Sitting around in the café most afternoons at the Brewery Art Colony in the latter half of the 1990s, Roland Reiss didn’t exactly hold court. He was too good a listener to do that. He enjoyed the give and take and would seize upon whatever subject in which a person was an expert. Over a cup or two of whatever they were drinking he would pull fundamental truths out of them in an interrogation that was much more a mental massage then it was a Q and A. In addition to mourning his physical passing, the sad knowledge that we will never see him again, share our latest creative activity with him, of all these and more the loss of that infinitely deep well of knowledge, the thousands of conversations where he massaged up to the surface what someone knew and held in their brain, a repository, until a future conversation with someone else allowed him to impart what was gleaned in a chat over lunch a year or a decade prior – that is what I will miss most about Roland.
It was in sharing information that Roland will be remembered most by those who knew him – and not just by those to whom he imparted ideas. Are there a hundred thousand artworks by two thousand artists who got over their mental block after an encouraging studio visit from Roland? Easily tens of thousands of paintings out there exist because an artist discovered the best possible material for what they wanted to accomplish after Roland saw what they were looking for and happily whispered the secret of what gel, or medium or solvent or surface material would work best. There is a parable of two armies. Each had printed out a guide for their general on how to proceed in battle. One general guarded his book, read it in secret and only gave out the information to others when the situation called for it. The other sat down with his troops and had them copy the whole thing. When the battle happened, the latter general’s troops knew everything their leader did and triumphed. Roland was the latter kind of leader. He wanted you to know everything he knew so that you could be the best version of yourself. And perhaps you didn’t notice but he wanted to know what you knew, understand what you did better than anyone else, so he could share the best of you with anyone else he might meet who would benefit from what you had spent a lifetime perfecting and achieving.
I noticed that the artists who lunched with Roland made better art after a few months of conversations with him. He had an insatiable thirst for connecting with the greatest possible artist inside a person and pulling that master out. And he did it just to be a good neighbor, there was absolutely no career advantage for him – by then he had already done the Whitney Biennial, Dokumenta, museum permanent collections, full page advertisements for his gallery solo shows on the back cover of ArtForum, there was nothing any of his studio artist neighbors at the Brewery could possibly do for him, except to have a nice exchange about life while taking a break from that time in the sacred space every artist calls their studio. And so there he was, day in and day out, a deep resource and an insatiably curious learner, all in one. And it wasn’t just studio advice he gave. He knew the ropes of the art world, had suffered his own battles with human nature, be it the greed of gallerists or the jealousies of colleagues, and was passionately committed to letting anyone heading in those directions just what the likely outcome of the path they were on would be. He was a patient father figure to some, a keeper of secrets to others, a field general with an open book to all.
Of course, the final brutal truth in the art game, and the one of which he was most aware, is that the only thing that really mattered was the art. You can be the nicest person, the best friend and the most loyal advocate and art history will not give a hoot about your existence if you made dull, derivative art. Roland was no fan of mortality and worked tirelessly in the studio. The clock was ticking and he wanted to live beyond physical death in his art. All of his art was of its time yet carried a certain leap of faith in the immortality of the art object that advertises its own timelessness. He had three distinct bodies of work that reached world class status in my estimation (that alone is amazing/something few artists per millenia ever accomplish). His sculpture of the 1960s sat on a tightrope between Pop art’s garishness and Minimalism’s specific object. Entertaining forms asserting their crowd-pleasing presence, these varied (though usually large-scale) works were simultaneously the antidote to both the rigidities of Judd and the frivolities of Warhol. But he began making his dioramas – the work he is most historically lauded for – as an escape from the dead-end that many an artist sees in formalism. After more than two decades of commercial, critical, institutional and personal success he just up and abandoned them. He went to painting. He told me once about his decision to stop making the art that the world expected from him and start making the art he wanted to make. He could have gone two ways, to making larger versions of the dioramas as experiential walk-thru installations or he could embrace painting. He chose the latter. Why? To paraphrase him “When you are painting you are putting your talents and intellect up against every painter before you and every painter who will come after you. You are doing this to be mentioned in the same breath as Velasquez. When you are making installations you can be part of the conversation with Ann Hamilton after one big show.” And so he painted in his present with an eye to what the future will love and what the past could always deliver.
He was the warmest of company, usually picked up the check, always had gossip about our mutual friends and poked fun at the power players out there. Mention an artist from the past and he could pull out an anecdote that was interesting and useful to make sense of their oeuvre. He had definite opinions (with no shame in being pragmatically left of center) and would talk about current events without being strident or making politics his personality. He understood his role in the structure of academia but rolled his eyes at the excess and the pretense of its practitioners. Too many times to count I would glance at the Brewery Art Colony while driving up or down the five freeway at night and see the solitary studio light from the big window looking east in his fourth floor penthouse studio there and just feel like art history was percolating and that something being made under that light that night might be around in a few hundred years. He certainly knew the best materials to help that happen and the way the game was played to give his art a chance at being seen. But more importantly, he knew what the best art that had survived the test of time looked like and he joined that conversation with a distinct versatility that audiences years from now will enjoy.
Condolences to his wife, Dawn Arrowsmith. Roland Reiss 1929-2020.