“To me you bulldoze
your way into your unique given to see if there is a there there that you can
live with and then make something out of.”
Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie
The polymath
New York artist Alfred
Leslie’s life has been a search to make works of art that have meaning that
extends beyond the zeitgeist of the day. Working with painting in both the
abstract and realist genres, filmmaking, sculpture, digital imagery and writing
he considers himself as an autodidactic despite having studied at New York
University (NYU) during the tail end of the 1940’s
As he told Art
in America’s Judith Stein “I enrolled at NYU under the GI Bill. I was able
to ghost most of the classes, doing pretty much what I wanted. It was a great
situation, a unique moment—a fluke, really. The postwar art department was in
flux, uncertain about how to mix high-school graduates with the newly
demobilized military personnel.”
But even
then in his early twenties Leslie was mixing up his artistic disciplines
working on painting, sculpture and avant-garde films.
As he
explained to the Brooklyn
Rail’s Phong Bui a few weeks ago “It was
simply a question of staying away from the easy path and to trying to find
something consequential in what you were making. Plus, I think of myself as
self-taught. My kind of basic skills were pretty much in place when I was a
child. I could draw, make films, and act. I won prizes and art scholarships and
I was a gymnast, but none of it ever seemed to me to be a straight arrow to the
truth. (Whatever that means.) Thinking on it now I seem always to be looking
for something more consequential but could never figure out what it was.”
When he was 24 Leslie had his first solo exhibition in New York showing his
abstract expressionist works and within a decade his work was gaining exposure worldwide.
Then in 1962 he changed course and started painting in a realist figurative
mode.
About which he has said “there was a point
at which I realized that if my work was to develop and evolve, and if I was to
mature as an artist, these figurative ideas could not be ignored, even though
following them could seem to imply that I would be turning my back on the
twentieth century, turning my back on my abstract achievement.”
The catalyst for this change was primarily his
involvement with film and photography.
“Figuration
and narration were then contentious issues for many painters, but these
concerns didn’t exist per se in the film, theater, literary or still
photography worlds, all of which I was a part of. The virtual banishment of
figuration and narrative from the vocabulary of so many thoughtful artists was
one of the legacies of the modernists, who handed them over to photography in
all its forms. I never accepted this, and considered film and photography to be
part of the continuum of painting,” he has explained.
About which
he has elaborated stating “The person I paint doesn’t exist; the body is a
reflection of process and randomness, a composite of sittings. By the time I’m
through, the only “there” that’s there is the “there” I have made.”
Leslie has
been afflicted for all his life by an isolating hearing impairment caused by a childhood
illness. It is a disability that predominately comes to the fore when invited
to participate group panel discussions.
A challenge
about which he has said “It was tough
when all the sound was projected out into a dark room, and I couldn’t hear or
even see gestures. I remember a panel at Cooper Union that Edwin Denby
moderated. I just sat there and didn’t say anything. Finally Edwin called on me.
So I did what I usually did: stood up, faced the audience and said, “This is
all a lot of shit.” Most of the time everybody would laugh, applaud, even
cheer. Then I would
say whatever I wanted to say.”
An exhibition of his early work Alfred Leslie: Abstraction 1951 – 1962 is
currently on show at New York’s Allan Stone
Projects until the 24th
of December.
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