Raquel Rabinovich on the invisible world, slowing down & mud as aesthetic

In a bright, airy studio infused with an uncanny sense of the ethereal, ensconced in a forest in upstate New York, Raquel Rabinovich is at work on sculptures and drawings that are subtle in the extreme. An Argentine expat who was once briefly imprisoned as a teenager for civil disobedience and a visual artist paradoxically concerned with “invisibility,” Rabinovich’s work occupies a radically organic territory of abstract art. Her recent sculptural pieces, the Emergences series, are most closely related to land art, featuring rock formations positioned in the path of the Hudson River’s tide. Ultimately, Rabinovich’s work is invested in a visual language that interrogates the essence of meaning itself. For example, her River Library, which is archived in a long wall of drawers in her studio, contains hundreds of river “texts” and takes the act of reading as metaphorical for the process of deciphering significance from objects. The “Gateless Gates” painting series emphasizes even more acutely the search for signs of meaning, which may be partially concealed even in direct view. The conceptual sensibilities driving Rabinovich’s work are neither impractical nor sentimental, and are rather directly intertwined with and inspired by the processes of nature. Therefore, the art objects Rabinovich creates are meditative, essentially puzzles for contemplation that reward the conscientious viewer with an avenue that leads from the plane of material to the transcendental.

She has work on view in two upcoming exhibits, one at Creon Gallery and the other at Morgan Stanley Global Headquarters.

Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

Your work is engaged in the plane of invisibility. What exactly does that mean?

I have been interested in invisibility for a long, long time. I remember a series of paintings I did in ’63 in Buenos Aires called The Dark Is Light Enough, and I think it was the beginning of this lifelong interest. When I say “invisible” I mean to look at something and see what’s behind it and behind it and behind it. Not to stay with the appearance of things but investigate and explore everything that is not visible or apparent seems to me to be a search that is very meaningful. That has been a search that led me to paintings, works on paper, sculptures and installations for the last 50 years. My sculpture medium when I lived in NYC during the 1980’s was glass. Then eventually, when I moved here to the country, I began to work with stones.

Stones, unlike glass, are not transparent and ‘invisible.’ Still, when I use them to create sculpture installations along the shores of the Hudson River, they become invisible at high tide because they’re covered by the waters of the river. These sculptures, called Emergences, exist in a perpetual state of flux, being gradually concealed and revealed with the rising and falling of the river tides. I’m interested in that process – not only how you see what you see, but how something emerges into view from being concealed. It could be a thought, it could be images, it could be whatever philosophical assumptions we have. In the case of the sculptures, the water covers them gradually so the process of emerging from being invisible to becoming visible is very slow.

It seems to me that our contemporary culture, especially our city culture is very fast: we have computers, digital images, cellphones . . . I want to slow down to be with the whole process. Perhaps the slowness in my art is a comment on contemporary culture in the context of nature. Nature respects the slowness of process. You cannot speed up evolution. You cannot tell a baby to be born faster. You cannot tell the plants in the garden in winter to show up today.

For everything, there is a process in time. I respect that when I work. There is a time for incubation, a time for being with what slowly emerges, a time for invisibility to be present.

 

You’re a bit of a land artist.

You could say that, though my art is and is not land art. It seems to me that most land artists tried to preserve [their art]. From Walter De Maria to Robert Smithson. For me, it’s not like that. It’s about letting go and not about control. I know from the beginning that when it’s completed, it’s not mine anymore.

 

How did you become interested in this art of the invisible?

I like the challenge of discovering something that is not obvious. I spent many years in Europe during the 50s and part of the 60s making art and visiting museums. Say I would go to Museo del Prado in Madrid and I see Velasquez. I look at the figure and ground in his paintings, but what I really ‘see’ and gets me is the background itself, which seems to me to be the essence of his paintings, just behind and around the figures. I think that that presence of the ‘invisible’ got me started with the concept that what we see is not what we see.

 

It seems like landscape is very important to you?

Not exactly landscape as we know it. I am interested in nature’s modus operandi and resonate with the cycles of nature. I am interested in using the context of nature to make references to impermanence and the passage of time.

 

Are there political or social implications to the process of trying to see what’s not obvious?

Not in a direct or literal way. For example, with the mud drawings, the series I call River Library, I use mud from rivers around the world as my medium. Mud embodies the history of the Earth and humankind. Like the alphabet of a language yet to be deciphered, like a yet unwritten history of nature and culture, functions like a text, providing a trace, a memory of our existence. I gathered mud from the Ganges in India and from the Hudson here. Also, other people who know what I’m doing and encounter rivers in their travels, gather mud, and bring it here or ship or send it to me. When I get the mud, I seem to get an alphabet with which to ‘write’ my drawings. Mud is invisible under the water, in the riverbed. It accumulates in layers. When something gets into the river, it doesn’t mix with what is already there. While the waters of the rivers constantly flow, the mud accumulates layer upon layer upon layer.

If you look at the Hudson River mud, if you see the latest layer that’s there, it’s the chemicals from General Electric. I’m not interested in the science part, but in the mystery, which is embedded in that mud. I say mystery because it’s not known in a rational way. I don’t mean something mystical. I mean something that is not obviously seen or known.

Rivers are repositories of history, the history of the planet, the history of people, the history of culture.

 

I’m interested in the theme of “text” as literal and metaphorical your work. You also did a piece using the work of Italo Calvino.

That was in the 80s, I was actually living in NYC at the time. That was when I began using letters and numbers. First, I used them to indicate proportions within the space of each drawing in the series “Temples of The Blind Windows.” I drew on the Fibonacci series to establish spatial relationships within the drawings. During the 80s, I did a series of glass sculptures in which I drew also on the Fibonacci series to establish spatial relationships between the glass panels of each piece. Starting with just using letters, I got interested in text itself. I became fascinated with a book I read at the time by Italo Calvino called Invisible Cities, and also during the 80’s, I did a glass sculpture installation and a series of drawings based on that book.

I used the idea of an invisible city, what it meant for Calvino, to create my own city, which is not in the book, and then I used excerpts from the actual book to make seven drawings.

I remember writing to Calvino for permission to use his text and he was excited. He said, “Well, send me photographs.” By the time I wanted to send the photographs, he died.

 

Does literature inform you as an artist?

Indirectly, I would say yes. For instance, one of my favorite writers is Borges. I think that a certain way of seeing for me comes from him. The way he perceives reality and how he invites you into his world . . .

 

You did some paintings that involve text, right?

This is part of a series of maybe 20 paintings called “Gateless Gates”. The title is embedded into the painting and it is not obvious. You have to sort of dig it out of the paint itself. Gateless gate is a paradox used in Zen practice. The mind transforms itself when confronting the paradox. If you look deeply and spend time with the painting, then you will discover the text, which functions as a metaphor for what happens in the act of looking at a painting. You have to go through the ‘gateless gate’ to get to the painting because what counts in the painting is embedded in the painting itself. It’s not as if you add or take away meaning. Meaning is inherent in the painting. When you wonder what it means, you are already entering the process of painting itself.

 

How I hear you speak about “the process of painting,” I’m reminded of what I’ve read about the French Impressionist studies of light. I recall reading about how Monet would simply sit and watch how light changed before even beginning to paint.

I can relate to how sitting and thinking is part of the work. It is a sort of incubation. It also happens in nature and in every creative process: something is happening even if it is not visible or tangible yet.

 

What are you working on now?

I continue working on the two ongoing series that I mentioned before: Emergences and River Library. And I have just begun a new series of paintings, after 15 years during which I concentrated only on installations, sculptures and drawings.

 

Artist Sebastiaan Bremer and architect Jing Liu dish on how to exhibit high quality work on a shoestring and why art still matters in hard times

It’s 1999 and you’re an emerging artist in New York and there’s a ruckus going on at the auction houses but none of that’s “trickling down” to you yet and how’s a dude supposed to make art when he’s got no bread, and paint and stuff’s expensive? Well, one option is to apply your artistic ingenuity to constraints imposed by limited resources in order to create an exhibit that both showcases new talent and with tongue firmly planted in cheek criticizes the system that imposes economic limits on creativity unevenly (genius, no?) Which is precisely what illimitably optimistic Dutch artist Sebastiaan Bremer did when he got a gaggle of friends (Donald Baechler, Guy Richards Smit, and Pamela Fraser among them) to make blueprints for original artworks-to-be and exhibited the blueprints in a DIY gallery above a Burger King in Chelsea.

In response to the current global economic climate, which has generally been less than kind to artists (and yes, art still matters when the economy goes south), Bremer collaborated with architects Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu (founding designers of SO-IL and of New Museum fame) to recreate the blueprint show in Feb/March of this year at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, Netherlands including some of the artists in the original 1999 show in addition to new artists and architects. This round, participating artists and architects were asked to submit the blueprint of a work that was an early definitive piece. Additionally, in 2014, blueprints are obsolete adding to the current show a stroke of commentary about the radical changes technology has introduced to art-making.

Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

How did both iterations of the blueprint show come about?

SB: I didn’t go to art school and after I went to an art residency in Skowhegan, Maine, I realized that all these other people who did go to art school had a very tight community. So after Skowhegan, I wanted to keep that going. Also, if you’re an artist, you always try to get people to come to your studio, which is a weird feeling especially in the beginning. So if you curate the show, you’re the one going to other people’s studios, and you see how that dynamic changes and how other people are nervous and uncomfortable and you realize there’s no need for that. For me it was just nice to change that relationship and build a sense of community. It was fun to start curating, and the show in 1999 was a bit of a response to very heavily curated shows. These heavily curated shows were based on a complicated conceptual structure where the curator put themselves almost in front of the artists and the blueprint show was a bit of a play on that where there was no relationship with the artworks except that they were all made by friends of mine and the only way to give the show any cohesion was to make all the works look alike by making them blueprints.

A few years ago, I met the director of the museum in Amersfoort and he was lamenting the fact that he wanted to do more artist curated shows but he didn’t have the money to make it an international affair. Then I said, “Well, I have this cheap show for you if you want. I did one years ago.” But years ago, I also wanted to include architects because of the blueprints. Since I’ve become friendly with Jing and Florian, I asked them to become a part of it and Jing came up with a formal twist so that it wasn’t so arbitrary. So we asked all the participants to come up with their original, signature work and turn those into blueprints.

 

And the curators also have their own work in the 2014 show. What were your submissions?

JL: Florian and I specifically chose something that was unrealized. It was a project from 2008 when something like 2/3rd’s of architects left the profession, but when we actually joined the profession. It was a time when everybody didn’t have business, all architects tried to do something else, like went into the film industry or they went into development. It was kind of an identity crisis for the profession. We actually stayed firmly within the profession and believed firmly in what we were doing. We believed in realizing works, not just paper architectural renderings. We believed in making a physical outcome. In trying to do that in 2008, we had a lot of failed projects. We had hundreds of pages of drawing sets that didn’t end up physically built. We wanted to not forget that time even though now the economy is better. It takes a real commitment to try to realize something so that’s why I think we chose the work we did. It’s the floor plan of a house that was never built. It was a holiday house that we designed for Ivan Chermayeff. He was in his early 80s so it was like the last project in his life. It was really kind of an intense collaboration. We had a full drawing set and we had a contractor on board. And then he lost his money to Bernie Madoff. Basically, the budget was gone in one day.

 

And what piece did you submit, Sebastiaan?

JL: There’s no tears in your story?

SB: No, there are. For a long time I painted and used photography as source material. Then when I was in this art residency in Skowhegan, I really started to branch out in three different ways. One was making large collages and then I did these large murals where I would paint very different shades of white. The third one was drawing straight on photographs, but I was very tentative and it cost money to make prints. Then I had a photograph I really wanted to use as a source for a painting, but the photograph itself was so strong that I couldn’t put my finger on why I liked it so much and I knew I couldn’t make it any better than the photograph. That was the conundrum. It was a picture that my mom had taken of my cousin swimming underneath the water in a swimming pool. It was a very still, beautiful, haunting kind of image, but it wasn’t my photograph and it felt like my connection to the work was very thin. Then one day my wife (she wasn’t my wife yet) was in Brazil and was getting on a plane and she called me up at 6 o’clock or 7 at night and was like, “The plane is going to crash and I’m going to die and it’s going to be horrible and we’ll never see each other again and I’m just calling to tell you that I love you very much.” So I was like, “It’s going to be fine, don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine and dandy. We’ll see each other tomorrow. Don’t worry.” So I calmed her nerves I thought and I hung up the phone, but then I couldn’t sleep and I thought, “What if . . .” Finally, I was like, if I’m awake anyway, I’d rather start working and use my time well instead of watching TV or something. So I got that photograph out, the one with the swimming pool and started making these little lines with little dots and slowly by doing this exercise I started to calm myself down. It also started to seem as if the little figure in the water was anybody and it could be an allegory almost of keeping her aloft. So I tried to continue making the drawing as long as I possibly could so then it became this test of endurance and this magical thinking of holding her aloft that finally resulted in this work. I held my breath for 13 hours afraid she wouldn’t come home. That was also the first time I realized that my relationship to the image made sense somehow.

 

How has your view of the art world changed since the 1999 exhibit?

SB: When I came to New York in ’92 for the first time, I was 22 and I came from Holland and it was a very limited arena for me. In New York, there were still artists in SoHo and some left in the East Village. Everybody that I met was saying, “It’s over. What we had was so great and now it’s gone.” And I was just eager and young and I was so excited and everyone was like, “Why are you so happy and positive?” And I was like, “It’s good. Stuff is happening.” And it was a nice period for me because people get together and get this spirit of camaraderie together.

JL: The reason obviously architects and artists too get asked a lot to give renderings for free, and I think the only reason we were able to ask architects on our side to do this, is because there is this underlying camaraderie. We feel we have this connection under the business of it all.

 

Last year there was a controversy when the bankrupted City of Detroit considered selling works worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the Institute of the Arts. What obligations if any does a city have to its art communities?

SB: I think art is crucial because in the end, after awhile, what’s left of culture after people die are the buildings and art. There is a responsibility I think of every generation to preserve certain bits. Of course you have to also leave breathing space for people to build new things or improve upon or change or sometimes destroy what’s there. But the selling and holding of art is difficult. You can never really put art before people. If there is hunger, I would say you should sell your gold and diamonds and art. But I think maybe in Detroit, for example, there are other choices to consider before selling out the art.

JL: Detroit has been selling its architecture for a very long time already. All these amazing buildings Detroit had in modern times . . . they’re all gone. I think architects are more used to their creations being destroyed. The more important structures are the symbols of their times and in political or economic turmoil, the first thing to go are the symbols.

SB: Well there was the World Trade Center that was destroyed as a symbol.

 

How does architecture fit into the context of an art show?

JL: Architecture, before it became a profession, was one of the oldest forms of sculpture. I think definitely it’s an art form, but it has to engage with life and human scale with a different set of parameters than art has to.

SB: My favorite art in history, you go all the way back, are the cave paintings in France. They’re 30,000 years old and they were also, we can only guess, very important as cultural things, but they were also on the human scale. At that time, art served a purpose that was more religious and more magical maybe. I think there is this spiritual component or a religious component to art that artists don’t like to talk about very much. There is this thing about enhancing an object or imbuing it with more power than it has on its on surface . . . it’s all about re-contextualizing things and re-imbuing them with a certain force.

JL: I think the blueprint, in this context of oppression, is actually a very interesting medium. Arguably architecture only started as a profession like three or 400 years ago because before that people just made things and you had master builders who knew how to use the material, knew some sort of abstract common forms. It was really the invention of pen and paper that was used in many disciplines as well as architecture that alienated the process of the hands using the material and the craftsmanship of the master builder to people who don’t have the knowledge in their hands to handle the material but they have the abstract knowledge of how to put things together and they codified this knowledge in symbols and they were able to reproduce it. So when you become an architect now, you don’t have to become a carpenter to relay this information in lines and hatches and digits.

 

In a widely read blog post about a year ago, Paddy Johnson of Art F City criticized NYC as no longer a viable place for emerging artists to work.

SB: That might be true, but if you can make something happen here, just because of the density and how many people come through here, you do get relatively more attention. But I think if you want to live in a thriving artist community for very little money, you’re probably better off in Winnipeg or in other places where it’s more affordable. For awhile, it was Berlin that seemed like a logical place. But these predictions about where things are going to go or the demise of New York happen very often. These grand statements. I think it’s true that it’s very expensive to live here and to be lower middle class is expensive and to live the rich life here you have to be insanely wealthy.

JL: It’s very competitive for sure. Any job you go after, you find yourself with 5,000 other fish in the pond. But I think it’s fine. I think it’s also good to find yourself as a creative person on the tip always.

 

What advice would both of you have for emerging artists in a recession economy?

SB: Be born in a nice family and work hard. The connections are very important, but you have to forge those connections and maintain them. It’s very important I think to create some kind of a network. Some people do it through education. Some people do it through organizing their own initiatives. Some people do it because they’re born into a connected family. More often than not, that last thing is true. It’s a very sad reality.

JL: I don’t think that’s true. At least, I hope that is not true. I think it has been like that and it still stays in our society, but I think as a woman and as an Asian, I’m on the panel talks a lot about what you can do as a woman still in a male-dominated society and profession. I do think that, yes, there is a lot going on between families that know each other and fraternity, and I’m thinking it’s not going to go away anytime soon. Obviously too, if you relate to someone more because of your upbringing or background or personality, you’re going to find it easier to work with them. I think it’s natural.

SB: No, I don’t think there’s a conspiracy.

JL: Exactly. It’s there, but I think it will slowly change. It will happen eventually.

SB: Not regarding art specifically, but the most exciting change at this moment in the world right now is not technology or computers, it’s women. It’s totally true. If you look at how much has changed in the last 100 years and when you think about how 51% of the world’s population has become a part of the work force and not a domestic work force, that’s the biggest change happening to the world. And it’s exciting as the father of a daughter, to see how she looks at the world.

 

With her thrift store clothes, self-described New York brassiness, and uncanny ability to solve with simplicity the unusual formal problems that only artists have, my first impression of Anya Kielar some six years ago was that she was so damn cool. I was 23 years old, working at the Dikeou Collection in Denver, CO, and Kielar was assisting then-boyfriend now-husband Johannes VanDerBeek with the installation of his piece, “Newspaper Ruined.” Now married and a mother, Kielar has stayed on schedule with her own career as an artist making most recently “sprayograms” (one of a few innovations) and sun prints of women’s clothing that are reminiscent of the packaging used to contain Barbie clothes. Kielar refashions the artifacts and marks of femininity—long opera gloves and big pouty lips, for example—into surreally vibrant characters with personality. Large noses and eyes and lips made from painted garbage and sand turn an exhibition wall into a female face that’s something like a stylized she-Frankenstein of archetypal womanhood. In the SoHo apartment where she grew up in the ’80s, Kielar reflected on the identity of “artist” and what it’s like for artists to start a family.

Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

You grew up in New York in the ’80s, which is looked back at as the heyday but it was also the AIDS crisis. It seems like there’s a lot of nostalgia right now for what New York was back then and you grew up right where it was happening.

I definitely was influenced. We had galleries right across from us out the window. Those were galleries for a while, not offices. I was a big fan of Basquiat when I was in high school of course. When I was applying for Cooper Union, I had a lot of terrible Basquiat/Edward Gorey influenced work. Terrible paintings.

 

Where does your interest in the female form as Other come from? It’s interesting that your work is described as depicting the Other because I don’t really get a sense of “otherness” from your work. 

I think it’s always been me trying to relate to myself as a woman in the universe and how complex that is. At the very base of it, I think it’s all simplistically self-discovery or about the strangeness of what femininity is, and how women are depicted in art history and culture. I’m especially fascinated by ancient cultures and drawn to things that were made to carry out some symbolic purpose or that had some kind of belief structure behind them. I think that’s something similar between my husband and I. The idea that a fertility figure or a figure that’s supposed to harness somebody’s soul after they’ve passed away—I just find that really fascinating. I think a lot of my imagery comes from Prehistoric work.

 

The work certainly depicts womanhood very differently compared to much of art history. You just said something about art that “carries out a symbolic purpose . . . ”

I think that’s the end goal and I can only hope my work captures a little bit of that power of conveyance through its symbology . . . It’s so hard given everything that can be watched, read, or heard in once day to expect a viewer to have a lingering memory of your work. But if you put yourself fully into your work, almost like it’s a vessel then I think even in the short amount of time someone looks at an artwork there is a chance you can give them something to hold onto. Again, I can only hope my work carries some kind of meaning that sinks into the viewers in a lasting way. I struggle a lot with how to make an object have that effect. I watch movies all the time and I think, “I’ve never cried at something I’ve made or that one of my friends made,” the way you do in a movie. So sometimes I’m like, “Am I in the right field?” But then I think there is a real power to the fact an object is made by a single person who is struggling to capture the quality of the world they feel is around them. That their reasons behind making it as an art object is to represent something they see in their culture that is worth depicting in a new light. I think when it comes to an art object you can get a better sense of the insatiable, underlying desires of the individual behind it. I think that’s what I’m most inspired by. Not to say that contemporary art doesn’t harness that, it’s just that there is a bareness and vulnerability to work that was made to harness the spirit world. I think it’s a really hard thing to capture that quality. It may be why I’m always changing my materials and my process constantly because I’m using my work like a barometer for my soul. I know maybe in the long run, that’s not the smartest tactic as an artist. You’re supposed to have your thing and I feel like I haven’t found that thing yet, but it always excites me to work with new stuff, but maybe that’s also a quest to find that one thing that emits all the things I want to emit to the world. That’s what makes art making exciting. If you found that formula, you’d probably be disappointed.

 

There is, I think, a contemporary jadedness about what art does in the world. 

It’s hard because when you’re creating this tiny drop in this sea of cultural-whatever, it seems kind of like it just gets washed away or something. But you look back and you mention an artist’s name and you can see all the ripples of how much Brancusi has affected so much contemporary sculpture to this day. Time will tell that.

I also believe in luck. I just happened to be lucky that I had that one show and things snowballed. Not to say that it’s only luck.

 

Yes, there is a formula I think of talent and luck.

I have some very talented friends who have never broken in. Then I have friends who are doing exceptionally well. It’s interesting what happens over time if you’re friends with very talented people. It’s almost like it’s just this lucky twist in the road and some people make that bend and some people don’t and it’s hard to figure out why. It’s impossible to even think that way like, “How can I make something that will be successful in the marketplace?” It doesn’t work like that. There definitely are artists that think like that and are very successful at it. Hopefully, you work really hard and it leads to other things as well like a better teaching position or better grants, not just solely relying on sales.

 

Then on the other side, there’s the manufacture of wunderkinds, people who can afford to participate in the market and people the market sensationalizes.

Yeah, there’s a lot of those, but I feel like it’s a really good time to be a female artist, more so than any other era. Out of my friends, I can say that the majority of them who are doing really well are my female friends. So I find that really inspiring. I mean, ask me in 50 years if I think that I was totally naïve, but I think it’s a good time to be a female artist. There’s inequality in every aspect of life. But things are changing.

 

I agree that there’s this old school worldview that’s essentially dying off. I just saw Baselitz in The Guardian today defending remarks he made a year earlier about women being unable to paint. But the reaction to his statements seemed to be a combination of both anger and comedy. People seem to regard his comments as silly.

And dated and weird.

The way I was as a young person absorbing things, I never was somebody who got very upset about things. I think I generally have a ridiculously positive attitude toward being a female artist. But I get a lot of calls for group shows last minute and I call that “lady filler.” They’re like, “Shit, we need another woman in the show.” I don’t want to say that because there are people who did curate shows or it was a conscious decision to have me in the show, but that’s a pretty common thing among female artists. It’s always kind of funny, but I’m glad it happens.

 

The stereotype of what an artist “is” used to be this idea of the singular, tortured man. What’s interesting is that the stereotype of the female artist involves an assumption of eccentricity and madness.

In general, the characters are more amusing so that gets played up. If you look into anyone’s personal life or how they conduct themselves throughout the day whether they’re eccentrically dressed or whatever, people are just really strange. It’s more about the way things are romantically remembered.

I am reclusive in a weird way and sometimes I want to be around people. My husband will remind me, “You chose this career,” but to be productive you’re pretty much by yourself in a room all day. It’s a strange way to live your life. You kind of become a little strange because when you’re just around yourself all day, how you relate to people and how you relate to the world can become a little different.

Something I think about a lot is being alone and also how strange it is to constantly try to tap into your inner being to call out these images or things to attach to a feeling I have to compel me to do this thing. It’s very emotional, a very strange thing. It’s like being in therapy all day by yourself. It’s exhausting and it’s kind of weird to do that all the time.

I’ve had two periods of my life where I’ve had mental breakdowns and it’s always had a lot to do with insomnia and you get delirious when you don’t sleep. The thing with insomnia is that it’s a snowball effect brought on by anxiety. So I attribute the breakdown part, the depressiveness and stuff like that to the insomnia, but the insomnia is an effect of something different. I do think that introspectiveness, always trying to figure out what you’re trying to say or why you’re trying to say something or what you’re trying to hide or what’s revealed in your work . . . the two times I had episodes of depression, looking at my work was painful. When I was making it, it was just happening. The last time was right before I got married, the first time we moved upstate and I think the extreme isolation wasn’t good for me and it was also a difficult time in our lives. I kind of hid from everybody that I had this thing with insomnia until I got really kooky and I was taking Ambien, which made me crazier because it wasn’t working. So all these weird things were happening while I was trying to work on a show. I think what you’re supposed to do when you’re feeling anxious or a little bit depressed is to put yourself in the world or maybe stop asking yourself things that thoroughly, you only get propelled into a crazier state. I remember at that point, looking back at the work that I’d made several months ago, I’d made these plaster pieces and they were a lot about the female body and aging, and I remember making them semi-consciously, but not really, it’s also just dipping things in plaster very simply, but then looking at them I was like, “Oh my god this is what I think of my body.” Everything was a lot more psychologically in tune, or I thought I was a lot more in tune with my work. That’s kind of the crazy thing is that you can be making something and it never really can be stream of consciousness, you’re always conscious or you’re always quoting something or you’re always trying to say something, but it is kind of crazy if you look back at your work and you can draw the references to how you saw yourself or the world. But in the moment, it doesn’t seem that charged. It’s been a real eye opener. It really keyed me in on the subconscious effort that goes into making work and that’s something you want to harness.

 

I think when I met you at the Dikeou Collection when I was about 23, you and Johannes had been together a few years. I recall you and I having a conversation back then about how hard it can be to be a woman pursuing a career and trying to have a personal life. You mentioned something about seeing other strong, driven women you knew being trampled by men in romance, which is something I’d kind of thought about as well.

It is such a big part of life. You have to be so vulnerable and such an idiot to fall in love and to be with somebody. It’s a daily thing you work on, but it’s really nice to have one person that you’re not competitive with. I really just wish him the world and hope for him more success than I have, and I know that he has the same feeling toward me, and that doesn’t really exist with anyone else.

 

As I recall, there’s a funny story about how you and Johannes began your romance?

We were in Cooper Union and I saw him on his first day of school. We hooked up when I was graduating and he still had two more years. It was the end of his second year when we hooked up. The first time I saw him at school, he had a heart on his shirt and we locked eyes and he didn’t look away. I was with somebody at the time, but I was in love with him for like a year before I ever talked to him. Then he was working on this giant Crazy Horse sculpture. [At Cooper Union] you basically got a desk to work at with maybe six feet of space and three feet on the side of the desk and the horse didn’t fit in that because it was nine feet tall and maybe 10 or 12 feet wide. It was a larger than life horse. He was working on that and we both kind of liked working alone at school late at night. While I was working on my senior show, every night I would walk past him, it was like a fairy tale, he was literally like a prince on a horse and he’d be like all powdered and white because he was using plaster. He was even really clever back then because the plaster was free, he used like 30 bags of it. He’d be doing that all night. Everybody on the floor knew when his piece was due because everyone was always rooting for him because he was this sweetheart always doing these crazy, impossible things, and his Crazy Horse was supposed to be a comment on American culture or something. It was turned into a miniature water park and it had a motor in it and he actually hooked it up to a pump. Of course it leaked and was crazy, but everybody was helping him before crit, so I grabbed a spray paint can and was spraying one of the slides for him. He stood up and dusted his hands off, and said, “We’ve never been formally introduced. My name is Johannes VanDerBeek” and I went, “I know who you are, Johannes,” and that was pretty much it. I think a couple days later, I literally grabbed his arm. He was standing in the lobby and I was like, “You’re going to walk me home.” I was living here, in this loft in SoHo, and I made him walk me home from Cooper Union. Then I said, “You’re going to meet me here tomorrow at 7p.m. and we’re going to go on a walk.” I was very aggressive because I knew he was a special human being.

 

How has having a family changed working for you and Johannes?

Our second year anniversary was this October. So our first year anniversary I was just beginning to be pregnant or whatever. It was kind of old fashioned because we were together for 10 years and then within six months of being married I was pregnant. I mean we had been planning on it. That was a big life changing moment. It literally made us change our lives from being in a big live/work space in DUMBO. We knew we had to get rid of that. We would be washing, like, resin in our sink and you can’t do that with the baby.

Your kids just demand your full attention. It was really trying this summer because I was asked to do two solo presentations within five months of each other so we quickly had to learn about how to straddle a heavy work schedule and keeping Talula happy.

I’m a Cancer so I’m a big homebody. So [before having a baby], I’d be like, “Oh I’ll reorganize the pantry and work in the studio and do laundry and then work in the studio.” When I could really focus was at night so that’s what I really miss is that night time when I’d be in my studio from nine to one a.m. or something. When I envision my memories . . . like, my music on really loud and having some wine and working in my studio and I think, “Oh my god, it’s going to be a really long time before I can do that again.”

It’s kind of good too though. Everybody said this. You’re a lot more efficient in your studio practice [after having a baby]. You’re thinking about your work all the time and then when you get an hour to work you’re actually physically working. In the past, there’d be a lot of sitting and thinking and a lot of wasting a lot of time. So now, I feel like I’m more productive when I do get to work.

 

Have these time constraints changed the work?

Yes now I find myself coming up with pieces that can be made in quick bursts of time. My last two show were paintings done on wet pieces of fabric out in the summer sun so they had to be completed within the time it took for them to dry. But it’s great when your life changes and forces you to adjust because it can lead to completely new ideas. Over the summer I also came up with these canvas pieces that I called “impressions,” that were literally impressions I took from clothes that were saturated in paint and laid down on canvas. It’s like a stamp where I put one on, walk away from it, feed the baby, and come back and do another one. I think your work just naturally evolves to what your life is and how you need to work.

 

My impression is that you and Johannes have been very intelligent about finding ways to fund basic living while still having time to make work and that’s really the rub for a lot of emerging artists.

We’ve been kind of lucky. Right out of college, Johannes started working with Zach [Feuer] and I took a year off and then I went to graduate school. I was just figuring out what I wanted to make and I applied to with very different stuff. It was performative/photo-based digital stuff. In graduate school, I realized I enjoyed making more of the work rather than the final photograph. In graduate school you’re given a chance to dive into your head and challenged to dissect your interests. I realized what I really loved doing was making the sets or props or objects for the photographs and then I thought, “Why am I stressing out so much trying to make these finished photographs when I enjoy more of the sculpture and handmade aspect of the work?” Also, Johannes has always really influenced my work and he’s done a lot with sculpture and I think that influenced me subconsciously.

I basically had my first show with Daniel Reich a month after my thesis show. All my thesis work went into that show plus I made a couple supplemental pieces. And that was kind of at the height of the market before it totally fell out. So we were kind of lucky to have shows where you’re modestly able to kind of live off of that. We also had the gallery [Guild and Greyshkul] and we all got a small—really small, small—salary from that. I think we were living in this place in Hell’s Kitchen that was a floor-through that was 12 feet wide and at the narrowest nine feet. We had a room that was 30 feet so we both had a section of that so my studio was nine feet by 15 feet. We also had the basement and the gallery and that was our house and our studio. Johannes made this giant wax bush in this crazy apartment where I would have to literally bend under it to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And that piece that’s at the Dikeou Collection, the newspaper piece, he worked on that at the Hell’s Kitchen apartment, but there wasn’t room to fully set it up so I remember we had the dining room table and these pieces were all over the table and any surface in the apartment including the galley way kitchen.

Also, I think that’s really influenced how we work with materials. It’s not like a fake folksy-ness. The newspapers were free. Or, I literally found objects and furniture on the street. I also lived by the Salvation Army and so I used a lot of thrift store finds. Not so much now, now I’ve been working in fabric, but with modest materials. Now I’ll try to go to the fabric district and try to find the cheapest and highest quality fabric per yard. My dyes that I got, they’re powder so they last a long time.

The thriftiness is still within us. We’re both kind of hands on. I really believe in making my own work. I’m not an artist that can have an idea and have other people execute it. Maybe I will one day. There are things that you just cannot do. But I think that also comes from kind of enjoying finding materials that you can transform into art materials. There are shows where the material budget was really limited. For example, I did a show at Rachel [Uffner’s] with these things called “Sand Paintings.”

 

I believe the Dikeou Collection owns at least one of these pieces?

Yeah, well basically, for all that work, the only thing I really purchased was masonite, paint and sand, and for all the objects on it, I would take walks at night through DUMBO and find fruit containers or sticks or detritus or recycled materials or wine bottles—those I would find in my own house. You just kind of come up with these things where you need to work like that. As you move through different periods of your life, your work is totally affected by what you can manage and what you can’t.

 

It makes so much sense that so many New York artists turn to garbage for materials. I hear that almost every time I interview an artist for zing.

New York is just crazy. Now our place looks pretty spiffy, but I grew up just going to flea markets. This area used to be good for that. On Canal there actually were three different flea markets and my dad would go every weekend. I grew up like that. All my clothes were from thrift stores and I’m still like that. I get most stuff from thrift stores. It’s more fun and it’s very inexpensive. New York is a great place for that. There’s so many people, it’s so diverse, and so much waste comes out of everybody, it’s just a great place to find stuff.

 

What are you working on now?

My most recent work were these sun prints I made up in the country. They involved wetting fabric and applying dye and then laying objects on top of the painting. The sun does the rest and it’s kind of amazing. The areas around the object dry faster than the areas where the object is so the heat pulls the dye away from where you have an object. It’s similar to the process of the photograms and they look really photographic but they also involve a lot of painterly moments where the ink bleeds in unexpected ways that are ghostly and foggy. I was making them late into the fall after the success of the summer versions but it was getting colder so the sun wasn’t strong so the images were really faint. In the beginning I thought, “Oh god these are failures and I hate them.” And in the end, those were my favorite ones because they were so elusive. That’s what’s interesting about art and process, is that you can get kind of mechanical with the process and you know what it’s going to look like. But it’s always kind of the best when you don’t know what it will look like. The better things come out when there’s a little bit of fuzziness about how it will look in the end. Then it was funny because I was trying to emulate the ones that were failures, but it never works out that way.

One body of work always leads to another. So my last two bodies of work have all been in fabric and I’ve been working in dyes and I’m excited about where those things went, but working on the sunprints made me want to reinvestigate my spraygrams or working again with the airbrush, but maybe bringing the hand back into it. The previous show was really painting different mediums on fabric and the last one was using objects as the main handmark, but I kind of want to meld the two a little bit and I think maybe I want to get into three-dimensionality again.

 

Illustration by Nick Sumida

Since the days of my youth, I’ve always enjoyed a nice, weird story. Whether it’s the Brother Grimm, Alice In Wonderland, Edgar Allen Poe, Flann O’Brien, or my father’s improvised bedtime stories about cat gangs, the more bizarre the better. Phillip E. Shaw is an old friend, longtime writer compatriot, and fellow weirdo (among many other things). A section of his manuscript The Takes—a tale of a family assemblage thrown into cosmic crisis—was presented as my project in issue #23 in zingmagazine. Phil’s fiction met my aforementioned standards, and I most likely would’ve been as much as a fan when I younger as I am now. As it so happens, this book is still available to be published [hint hint]. Phil and I corresponded both telepathically and via email. Here are the results:

Interview by Brandon Johnson

 

In my intro I called you a weirdo. Are you a weirdo?

You called me a weirdo? I think that’s fair.

 

There’s a folk gothic quality to this story, like the Grimm Brothers—maybe it’s the combination of violence, strangeness, and adversity. Is this due to your German heritage?

Maybe. I read Heidegger’s Being and Time a few years before I started The Takes. He’s concerned with authenticity, being towards death, and what defines existence. Looking back, it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s a lot of that going on in the book. I know the Grimm stories, but I wouldn’t say I know them that well. I saw the movie a couple years ago with Matt Damon as one of them, hunting witches etcetera. Not a good movie.

 

The Takes are a family—two precocious kids, Brian and Olivia, and their hapless father Norman. I see Norman as the antithesis of the modern hero, a Leopold Bloom in American clothing sans interior life. Who does Norman represent in our society?

That’s pretty right on. The lack of interior life has a lot to do with Norman being not a real person in the natural, common sense. He just doesn’t have the complexity, at least at the outset of the book, which other characters have. Brian and Olivia are definitely precocious, and that’s probably the more noticeable because of Norman’s flatness. But Norman’s journey toward complexity is one of the arcs in the book. And so in a way he represents anything that grows from flatness to complexity. He doesn’t get there at the end of the first book, though. I’m writing toward that in the next one.

 

I’m interested in this fake-human/real-human thing—the flatness of Norman and his progression toward complexity. It seems like people could relate to this in life—trying to be present or authentically themselves, via meditation, yoga, various forms of art and culture. Is this also coming from Heidegger?

Yeah, Heidegger is batshit for authenticity. His road to that authenticity is through being-towards-death. At least as I read it, if we know that the end is coming at all times, we won’t squander the present or indulge in fantasies like “I’ve got a lot of years left,” or “tomorrow is another day that’ll make up for today.” That kind of mindfulness can be a product of yoga, meditation, and everything else that combines the intellect—he isn’t engineered to get it. Even for Brian and Olivia, the idea of loss doesn’t really start to have meaning until the end. Can people relate to that? I do, anyway. At least I think I will.

 

After Helen’s interloping Mother rampage, we meet her creator—a low-level Deity who’s churning out defective quasi-humans to unleash upon the earth to please his own vanity. This is interesting to me, especially in the age of the Internet, where anybody can release anything in any stage of completion to the big blank Unknown at little to no cost to themselves. Is there any relation here? Or maybe this is a comment on the creative process in general? As he said “It’s a lot like poetry, babe. Some compositions just don’t turn out as well as others.”

I never really thought about it in terms of the Internet, but damn that’s pretty close to the bone. I’ve been guilty of that for sure, shoving out my imperfect, unfinished creations. Why the hell not? I guess the only reasons not to put it out there would be low quality creations cheapen my “brand,” or whatever, and dilutes the medium by flooding it. Procrustes has definitely done that. He sees himself as an artist, but his art isn’t ready. Just like Norman he’s going to grow through the experience of realizing this, of being chastised and cheapened for his transgressions. Which I guess means that there’s no room for vanity in art because art outlives you, goes further. And that it deserves to have a that life of its own.

 

I’m also interested in this pantheistic universe where according to the character 8, “there are no rules except infinity and the inconsequence that not only accompanies but defines it.” What’s up with the pantheism? Why is the “God” God just a bored dude staring at his television?

Pantheism is really natural to me. Even monotheistic religions tend toward pantheism after awhile. Most, I’m not sure all, monotheistic religions tend to deify some entity other than the primary God, whether it’s his son or his son’s mother or his son’s cousin or whomever. We like characters. I decided that 8 should be bored because he’s not an interventionist in the sense that he’s controlling everything. It’s that watchmaker argument, in which God sets things in motion but has no control of the mechanism after it’s been created. How long can you watch a watch tick? So he’s bored.

 

I just read a draft of a newer story you wrote about a down and out Tony the Tiger who goes on a psychotic drug-fueled rampage. Where are you going with this?

That, not surprisingly, started when I was buying cereal. I looked at the store-brand cereals and the name-brand ones. I wondered how much store-brand mascots made, where they would live if they were real, how they’d feel about the wealthier, more established name-brand mascots. I wasn’t sure but I figured Tony was the oldest of the mascots. His fall would be the most tragic, and so he had to fall. But it’s also a story about obligatory friendships, identity, blah blah. What did you think about it?

 

I was thoroughly entertained, but with a little reflection I was surprised how believable it was for a giant tiger humanimal thing to be in existence. Like when he’s drying off his fur with a towel—totally believable that this thing exists. Maybe it was the dialog that made it more real for me—there was a lot of character and nuance. With that said, I know you’re currently working on a few projects across different mediums. Anything you’d care to mention here?

He’s definitely real to me, anyway. Projects? Always. I’m trying to do a thing where I release, record, or curate a different 2 or 3 song single every month in 2014. The first one is a “band” called Boner Beach that’s available for streaming up or loading down on bandcamp at this moment right now. And I’m working on the sequel to The Takes, which goes back a number of years, then forward, then back again. It’s a prequel/sequel that advances the conflict between all those gods with indeterminate goals in the first book. And of course it explores what happens when two kids get absolute freedom, and how debilitating that can become.

 

Lizzi Bougatsos doesn’t believe in waste. A scattering of Christmas tree ornaments with miniature dildos affixed to them cutely adorns a table in her studio share in SoHo. A natural junk collector (and an artist disinclined to working in a studio at that), she’s using up the materials she already has on hand. When the front woman of experimental band Gang Gang Dance is done working with these items, she intends to make art with different sorts of objects: water, ice, trees. There’s a dilemma in the process, however, because Bougatsos’ understanding of beauty goes beyond the formal properties of material and the conceptual concerns of vision into the ethics of material itself. In other words, in a capitalist economy, art is an expression of consumerist waste, so how to make art that is both a product of creative human construction, but not another excessive object in an economy of exploitation, gluttony, and squander? Bougatsos has some ideas.

The first time I encountered Bougatsos’ work was via the Dikeou Collection when curator Devon Dikeou, in collaboration with Artpace’s Mary Heathcott, exhibited a trio of 2010 pieces in group exhibit, “Swapmeet” at Artpace in San Antonio. I was surprised at the emotion—a sort of girlish, bitchy glee—that the objects elicited from me. A FOR RENT sign with “my pussy” scrawled in the entry field, Tracy Morgan raising his eyebrows on a Cop Out poster through a vanity light stand, and “In god we bust” scribbled in neon green lights. So irreverent and unpredictable, and most of all, I recognized I thought, the too little expressed reaction of contemporary female identity to the mainstream smorgasbord of celebrity obsession and perpetually confusing/infuriating onslaught of depictions of femaleness. However, Bougatsos’ work is shifting to reflect a shift in consciousness she anticipates for culture.

Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

You’re known as an icon of the underground and some of your artwork appropriates/parodies the cult of celebrity. I’m curious about your thoughts on the relevance of subculture for unrepresented voices and perspectives?

I’m really excited about the youth now. I believe that every 10 years there’s a revival in some way whether it’s in music or art. The other day, my friend had a bunch of New York Times-es from the past month. I went through them all and there was a designer that I knew, there was a musician that I spoke to in a bar recently. They all know Gang Gang, but now they’re making their own albums and they’re in the Times. They’re making their own clothes and they’re in the Times.

I don’t believe in hierarchy. When I would curate art shows, one way that I would deal with the underground is put in artists that were emerging or never represented. For example, Rita Ackerman and I used to curate a lot of those and we would put a Louise Bourgeois next to a photographer that never showed in a gallery before—Katija Rawles known as a fashion photographer, her work was sort of similar to Marilyn Minter. There was another photographer that was an underground figure in New York for a really long time. Her work is incredible—Robin Graubard.

My whole goal in curating art shows was to never have anyone on a pedestal and keep everything on the same plane. And I feel that way about music too.

I never believed in idolizing somebody higher than yourself. I like to deface celebrity a lot because there are all the politics that come with it that are so gross and hard to deal with.

I would always play the show and then do the merch table after the show. The only reason I didn’t last tour is because I’m getting older and I’m getting tired. But if somebody asks me to come out and sign things and talk to people, I’ll always do that.

I don’t know. I’m excited about the underground in music.

 

With digital media’s impact on culture, is there a scene that is genuinely underground anymore?

I think the underground is equivalent to selling out. I don’t know if it exists. I mean I think there’s underdogs. I think there’s people that are coming up that need to be represented, but they don’t stay underground very long now because of the internet. It’s like two walls that face each other and cancel each other out.

For example, in the past, when we didn’t have the internet, you got a music contract for a tampon commercial. I always say tampon because Gang Gang was always like well the only thing we’d do is a tampon commercial, like we won’t do a car commercial. But because everything is so free, now you do those commercials. You’re forced to kind of do them. You’re forced to take that car commercial. Because there is no idea of selling out. With the internet, there’s survival too. One has to learn not how to be watched. Identity theft is huge.

Censorship was a big issue that came up like three years ago. That was going to be a big issue. We’re seeing it on like Facebook and even imagery on Instagram, but now everyone has a voice. If you want to be in a movie, just make your own. If you want to make a song, just put it on iTunes. There’s no need for a label even anymore.

 

What are the underdogs?

They’re the ones that haven’t been discovered yet, have the drive and will be a part of culture.

I think culture is a force, but I think that a big part of it is common sense. You need street cred. You know what I mean?

You gotta work for it and you gotta have common sense. If you’re from New York, it helps. If you act in a mindful way, you will be rewarded.

I went to this art lecture once. Jerry Saltz was giving a lecture about how to make it in the art world. He had this pie diagram and it was really funny because being in the right place at the right time was a big part of that pie, like 65%. Like Yoko Ono when she met John Lennon—as far as I’m concerned he was in the right place at the right time. It’s really interesting, like, there’s about 65% of life that is about chance. 65-85%. I think he said luck went hand and hand with chance. I’ve heard actors say that too.

 

What were your ambitions when you were 19? How did you perceive the career in front of you when you started out?

I’ve been thinking it about it recently. I perceived it exactly as I perceive it now. I remember my girl friend was dating this hot Columbian guy whose dad owned a deli and they had to move out of their deli and they put all this stuff in the garbage. I went into the garbage and I took out this huge tube and I took it home, coiled it up and put it on a piece of whiteboard and that was the sculpture that I made. I remember taking it off of the board and placing it on the beach and placing it on the lawn. I just believed in performance ever since I was in that garbage. It was sticky. It was filthy. There was, like, Coke syrup. I remember everyone saying, “That’s disgusting. That’s garbage.” There was nothing gonna stop me from making performative land art out of this sticky, disgusting tube.

Later on, I met Pat Hearn who was one of my major mentors and she was the first person that ever said anything to me about my art. She was dying of cancer at the time and she was so thin. She looked kind of like a shaman. She had this huge turban on and she said, “You remind me of Joan Jonas.” She said, “You work with error.” And that’s kind of why I kept working. Then I met this other artist, Suzanne Anker. I met her in New York when I was in college. She said to me, “This is sculpture” [throws a no. 2 pencil in an arc.] That was another thing that made me, it just stuck. Every single place that that pencil went in the air from the moment that it was kinetically and chemically in motion, it was performative sculpture.

 

Have you ever doubted your practice as an artist?

In 2009, I had an art show with James Fuentes and I got really upset. I didn’t have an art studio. I had to borrow one for a month. I never had an art studio. I always made art out of my apartment. I wanted to make this sculpture of a tongue that moved so I went to the sculpture store and I bought this material, it was $100, and I brought it to the studio and I read the directions and I was like, “Why am I buying this $100 material to make sculpture with when I have no money to eat anything?” So I brought it back and ever since then I’ve been really skeptical of what I put out. I just didn’t want to contribute to anymore waste. Waste is such a huge problem for me. I recycle almost everything. Everything that I own, I usually put into my artwork if I don’t sell it or give it away.

Three years later when I saw Urs Fischer make that tongue sculpture, I said to my friend Spencer, “I wanted to make that and I didn’t make it. Did you ever get upset that you didn’t make something and then you see someone else do it?” And he said, “Yeah, sometimes I get upset, but they did it first.”

 

How do you come through the other side of doubt?

I think it’s just a survivalist thing. I mean that’s the only way I’ve been able to make art or even music. I’ve always had a purpose for making music. With art, it’s really a survivalist thing. I get upset when I see really crappy art, but I don’t know why I keep making it. Because people really like it and I do get joy out of it, and I think that’s the communion side of my makeup. I really enjoy when people are laughing.

 

There’s a strong element of provocation in your work—an intense emotional charge and sense of humor coming out it.

That’s the performative side, I think. I think that it’s about gratification really. I think I get a lot of gratification from taking a knife and stabbing it into the wall and hanging pearls from it or a microphone and having that be my self-portrait. If it’s visually balanced, then I’m so satisfied.

 

You make work pretty spontaneously?

I have a tough time laboring. I am not even a studio artist. The fact that I have this studio, I mean, it’s pretty tough for me. This isn’t the way that I work.

Lately, I’ve been dealing with more physical forces of nature. Like ice or plants, dirt. Those have been the driving forces for me lately. You can’t own them. If you do own a plant, like the piece I put in my last show, a tree, when someone bought it, I gave them instructions on how to take care of it. I believe in making things that grow or that you can’t really own anymore. Like, I’m a feather. That’s how I’m thinking about my art right now.

 

You mentioned your problem with waste and described in other interviews your interest in a “shift in consciousness.” What is art’s and music’s role in a shift in consciousness?

I mean people put so much money into the fabrication of things that aren’t beautiful. Everything that exists in nature is already beautiful. That’s the dilemma I’m having now. I almost believe that art is the anti-Christ of what is beautiful. It’s basically a gluttonous production of waste and more garbage and more things that we’re going to have to bury. This is a dilemma that I face almost every few years.

I remember I was on tour and we were in Ireland and there were these stone statues facing the sea at the top of this mountain. And I thought, “This is the kind of art that will withstand the test of time. This is the kind of art that never goes away. This is the kind of art that you remember.” You can’t throw it away and it will erode naturally. When I look at those, I never want to make art again.

 

In the year I’ve been doing these interviews, one question I’ve asked almost every artist is do you think the world is ending because of environmental problems with material?

No.

I’m hoping that there will be a shift of consciousness that’s more mindful and more humane. The truth is there’s always evil because there’s always holiness and there needs to be a balance of yin and yang. I don’t think the world will end, I did almost think that for the Mayan calendar and I was a little bit scared, but I knew that that just meant that things were going to change and I was just hoping for a mindful consciousness among humans.

 

In a mindful world, where do you think art would be situated?

I have no idea because evil still holds the leash of art.

I mean this all goes back to how I studied ceramics for eight years. I knew that clay was from the earth and it was the only thing that wouldn’t pollute the earth, it would just go back into the earth. So I never considered myself making waste when I was working in clay because it could be recycled. When I did work in clay, I also believed that medium was equivalent to those sculptures on top of the hill.

 

You’re also considered a fashion icon. How does fashion matter to your art and music or vice versa?

I’m in this position where one of my closest friends, you know, she’s a fashion icon and she designs cloths. I get all of her hand-me-downs and it’s funny because sometimes I’ll have these really incredible things, but it’s not about having these incredible things, it’s about playing with them. I think this is where being an underdog really comes into play. You’ll see this hat at Balenciaga and it will be like a helmet with a crazy visor on it and there’s no way you could afford it, but if you’re creative you can recreate it, some version of it. So then you don’t have shell out $8,000 for this hat.

Some designers make the most beautiful art, wearable art and its so linked with performance. I loved when Björk wore that swan. I even liked when Lady Gaga came out of the egg. I love those crossovers. I love erratic creativity that sort of disturbs.

I’ve been called a muse by a lot of different people over the years and I’ve been told that I inspired this and that. My friend that I was talking about likes to watch me get ready.

 

It’s interesting because fashion also involves the use of material—“wearable art” as you called it.

Exactly. But it’s the man too. You have to know how to wear it.

 

You’re referred to as a feminist frequently and there is this irreverent revelation of female identity happening in your work, but you never actually describe yourself as one.

Well, I do identify, but I never believed in calling myself a feminist. The people that I’ve always admired or wanted to be more like were men because somehow they always get a break. It seems like the women who get the break to be in the group show with the men are really in the show because they’re not a force, they’re not a threat. I’ve always considered myself a humanist instead of a feminist. I admire people who earn their keep. I don’t care whether they are men or women.

I do don’t think it’s easy for women. We’re a threat. We’re able to create physically and a man can’t do that so I think that opens us up to having more psychic powers or something. We sort of see in circles, like mother universe, and men see in squares. That is why they so-called “succeed.” Most of the men in my life have A LOT of female in them. That’s why they wanted to do a tampon commercial, he he.

 

What are you working on now?

One piece is a sculpture that I’m envisioning right now that will go in somebody’s house, it’s a tree sculpture. The other piece that I was making was supposed to be a waterfall made out of ice, but I couldn’t make it happen. I got a movie job and I acted in a movie.