“Installation View, Joshua Smith at Shoot the Lobster, NY, 2012”

“Untitled (Speakers)” at the Dikeou Collection is one of the first pieces Brooklyn-based artist Joshua Smith showed in a gallery setting. The sculpture, a stack of custom-made speakers gifted by his grandfather, croons Ray Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” and nudges playfully at the selfishness of artists and a melodramatic need to be loved. Though Smith has abandoned sculpture for painting, he continues to analyze and critique the artistic persona with his work. We met for an interesting discussion at Shoot the Lobster in New York City where a show of his recent monochromatic panels was on display.

Interview by Kriti Upadhyay

 

What are some recurrent ideas in your body of work?

I don’t know . . . love, longing, discomfort, being-lost, hope, elation, lust, sickness, shame, soda, terror, pizza, cats, dogs, death, Printer-Registration-Errors, The Tyranny of Context . . . all of the big issues. And the small ones too. I used to try to illustrate different feelings, trying to depict what it felt like to be a person, to move amongst a network of feelings and things to think about, but I stopped that because I’ve realized that all of the feelings and the things are already always in the air, or just bubbling in the background of our minds, and that abstraction can actually summon these things and feelings, one by one to the surface, they can reveal themselves. To try to illustrate what everyone already knows or feels is pointless when we’ll all just continue knowing and feeling it either way.

 

You’ve been producing monochromes for an extended period. What continues to draw you to them?

I actually like the paintings, myself. I enjoy looking at them. I am not nearly as orderly and contained personally as the paintings are, so they really feel outside of me. Left to my own devices I would just make a bunch of garbage but for me this body of work really demands some isolation and commitment, so I’m going to honor that. And the works are really meaningless unto themselves, so I’m able to step back and look at them, myself, as part of the audience. It’s nice to wonder what makes some of them successful and others failures.

 

You said that the works themselves are meaningless. How has this affected your development as an artist?

I don’t have ownership of what the works might mean, or over how they are to be interpreted. All of that is very personal, and in that sense I of course have a massive attachment to the works for personal reasons, but how I see them, what I think they mean, that’s mine and I don’t think it’s right or correct to try and force that on anyone else. The point is that Red and Blue don’t mean anything concrete. Either does Painting, Sculpture, Performance, so forth.

 

What personal resonance does this sort of “ahistory” carry considering you don’t come from an art historical background?

The press release for the my most recent show mentions that there isn’t such a thing as “ahistory”, which is to say that of course these paintings are from a specific place and time, and that they are informed by the history that precedes them. But I thought it was necessary to say that, in light of my hopes that viewers not necessarily feel the burden of knowing art history or the history of monochrome painting before seeing the show. Of course I can’t shake off certain histories personally, but the point is that there isn’t one correct history within which to place the paintings. The point is that the paintings aren’t jokes or lamentations about the history of painting, and that there’s nothing to “get”. I just want viewers to place the works within their own histories. Which really goes without saying. They’ll do that anyways.

 

You mentioned that you think artists should strengthen their attachment to practice. Can you describe any experiences that influenced your adoption of this view and elaborate on what exactly you mean?

I’ve definitely read some very suspect press releases, that are then copied and pasted into very suspect reviews and articles, so I think most artists specifically don’t share enough attachment to their practice. I think that they often ascribe their own interpretations of what they do with far too much authority, and I think it’s shocking how many people in the cycle are willing to repeat whatever artists say of themselves and their work. Every artist will tell you that they’re ushering in the revolution. Almost none of them are, right?

 

spring morning, casein on panel, 984 x 147 in.

 

Stephen Batura is a Colorado artist represented by Robischon Gallery in Denver. His large-scale, monochromatic paintings based on historical photographs from the early 20th century, as well as images from books and the internet, are currently on display at Robischon Gallery in an exhibition titled “Appropriated: The Chronicled West.” Three other artists, Edie Winograde, Jerry Kunkle, and Gary Emrich also have works in this show. “Appropriated: The Chronicled West” is open through May 5, 2012.

Interview by Hayley Richardson

 

You are originally from Colorado, and have lived, worked, and exhibited here throughout your career. It seems like this state has its own distinct “breed” of artist and that the art community here is very tight knit. What do you think it means to be a Colorado artist, and what does the art scene in Denver in particular represent to you?

I can consider myself a Colorado artist because I am a native, I was born here, and that is unusual for the art scene. The art scene I came up in is much different than the one that is available now. In the early 1980s there weren’t a lot of galleries in Denver so a lot of artists started co-ops, and that was the best place to see contemporary art. I went to those places for years before I joined one of them and even before I joined it was a very open and accessible community and there was a lot of enthusiasm for new work and risk taking. I think now I am not as in touch with all the galleries—there are many more venues for fledgling artists and ambitious artists too. That’s a big change, and a very positive one for Denver.

 

Do you think there’s been a strong core group of people involved in the art scene here over the years?

I think it’s become way more developed since then. When we think about “groups” that formed over the course of art history, they are really less connected than we like to think. Certainly they are all contemporary people and I know a lot of current artists, but we are not all in each other’s studios everyday discussing ideas. So the affinities that develop between people and artists are usually very casual. There’s usually one or two people who you align with and who push you and you push them. But the difference, with Denver especially, is the availability of places and opportunities to show. The level of competition is nothing like when I started and everybody encouraged one another, there weren’t people trying to get your “slot.” Everybody wanted to see what you did and they wanted you to see what they did and I am not sure what the atmosphere is like now, if there is a lot of competitive interactions, but it was a great place to start. There was a lot of encouragement and people were interested in what everyone was doing.

 

Your paintings currently on display here at the Robischon Gallery are representative of a very large body of work that you have focused on for about ten years. Can you tell me what is has been like to explore this theme so deeply and intimately? Can you describe how it has evolved over the years?

Well that question is incorrect with this work in this way: the train wrecks, in which there are 5 in this show, are separate from the work I have been doing for the last ten years. The work from the last ten years has focused on the output of a CO photographer who is not very well known named Charles Lillybridge. I’ve been making work based on his photographs for about a decade. So what connects this work with the train wreck work and the earlier work is that I use mostly found photography, historical photographs. That’s something I’ve been doing since the mid-1990s and I continue to do it. I work from some of my own photographs—I’ve been working from this resource of Lillybridge photographs from the Colorado Historical Society Collection for about a decade.

I started the Lillybridge stuff at about the same time as some of my train wreck paintings [points to 2 on display] around 1998. Other paintings in this show are later, like from 2002.

 

Are the paintings that are not based on the Lillybridge photographs still inspired by other historical photographs?

They are still from the same collection of photos donated to the Colorado Historical Society, but are poorly documented as far as when and where they were taken. It is a very odd trove of images, very peculiar, idiosyncratic photographs taken by a guy who lived in a little shack by the river, and wandered around with his camera and took pictures.

 

Many of your paintings in this exhibition depict scenes of destruction and collapse, yet they are set within a historical context in which this region of the country was growing and prosperous. Can you talk a little bit more about why you chose to focus on this time period in your work? What is it about this era, and the photographs you work from in particular, that captivated your imagination for all this time?

I think I like the ambitious nature of what’s happening, whether it’s something being built or something that has failed in the form of a train wreck. They are both big, ambitious projects and sort of overreaching ideas. I like my paintings to reflect that large-scale idea. The way I developed the train wreck pictures—I had been working before that with very simple images that I took photographs of myself. I found figurines in thrift stores and then I photographed them and then made very large-scale paintings of those. They are very simple images without much detail, which was sort of the point. If you blow up a little figurine that’s five inches tall to five feet tall, there is very little content in it except for the shape with a couple little pieces of paint on them. From there I wanted to do dramatically complicated work, so I started to find these pictures of train wrecks which were spectacular, loaded with detail, and had elements of all kinds of painting: people, landscape, some elements of still-life with all this stuff spilled and piled up everywhere, and also a lot of abstract references which is where my interest in painting stems from, the Post-Impressionists and onward, and especially what we call “modern art.”

 

I am curious about your process. How are you able to translate small, antique photos into monumental contemporary paintings? Can you also talk about the physical aspects of your work, how its large compositions are put together with two or three separate panels?

I am very practical. I knew painters who did big work had trouble getting it in and out of spaces. I like wood panels. I like to work on a hard surface. I knew I could put them up next to each other and make paintings that fit together. So that explains my approach. I knew I wanted them big, and it’s still a practical solution that works fine.

As far as the method, I am working almost exclusively from downloads from the internet and sometimes I photograph little pictures I find in books. That’s where a lot of the train wrecks come from. These are, universally, not very clear photographs. They are often just basic journalism. There is not any attempt to do a bold statement or make a work of art. They are more of a record of an occurrence. So I work from these small images that are obviously black and white and what that let me do was allow some of my input, such as the use of color, which let me define these often undefined parts of the painting that were very vague in the photograph. So I am working from small, not very well composed, not very refined images, and then using my imagination and my instincts to complete that into a large format painting.

 

I read about your exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art that took place last year, and how you switched gears from works like we see here now at Robischon to doing paintings of collages you had made from fashion and design photography. What prompted this transition from painting recognizable imagery from the early 20th century to painting highly abstract and conceptual works?

It might be too strong to use the word “boredom” . . . I had worked for two years on a show here at this gallery [Robischon] in 2009 and had over 60 works in that show. I had worked pretty much non-stop on that, and that was all Lillybridge influenced work. When BMOCA approached me about an exhibition, they had planned to show some of that work, and when they came to do a studio visit, I had just begun doing these very automatic collages from a bunch of fashion magazines someone had gave me. I tore them up and I started just assembling pictures without thinking about them, and I had big stack of them laying on my table when the BMOCA people arrived. They wanted to look through those and they really responded to them. I had a few months before the show, and they said that if I wanted to pursue this stuff then they would show that too. You don’t always have the opportunity like that at a museum to show brand-new work, and I was real excited to try that. So I took these collages and made paintings of them.

 

Are they on the same scale as these works here at Robischon?

Not quite . . . they are large but not as large as these. They were experiments and it was an interesting break from this hard representation I had been doing for quite a while.

 

Is this something that you would like to continue, or explore other similar avenues?

I think it’s in my head and I’ve been trying to play off some element of that, the collage element in particular. I think I am sort of casting around with the old work and with the newer stuff and see where it goes. There a few paintings in this show that are brand new and we will see what develops.

 

Have you ever worked in collage prior to this exhibition?  What other types of art making do you enjoy?

I don’t think I have really done collage before. The closest I came to collage was when I was doing very simple things to photographs. This would have been around ’95. I did paintings based on costumes and I would find photographs of costumes in books and I would take the picture and maybe make one cut through the image and then push the two pieces together to make the image smaller. So a big dress would become half the size and have certain contours. They were meant to be a little mysterious about how I arrived at that. They didn’t look contrived but if you look close you could a seam in the picture, a break in the contour and things like that. So there was a little subtlety to them, but I wouldn’t call them collages because they weren’t multiple images. It was just one image that was cropped and slightly altered.

 

I don’t really have many other artistic pursuits. Painting has always been what I responded to most. I draw a little bit. Drawing was sort of born out of this Lillybridge work because I was trying to figure out what I was looking at. It was easier to do that with a sharp, pointed instrument to draw with—somehow get a sense to know of what I was trying to deal with. Before that I really didn’t do much drawing. The work that really has developed is pure painting. I’ve never done any sculpture or anything like that, I mostly respond to two-dimensional work.

 

Which artists do you admire? Who has leant the most inspiration to your work?

I would say there are three artists right now who most important to me that I keep going back to. Most recently Gerhard Richter, the range of his work is amazing and he has really launched a lot of different things. When people see a retrospective of his work they will see connections to a lot of different work by a lot of different artists from all over, so he did innovative things before many other people and he continues to make impressive work.

Matisse is somebody that has always intrigued me. I always loved his looseness and his color and his explorations. He doesn’t get enough credit for experimentation. People definitely recognize it, but he was so relentlessly innovative. His works on paper, which is what I was looking at when I was doing the BMOCA collage work, his cut-outs are so brilliant and represent a distillation of everything he ever did.

The third artist would be Max Beckmann. Apart from being the most beautiful painter, he made such great, lush images and was able to do mysterious narratives and somehow get away with it. He wasn’t tied to a narrative tradition that we knew, and he wasn’t doing what other modernist painters were doing by making simplified images from life. He was really telling stories but we didn’t know what those stories were and yet they are evocative and they are still difficult to decipher. So those are my three guys . . .

I go through phases where I look at different artists and different ones crop up. I was very influenced by Luc Tuymans from Belgium, who I first saw in the early 90s. He was one of the first people to use photographic work that is obviously photographic but still very much his own work. He widely influenced younger artists with that approach. There are a lot of artists that I will tune into while I work on certain problems or work for certain show, but those three I mentioned before are the artists I turn to again and again.

 

What do you see on the horizon of the larger Colorado art community? What is on your plate for the future?

I am very impressed by the work by young artists that I see around town and in the galleries and museums. It’s a problematic opportunity to show young people who are not defined yet and I worry about them having the opportunity to show so early because that can lock you into a style or a format or a way of working that you might abandon if you don’t have early success. But with that said, I am really happy to see really high-quality work from young people, to see them have opportunities to show, and to have a great institution like the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) have a much more involved presence in contemporary art in the form of their new Director. The gallery system has greatly expanded from just co-ops to more professional galleries that are helping the artist in a lot of different ways. When I started, it was really on the backs on the artist to do every aspect of the job.

Right now I am pursuing whatever I feel like pursuing. As far as what I am doing at the moment, I don’t really have a particular show lined up but I have some ideas for things I want to do. So I am working with this new format, working through some of these collage aspects. Otherwise I don’t know what the future has in store. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

 

Red Menace, 2011

 

With a background in painting, Charles McGill has branched out across media: found objects, graphic design, performance, essays, photograpy, appropriation, digital arts, and more. His latest exhibition, “ Trapped,” at The Phatory, features golf objects re-processed through the social-political “Black” experience. On the walls are vintage golf bags that have been gutted, stretched, and arranged into figures on 4’ x 4’ squares. The subjects are creepy, provoking numerous associations, both perpetrator and victim, powerful and disempowered. Reminiscent of John Chamberlin and Philip Guston, these works must be seen in person for full effect. “Trapped” runs through May 26, 2012.

Interview by Brandon Johnson

 

The majority of works in this exhibition are composed of an unconventional material—de/reconstructed golf bags. What first drew you to work with them?

Actually, I worked at a golf pro shop on 49th and Madison back in 1996 and one day, while straightening up golf bags on the floor I thought it would be cool if I could combine a vintage recording of Malcolm X with one of the very opulent and durable looking golf bags. The bigger, the better, and the more opulent, the better. I thought the contrast would be interesting. That was the very first thought of the possibility of using a golf bag as an object or subject in my art.

Sometime later, maybe a few months or more, I was working in the studio one day on a body of work that had come to its end. I was at the point where I couldn’t make another one of ‘those’ whatever it was at the time. I looked into the corner of my space and I saw an old golf bag that I hadn’t used in a while and probably wasn’t going to use any time soon and I said to myself, I’m going to collage lynching imagery onto that bag. It seemed consistent with the essential motivation for most of my work, which is, to seem to combine opposites so that some similarities can be arrived at eventually—if only via their propinquity. So this lynching imagery and the golf bag had some similarities but they weren’t directly related. I made the Lynch Bag and a collector bought so I thought to myself, I should probably make another one…

 

Golf is a game traditionally practiced at country clubs—romping grounds of wealthy, powerful white males—known to exclude other genders and races. As an African-American, artist, and golfer, what are your feelings on the sport?

I love golf. I love to play it and watch it on television. I’ve been to several PGA Tour events to watch the pros hit the ball and they truly play a different game than the one I play—that’s for sure! I’ve worked in golf from midtown pro shops to green grass country clubs. I was even thinking about getting my PGA pro status at one point so that I could be a teaching pro, but couldn’t devote the amount of time and focus that it required to get as good as I needed to be in order to pass the playing ability test. So after three and a half years of working hand-on and teaching juniors how to swing the club, I decided that what I really should be focusing on, and the real reason for exploring this career opportunity, was to further examine my relationship to the subject matter. It was a great experience working at a real country club, seeing how things really functioned and how the members really were as people as opposed to what I imagined or assumed rich country club members to be and how they might act. I think a lot of people think that rich members of country clubs are snooty with an aversion to anyone who isn’t white or rich or privileged. That wasn’t my experience at all. I met some of the nicest and most generous people I’ve ever encountered. And they were consistently pleasant. They were often grounded in faith and lived by it. I’m sure there are plenty of country clubs where racial or ethnic of intolerance is welcome, but it wasn’t my experience.

The other country club experience I have is at a place called The Bridge in Bridgehampton. The owner’s name is Robert Rubin and he is an avid collector of contemporary art. Needless to say, he came across my work one day and it was a match made in artist/patron heaven. Bob always likes to think and move to the beat of his own drum. So when he built this golf course and clubhouse he made the entire concept kind of funky. It cost $600k to join the club, but if you want to wear a t-shirt to golf, hey what’s the big deal? I’m an honorary member—I don’t have that kind of cabbage!

Bob has featured some of my work in the clubhouse and it has seen by some pretty influential people. I’m grateful for that. He actually installed my first life-sized sculpture of Arthur Negro, The Head of the Former Black Militant Golf and Country Club. It happens to be a self-portrait. It’s an impressive piece and he installed it out there, Black Power gloves, Uzi, black beret and all. What better place to have that piece on permanent display? Talk about combining opposites—it’s perfect! If you call the club, the outgoing message is a recording of James Brown singing “Should I take’em to the bridge? Take’em to the bridge?” from Sex Machine. It’s a perfect setting for some of my work.

Here’s a link to the NY Times piece on the club.

 

These works are very archetypal. They are figures, but assume no form in particular yet are loaded with references to power dynamics. KKK, S&M, Abu Gharib, secret societies, the gallows. All things referring to relationships of dominance and subservience. Did you intend for the works to be veiled and open-ended, or were you seeking specific associations?

I never have any specific associations or ideas. To be honest, I try to stay away from “good ideas” and work primarily on instinct and intuition. One day in the studio after spending time tearing these things apart and constructing abstract compositions on board, I cut one bag open as it lay on my work table. In doing so it began to have the eerie feeling of an autopsy—like I was beginning to perform an examination within the chest cavity of this thing. I pulled the bag open much like a coroner might do in cracking the chest cavity of a human corpse. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I’m only guessing on how it might feel. Anyway, that’s how it felt and I kept working and attaching this bag to the board, gluing and stapling and cutting and sawing these bags apart. It’s a very intense and frustrating process because the bags are not made to come apart. They are very well-made and are meant to stay that way. So I can get pretty angry making these things which might account for the emotional content of the pieces more than any direct association with another entity.

During this one particular piece, I took the hood that comes with bags like these and snapped it on to the top where it belongs (it’s a rain hood essentially), and there it was—a sinister figure, hidden and disguised beneath this dark hood. I kept working and made one of the best pieces of art I’ve ever made. That piece is called Four Men in Formal Attire, was sold and is in a collection of Bill and Pamela Royall in Richmond, VA. In the cradle of the confederacy! How cool is that!?

 

At the gallery we discussed the timely political relevance of this exhibition as racism gains social acceptance under the guise of politics, especially during the Obama presidency. Could you explain in more detail how the current political environment relates to this body of work?

Well I never look at anything in current events to inspire me or what I do in the studio. Actually, I made one piece some years ago that was a specific reaction to Amadou Diallo being shot by the NYPD, but other than that, I rarely do.

Having said that, I do think the wave of apparent and acceptable racism that seems to be affecting and influencing the tone of political dialogue is rather disturbing. I do think that the work is beginning to reflect this resurgent supremacy-minded activity. There seems to be a total disregard for respecting the office of the presidency simply because the office was occupied by a black man.

Early in Obama’s presidency there was an active campaign if you will, to discourage young kids to all of a sudden NOT aspire to be president when they grow up.

This whole feeling that Obama was something other, was “not one of us,” didn’t love “our” country, that this angered segment of society was going to “take our country back!” From whom? The black guy?

The Tea Party, O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Rush, Bachman, etc . . . they all stirred a pretty nasty pot of racial protagonist soup that comes dangerously close to inciting people to act a certain way. It’s like they are giving stamps of approval for behavior that is reckless, separatist, and backward. It paves the way for the president to be told “You Lie!” during his State of the Union and in the aftermath, talking heads rally their base of troops to support this very un-American behavior.

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the golf bag is a very inherently political object. I use it to make art and in doing so, it very easily lends itself to interpretation on many levels and it is just pure serendipity that it has relevance within the current political landscape.

 

Untitled (Robin Hood)

 

I tried numerous times to sit down with Denver’s own Zach Reini to catch up and talk about art and music. But the more we tried to sit down to interview, the more we were distracted by Goldeneye for Nintendo 64, skate videos, or eating Chipotle. Finally we hunkered down and let it rip. For those who don’t know Zach Reini, he is one of the few young Denver artists gaining attention while still in college. Known for his large black on black paintings, Reini attends Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design where he will be receiving his Bachelor’s degree in a few months. Reini is represented by Rule Gallery in Denver.

Interview by Michael Bhichitkul

 

Why do you use such iconic imagery in your work? Why blur the imagery to extent where it nearly unrecognizable?

The iconic imagery is attractive—it seduces people. I fell for it as well. It’s something that I know and am familiar with. Since imagery of such pedigree is so readily available, everyone has interacted and constructed their own histories with it at some point. I abstract these forms to place them outside of their recognizable context, stripping them of their pictorial power, allowing the viewer to reconnect with their histories from a new tilt. This delay of decoding, finding out what information is there and what it represents, is of great interest to me—especially with the instant satisfaction induced by the Internet and other popular media.

 

Black is a dominant color in your work. Why?

In my work, I’ve tried to maintain focus on the visual information that is important and trim off all of the remaining fat. With black, there are fewer allusions to things outside of itself that other colors tend to reference; i.e. blue, sadness; red, passion; yellow, happiness. I don’t want an easy of a trigger in my work, but rather the essential elements in the piece to engage that emotional read, not the color. I’ve found black to be as far reduced as something can be while still possessing a particular visual weight about it.

 

You mostly work with paint, but you also use ready-mades as sculptural pieces. What draws you to sculptural work?

I wouldn’t label myself as a painter, that’s far too limiting for me. My attraction to sculpture is based on necessity. If a piece needs the physicality that a painting cannot provide, then another form is required. There is no need to make a painting of person when photography can do this much easier, without the romance of the artist laboring over the rendition (unless this is a part of it). It can get a little fuzzy at times, but I like to make work where the content supports its physicality and vice versa.

 

You’re close to earning your BFA from Rocky Mountain College Art and Design, but you are already represented by one of the most respected galleries in Denver, Rule Gallery. This distinction would be considered a major milestone for an artist post-BFA, but you happened to reach this milestone early. Can you talk about your relationship with Rule Gallery?

I’ve been affiliated with the gallery for about a year now. It all came about pretty suddenly and spontaneously. A friend of mine, Joseph Coniff, was interning at the time Robin was putting together a group show of emerging artists at her old space. He called me up and asked if I had any pieces to bring down and show her. Understandably, I jumped at the opportunity. It turned out that she liked my work and even sold a piece. The relationship built pretty naturally from there and I was then featured on her website which is where we stand now. I’m really appreciative of the opportunities she’s given me and can’t wait to see where it goes in the future.

 

Another big achievement is a solo show titled Suburban Lawns at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, which just recently closed. As a BFA student, what did you take away from this experience?

It definitely opened up my awareness of the opportunities available for a young artist, as well as the difficulties of gaining exposure at this stage. It has helped me take a more professional stance with my work, and realize that confidence paired with the right people, work, and presentation can go a long way. It is 100% different than showing in an academic environment, because when you show in the academic space it immediately gets categorized as “student” work. I urge my fellow emerging artists to branch out as much as they can, to open themselves up to the available opportunities. But, then again, the school environment is great when people are still experimenting and trying to solidify their ideas.

 

Some people might not know that you have multiple music projects. Can you give us a teaser of what these musical projects are and what genre they fall into?

I’m involved in several projects primarily centered around Hardcore Punk, Noise, and all of its subsequent sub-genres. Two of the projects, Civilized and Cadaver Dog, have tapes coming out soon on Youth Attack, both of which I am very pleased with. Another, Polyurethane, which started as a solo project, is more on the Noise side of things with definite cues to Hardcore. Hopefully a release will be coming with that project soon too.

 

You also make small zines, which link back to the punk/hardcore sub culture. Is there a way to get a hold of any of them?

I post all my zines for sale on my webstore: http://shop.zachreini.com

 

What other influences outside the art/punk DIY realms help you develop new work?

The Internet, chance observations, people interacting, pretty much everything. This question is assuming I attempt to pigeon-hole myself with my influences, I gain something from everything I experience. Similar to everyone else, I assume.

 

Along with being a visual artist, and a musician, you’re a man of many stories. Do you have any that come to mind in particular?

I heard a quote about Chris Farley saying that he only had one character, but he did it at different volumes. I think I have one really great story that I try and tell differently each time for a new effect. What I’ll say about this one (without getting too graphic) involves the following in semi-specific order: half a vegan pizza, bad beer, breakfast burrito from Viva, garbanzo bean salad, a pair of unsuspecting shorts, the light rail, an unfortunate bowel mishap, and a good friend and an unknown old lady to witness an awkward run home. I think you can piece it together from there.

 

2011 was a great year for you: multiple gallery shows, Suburban Lawns at BMOCA, voted best artist of 2011 in Denver’s 303 Magazine, and a feature in New American Paintings. What do you have in store next for 2012?

I’ll take what I can get and what I can make for myself. I plan on continuing to move forward and see what happens from there. I don’t want to become stagnant or regressive just yet. Keeping busy is the key.

 

Rossana Martinez, See the World in Orange and Blue, 2011

 

“Telefone Sem Fio: Word-Things of Augusto de Campos Revisited” was a 2011 exhibition at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts organized by Telephone, a journal of translation edited by Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault. The exhibition used Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos as a point of departure for a group of poets, translators, and artists to “translate” across mediums using text, sound, and visuals. The exhibition featured exquisite original works by de Campos and a plethora of new work including highlights by Tom Moody, Rossana Martinez, Steve Savage & Jean-Sebastien Baillat, Macgregor Card, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, and Kenneth Goldsmith. A limited edition catalog produced by Ugly Duckling Presse became Telephone #3.

Interview by Brandon Johnson

 

Is this Telephone’s first exhibition?

Yes, this is Telephone’s first art gallery exhibition. When Michelle Levy approached us, we were very excited by the notion of working with the EFA and expanding Telephone into a venue where all different forms of media could be present. In general, we have always been interested in the broadness of the umbrella under which poetry translation lies—this gave us even more room to explore.

 

How did you first learn about Augusto de Campos? Why base an exhibition on his work?

Actually, I’m not really sure. I think I’ve had a vague idea of his work for a while, but it was during the formation of this project that I really became familiar with him and his history. The more we researched him, the more he seemed like the perfect choice for the exhibition. Augusto de Campos is considered one of the founding fathers of the Brazilian concrete poetry movement—his work and ideas have been an influence on poetry, design, and art even up through today. Who better to pay homage to than a poet, translator, and pioneer of visual (and sound, shape, etc.) poetry?

Being that his work features such a wide range of media—written poems on paper to sound recordings to videos to websites and so on—it really suited our goals of creating an exhibition that featured poetry in translation while simultaneously fitting within a gallery setting. We really wanted all of our translators to branch out/feel free to vary their form and medium—de Campos’s poetry really seems to promote that.

His website with examples of his work and concrete poetry manifesto can be found here.

 

How did you decide on whom to curate into the show? It seems like a very
specific niche.

We always look for a mixed group of “translators” in order to get at as many variables, or differing interpretations as possible. Michelle Levy was in charge of bringing in artists and Telephone curated a group of writers. Of course, there is some overlap in these groups. On our end, we tried to get writers who seemed open to the idea of extending their work beyond the standard words on a page, or who were particularly interested in de Campos’s work, concrete, and Brazilian poetry. No matter what they all share in common, it was clear to us in advance that the execution would differ greatly.

 

I see that original Augusto de Campos books and prints were lent for exhibition by the Sackner Archive for Concrete and Visual Poetry. Can you tell me more about this organization? Is it open to the public?

After our co-curator Michelle Levy visited the Sackner Archive in Miami, she was convinced it was essential to have the original works in the show. This is the typical effect the archive has on its ‘public’—which is any interested party really who gets in touch with them to schedule a visit. There’s also a documentary available that outlines their holdings/mission. They maintain the largest private collection of concrete and visual poetry materials and were a generous resource for our show.

As these works become increasingly difficult to come by, and somewhat overlooked by Academic holdings, collectors like the Sackners form an essential link between concrete poetry and the contemporary artwork inspired/translated over from it—in our case, quite literally.

Their website can be found here.

 

Telephone is about translation. This exhibition is obviously highly interpretive. There’s often a dichotomy in literary translation of staying faithful to the original versus taking a more interpretive approach. Do you have position, either within or outside of, this argument?

Being a translation journal that predominantly features highly interpretive work, I think it necessary to point out that it is no argument against faithful translation, but rather an argument for the many different modes of “translating” poetry. Rather than saying our position is by a particular type of translation, we are saying that there are so many ways to translate poetry and we find all of them valid and interesting. We always push our “translators” to approach the work in any way they see fit—our focus is to show that variety side by side, to look at the original poems from many different angles. I know that I’m arguing semantics here, but why shouldn’t, say, a homophonic or interpretive or visual translation be considered faithful, as it likely pays very close attention to reproducing specific aspects of the work.

 

Any more exhibitions/events in the works? What can we look forward to from Telephone?

We don’t have an exhibition planned at the moment, though we would love to continue curating and working with galleries. Outside of that, we do have a lot of exciting new things on deck. In the near future, we plan on pulling together a sound poetry issue that will likely be recorded on vinyl and provided with a sleeve insert that has scores, notes, texts, etc. We are currently in the process of becoming a press, Telephone Books.  Our first project as that incarnation, which we are making as an imprint of Nightboat Books, is a collection of English to English “translations” of all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each reworked by a different poet/translator (due out Fall 2012). That project is particularly exciting because we get to work with so many wonderful writers and they bring out so many varied interpretations of Shakespeare, texts most of us are already relatively familiar with. In the bigger picture, we also want to expand our press and start making things like art books, handmade objects, and so on. In general, we are always on the look out for new projects that expand the definition of what is considered translation and working with all different venues and types of media is always a part of the discussion.