Richard Benari’s current work focuses on the possibilities of a pared-down photographic language and its ability to provoke a visceral response to form. His chief concern is the interpretation of that language in print. Relying solely on the literal qualities of the photographic object, meaning in his pictures derives from the unique interaction of surface, ink and light, rather than from the image, per se. His photographs are in numerous private, public and library collections including Smith College Museum of Art, the University of Oregon and Yale University.
Lauren Henkin grew up in Maryland, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and resides in New York City. She states, “My work focuses on the tension between preservation and extinction. I work from the inside out, using internal narrative as the foundation in which to reinterpret space, light and form found in the external.” Henkin is an educator, reviewer, writer, frequent speaker, author of numerous books, and active member in the arts. Her work is widely collected by private collectors as well as institutions such as Southeast Museum of Photography, Yale University, Smith College and Dartmouth College among others. Her work has been published in numerous journals on photography and the book arts including PDN, Shots Magazine, Black+White Magazine, Diffusion Magazine, Flak Photo, Urbanautica, Landscape Stories, Parenthesis and The Washington Post. She is a Px3 multi-category winner, Oregon Regional Arts & Culture Council grant winner, with other award nominations in both the Brink Emerging Artist and Contemporary Northwest Art Awards.
Interview by Josh T. Franco
The notion of a “touching photograph” is schmaltzy, saccharine. Well, at best, a photograph can be genuinely touching as a mnemonic talisman. And these are crucial. Distinguishing between personal and generic is the key. But touching a photograph feels illicit and irreversible. If the viewer is not imbedded with basic conservation protocol, she is nonetheless touching, and that is something in a world where looking at even shocking images is quotidian. The fingerprint will never fade. The human oil cannot be fully conserved out of the print. You have offered up your photographs explicitly for handling, manhandling. (Is mangling so far away?) To do so in the context of art is a risk. Thank you for taking a risk, not merely for the sake of being risqué. The touching matters, you tell us. It makes me begin my engagement with your work in a place other than the visual. Tactility seems the highway, visibility the exit ramp. The vehicles: hand-built vellum and sandpaper.
“Manhandling” feels a bit loaded. But “tactile” fits. That’s what we were after—reconnecting viewers to the haptic quality of a photographic print. And, yes, there’s some risk in that. Thanks for acknowledging it. The idea isn’t so much that the feel of the print in your hand supersedes the visual, but that you get to experience the print as we did when making it: up-close, unframed, unmediated and accessing the ambient light in which it is viewed.
And what is pictured in Pictures? What is visible? By beginning from touching I—nor you, I believe—am not implying that the visual is secondary. The labor and care with which the images are crafted seem guided by a desire to put in perpetual motion a scale. On one side of the scale are objects in space. On the other side, objects’ images as ideas. To tip the scale, the print and the viewer/handler must dialogue with one another. Orientation seems key. The process of holding up, rotating, flipping, is integral to the intended experience. I think?
Handling the print is secondary; that’s right. Again, we wanted to create an intimate viewing experience, and one in which the feel and weight of the print would be add something—a way to further convey, or sometimes play-against, the already-tactile quality that’s so much a part of the photographic print. So the scale of the prints became important. But our main concern: give the prints a chance to be viewed in different kinds of light. At the end of the day, Pictures is a study in photographic abstraction. Meaning here doesn’t depend on the image, it depends on the object—the print itself. So the ambient light in which the prints are viewed is as important an ingredient as the ink with which they are printed.
About orientation: Actually, it’s not so essential. Two of the project’s four folios are shot in portrait and what we noticed is that that’s a bit tough for viewers. People see the world in landscape, after all. So, many viewers try flipping the vertically-oriented images on their side. But, after a few minutes, they’ll right them vertically again. The visual clues in the images—the way the lines run, the way the light falls—tend to tip them off about our intention.
Orientation and vertigo do play a role in how one experiences scale in the works. Where there is a rocky landscape, the light’s presence in the photograph is manipulated in such a way as to confuse: is this a sheer rock cliff? A rocky, endless beach? A trompe l’oeil drawing? And when one is sufficiently disoriented: Is this an abstraction? But as vehemently as you want us to demystify the photograph’s claim to truth through touching it, you seem to want us to avoid abstracting this image as well. What does it mean to say that these are rocks? Or that they are not?
Yeah, these images are plenty disorienting. That’s purposeful. There are no clues about scale in these images and no tips about pictorial space. In fact, subtle shifts in tone purposely confuse the viewer’s read of pictorial space. So the Oregon landscapes, for example, tend to engage because of the sheer feel of rocks and because of perspective—the images feel at once vertiginous, like you said, and flat. But for us, “abstraction” and “disorientation” aren’t at all synonymous. We’re interested in abstraction because it intensifies the physicality of what’s photographed; disorientation is a by-product. A real useful one, but still a by-product. The Oregon landscapes, which say so much about abstraction in the found and the everyday, convey the sheer physicality of place—without reference to location and without documentary comment. Similarly, the sandpaper constructions create a tension, we hope, between the solidity a viewer sense and the fragility of the paper. They also feel voluminous, and this lends a kind of biomorphic feel to the prints. We were surprised that so many viewers see legs and pelvis in these images.
The onus to orient again falls on the viewer/handler herself in the photographs of interior walls. How did you get the images of stacked empty walls to behave as if nothing but two dimensions? I am thinking here of the odd moments where the edge of a wall closer to the foreground and the edge it creates (the same edge) against the wall behind it twist on one another. It’s as if the beginning of a braid happens in an arbitrary pinpoint where the walls are, in reality, just as far from one another as in any other spot. Is the editor exposed? Is the viewer working hard enough?
It’s a good read of the images. Thanks.
A big part of this project was to return the viewer to the pleasures of modernism. So, again, the idea of flattened perspective was key. In each of the prints, subtle shifts in tone confuse the viewers read of pictorial space. This is especially true of the interior shots, the architecture studies. So a part of the tension in these images is about, again, about depth and flatness. About how it was done: a lot depended on the light in which we photographed and a lot depended on how we interpreted these images in print. We tend to photograph at the tightest aperture available, which sharpens the image but also deepens pictorial space. So the flat light in which we photographed, the subtle gradation in tone and, later, careful spit-toning—all of this was key. It’s also generative. It’s helped shape one of our current projects, which focuses on the built environment and how we conceptualize space.
The slowest arriving question about this work is the question of text. It seemed at first to have nothing to do with the printed work, the alphabetical. Perhaps it is the handholding that takes me there. Do I engage these works like books? Why do they make me want to read them?
This is a terrific question. Thanks for asking it. The short answer: These photographs aren’t intended for the wall. First, there’s a lot of them—four series of five—and each image within a series dialogues with the next. So, seriality is key; that is, these images develop their ideas across a series. So there is a textual reference here, and a kinship with books—which is, in part, why we first decided on the folio format. Also, it was important for us to give a sense of those ideas unfolding, but without any narrative present. It feels like the majority of what’s photographed today hinges on narrative. We wanted to make a conscious break with that.
The longer answer, though, involves how we—the viewers—have become accustomed to looking at art: on the wall, episodically, and seldom within the context of what surrounds a work or how the work is lit. We tend not to engage the curatorial decisions that went into hanging the art—probably much to the frustration of curators. So a piece of this project involved a degree of “self-curation” on the part of the viewer. The viewer gets to order the prints and choose the light in which they’re experienced. By doing that, they create a kind of conversation with the work—and with us, a kind of questioning of our intention. There’s more to say here, but it’s a long conversation. Perhaps another day.
These works are meant to be consulted and engaged, to be brought out and experienced within the specific and viewer-chosen context of light and quiet room. In this sense, the textual reference goes deep—as if it’s a book one would wish to consult and experience, then later re-read. The impetus for this is the Chinese Handscroll, and the best feel for that is Maxwell Hearn, Chief Curator of Asian Art at the Met, talking about it. Here’s a link to that kind of kitschy vid from the Times. (Click.) Of course, we don’t intend to “lovingly swaddle” and of our work in silk.
You touch your work as well, beyond the touching required by all photographic production. Crumple: to create lines whose weight is not the detritus of graphite traveling on vellum, but the result of intimate handling in three dimensions. You have had such intimate relations with your material. I wonder why, and I wonder how the “why” changed as that mode of relating unfolded over time, forgive the pun. How does your relationship with the material set up the framework for our relationship with it? What will the institutions taking on this work have to consider in how they relate to their visitors as a result?
Materiality is the thing we wanted to convey most. We wanted to give a viewer a chance to experience the sensations and emotions one feels from touch, without reference to any actual thing. So the crumpled papers, for example, have an ethereal and often a fleeting quality to them. There are moments in the prints where the ink is barely visible on the paper and image and paper seem to become one. An interesting effect, considering that the image itself is of a piece of paper, though people have read these as any number of things, from aerial landscapes to bed sheets. We’re drawn to these prints because of the tension they create between the material fact of the print and the ethereal quality of what’s photographed. Plus, again, how these, in particular, depend on the ambient light in which they’re viewed. I hope viewers of these prints share that our take.
About how the institutions that have acquired this work will choose to exhibit them: of course, it’s not our call. We made an effort to reach out to those institutions which had study rooms, hoping this work would be accessible off the wall and in-hand. We also considered offering acquiring institutions two sets: an exhibition set and a handling set. But, like you said earlier, museums and library special collections—the institutions that have shown the greatest interest in these folios—have their own set of conservation protocols—and rightly so. Many institutions have incredibly good facilities—their study rooms—that enable viewers to page a work from the collection and view it up-close and personal. It’s a terrific resource, one we hope more viewers make use of. The white gloves don’t concern us. These institutions go to great trouble to make work available—and in a ways that acknowledge the artist’s intention—while still maintaining conservational safeguards.
I thank you both. Engaging your work has been, after all, a touching experience.
Thank you, Josh. These meetings have been terrific.
The strangely shaped ceramics arranged in a line like soldiers and stacks of jaunty portrait drawings of flamboyant characters create an aura of sweetness paired with the macabre in Elisabeth Kley ’s Brooklyn studio. Hidden faces painted on kiln-fired jars stare back at the viewer and a dusty cat sashays about the room until jumping into Kley’s lap to do some affectionate writhing. The studio if full of both life and death—and yet, without the usual luggage of either. The subject of mortality, for Kley, invokes bright colors and eccentric patterns. Faces are both inviting and defiant. Designs are aggressive, but playful. What is perhaps most alluring, however, is that these uncanny, subtle juxtapositions that Kley works in are as intelligent as, well, friendly. I’m not sure how else to put it: I don’t believe I’ve ever felt like a ceramic jar was trying to be friends with me the way Kley’s jars and portraits do, that is, these works smile and actually look inquisitively at you from across the room. For all the ways that art tries to seduce, repel, antagonize, disgust, and move viewers, the experience of feeling an actual personality projecting from a jar is unsettling if just as charming. Of course, these jars and portraits have a real bite to them too: Kley’s interests as an artist span from Louise Bourgeois to Dali to Chanel to Kolomon Moser, etc. etc. Her Facebook wall is a flood of various images: Anna Pavlova, Harry Belafonte, Henri Matisse, and “the first yogasan chart ever found.”
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
I’m curious about your ceramics with eyes. How did the notion of an object that looks back at the viewer come about?
Well, it might have been because I was doing portraits at the same time that I started doing ceramics, but I also wanted really early paintings that I did when I was 18 or 19 to have eyes. I’ve always liked the idea of objects looking at you. For the first several years I made ceramics, they almost all had faces and eyes, sometimes quite disguised. The pattern on this piece from 2009 (gestures to colored ceramic on the floor) was taken from an antique French tapestry that Louise Bourgeois used for a sculpture of a head. It’s a leaf face with eyes and a mouth. I was after a specific expression, rather sad and blank. In the last few years, the faces began to feel cartoonish, so I switched to large aggressive flowers.
What was the portrait work you were doing at the time you started making ceramics?
It started when my father died. I was devastated and I wanted to do something with the feeling. I made ornamental drawings of angels and also some drawings of corpses done from pictures I found in the library—the first time I ever worked from photographs. Later, a friend asked me to be in a show about David Bowie. I liked his gallery and I wanted to be in the show, so I found a bunch of pictures of David Bowie and made drawings looking at them. This was the beginning of my portraits.
My father wasn’t particularly flamboyant, but he did have a mustache, and sometimes he sat in a chair in a certain pretentious way that reminded me of Dali. So I began doing drawings of Dali, again from photographs. I then went on to other aging, flamboyant characters including artists Nevelson, Warhol and Fini, fashion designers Erte, Chanel, Trigere, and art world characters like Peggy Guggenheim. I was interested in mortality and decoration, aging people defying death through extreme dressing up. Later I carried the idea of transformation even further with characters in drag: portraits of Ethel Eichelberger, Candy Darling and Jack Smith. At the same time I was doing large drawings of colorful airy pavilions, using expensive Japanese paper. I would begin at the bottom with a horizon and continue up adding sections in pen and liquid watercolor. If I made a mistake, I realized I could cut out the part I didn’t like and neatly collage in a replacement. I began doing the same thing with the portraits, and eventually I began getting messier, constructing the faces by gluing on separate features, which reminded me of putting on makeup. Around the same time I became friends with an artist and drag performer whose work I had loved for years. I photographed his performances and used them to make drawings. The drawings weren’t pretty, but he tolerated me. He was my first (and so far only) live muse.
It’s interesting because you’re a female artist whose gaze is setting upon men who are bending gender.
I admire the guts it takes for people to transform themselves so dramatically. I am fascinated by metamorphosis.
When did you begin making ceramics?
This was also quite happenstance. My husband wanted to get a kiln and make ceramic sculptures, so we decided to take a class at a small local pottery studio. I had recently abandoned painting for drawing. I was tired of painting’s historical baggage and wanted to do something lighter. I’d always liked the decoration of historical ceramics, so I thought, why make paintings about it when it’s so much nicer to make the ceramics themselves.
What about decoration appeals to you?
I like an extreme environment that’s visually over-the-top. I remember when I went to Mexico in 1990 I was interested in the colonial hybrid decoration that is Spanish and Native American together. I thought, oh my god, everything is so decorated and everything is so colorful. I just love that.
How do you make your color choices for the ceramics?
I’ve become comfortable with a group of underglazes I mix myself. I’ve chosen the colors that are clearest: lime green, turquoise, yellow, yellow orange, orange red and deep blue. I want the work to emit light—I adore Matisse—but at the same time I want it to be loud and defiant. Bright colors don’t always signify happiness; they can express other emotions, perhaps exhibitionism and rage. They may also cover up things you want to hide.
Where do the patterns and motifs that decorate your ceramics come from?
I look at a lot of things: Islamic, Central Asian and Russian textiles, Ballet Russe sets and costumes, Islamic and Spanish ceramics, Wiener Werkstatte design. I improvise from images I see in books or in photos I take at museums. I’ve always been interested in foreign cultures. I had a collection of costume dolls when I was small.
You mentioned “decoration and mortality.” How did those two come to pair in your mind?
I think it was through the idea that the extreme behavior and the extreme of visual expression, the personal visual expression of someone like Dali, or also Warhol, those different artists as they aged—maybe they were always flamboyant—but it seemed to me as they aged, that the flamboyance was like a battle against death.
Did your father influence you as an artist?
Yes, I think so. He was an architect. My parents encouraged me to make art and sent me to an after school sculpture class at the Museum of Modern Art. My father always painted. Some of his work was quite interesting, especially a few quite surreal pieces made when he was in psychoanalysis, before he had his crazy shrink committed. After that he painted athletes, trees, and portraits of my mother.
So you’ve been making art your whole life?
Always. At 5 or 6 I was planning to be a mommy, but a few years later I knew I was going to be an artist.
I took sketch classes on Saturdays at the Art Students League as a teenager. When I finished high school I’d had enough of academics so I continued there instead of going to college, not exactly the best career path. I didn’t have a clue about contemporary art, but I tried everything else. I was aware of the old masters, Post-Impressionism, Matisse and Picasso, and Abstract Expressionism. I began rather abstractly doing hallucinatory paintings with hidden figures out of my imagination, but then for some reason I became compelled to make my way through art history and conquer the representation of three dimensions. Life drawing, modeling clay sculpture figures, wood carving, still lives, and so on—all things I’d now advise artists to skip unless they are necessary to what they want to do. Next I learned etching at Hunter College and then I enrolled in the studio semester program at Empire State College. It was designed to allow art students from upstate to experience the New York art world by providing studios in Manhattan at State University tuition, which was really cheap at the time. Contemporary artists like Eric Fischl and Carolee Schneeman came in and talked about their work and looked at yours. That’s when I became aware of what was going on around me.
What was your impression of contemporary art when you started to encounter it?
I wasn’t really crazy about macho Neo-Expressionism and the messy East Village scene. In the nineties the market crashed and things became more modest, which I liked. Of course now I’m more open-minded and interested in a lot of art I once dismissed.
What do you think about where art is now?
There’s a lot going on. I tend to like dark, sensational, somewhat twisted things, maybe because they make good copy. I was writing for Walter Robinson during the last four or five years of Artnet and I knew what he liked—TABLOID. I had a great time writing about artists like Otto Muehl, the Viennese Actionist who recently died, as well as Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, Miriam Cahn, and Ron Athey. But I also love Tabboo!, whose work is supremely joyful.
What’s a recent show you’ve seen that was good?
The Kolomon Moser show at the Neue Galerie is sublime, and my friend Joyce Pensato’s retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum is fantastic.
Given that you have been a lifelong artist, what advice would you have for a young artist starting out today?
Learn a skill that is in demand and pays extremely well by the hour. I never did that.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on drawings for two large round bottles to go with the four that are already done. I’m also making five longer, skinnier bottles that I can put in between the six large three-part bottles I finished last year (gestures to line of large ceramics). It was fun to make these exuberant and crazy shapes, but then once I was trying to figure out how to decorate them, I felt somewhat constrained. Complicated shapes need simpler decoration. The round ones can be more complex and interesting.
I have also decided that it would be nice to unify everything I have [at the studio] with some really aggressive black and white wallpaper. I’m running out of space and there’s only so many more ceramics I can make. Eventually I may go back to doing portrait drawings, and hang them on the wallpaper, which might turn the other work into décor for the spaces where they live. I went out and got a little silkscreen kit and I’m starting to figure that out.
Is that typical of your process? The idea is followed by gathering materials and then playing around?
I would say that my process is really quite obsessive. For example, I did a printmaking project for Randy Wray’s Element Editions in 2010. He wanted a group of unique variations on one print, but I wound up making 4 small and 4 medium plates to warm up and then 6 larger ones, each with two versions in black and white, and more in colored ink with collaged and painted additions on white paper, and even more in colored ink on colored paper. I worked on them for months. Similarly, every portrait subject is drawn repeatedly and each ceramic bottle that I make requires extensive preparation with many black and white drawings and colored watercolors before I can finally apply decoration. Although I strive to make things look as if effortlessly done in one breath, I don’t work quickly. Everything must be completely explored.
Earlier this month, Meghan O’Rourke explored the contemporary trend of American authors writing about their own deaths (typically when faced with the slow progression of a fatal disease) as a reality-entertainment driven literary realism. O’Rourke wondered at the “surprise” that “writers express . . . that their minds really are housed in bodies” and the “strangely fictive” quality of a work that anticipates the death of the author who will not be able to write her own ending.
A recent “lyrical novel,” that grapples with the unimaginable reality of death in paradoxically surreal terms, written by Tarpaulin Sky Press newcomer Claire Donato (still very much among the living) is Burial. The work is a stripped down, sterling aesthetic rendering of both grief and death, totally uncontaminated by sentimentality and yet no less visceral. Vomit, weeping and decay are stark happenings in the meditations of the book, in which, essentially, the narrator arrives at a hotel, which she conflates with the morgue where her father’s body is resting, and prepares for his burial. In this awkward landscape where a mind in mourning wanders, the characters are gaunt with anonymous identifiers like “Groundskeeper” and “The Voice”, and sentences are compared to necklaces that strangle. What’s most uncomfortable and rather breathtaking, however, is Donato’s ability to maintain an excruciating clarity of thought while teetering between prose and poetry, consciousness and death, self and other, thought and silence, grief and object, mind and body.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas.
Burial is a chapter book of prose-poetry, which is an enthusiastic, mercurial, ill-defined genre, often perceived as difficult. It seems to me that Burial operates on an intuitive plot as well as extremely precise logic that is seldom present outside of prose poetry. How would you characterize prose-poetry as a distinct genre (perhaps it’s not distinct at all)?
I imagine the ‘prose poetry’ label is where we put sentences that don’t behave the way we expect them to. In my mind, prose-poetry is not a distinct genre; rather, it is a classification readers may or may not bring to the text, perhaps as a received idea, personal boundary, or heedful reaction.
On its surface, Burial does not necessarily fulfill expectations of traditional American fiction. By traditional, I am referring to popular fiction dependent upon plot, character, and so forth; however, this category—like prose poetry—is general and broad, and I try to avoid general and broad categories in my writing, as in my life. Burial engages and distorts conventions of fiction, and as I wrote the book, I read widely. In particular, I took in a lot of contemporary and historic international fiction. Much of the literature I read destabilizes the boundary between prose and poetry. Nathalie Sarraute, one of the authors to whom I turned, once said “there is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose.” Perhaps there exists a spectrum of extraordinary language, and this spectrum is contingent upon each reader’s linguistic adventurousness or threshold of abstraction. Maybe we simply need to rethink what we believe to be “poetic,” or what we believe to be “prose.” Or, maybe it is all dark matter.
Further, I find it useful to think of genre as a type of performance, wherein the author ‘puts on’ a genre in the same way one puts on a wig. But I was not consciously attempting to perform prose poetry when I wrote Burial. In the end, its mode of meaning-making makes more sense to me than so-called straightforward prose.
In terms of the first-hand experience of the text, the reader is basically asked to straddle two worlds simultaneously—the narrator is in a morgue and the morgue is a hotel, and the narrator checks into the morgue to grieve, suspended in a death that is not her own. It’s sort of a metaphor that gets wrapped around itself—a gesture that is repeated throughout the book. It’s interesting because as humans our minds do occupy this shadow world of death when we wonder about our own and witness that of others. What was the process of generating this prose-poetic work that straddles planes?
Burial’s world came about organically. The more I wrote the book, the more I felt as if its text possessed agency, and the more I recognized the text’s agency, the more my body was a vessel where its language could take root and become what it ended up being. This counteracts the traditional notion that the author’s mind is some grand source where language finds its origins. I was possessed by Burial, as in a fugue; its language was (and is) bigger than ‘I.’ This is not to say the process of generating the book was so free-flowing that it did not involve work. It involved a lot of work, hours of reading, writing, and research. Apart from these activities, my process entailed a lot of looping about on my feet in a fugue. I walked and ran loops around parks; I rode trains back and forth, back and forth. I wrote and rode. I memorized passages and repeated them to myself ad nauseam. (I still repeat these passages to myself, much in the same way one repeats melodies in one’s mind.) My process did not include storyboards or outlines; I began with language as material. Here, I hesitate to say ‘I began with language as material in the same way a painter begins with paint as material,’ because what if the painter begins with a concept? I began by generating prose-poetry that meditated on objects—morgues, caskets, flowers, and fish—that later became recurring leitmotifs in the narrator’s world. She (the narrator) grew out of these objects, first as an ‘I,’ then as an absent first-person speaker—or should I say listener?—when I edited away the first-person.
In sum, Burial’s world expanded outward as its narrator—both present and in absentia—took shape in language. Within her language, my material, I located the book’s concept (a woman grieving the loss of her father checks into a hotel she conflates with the morgue where his body is being kept . . . ). There existed a period of time where a draft of the manuscript was at rest. And then I picked it up again, retyped it all and addressed its defects. These defects were, of course, subjective: In ways, I aspire to create defective texts.
Or, conversely: Language as paint, paint not necessarily as equivalent to words. Concept preceding or not preceding text. Burial as a peripatetic process, a contrapuntal composition.
The work is both macabre and deeply philosophical, operating by a series of simple questions horrifying in their magnitude. Early on, the narrator asks, “What does it mean to be dead?” I’m curious to know more about your interest in writing so closely to the subject of death in this way that performs the painful mental struggle with mortality.
What’s not interesting about death? There is no greater mystery! I’ve always been interested in writing about topics unfamiliar to me, instead of ascribing to the writing workshop cliché of “writing what [I] know.” Paradoxically, death is both unfamiliar to me (insofar as I am alive) and immediate: I am going to die, and people I love will die, and this inevitability is a tremendous site of anxiety and preoccupation. As a human being, I simultaneously dread and desire to understand death; as a writer, I explore it as a subject, and it becomes a living thing, an organism that reflects life.
A poignant moment I thought was the opening of the chapter titled, “Question,” in which the question is posed: “Must crisis enter the heart? Or might the heart open its gates, spill open its contents and reveal itself as wholly self-contained, split apart by death . . . ” So there’s a choice between crisis (death?) entering the heart and the heart as its own crisis, which is to ask how do crisis and the heart relate. What are the crises that contemporary literature is responding to?
The answers to this question depend on the contemporary literature to which we are referring. The answers also depend on which contemporaries we consider. In the literature I craft, I am interested in writing toward essential questions: How to live? How to die? What is death? Why are we here? I am also interested in investigating how we negotiate our own subjective perceptions with a supposed objective reality, or how to see the seeing; how to transcribe the body’s peculiar physical sensations, defenses, questions, ways of indicating, and so forth; how to step outside of these patterns; how to play; how to empathize; how to work within and beyond discomforting spaces; how to imagine a world without myself in it. I am not sure these preoccupations of mine are crises. Presently, the crisis for me is to read or write, and how to survive.
There’s a dialogue about love that occurs between a male Voice and the female narrator, who is often commenting on the bodiliness / objectness of her environment, even choosing the cold factness of the body over abstraction. It’s a striking and tricky way to work with an original female perspective that embodies both voice and gaze, by putting such a voice in conversation with other voices. How was the voice and perspective of this book shaped?
Burial did not occur in a vacuum. Its voice and perspective were shaped via sensory processing, as in reading, watching, listening, touching, and taste. While working on it, I ingested so many books, records, films, and long-form television shows. I turned and returned to visual art. I watched dance performances. I went for long runs and did yoga. I had conversations with co-investigators, mentors, and friends—notably, I took decompression walks with my neighbor who was studying for the LSAT. I worked as an amanuensis while writing the book, and the process of transcription influenced my writing in ways I do not fully understand. As I edited the book’s final drafts, I turned to my bones. All of these things helped me perceive more clearly.
Those interested in specific examples can check out Burial’s acknowledgements, where I include a partial list of sources that inspired the text. Even that list, in fact, was inspired by someone else—my friend Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi suggested I create it.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a second novel (entitled Noël), multiple poems, and a theoretical performance called SPECIAL AMERICA, which I collaborate on with Jeff T. Johnson, and which is my favorite art to make.
The collaborative group in contemporary art practice is really an old thing all dressed as new, and rechristened—rock star style. In some ways, the medieval guild was the long lived precursor where a group of artisans—let’s say stone workers, grouped together to work on a project—let’s say a cathedral, and the work of the group became apotheosis of a lifelong achievement, if that . . . There was security and anonymity. This practice segued into the school of the Master, when young artists apprenticed for a master often completing his works or filling massive amounts of it, perhaps specializing in drapery or some other eccentricity, and sometimes even moving onto studios of their own. Security and a little less anonymity. As the twentieth century rolled along groups had manifestos and full fledged memberships—Think the Dadaists and the Surrealists, much less the Fluxists or the Situationalists. More security more group celebrity. In terms of contemporary art practices in the 80’s and 90’s we would often see collaborative teams of two people—Fischli & Weiss, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Doug and Mike Starn, Pruitt & Early, Jane and Louise Wilson . . . or an artist working in tandem with a group like Tim Rollins and KOS. More security less anonymity. And then larger groups started to emerge like The Art Guys, Art Club 2000, The Royal Art Lodge or Bernadette Corporation. Group security group anonymity. The 21st century iteration of group effort exists in many forms and shows up in many venues from the recent shows like the “Ungovernables”, and “Younger Than Jesus” and is almost de rigeur . . . in terms of galleries on the Lower East Side or following the pop-up model, curatorial collaboration is widespread from Reena Spaulings, Lucie Fontaine, and 47 Canal to the ever present Bruce High Quality Foundation. In Austin, Texas, another group has emerged: Okay Mountain. Like other collaboratives Okay Mountain reaches across curatorial and market boundaries creating a new space for their work, practice, audience, and collaboration. A team of ten guys, we caught up with them recently and the interview that follows is the zingmagazine scout shout out.
Interview by Devon Dikeou
Where did the name Okay Mountain come from . . . As an editor, I am intrigued with style guides/copy editing, so . . . How did you reconcile “Okay” vs “OK” Mountain . . .
When we dissolved our two smaller spaces (Camp Fig and Fresh Up Club) in 2005 we knew that the new venture would have to have its own identity so we needed a new name. About a half dozen of the guys met up one evening to make a decision, where I think we met for at least three hours, mulling back and forth over different ideas. I think we all liked a name that alluded to a physical place (Forest, Mountain, River etc) and Okay Mountain was a name that no one hated. What also appealed to us was the idea of this huge, mighty form . . . but just an okay version of that. A tinge of self-deprecation, but ultimately a mountain is still a mountain, even if it is sort of dinky. The second runner up was ‘Boosterz’ which was supposed to sound like a sucky sports bar. It was a lively debate, but ultimately the right choice was made.
Truthfully, I don’t think that the “OK” vs “Okay” debate ever even came up. We all envisioned the wording as “Okay” without even discussing it, which is a rarity. It’s not too often that we’re all on the same page about anything without numerous conversations and debates.
Give us a little bit about your historic and artistic etymology . . . You were all students at University of Texas . . . Who did you study with . . . Mel Ziegler . . . Right? He was part of the collaborative team of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler . . . Are there any collaborative inspirational voices that you learned from be it Ericson and Ziegler or other collaboratives . . .
Obviously, there are a lot of us, and so the story of our forming has many threads. It is true that about half of us attended the University of Texas, though not all at the same time. It is also true that several of us were inspired by Mel’s tutelage, but more importantly, Mel rented out his studio to us so that we could form Okay Mountain, and then later sold that building so that we, like his little eaglets had to fly on our own. Once, in lieu of better entertainment, we burned a couch to cinders in our yard, then, in fear of Mel’s judgement, we crudely buried the scorched remains. But Mel figured it out and left us a note of avuncular reproach in which he addressed us as the Okay-Mountain-bad-boys, and signed himself the daddy-type-landlord. I think that is how both parties conceive of our relationship still.
That said, we definitely were not modeling ourselves after Mel and Kate’s collaboration, nor any other collectives. We opened Okay Mountain as a contemporary art gallery in 2006 with no plan of collaborating. We’re still called an alternative space but our plan was to be a totally-legit, mainstream operation that showed the type of art that we liked and was otherwise unseen in the region. We really agonized over getting the drywall and lighting in good shape, and we had a lot of experience by then because Okay Mountain was a hybrid of two separate galleries that various Mountaineers had founded and run in the previous few years and for one reason or another had outgrown.
The unsexy minutiae of gallery operations meant we were together often. We were trying to be egalitarian about everything from curating to lawn-mowing, and during all gatherings we’d pass around a sketchbook for the fun of it. That began our series of 7×7 (inch) collaborative drawings, which we’d sell out of our back room to help cover the rent. They sold well and from those we were asked to do our first show, as a collective, which we had never imagined hitherto. That was about two years after we opened as a gallery and although we can’t even claim the idea of forming as a collective, we quickly grew to enjoy the possibilities and began in earnest to make work together. If there is anything unique about our collective model, it is that we were not drawn together by a shared political or aesthetic ideology. In fact, we generally disagree about all-things-art. We do, however, enjoy spending time together and somehow art is the sphere that brought us together.
This brings to mind the Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse, which is very much in the spirit of your zingmagazine project soon to appear in issue 23 . . . Please detail the process for your zing project entitled, “Family Tree” . . .
Family Tree is the most recent iteration of a long line of Okay Mountain drawing games. These games started as a way to kill time while working gallery hours and during weekly meetings. We continued the practice for years. Whether that be at bars, in airports, on planes, in a car during a long road trip, or in an hotel rooms, anytime a lot of us are together we played drawing games. For years we played a game called “What Kills What”. Someone makes a drawing and then the next person has to make a drawing that kills/renders moot/cancels out the first, then the drawing is passed and this goes on endlessly. I imagine each and every member’s sketchbook is chock full of past “What Kills Whats”. While traveling for projects, one of our members decided to morph the game into “What Makes What”, essentially mating two things together to make an offspring. After a few runs of the game it was aptly titled, “Family Tree”, as it lays out a genealogy of sorts. When approached to participate in zing 23, we decided to extend to game to create a drawing project exclusively for print. In designing the layout of the project, it was important that the game grew in complexity as the viewer flipped pages, to capitalize on what was so fun about playing the game in the first place—watching objects slowly become absolutely absurd and seeing how your friends riffed on each other’s content. We emailed a few different possible growth patterns and blueprints to one another, voted and then started drawing. One member took the directorial position and orchestrated the entire project, deciding the pairs, making mock-ups, and passing out assignments to members. Six batch assignments were handed out and completed over the course of a month and a half. After all of the content had been generated, the line drawings were compiled into large Photoshop files, which were layed out, colored, cleaned up, and sent to print.
It is also interesting that each of you have your own art practices . . . how do each of you juggle each of your individual careers with the ideas, goals, and practicalities of the group . . .
Balancing our individual careers with the trajectory and obligations of the collective can be as challenging as it is rewarding. There have been times when the collective has shows lined up in pretty quick succession, enough that is is hard to decompress and reactivate our individual practices. Working in a group that is under one banner is not the easiest thing in that regard. Your personal practice flies out the window in service of a common concept or formal undertaking; sometimes your role is as a general at the center of an idea, other times you are left sanding a log outside in 20 degree weather. The flip side of this coin is that everyday you enter the studio you are being challenged, educated, and enriched by your fellow collective members. It’s a complete experience, best of times/worst of times in the most literal sense.
I first saw your work at the Pulse Fair in Miami 2010 . . . you showed a Food Cart, I believe it was called “Benefit Plate” . . . which is funny because Austin seems like it is the center of the Food Truck culture . . . But I feel I first started reading and hearing about your work after “Corner Store” (which was exhibited at Pulse 2009 in Austin’s Arthouse’s booth) . . . when did your work as a collaborative first receive national exposure . . .
As it is with others, our success started locally and spread from there. We were given a show by Jade Walker at the Creative Research Laboratory in Austin (“It’s Going to Be Everything”, January 2008) and that started the process of our group thinking about doing a show that was a combination of our art efforts, which had been very loose, organic, and informal up to that point, and started us down the path of exploring the different ways we could collaborate. From that, we were offered a show later in the year at Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, which allowed us to use some of our favorite aspects of the CRL show and add a few other elements. It was Sue Graze and Elizabeth Dunbar at Arthouse who gave us a chance to make an international splash at Pulse Miami in 2009, and we were ready. Instead of taking a shotgun approach to filling the gallery space like we had done with the first two collaborative shows, we created an all-encompassing idea in the “Corner Store” and filled it with all of the ideas we could generate within it. That loose, fun structure, combined with the winking subtext of the art fair as a fine art convenience store for the wealthy, was a big hit with everyone attending—we won the Pulse Prize and People’s Choice awards, and all of sudden we had to filter through a ton of offers from gallerists and institutions.
When I visited the studio you all were working on a kind of “Big Wheel”, titled “Ultrasonic VI” that was shown at Mark Moore in LA. Wheels like “Ultrasonic VI” conjure everything from Pat Sajak and Cake Walks, to “The Price Is Right”. How do you see the viewer in terms of participation . . . or for that matter, the viewer in terms of relational aesthetics . . .
Our works do tend to invoke a collective approach to enjoyment, which is related to some of the ideas behind relational aesthetics. But for us participation is not simply an end goal that we work backwards from. Nevertheless, often times participation becomes integral to the execution of our ideas. In other words, our work does not necessarily require direct viewer interaction, but it can; and different projects result in different levels of viewer participation. Some projects are explicitly open to more than “looking,” and some (like the wheel) are ambiguous in regard to viewer interaction. The wheel does move, which was very important to us, but it is a little uncertain whether you should spin it, or even if it does spin. The wheel is more a promise of interaction and as a result sets up a dilemma in the gallery space, creating some tension around the art object, the audience’s role, and even the gallery’s ability to navigate this ambiguity.
Regardless of how hands-on audience participation ends up being, we are always very conscious of how we hold the viewer’s attention, what we give people to focus on. And we generally side with maximal engagement, making works that we know will be readable by a variety of viewers and different types of audiences. I think we have a specific kind of respect for our viewers that manifests into a lot of tangible and visible effort. Ultimately, we cherish opportunities to present objects and ideas to the public and work accordingly.
One aspect about the collective related to audience considerations is the group’s large number. As we brainstorm or make a work, we tend to act as an audience. Because each of us requires unique (and sometimes similar) things from a project in order to be satisfied, we gravitate towards an egalitarian horizon, which translates into a kind of de-facto politics or ideology of heterogeneity. That may sound a little heady, but it is one way to try and understand our relationship to each other and to our audiences.
A while ago at Austin Museum of Art’s Laguna Gloria (AMOA and Arthouse have since merged) you were among a group of artists that were chosen to design a hole for a Miniature Golf installation . . . Your hole is entitled “School Night” . . . What did you take into consideration, what were your models, Augusta or Austin’s world famous Peter Pan MiniGolf . . .
It was really nice to be invited to participate in this. Miniature Golf and similar attractions are a subject we were already very interested in as a group and so we tried to look at it as a pretext to make an artwork that we would have made regardless of an overlapping purpose. Once that was established, we focused on what we found interesting about mini golf locations like Austin’s Peter Pan MiniGolf in the first place, as it exists in culture, rather than what might be interesting about an artist’s take on designing a golf hole in a museum setting. We were interested in how those kinds of places can evoke a transitional state of growing up. A time that involves jumping fences and lobbing empty bottles, before being able to officially join the nightlife of the twenty-one and older ranks. We’re happy with it as an artwork and look forward to showing it where it can be seen in a context with our other work.
Indeed, it looks as if the golf hole has made it way into another work . . . “Long Plays”. What’s your view of recycling ideas or pieces . . .
“School Night” was shown recently in our solo exhibition “Long Plays” at Mark Moore Gallery in LA. We were happy to show that work amongst other bodies of work in order to properly contextualize it. When seemingly disparate bodies of our work are exhibited in one space the viewer has an opportunity to follow the threads and see larger patterns in our thinking. Okay Mountain is happy to recycle ideas and works, as long as we are not being redundant. Each time we brainstorm on a new project we gravitate towards subjects we have touched on in the past. Inevitably, we see these subjects in a new light or make a new connection to them within our practice. Certain subjects have consistently resonated deeply with the group as a whole. Our artistic identity was formed in the explorations of these notions and those explorations will continue to grow and compound one another.
Finally, I am interested not just in the collaborative aspect of your practice as a group, but how that practice extends from being a dealer/gallery to an artists’ collaborative—the give, take of the viewer, the context, the artist, the collector. Can you please elucidate on these multifarious relationships . . . and Okay Mountain’s various hats . . .
In a certain sense, I think Okay Mountain’s multifarious relationships are central to organization’s vitality. Because each of the members wear so many hats, I think each of us gain greater perspective of our activities, as well as one another. When we started Okay Mountain, we were just a group of artists that wanted to be around art that excited us. In order to run the gallery each of us had to acquire certain skill sets ranging from roof tarring to public speaking. It has always been our model to trade off and give somebody else an opportunity to try something new—whether it be cleaning the bathroom, curating an exhibition, or working closely with a collector. This is not just an idealogical, egalitarian thing either—it has to function this way or everything would fall apart. This practice extends into the collective, as well. Each collective project has been quite different from the previous projects because we want/need to try new things. The group is composed of individuals with diverse interests and backgrounds and in order to keep ourselves excited and focused we have to challenge ourselves. Over the years we have realized that whether we are doing studio visits, working in our personal studios, managing our rental studios, or working on projects with the collective, each and every one of these activities impact and influence one another . . . which is a good thing.
Okay Mountain is: Carlos Rosales-Silva, Josh Rios, Justin Goldwater, Ryan Hennessee, Nathan Green, Peat Duggins, Michael Sieben, Sterling Allen, Tim Brown . . . each question is answered by a different member. There are nine questions and nine Mountaineers, more group security and group anonymity . . .
Zing #23 contributor, Graham Fagen has a mind akin to a tornado: one idea seemingly starts to spiral and picks up other disparate ideas until a cyclone of items such as Jamaican reggae, Auld Lang Syne, Scottish identity, and the 18th century slave economy is barreling out as a (no doubt, unusual) series of songs. Fagen’s recent film The Making of Us, part reality TV and part scripted metafiction, will be shown later this month at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His forthcoming project in issue 23 features a sort of smorgasbord of his work ranging from a photograph of a “pish balloon” (just as gross as it sounds, and, which was, it should be further noted, plagiarized in a YouTube documentary) to ship blueprints to stills from his film.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
The Making of Us is a film that explores that threshold between fiction and reality by making the process a part of the narrative and the audience a part of the cast. It’s not too far from reality TV. Why do you think the interrogation of reality is currently a popular subject of art and film?
Maybe it is so popular because the boundaries of reality are so blurred today by TV shows and Internet living? Just like the blurred boundaries of the concept of truth! The Making of Us developed from an interest in the way that we, as viewers, look at the arts, i.e., theatre you sit down for a known period of time and in an art gallery you stay for as long as you want. Theatre director Graham Eatough and I clashed these two together in an earlier project called Killing Time and it was interesting to see an audience work at finding their place in the work. For The Making of Us we wondered about other influences that could be added to such a scenario, such as a film crew.
In your piece, Natural Anarchy, there is an order in the color pattern of the lettering and language itself is a kind of order. Do you think humans can achieve actual anarchy? Would we want to?
Yes, I’ve used primary colors. We didn’t invent these colors; their matter of factness was discovered by us. They function, do a job, without us controlling or arranging them. The same is true for all natural order. I love this fact. And I love the ambiguity of Natural Anarchy and how people interpret the work. Viewers seem to split between being worried and looking for an explanation or relaxed, smiling at the thought. It does seem to divide viewers like that.
I’ve no idea if humans could achieve actual anarchy! Some might want to but the situation reminds me of the Groucho Marx quote “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
What is the significance of exploring culture via art? Why not explore culture scientifically or statistically instead?
Culture is, of course, explored scientifically and statistically. This work will result in facts and figures that are usually used to direct and demonstrate a need for a political direction.
I’m interested in the things are hard to give exact meaning to, the territories of nuance, paradox, subtlety, contrast, vagary, etc. I’m interested in a position that is hard to pin down or describe. Something between categories. For me that is my understanding of the complexities of culture and it is also the way that I understand my reasons for making art.
Do you do collaborations regularly?
Yes, I’ve done some collaborations. The collaboration work I’ve done with the theater director is maybe the most prominent work I’ve done in that retrospect. The other one that’s very obvious is that I worked with a music producer named Adrian Sherwood. I approached Adrian to work with me to see if he’d be interested in reworking at old Robert Burns song. Burns lived in Ayrshire in Scotland where I went to school in the late 1700s. He was going to leave Scotland to go work in Jamaica and he was going to work on a sugar cane plantation as what polite society would call a “bookkeeper,” but what in actual fact was a slave overseer on a plantation. When you left, you never had enough money to come back, so the community that you left considered you as dead and gone. So he decided that he would self-publish a book of his songs and poems to leave as a memento. So he did this and he heard rumors that a printer in Edinburgh wanted to reprint the poems and he canceled his sailing to Jamaica from the west coast of Scotland to travel to the east coast where he booked another passage to Jamaica, which he would take if the rumors of the publisher weren’t true. The rumors about the publisher were true, so he stayed in Scotland despite having booked a few passages to go to Jamaica and it was his book of poetry that kept him here. Four years before he died, he wrote a poem called “The Slave’s Lament” and because I grew up in Ayrshire where Burns lived, at school each January on the anniversary of his birth, we had to recite by heart his poetry to the class.
Away from school, I was making my own music, and I sort of caught the tail end of the punk movement and along with the punk movement came Jamaican reggae so I was buying a lot of Jamaican reggae records and I guess I wondered out of idle curiosity during my teenager years why at school, what was being taught as my cultural heritage was kind of meaningless to me, but yet the cultural polar opposite, Jamaican reggae, meant so much more to me than what my cultural heritage was according to school. I had a chance to research Burn’s father and that’s when I discovered that he booked these passages to live and work in Jamaica and that finding helped me make some bridges with that idle curiosity that I had.
So I approached Adrian Sherwood who works in London with a lot of Jamaican reggae artists and performers to see if he’d be interested in working with me to remake a new version of Robert Burn’s “The Slave’s Lament,” but with reggae performers. That was a great process, I really enjoyed that one. It was creative in that Adrian was into the idea and we talked a lot about the songs and the kind of feel I wanted the songs to have, and he would recommend people that he’d worked with that could help us achieve the sound and feel we wanted the song to have, and then you let them do what they need to do in order to achieve the song.
In an interview you said that your process is “an inquiry into cultural formers.” What are “cultural formers”?
There’s a sculpture that I made not long after I graduated from my master’s course and the sculpture’s called “Former and Form.” It’s a really simple sculpture. It’s pieces of wood that are held together with G-clamps and into the pieces of wood I poured some concrete and when the concrete was set I took out the cast and set it next to it. So it was a very simple sculpture and the size of the concrete was about the size of a house brick that’s very common in the UK. The more I worked on projects, the more I realized how important this sculpture was because this sculpture felt like a thinking model. What I was interested in about the sculpture was that I could show a form or a shape, but I could also show the mechanisms that were required in order for that shape to exist. In order for that shape to exist, I had to have some concept or some idea of what shape the mold had to be. So it was a cause and effect relationship.
When people started asking me what my work was about, I tried to find the shorter way to explain the complexities, and that’s when this concept that was becoming clearer to me from that earlier sculpture about “cultural formers” and things that shape our cultures and the way that we behave and then the way that we shape the culture, so the two-way relationship that’s there as well. The thing that was really important to me about that as an artist was the understanding when I started being invited to do other projects. One project in particular, I was invited to be what in this country is called the “official war artist.” I was asked by the Imperial War Museum to be the war artist for Kosovo and that’s where my knowledge of what I was trying to do as an artist became really important because not only was I able to understand a reason for examining my own culture, but I realized that comprehension was actually really important and it can help you understand other people’s cultures and find relationships to help understand what the differences are. So when I went to Kosovo to understand somebody else’s culture, for me, it was so interesting, because their culture had basically been destroyed. The work that I tried to do there was address cultural breakdown or cultural shifts of knowledge and logic that makes a culture hold together.
I’m curious about what you mean when you call a sculpture “a thinking model.” Can you explain that?
When I was making it, I was making a concept that I had that was quite simple in a formal sense and when I made it, it had a life and it was exhibited. It was for the Arts Council’s collection, so it had its own life, but its relationship with me is still the conceptual one. For me, that sculpture explains the complexities of what a cultural former is, or the way that I’ve been using that term “cultural former.”
How does art interact with the breakdown or development of culture?
When I came back from my time in Kosovo and made the exhibition for the museum, it was interesting because it was a question that especially journalists, maybe no so much art critics, but journalists would ask about, like, that must really have changed you? There were lots of questions about what value and what’s the use of making art about this sort of subject. There’s a lot of literary theory you could talk about the relationship to, maybe, genre, but for me what was important about my work was that real life theory. So for example, having been to Kosovo and trying to make an art work that would maybe try in a small way to address the complexities of war and conflict was very important and it was important that that work was exhibited in a museum that hopefully people came to see and try to understand through the artwork a different position or a different route to what war and conflict is. So you’re not experiencing it through the medium of a newspaper or a television or from a politician or from a UN official, it was a more paradoxical introduction through the medium of art. Paradoxical because it’s a simple way to access a very complex situation. That subject of “cultural formers” is very real in terms of a subject area that’s real and that’s what key in priorities for me when I’m making the work as an artist.
How does art differ from media?
The difference would mainly be the way that you see the subject matter in that you make a conscious decision to go to an art gallery or to a museum. Then once you’re there there are preconceptions about the way that you as a viewer would behave or react or interact with objects, or the formality of the construct you’re seeing within these places. That’s a very difference relationship to receiving media in the privacy of your own home. It’s public, for a start.
That’s maybe one of the reasons I started to become interested in working with a theater director—thinking about the notions about how we perceive art and how we receive art depending on the place that we’re in. If you go to a theater, you’re quite prepared to sit in a comfortable seat for an hour and a half and watch something and kind of believe the fiction that’s being presented to you, but if you go to an art gallery it’s very easy to go out and think, “I just don’t like this at all” or “This is aesthetically doesn’t engage me so I’m just going to walk out.” Or you may do the opposite and you may be really engaged and spend a long time there. That question of differences in media is about the ways that you receive them and the associated notions of different media.
Does art take in history and culture and shape our perception of it, or is art on the other side of that fence and shaped by history and culture?
I think art sits on both sides, certainly in the ways that I’ve received it and perceived it, and the way that I have worked with it. I would like to think that I’ve worked on both of those points. I was about to say on both sides of that fence, but maybe that’s the first thing, maybe it’s not a fence, it’s more fluid than that. There’s a lot of debate in the UK about is art political or where is the political art or where is the political art going. For me, the art that I enjoy and the art that I think is important is the art that can be both of these places that you talk about. It’s art that will not just provoke, but can also offer opportunity to reflect and use art history as well.
I think we live in a kind of a cynical time—on the brink of environmental disasters and constant wars. It seems to me that so many contemporary artists and writers and thinkers are engaged with this sort of darkness as a way to try to engage with the world. But then what is art’s role in this world?
That’s quite a description of “the darkness.” It reminds me of a documentary I just saw in which a young journalist was interviewing the Sex Pistols when they had just started and at that time in Britain there really was darkness because a lot of the power stations were working three-day weeks and four days of the week you could be in a power cut situation and there were lots of cuts and garbage men were refusing to pick up garbage. I remember seeing my very first rat, which I thought was a rabbit because the rats were so large. Going back to the point of the darkness, there was a young journalist interviewing the Sex Pistols for a news channel and you could tell the young journalist was quite a liberal guy and you could tell he was really excited about what the Pistols were doing and the fact they were raging against this sense of cultural and societal breakdown. So he’s got his microphone and he’s interviewing Johnny Rotten and he said, “Johnny, we’re a country on its knees and you’re coming along and rallying against political authority. What are you going to do about that?” And he passed the microphone over to Johnny Rotten and Johnny Rotten just said, “We’re gonna make it worse.” Which I thought was a fantastic answer and for me it’s quite an important answer in relationship to what you’re talking about. Because I think the other thing that’s really important is that artists and intellectuals of course have always been part of a more liberal stream, but they’re always part of the bigger majority as well and I guess that’s where those limitations on what kind of influence you can have on these kind of political powers.
What’s interesting about the kind of “darkness”—and these are your words, Rachel, not my words. The thing about the darkness that is Rachel’s is that slowly you start to find out about the mechanisms that control the way that we work politically and how we do business. The banking crisis and things like that, you start to find out the truth about the mechanics of how governments are influenced not necessarily by voters, but much more influenced by oil firms, banking industries, people like that.
So it’s a good point that “darkness” is my word. The body of your work that I’ve seen—there’s a grittiness to it and a humor to it, but it’s not consistently dark. How would you characterize the era that we’re living in and facing as artists and thinkers?
I think we need to stay extremely positive about it. I think we need to be cheeky about it. That cheekiness is maybe the most important thing. By “cheeky” I mean that we don’t become afraid to say what we truly feel we need to say and we say it in whatever way we think is the best way to say it.