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Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings
Essays on art-making, abstraction, humor, not-knowing, awkwardness and more, from one of New York’s most influential and popular painters and teachers
Since the 1970s, Amy Sillman―a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene―has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor. As Jason Farago notes in the New York Times, "Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings."
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Since the 1970s, Amy Sillman―a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene―has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor. As Jason Farago notes in the New York Times, "Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings."
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 20, 2020
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March 14, 2021
At one point in the essay “Abex and Disco Balls,” Amy Sillman writes “…when I saw Leidy Churchman’s videos, I thought, I can die now; my message to the world has been received, and gestural painting is in good hands again.”
I felt something very similar throughout my reading of Sillman’s book; there is so much good meaty straight talk here. And that's not so unlike my impression when I first stumbled upon a show of her paintings at Bard College many years ago. Here’s someone embracing the awkward yet sophisticated in forms and colors - and in this book, with words and drawings.
Another bit of Sillman I stumbled on after seeing her work in person was a talk she gave at the Guggenheim - and I was delighted to find that talk transcribed here in this book as an essay, “On Color.” She speaks of the heft of the stuff, the quasi-fetishistic we painters possess as we stuff our shopping carts, once upon a time at Pearl Paint. “Making a painting is hard, it makes you crazy. Before even the vicissitudes of color, you have to negotiate tone, silhouette, line, space, zone, area, layer, scale, speed, and mass while interacting with a meta-surface of meaning, thought, text, sign, language, intention, concept, and history; you have to go your own way, to cut away from your heroes and influences, and still be utterly conscious and literate about the discourse. You have to simultaneously diagnose, predict and ignore the past, present and future, all at once; you have to remember and to forget impulses toward romanticism and irony; you have to both love and hate your objects and your subjects, to believe every shred of romantic and passionate mythos about painting and at the same time to cast a gimlet eye upon it.”
Here’s someone who embraces the process: “…drawing itself seem like an activity not founded on logic but made up of contingencies, overflow, stray parts - a process that might be described as working blind, like a mole, or like a beaver building a thatch, rather than like someone with an overarching worldview.”
“But still, in art -making things don't necessarily happen in order. They happen simultaneously, or they circle around and repeat, or they are incomplete, or people realize things backward or feel a fondness for forms of obsolescence.”
Sillman seems like both the perfect painter and the perfect spokesperson for this time of gay, queers, trans, re-evaluation of language, acceptance of difference in the face of rising fascism. For some of us painters coming to age in the 70s and 80s, we looked to our grandparents of painting, the AbEx generation, with love, while realizing that the stuff could be bloated with self-seriousness and macho bravado. Yet we refused to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Sillman wrote, “…I don't find it odd that AbEx practices have now been vitally reinvigorated by a queered connection of the vulgar and camp. Many artists - not least of them women and queers - are currently re-complicating the terrain of gestural, messy, physical, chromatic, embodied, handmade practices.”
Some of the drawings in the book are rich for their exposing her own abstraction language. It reminds me of a book I once bought in a dollar bin - it was a Miro catalog with handwritten marginalia by the previous owner, the art critic Thomas Hesse. In his notes, he made references to the real world things going on in the images - things that I was totally overlooking for my formalist eye. I suppose there really are abstract painters who live and work in that world of colors and shapes, but others of us are thinking, musing, riffing off of memories of bodies, interactions, all that stuff of the real world, although perhaps without it being immediately obvious. Kudos to Sillman for showing her cards.
In some of the essays, Sillman demonstrates her ability to write with the best of art writers; I’m taking Art Forum type stuff. And in other essays, she seems to say, aw fuck all that, and writes in non-art-forum sort of ways. Her essay on Louise Fishman is a riff off of baseball commentary, while her essay on Maria Lassnig reads like a love letter. While that might come off as gimmicky from another writer, here, you can’t doubt her sincerity.
In reading this book, I thought of Zeno’s paradox; that you can’t really get anywhere, because before getting there, you had to get halfway there, and are thus unable to reach any destination. In reading this book, I kept slowing down, hoping not to finish it, endeavoring to create my own personal Zeno’s Paradox of reading. It didn't work - the book is finished. But now, it’s destined for that shelf of books in my library that continue to be the sort of thing that gives a painter that extra urge to get into the studio and work. This book of Sillman’s is there, now.
I felt something very similar throughout my reading of Sillman’s book; there is so much good meaty straight talk here. And that's not so unlike my impression when I first stumbled upon a show of her paintings at Bard College many years ago. Here’s someone embracing the awkward yet sophisticated in forms and colors - and in this book, with words and drawings.
Another bit of Sillman I stumbled on after seeing her work in person was a talk she gave at the Guggenheim - and I was delighted to find that talk transcribed here in this book as an essay, “On Color.” She speaks of the heft of the stuff, the quasi-fetishistic we painters possess as we stuff our shopping carts, once upon a time at Pearl Paint. “Making a painting is hard, it makes you crazy. Before even the vicissitudes of color, you have to negotiate tone, silhouette, line, space, zone, area, layer, scale, speed, and mass while interacting with a meta-surface of meaning, thought, text, sign, language, intention, concept, and history; you have to go your own way, to cut away from your heroes and influences, and still be utterly conscious and literate about the discourse. You have to simultaneously diagnose, predict and ignore the past, present and future, all at once; you have to remember and to forget impulses toward romanticism and irony; you have to both love and hate your objects and your subjects, to believe every shred of romantic and passionate mythos about painting and at the same time to cast a gimlet eye upon it.”
Here’s someone who embraces the process: “…drawing itself seem like an activity not founded on logic but made up of contingencies, overflow, stray parts - a process that might be described as working blind, like a mole, or like a beaver building a thatch, rather than like someone with an overarching worldview.”
“But still, in art -making things don't necessarily happen in order. They happen simultaneously, or they circle around and repeat, or they are incomplete, or people realize things backward or feel a fondness for forms of obsolescence.”
Sillman seems like both the perfect painter and the perfect spokesperson for this time of gay, queers, trans, re-evaluation of language, acceptance of difference in the face of rising fascism. For some of us painters coming to age in the 70s and 80s, we looked to our grandparents of painting, the AbEx generation, with love, while realizing that the stuff could be bloated with self-seriousness and macho bravado. Yet we refused to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Sillman wrote, “…I don't find it odd that AbEx practices have now been vitally reinvigorated by a queered connection of the vulgar and camp. Many artists - not least of them women and queers - are currently re-complicating the terrain of gestural, messy, physical, chromatic, embodied, handmade practices.”
Some of the drawings in the book are rich for their exposing her own abstraction language. It reminds me of a book I once bought in a dollar bin - it was a Miro catalog with handwritten marginalia by the previous owner, the art critic Thomas Hesse. In his notes, he made references to the real world things going on in the images - things that I was totally overlooking for my formalist eye. I suppose there really are abstract painters who live and work in that world of colors and shapes, but others of us are thinking, musing, riffing off of memories of bodies, interactions, all that stuff of the real world, although perhaps without it being immediately obvious. Kudos to Sillman for showing her cards.
In some of the essays, Sillman demonstrates her ability to write with the best of art writers; I’m taking Art Forum type stuff. And in other essays, she seems to say, aw fuck all that, and writes in non-art-forum sort of ways. Her essay on Louise Fishman is a riff off of baseball commentary, while her essay on Maria Lassnig reads like a love letter. While that might come off as gimmicky from another writer, here, you can’t doubt her sincerity.
In reading this book, I thought of Zeno’s paradox; that you can’t really get anywhere, because before getting there, you had to get halfway there, and are thus unable to reach any destination. In reading this book, I kept slowing down, hoping not to finish it, endeavoring to create my own personal Zeno’s Paradox of reading. It didn't work - the book is finished. But now, it’s destined for that shelf of books in my library that continue to be the sort of thing that gives a painter that extra urge to get into the studio and work. This book of Sillman’s is there, now.
September 30, 2022
read for class. i loved this! tbh when i googled sillman's paintings i wasn't super into them (like poetry, painting is super subjective; unlike poetry, painting sells for millions of dollars) but i loved her ziney drawings, her overall DIY ethos. in this intimate, messy book, i rly felt that she embodied it despite being so embedded in the art world. as w other readings i've been doing for this class on writing by visual artists, i'm like, times were diff in the 70s! ppl could be working artists in nyc?? institutions weren't as massive?? idk could be nostalgia too
"i've always been very interested in the underdog, the dropouts, the outsiders, people who choose an extreme path—almost a la simone weil—a refusal to compete"
"in new york you can just disappear, or just say, in a very profound way, you're not going to have access to me... but that's only possible when there is a genuine idea of subculture, an idea of the outside" maybe it doesn't feel like a subculture exists in nyc today. maybe slime queen performing on her friend's bf's roof is the subculture tho
that said i'm a poser, and she is too! i related to how she obsesses over having a DIY aesthetic—"there's this part of me that wants everything to be super tight and good, even though i like it to look like it's breezy... there's a high-low, an informed openness at work here" maybe not the same but i love fussing over things in poetry or ableton even tho ultimately i don't know anything and it doesn't matter
"what could be less punk than staying up late in a studio trying hard to make a 'better' oil painting?" hahaha
"you have to both deny and embrace all your impulses toward romanticism and irony; you have to both love and hate your objects and subjects; to believe every shred of romantic and passionate mythos about painting and at the same type cast a gimlet eye upon it" like what my ex just said about being sincere but with enough irony to remember where you came from... not so ironic you're nihilistic, but w a sense of humor
"awkwardness is that thing, which is fleshy, funny, downward-facing, uncontrollable; it is an emotional or even philosophical state of being, against the great and noble, but also against the cynical" in her essay shit happens, hey shit is very important to my aesthetic/poetic philosophy too
i've always thought that abstract art was very conceptual/pretentious, but from this book i learned that it's abstract bc it's intuitive, immediate, bodily
i don't rly resonate w anything she says about color and shape though i like how material and wet both of those concepts are for her. maybe overall in this class i'm not that interested in using words to describe visual exp. just look lol
this isn't a very new idea but i liked how she wrote about art and politics, art as "politics of the personal," composition being in the "realm of intimacy, care, and feelings." i often roll my eyes at attempts to politicize art in of itself but ya know i also know this is true. i liked how she put it, uncertainly, passionately, written from the real agony of feeling useless, aware that it's not revolution but that it is for her
"i've always been very interested in the underdog, the dropouts, the outsiders, people who choose an extreme path—almost a la simone weil—a refusal to compete"
"in new york you can just disappear, or just say, in a very profound way, you're not going to have access to me... but that's only possible when there is a genuine idea of subculture, an idea of the outside" maybe it doesn't feel like a subculture exists in nyc today. maybe slime queen performing on her friend's bf's roof is the subculture tho
that said i'm a poser, and she is too! i related to how she obsesses over having a DIY aesthetic—"there's this part of me that wants everything to be super tight and good, even though i like it to look like it's breezy... there's a high-low, an informed openness at work here" maybe not the same but i love fussing over things in poetry or ableton even tho ultimately i don't know anything and it doesn't matter
"what could be less punk than staying up late in a studio trying hard to make a 'better' oil painting?" hahaha
"you have to both deny and embrace all your impulses toward romanticism and irony; you have to both love and hate your objects and subjects; to believe every shred of romantic and passionate mythos about painting and at the same type cast a gimlet eye upon it" like what my ex just said about being sincere but with enough irony to remember where you came from... not so ironic you're nihilistic, but w a sense of humor
"awkwardness is that thing, which is fleshy, funny, downward-facing, uncontrollable; it is an emotional or even philosophical state of being, against the great and noble, but also against the cynical" in her essay shit happens, hey shit is very important to my aesthetic/poetic philosophy too
i've always thought that abstract art was very conceptual/pretentious, but from this book i learned that it's abstract bc it's intuitive, immediate, bodily
i don't rly resonate w anything she says about color and shape though i like how material and wet both of those concepts are for her. maybe overall in this class i'm not that interested in using words to describe visual exp. just look lol
this isn't a very new idea but i liked how she wrote about art and politics, art as "politics of the personal," composition being in the "realm of intimacy, care, and feelings." i often roll my eyes at attempts to politicize art in of itself but ya know i also know this is true. i liked how she put it, uncertainly, passionately, written from the real agony of feeling useless, aware that it's not revolution but that it is for her
February 14, 2023
[3.5 stars] Sillman is an amazing artist. And I imagine she'd be an excellent teacher, too - the breadth and depth of Sillman's grasp of art history is palpable. Her analysis of her peers' work is also razor sharp, if a little less fun to read. The essay on color and the one on shape are exceptional. These two pieces alone are worth the price of the book. I also discovered a bunch of really great painters, whom I hadn't heard of, through her advocacy in this collection.
The progressive political potential of abstraction is a recurring theme here. Sillman makes a virtuosic case for it, and I do not doubt for a minute her commitment to form-as-a-political-project; that said, at times it does feel as though she is trying just a tad too hard to convince herself (I am a fan, so like most of her target audience, I am already sold on the idea.) It also feels like a particularly New York-centric take on how people relate to images, which, isn't necessarily a criticism, but I just don't know how often people outside of America still think about the ideological resonances of the New York avant garde in this very specific, slightly paranoid sort of way.
The drawings are *hilarious.*
The progressive political potential of abstraction is a recurring theme here. Sillman makes a virtuosic case for it, and I do not doubt for a minute her commitment to form-as-a-political-project; that said, at times it does feel as though she is trying just a tad too hard to convince herself (I am a fan, so like most of her target audience, I am already sold on the idea.) It also feels like a particularly New York-centric take on how people relate to images, which, isn't necessarily a criticism, but I just don't know how often people outside of America still think about the ideological resonances of the New York avant garde in this very specific, slightly paranoid sort of way.
The drawings are *hilarious.*
November 21, 2020
Great stuff! I’m already a fan so this wasn’t a hard sell for me.
What I most enjoyed about Sillman’s writing was her obvious enthusiasm for the history of painting, as well as an expansive knowledge of the “canon” as well as an insider view into the myriad ways she’s used and abused such knowledge in the service of her own practice (all painters do this). Something I came away thinking- “I bet she is one hell of a teacher.”
Additionally, these essays happily show someone thinking through their fingers- a kind of intellectual inquiry that bears a resemblance to her paintings but takes language as its primary material.
Couldn’t make it through the Louise Fishman “color commentator” essay. Too silly.
What I most enjoyed about Sillman’s writing was her obvious enthusiasm for the history of painting, as well as an expansive knowledge of the “canon” as well as an insider view into the myriad ways she’s used and abused such knowledge in the service of her own practice (all painters do this). Something I came away thinking- “I bet she is one hell of a teacher.”
Additionally, these essays happily show someone thinking through their fingers- a kind of intellectual inquiry that bears a resemblance to her paintings but takes language as its primary material.
Couldn’t make it through the Louise Fishman “color commentator” essay. Too silly.
June 24, 2023
It does not evade me the irony of the act of me, an artist, writing a review of a book written by an artist full of reviews on other artists. I hadn't heard of Amy Sillman before and I also studied art history. This seemed to be the kind of book geared towards people just like myself, both artists and art historians, because this book is one bug name drop after another. It's been a fee years since I studied most of the artists mentioned, so I've forgotten a bit. That means a lot of this also went way over my head. I really enjoyed certain chapters, my favorite being on color. I want my past art professors to read those along with me and discuss Sillman's interesting perspective.
August 27, 2024
I think discussing the formal elements of art kills it for me, even though it is important to do. Amy Sillman seems to think a lot about the technical formalities a lot which initially I struggled with. I did enjoy the essay on awkwardness, there were a couple of essays at the end which were special too. I think we have different taste. I also struggled to relate to the art world she was referring to, it felt quite unreachable somehow- perhaps it’s not. Saying this, I really looked forward to dipping in and out.
January 17, 2021
The essays on Shape and Color are
excellent. Amy Sillman paints some of the most exciting work I have seen currently. She is articulate about her process and what she is thinking. And she has a sense of humor. Worth the read if you are interested in contemporary painting.
excellent. Amy Sillman paints some of the most exciting work I have seen currently. She is articulate about her process and what she is thinking. And she has a sense of humor. Worth the read if you are interested in contemporary painting.
November 18, 2021
wish I had read Ab ex and Disco balls in grad school.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews