Some time back photographer Jeronimus van Pelt contacted us about a project he was doing with welfare artist Daan Samson featuring women working in the artworld framed within a sexualized context. The photographic series features eight female curators, theorists, artists, critics, museum directors, and others who agreed to participate, working with stylist Margreeth Olsthoorn to stage the scenes. “Art Babes” debuts today as part of Torch Gallery’s booth at Art Rotterdam 2011.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
How did your collaboration come about?
Jeronimus van Pelt: A few years ago, I visited Daan Samson’s exhibition entitled “Showing One’s Colours” in TENT, the Rotterdam art centre. Almost excusing my enthusiasm, I mailed him that his work made me feel cheerful. I felt a kind of ‘direction’ in his otherwise unsettling art projects. The self-proclaimed art celebrity turned out to be surprisingly simple to approach. Almost immediately he was prepared to make an appointment in a museum in my hometown of The Hague. In the museum restaurant we ate cheese croquets with toast.
Daan Samson: There, in that restaurant, I met a photographer with an artist’s soul. Jeronimus showed me portraits of top civil servants, patricians, close friends and ministers. His shots were all characterized by splendid, sophisticated lighting. He talked comprehensively about the way in which, during his shoots, he establishes contact with the personalities in front of his camera. His stories and photos do indeed show that he manages to ‘disarm’ people.
Jeronimus: After a while, Daan raised the concept of the Art Babes. He invited me to collaborate on a photographic series within which we would give professional artistic women the opportunity to immortalize themselves as ‘sexy creatures’.
How exactly did you select your subjects?
Daan: What followed was an extensive search through the realms of emancipated art fields. We approached attractive artistic women at vernissages and art receptions. We sought models in all layers of our domain. I looked not only for artists and influential exhibition-makers, but also for vital art restorers, reviewers, and even cloakroom girls in museums. Websites such as Facebook are also very suitable channels to check photos and backgrounds. Correspondence with the potential Babes was often followed by a meeting with the artistic women in question. We spoke about sexuality, liberation, looks and lingerie.
Jeronimus: Daan regularly sent me profiles of artistic women who had agreed to give a glimpse of their most sexy side. After that I, too, sought contact with the Art Babes. Within this kind of photo project, it is important that the model and the photographer manage to get on the same wavelength before the photo shoot. I wanted to hear the voices of all the participants, in order to gauge the way in which they approached the theme.
Daan: Jeronimus is a person who relies on emotions. During the project I observed that he wished to reach some sort of communal trance. For example, in the preparatory discussions he tests the degree to which a kind of energy could be released during the shoots. During those discussions, he promotes a situation that structures this eventual trance.
Did you have to approach many women to find participants, or were your candidates generally open to the idea?
Daan: We live in confusing times. Concepts such as ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ seem to have become unstuck. As a result, the self-image that women have has also undergone a paradigm shift. Therefore it was not very difficult to find participants. To the Art Babes, our request probably just came at the right moment. Often the artistic girls had to admit, albeit coyly, that they found it quite flattering to be seen purely and simply as a sexy chick. Other women indicated that they were furious after reading the very first e-mail. Nevertheless, they too wished to participate, even if it was only to come to terms, once and for all, with the feminism of their youth.
Jeronimus: The Art Babe concept gives provocative commentary on our times. To me personally, it was not a goal to supply a specific male view of the concepts of sexuality and beauty. I often spoke with the models about a kind of softness that we could reveal. This softness has little to do with eroticism, it is more about a sort of energy—the softness of female energy. Recently I read an interview with the singer Antony Hegarty and I was rather impressed. I would like to explore with him, in a photographic context, what he calls the ‘softness of the cross-gender principle’. It is not clear whether Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa with the aid of a male or female model. I experience a deep source of inspiration in this idea.
Daan: Nevertheless, the Art Babe photo series has a certain macho character. We show influential artistic women within the context of sexist role models. And it is fine that present-day women apparently have the spirit to display some of those traits now and again.
Jeronimus: Sexual clichés versus ‘lipstick feminism’ . . . it is a curious and interesting mix of impossibilities.
Is this a reaction to what can sometimes be a dogmatic intellectual insistence on political correctness, especially in the world of contemporary art?
Daan: Yes, I believe so. The masks can be dropped now, even within the world of the arts. The concept of ‘shame’ is now only for those who are actually ashamed.
Jeronimus: Both Daan and I are post-hippie children. Perhaps the Art Babe project is also a personal means of reflecting upon the feminism with which we were raised in the seventies.
Daan: And our fathers and mothers can be proud of us. We have created, with love, an attractive environment in which the Art Babes could break out of their culture-driven straitjacket. Stripped of intellectually representative expectations, the girls could emerge as seductive sex kittens.
Jeronimus: Women liberators . . . that is what we are.
Daan: Hahaha. Princess Máxima Zorreguieta will be delighted to hear that. Didn’t you make a portrait of her recently?
I’m enjoying the settings of the portraits—particularly those that suggest the artworld—Jantine surrounded by cocktails littered about at an opening, Anne sitting on crates presumably containing works of art, Eva among foam and bubble wrap in a storage setting. It’s disconcerting to see these banal work scenes become sexualized. How were these scenes selected?
Jeronimus: After pioneering work with the first two photos, we reached the conclusion that we did not want to offer true anecdotes. The energy that I like to experience in a photo is released when you offer a model the comfort of leaning upon both the fictional and the real.
Daan: With our photos we expose the true ambitions within the art scene. We allow dreamed aspirations to run wild in front of the camera. In the choice of locations and ambiences, we occasionally pounded hard on the loud pedal. And the women showed themselves to be seemingly at their ease within our décor of top hotels, smooth vodka and tasteful lofts. Fashion guru Margreeth Olsthoorn dressed all the Art Babes in creations of international fashion designers, such as Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan and Veronique Branquinho.
Jeronimus: Whereas I seek the power of a photo in a kind of immaterial intensity, Daan is more initiated into the world of luxury and comfort. Within his artistic calling, he pleads for a revaluation of the material. In contrast to many other artists he will not sneer at earthly possessions.
These photographs are like pin-ups to art dealers—a fantasy specific to the industry. Who is the audience for this work?
Daan: First of all, photo-lovers will be delighted by such marvelous images. Jeronimus has shot amazingly refined pictures. And the more general art collectors will also be astonished, not only by the scintillating photos but also by the Art Babes we have liberated. And finally, the less involved citizen is also welcome. We realize that there is a gap between the artworld and society. However, with this photo series we offer a hand of friendship. The most seductive Art Babes are presented on a platter.
On view at Art Rotterdam February 10-13, 2011
With a foundation in painting, Nils Folke Anderson now works in large-scale sculpture. His most recent works feature repeated interlocking geometric pieces that can be shifted into different formations and left to pose like the kids game of “statues.” At first glance, it’s Sol LeWitt meeting minimalist sculpture. But looking a bit harder, Anderson is going the opposite way on the same road, doing the two-finger wave as they pass. I visited Nils Folke Anderson’s expansive Sunset Park warehouse studio on a wet September Tuesday. Across the hall from Marian Spore, and with a view onto New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty vague in the fog, it was well worth the shlep from Bushwick. The studio itself contained a large iron sculpture of interlocking bent rectangles with more yet-to-be-assembled pieces stacked on the floor, their scaled models lined up in a row. After a quick survey of these works, we headed up a floor to a smaller studio to discuss his work. Afterwards, we went looking for avocado milkshakes while talking trash about Blockbuster only to end up with a Vietnamese feast in Sunset Park Chinatown. Not bad at all.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
Let’s start at the foundation of what informs your sculpture: the concept of “reciprocal linkage.” Can you explain it in your own words along with its importance to your work?
I borrowed the term reciprocal linkage from internet terminology, where it’s used to describe how multiple websites are linked to each other.
In my work reciprocal linkage is the term I use to describe a basic principle of interrelation, in which a number of elements that are essentially empty frames all link through one another. Together they create a dynamic, formless unity in which each individual element bears the same relation to the whole as any of the other elements.
Because all of the frame elements are made alike (same dimensions, material, etc.), a situation is created in which they are totally interchangeable, but also confined by this specific kind of linkage. I work in the openness of this space, interacting with a reciprocally linked object until I arrive at a stopping point, in which the elements make an interdependent stasis, all leaning on one another to form a configuration.
When we spoke at your studio, you related this concept to complex relational systems like economics, politics, with each piece affecting the great whole so as to shape the entirety. I like the idea of how this formation is alive in a way, and then reaches a point when you leave it to pose. This is a departure from more rational systems, like algorithms, used to create work. As the artist, you are directly involved in the aesthetic decision of how the piece will be arranged. How would you compare your sculptural work to someone like Sol LeWitt and why have you chosen to take the positioning away from either chance or systematic rationality and literally into your own hands?
Sol LeWitt’s means were logical and rational, but the results are also poetic and humorous and beautiful. I admire how his work manages to be rigorous and light at the same time.
In my work I am interested in a direct, tactile engagement, the kind of subjective, physical, and psychological engagement that LeWitt in some ways rejected. When I am configuring a reciprocally linked sculpture, I move it until it stands up on its own. Along the way there are things it will and will not do, depending on its size, material, shape, location, etc. The sculpture has a specific character, and the interaction that occurs engages an immediate, physical intelligence. The moment of resolution happens in an instant—everything is in play, and a moment later everything snaps into place and I am released. The sculpture and myself are separated. I assess the result and decide whether or not to reengage.
I am interested by the density of concerns that come into play at that moment, by the challenge of making the right decision when there is no right decision to be made.
That is the conundrum—when to let go. Especially when there is “no right decision to be made.” Instead of logic, physics—gravity and friction—plays a role in determining the final form, among the density of concerns. We talked about this having a more ab-ex attitude. You said instead of repetition like LeWitt, there is “recursion.” How does this term fit in?
Recursion occurs when a thing is in relation to itself. It is the basic mechanism of deconstruction—that in placing the self-same in relation to itself something radically different might precipitate. Through recursion a novel face can arise from what had seemed stable and well understood.
In the case of reciprocal linkage, an indeterminate, liquid character emerges from what are completely self-equivalent square frames, simply by the act of joining them together according to a particular organizing principle.
Robert Smithson wrote a great piece contrasting “liquid” and “crystalline” thought, in which he advises the reader suffering from a liquid mind to make a mud pool and watch it segment as it dries. But I’m interested in the whole event he describes, the muck and the cracked polygons of dry clay, and what occurs along the way. I’m pursuing a continuum that absorbs it all.
You mentioned the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark as a primary influence. How does she fit into the picture?
Lygia Clark made a body of work called Bichos in the early 60’s, which she built by hinging together metal plates. These sculptures are meant to be manipulated by the viewer into various forms. “Bicho” means beast, or animal, or bug, and the basic proposition is to create a tactile/visual dialogue between a person and this object, an object that—through the interaction—takes on a kind of internal life based on the nature of its construction. There’s a tension between the will of the object and the will of the person touching it, and a decision to be made regarding when and why and how to disengage.
These sculptures also continuously empty themselves—they are the opposite of a palimpsest, because there’s no trace of what forms they have previously taken. Every movement simultaneously creates a new form and destroys the prior form.
I once recreated a Bicho, in steel rather than aluminum, and I was struck by the conundrum of the stopping point that this work presents. I still am.
I find it interesting for a painter to move into sculpture. How did you decide to begin working in sculpture? How would you say your background in painting has influenced your sculpture practice?
I’ve built things all my life, and because my art making was oriented towards painting for a long time, I had the benefit of making objects without thinking about them as artworks. I taught carpentry, built mud houses, worked in construction, made my own furniture, never thinking about art exactly. I’m making steel sculpture now, but my education in steel came from helping my brother build domination equipment for S&M dungeons. Later I worked in the wood shop of a framer and found a book on Japanese joinery and immersed myself in that world. All of this was a respite from art, and I developed a facility with materials and structure along the way that is now central to my art.
It was my engagement with color that provided the bridge between painting and sculpture, specifically the understanding of color as something that has three dimensions (light/dark value, hue and saturation). Color interaction happens within a three dimensional color space, it happens densely and all at once, and something analogous happens in reciprocal linkage.
I made the jump from painting to sculpture because I sensed that possibility. I had also recently become a father, and the tactility and vividness of holding this little living being gave an urgency to this transition to sculpture. It was a good moment for change.
Going back to Lygia Clark, she was bothered by the non-presence of the backside of paintings. She folded that empty space into her Bichos. She didn’t eliminate that void, but rather turned it into an active element of the work. That image—of contemplating the reverse side of the painting—also instigated me towards sculpture.
Wow, so your sculpture truly has a solid foundation in craft too. The S&M thing is quite funny considering Robert Morris’s famed poster in all the gear, but also something I would never have guessed you had done. At the studio I got a sense of the reciprocal linkage emerging, with your Peter Halley-like paintings demonstrating a degree of inter-linkage already. The transition to sculpture seemed quite natural, especially now that I’ve learned your experience in building and craft. Good deal. So, what do you have coming up we can look forward to? I know you just opened a group show at Nathan A. Bernstein & Co. Tell me more about this and other upcoming projects / events.
I’m working on several outdoor sculptures, including my first permanent public commission. And I’m painting again, after a hiatus of several years, preparing for a show next year that will have both painting and sculpture.
The show at Nathan Bernstein is a group show of light art, with Dan Flavin, Keith Sonnier, Anthony McCall, Jenny Holzer, among others, beautifully curated by Nicole Berry. I have a reciprocally linked neon piece in it, my first neon sculpture with multiple colors. The neon sculptures have these discrete elements in them, like my other linked work, but with one continuous electrical series running through them, and one continuous field of light.
still from Break, 2004 at the Dikeou Collection
Serge Onnen is a French/Dutch artist, trumpeter in the band Oorbeek, and longtime friend of zingmagazine. He has had a project in #17 of utopian trees, a zingbook of face drawings titled Volume O, and video work and wallpaper in the Dikeou Collection. Serge’s new book coming out with J & L Press is called Drawings on Hands. He will also be in the upcoming issue of zing, #22.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
Your new book, Drawings on Hands, is very obviously about the drawing of hands in their various positions and actions. Can you tell me more about it?
Each of the books has a very simple starting point: heads, horizon, writing, and now hands. This book is more or less 50% found, unknown drawings and 50% artists’ material. The goal is each time to make an intelligent book about something simple without the use of text. I want the viewer of the book to wander around, without too much distraction. There’s very little information in the books. So when I pick something as general as drawings of hands, I first have to make all sorts of categories: tarot, sign language, manuals, religion, medical, magic-tricks, etc, etc. And of course collecting the artists’ material. I research all fields until I find drawings that are interesting and not too obvious. The collecting and shifting takes a long time. Stacks of hand drawings become smaller and smaller. I start making connections, story lines, jokes. It’s all very precise. There’s something anonymous in the design, a stack of paper with an elastic cord around it. And also many of the drawings I pick have this anonymous quality that manuals have. But at the same time, drawing is a very expressive medium, so that remains, even if it’s a blown up lousy jpg.
I didn’t realize you had done all these thematic books in the same way. I was familiar with the heads book as we published it along with zingmagazine #16, but haven’t seen the horizon or writing books. In fact, there are a few hands that appear in the heads book. It seems to be a mark of distinction – a level of achievement—to be able to draw hands well. As an artist who does a lot of drawing, what is your particular interest in hands?
There’s a website that comes with each issue, check them out:
www.jandlbooks.org/geology_info/toc.htm
But it’s really all about the books and their design. Drawings on paper, not drawings on screens. I personally think feet are harder to draw, but it’s true that I draw lots of hands. But I don’t really notice it anymore. Your hands are always there. Available. It’s the part of your body you have the most eye contact with. They are very flexible, more so than a face. You can put every expression you want in a hand and it will still keep a certain anonymity, gender is irrelevant. And of course the idea of “hand made”. I like art to be made by a human; that’s a very powerful aspect of art-making to me. But, it’s never about “hands,” I guess. Nor in my book or my work. I find hand studies as a topic boring.
On the back cover of the book, you have a description:
A left hand draws a self-portrait on a sheet of paper. The hand leaves the room. Another hand picks up the drawing and looks at it. “Why can’t I do this?” This is an extremely jealous hand, and he crushes the drawing. Then he walks toward a hand mirror, opens himself and pushes very hard against his cold reflection. He takes a few steps back and stares at the print made by his heat until it slowly vanishes.
So, are you saying it’s more about the actions of the hands and their expressive quality and less about the drawing process of the hand itself? Is it the manipulation of the hand rather than the depiction?
Yes, just drawings of hands won’t do. Everybody knows how that book will look. I guess I’m not so interested in amazingly well drawn hands. Two of my favorite drawings in the book are of the Japanese tegata drawings. This is an old Japanese tradition where sumo wrestlers ink the palm of their hand to make prints and then give these to their fans. There is one 18th-century drawing where a sumo wrestler makes such a print. It’s still in use today and these prints are collectible. I’ve been trying to get one. A human print as an artifact. Not as a piece of evidence as it means in western culture—very different to the Hollywood Blvd tradition of hands in the pavement (wonder where that idea comes from, because when I think about actors, their hands are not the first thing that comes to my mind…). But there are also some drawings from an old manual for magicians; Yes! Here the hands are real actors.
Actually, that’s funny you bring up the Hollywood handprints. Devon [Dikeou, artist and editor of zingmagazine] did a piece called Norma Taldmadge’s Chinese Theatre based on the origin of that tradition. The actress Norma Talmadge accidentally stepped onto wet concrete in front of Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, starting the tradition.
But moving forward, you have a project in the upcoming issue of zingmagazine called “Insurance Value Drawings” featuring catastrophic collisions of insurable objects—a grand piano dropped onto a crushed palette of iMacs—along with cost of the products destroyed. Where did the idea for this series come from?
So, the handprints started as an accident? Well, you could say the insurance value drawings started like that too; when you have a show in an institution or museum you’re always asked about the insurance value of the work and that is always something much lower than the market value. So, art has many different prices; as destroyed, so to speak, “dead;” or as “art”, so to speak, eternal. In the past, I’ve had pieces that were not sold and I wished had been destroyed. I destroy work constantly without ever getting paid.
It’s another value dilemma. Like everything in our world. There’s not one thing that can’t be priced—this idea is still puzzling to me. But there is also something else; with the goods in the drawings (most items are on pallets), I also thought of the meanings these objects have; so when you drop a Steinway on a pallet of iMacs you will not only get a great sound, but also some kind of conflict, revenge; old vs. new (well, the iMac is old today, but was quite new when the drawing was made! so that’s also interesting, the meaning has shifted). Also, the long tradition of dropping grand pianos in art and slapstick. I like objects destroying each other. A fallen tree on a car, fallen book-shelves, stuff like that. It’s melancholic—it’s not the violence of hurting. Each insurance drawing is also a composition: a motorcycle & olive oil, a motorcycle & Nespresso, telescope & M&M’s, lingerie & crude oil. In that way it’s not a real accident—they’re sketches for beautiful swindles. There are a lot of musical instruments among the insurance drawings. Music & violence is a good match. Guitars also have this powerful meaning when crashed, but when it’s crashing into cans of Nivea for Men, it becomes as ridiculous as most rock and roll bands that will smash a guitar nowadays. The Gretsch guitars vs. Jack Daniel’s is more the idea of two delicate brands. You can crash as many Fender Stratocasters as you like but don’t dare touch the Gretsch! Two brands that play with “classic rock” & “good taste and connoisseurship” and being “exclusive.” And all that crap. I’m not saying these aren’t good products, that’s not my point. Originality has nothing to do with exclusivity. But all these brands try to make you believe it’s the same thing. They will only gain originality when damaged. Oh, something very funny happened with the motorcycle & Nespresso drawing; a few months after I made that drawing, George Clooney got into a motorcycle accident! In Europe he is Mr. Nespresso.
You mention the lack of violence in objects destroying each other. There’s a similar theme of crashing and smashing in your video piece at the Dikeou Collection called Break in which two hands slap together to smash things, like a beer mug. In your statement for this piece, you say that violence in animation doesn’t hurt. Is the fictional aspect of drawing important to you? Does is provide a sort of outlet for violence in the world?
In that animation two hands crash objects against each other but are gentle to each other. I think I always had a fictional attitude toward drawing; as I child I made sounds while drawing and the characters had voices. Very often they were fighting, that’s true. When I draw I need to get inside the world I’m creating. Then I can try to rule it and believe it’s good or not. It hasn’t chanced so much, only the worlds I draw have changed. So when I started to work with animation and studied its history, I noticed how violent it has always been. In an animation you can transform anything. Violence is, of course, transformation. Animation always plays with these ideas. It means something else and that is always interesting. You just take that violence for granted, even if it’s not funny. It’s fun to drop an anvil on someone’s head in an animation, but in a movie that will become a splatter scene. I don’t enjoy violence in movies. But I do in music, drawing, etc.
On the other hand, your project in zingmagazine #17, “Sanitary Park,” looks at a “place where everything is clean and perfect. A man-made park where no human is allowed.” There are drawings of trees, interconnected page to page, with ends that are amputated stumps. They are abstract, organic, a “pure environment.” This is in stark contrast with the messing smashing and crashing of “Insurance Value Drawings” and Break. Can you tell me how this project relates to the rest of your work?
Holland, where I live most of the time, is totally man made, as you may know. It’s the 17th-century’s Dubai. All the work I did about 10 years ago for “Sanitary Park,” around a hundred drawings and a show in Holland’s biggest hospital, was about creating a park out of drawings. A safe and secure zone; like one finds also in a bathroom or hospital. These places must be very clean, sterile. Industrial and organic. Places where one thinks it’s safe to take off ones clothes. The zing drawings are the extreme version of that idea, amputated, no humans allowed. It’s also a lot about the idea in the urban brain that nature is pure. That is the way it’s being represented: “purity is an invention of the police” like one of my heroes Roland Topor said. I need to go back to the work I did before Sanitary Park to explain how one thing leads to another. Those drawings were “heavy bags.” People in and with bags. You never know if they’re vagabonds, hikers, homeless people, refugees. Leaving things behind and going into the wild voluntarily or non-voluntarily. The romantic and the dramatic version hand-in-hand. So, there’s often a ‘better world’ fantasy in my work I guess, playing with those ideas of rejecting society or being rejected by it. The violence only came in when I started to work with animation. But always object-related violence and also always repetitive, rhythmical, in the drawings, animations and also in a wallpaper I designed. I did a wallpaper where champagne-glasses are being toasted very cheerfully and violently. I call that “violent choreography.” It’s a composition, like the insurance drawings. I like objects that have something dangerous and something human in them. Like a fork is a little hand-prosthesis. Or a pair of scissors that looks in many ways like eyes: they blink, have two eyes, and will always keep their elegance. Beautiful.
It’s great to hear about your past work in zing and how it relates to your body of work as a whole. Besides your upcoming project in zingmagazine #22 and Drawings on Hands, is there anything else coming up that you’d like to mention?
Yes, you develop and change ideas over the years and it’s good to reconnect with it using language. I can recommend to any zingchat readers going upstate to DIA:Beacon by train, get out of the train in Peekskill and check out my kaleidoscope sculpture “monetariumplanetrarium” on the waterfront, part of the Hudson Valley Art Centre. It’s a piece I’m real proud of!
Hand-written manuscript of Commuter
James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press) and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. Commuter was recently voted 2009’s “Best Book Length Long Poem/Sequence” by ColdFront magazine. His work appears, or is forthcoming in: EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Apostrophe Cast & Greatcoat among others. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting & exchange of poetry resources.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
Your collection, Commuter is a poetry of urban disaster, or more specifically, the detonation of a terrorist bomb—essentially, the poetry of an event. What do you think is the influence of 9/11 and the “War on Terrorism” and methods of contemporary warfare on language? On art’s concerns with consciousness? Do you think violence changes how we shape our questions about beauty?
I like your description of Commuter as “a poetry of an event.” I wonder if it might be even more accurate to describe it as a poetry of event. In this case, the event is the dissolution, dislocation and withdrawal—coexistent with the rethinking, rewriting and (re)witnessing of a rapidly changing sense of what constitutes relation and to a broader extent, community. Commuter attempts to (as you suggest below in some cases “aggressively”), enact an event of discourse and relation in this intersection. A discourse that resists the logic that results in the community of death created by and around suicide bombing.
I think this logic is very common though, and in many instances a symptom of the practice of poetry of witness (and arguably of poetry in general). So, the other primary concern was refusing this thinking. In many cases poetry of witness, and especially poetry of secondary witness, presumes to be a vehicle for the unspeakable, the testimony of those who are silenced. Yet, this logic is a means to an end, almost always that end is the “project,” the communion with another, the making meaning out of what I believe is ultimately utterly meaningless: death. In instrumentalizing another’s death, a text entertains a conception of community similar to that of suicide bombing, both constituted on the value of another’s death: the justification, defense, and potential of death. In one case metaphoric, in another martyrdom.
These logic systems center an understanding of communal structures in an originary essentialist past that only needs to be reconstituted through fusion with another for success. They suggest community as a product. As such, these systems no longer contain the possibility for the “eventness” necessitated by the limit(s) that a community is. Expanding on Maurice Blanchot, Jean Luc-Nancy calls it an “unworking” of community. I’ll quote him so I don’t botch it too badly, “that community, in its infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion signifies an irrepressible political exigency, and that this exigency in its turn demands something of ‘literature,’ the inscription of our infinite resistance.”
To make a long answer longer, but hopefully to answer your question, this exigency and “infinite resistance” must reshape our questions about beauty. In the pressurized space of a tradition that attempts to situate the beautiful (especially in poetry of witness) on an “authentic” subjectivity, the space for a rearticulation of beauty, much less of trauma is very limited. I personally have a very fraught relationship to beauty, in many cases finding it to be a default aesthetic mode for much poetic witness: when the trauma gets tough, the trauma turns beautiful. It seems that poetry of witness generally doesn’t interrogate the implications of beautifying atrocity very often, usually relying instead on an empathetic response that has strong affinities with the sentimental tradition. This understanding of beauty is unable to account for the unnerving experience of such works as Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz and After, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Rachel Zolf’s The Neighbour Procedure or Vanessa Place’s, The Guilt Project, much less the events that these texts strive to express.
So a main question for me became, how to think/write with the full awareness of my own complicity in all of these issues, what Nancy calls a “literary communism.” I like the emphasis he places on the idea of offering texts to communication, a certain manner of sharing that the text enters. What is important to this idea is abandonment. In offering something, you abandon it at the same time. Commuter seeks to populate this limit. In some sense this extends to a certain description of thinking as care for another: the offering/abandonment of a text in/as an uncrossable threshold, where the text becomes, not exactly a common ground, but a meeting place nonetheless. And the process of the work changes then, it commutes, (especially in the sense of a traveler, and the alteration of a period of imprisonment) a discourse as part of a communal formation: it is preoccupied with the unending travel(er) of/on communication.
The Prologue locates us in the chaos, panic and fragmentation of a destroyed urban space. There are people “combing hospitals,” architecture goes rickety, time is being counted and noted—these elements of a walk through the city, architecture, and time are all hallmarks of surrealism and the New York schools of poetry. How influenced are you by surrealist poets and/or NY school poets?
Well, you caught me; I do absolutely love Frank O’Hara. That being said, my concern about reading the book as surrealist would be surrealism’s emphasis on irrationality, or nonrationality that seem like a less than rigorous response to the horrors that took place in reality, and their eventness in Commuter. As I mentioned above, emulating purely rational thinking also doesn’t seem to be the answer. Perhaps there are alternatives?
As I think your question indicates, surrealist logic on one level could account for Commuter in some ways, and they both use similar techniques. It is, in a certain sense about someone shooting a revolver into a crowd. However, in response to the seeming irrationality, or dream like quality of the events there is a care for the reader and victim, an attempt to come alongside, to meet him or her in the event(s) of witnessing writing/trauma that is ongoing.
This question comes to a head in the work on page 73 where I insist that these events were not hallucinations and ask the reader to write paragraphs containing certain words having to do with dream narrative and such.
My other concern was a refusal of the solipsistic and ironic positions that preoccupy much of the pseudo-surrealist poetry that has been very popular for awhile now.
It may be a more helpful framework to consider these themes through the context of the Situationist International, specifically their ideas of psychogeography and the dérive. Debord’s description of the dérive is a very accurate description of Commuter: “a technique of rapid passages through varied ambiences.”
The work slips between what sounds like journalistic reporting and broken, breathy poetry. What is the relationship between poetry and “reporting” on the world?
“Breathy,” hmm… I can see where you could say that. I was thinking more of an out-of-breathness, rather than breathy poetry, since you mention its brokenness also. I was reading Kenneth Patchen’s Panels for the Walls of Heaven recently and was struck by his long, long, extended and barreling lines that forced the reader to alter his/her breathing. It was as if Patchen’s thought accumulated at a different speed than the readers breathing rhythm. As a result, I could no longer breath where I wanted to. This became integral to the project because, for me, the extension, or overextension of the breath mimicked the incommunicability of many of the traumatic events in the work. Altering your breathing pattern causes you to become immediately conscious of it. As awareness of breathing enters thought, it becomes irregular: how many times have you tripped over your breathing the moment you thought about it? In some sense, this is comparable to the way that you become conscious of another person. There is a sensing of patterns, which at the same time, disrupts those patterns. He/she has been there all the time but an alteration on your part causes you to listen differently. I think the differences you’ve pointed to speak to this very well. It is about the passage between very different conversations, in this case poetry and reporting, that (like the breath) only interrupt our awareness when they are disrupted. Considering their proximity on the page, it becomes necessary to continue that interruption/passage, rather than end its relationship.
- NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! is an amazing example of this (dis)embodiment, showing the limits of the breath. She splits words across the page, but maintains a narrative, so that as you’re reading, your sense-making is completely at odds with your breathing and is spaced very differently than you’re accustomed to. It’s a wonderful technique and complicates a simplistic embodiment of the work.
Given that this work places a heavy emphasis on the materiality of the page as well as how the work is performed/experienced, where/when do you locate the event of poetry itself?
Primarily in interruption and failure. I think poetry has the capacity to interrupt first its own mythologies/ideologies and to a broader extent, the mythologies/ideologies that govern much language usage and thinking today.
I view Commuter first and foremost as a process, but this process is one of perpetual interruption: of itself, of events, of thought process, of reader expectation and writing. In this case, it is an interruption of a signifying practice that locates the possibility of the representation of trauma through language, especially one based on an “empathetic” stance that attempts to understand the other through a recognition of similar experience: you’re human, I’m human, therefore I understand what you’re going through.
However, something I consistently grapple with is how to relate motile process to what seems to be the utter stasis of death. Is there relation of a different sort here, and if so, how can one write this relation? In some sense, it returns to the question of community. If our access to the other is through death, then what manner of access is this?
As far as failure is concerned the book purposely foregrounds its failure to “represent” trauma and all its effects through language. However, it is this failure, or the continuous contention with this failure, that generates and supports the community I’m suggesting and places a large responsibility on the reader as a member of this community. To be more specific, the book’s response to atrocity is to precisely fail to reconcile it metaphorically or otherwise, (and therefore reduce) a certain usage of trauma by language: a (re)production of trauma through a certain logic of expression. I’m always hesitant to suggest that trauma can be cast into (a) language, or should be for that matter, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written.
The book practices a thinking that envisions witnessing as an awareness of singular events in contact, not in communion: whether these events are love, atrocity or anything in between. In some sense a thinking in contradictions, rather than through them. I don’t mean to suggest that relation isn’t happening but it is a relation supported only by this incessant “communication.” And this communication is in the form of an interruption of the assumption that we are fully sharing, to the point of knowing, another’s experience. In some sense it is a contact with the limit that is/is not another’s singularity. This is why I keep insisting on the importance of the reader to Commuter. He/she is vital to the social process that is the work. The reader is the 3rd “witness.” In that sense, if a reader is contacted, perhaps the work fails very differently!
After the Prologue—which sounds more journalistic than poetic—Commuter opens with a poem that is essentially instructions for constructing a bomb, and thus the poem becomes not the event but the ignition of an event. There are many things I could say about the idea of a poem-as-detonator but I’d like to start with a metaphysical question about the relationship between events and language: to your mind, does language call events and organized chaos into being or into our awareness of being? Or is language simply a naming system to describe what already is? Is this tension a major concern of your poetry?
I love your distinction between the poem as event and the poem as ignition of an event. I think that this difference is very important for Commuter.
The short answer is yes; this tension is a major concern. I would have to say that I think language names, or more precisely delimits—the unnamable, or for language in general the first order, or to use a risky word, the unconscious. For me, language exposes a threshold. It (de)limits, or chalks communication. In Commuter the relational abundance of “it” speaks to your question. As I’m sure you noticed “it” refers to and can be substituted for any number of referents, signs/signifiers. “It” is a person, a helicopter, a currency etc. So this “name” at once, “calls” events into occurrence and at the same time serves as a threshold, or chalk line, albeit a loose (and in this case jarred loose) one, for event(s). These aren’t necessarily traumatic events but trauma usually communicates these limits more clearly than other discourses. But here is the challenge: part of the project was to activate, or as you put it, ignite this abundance, to write in a way that precisely emphasized the potential of the word, prior to its manifestation as a threshold. What I was in part, trying to touch upon was what Deleuze calls “order-words.” Words that relate to and ignite implicit presuppositions in the reader. In some sense, this confronted the impossibility of communicating my own, and another’s mortality through this precise failure to situate, or name, in the sense of commune with, understand, or essentialize identities within the poem. The radically provisional quality of these order words, whether they are more associated with discourses of trauma, another person, a lover, or quotidian life, also abundantly “name” various other events for the author, victim and reader. This abundance necessitates similar event of the crises of naming on the part of the reader.
MacLow’s idea of “controlled hysteria” is important here also. He mentions the features of this hysteria as barely controlled emotional outbursts, sometimes appearing aggressive or angry. What is most important to Commuter though is his last feature, suspense. In an analogy to the order word, the reader senses that this outburst is almost uncontrollable, it appears at its limit of containment, it’s suspended, or as we said above, it delimits the event. Interestingly enough he calls it a very “theatrical” experience.
The language of Commuter is both expressive of empathy for those who are victims of terrorism and is highly descriptive of violence—balancing both extremes while managing to produce quite beautiful phrasing. When writing Commuter, did you have ethical concerns about working the event of trauma into the texture of poetic beauty?
I’m hoping that this question is in part answered by your question about rethinking beauty. But to expand on it more, yes, absolutely I have ethical concerns. One of the biggest challenges for me is the risk and implications involved in secondary witnessing. Although I’m as unsure as I am convinced that it is necessary, it is an incredibly provisional practice. One idea that bothered me was that in the context of witnessing, received semiotic use becomes especially problematic in the representation of another. That is the reason for many of the crossed out words, which also equate this problematic mythology/ideology of beauty with the equally problematic mythology/ideology associated with the romanticization of the femme fatale.
I’ll return to this idea of infinite resistance also. As far as an ethics of this text is concerned, I would argue that this resistance translates to the reader through the author. First in the reader’s experience of the author’s fragmentary responses, and secondly in his initial inclination (and the author’s) to combine or fuse these events. Both of these events are results of a reader’s reading habits, especially combined with the expectations of poetry that deals with atrocity. So this infinite resistance begins in the text and continues into the reader, who as a 3rd party, is asked to participate in the writing of the text itself. Though the reader’s relationship to the text changes, the suspension of his/her ability to connect or link events in the text becomes the primary mode of relation within the text. Sometimes forcefully, the reader is asked to share, to communicate (in) this suspension, to both found and be complicit in this “community.” He or she is asked to be unsuitable to “witness” the author’s inability to witness/commune with these events, to come alongside him and to distribute these events in an unsuitable semantic system.
In addition to gaps in the page, gaps between words, partially erased words, lines stricken-through, there is a brokenness or disjoint or strangeness between how subjects and objects relate in the post-bomb language of Commuter. For example, on page 60 are the lines, “clearer to / frame you / behind the reason / I fisted a door?” I’m not sure whether “fisted a door” is just an odd , condensed way to say something synonymous along the lines of, “I put my fist through a door,” as an expression of violence or anger, or whether it’s intended to reference the extreme sexual practice of “fisting” (which would be surrealist—essentially, sadomasochistic sex with architecture—which is sort of incredible as imagery of terrorism). I interpret that it is the double-entendre that is important here as shards of phrasing and syntax reform to make a new, odd, off-ish sense of each other. Why does the fragmentary, disoriented (but still precise) language of trauma belong in the realm of poetry for you?
I think it’s Kristeva who says it and her description applies very well here. She says that process as practice is always an extreme moment. Language is/as a form of violence . . . Blanchot even suggests that it is a form of terrorism. I’m not sure these are answers to your questions but I think they provide a framework for the phrase you excerpted. I’ll also have to refer to the interruption, or disruption we talked about earlier.
I like your reading of this very much and yes, as a short answer it is about that odd-offish sense. Part of the strangeness of this figuration comes from thinking of the practice of poetry of witness as a masochistic act, understood as very different from a sadomasochistic one. I’m working on a paper now that analogizes the process of poetry of witness with a masochistic relationship: it relies on a certain power dynamic between pain and/or trauma to the author: specifically on the generally expunged element of desire combined with the illusion of the (author’s) powerlessness, in the aesthetization of traumatic events. But this recognition of the power structures in a masochistic relation also provides great potential for rethinking identity formation, community and sexual politics.
The work is aggressive, most obviously in the directions to the performer that are scattered through the pages. I admit I felt even a bit uncomfortable when I encountered the list of immediate family and close friends on page 40 with the footnote instructing the reader to cross-out those names and replace with others. How much is this about subjecting the reader to a kind of objectification or about making the reader complicit in the activity of the poetry?
I’m so excited you felt uncomfortable! What a huge compliment! I also hoping that you felt invited, to be a part of the text, to perform it. I would say it is both of these things: complicity, which we discussed beforehand, extends to the author as well as the performer. I’ve called them the reader in this interview but you bring up the very important distinction Commuter makes: that of the “performer” as reader. At a very basic level I think this contributes to both the feelings of aggressivity and complicity you noticed, since a reader is not usually accustomed to thinking of the public connotations of him/herself performing a text, in both public and private.
I think to a degree a feeling of objectification is a helpful response to the piece and may indicate the tension within an artwork that Adorno speaks to. However, though objectification may initially be a part of it, I would hope that the extensive questions and invitations to perform, both sustain and recombinate this feeling of objectification with others. Part of that feeling as you said earlier, is that subject/object distinctions seemed to be rather difficult to pinpoint. Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz discusses the etymology of the word witness and describes one definition as a figure in the position of a 3rd party, someone who for other reasons than trauma, also cannot bear witness. This is where the possibility of secondary or proxy witness appears although it is a highly unstable position.
The juxtapositional quality of the text places the reader in this third position. So, in effect, the reader “witnesses” or dérives the process of both secondary and firsthand witnessing. So to feel uncomfortable here, I think, is a very warranted initial response. Hopefully, as the book encourages relation (as you’ve pointed to), it also initiates other involvement on the part of the reader, namely the ethical tension that their rotating position of witness, secondary witness and objectified other, elicits. Since these positions do not tend toward reconciliation within or outside of the work the reader must persistently contend with them all.
Blazer’s comment about making the poem into “a necessary function of the real, not something added to it” is very important for this involvement.
When I saw you read at the Dikeou Collection a couple summers ago, you used a white noise machine in the background of your reading. Does poetic language ride the white noise? Or rise out of the white noise? Or, as a poet, do you listen into the white noise?
I love drone/noise music, Spaceman 3, Noveller, Skullflower, E.A.R., Kites, Steve Roach, William Basinski, etc. For that project, tentatively titled The Poster of Contour, or 0, (Zero comma) I am experimenting with noise, or more specifically drone, as a platform for the performance of the piece. The work takes vacuums/vacuuming/vacuity and fluid dynamics as primary themes and so the idea of a droned tone as a vacuum, or fluidity allows for a certain affirmative quality to the historically abhorred natural “vacuum.” The idea in part stems from Berio’s Oboe Sequenza. What amazed me about the piece was the droned B that, as the piece progressed, and the oboe counterpointed against the drone, it began to both collapse the piece into an imaginary horizontal line that extended out from its source, and yet at the same time, it filled the room to the point of almost a visual throbbing. It seemed that a vacuum of sorts was created, but one that was fully empty. The oboe counterpoint became a sort of supplement, to this absence, like the language of the poem around a certain immaterial space. Many of Varese’s pieces have a similar visual/auditory effect on me. I guess it is similar to Scriabin’s synesthesia. Is there a specific name for that? The sequenza is fantastic, especially performed live.
In answer to your question, I think it’s both; language both rides and rises out of noise. It’s information theory at it’s most basic, noise coexists with language, music etc. For that performance, I also “listened into” the noise: the tone that droned through the piece was my normal speaking voice, which happens to be approximately an F#. I tried to keep that pitch for many of the sections dealing with vacuums.
What forthcoming projects do we have to look forward to?
At this point, I have two main projects I’m working on, besides my dissertation. One, Friend of Mies Van der Rohe rethinks Heidegger’s concept of dwelling through Philip Johnson’s Glass House. The other, tentatively titled The Posture of Contour, or 0, (Zero Comma) explores those strange registers between the performance qualities of a lecture, a poem and conversation in a David Antin style. There are some wonderful expectations to be disrupted in the contrasts of these genres.
“Christo” from IS IT ART OR FART? blog
Anonymously authored blog-to-book Is is Art or Fart? features snapshots of everyday objects that, in the eyes of the authors, resemble works by contemporary artists. Nobody is safe, even their recognized forefather—Duchamp (posted Sept. 8, 2010). Is it Art or Fart? sends up contemporary art—or does it?
Interview by Brandon Johnson
In the prologue to Is it Art of Fart, “fart” is described as “coincidental moments in everyday life that, when isolated and named by artist, bear uncanny resemblance to art seen in museums and galleries around the globe. Why is it called “fart”?
Art has aura. Farts, as we like to call them, do not. From certain angles or upon first glance, farts might appear auric—but this false or temporary aura quickly dissipates like a passing gas.
Lifted from Wikipedia: In parapsychology and many forms of spiritual practice, an aura is a field of subtle, luminous radiation supposedly surrounding a person or object (like the halo or aureola in religious art). The depiction of such an aura often connotes a person of particular power or holiness.” What do you mean by “aura”? Is art “holy”? Is fart “profane? (Side-note “In Iran the aura is known as farr or ‘glory’”)
Yes, art objects are often treated and revered as special, valuable, holy objects. This is a property of Art that the Roman Catholic Church, the forces of Modernism, and the Contemporary Art Market have all, at different points in Western Art History, desired and worked to uphold. Fart is not art. It’s not profane, nor is it pagan; It is simply a part of regular, everyday, pedestrian life.
I was trying to figure out how this book fits into the grand scheme. At first I thought along the lines of artists as brands, a somewhat cynical/critical approach, but didn’t really see that edge after a second look. Now, I’ve decided it’s more linguistic—a rhyming of objects. The photographed images rhyme with the work they are being identified with in the same way as “fart” rhymes with “art”. What do you think of this theory?
Well, certainly rhyming has something to do with pop music—and pop music is readily accessible and gaseous ether that circulates through contemporary urban life. What we mean to say is that the book is about art-in-popular-life. We are truly indebted to the enduring power of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades—those dramatic gestures that bridged the gap between art and everyday life.
Are there special Duchampian glasses one can wear to gain “fart” vision?
No, not really. Recognizing farts is an uncontrollable phenomenon. It just happens.
Does this book “stick it to” the art world?
There are so many art worlds. The book likely stinks to some of them.
Have any artists voiced offense at this book?
Actually, a few very well-known artists have mentioned their disappointment over not being included!
Blog: http://isitartorfart.blogspot.com/