Editors note: I’m pleased to announce that Hewitt Callister has agreed to become a regular contributor to Vantage Art Projects and will take on the challenge of writing about artists and their work. Here’s a statement about the position he comes from when approaching both the artworks and the person behind the works – Jennifer Mawby, Vantage Art Projects.
Fighting the Material: Conversations with Artists Who Still Believe in the Work
By Hewitt Callister
Art should resist. If it does not push back against the artist, the viewer, or its own making, then what is it doing? This is the question I find myself circling every time I step into a studio or ask an artist why they bother. Because it is a bother, isn’t it? Making anything that will not immediately be consumed, flattened, and repackaged for resale feels like an act of willful defiance.
I send artists questions before I write about them. Not the usual careerist fluff about influences and art school pedigree, but the things that actually matter. I ask what keeps them in the studio. I ask what makes them fight with their own work, where they feel their process slipping away from them, and whether they trust the material or see it as an adversary. The responses vary, but there is always a moment, a hesitation, where you see what really matters to them.
Some talk about the struggle, how a piece never does what they want, how they have to break it before it finally resolves itself. Others are more fatalistic, claiming they just follow the material’s lead. One painter, whose work looks like a battlefield of scraped and torn surfaces, told me, “I like paintings that refuse to be finished. The best ones feel like they’re still shifting even after I leave them alone.” Another said, “If I know what it’s going to look like before I start, I lose interest.” This, to me, is where things get interesting. The moment an artist stops being a planner and starts becoming something closer to an antagonist, wrestling the work into a state that neither of them fully understands.
Then there is the question of permanence. I ask if they think their work belongs in a museum or if they care who collects it. Some shrug and admit they play the game, while others sneer at the very idea. But when I ask, “If everything you’ve ever made were destroyed tomorrow, what would you start over with?” the answers shift. Some name a new medium, others say they would not bother, that the work was always about the process, not the object. I have had artists tell me they would go back to drawing, to something primal, or that they would quit entirely. One, a sculptor working in materials so fragile they might as well be dust, laughed and said, “I’d probably start with dust.”
There is no right answer, but the way they answer says everything. The artists worth writing about are the ones who still believe the work matters more than the system built around it. They fight with the material, they let the material fight back, and in that struggle, something real happens. The rest is decoration.
And decoration has never interested me.
About the writer: Hewitt Callister is a retired teacher, painter, and anti-social critic known for his sharp, contrarian takes on contemporary art. Born in Toronto in 1956, he spent decades teaching before retreating to his studio outside of Montreal, where he paints, writes, and mentors a select few.