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William Christenberry - Place, Time, and Memory Southern Spaces

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Duration:
00:27:08
Publisher:
southernspaces
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Vimeo
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producersouthernspaces
Description:

In this abridged version of an illustrated lecture given at Emory University on February 26, 2007, artist William Christenberry introduces major themes in his work and presents examples from more than forty years of photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture centered upon his home state of Alabama.

http://southernspaces.org/2007/place-time-and-memory 


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As a student at the University of Alabama,
and my master's degree for what it's worth is in painting.
Although I took a great deal of sculpture and you're
going to see quite a few, quite a few photographs today.
But, excuse my English, I don't know nothing about photography.
But I started out in the early sixties wanting
to find a way again to deal with things that I grew up with,
with the good and the bad.
So here's a little.
This is the earliest photograph I have, earliest negative 1960
of a street in downtown Greensboro,
Alabama, which is the county seat of Hale County.
That's spelled H-A-L-E, not H-E-L-L. So Hale County.
It is in a way where my heart is, and I go back to it often
often and still go back to the places that still exist
and watch it's change, watch its, not demise,
but how dramatically it's changed over the years.
I'm starting off with the photographs
because you're going to see how they influence the sculpture
and the paintings.
As a student, I was painting pretty much
total non-objective paintings in the vein of not so much Jackson
Pollock, but Franz Kline, Philip Guston,
great artists of that period.
But I was not content with total non-objective work for myself.
That doesn't mean I don't like non-objective art.
I do.
I wanted to find a way, as I said,
to come to grips with this landscape of my childhood.
Rare black and white, browning, the upside-down promised hand.
This pit, this building was once run
by my great uncle, Uncle Sidney Duncan, as a country store,
and time goes by.
Late fifties, early sixties, and some Gypsies
come through the county, and they rent this building
from a landowner, whose house was 500 yards over to the left,
to tell fortunes.
Time goes by.
One day the landowner goes up there and they, the Gypsies,
had skipped the country, he said.
They had broken out my windows.
They had demolished the interior of my space,
and I just took their old sign and stuck it in the window
to keep the rain out.
Well, that became iconic to me, and I would go back to it
almost annually until the early eighties, when
it was, the building collapsed on its own.
And here is the first color picture of it,
of the upside-down promise sign.
I want to show you a couple of paintings.
This painting was made in 1960 called Tenant House,
Roman Numeral One.
It’s about 85 inches square.
All of the elements of Expressionism
except in this case, subject matter.
The tenant house, there in the center,
the grey structure to the right, the barn,
very expressionistic sky and tree.
And this was pivotal.
This was the breakthrough.
This is pretty much still what I'm trying to do today,
not necessarily in painting, but dealing
with this landscape and the feelings
for that landscape that permeate my being.
Tenant House, Roman Numeral Two.
The same year, back to the photographs,
something about that orange and blue building,
that blue sky and that red earth that caught my eye that day
in the early sixties.
My father and I have been doing, we
were visiting Sandy and the children
and I we were visiting Alabama this summer
of the late seventies, and Daddy and I had gone to a lake
nearby, to do a little fishing.
And we saw this terrifying thunderstorm
coming up and underneath that storm away over in the distance
where Sandy, the children and my mother.
And as you know, in the South, when
you see a storm cloud like that, you
think of tornado and other things.
But nevertheless, the sun was shining brightly here.
And I said to Daddy let me make a quick snapshot of that
before we move on.
And he said okay.
I made two or three different views.
This is probably the better one.
And I said, “Daddy, who runs that country store back there?”
He said, “Oh, it's Mr. So-and-so we went to high school
together.” So a few days later, I negotiated.
I got it for free.
The sign, which is eight feet high.
This is what I call my pure landscape.
[Background laughter] There was once over here to the left,
a country store that sold gas, but it
was long gone, just leaving that sign out there.
Probably again, one of the subjects
and one of the photographs that most gave me
a sense of direction that I'm still pursuing to this day.
Sandy and, we had two children, two babies,
and we were driving from Washington to Tuscaloosa.
Well, actually, Greensboro, just south of Tuscaloosa,
to visit my parents at Christmas time.
Along, tiring trip.
And I saw this, we came around a curve in the road,
and here was this beautiful country church, truly
like the hymn says, the church in the wild wood.
And I said, Sandy, let me make a quick snapshot of this.
So I made the snapshot and didn't think too much of it
till I got it back two weeks, a week or 10 days
later from being processed, and it just truly stayed with me.
And it's hard to express that kind of statement
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01-09-2025 00:00 - 01-09-2025 23:59