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By Chris Norris Design by LUCY QUINTANILLA
The Story of…
A Kindred Spirit in Claes
4
Kass Meets Picasso
2
Ruscha Lands a Punch
3
Start Here
1
Towers of Light
8
Always Andy
6
Grandmaster Kass
7
10
Love is Love
9
next
The New York art and life that inspired Deborah Kass’s all-caps Brooklyn icon
Stelllllla!
5
The
STORY
OF
KASS on KASS
2. Kass Meets Picasso
START HERE
4. A Kindred Spirit in Claes
3. Ruscha Lands a Punch
6. Always Andy
5. Stelllllla!
8. Towers of Light
7. Grandmaster Kass
Kass on Kass
9. Love is Love
Three years ago, the Brooklyn sun rose over two words that New Yorkers had either yelled, rapped, or kvetched for as long any of them had lived. Pairing two resonant, local interjections, artist Deborah Kass turned her 8-by-17-foot sculpture, OY/YO, into a palindromic phenomenon. The next day, a photo of the work made page one of The New York Times. Soon after, local officials sought legal means to keep the privately-funded tourist mecca on display permanently. “I certainly never did anything this huge and public before,” says Kass, who, at 67, self-describes as a “100% provincial New Yorker.” Rendered with aluminum, paint, and a few metric tons of cultural savvy, her work debuted in DUMBO, then moved to Williamsburg’s waterfront, then to the grounds of its permanent home, the Brooklyn Museum. Stanford University comissioned their own OY/YO to be installed at their Cantor Museum in Fall of 2019. Here, Kass takes us through nearly five decades of personal and New York history that helped produce this icon of contemporary public art.
Deborah Kass, OY/YO
Raymond BoyD/Getty Images (YO), Randy Duchaine / Alamy Stock Photo (OY), Previous page: Paul Marotta / Contributor (love), STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images (can)
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I’d wanted to be an artist as soon as I was conscious, and I don’t know why. It certainly wasn’t what anyone I knew did or even talked about. I was living in Long Island, and visiting the Met with my father and on class trips—part of the New York suburban education. My first big revelation was there. It came when I saw Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. I was maybe nine and I just went, ‘Wow. This person looks different from every other picture of a lady in this place.’ I was mesmerized by both the painting and the subject. ‘She looks different. She looks like people I know. She’s fat. She looks a bit like Grandma Eva. I know who this person is a little bit! More so than the people in a Courbet, or Delacroix, or even in other Picassos.'
Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein
Felix Hörhager/picture alliance via Getty Images
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Tracey Whitefoot / Alamy Stock Photo
“I had the idea for OY/YO when I was literally standing in MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] looking at OOF. I’d been going to MOMA since I was a kid. It’s always fun and often it inspires something, which is what you hope for when you go look at great art. You go to see a show and then you go visit your favorites on the way out. The old friends are the same old guys—and they’re almost all guys, unfortunately—and on the way out, I ran into Ed Ruscha. OOF!”
Ed Ruscha's OOF
When I started going to MOMA, it was more like, ‘Ok, I’m doing this with my life.’ I was 14, 15. On Saturday mornings I’d go to Art Students League to take drawing classes, anatomy, basic life drawing, and then go to MOMA in the afternoon because I really, really wanted to figure it out. And I’d be like, ‘Hmm, this Mark Rothko. It really looks amazing but it looks so damn serious and so spiritual and I don’t think I can go there ‘cause I don’t think I’m that kind of girl.’ And then it was de Kooning: ‘Oh my God, look at the paint, the paint’s amazing, what’s he doing with these women? Who cares, the paint’s amazing!’ The first Oldenburg show I saw there was kind of a big deal because it was funny. And I was like ‘Thank God someone has a sense of humor here!’ That was big. I got it and I loved it, and it was cartoony and I was a cartoonist so I was like, ‘Wow, that can be art? That’s amazing! When the Pop Art thing came bubbling up, it was really through Oldenburg.
Claes Oldenburg's Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything
Henry Groskinsky/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
I’d wanted to be an artist as soon as I was conscious, and I don’t know why. It certainly wasn’t what anyone I knew did or even talked about. I was living in Long Island, and visiting the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art] with father and on class trips—part of the New York suburban education. My first big revelation was there. It came when I saw Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. I was maybe nine and I just went, ‘Wow. This person looks different from every other picture of a lady in this place.’ I was mesmerized by it, both the painting and the subject. ‘She looks different. She looks like people I know. She’s fat. She looks a bit like Grandma Eva. I know who this person is a little bit! More so than the people in a Courbet, or Delacroix, or even in other Picassos.
The real big one was Frank Stella, when I was 17. He had a retrospective at MOMA when he was 44, and I was 17, and that one really changed everything because I understood what he was doing. And that understanding thrilled me. Like, I understood how he got from A to B, and B to C, and that was my biggest epiphany. Because I was like I….get it! I get what he’s doing. I get the objects afoot. I get the edge, the relation of form to the content. I get what he’s talking about. And that was a big thing. And that’s why I quote Frank in so much of my work, because he meant a lot to me.
Frank Stella's Quathlamba
Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
John Lamparski/Getty Images (WARHOL), ©2019 deborah kass/ arists rights society (ars), new York (double double yental (my elvis), " 1992)
“I’m still waiting for my phone call from Barbra Streisand. I know she has one of my paintings [of her]. But, talk about a role model. Back then, she was it. She was the one. Barbra was a sensation for just being who she was. And nobody like her had been a superstar. I mean, she was just totally fucking radical. And what was radical is her self-regard. That was it. It’s just beginning middle and end. It’s like, Whoa, a girl? With that self-regard? A Jewish girl, in public, with that kind of self-regard? This is the new big star? Oh. My. God. It was like heaven, it was a revelation. At least to me. Then throw in her politics, liberal Jewish Democrat from New York? Nobody was like her. Except people I knew. They just weren’t 21 and becoming a superstar, like she was.”
Deborah Kass, Double Yentl
“I had the idea for OY/YO when I was literally standing in MOMA looking at OOF. I’d been going to MOMA [New York’s Museum of Modern Art] since I was a kid. It’s always fun and often it inspires something, which is what you hope for when you go look at great art. You go to see a show—and I don’t even remember which one this was—and then you go visit your favorites on the way out. The old friends are the same old guys—and they’re almost all guys, unfortunately—and on the way out, I ran into Ed Ruscha. OOF! In 2011, she produced the first incarnation of YO, an oil painting with bright gold letters on a vivid blue background.
Ed Ruscha's 1962 "OOF
Andy Warhol's Double Elvis "Andy, really, changed everything," Kass says. "It’s hard to overstate that. Andy Warhol and the romance of New York in the Abstract Expressionist era—these two completely divergent things created the art of my generation."
Andy Warhol, Double Elvis. Andy, really, changed everything. It’s hard to overstate that. Andy Warhol and the romance of New York in the Abstract Expressionist era—these two completely divergent things created the art of my generation.
“You’d have to be blind not to see the warm, wry lifeforce beneath her works’ cool, detached Warholian surfaces.”
— critic Robert Storr on Deborah Kass
I wasn’t a Downtown scenester at all. I was really an art person. But other than art, Hollywood and music are my two favorite industries. My musical tastes have sort of changed, but only a little. I’m an American Songbook person, my parents’ music, and it has really informed my work. Start with black culture, throw some Jews into the mix, and you end up with the American songbook and there is nothing greater. Blacks and immigrants making the most important American contribution to the world. I really love jazz, whether it’s Thelonious Monk, or Callas. Or Barbra. Or Frank. Or Sarah Vaughan. Or Coltrane. I love the 20th century of music. I love Motown. I love the Stones, you know? I love Dylan. I love the music of my parents’ generation and I love the music of my generation. I mean…Chaka Khan? Prince? It’s the greatest.
Deborah Kass's Good Times
©2019 deborah kass/ arists rights society (ars), new York ("good times," 2015)
“I lived in Trbeca for 9/11 and I still can’t think of a better tribute than this work. It was just brilliant. Every September 11th I go somewhere to see it, and it always makes me cry. I was living six blocks above it on West Broadway and I’ll tell you living in Tribeca after that was a nightmare. It was brutal. Nobody understands what it was like. I had to show my driver’s license to go south of Canal Street and West of Broadway. And those firetrucks with the dust and people leaving flowers...that was outside my window on Duane Street. And it’s wet 24 hours a day because the garbage trucks are wetting down my streets because everything’s toxic here and you can smell it. I was down there looking at the wall over by Battery Park, with all the missing people, and there were pieces of paper taped to everything, looking for people. It was bad, it was terrible. But those lights are just amazingly good. They truly are.”
Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere's Tribute in Light
Noam Galai/Getty Images
Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Robert Indiana’s LOVE began in two dimensions. Feeling he was a poet and a painter, his early 60s paintings treated text, numbers, and symbols in striking colors and hard edges common to other abstractions of the era. In 1965, MOMA commissioned him to produce their Christmas postage stamp. Breaking the word into two stacked rows of red serif characters, with a tilted “O,” he set them against a bright blue and green backdrop, minting an image that swiftly spread throughout the culture, now a visual synecdoche of ‘70s America. Originally executed in red, green, and purple, the more familiar version resembles this one in midtown Manhattan. Bold red letters standing out against a backdrop alternating between bright blue and green. Its titled “O” brings playfulness and a sense of human imperfection: instantly accessible and the prototype for playful works of public art.
Robert Indiana, LOVE
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Deborah Kass
Three years ago, the Brooklyn sun rose over two words that New Yorkers had either heard, yelled, rapped, or sighed for as long any had lived. Paring two resonant, local interjections, Deborah Kass turned her 8-by-17-foot sculpture, OY/YO, into a nearly instant phenomenon. The next day, a photo of the work made page one of The New York Times. By year’s end, OY/YO had [metrics on Instagram hits?] Soon after, local officials were seeking legal means to keep the privately-funded tourist mecca there permanently. “I certainly never did anything this huge and public before,” says Kass, who, at 67, self describes as a “100-percent provincial New Yorker.” Rendered with aluminum, paint, and a few metric tons of cultural savvy, her work in palindromic slang debuted in DUMBO, then moved to Williamsburg’s waterfront, then to the grounds of the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be until the end of June. A bold, wry work, OY/YO speaks to, and for, every place it has lived. Deborah Kass takes us through nearly five decades of personal and New York history that helped produce this icon of contemporary public art.
"So many artists of my generation were inspired by Abstract Expressionists and the mythology of New York. Only it wasn’t mythology, it was true. I’ll always love this city."
"When my mother was dying, we turned on the Frank Sinatra channel. And Sarah Vaughan came up, my father’s favorite. My father played the sax, and clarinet, the musical dentist, and he’s why I’m so into all this music. And right then, Sarah Vaughan came on singing “Over the Rainbow” and it was the most perfect way to go out. What do I want to die to? I think it might be [John Coltrane’s] A Love Supreme. I don’t care what song, just put that fuckin’ thing on. I want to hear people going [low voice] 'A love supreme…A love supreme.' Yeah, that’s probably how I want to go out."
Grace Roselli
