Stone-Tape Theory, Oil on linen, 2012
Billy Jacobs is an astute fellow, with razor-sharp opinions on music (and many other things). A Velvet Underground devotee, Bowie freak, rock ’n’ roll junkie. Billy is also a painter whose work I’d buy if I had the money. His paintings are the essence of desire—attractive yet elusive. I visited Billy at his studio on Wooster Street in Soho to attempt to speak about painting after staring at a computer screen all day. Here are the results.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
Last visit you had paintings on the wall of governmental conspiracy figures, Manson girls, and Area 51. What initiated these interests?
I have always been a sucker for esoteric and sensationalistic topics of 20th century history. My interest in these topics developed by hearing passing references in films or music when I was younger, and I would need to seek out the story. I always had a hard time accepting that these people or events were real, and so I would become transfixed by their images, which act as a kind of documentation or evidence of their existence. Why did I then feel the need to paint them? I am not sure if I can answer that beyond saying it was a compulsion and felt very logical. Maybe I wanted others to become as fascinated with these topics as I was?
What’s your favorite conspiracy?
I’ll go with a classic: the JFK assassination. I began “researching” it when I was about twelve, and was intrigued by the cognitive dissonance surrounding the event. The majority of people do not believe the official story, yet they still have a hard time accepting a conspiracy theory. Recognizing that dissonance at that age definitely warped my view of the authoritative voice of history. My mistrust was exacerbated by the availability of so much evidence and documentation, especially photographic. This still is pretty unique to the JFK assassination: you can actually see photographs of the alleged participants, and learn about their biographies, and theorize motives. It stands in stark contrast to many other conspiracies where the participants are just faceless government organizations and the motives are vague “national security” It was probably my introduction to abstraction as well. I would pour over the high contrast black and white photos, in which researchers would claim that a fuzzy white mass definitively proved that there was a second gunman or whatever. A conspiracy I love in terms bizarreness, is anything to do with Reptilians. I do not claim to be an expert on this conspiracy, but the gist is that there are Reptile-like humanoids that inhabit our leaders. There are two schools of thought on the Reptilian motives: one that they are in collusion with the classic Gray Aliens, and trying to enslave humans, or that the Reptilians are in conflict with Gray Aliens, who are benevolent creatures watching over us. I am so intrigued that for some people these theories are the logical way to understand the world.
Lately, you’ve been engaged with the idea of landscape, but unlike your “bird’s eye view” paintings, these are divorced from subject. What happened?
Most of the aerial paintings were of Area 51, a secret military base in Nevada. By making multiple paintings of the same subject, the process became more about exploring abstraction than just rendering a specific image. I realized that I wanted paintings that were more visually abstract, and had vaguer and more mysterious subject matter. I began painting Egyptian ruins because I know very little about their historical or cultural specifics, but have always found them visually fascinating. Ironically, about six months after I began the paintings, the revolution in Egypt occurred. It was an interesting reminder that you cannot ever escape the social/political implications of a subject matter.
After painting fairly realistic landscapes of the ruins, I became more focused on the structures themselves. I began collaging my source material, forming new structures. I was focusing on rendering these new, unreal structures, instead of just depicting a vista with a sense of space. This rebuilding simultaneously allowed for me to push the abstraction of the painting and disrupt conventions of the landscape genre, to an even greater degree than the aerial paintings.
I see Egyptian ruins as almost metaphorical to your the development of your painting. Could you be more specific about why Egyptian ruins fascinate you?
Ancient Egyptian ruins are a loaded, yet not pointed, subject matter. They embody ideas of the past, specifically bygone civilizations, mankind’s physical creations, etc., but they also imply the present because they exist today. In fact, a lot of my source material are images by Francis Frith, the 19th century photographer. Today, his black and white prints feel almost as distant as the ruins themselves. I am sure there is a colonization critique to make about Frith’s work, as he mined another culture for his work. I do not know or care about his intentions, though. I initially chose his photographs purely for visual reasons, but I like that using them inherently comments on the tendency for any era to assess past eras. However, I do not identify with Frith any more than I do with the Egyptians who made these structures. Rather, I find both cultures equally exotic because of the distance that time creates.
Something we didn’t discuss at your studio was titles – which, looking at your website, seem important. Are they important?
We probably did not discuss them because they are not really part of my process. I keep a list of potential titles and, when I am finishing up a body of work, I will impulsively assign titles to specific paintings. It is not completely free association, but it is usually a snap judgment. The phrases mostly come from songs, films, etc. and perhaps are paying homage to my artistic inspirations. I can understand why a lot of other artists leave their work untitled, but that always disappoints me. Since the viewer usually will read the title after seeing the work, it seems like such a great opportunity to create another level of tension by confirming or denying the tone, subject matter, or attitude of the work. However, I do choose series or exhibition titles with much more care, as they will often be an introduction to the work.
You brought up lying a lot in our discussion. What is it with painting and lying?
A good friend of mine has often described painting as “a lie,” so that is often on my mind. Even non-representational or conceptual painting usually has an optical or illusionistic space or aspect, which for me, is the quintessential trait of a painting. This illusion, or lie, or fantasy is the perfect complement to historical subjectivity. History is an agreed upon, somewhat inaccurate, and essentially fantasized narrative. That idea gets compounded with alternative histories: conspiracy theories, forgotten histories, myths, and other revisions. Our inability to accurately grasp events is perfectly manifested in a painting’s abstraction.
Can you explain the term “paintingland”?
The title of my first career retrospective?
In February this year, the New Museum opened the much discussed and ambiguously criticized exhibit, “NYC 1993: Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” a show featuring dozens of artists from the era of Gen-X and the culture wars, blue nail polish and grunge. Twenty years ago, one of those artists, Patricia Cronin, was just beginning her career with a Polaroid photograph series controversial for the portrayal of frank eroticism from a woman’s perspective, and alternative sexuality including same-sex twosomes and moresomes back in the day of the AIDS crisis and don’t-ask-don’t-tell.
On a rainy afternoon this March, Cronin toured me through her studio to talk about the work she made in that moment of America that was pre-iPhone, pre-9/11, and pre-Google, but post-Roe vs. Wade, post-Reagan, post-Cold War. She discussed, as well, her current work as a scholar resurrecting the legacy of the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who was renowned in her day, though she’s now lost to the selective memory of history.
Cronin took a self-made career path that today seems almost impossible for most of the current 20-something creative set. Her studio with huge vertical windows and high ceilings on that rare quiet Brooklyn street emits an atmosphere of sanctuary. The space is occupied by bodies that are both sexy and—as Cronin will say herself, specifically of the Dante series—heartbreaking. There are life-size macabre male figures writhing off their canvasses, a small pair of paper angel wings thrashing and fluttering in a current of air from the heater, and there are tables of Polaroids featuring the most intriguingly carnal acts. The fleshiness of Cronin’s paintings and photographs results in work that is less depiction and more impression, that is, the viewer does not passively view, but becomes implicated. It’s work that’s as uncomfortable as seductive, as witty as visceral, and while Cronin’s work decidedly reflects a lively engagement with the world that bore it, there are also deep strokes that touch upon the more intense themes—and anxieties and absences—of art and history.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
So, tell me about the Polaroid pieces “Boys” and “Girls”, which are in the “NYC 1993: Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star” exhibit at the New Museum now, right?
Well, in 1992 (and it’s still the same today), you could not see the full expression of female sexuality reflected in the culture. So my friend, artist Ellen Canter and I thought we would do something about it and started going to artist studios and putting this show together. It was called, “Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art By Women” and we chose the artists, picked the pieces and pitched it to a lot of venues. David Zwirner presented it in 1993 and it included Louise Bourgeois, Yoko Ono, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Carolee Schneemann, and Cindy Sherman, among others.
And this was your first big exhibition, the one that really put you into the game?
Yes. Actually, I was always kind of surprised no other gallerists ever picked up on these. It’s great that younger curators are interested in them. There’s politics, sexuality, my three girlfriends at the time and Madonna! [points to Polaroid in “Girls”, in which a cardboard cutout of Madonna is visible]. The Madonna image was a life-size marketing display cardboard cutout promoting her infamous Sex book and the film Body of Evidence. A friend of mine worked at a video store and I asked her if I could have it as soon as the store was done with it. I took it home on the subway and put her in my bed and that was it.
Yes!
Which was really fun.
You can’t turn down a life-size cutout of Madonna. Tell me a little bit about the process of the Polaroids. They look very candid. How orchestrated were they?
They’re not orchestrated at all. It’s not set-up photography. The curator, Sandra Firmin, has written about them and contextualized them as being made during the Culture Wars and in relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe and Catherine Opie, but without the distance or the safety of a studio shot. These are taken within the frenzy of participation. There’s something really at stake in these photographs. I’m a really good student of art history, art theory, and performance art of the 80s and 90s. It’s when I came up in the art world. I saw art moving away from these ideas and I wanted to test them. I was really interested in power and representation, feminism, and the gaze, but as a lived experience. Not just about how art history problematized the gaze in terms of allegory, but how I am a woman, I was there, I took those photos, and now you are me as the viewer. It’s the seeing eye being imbricated. It is an index of a feminist narrative. Not THE feminist narrative, just A feminist narrative that just happens to be MINE.
One thing about these works is that they interrogate that boundary between another industry that is short on female gaze, which is pornography, and what is the difference between porn and art. Was that a question for you?
Oh yes, most sexually explicitly imagery, whether it’s pornography or art or that blurry space in between is basically produced by men for men. Back in ’93 everything was so politicized. There was a recession, scapegoats were needed, and many people in non-hegemonically normative bodies were demonized to consolidate the conservative electoral base. AIDS was an epidemic, research barely existed and politicians wouldn’t say the word. Abortion rights were at the front line, how to control women, very little has changed. That we’re still living in the culture wars is frightening. Along with other feminist activists, I was arrested for closing down the Holland Tunnel when the Supreme Court Casey decision came out. There were very few boundaries between the bedroom and the streets. Between ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), WHAM (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization), and WAC (Women’s Action Coalition) and other political activist groups that everyone I knew was participating in, and what you were doing in your bedroom or with your friends, there was no barrier, no walls. It was all the same thing, and that’s what I think you can really see in this work.
That’s what I found interesting about them—there’s this confrontational sexuality, but there are elements of aesthetics that are at work and there is an eye that is tracing beauty, but it’s also all so unapologetically political and there’s this way that there’s almost no boundaries.
But they’re not abject. I know 50 Shades of Grey is a very popular book this year, and I just want to say—this is no 50 Shades of Grey. I don’t understand women choosing abjection. I just don’t get it. Well, I understand there’s a lot of money in it, whichever way you do it, in your professional life or in your personal life. That’s how the culture encourages and rewards women. My work is all about female agency. Which doesn’t exclude a sense of humor, by the way. In the “Boys” piece, which is much more about S&M than the other, there are a couple of fun moments. I’ve got ‘safe sex practices’ that are hysterically funny like boiling your dildos so that they’re sanitized.
Was that a thing in the ’90s?
Yes, everything had to be very clean and if you participated in any S&M activities. Everything had to be washed in hydrogen peroxide. So cleansing is actually part of it. But also, the images with the TV set—it’s Bush Headquarters, which is obviously a double-entendre, but it’s also actually George Herbert Walker Bush (with Barbara next to him) conceding to William Jefferson Clinton on election night in November 1992. Dan Quayle is in another image.
Ohhhhh.
A Clinton Administration was what a lot of us were hoping for, because the political climate had been so oppressive under Bush and Reagan. And in the midst of a recession, no artist was risking a financially lucrative art career if they actually had the courage to speak the truth. I think that’s what my images do. Now, many people are less inclined. But there was something about back then that was incredibly liberating you could actually just tell your truth. And then someone would have the equal courage to put it up on their walls. Hopefully, people will become more interested in that kind of direct communication again.
One thing I was thinking about is that there is a sense of beauty as defined by the female gaze here. I don’t want to canonize the female gaze, but I am curious from your perspective, what are characteristics of the female gaze?
I can’t get into a debate about Lacan, Mulvey and Foucault; all I can tell you about is my female gaze. And within these S&M performances in the “Boys” piece, they were the exact opposite of everything else I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. In this relationship, women are in total control and it is a vantage point that most people don’t see in male/female relationships. I took these images from that very rare subject position and I found it incredibly powerful.
I mean, there’s an awareness of power. That’s what I notice about these, there’s very much an awareness of where power is and it’s not exploitive, it’s not abject as you say, but these [images] are very much aware of power.
The same is true with the “Girls” piece; I’m forcing the viewer to assume my visual subject position, to assume a lesbian body. That’s a very specific female gaze!
So how present do you think the female gaze is now, compared to when these were made?
I don’t think it’s very present at all. But I like movies from the 40s when women were smart, fast-talking, and [snaps fingers three times] . . . savvy and sassy, you know what I mean. Oh, but I just saw Kathy Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and I thought it was very much from a feminist perspective and a great film. It has stayed with me. The solemnity of the narrative is told with arresting visuals. She should have won the Oscar for Best Director. Can you believe she’s the only woman to ever win it? This is 2013. And I thought the art world was bad. And, I really identified with the lead character.
Where does your interest in the body come from?
Being raised Irish Catholic in New England, I’m hardwired this way, and I’m simply obsessed. There’s the natural world of the body, flesh and bone, blood and tears, and there’s the unnatural world beyond, and you’re trained to believe in both of them. I also think it’s where my passion for social justice comes from.
One thing that I think about as a female writer is have times changed. I mean, things are different, but it’s all still there, so have we just remixed it in a way that’s appropriate to us?
There’s so much resistance to female agency and authority. This might officially be a “timeless” theme. I wouldn’t say it’s demoralizing, but it is unbelievably depressing.
One thing I think about as a woman and a writer and as someone who follows art, is when I see or read work by women, I feel like part of the problem in engaging in political subject matter is that you risk being reactionary and not a voice that’s at the table. And I see your work as politically in-your-face, though I don’t see it as reactionary. It’s carving a place for itself.
Let’s start with everything is political. Then, of course my work is politically motivated, too. But I think the reason it doesn’t feel reactionary is because I’m always looking for a trifeckta; the right image or form for a very specific content and matching that up with just the perfect material. So it’s really conceptual, and engaging and satisfying to look at. If you take away any one third of this equation, the work should fail completely. Sometimes the work takes the form of a three-ton Neo-classical marble statue and sometimes it’s writing a catalogue raisonné and other times it’s figurative, expressive paintings, all to address my specific political content. I mean, I’m obsessed with the body and what it’s like to inhabit one. How we succeed and how we fail as human beings. Whose body has value, who gets to decide, what that feels like when other people decide the value of your body and what the cultural repercussions are of constantly being ascribed a certain political status. I’m really glad you see these works as not being reactionary. I just think it’s the artist’s job to tell you what’s it like to be “me” right now.
And one way to do that is to look back at history, like I did with my interest, a trilogy really, in Harriet Hosmer, the first professional female sculptor. First there were the watercolors of her Neo-classical marble statues, then Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonné that I wrote and now the last part—The Zenobia Scandal: A Meditation on Male Jealousy, published by the forthcoming issue of zing.
One thing that stuck out to me about the Zenobia project was a quote from Joy Kasson, which was, “Hoping for popular approval, Hosmer did not defy her audience’s expectations about woman’s nature, but she did try to propose a different perspective on the captivity theme.” Do you think compromise is something that is necessary in some way?
It’s so interesting. Kasson is talking about “Zenobia in Chains,” an over life-size marble statue of Queen Zenobia, the Ruler of Palmyra (modern day Syria). I don’t think she compromised with “Zenobia” at all actually, because when Hosmer picked Zenobia as a subject, all of her male counterparts, including writers, sculptors and painters, chose Cleopatra. And we all know what happens to Cleopatra. She commits suicide instead of being captured by the Roman Army. Zenobia, after her husband was assassinated, rules for seven years in proxy for her son, conquers Egypt and most of Asia Minor. It was astounding what she was able to do in the 3rd century. She was educated in philosophy and mathematics, and was a brilliant military strategist. Eventually she was defeated by Emperor Aurelian, but doesn’t commit suicide, and they march her through the streets of Rome in gold chains as a war trophy. But the dignity and the solemnity with which Hosmer portrays Zenobia somberly moving forward is amazing, instead of Cleopatra on her deathbed. I mean, Zenobia talks the Emperor out of killing her and ends up getting remarried, has five more children and lives out her days in Tripoli outside of Rome as a diplomat—it’s unbelievable. Hosmer chose Zenobia as a subject when all the men are choosing Cleopatra—that’s how they saw women. Hosmer chose to depict a strong woman ruler at a moment of potential humiliation but through her own agency persists, perseveres and prospers. This subject choice is intentional. So no, I don’t think that was compromising.
It’s an ambiguous piece. I’ve looked at [photographs of “Zenobia in Chains”] over and over this week, and I can read it so many different ways. There’s ways to read it as an objectification, a subjugation of women, and there’s even that very cynical idea that she has more value as a queen.
Yes, you can certainly read it as ‘we won, the enemy Queen is our war trophy.’
Right, it’s not just any woman in chains, it’s a woman with more ‘value’ in chains. And there’s the reading of the woman with dignity even in humiliation, and I think humiliation is such a huge cultural force with women. We even see it with pop icons. We love to see a beautiful woman fall apart in media. I’m thinking like, Britney Spears going down.
I think the culture at large loves heaping huge rewards on women who can’t handle it. It feels almost premeditated in a sadistic way.
Right, and then it’s sort of a public spectacle.
Oh yeah, because it’s demoralizing to other women or at least a warning to others, don’t try to compete in the big leagues.
One thing that really interested me about the project is that Harriet Hosmer’s story is sort of this female revenge narrative in a way. You discuss in the introduction the issue of “eradication from history,” so I love this idea of resurrecting someone or something.
I diplomatically call my Hosmer Catalogue Raisonné an “institutional critique.” It’s not DJango Unchained. It’s more about justice than revenge. There’s a dearth of scholarship on important female artists and when I realized how famous Hosmer was in her time, how critically acclaimed, winning all the major commissions and exhibiting in all the international expositions (like our biennales) and that she didn’t have a catalogue raisonné? I decided to make one for her. In my research for the catalogue raisonné, I discovered this whole scandal instigated by jealous male sculptors. My discovery of this scandal happened at the exact same time as something very similar was happening to me: an ugly vendetta by jealous people I had considered close friends. Not unlike Hosmer, it was also a bitter unsuccessful old white man. While I was trying to figure out how and why Harriet Hosmer got erased from history, I learned from what was happening to me exactly how people try to wipe you out: destroy your reputation, damage you financially so you just disappear. Thankfully, the next year, I won the Rome Prize and was living at the American Academy in Rome. I was already working on Hosmer’s catalogue raisonné, and the more I read about her Zenobia scandal, I thought, wow, this is a really good story. It’s not right for the catalogue raisonné but I should do something with this because this still happens to women and so many women I know. Since all the characters involved, whether it was Henry James or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, were major figures in the arts, I realized, I didn’t need to write this narrative. I just let them speak in their own words, friends and foes alike. So I sequenced their quotes to chronicle this event and Hosmer’s clever response that also really resonated with me. It was a great creative vehicle to exorcise everything I’d been going through. Isn’t that what artists do?
For those of us who are educated in our areas of expertise, but don’t have lots of money, what seems implied in your project of Hosmer as well as Zenobia, and an idea that I really like, is that maybe we can rewrite the canon.
I would love that. Nothing would make me happier.
Through the patch-work of voices rasping from the most notorious era of American history, Laird Hunt’ s most recent novel, Kind One (Coffee House Press, 2012), depicts the ordinary, excruciating lives of three women in antebellum America. Though minimalist in approach compared to previous works by Hunt, Kind One operates via a series of trompe l’oeils, that is, if you are lulled by the steady round sung by Ginny, Zinnia, and Cleome as they embrace and beat, soothe and scar one another, you may not notice that slowly, slowly you have been saturated with countless other stories—an infant who drowned, a secret walk in the woods, a purple string extended between a shack and a well like an artery, an uncomfortable afternoon with one’s own stunned ruminations about the humiliation of American history. The exploration of power struggles fought at close range is the engine of the text, and characters no sooner become pliable and plain, a cozy surrogate from which a reader might comfortably take a seat, before they implicate themselves in a more difficult, bruising human dance of cruelty and friendship.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
Of all your work I’ve read, Kind One operates the mostly closely to realism, although I would argue that if realism is the convincing illusion of reality, Kind One is the convincing creation of a work of realism. The intentional materiality of narrative and language both induces a dream and calls attention to the work as a creative act. Like other novels of yours, Kind One calls into question the nature—and reliability—of reality as a phenomenon itself. Can you tell me about this choice to write a novel that appears to be more realistic than your past works? Were there particular writers that influenced this choice?
I’ve been listening to Roscoe Holcomb sing today, in fact he is singing in my headphones as I type. I was trying to imagine parsing whether what he was doing was a kind of realism— in fact I can barely understand what he is singing most of the time and who knows what the sound of a banjo, his banjo means (both aspects of what he does certainly, of course, signify). It is certainly real. It’s coming through my headphones. But it seems to me real in much the way the coffee in my mug is real and not at all in the way a novel written in the realist manner is typically experienced as representing/counterfeiting the real. I’ve always aspired to something like Holcomb rather than something like Dickens, if that makes sense. This isn’t to say that some of my work doesn’t make use of realist devices and approaches. Kind One certainly does. But I like to think I will have lost whatever more or less serious game it is I’m playing if I ever begin, in a fundamental way, to imagine I’m working towards or away from a set of group think conventions (and group think happens across the aesthetic spectrum). In this context I could cite as influential work as diverse as Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and Akhmatova’s Testimony and Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian.
Violence isn’t censored much in Kind One and that narrators are indeed quite frank in their recount of events. The use of language, however, tends to avoid clinical descriptions. Ginny says her husband “comes in at her morning and evening” to describe six years of a routine of incidents that includes both consensual sex and marital rape. Alcofibras is “fitted for drapes” when he is whipped to death. Rather than concealing the violence, I thought this understated diction was frustratingly distant and therefore powerful as a mode of description for the content. Why did you choose to depict violence primarily in these voices as opposed to an authorial voice?
It’s certainly the case today that you can sit on the bus or in a restaurant or almost anywhere you can conceive of and listen to someone speak in outrageous detail into a cellphone about the injuries suffered by someone’s cousin in a car accident or a fight over a parking spot or about the colonoscopy that someone has undergone as a result of the natural deleterious processes of aging, and that a whole array of television programs and movies exist seemingly with the single goal of laying out with great precision the results of trauma on the human body, actual or imagined. All of this is aided and abetted by the internet, which can serve up the specifics of horror suffered by those who cohabit our planet at the touch of a link. I’m not sure though that any of us speak to ourselves in this way, not to our deeper selves, not to the parts of us that are really listening to what we have to say. What is the shorthand of the soul? Kind One proposes itself as a kind of whispering, the voices pitched between speech and writing. A whisper can chill. A quiet remark can annihilate. And sometimes it is all that can be managed. All that we are up for saying. Frederick Douglass speaks of the “blood-stained gateway” that led into the institution of slavery. He meant the whip. He is far from being afraid of specifics but he also makes use of this kind of chilling, potent, experience-based metaphor. In Kind One, Zinnia “tells” Prosper what was done to her by Ginny by holding his hand up to her scar. Sometimes all we can do is point.
One way that Kind One produces an illusion of realism without actually utilizing the traditional techniques of realism to the letter is via a relapse of imagery—the baths, the key, the purple string, the well, the silent coupe, the daisies, the pigs. It’s rather songlike in that way and there’s a definite nod to poetry at work here and the patterning of motif is elaborate. Bizarrely, this is also the mechanism of propulsion taking precedence (I suspect) over plot. What is your process for conjuring a narrative with direction and energy?
One of the particular challenges of first person narration is that plotting finds itself doubled. First the person speaking needs to decide how he/she is going to tell the story, how it is going to be arranged, plotted, then the writer needs to do this. One could argue that this is of course all part of the same authorial gesture, but in the case of Kind One, which has multiple first-person narrators, I found it very much worked this way. Ginny needed to decide what she was going to say and see what she could say, as did Zinnia and the others, and when they had all finished I needed to go in and rearrange the narrative furniture, paying close attention to what was distinct in what they had to say and what overlapped. Patterning—and you’re right that there is a fairly complex system of reprise and echo at work throughout the book—is much more interesting to my mind than putting into play some sort of received mechanism used to create the illusion of a causal universe. The patterning has to be complex and unpredictable, or verge on the unpredictable, and it may well be the variety of pattern that is only fully apprehended afterward even if it is felt throughout. I think there is great propulsion to be gained by working with both blatant repetition (pigs, pigs, pigs!) and a subtler, much subtler system of reprise (kind, nice, gentle, demon, fury).
When Barthes calls literature a tissue of quotations he is also calling it a tissue of repetition and reprise. We don’t need Barthes to tune into the dominant that reprise represents in life on and off the page. All you have to do is live among others to hear yourself and them say the same or practically the same thing about some reasonably small number of things over and over and that is life. Far from finding this numbing, I hear (and see: our gestures repeat and reprise themselves too after all) great energy and power accruing in this mechanism of resaying that plays itself out over the course of our lives. Spells and chants and words of power are powerful exactly because they insist, they say again, they confirm: which we all do all the time without necessarily thinking of it in this way. In this context, withholding, delay, echo and return are powerful tools for exploring the potential as well as kinetic energy of a work and the language that manifests that work. To organize the constituent elements of books (which is another way of saying to “plot” them) with this in mind strikes me as completely reasonable.
The features of the inner human life that are examined most frequently in your work are madness and memory. Another crucial quality to the relapse of imagery—and I suspect, the propulsive energy it invokes and rides—is the exploration of the process of recollection. How does narrative relate to memory?
It is overlapping to the point of being identical. Still, there is that gap, that small difference between narrative and memory, that keeps them distinct. I remain powerfully drawn to the exploration of that gap. It feels to me like a planet or planetoid object that (like Pluto) that for so long was sensed but not seen.
Like prior novels, Kind One is written in a series of fragments. A narrative arc is intact (or rather mostly, but broken in choice ways to create space for haunting absences) and the plot deals with time as linear. On the one hand, I’ve always read your use of the fragment as a form of subtle play with the fragmented nature of memory. On the other hand, I often wonder if writers who work in the fragment are responding intuitively or intentionally to the impact of technology on attention span. William S. Burroughs correctly predicted that the television would supersede the book as the most popular form of narrative art and new technology has irrevocably changed the publishing industry in the last five years alone. What is the future of written narrative, in your opinion? Do you think that the use of the fragment is a way to appeal to the preferred (and trained) modes of modern consciousness without losing artistic sophistication?
I’ve been very interested in and heartened by the explosion in very recent years of book arts, in some cases as a very conscious rebuttal to the shifts being enacted in the world of books by the cigarette-like spread of technology that shows all the signs of being produced not to empower but to ensnare. New Directions is among the higher profile places that have moved aggressively and with great success to celebrate the technology of the printed book. I’m thinking of work like Nox by Anne Carson or the Untouchables by B.S. Johnson, but also the lovely edition of Microscripts by Robert Walser and the very handsome, magenta-stamped edition of essays by Roberto Bolaño. The graphic novelist Chris Ware just published his own book in a box, which is essentially a collection of gorgeous fragments. He wanted to make and disseminate something that could not be reproduced digitally (his drawings often feature parents spacing out with iPads in their hands as children play nearby).
There are also projects like the magazine Birkensnake, co-edited by Brown and Denver graduate Joanna Ruocco, that exist to move from eye to hand to hand to eye and could never be experienced in all their wild papers and materials and unusual inks with an Android or iPhone. I don’t at all want to give the impression that I’m a Luddite. I’ve been interested since the short-lived early Rocket Readers in the possibilities of electronic reading experiences. And it is quite possible that I have been stitching shards all these years as a kind of response to and affirmation of the visual experience of reading little chunks at a time of Waiting for Godot on my Palm Pilot in 1997 or so. But my writerly sense of self is still dominated by the exigencies of post-scroll pre-smartphone reading technologies and I’ll likely keep principally attending to them, both consciously and not, as I continue to work on my central preoccupations: memory and narrative and fiction and prose.
The subject matter of Kind One explores race and gender in antebellum America and as far as I am aware, this is the only novel you’ve written that primarily takes the perspective of women. Additionally, the novel spends a significant amount of time in the perspective of a woman of color. The portrayal of the main characters is not objectifying, degrading, self-congratulatory, or facile—though there is a remarkable shared stoicism to their voices. As a white male author who began his career at the height of identity politics in America, what was the impetus to take the perspective of the other? What challenges did you face in your process in writing these voices and characters?
I recently found myself in conversation with the excellent writer and editor Kate Bernheimer, who made the comment, about Kind One, that it must have been really hard to write. Which it was. And how much harder, of course, infinitely harder, must it have been to live these things that the novel evokes. Peter Warshall, an early mentor, whom I served as a teaching assistant at the Kerouac School in Boulder, reserved the highest place in his vision of things literary for those novels that took on the most complicated quandaries and deepest moral dilemmas and most difficult situations. He spoke of Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom among a good number of other books.
I think of this because for a number of years I felt like some of the greatest writing challenges that an American might usefully take up were cordoned off for me. It was the mid 1990s and I was expressly told by my peers in writing school that I must not, under any circumstances, write the other. That if I did this I would be perpetuating a violence that was very real and very much ongoing. Plus as a straight white male I could never convincingly enter the head of someone who was unlike me. It would be a joke. A violent one. I am nothing if not attentive to the concerns and feelings of others and for years I took this injunction as an opportunity to avoid a fearful trespass. Also, somewhere along the line, most probably upon the publication of Beloved by Toni Morrison, it came to seem as though slavery was something only writers of color could legitimately address, in the way that the Holocaust seemed a subject that only survivors and their descendants had the right to take up and wrestle with in all its awful, heart-wrecking depth.
No doubt the work of W.G. Sebald, who as a gentile and son of a Nazi soldier wrote at length and compellingly about the Holocaust and its after-effects in Germany, put into my mind the idea that I might take up or try to take up the subject of antebellum chattel slavery and its legacy, which after all still sits dead center in the national psyche, and with so much still to be considered. In that context, I remember a comment made in passing by Tony Horowitz, that there remained so many, many unexplored stories about the Civil War, its antecedents and aftermath, and that too had an energizing effect on me. More than anything else though it was the voice of Ginny Lancaster which came spilling one day off the tip of my pen, and the other voices it gave birth to, that called me to this work. And maybe, thank God, I had aged out of being afraid of offending the vocal members of my workshops who were still and are still (in my mind) telling me not to do this and that.
The novel is very aware of power in human relationships and moreover intimate power is unstable. There’s also a bit of a mockery of constructed power roles at work (for example, when the main character though barren must be referred to by the black slaves as ‘mother’ per the rules of her tyrannical husband). It occurred to me while reading Kind One that ceding or taking power is often an intellectual act—something that requires a certain amount of deliberation even in the face of coercion and pure force—as humans, as primates, we’re always very aware of power. I suspect that one of the great misunderstandings of oppression are the internal calculations of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Internal language, which is best accessed and portrayed via literature, is possibly the most effective way to portray the long-term, conscientious, internal processes of oppression artistically. How does one go about exploring and then depicting the inner lives and reckonings of an oppressor and of someone who is oppressed?
This is lovely in that it speaks its own answer even as it formulates its question. There is self and then there is awareness of self and we all have both even when we are shackled, even when we snuggled down by choice in a cold frame by an outhouse. An editor at a major publishing house who has now gone on to edit a famous literary magazine read the central narrative of Kind One (Ginny’s tale), which for a long time was the whole book, and commented that he could not believe in this poor, rural woman’s voice. It does quite a lot of work this poor, rural woman’s voice, and perhaps it seemed to him that it did too much. All the voices in the book are set to work and to speak complexity in their different ways. Attention to the shallow and deep parts of the pocket both, to borrow a bit from Ginny, seems crucial in this. I imagined Ginny as simpler and more complex than it was reasonable for her to be. I imagined all the characters in the novel in this way. Their voices are pushed past reasonableness, towards reticence, towards hyperbole. As the subject of slavery required that they be. There could be no easy middle ground. Just as there could be no clear conclusion. They were and are in a vortex.
In that vein, the image of masculinity in Kind One is complicated. The novel in fact begins with a short vignette from the perspective of a farmer who is digging a well. The portrayal of this character depicts a rich inner life including the expression of emotions and self-awareness about the delivery or withholding of violence (particularly in regards to his wife and child). This gentler depiction of masculinity is counterpoised to the brutality of other straight, white, male characters in the text and thus there is the implication that the qualities of violence, domination, and cruelty are not intrinsic to male identity. If depictions of the other, particularly when beheld by the gaze of privilege, must shift, must the image of privilege (in the example of Kind One, masculinity, whiteness), shift as well?
If writing, if literature, has work to do, and I believe it does, it is in this domain.
Though primarily realistic, there are flights of surrealism, which are frequently in response to trauma. Zinnia and Cleome teach Ginny about the escape of the mind, which she is already very amenable to from her love of books. Alcofibras is called upon to deliver oral stories. And when Ginny is imprisoned and near death, she experiences flights of the mind. Thus, imagination is held in direct contrast to trauma in Kind One. What is the role of imagination in the contemporary mind (a mind inundated with technologies and mass marketing, a mind frequently confronted by the trauma of war and poverty warped by the often false sense of distance)?
Even as I make reference above to the challenges facing American writers, I do not fool myself even for a minute that the corporate advertising-driven gadget nightmare we are building for ourselves is any more urgent, or rather anywhere near as urgent, as the nightmares of illness and poverty and environmental devastation and war that so many people on the planet are facing. The endless cavalcade of apocalypse books and shows remind us here in the west that we are always only a meteor or virus or nuclear weapon away from a return to the “old ways”, to lives that are “nasty, brutish and short” to borrow a bit from Leviathan. Too many people are already and still living with seemingly incommensurable challenges, like how to find a drink of water that hasn’t been polluted beyond hope of recovery, and while I would never presume to suggest what would be most helpful or useful in these contexts (which also play out here, daily, in the richest nation in history), I do know that every one of us can and does imagine, and that it is the imagination and the closely related faculty of dreaming, whether controlled by fear or joy or desperation or tech-enabled passivity, that can and does still allow us to be both here and elsewhere simultaneously. And that is something.
Similarly, the role of parable is crucial to Kind One, though unlike traditional parables, the lessons of Kind One are often ambiguous in their final statements and more seemingly invested in creating an emotional or psychological texture. Most striking of these is the parable of the skulls with flames who hunt all the other animals out of jealousy, as told by Cleome. This story doesn’t offer a lesson in the sense of prescriptive advice and rather endows the real world with both magic and evil. What is your interest in parable? I can’t help but think about how children’s stories are often allegorical, so—were you told parables as a child that have perhaps influenced your sense of narrative?
If you have read the Palm-Wine Drinkard by the late Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola you will recognize the skulls, though his are up to different things than Cleome’s. Almost since I started writing I have been interested exactly in the textures as you describe them on offer in fables and folk tales. As often as not the ones I have been exposed to are non-Western in origin and they move in different ways and with different rhythms than we are accustomed to encountering in the works, say, of the Grimm brothers or Hans Christian Anderson. The stories my characters tend to tell or that exercise their imaginations are like parables or fairy tales with their moralizing ends broken off. Tutuola’s stories within stories tend to function this way. I was never much interested as a kid in the moral conclusions in Aesop’s or LaFontaine’s fables, but the worlds they evoked burned new pathways in my brain. Those new pathways had the curious virtue of leading me straight into spaces that felt very, very old.
What forthcoming works do we have to look forward to?
I am working on a collection of autobiographical essay-stories that admit fiction to varying degrees. I’m thinking of borrowing and adapting the subtitle of the short novel I just co-translated from the French. The book, by Arno Bertina, is called Brando, My Solitude, a biographical hypothesis. So I might call this book, Runner, a hypothetical memoir. I’m working on other books too, at least one of which is a novel, told from a woman’s perspective, set in the 19th century.
Getting free books and drinks rocks especially if you’re a creative type hauling 16 tons getting another day older and deeper in debt, but what about free art?
Last weekend, Heliopolis in Greenpoint opened a new exhibit, “Witness My Hand,” by Paul Ramírez Jonas where one can take a photocopy home for the effort only of pushing a button. The photocopier that replicates/creates reams of the work is the pedestal in the installation and Ramírez Jonas refers to the items on the photocopier as a “sculpture” calling into question what exactly among artist, viewer, photocopier, original and photocopy is the actual objet d’art.
The experience of the exhibit is a bit like going on a vacation: you arrive at the compact, bright gallery space, realize that the rules are a bit different because omfg you get to touch stuff, anxiously watch other visitors make photocopies first and then perhaps as the adventurous type choose to play along and make your own photocopy. You study your acquisition a bit over your glass of wine in a plastic cup before folding it away into your coat. It’s only later at a bar when you reach for your wallet or perhaps when you’re rifling through your pockets looking for your cell phone that your fingers stumble upon the paper again, and you remember there is art on your person. You have this memento and by virtue of where/how you acquired it, you’re not exactly sure what to do with it. Does one frame it? Tuck it in a box of miscellanea? Hide it in a jewelry chest among earrings and other trinkets? Throw it away (gah)?
This disorientation of where art is located, in which art is neither literally out of reach, nor truly owned by the audience, teases out anxious questions around the art economy. What is the real value of an art object (and in the damaged world economy what is the value of any object)? Who determines the worth of a work of art? Who owns art? Perhaps least asked, but most crucially, how is art distributed?
Along those lines, the title of the exhibit refers to the occupation of notary (one who bears witness to originality). It would be a reach to interpret “Witness My Hand” as a direct statement on the increasing controversy (and yet dubious legality) of copyright violations from illegal online file sharing. Yet a packed opening reception surrounding a photocopier—nearly a beast of an antique—that visitors use to self-serve pieces of art as from a candy dispenser, does imply the freedom of information/technology activism’s take on the Bacchanalian spirit.
Ramírez Jonas’s particular iteration on the subject of art business and art spaces, of which, it should be noted, much has been said that ranges from the impressive to the foolish since Warhol, is successful significantly because the work is sincere, playful and thoughtful rather than cynical, snarky or final. Most of all, “Witness My Hand” comments on art without being exclusively about art economy, nodding just as heartily at the basic joy of engaging with whatever happens to be on the pedestal. Can this variety of joy be commodified? At “Witness My Hand” art isn’t actually free, but it is a sly gift, that is, should you choose to reach out and take one.
“Witness My Hand” is on view at Heliopolis through March 24th.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
Is part of your interest in creating paper copies of a sculpture about comparing 3-D and 2-D compositions?
Not at all. My interests is not so much in me making copies as the viewer making copies. How is the art of looking different or similar to making copies, in fact to making. I am not claiming that they are the same or different, I am merely trying to create a situation where the viewer becomes an engaged part of the public. The choice to make, or not to make, a copy is what I hope will establish a relationship between the public and the sculpture. In fact I am interested in conjugating the word public: to make public, to publish. That is what both a pedestal and a copier do for the original, they publish it, they make it public.
In the conceptualization of this piece, how important is audience reaction and how do you anticipate audience reaction?
In the 90s and into the 00s I made worked that kept flip flopping between works that were predicated on participating and looking. When I achieved participation I always feared I had only accomplished some form of entertainment; and when I relied on the more Apollonian mode of viewership, the work seemed too distant. For the past few years I have settled for a kind of potential participation. In these situations the public can participate; but the artworks can function with you or without you. I want the choice to be important, to be felt. I want a threshold, however small, to be crossed by the viewer—and always—I want the option for the public to rescind their participation.
I believe that was your daughter at the opening with you? From what I know of you work, it occurred to me that there’s a playfulness that possibly engages the perspective of a child. How does your daughter react to your work?
She is very critical. Most kids are. If I see my daughter’s eyes, or her friends, glaze over and loose interest in what I am working on . . . I know I am in trouble.
The title “Witness My Hand” suggests that neither the pedestal (copier), sculpture (book), or photocopies are the artwork, but rather it is the audience observing the interactions of these elements. In some ways, the art object of your piece at the Dikeou Collection, “His Truth Goes Marching On” is in actuality the song that can be played and the different ways it’s played by different viewers, rather than the (quite beautiful) chandelier of glass bottles itself. What, to your mind, is an art object?
That’s an easy one! I would have to place myself squarely in the camp that the art is in the relation between you, me, and the object between us. Borges said it best:
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library, not the books in Emerson’s magic chamber. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.[i]
[i] Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights (New York: New Directions Books, 1984), 80.
How was the content for the sculpture that would be photocopied chosen? What is its significance?
The bust of Psyche was selected in a rather straightforward way. I simply looked at what was available. I thought that supply and demand would reveal what busts and what statues remain aesthetically and culturally significant to us as a culture. I hoped that whatever high quality reproductions are for sale will actually reveal this. So while I would have loved a bust of Piero Manzoni or Che Guevara, I instead had to choose between Psyche, Freud, Mozart, The head of Pericles, Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Obama, etc. I inserted a clock in the concealed hollowness of the bust so the copy would not only show you the only part of the “sculpture-in-the-round” that we never get to see, but also the present time.
The second object is a statue of an open upside down book. In some ways it is very simple: it is what it is. It is also an inversion of one of my favorite kind of headstones at the cemetery: the open book.
A photocopier seems almost archaic with the technological revolution of the last five years alone. The reference to the origin of “notary” and the mention of copy centers in the press release suggests that you are, as an artist, observing an arc of technology especially in regards to how we relate to art. How do technology and art interact?
I seem to have a strange ability to become attracted to technology just as it is about to die. I am working with admission tickets just as they are becoming hard to find. However, the way we interact with technology is such that even the most up to date gadget will be nostalgic and outmoded within a few years. With the copier I had the initial instinct to use a 1963 Xerox, the first desktop plain-paper copier, I have no idea how many hundreds of thousands were made . . . I could not find a single one for sale. In fact I only found a handful in museums. My apologies, I am totally nerding out on you! I don’t really have an answer to your question. Art and technology are part of our culture and they are inseparable from each other. I just like to note that we take great care in preserving our art history, but our technological history is almost disposable . . . the first web page ever online, for example, was lost years ago. Someone should have made a copy.
“Mix & Match: Watercolors from Cape Breton” spread from zing #23
From primordial human-scale concrete and cast sculpture made in various abandoned buildings in 1970s downtown New York, to Japanese brushes and watercolor on a remote coastal island, Jene Highstein‘s career has spanned decades, locations, and mediums. Most recently, the Cape Breton Drawings, which introduced color to his notoriously black palette. Moving from the terrestrial to the atmospheric, these works bring the viewer to the “magical landscapes” of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The Cape Breton Drawings are currently hanging in a solo exhibition at ArtHelix in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The drawings will also be featured in “Mix & Match: Watercolors from Cape Breton” in zing #23. In person, the man is a witty visionary, sharp of thought and full of personality—first hand experience of what this generation was about: achieving greatness, and having a great time doing so.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
What is the significance of Cape Breton to you personally?
My mother’s family is from Wilmington, NC and I spent my childhood summers on a beautiful white sand beach on the Atlantic. That experience was very moving. We would go to the beach early in the morning and spend all day in the sun swimming in the ocean and fishing off of a long wooden, and later, steel pier, which jutted far out into the Atlantic. We caught a myriad of fishy creatures, which we brought home for supper.
Meanwhile many of my friends had bought property in Cape Breton in the late 1960s, but I had never visited. Among them are my cousin, Philip Glass, and friends Bob Moskowitz and Hermine Ford, Joan Jonas, Rudy Wirlitzer, and Lynn Davis along with many others.
In 2002, on a lark, I took my son Jesse with me to have a look and fell in love with the place. It is very much like the NC experience in that the beaches are quiet, family-type places with few people, but the main difference is the remoteness and wildness of the landscape. The weather is relentlessly changeable, coming from one of four directions in turn so that in one hour the light changes dramatically. The color of the sky, sea, clouds; the fog rolling in and out, the rain coming and going all make for an amazing display of light and color and intensity of sun.
The Black Splash Drawings from 2007 (especially “Gesture (Nature)” and “Atmosphere”) seem to be precursors to the Cape Breton drawings. What initiated the Black Splash Drawings?
I have mixed my own black watercolors for many years but used them on traditional etching and other fine art papers. In about 2004 I began to experiment with what we call rice paper and the Chinese call Yuan paper. These are very different materials with extremely different reactions to the water element in the watercolors. Being in Cape Breton, so divorced from the NY art world and its taboos AND being a sculptor with no real inhibitions as to style and the history of painting, I was freed from all those constraints. I had used Chinese brushes for many years and am comfortable with their extreme sensitivity and ability to convey complex emotional charges. I began to use a kind of splash technique and was intrigued by it. That’s how it began to dawn on me that that technique could work. Over time I was able to become freer and freer with it and continue to do so.
What brought you to watercolor?
In the 1970s I used dry pastels for my black. In the 1980s I switched to black chalks, but by the 1990s I began to mix my own watercolors from bone black pigment which gave me the most dense velvety black that has become the basis of all my two dimensional works.
You have described your earlier sculptural work as not being based on natural forms but evolving in relation to nature, carrying natural associations. Can this also be said about the watercolors?
Yes, I suppose so. The watercolors came about from the intense saturation of my visual world when I went on long walks with friends in the remote areas of Cape Breton. These experiences were also reinforced by exploring the local beaches and bogs, which turn up equally unexpected encounters. The resulting watercolors are not so much impressions of these experiences but perhaps meditations on them.
Many of the pairings have horizontal lines dividing them—are these horizons?
The works are evolving. The more recent ones have a more defined reference to sea, sky, land and water but it’s a fluid transition because one’s experience of these areas is very fluid since they are constantly shifting, making it difficult to say which color or atmosphere would be associated with which . . .
What role does perception play in this series?
That’s an interesting question. In traditional Chinese landscape painting, as I understand it, the artist goes to the site and spends time there but doesn’t make any work. They return to their studios and indirectly interpret what that have experienced. Also, there may be elements of poetry or other language-based parts of the story, not to mention all the seals and comments of the subsequent viewers of the works.
My approach is also indirect in that I set up a studio in the dinning room of our house and began to work there with no particular plan. The work evolved every day on its own without too much intention on my part. It has become increasingly complex and dense in color, but I don’t think it has become more specific in reference to nature. My friend Hermine Ford looked at them and said, “I see, these are looking down, these are looking straight ahead and these are looking up.”
Your project in zing #23 features sections of the Cape Breton drawings paired with one another—4/5 one drawing and 1/5 the other—”mixed & matched” so to speak. Can you explain the thought behind this format?
“Mix and Match” seemed a good way to present a complex subject in a simple way. There is now a large body of the Cape Breton Watercolors, which span the simplest to the most complex ideas so I thought that I would scan through a lot of the images and see if somehow they could be paired into two sets of 4/5-1/5 images on facing pages, which would make sense. I’m happy with the results.