 

[00:24:20.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I remember walking into that studio. They said, "Did you ever do a woodcut of Pat Branstedt at Aero Press?" And I said, "No. I did a linoleum cut in school." So they handed me wood and some tools and said, why don't you make a few marks? And I did that. I did a head and a hand. And then we started fooling around with inks. They first got me into monoprints. I guess they printed it out normally—

[00:24:45.89]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Each one [inaudible] individually. 

[00:24:46.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and then I brought the block with color. And they pulled off. But I didn't think I—we'd better check this, too, because—

[00:24:59.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean, whether that's the first time that the hand came up? 

[00:25:01.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I think it is. But then I tried to do heads in California, remember? And I threw them away when they didn't work out. Also—whoops, now I'm remembering a series of drawings I did around my divorce that had heads and hands in it, and heads throwing up black paint. You know those? 

[00:25:20.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I think so. Or maybe I've seen later things. 

[00:25:22.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  There's hammers and heads. Very psychological. 

[00:25:24.17]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  No, I've never seen the hammers. 

[00:25:25.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  This one drawing's got a hammer on the inside of a head. 

[00:25:32.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. So, well, that period sounds like sort of a watershed of, in fact, the most maybe Expressionist-type period of, or at least self—of focusing on the self, maybe, that you've been through. 

[00:25:50.67]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. But I didn't think that those images could be paintings. They became paint on paper. And the two paintings that I tried to make of heads in California were really boring. So I was very, very rigid. I didn't allow that quality in there. I think I wasn't quite at that point in my psyche yet to allow it. I think that maybe the heads and hammers came after California. Some of this is all mixed up with divorce, a lot of it. 

[00:26:17.43]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I actually wanted—I hate to have you talking about five different things at once. [Susan laughs.] I didn't want to talk about that part of your life, too, but—[Cross talk.]

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:26:29.91]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It would be smart if I had a bio of myself, because I don't remember that much. [Cross talk.]

[00:26:40.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, it's hard to remember years, too. But I guess, well, what makes sense? Does it make sense to go back and say what was happening in your life? 

[00:26:50.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, the heads had come up, not the hands, I don't believe. But the heads had come up earlier; disappeared; finished the horse. They came up again in a real iconographic, simple way in the little plan drawings, then became developed into these kind of, again, iconic imagery. I don't know what to call it—and huge, very simplified, but trying to deal with hollow and solid space, and trying to take on a few more issues, a little bit of color, kind of keynote color to denote different parts of the configuration. And then that was over. 

[00:27:30.14]

I knew that that was after those four paintings. I think I did a fifth one, a smaller one, a gray one with a purple fist and head on the bottom. And the eyes doubled up. But I realized, even that painting shouldn't have probably been done. It took care of itself. There wasn't anywhere to go with that particular image at that time. 

[00:27:54.51]

So I decided to throw myself a real left-fielder and take up oil paints without an image, just learn to—and I figured it would take years before I was able to produce anything. But that wasn't true because those small boat paintings got kind of juicy. And I took to the stuff quite easily. I was terribly afraid of it being muddy, the white paint. 

[00:28:22.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Those started out—you started out on a sort of—your scale got much smaller. 

[00:28:26.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah. I was terrified of oil. 

[00:28:28.39]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Of filling a great big canvas. 

[00:28:30.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And besides, I was working in this messy old barn. I just had a piece of plywood nailed to something or other. I wasn't even in a proper studio at all. 

[00:28:40.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, I think it's interesting to shift the scale like that anyway. [Inaudible.]

[00:28:42.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, so it was very makeshift. 

[00:28:45.34]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, and so the boats were really the first thing that you did do with oil. 

[00:28:49.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and just really because they were there. 

[00:28:53.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Huh. And they were only kind of parked in that creek. I mean, they weren't—you hear about the creek, and you see these boats that look like they're substantial. And they should be. And I always wondered, how were they sailing in the creek? They weren't sailing in the creek. 

[00:29:09.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  They must be parked there. 

[00:29:11.09]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Storage—

[00:29:11.81]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  They were dredged—those creeks in the middle, I guess, for boating. 

[00:29:16.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh. I mean, they were big. 

[00:29:17.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, a fairly deep—deep enough. I mean, a cabin cruiser couldn't come down the creek, but these little sailboats could. 

[00:29:24.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, and speedboats. 

[00:29:26.24]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You know, I invented some. You'd see motorboats and things like that. And I thought that I used to—my father used to have motorboats all during my childhood. 

[00:29:35.90]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's right. You said you spent summers on a lake and stuff like that. 

[00:29:38.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, so it was kind of familiar imagery. And the way the oil paint seemed to come on out of the tube and onto my brush and onto the surface became—it became simple to knock out water, you know. Each brush stroke carried a slightly different darkness, or lightness of mix. And it became tremendous variation rather than this all over—

[00:30:07.55]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, also, you're not as stuck with something once you put it down, right? 

[00:30:10.52]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Right, right. Well, acrylic was always built up. I've always thought I've worked collectively. 

[00:30:18.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? All along? 

[00:30:19.10]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Still do. Oh, yeah. There's very few paintings that just kind of came out and didn't need too much messing with. 

[00:30:26.84]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It's interesting because the illusion of the original, the acrylic is thinner. It looks as if—

[00:30:36.70]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, but there's a lot of over-paint. It wasn't thinner mix. I mean I almost painted with glazes because in acrylic I used to take this very good tempera, and take like a teaspoonful and put it into about a pint of matte medium. So it was tinted medium that I was working with. And then I built up color by painting over and over it 'til it got more resonant. But it was thin coats, almost washes of color built up into some body. Because oil, the body comes instantly, because I never learned to use oil in that same way. Seems too watercolory. And there's no body to it like there was with the matte medium. 

[00:31:22.17]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. 

[00:31:23.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's just too washy for me to use it that way. 

[00:31:27.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And did the size of brushes change and stuff like that? Does that ever—

[00:31:35.45]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Never! [Laughs.]

[00:31:35.66]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It's always been sort of small. 

[00:31:36.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Half-inch brush. 

[00:31:40.13]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Huh. So those were, I mean, those were your prac—there aren't some paintings that you threw out or something that there were real practice paintings, just in oil. 

[00:31:47.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I expected to have, but now. Maybe a couple. There's always been, I mean, some years it's been three or four paintings that I've thrown out. 

[00:31:55.46]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Do you think you were calling on some really early painting training that you had learned? I mean, the old Lazlo Szabo.

[00:32:01.55]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, that wasn't the first oil. I had this other experience that had nothing to do with color. I was taught red, yellow, blue, and all that stuff, but sort of. But I was just working in black and white in oil. 

[00:32:17.00]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You mean, back then. No, no. You mean now. 

[00:32:18.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In that barn out in '81 when as an adult person, I started painting with oil. 

[00:32:25.43]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But it was the application of it that you already had sort of a basis for. 

[00:32:30.75]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I remembered, I remembered. And I had all this other painting experience. But I remembered oil to a little greater extent than I would have thought I would have. 

[00:32:51.07]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  To maybe take this as a juncture, because those paintings seem to be in a way, they seem like kind of happy paintings. I mean, they seem as if you were enjoying the environment and stuff like that, and what you were doing. 

[00:33:04.04]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. It was a good summer. 

[00:33:04.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, it sort of seems that way. 

[00:33:05.99]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was a great summer. 

[00:33:07.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They didn't all get produced in that one summer, did they? 

[00:33:09.10]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, no, "The Creek" and a whole bunch of paintings that actually got shown for the very first time at that Stedelijk show, got done all during that—in fact, I worked out of that creek experience all of the next year, I believe. 

[00:33:22.94]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah? You brought it back. 

[00:33:24.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I painted the swans, the boat on its head, and an arm and a head, and a black painting called "The Creek." It was sailboats at night. And "Ten Men" came the next year. 

[00:33:39.22]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The buoy, what about the one on buoy? Was that a float? 

[00:33:42.82]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  The one on the float. Yeah, that was. I think that's the next year. I think we're in '82. 

[00:33:47.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, okay. 

[00:33:49.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  '81/'82, that year. Do you know when my show at the Stedelijk was? 

[00:33:55.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  No, I don't. 

[00:33:56.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I remember having a tantrum and calling Miani up. And they had done something very brave, Alexander van Gravenstein. And that is, he took it upon himself to book a show for unpainted paintings. They weren't done yet. 

[00:34:13.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, right. In other words, he actually requested to have new things. 

[00:34:18.50]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. I think we started with the heads, more big heads. And most of the show was not in existence when he asked for it, although he asked for it two years ahead of time. 

[00:34:33.16]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So for big heads, the ones that you painted that there were only—

[00:34:36.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, in 1980. 

[00:34:38.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, okay. So he asked for a show that early? 

[00:34:40.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, he did. But nobody knew where I was going, including me. But I thought, well, gee, two years, given my normal productions, of course there'll be enough paintings for the show. But at some point, I didn't know if any of these new paintings I was doing were what he would want and if they were good, and whether they—I told Miani I wanted to cancel it, that it felt like a tragedy. 

And she was very good. She said, "Susan"—what is it? It was May or June. And the show was going to be in next fall. She said, "Why don't you just work, see how it goes for the next few months? And if you don't want to have a show in August, we'll call them up and I'll tell them there's no show. So what can happen? Look, it's not the end of the world." So I said, "Okay, okay." [Laughs.] And then I got down to work. 

[00:35:30.05]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's amazing. 

[00:35:31.16]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it's the—I don't think I'll ever do that again. It was pretty frightening. 

[00:35:37.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Scary, isn't it? Maybe it also produced the opposite effect of sort of leading you to something new and knowing that they would show it. 

[00:35:44.57]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And certainly developing it or pushing those paintings, really pushing those paintings. Yeah, I mean, it's the first time—I think the only time in my life that I made a commitment to show work in an important place and an important event when it didn't exist yet. 

[00:36:06.22]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you have some idea how many he would want, or how big a show it would be? 

[00:36:09.91]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  We had a floor plan. We knew one room was taken care of by the heads. I don't exactly remember what other ones he had. Probably—he came and visited me several times over the next two years. And the work was coming along. But it still seemed like I couldn't take care of this much space. As it happened, we had to put two or three paintings away. 

[00:36:34.63]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And not show them? There wasn't room for them? 

[00:36:36.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And I'm not even sure how many paintings there were. Maybe twenty? We'd have to look back at that catalog. 

[00:36:44.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Of course, it didn't make you just do some great big paintings, like all you produced is two. 

[00:36:51.46]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, each painting was whatever scale it was. We said some little ones, too. 

[00:36:57.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Including some of those—the first oils, you mean, also. 

[00:37:03.61]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I'm not sure. Yes, yes, some of the—black boat thing. I have a catalog here. 

[00:37:07.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Maybe we should—because I think this time I want to mention a date. 

[00:37:10.63]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Okay. 

[00:37:10.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  We ought to—

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:37:14.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Wait a minute. Where's the year? Yeah, that's a very early—Yeah, it's one of the first ones, "Speedboat." I think this was the first one that summer. 

[00:37:35.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? So it was the whole—

[00:37:37.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  This is later, back in New York. That won't make any sense on the tape. This was out there. And this "Reflections" was done out in the summer place. "Patches" just came from those kinds of feelings that I was experiencing about the boats. And this was when I went into AA for two years. That was how I felt then, one of the paintings that came easiest in my life. 

[00:38:08.39]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And it's called "The Beggar." 

[00:38:09.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And that extended into a more formalized idea about smoking and space. "Blue Bars," I'm talking about now. It's very funny because in this catalog, the hat is black. It was photographed before it went. The hat is not black now. It's hollow. 

[00:38:25.16]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So it's white. 

[00:38:27.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, but they photographed it. 

[00:38:28.62]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting.

[00:38:29.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  A few people did pick that up. 

[00:38:30.84]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:38:31.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In the catalog, the hat was black. But it too heavy. So it's just kind of a drawn hat, sketchy, in real life. That was "Maggie's Cartwheel." Maggie, my daughter, did cartwheels for one solid year. [They laugh.] But this painting is something that I'm still trying to catch up with, this "Maggie's Cartwheel," because what I thought I did was, I'd always worked with the image of the horse, say in the shadow, like the second image. 

[00:39:00.28]

What I thought I did there was make the person doing the cartwheel and then make a time lapse and make the shadow of the cartwheel being done. That's still a very, very interesting idea to me. And yet, I haven't quite been able to zero in on it with full focus. But it's real interesting to me to paint time into a painting. It's something that I want to do.

[00:39:23.02]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. That's fascinating. 

[00:39:23.81]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But you need a more contemplative time in your life to really figure this out than this time is for me. I mean, it's a very small painting, but it has—

[00:39:36.31]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But it's interesting because the shadow is preceding—

[00:39:38.93]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and then the shadow is purple. And. I don't know, it's got a nice feeling to that painting. And it had issues in it that were kind of important. 

[00:39:47.09]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And that are still active. That's good. 

[00:39:49.34]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. A lot of—probably, if I could ever see my own career, I'd see I've always been circling the same few things. But I'm not quite sure what they are. Like time, space, composition, smoke, air, light, shadows. 

[00:40:09.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, the new painting, the one with the dancers twirling around, made me think of something. It's the David Hockney photographs. They show movement, but not through blurs, but rather the figure at different moments, like a skater. 

[00:40:29.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, yeah, sort of, I suppose. 

[00:40:31.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, except there's something different you did. There's a quote in the book about him—it's really interesting—about the skater that you did, and how he says when a skater is moving, you don't see them in a blur the way a photograph usually shows them. But you really do see each thing. Yeah, it is sort of like Muybridge. 

[00:40:50.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and it's pretty interesting stuff. 

[00:40:52.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, it is interesting. 

[00:40:54.90]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But I never thought I'd be trying to do it. But what really, really interests me, I read it. I'm reading this book, Laughter in the Dark, by Nabokov, which I'd never read. And there is this one image in there. And it's just so amazing. The sentence ends with the shadow of a juggler on the curtain. 

[00:41:15.70]

But it also deals with the doubling up in phantasmagoria of an image that's a very insubstantial manifestation of a human presence—not really talking ghost here, but doubling up. That's what that painting was supposed to be. It was about somebody losing the boundaries of their own skin and endlessly extending into space. But I can't do that yet. I can do a little bit in skimpy pencil drawings. It starts to happen. It's just somehow I just became many, many side ways. 

[00:41:51.13]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, that's interesting. 

[00:41:55.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Anyway, we jumped again. 

[00:41:56.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, but it's all right. I mean, it's interesting to get these kinds of things. 

[00:42:01.51]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, there's one of those throw-up heads. 

[00:42:06.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  All right. Okay, and those are in the late '70s. 

[00:42:10.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, before the big heads. Those were the little stress paintings there. Those are little tiny paintings, by the way, on canvas. 

[00:42:20.04]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So meanwhile, let's just say Alexander van Gravenstein was what? The director of the Stedelijk? 

[00:42:24.98]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Curator. 

[00:42:25.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Curator. Okay, let's see. There's no date. Here it is, okay. It was at the Stedelijk. 

[00:42:33.84]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Was it in Dutch? 

[00:42:33.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  October through November, I guess, '82. 

[00:42:38.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Uh-huh [affirmative]. So I guess, yeah, that was the fall of '82. Yeah, so that whole year after the creek, after the summer of '81, "Creek" was more or less painted to fill that museum show. 

[00:42:49.05]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, it's a pretty amazing show to me. [They laugh.] Wow. And almost all of these were that fairly monochrome. Except a little bit of, I mean, black, a little bit of blue.

[00:43:01.74]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I wasn't willing to take on color at all as an issue at that time. 

[00:43:11.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Were you thinking at that point, or have you ever—I mean, since, I'm sure you have, because things have been said about it and stuff. But did you think about Giacometti? 

[00:43:22.29]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I rejected thinking about him. I can think about him now more and more with admiration and glee. But for a while, I thought I didn't want to squeeze life and compress life like he finally had to do to get it down to the bare bones of the issues. But I don't know where I'll end up. But if it's even close to the intensity that some of his pieces have, and the truth that they have, I'd be damn happy. [Laughs.] But I could not—to me, was all he was doing, he was reducing. 

[00:44:05.19]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, it seems like a different thing, because primarily he was doing things in sculpture, even the paintings. 

[00:44:12.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I've always thought it's luckier to be a painter because you're not—I mean, of course you're two-dimensionally confined. I mean, I've done a lot of pieces, a lot of work about non-gravity or anti-gravity. It's one of my favorite things to do, is sling an image up somewhere in the air. 

[00:44:33.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's right, yeah.

[00:44:35.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Or it has been. Now I'm interested—I did this half and half torso last year where the hips have to rest on the bottom of the canvas. And in fact, I'd just as soon see the canvas sitting on the floor. I thought, well—

[00:44:47.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting, yeah. 

[00:44:50.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  All these issues tend to flip-flop if you're into them enough. You want to play the reverse side of what you played a few years ago. 

[00:45:05.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Let's see. 

[00:45:08.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I cannot stay on this subject. [They laugh.]

[00:45:10.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  All right. Okay. That's fine. 

[00:45:13.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You're not too—[Laughs.]

[00:45:15.21]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  No, because I answered my—

[00:45:17.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I mean, listen, this paper is going to come out like the conversation comes up. 

[00:45:23.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, well, actually, when you're reading the thing, it's interesting anyway because you go back and forth. You need a little bit of a break when you're reading it, too, from just the very cerebral to the brass tacks. 

[00:45:35.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I hope they edit it a little bit. 

[00:45:35.63]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, the "ums" and all that stuff, I hope. Yeah, it is. Well, maybe you could talk about your personal life a little bit, if you want to. I mean, if that's anything that—just a little bit during the period. I mean, in terms of do you remember when you when you met George Trakas, who was—

[00:45:59.94]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah. '69 to '70. 

[00:46:04.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Was there an interesting meeting or anything like that? Fascinating? 

[00:46:10.10]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah. I was taking a movement mime class with a very fine dancer named Debra Hay. And a lot of—

[00:46:19.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's actually somebody—I wanted to get that name because it didn't come out clearly that well in the first. 

[00:46:23.49]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I just saw her a week ago. I saw her for the first time in about ten years. She performed for two nights in New York. Very intense, very interesting. 

[00:46:32.49]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, I think you mentioned. 

[00:46:33.63]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Debra Hay, that's H-A-Y. And I went to this class with this friend, Michael Singer, and this other artist, Mary Heilmann, and a whole bunch of people I was just beginning to meet. And her former husband, Alex Hay, who was around Rauschenberg, who was—kind of lots of people that I still know something about. And I was doing these movements in this middle of the class. And this carpenter guy came in in overalls, plaster in his hair. 

[00:47:03.16]

And I had a flash that this man was married, and had a bunch of kids, and looked healthy and happy. And that was the kind of man I wanted to meet and be with. Well, as the class went on, I flirted. And I gave him the eye. And eventually we started doing a couple of exercises together, including the game of—

[END OF TRACK AAA_rothen87_6514_m]

[00:00:05.70]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Okay, so I met George in that class. Then I found out he—I started working with Joan Jonas, being kind of a human prop in her pieces. And he was—he used to dance a little bit, George, but was a carpenter and a sculptor at that time. Anyway, I found out he wasn't married; he didn't have children. And I don't know whether he thinks he seduced me, but I think I seduced him. [They laugh.]

[00:00:30.93]

And he was rather shy. But I followed him one night from a Joan Jonas rehearsal, and I found out where he lived. And I plotted with my friend, Mary Woronov, to ask him to come have a beer with us and then to leave, so I could be left alone with him. 

[00:00:46.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, really? For her to leave, right. 

[00:00:47.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. So she would leave. And we went together, had a very stormy relationship for a year, broke up, got back together, finally decided that we couldn't stick together alone, but if we got married, we would, and we wanted to. Marched down to City Hall about a year after we met, and year and a half later had a child. Kept separate studios. 

My parents gave me some money when we married and he insisted I use it for my own studio so that I could continue painting, and he could, of course, continue uninterruptedly [laughs] doing his sculpture. He had a great studio on Franklin Street. I was on West Broadway. And we were married for, well, it's hard to remember because there was some trial separations and back together, but about eight years, seven, eight years in that. And we had a child and—

[00:01:40.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You had Maggie a couple a couple of years into it? And—

[00:01:42.94]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I think we were married in May of '71, and she was born in November of '72. And there weren't very many artists that had kids. A few. Phil Glass had kids, but we didn't know him that well. 

[00:01:56.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting.

[00:01:57.39]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And it became a different sort of life. 

[00:02:00.13]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  More domestic, you mean? 

[00:02:01.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  More domestic, less social. We have different demands than most of the free-wheeling people, 112 Green Street people, Chatham Square people. I can name names if you want, just about twenty, twenty-five people. Gordon Matta, Jeffrey Lew, Susie Harris, Tina Girouard, Dickie Landry, Phil Glass, Steve Reich. 

[00:02:24.15]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay, same people—you've mentioned them before. 

[00:02:26.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, a lot of these people. 

[00:02:27.24]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And they're the ones who, they were still single, mostly, or at least—

[00:02:31.46]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:02:32.93]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —not with families and stuff. 

[00:02:34.11]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Right. 

[00:02:36.52]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  So you and he became more of a family capsule or something? 

[00:02:40.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, and I started working hard. George was always a very hard worker, would carpenter all day, make cupboards and cabinets for people all day, and work all evening. 

[00:02:48.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Do you think that's what helped—in some ways, helped—induced—doing more work, that being made to be at home? 

[00:02:55.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, yes. 

[00:02:56.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting.

[00:02:58.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Made me feel guilty if I wasn't working as well. It was good for me. It was good for me. And my former boyfriend also—didn't work with the intensity of George, but John Duff was also a pretty regular hard worker. I learned work habits from other people.

[00:03:18.48]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's good. But you work was so different that it wasn't as if you were ever—you never collaborate—well, except in early dance things probably, and stuff like that, but—

[00:03:28.08]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Never collaborated on a piece of art. 

[00:03:29.92]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Did you pretty much consult with each other about what each other were doing? 

[00:03:33.60]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No. He used to come in and look at what I did and say, "Terrific, terrific, terrific." And then we used to have drinks, and "What did you do today?" And blah, blah, blah. We did not talk about that. Sometimes other people saw it in shows, but it all, it seems like it was more in a social way. It wasn't a heavy art talk household. Although he was certainly capable of it, but I'm not sure if I was. I was asking more questions all of those years than having answers or thoughts. 

[00:04:01.75]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Asking questions and doing work.

[00:04:07.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Wondering, "What is this? What is this? What is it?" 

[00:04:09.69]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. And then, well, through the course of it then, then it sort of just—as these things do, I guess. [Laughs.]

[00:04:23.04]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, we ran into trouble sometimes. He was traveling. I was feeling too—sometimes burdened by motherhood, and washing machine would break and he'd be out of town. And although he was a very good father, he was still—if he spent two or three hours a day with the kid, I still was spending fifteen. I mean, he did more than any man I'd ever seen. However, still—still and still and still. 

[00:04:53.04]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:04:54.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I'm sure that I started earning, I guess, a little more money than he did, a little sooner than he did. Well, still, I mean, sculptors just don't know how to earn money or save it. And if he got a budget for a piece, he overspent it. 

[00:05:08.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, and that's what—partly why he was traveling was because he—

[00:05:12.23]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, he started getting commissions for pieces and he was still doing carpentry for most of those years as well. And we tried to split the expenses as best we could, but I was living off my parents, as well as George. I wasn't working. So, it's hard to—I mean, I can't really analyze the breakdown of the marriage, except that it stopped being supportive. We weren't helping each other anymore. 

[00:05:37.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Well, and I'm trying to think of where it inter-related sort of with what work was going on. I mean, you mentioned—you refer to it—to bad point periods in it or the breakup of it as being a period—

[00:05:50.31]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  The late '70s. 

[00:05:50.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —when you were doing certain kinds of work. 

[00:05:52.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, the late '70s, Probably '77, '78, '79 were the years that some of those—black paint coming out and the horses breaking apart and floating in places, that was that work from that time. 

[00:06:11.94]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Can you—let's see. Well, you mentioned the piece that was done, what, when you left AA or went into it. Do you want to—

[00:06:18.42]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, "The Beggar"? 

[00:06:19.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:06:20.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That's—well, we're jumping again. 

[00:06:23.06]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh. 

[00:06:23.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I think George and I broke up in '78. 

[00:06:29.14]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, okay. 

[00:06:31.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  "The Beggar" is '82. 

[00:06:33.94]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, through that time, after the breakup and stuff, you did, again, you did keep working still, right? I mean, even doing those kinds of—

[00:06:41.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I mean, in my way. I'm the kind of person that will work hard for a day, won't work for two, will work an hour for the three next three days, then suddenly pull three days in a row. 

[00:06:52.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Were you morning, noon—

[00:06:53.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I was doing—no, it doesn't matter. I'm not really a night person. I'm very much geared towards a school day, actually. 

[00:07:00.64]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But you didn't go through any sort of horrible black periods then? 

[00:07:05.14]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I felt that I did. I mean—

[00:07:08.38]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, of course. 

[00:07:09.80]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  When you look at output, it's somewhat irregular. 

[00:07:13.14]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I'm sure. 

[00:07:13.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  There are years, not necessarily the years that I would name as my bad years, but years that not much came out. There's one year with five paintings in it, one year with fifteen. But I guess it evens out over a five-year—

[00:07:29.44]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, one balances another.  

[00:07:31.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But yes, I felt stuck. I mean, every time an image was—when the boats were gone, I got scared. I don't even remember at the moment [laughs] what I did after "The Boats." 

[00:07:41.84]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is that—that show—

[00:07:42.69]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, "The Beggar," and "Blue Bars," and "Ten Men" came after "The Boats. But the figure came to occupy the space that the boats had and the horses had. But it became a realer kind of space, too. Not just figure ground, but just was—

[00:07:57.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, when you—the boats really seem almost like a sort of anomaly there for a while. I mean, you refer to them the same way as they filled in a place for an image the way the horses did. And then when you went back to the figures like "The Blue Bars," they have a more sort of frontal, even iconic sort of aspect to them—

[00:08:29.66]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:08:29.78]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —like the horses one. Something I was going to mention anyway, and maybe the boats are the place to ask it, is about that anti-illusion, which had been the thing that was so important at an earlier point. Is that—

[00:08:43.58]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Gone. [Laughs.] Gone with the wind.

[00:08:44.03]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. [Laughs.] And bit by bit did that get chipped away at, or was it pretty quick? 

[00:08:51.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I think it went away as soon as the geometry went away. The X's and the sidebars and the—yeah. 

[00:08:58.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, huh. 

[00:09:00.65]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I just think it—I wasn't trying to paint deep space. I still have a lot of trouble painting any kind of horizon line. A horizontal line to me, it's like—upsetting. [Laughs.] Vertical lines are fine, but a horizontal line is, I mean, it's always a horizon. When you draw a line across a piece of paper sideways, it's a horizon.

[00:09:25.24]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, that's right. 

[00:09:25.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I didn't want to even be that definitive about space. 

[00:09:28.72]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, that is the one thing, in a way, that always keeps that—that does keep it a little bit anti-illusionist maybe in some way. 

[00:09:34.81]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:09:34.91]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I mean, it makes the work about some other thing, like what you said, the body sort of splintering into lots of bodies—that kind of thing. 

[00:09:42.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Get me back on [inaudible]. 

[00:09:48.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  What, back onto the painting or the personal? [Laughs.]

[00:09:51.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, no, what we were just talking about. 

[00:09:53.47]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well—

[00:09:55.13]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Both being anomaly, "The Blue Bars" and "The Beggar" being more—

[00:09:59.41]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, about the illusion. I guess it's sort of progression of the work. 

[00:10:08.52]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I think they were all intuitive. You take a painting like "Blue Bars." I knew I wanted to do this smoke leaving the mouth the same way I'd wanted the black paint pouring out of the mouth. Something about the passage of materials, visualize materials through the body. It's almost like a language, but you don't paint words coming out of a mouth. At least I wouldn't. And there all this floaty thing was. And the blue bars, they probably came out of the I Ching. 

[00:10:37.00]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, yeah? 

[00:10:37.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Which I never was a huge fan of, but I had met it in 1965, and people that I knew periodically—periodically they appeared in my life. I never owned anything. But probably—and also in this other painting called "Squeeze," with the upside-down legs, I learned that a line would keep them from a sense of wavering. So I put those three brilliant blue bars to hold the space still for this gentle acting. So they're kind of intuitive things, using geometry just to lock in the space so that this quieter event can happen. 

[00:11:15.10]

It's about tensions and opposites, something very soft and smoky, and something firm and implanted, almost parqueted into the ground. And it has a second and different kind of presence. And so, I mean, I can't even say more than that because I just knew the painting was missing something, and I probably just went up there and did it. And then I painted them very well. I mean, I probably just made three slashes to lock in another aspect of the space if the smoke wasn't—

[00:11:51.55]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Did that strike you, that kind of painting, as being humorous? I mean—

[00:11:59.59]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. I've always been a little annoyed that people haven't thought my paintings were funnier. 

[00:12:05.18]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Yeah, I mean it's certainly—

[00:12:05.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I mean, I think "Patches," that painting, "Patches," where the guy's arm turns into three arms is very funny. I think a lot of my paintings are quite funny. 

[00:12:13.58]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I think they are too. And things like—sometimes one element in a painting will be very funny. Like a nose or something like that. 

[00:12:19.36]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:12:23.22]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But that seems kind of—it depends also on the context or on the need within a specific painting, I guess? 

[00:12:29.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Yeah, but a lot of it is intuitive. I mean, I'm sure a good Freudian would talk—there's two things with this cat in them. "The Beggar" was a literal image about holding out your hat, feeling very bereft, worried about was I an alcoholic, wasn't I, wasn't sure. I still, in fact, am not sure what that's all about, except I drink now. 

[00:12:50.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, well, that's the interesting answer. [Laughs.] You can do it—

[00:12:54.08]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's borderline stuff with me. I've never been a sloppy, messy, falling down, weeping drunk. I'm kind of a drinker. 

[00:13:03.20]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. I think there's a—I think—

[00:13:04.94]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And nobody in all these years has been able to be—anybody in AA will say, "Yes, you're an alcoholic." Anybody who watches my life says, "No, you're not an alcoholic." An alcoholic is somebody that blacks out, that has discontinuity and—

[00:13:21.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. 

[00:13:23.00]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But seeing that I drank more drinks—say, four to anyone else's two, I decided this is what's wrong with me. I am an alcoholic. So I quit drinking for two years and I went through—Well, for one thing, if you're used to going to sleep with several scotches or whatever, and I didn't sleep well for three months. So I was emotionally kind of wrecked on that quitting period. And during that period, that painting got done. I was just feeling very vulnerable and one big trough in my life. 

[00:13:54.49]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Well, do you detect a difference in the work? Were you—let me put it this way? Would you drink during the day? Would you drink when you were painting? 

[00:14:03.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, never drank—I was a cocktail—five or six o'clock—

[00:14:07.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  At the end of the day, right. 

[00:14:08.28]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  —as I started to cook dinner, I would have liquor. Occasionally at lunch, occasionally in the summertime, beers in the afternoon. But never, never—

[00:14:17.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Because there is such a thing, I guess, as drunk painting, which is a whole other thing. And I never would have seen it—

[00:14:22.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, and I don't—I have painted when drinking and I usually undo it and scrape it and remove it the next day. Once in a while, a bravado gesture. Even now a bravado gesture gets made when I'm a little bit high. And in the cool, clear light of morning, it either disappears or I think, good. That's great that you did that. [They laugh.] You know, and that just brought the painting up another notch. 

[00:14:49.89]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Right. Huh. 

[00:14:52.71]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And those green heads got painted in there when I was a little high. In that pink painting. Those three—those two green heads in that long pink painting that you just looked at. 

[00:15:02.11]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, this—really? 

[00:15:03.27]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it was kind of like twelve or one [A.M.]. I'd been fussing and fussing, and I just took the green tube and went [makes stroke with hand –Ed.]. And it looked good in the morning. 

[00:15:15.25]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. [They laugh.]

[00:15:25.13]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  So you can't say much about my painting and drinking, because I didn't paint when I drank. 

[00:15:29.75]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Right. 

[00:15:31.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In in any substantial way. 

[00:15:37.24]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. So that was some—and it also wasn't a product of, so much, going out to parties or anything like that. It was more sort of—

[00:15:43.15]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I always drank. All my whole life. It only—all of a sudden I need to call it more serious stuff than it was. Nobody told me to. I decided that I drank more than anybody else. And when I tried to just drink beer or just quit, I would always say, "Fuck it, I don't want to drink the beer. I want a scotch." 

[00:16:07.37]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:16:07.87]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And I don't want two, I want three. So then I thought, ah-ha! 

[00:16:13.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And it wasn't something—It was because you—You didn't stop yourself when you said I want the more, or something. 

[00:16:21.54]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, that's what's really scared me. Then I thought, ah-ha you can't—you know. 

[00:16:26.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. So then you took yourself off—

[00:16:29.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, then I took myself off. [That's when I started going to AA –Ed.] It was good. If I ever think I'm really in trouble, I'd do it again. 

[00:16:38.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. I mean, I know loads of people are—seem to be—sort of reach a point or reach an age, I guess, or something, when you—

[00:16:46.58]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  When they get scared and they realize they it's a crutch. 

[00:16:52.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Right. Did it change any—when you were drinking more, did it mean you would get up later and get to work later, or anything like that? 

[00:17:05.53]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No. 

[00:17:05.89]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Do you always feel—yeah, so pretty much. 

[00:17:07.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I never could sleep much later than seven-thirty or eight. 

[00:17:10.28]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, right. So that's when you say you have school in the morning. 

[00:17:12.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I'd just have a hangover. And then I learned that three Bufferin kills a hangover if you take it the night before. But yeah, I suppose excessive drinking makes you cloudy in the morning. Functional, but not—not as chipper and bright as you would be. And I still have that problem sometimes. And it'll be a couple—I've had some stress this year. I've drunk more than I usually drink. Got scared, pulled it back. And now there's a new rule. I never drink to get drunk. I would always not have the drink that would make me drunk. 

[00:17:47.09]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:17:48.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I know it's—a lot of people I know drink just—you know, you never knew. But the minute my head felt a certain way—club soda, or home, or sleep. So it wasn't about getting loaded. It was about staying on. Just changing your reality a little bit. 

[00:18:06.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Do you usually work more in the morning or afternoon? Is there a pattern? 

[00:18:14.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, a lot of times—I would say afternoon. A lot of times I use morning for laundry, checks, telephone calls. I try to, but I am a slow waker-upper anyway. And sometimes I just read. I just—and then by the time it gets toward noon, the guilts and the inertia get to me, and I'm in here. And I very often paint in the evening. 

[00:18:43.87]

I mean, I like to paint to about six o'clock, and then from about eight to midnight. Or sometimes—but that's maybe twice a week, those evenings. I like being irregular, too. It's the part of me that's very immature and doesn't like anybody's schedule and doesn't like to do the same thing two days in a row. 

[00:19:03.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I can relate. 

[00:19:03.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Same way? [Cynthia laughs.] Good. 'Cause I get jealous when I hear people who have very firm, structured habits. 

[00:19:12.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. And I guess lots of artists do, I suppose. Or maybe writers. 

[00:19:15.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I suppose they do. Yeah. But there's a rebel in me that doesn't want it too fixed. 

[00:19:27.91]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Before going on to really more recent paintings and stuff like that, how about printmaking and the role of—I mean, is it something that you really have enjoyed doing once you started, and everything? 

[00:19:38.58]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Peripheral. It's fun to work with people. It's frustrating as hell. The damn thing prints backwards. It never comes out. The print job, because you can flip—

[00:19:46.04]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:19:46.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  The ink never looks like the charcoal or the crayon or the paint. And yet there's some body and substance that you build up by building up six, seven, eight plates to make one image. It has its own limitations, but you can start to gradually gain some power and control of—It's fun to work with people. The surprise is fun. There's a little bit of lack of control, which annoys me, but I like it, too. 

[00:20:16.67]

And I don't—I mean, I've always put it down, and I always complain about it, and I always keep going back. Also, print studio people treat you so beautifully. ULAE Bill, I mean, they just—and Gemini, too. There's an extremely gracious character to these places that is a very seductive part of it. 

[00:20:39.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Mostly you've done—you did woodcuts first you said, and then you've gone mostly—you've done lithographs? 

[00:20:47.73]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I've done etchings, which—lithographs, woodcuts. I'm back to etchings a little now. Yeah, I guess I probably hit—I've never done silkscreen. 

[00:21:01.02]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  But it was first—was it first suggested to you as something like just a way of having multiples or something? 

[00:21:05.57]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I think Multiples called me, Marian Goodman. I think that's—

[00:21:10.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They might have been the one—

[00:21:11.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Or was it Kathan Brown's? Parasol Press, I think, was maybe the very first. I worked out in Oakland while I was teaching at Cal Arts. I flew there with the—

[00:21:20.43]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Crown, yeah. Crown Point. 

[00:21:22.26]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And we threw out most of what I did. Threw it away. Everything. 

[00:21:25.77]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:21:26.19]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It was a bust. Yeah. It was as bad as California. California was totally bad. That time—those three months. 

[00:21:34.17]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay. California reminds me of David Salle again. Not just him, but I was sort of—I wanted to get into it a little bit. The business, you know, the inclusion in the big international shows, and what sort of—those people who are in the same—who have been in some of the same shows. Like Schnabel and the Europeans. 

[00:22:00.13]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That's kind of a surprise to me. Because if I ever thought I had a generation, I thought it was whatever the New Image Show people were. 

[00:22:07.13]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. 

[00:22:08.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But I don't know where this quite started that I got pulled out of there and into this younger group. But I guess I'm—I don't know how I feel about it. I mean, that's sort of like this distant curiosity of—you know, am I the grandma there? Or am I this bridge that I've been seeing myself called? And why did I get put with them rather than with Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro and the Paula Cooper artists?

[00:22:34.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Well, I guess among the European artists who are in some of those shows, they are older. Some of them, at least. 

[00:22:41.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Some are. Baselitz and Penck and those people. 

[00:22:44.61]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, right. 

[00:22:46.58]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't know. That's a case—I mean, I've never traced it, but somewhere, sometime, somebody must have taken my work and put it with these people and made a show. It was probably in Europe. There was a show—Moskowitz, Rothenberg, and Schnabel. 

[00:23:02.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, really? It was a the three-person—

[00:23:04.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  In Jean-Christophe Ammann's place in Basel. It was a three-person show. Maybe that's the first time I was shown with them. 

[00:23:18.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  They said Moskowitz was part of that other—he was in the New Imagists. 

[00:23:20.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Yeah, so maybe the two of us got pulled out at that moment. I don't know when it was. We'd have to look at a group of them. 

[00:23:28.61]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I think it's more—maybe what's more the case is that there are—I don't know if it's of your generation—Well, you're the one who paints, maybe, of that generation. And most of those shows were painting shows. 

[00:23:42.72]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Neil Jenney, Lois Lane. And then David [True –Ed.] I mean, I think of the New Image people. I didn't know very many painters, as I said. Elizabeth—who got not put into this other generation. 

[00:23:59.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Do you feel as if—

[00:24:01.76]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Even though with imagery Elizabeth was very abstract. 

[00:24:04.28]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. I mean, the work is also different. There's not—you probably don't feel as if you're thinking about the same issues as much. 

[00:24:11.90]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  As David [Salle] and Eric [Fischl]? Oh, my God, no. 

[00:24:13.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Or—

[00:24:15.22]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Or Julian? 

[00:24:15.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, or Julian. 

[00:24:17.45]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Julian's a little closer to my own sensibility than those two guys are. I mean, I have tremendous alternate piece by piece respect for what they do. But even socially, ages apart. They're very well adapted for a successful artist's life. And I've always had that Bohemian resistance to it. Feeling co-opted and, you know. That other attitude—I'm more comfortable with it. Although it's been pointed out to me, I live quite well. I have a house in the country, a house in the city, and a car. [Laughs.] I mean, I haven't had too much trouble with it, so—

[00:25:03.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Those are things—people in the suburbs have all those things anyway. [They laugh.]

[00:25:08.92]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, I guess one thing—I can think of myself as rather suburban at this point. [They laugh.] I need a bathroom break. 

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:25:15.95]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay. So you said that you feel awkward doing that kind of—

[00:25:24.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, initially, I guess I felt a little awkward in this context of David Salle and Eric Fischl and the whole, I guess, balloon scene, because it wasn't my scene. It wasn't—the concerns weren't the same. We were all using imagery, but I very differently than they. 

[00:25:41.14]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Well, I suppose inasmuch as some of those big international shows might also include a Robert Ryman, too. I mean, they kind of seem to cover a range. It always often seems to be the same people. 

[00:25:52.06]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. Of what painting can be. But things have gotten so terribly trendy in the last five, eight years, that there's always been, it seems to me, a very strong desire to make a "what's happening" show a theme show. You know, showing different sides of the new thing. And I could have imagined now, in retrospect, that I would have been left quietly back with a slightly other intention than making—addressing the culture directly, as many of these artists do—taking on cultural issues. 

[00:26:28.51]

My works have been more about private issues, and perceptual issues, and paint issues than information. But I have to say that I think, probably, you can't see how it would have gone had this not happened. But it was probably pretty vitalizing to my name or my work staying fairly visible. 

[00:26:52.83]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:26:54.03]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But I don't quite understand who did it, or how, or why. I mean, sometimes I felt it was tokenism, that I was a token woman in a very male-oriented art world. And that I was a woman using images in a way that—Elizabeth Murray was making abstract work. Lois Lane, just her nature and her lifestyle are more retiring. She's not in New York anymore. And she's extremely shy. And she doesn't have a way of, perhaps, personally being visible. I'm not sure how important all that stuff is or isn't. 

[00:27:33.15]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, probably to some extent. Although there often seems to be some bottom line of including a few people who are actually good in every one of those shows. 

[00:27:43.86]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And see, that's the hardest thing I have—I have a hard time saying that that might be why. [They laugh.]

[00:27:50.27]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, I didn't think you were going to say it. [They laugh.]

[00:27:53.85]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I was trying to find another reason. But it did seem a little weird. I mean, Eric Fischl, I guess, of those people we've mentioned, is the closest in age to me. He's about 38, but still has four years—and still in New York. And in his work and in his brain, there's a generation gap. 

[00:28:16.14]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. He's thinking about different things. Are there people, other than the ones you've mentioned—is there anybody in your own generation, or any other—well, of, let's say, living people, whose work you really do—

[00:28:28.89]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Painters? 

[00:28:29.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:28:29.97]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Painters [inaudible]. Everybody has their own little plot of turf. I mean, it happens with age and time, and using your own style. Yeah, I have tremendous admiration for Murray. Elizabeth Murray. I'm fascinated with Neil Jenney's evolution. 

[00:28:57.45]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And their work is all pretty well independent of your—I mean, you don't—

[00:29:00.78]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. I really, honest to God, can't think of anyone else whose—I mean, I respect Pat Steir's work and her endeavor tremendously. It's very different from mine. I won't mention the people whose work—I have other—you know, there are painters that are occurring to me now. This is not a put down tape here, so—

[00:29:20.43]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, right. Well, let's maybe talk about some historical ones. Or maybe it's a way of getting into the Mondrian, and that sort of next stage in your painting. 

[00:29:40.51]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:29:40.60]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That was sort of an interesting—When did you first start thinking about him or putting him into a—

[00:29:45.91]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Never thought about him. Drew a drawing late one night. It looked like him. I suppose I could have told myself it looked like William Burroughs as well. But the few photographs I saw was just a pair of glasses. It was just kind of a semi-conscious charcoal. Nice drawing. Whited out face near a window. Pretended that it was a visitation of Mondrian. George, my ex-husband, loved Mondrian. He turned me on to him, really. Got physically excited and—really not what I was—you know. Loved Mondrian. I had never painted—you know, I thought it was boring. Giacometti you could always see, but Mondrian?

[00:30:30.88]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, the interesting thing about that, which I read somewhere, was saying about how—or maybe you said it—that you were sort of relating to him, the person, and the artist, or your view of him, rather than his work. 

[00:30:42.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. 

[00:30:42.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Inasmuch as your work is so different that that—

[00:30:45.04]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. I think I might have said it. And it's pretty much true. 

[00:30:49.99]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Which I think is interesting. 

[00:30:51.49]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Isolated. He's ascetic. I don't think of myself—there was enough opposites there. It was a playfulness. I'm sure there's some stuff about a father figure. Although he wasn't—but in my perversity, I could force him to be one. He became—he really became a character. The few tiny little pieces of things I know about him—I made him dance in Harlem in one painting. I made him stand and sniff green stuff in a painting because I knew he hated green. 

[00:31:25.81]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. [They laugh.] I think that painting—or, no, maybe not that one. But one of the Mondrian—maybe it was "Mondrian Dancing," was with the two—what are those figures called? They were in the Whitney Biennial, I think. The two tiny figures with the faces— 

[00:31:44.35]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Oh, that was another painting. "Green Ray." 

[00:31:46.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  "Green Ray," yes. I think it might have been shown with one of the Mondrian paintings. 

[00:31:50.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes, it was. 

[00:31:51.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And they went—and somehow they worked really well together. 

[00:31:53.44]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yes. That's a weird one. That's one of those strange ones, an idea about puppets. Two men and two panda puppets. I don't know why—I don't even think my kid has a panda doll or a bear in the house. But they wound up—it was sort of a teddy bear image, but they wound up being these grotesque sort of panda bears. And I became real interested in trying to paint their faces the same, the panda bears, but I couldn't. So then I got real interested in how to make them almost the same, but different. That became one of those weird paintings. I mean, there are paintings that you just can't say much about. 

[00:32:28.80]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Because they're sort of anomaly. 

[00:32:28.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Then the bodies of the men behind them disappeared. One of the keynotes was that ghastly yellow green streak that illuminated the puppet men's faces above the pandas. That was the keynote to the painting, and it was a formal element. A color and a line and a light. Everything else followed. 

[00:32:48.01]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The formal elements sort of created a mood, too, didn't it? So it was also that—

[00:32:53.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it was a cutting yellow light. It was a nightclub light. It was this phase in my work that I did a painting called "The Trumpeter" that got involved in—I was going out to hear some jazz at that time. And I wanted nightlight and I wanted theatrical light. Stage light. But that's not so much about Mondrian as I got sidetracked into a certain kind of mood that I wanted the paintings to have. 

[00:33:25.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:33:26.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's about nightclubs. 

[00:33:28.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, in almost all of the paintings, even the Mondrian ones, or the nightclub one, does it start out as one thing, and generally move to something else? Some of your paintings do. 

[00:33:42.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Some do. Most don't. 

[00:33:44.40]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:33:45.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Most is an idea. Then change in execution, but the idea is the idea. I mean, I knew I wanted to paint "The Trumpeter." I knew I wanted to make "Mondrian Dancing" in a club with a Black girl up in Harlem. 

[00:34:02.39]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You did. Right. Did you do a sketch or anything like that first? 

[00:34:06.23]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  No, but I made my accountant, who looks like Mondrian, [laughs] come in the studio and stick his arms out. 

[00:34:12.35]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Really? 

[00:34:13.04]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:34:13.79]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Is he tall and thin? 

[00:34:15.05]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Uh-huh [affirmative]. [Laughs.]

[00:34:16.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's great. 

[00:34:18.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Bill LeBaron. [Laughs.] [Inaudible] turn. And he enjoyed it tremendously. 

[00:34:26.36]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I'll bet. 

[00:34:27.17]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But Mondrian became not unlike the horse for a certain piece of time. You have something—I mean, I had much more feeling about what I was doing towards him as an imagined person than I do toward a horse. It's not a very—I don't love horses. In fact, I'm slightly scared of them. But I was—once again, I found something that I was hooked into in some way, this time consciously. Perhaps with the horse, subconsciously, or whatever that stuff was all about. 

[00:35:00.23]

But it became a bit of a dance in itself, the Mondrian paintings. And I feel like I probably would not, at this point in time, want to, or need to, make another horse painting. But if I had another Mondrian, I'm perfectly content for him to reappear in my work over the years. In fact, I believe I have one now of him sitting in a chair alone in a room. 

[00:35:23.04]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, I guess I saw it—

[00:35:24.35]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. It's that kind of head. 

[00:35:26.70]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. The first time you came out with one of those, and especially—maybe not the drawing, but the painting, actually, to show—showing it and stuff, did you feel that that was sort of daring? I mean, in a way, it seemed like it, to me, to do something that was—that's, in a way, irreverent, and yet not really. I mean, maybe it's reverent, also. 

[00:35:47.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I didn't think very much about what people would think. I don't until they—then I get shocked at some things people might say to me. But I'm not a very analytical person in that way. And I never—I mean, I have no idea what effect my work will have on anybody. And not very many people come to see it in the studio. So it's pretty much of a surprise. No, if somebody had attacked me for that, I would have been shocked. 

[00:36:14.53]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Well, no, I don't think it—

[00:36:16.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Or even taking it much more seriously than—I don't have answers for a lot of questions. Why horses? Why Mondrian? The answer is "because." They appeared. I was there, I received it, I grabbed it, and I took it where I could take it. But it's not conceptualized fully in my own brain. So to answer your question, no, I didn't feel brave or adventurous. But I thought I'd built a fairly nice painting. That's all that matters. 

[00:36:50.39]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Once it was done, yeah. You can show it. And it's just—

[00:36:54.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I also felt like I'd made a—like a child makes a fake playmate. 

[00:37:01.34]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That's interesting. Yeah, an imaginary playmate. 

[00:37:02.99]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  An imaginary playmate. I thought I had done the same. 

[00:37:06.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's great.

[00:37:08.88]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I mean, I really pretended to call upon this mysterious drawing, this visitation that he was—but I'm not in any way mystical or occult. Like, no knowledge or sense of those things. So I just realized that he was something for me to work with. He, it. But my attitude toward a man, then—a dead man. A sad man. A lonely man. 

[00:37:35.87]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  A very formal man, I think. 

[00:37:37.18]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. And a dedicated and pure man. I mean, there's a lot of things that I thought about him. 

[00:37:45.29]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. 

[00:37:47.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But it ticked off paintings in me.

[00:37:52.14]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I wonder if he was—I don't remember whether he was or not, but a theosophist. 

[00:37:55.09]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, yeah. 

[00:37:55.65]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Was he? 

[00:37:56.05]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That's exactly what he was. But I still—it's Madame Blavatsky, I think. 

[00:37:58.96]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right, right. 

[00:37:59.61]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't know much about it. 

[00:38:00.68]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  I don't know too much either. 

[00:38:02.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I'm not very interested in his writings or his theory, either. What I am interested in is when he moved the tape a quarter of an inch. 

[00:38:11.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  When he did what? 

[00:38:13.02]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You know, sometimes he made the paintings with yellow tape or blue tape. 

[00:38:16.23]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, right. 

[00:38:16.95]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  You know, and just to find out the exact right place for—that kills me with delight and fascination. 

[00:38:23.57]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Oh, really? That he would—

[00:38:25.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  That, I respond to. That under-painting and that movement—that it wasn't right. 

[00:38:30.08]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  He was sort of doing that by eye, too, in other words. 

[00:38:32.25]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah. The human touch and the little shift and the little error. And the completely plain, soft, nice application of paint. No fuss, no muss; just the opposite of what I do. If I could whirl paint into spaghetti and whipped cream and—you know, [laughs] I would. But he just placed it beautifully. Just where it was supposed to go. And then if it wasn't, he would just—that kind of meditation, that execution of a painting, knocks me out. 

[00:39:06.34]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Well, of course, his—

[00:39:09.10]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  But that's very up close. That's like you're eyeballing the surface, like an inch away. 

[00:39:13.56]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And formally he had a lot less to do than you do. I mean, let's face it. 

[00:39:18.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, but I am an Expressionist painter. I love the cleanness. This, you know—

[00:39:26.28]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. The moving it around and all that. 

[00:39:28.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:39:33.50]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  On the big—on big paintings, do you do something like—I guess you start out with something very sort of sketchy or—and then fill it in. You don't start off—

[00:39:46.07]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I always use a messy tinted gesso. I don't use white. I use like black or blue thrown into matte medium to prime the canvases. And I look for incidents in the gessos. I look to see if the way I did it the first time was different than the way I did it the second time. And if there are any—is there anything to grab on to in terms of location? But I usually have a sense of what the image will be and what the scale of the painting should be. I'm off sometimes, but I'd say about eighty percent of the time I'm satisfied with the fit of the image into that size piece of canvas. 

[00:40:26.56]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And then you kind of draw on it and outline on it? 

[00:40:29.06]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Occasionally with pencil, but usually I write with some black—or a dirty brush stuck in some old turpentine. 

[00:40:37.34]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Well, there was a—I don't know if it was a period of paintings or not, that—like "The Monk" and—some of the sort of—some of the overcoats. I think people are putting on coats. 

[00:40:52.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[00:40:52.42]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It seemed to be when things were, at least from your description, changing a lot in the course of painting. Like a figure might have started out down below and I would end up high up or something like that. Does that strike you as being—that there was a period when that was happening or—

[00:41:10.33]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Hmm. "The Monk" was a monk, and he did come after a print that I did of a disconnected figure with lines. No more than—I'm trying—where did you—did you read that? 

[00:41:28.59]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, it seemed—I guess at the time, when the ARTNews thing came out—and it could have been anything. It could have been the way the interview was conducted, or anything. But it was in February, of what, '84, probably? And you were probably interviewed like lots of months earlier. But it seemed as if you were talking about some of the paintings, and even—there was a parenthesis after one painting saying, you know, this one changed entirely after it was done, and something like that. I remember after you had been describing it—or maybe you even destroyed one, or something. It seemed as if—

[00:42:01.37]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It happens periodically. 

[00:42:02.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  It was a sort of searching kind of—

[00:42:03.32]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, it happens periodically. I can't say that it is a series—I mean, a whole bunch of paintings—it could happen tomorrow. [Laughs.]

[00:42:13.82]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Maybe in the middle of those, you were also doing certain ones of things that were completely resolved. 

[00:42:17.40]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's when things weren't really clear. Or I thought it was a good idea and it wasn't. And it never found its place, and it never found my conviction or my—and then sometimes you work on something like that for a month without allowing yourself to know that it's—it wasn't so hot in the first place. Those usually get thrown away. One or two are out there in the world, and I would go and chop them up in kindling if I could. 

[00:42:43.85]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah? Really? 

[00:42:45.38]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Well, one in particular. No, it's two paintings that I hate that I've done. But they're owned. [Laughs.] And they shall remain nameless. 

[00:42:57.84]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, we better—

[00:42:59.70]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah, I mean, I'm not always on. I'm not a great—this thing I'm doing isn't one I quite want to do this minute. 

[00:43:09.90]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah? But is that an idea that you're sort of pretty involved with right now? 

[00:43:13.82]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I want it to turn into a diffusion and a twinning. I mean, what I really want is, once again, my—I don't want the thing in its shadow or the thing in its double image. I want two things. Or maybe four things. 

[00:43:28.65]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Identical things? 

[00:43:30.90]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Not really. I want a multiplicity of—a small multiplicity of a—what's the—I can't even say it. But I think I can find it. As I said, is if I suddenly like it, like a cell in front of your eyes, I divide it in half, and then I divide it again. And you were slightly aware of the act of the divisions. I don't know why I want that, but that's what I want. And it's sort of—you know, that painting you mentioned, "Green Ray," was twin pandas. I want twinning and then some. 

[00:44:08.86]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. 

[00:44:09.79]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  What is that? The divided self? 

[00:44:12.21]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. 

[00:44:14.77]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's something. It's something about—

[00:44:17.74]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  The four faces of—

[00:44:18.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  —me and—something. Yes, it is. It's a psychological hint that wants to find a way to be visualized that's subtle yet clear. And it's also—it's anti-gravity, too, in that it's beyond the limitations of the skin, if not the weight. I'm not so interested in lifting the image into the air now as I am as diffusing it into space. 

[00:44:47.12]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And into paint. 

[00:44:48.35]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  And into paint. Yeah. I want that, too. It's just an intuitive—it's what I have to work toward. But I don't want this dancing thing anymore. Maybe I've calmed down. Maybe this dervish thing that it was trying to become is—well, it's an impossible thing to paint, anyway. I think the other one is more possible. The diffusion. And more—more likely. 

[00:45:14.71]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Had you done more dancers and dervish-type things? Or is this—

[00:45:17.72]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Oh, no. This is about six paintings, seven paintings about it in the storage thing. But they're very exhausting to paint. And they're psychologically exhausting. It would take too much figuring, and I've gotten too tight in some of them, trying to mark all the movements. It's a little bit—

[00:45:42.07]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Also, you're filling in—

[00:45:43.21]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  If I worked on it for another year, I could do it the best that it could be done by me. But I don't want to. 

[00:45:50.51]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  You're sort of more interested in this other thing you're talking about? 

[00:45:52.93]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. It's led back to that. Back to the simpler thing of twinning. You know, "Ten Men" once had ten figures in it. 

[00:46:01.37]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Well, I was wondering where it got that name. 

[00:46:03.96]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  It's an old idea. It ended up looking like a pattern painting to me, and so I painted them all out except the one little projection. But this is almost like ten men coming back, only it's seventeen, I think. 

[00:46:14.26]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. And they're all there. 

[00:46:16.30]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Uh-huh [affirmative].

[00:46:16.63]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  And it really makes it—it fills that canvas up—

[00:46:19.48]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yep. 

[00:46:19.66]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  —which is a little bit unusual for you. 

[00:46:22.50]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. That's all I wanted was that just that pink—

[00:46:27.34]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Yeah. Does this one have a name now? Or a working name that you can—

[00:46:32.78]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Just for identification purposes, it's called "the long, pink spinning one." 

[00:46:37.64]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Okay. [They laugh.]

[00:46:40.01]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  I don't know what it'll end up. I think purple hearts is a dark purple spot that I put in most of the bodies on the right side. So I think maybe something like spinning pinks with a purple heart. I don't know why that's there, but I just thought it was a piece of gravity that would shift with the spin, higher or lower in the chest area. 

[00:47:01.67]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. That's interesting. 

[00:47:03.43]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Like a rock in there. 

[00:47:06.30]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  That also goes back to some of those other things. "Falling Rock" and "Mist from the Chest," or something. 

[00:47:10.56]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. Hard and soft. You know, tension and curve. It's all that same—

[00:47:17.32]

CYNTHIA NADELMAN:  Right. Yeah. And actually trying to show the phenomenon itself in a way. I mean, that's why you might refer to the weather. 

[00:47:23.64]

SUSAN ROTHENBERG:  Yeah. 

[END OF TRACK AAA_rothen87_6515_m]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]