Fabiola Torralba is a dancer, educator, artist, and activist. After several years of community organizing and cultural work in San Antonio, two bachelor’s degrees, and some ethnographic fieldwork, she decided to return to her first love. Fabiola then trained under Erica Wilson-Perkins at Palo Alto College receiving an Associates of Arts in Dance with additional training under the Urban Bush Women, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and David Grenke of ThingsezIsee’um Dance/Theater among others. She collaborates frequently with local artists, schools, galleries, and non-profit organizations on multi-disciplinary, educational, and performance based projects. Previous works include, En Rumbo, entre nos, Zapatos Viejos, This Bridge We Call…, XVoto, Me Gustas Cuando Callas, and nos(otros) ¡somos!, a full length bilingual multimedia performance that presents multiple facets of the immigration experience by first voices. Fabiola utilizes movement as a vehicle for community building, civic engagement, and social-cultural awareness. She enjoys exploring interdisciplinary collaborations and the intersections between art, story, and action.
At the beginning and end of summer 2013, Torralba produced and performed in nos(otros)!somos! accompanied by a related solo installation at Lady Base Gallery.
Interview by Josh T Franco
How did you recruit the performers for nos(otros)!somos!? Did you have the idea then find them, or vice versa?
My primary objective was to find immigrants to invite to participate. Given that many do not identify themselves so openly and that I knew few myself, I simply asked people that I knew to participate and then asked them to identify people that they knew to invite as well. I set the parameters of the project in terms of vision and scope, facilitated its development, and co-directed the program. The rest was all magic.
What is the show’s relationship with the environment you created at Lady Base Gallery simultaneous with the first performance?
The initial performance of nos(otros) !somos! held inside of Gallista Gallery was part of the closing reception of my solo installation exhibit titled nos(otros). I felt the need to express my identity as a Mexican immigrant woman given the limited dialogue that exists in U.S. mainstream media on immigrants and my need to be recognized beyond stereotypes, romanticized notions, and politically influenced jargon.
The installation pieces were largely based on stories that I came across in my experiences working among immigrants and as a U.S. based immigrant in Mexico and Guatemala. Each of the pieces in the installation exhibit different aspects of the immigrant experience as I relate to them personally through the stories of other immigrants. These are immigrants who had traveled to the U.S. and had returned to their home, immigrants who currently reside in the U.S., and Mexican natives who aspire to migrate to the U.S.
Part of my goal was to complicate or problematize the dominant narrative of immigrant experiences. I wanted to share these images because they provide multiple facets of the immigrant experience that complicate and speak to the multiplicity of immigrant identity.
Another part of my goal in sharing these stories was to provide a space where immigrants could speak for themselves. Being that I was fortunate to have witnessed these first hand I wanted these stories to be told because I want these realities, these people, these voices to be recognized and heard. As a person that is now U.S. based, I also felt the responsibility to do so and in a way that would be more accessible to viewers than formal academic or literary processes.
Lastly, my experience as an undocumented immigrant has been largely marked by silence and erasure. The way that I’ve learned to understand my own experience has always been in relation to the experiences of other people. My sharing of these stories is a way to tell, understand, and come to terms with my own. Given that I had the opportunity to capture a crowd with the installation exhibit of nos(otros) and that I had the full support of Sarah Castillo of Lady Base Gallery to explore my creative capacities I wanted utilize the moment to share as many stories as possible by opening up the space for other immigrants to speak for themselves.
As a dancer and choreographer, I also wanted to facilitate a space where these realities could be explored through performance directly through the body. Hence the creation of
nos(otros)!somos!, a multi-media live performance that presents multiple facets of the immigrant experience by first voices.
I noticed Tomas Ybarra-Frausto was in the audience at the second performance. This made me think about the piece within Chicano/a art history, and I thought about how it blurs the line (which seems bleakly solid the more I learn) between Chicano/a and Mexican art. How does the whole performance, the cast, the context, relate to this distinction?
I’m not sure that I can readily call out the differences between Chicano/a and Mexican art but I know from being a Mexican immigrant who was raised in the Westside amongst a majority Mexican American community adopted into a working class Tejano family that major differences do exist between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Nationality for one is a major difference along with legal status and language. Naturally these and amongst other factors shape identity and cultural expression.
I have felt this distinction myself within the Chicano community, a feeling of silence and difference. It’s not a conversation that is always welcomed. Personally, I think it may be because many individuals still have their own work to do with their own internalized racism. The conversation can also easily lend itself to addressing questions of privilege and status which becomes even trickier in a state that doesn’t even admit its own history of colonization. Regardless, Chicanos have worked hard to reconnect with their heritage and situate themselves within their Mexican identity and continue to do this work by mobilizing, educating, and building community.
I created the space for nos(otros) !somos! specifically for immigrants because I felt that there was no space for us to tell our stories. Though the topic of immigration had become popular on a national level over the past five years or so, it is often a conversation that is shaped by U.S. nationals and not by immigrants themselves via policy, academia, and mainstream media. In the moments where there have been immigrants speaking on their own behalf it is only a sector of the population that is covered as news but these do not represent us all. Not all immigrants are DREAMERS, or Mexican nationals, or men that migrate to care for their families on their own. I had also felt that within the literature that I read as a Mexican American Studies student that immigration or migration was often romanticized or idealized. It was a topic that many did not have first hand experience with amongst my student peers and within the organizing community that I was a part of. Naturally, I felt alone. As I became more and more involved in local actions in support of immigrant solidarity efforts along with Chicanos and Mexican Americans, I realized that regardless of their families history of migration or ethnic identity, that I was living it alone and that this difference was valid and needed a place of its own.
I wanted immigrants speak on their own behalf because I didn’t want to feel alone anymore. I also wanted a space for us to speak for ourselves to break the silence and erasure that is so much a part of being undocumented. I also wanted a diversity of voices and experiences to be shown because we are not a homogeneous community and many have already been left out of the conversation.
Can you discuss a bit about the difference in the two venues in which you’ve now shown the work?
Lady Base is a gallery that supports the artistic practices of Women and LGBTQ artists of San Antonio. It is located inside of the Gallista Gallery in the South Side of the city and is run by Sarah Castillo, an artist and graduate student in the Bilingual Bicultural Studies program at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For more information visit http://ladybase210.wordpress.com/.
The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center is a non-profit cultural arts organization committed to social justice and the celebration of the artistic and cultural expression of diverse voices. For more information visit www.esperanzacenter.org.
To see what Torralba is up to now, check out her blog.
Street artist Kenny Scharf on the ups and downs of friendship, the absurdity of life
Recorded & edited by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.
—Andy Warhol
NEW YORK, 1976
I was invited into the Time Square show by John Ahearn who came to my show called “Celebration of the Space Age” at Club 57 in 1979. I didn’t ask anyone for permission, I just brought Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat with me and said, “You guys have to be in this show—join me.” Jean-Michel’s painting made a huge sensation, he got noticed and got into the “New York New Wave” show at PS1. He had a show in Italy, and boom—his career took off. I believed in him, for sure.
My friendship with Jean-Michel was very rocky. He had a double personality. He kind of turned on me more than once. He used to make me completely uncomfortable. Just tried to torture me sometimes. Once, I was at a party and there were lots of people and music and whatnot. It was a very crowded room and I felt really uncomfortable, like, something just felt really weird. And I turned around, from across the smoky room, he’s beaming an evil eye into the back of my head. I felt that and I caught his eye doing that, and I just started sweating. And it would happen a lot. It would always be the same thing and he was trying to make me feel intimidated and it worked.
About a month after I had the show at Fiorucci, Jean-Michel was making a painting with John Sex, and they made this wet oil painting and cars were driving over it—it was so cool and punk rock—and Jean-Michel was kind of spastic and he decided he wanted to have a show at Fiorucci. So he goes up to Fiorucci with these wet oil paintings and in that spasticky manner he used to have, he managed to get wet oil paint all over the clothes, and they kicked him out.
I heard later that Jean-Michel kind of had a problem with me because I didn’t sleep with him. I went to visit him at this apartment he had in Chelsea. He had his art, these collages, on the wall in the kitchen and I was just totally blown away by this crazy energy they had coming from them. The colors on these collages were amazing. That’s when he came onto me. I had just arrived to New York. I’d never done anything with another guy. I was scared.
Jean-Michel was really sweet, charming, funny. He adored Keith, he was always nice to Keith, which was really hard on me. It was one of those things where I liked Jean-Michel so much and when he would be sweet to me, I would be all forgiving and then he would turn on me again.
One time, years later, Jean-Michel and I were both in Italy at the same time and he apologized. And I was like, “I can’t believe you’re apologizing. I never knew what this was about. Why were you so mean to me?” And he said, “Because I’m jealous of you.” And I said, “Why?” Because he was famous at that point, I wasn’t really famous at all then. I wasn’t selling my work. Nobody cared about what I was doing. I was like, “Why would you be jealous of me?” And he said, “Because you’re happy.” I just had this incredible moment of empathy for him and was completely forgiving him for all the stuff and the very next day, it was like my heart was open and he took a knife and just went, “Rrrrrrr-nuh.” Immediately, he turned on me the very next day after apologizing. After that, that was it. I shut down. I swear it was like a month before he died, we kind of connected again. I felt sadness in him and he seemed really in such a sad place that I couldn’t keep that thing I was carrying anymore. Then he died.
John Sex was my first guy. John had moved from Long Island to New York with Wendy Wild together as a couple. I was living with Kitty [Brophy] as a couple. I met John at SVA and the four of us would go on double dates. We’d go to music venues like everybody did. Me and John Sex left the girls and ran off one night. There was a place called GG Barnum’s. It was this disco back then and it was crazy wild and all these dancers were above the dance floor on these nets. And the dancers would jump off and land almost on top of your head, this circusy kind of thing. Then they had these drag queens come on stage and do a show. By then, John and I were really drunk, and we got so excited that we jumped the stage during the show. We went back in the dressing rooms and the bouncers got us and threw us out and that’s how our thing started. Drunk and allover the ground.
Wendy was kind of distraught about what was happening to her boyfriend. Not long after that, Kitty went back to Arizona leaving me to continue my New Wave Punk Rock Bisexual studies.
John and I were involved awhile off and on. He was an amazing person in my life. Really amazingly smart and talented. He taught me a lot about art and Dada. One day he decided that art was bullshit and he threw all his art away in the garbage and announced that he himself was art and he only did performance art after that and became the John Sex persona that people know him as. But nobody knows that he was a really amazing visual artist.
I met Andy Warhol twice. The first time I met him was right after the “New York New Wave” show at PS1. I was in this group show that Andy Warhol was in and I went to this opening at a club called Peppermint Lounge, and Andy showed up there and I went right up to him and said, “Hi, we’re in a show together.” It didn’t impress him much. He said, “Oh, that’s so great,” and wasn’t even listening. He had these rude guys with him and he pointed to one of them and he said, “Make out with him.” And I was kind of like, stunned a little bit, shy and uncomfortable. I can’t remember if the guy did or didn’t honestly. I have the feeling that I chickened out and didn’t go with that. So that was it and he didn’t know who I was. Then later, Keith became famous and was invited to The Factory on Union Square for lunch and I just invited myself to go with him. I was creaming in my jeans. It was everything I could have dreamed, not only meeting Andy, but having lunch with him. I was used to a diet of bad pierogis and pizza and donuts, and they had food delivered from some nice place. So many celebrities were going to The Factory then. Andy was taking their picture and the celebrities were getting into Interview magazine. All of a sudden, I went from only knowing East Village celebrities in my sphere, to, “Oh, there’s Farrah Fawcett, or there’s Arnold Schwartzeneger.”
The artist David McDermott and the artist Peter McGough were around the scene then. And there was this guy Diego Cortez, who was the curator of the PS1 “New York New Wave” show, and his boyfriend was named Johnny Rudo. And Johnny Rudo had this loft in Time Square that he was renting from the artist Jimmy DeSana. Jimmy was a very interesting artist who died very early of AIDS, and he did these really intense sadomasochistic photographs that were very Mapplethorpy. So Johnny Rudo called me and was like, “I’ve got this room in this crazy place. There’s space for studio work and whatever, do you wanna come here?” So I left my East Village place and then two weeks later, Johnny Rudo couldn’t handle me. He was intimidated by my intense procreation of art making. I just got there and started hot gluing this and finding trash and painting that and taking over and celebrating the fact that I had some space to work. I was overwhelming him. I got home from school one day and all my bags were packed, and Johnny had brought David and Peter over. I was like, “What’s going on here?” And they were like, “We are here to kick you out. Johnny Rudo doesn’t like you. His dad is a lawyer. And we are here to kick you out.” I just looked at them and was like, “I got news for you. Someone’s leaving and it’s not me.” And the next thing I knew, Johnny Rudo put his tail between his legs and ran away, and David and Peter left too. So I called Keith and I was like, “Keith, I got this great place.” Because Keith was living in this weird men’s shelter, sharing a room with three old men. Keith was like, “Okay.” So Keith came up. There was even a painting that David McDermott and Peter McGough did of this scene. On one side, it’s me with space ships and dinosaurs, and on the other side is them with all their doilies and clocks, and they’re making a face at each other.
Life is just little crazy stories.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Lessons of New York is an oral narrative series told in parts and based primarily on interviews with artists who were involved in the Lower East Side scene during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
Read Part I of Lessons of New York.
Before he earned international recognition for his fantastical pop-surrealist style, Kenny Scharf was another dreamer in the City . . .
Recorded & edited by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
Traveling through the galaxies
Looking for a home
Interstellar tragedies
Living like a gnome
Stretching like a comet tail
From star to star and back
Intergalactic habitrails
Keep me on the track
—Klaus Nomi
NEW YORK CITY, 1976
When I arrived from Santa Barbara when I was 18, I was kind of surfery. I had that ’70s Farrah Fawcett, blonde hair. I grew up in California surf culture. My dad used to run a ladies’ knitwear line, basically the L.A. version of the New York schmata biz. My mom is a housewife, she got her hair done and she decorated the living room. My dad grew up in Brooklyn and he couldn’t wait to get out. It was a shit hole.
I was going to UC Santa Barbara and I had this art history course, which was a big class in an auditorium, taught by Eileen Guggenheim. She was, like, this savvy New York art lady. It was a course about 20th century art, and she was going into all the stages, and she gets to Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, and I started to get excited. She got to Warhol and the Factory, and I was like, “This is GREAT. I’m getting out of here.” And I thought, okay, I know this is the ’70s and that was in the ’60s, but I have a feeling there’s something here along those lines that I can find. So I told my parents, “I want to go to New York,” and they said, “Well, then you’ve got to go to school.” I applied to like 10 different art schools allover and none of them accepted me except SVA.
I was super excited to be in New York. I sold my car and basically here I was with a bag of clothes. Right away I went to a Devo concert and on the way, I took a leopard skin coat I found in the garbage and I cut it up. I cut my hair all punky, spiky and I put black under my eyes, and went to this Devo concert at The Bottom Line. I waited in line with all the other New Wavers, and within five minutes I became friends with everyone in that line. From then on I was, like, punk rocker/New Wave.
My first week that I was there, I was a little disappointed, because all the kids at SVA were like suburban kids from Long Island. And I was like, this is just like suburban L.A. where I just came from, and I’d had this idea that I was moving to New York and people were going to be amazing. I was like, there’s nothing different about these kids, they’re just paler. Then a week later at school, I heard Devo music playing and I followed it and there’s Keith Haring in this empty room he had taken over. He had covered the walls and the ceiling and floor in paper and was painting his Dubuffet-like black lines. He was in the corner about to finish and I was like, THIS is the person I thought I was going to meet, THIS is what I came looking for in New York. It was like, BOOM. I started talking to him and we became friends instantly.
Then a couple of days later, I was hanging out in the cafeteria at SVA and there was this super-cool guy named Chris there with Basquiat. I was holding a little portfolio of these paintings I was working on and Basquiat locked eyes with me and said, “What’s in there? Show me your work.” So I showed him and he looked at me and said, “You’re going to be famous.” I was like, that’s a weird thing to say, the very first thing someone says to you.
The first place I lived in was bizarre. There was this saleswoman from my dad’s company, and she was moving to L.A., and I was going to sublet her place. So I took her place on 55th between 6th and 7th. What a weird neighborhood. Out the window, you saw that blue glass of that ’60s Hilton Hotel. On the other side, it was Nowheresville. Empty on the weekends, full of strangers all the time.
I got a job at this place called Health Works, which was a salad bar. They had these salad bars and this one was right next door to the place on 55th. Basically people would come up and go, “I want a Salad Niçoise,” and you’d take chunks of tuna and mix it up right in front of them. The manager was like, “You clean up, you close up, you’re just right next door.” So every night I would take big vats of yogurt like out of those machines. There was Perrier, it was the first time water that you pay for got introduced, that was a new thing. So it was Perrier, yogurt, and I’d take a bag of pre-cut turkey chunks, I’d take a bunch of that, and then these kids would come over after work, and I’d feed everybody. There were probably 10 or 11 of us, people I met at the Devo concert.
I had everything. My first girlfriend in New York was Kitty Brophy. She went to high school with my roommate in Santa Barbara, and she had just moved to New York for Parsons. Larry Ashton, my roommate, came to visit. He later ended up moving to New York and took part in Club 57 and everything. This Arizona girl, I met her and she immediately moved in with me in my apartment on 55th Street. That night we met, we went to of all places—we were pretending we were sophisticated—to The Plaza for drinks. She grabbed me under the table and she was like a crazy, fun girl.
About a month after moving into the place on 55th, I got kicked out because someone had robbed me. I was coming home from school and I saw a kid on the street holding a bag of weed and I looked at him and the bag of weed and was like, “Oh, he’s holding a bag of weed.” Then I went up into my place, the door was down and I was like, “Shit, that was my bag of weed.” I went crazy and raced down to the street to see if I could find him. I am running allover the streets, and every kid is looking like him at that point. Anyway, because of what happened, all that caused, and because I always had all these kids eating in my apartment, the owner kicked me out. After that I just kept moving. I moved to 23rd and 8th and then I moved to 9th between 1st and A.
On 23rd, I was in a studio apartment and I remember there was hardly any heat and there were holes, the window was broken. I remember waking up one morning when there had been a blizzard and there was a snow pile on my sink. I saw it floating in. It was cold, but pretty. I had to paint with gloves on in there.
I discovered that Jean-Michel lived near 23rd, and we became closer and started spending more time just walking around tagging. I remember just going around, he would do the SAMO, and he had this big Fat Cap marker and let me have it. I remember I drew a TV set with antennas and inside it said, “The Jetsons.” We went around, and it was really cool. Then one day we were going around, and I turned to take the Fat Cap marker, and all of a sudden he was like, “I’m not giving that to you.” All of a sudden he turned on me, and I thought, “Uh-oh.” That was my first inkling that he had a double side to him, a scary side. He would change on the drop of a dime, you never knew what you were gonna get. He had an intense, demonic side sometimes.
Anything below 23rd Street was kind of fucked up. I quickly learned about the street. Especially back then, New York was the street, a very intense place. I got mugged a lot when I lived in the East Village, with knives, a gun. Even a guy in my building on 9th would wait for me in the hallway with a knife and I used to have to go to a building next door up on the roof over to my roof and down the fire escape into my apartment to avoid him. The reason why he was waiting for me with a knife, is because he was fucking his dogs and I overheard it and I reported him to the ASPCA. He was like this crazy Vietnam vet. There were a lot of Vietnam vets running around back in the ’70s, these crazy guys that were just let loose in the street. And he was one of them. He was fucking these big German Shepherds and I heard them crying. For some reason, he caught on that I was the one that reported him so he started waiting for me in the hallway. It went on until I left and went back to L.A. for the summer.
We all worked at nightclubs. It wasn’t right away for me. It was around the time I stopped going to school that I started working the clubs. About year after being in New York, I quit school. Keith stopped going and we were more excited about what was going on in the street than what was going on at the school. We were like, “Why do we need to be here for this?”
One day, I walked into Fiorruci with Kitty, and Joey Arias was working and he jumped on us and we became fast friends. I had him over at my studio. Around the same time, I was introduced to Klaus Nomi and I was thrown on the stage. All of a sudden I’m on stage at Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah and Danceteria. I was dancing this robot dance with Joe Arias behind Klaus. It was overwhelming. After Joey discovered me, and they saw the paintings I was working on, they said, “You’re a Nomi.” We did a one-day rehearsal and then we did a show.
Around that time, I got a job with Diane von Furstenberg because she saw the New Wave show I had at Fiorruci in 1979 and hired me to do her lipstick and nail polish campaign called, “Hot Pinks.” I did this whole campaign for her and I promptly learned I shouldn’t ever do commercial art. I went up to Diane’s office. It was a sleek uptown office. I went up and there was a shag rug and she was wearing a high slit skirt and big high heels, and Barry Diller was sitting behind her. And she was like, “Darling, I’m so excited to do this campaign. We’re only going to pay you like $50, but we are so excited because we’re going to introduce you to Andy and Halston and Bianca.” And I was like, “Oh my god, that sounds like so much fun, okay.” They ended up using the image for the campaign and gave me $50 and that was it. They never answered my calls. So one day, I just went up to the counter at Bloomingdale’s and took the advertisement and said, “I made this thing and they can’t answer my phone calls and I’m sorry but this is all I have,” and I just took it and left. It was a hand with fingernails all different colors pink and rockets were shooting out of the fingernails, but the rockets were lipsticks. It was really New Wave. I was like, “Fuck this.”
A few years later, after Keith became famous, he got invited to Sean Lennon’s ninth birthday party and I went with him and I’m standing there with Keith and he’d heard that story like a million times, how much I was complaining being treated like that. Then Diane walks in and I said, “I just wanted to thank you.” And she didn’t remember me and said, “For what?” And I said, “Because of you, I decided to go from commercial art to fine art and everything has been going great.” Because after that experience I went back to school and was like, I’m not doing this commercial art thing anymore because they just treat me like shit. Because that was how you thought you were supposed to make money, do commercial art. A week later, Diane found the painting and I got it back. Someone had painted over my logo for the Hot Pinks with a new logo on it. I ended up painting over that.
EDITORIAL NOTE: When I first interviewed Kenny Scharf in October 2013, I was struck by how muralistic the stories about his experiences were, in particular those that took place in New York during the 70s and 80s. Listening to Scharf recount his many anecdotes, one gets a strong sense of landscape as well as the radiant infinity of sprawling micro-narratives that go into the blockbuster of the City. I realized that in the course of conducting interviews with various artists for zingmagazine, I had encountered a treasure trove of personal tales ranging from the quotidian to the hilarious to the tragic to the absurd to the enigmatic that accumulate into a depiction of the lives of artists struggling as often as succeeding in the art capital of the world. Thus, I was inspired to prioritize the telling of these stories in the voices among us to tell them, as a sort of living history.
—Rachel Cole Dalamangas
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.