Sara Veglahn is the author of Another Random Heart (Letter Machine Editions, 2009), Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008), and Falling Forward (Braincase, 2003). She has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Denver, and Naropa University, and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
In a couple of your works, I’ve noticed the recurrent theme of drowning and I think when I saw you read at Burnt Toast in Boulder a couple years ago, you mentioned something about the narrator of a prose you were working on being obsessed with “deep water.” It seems water is frequently mesmerizing, but dangerous when it appears in your proses. Given the ghostly selves that haunt the words, I can’t help but think of Narcissus. But the narrators also aren’t self-obsessive; if anything they’re masochistic, absenting, breathy—sort of like if Narcissus and Echo had had water obsessed phantom children together. How does water relate to subjectivity as this tension occurs in your work? Why the obsession with drowning?
My obsession with drowning and deep water and rivers is borne directly out of my experience growing up near the upper Mississippi River—a dangerous, swirling, mysterious, muddy place that was always claiming people. The frequency of people falling into the river and drowning, and the rather nonplussed attitude of everyone about it (“oh, someone drowned…well, anyway…”) was always so strange and troubling to me. Plus, there was the added element of my own lack of swimming skills and a very early experience in a swimming pool where I had to be rescued by the lifeguard. And I am obsessed with rivers—that river in particular, but all rivers, too. They move, They have a place to go, they don’t have a choice, they’re traversed. You have to know how to read a river in order to stay out of trouble on a boat. Currents and the way the weeds flow and wing dams and so much that’s hidden. There are people who know that part of the river as well as they know their own family—and they do use the term “read” but I suspect they may not think of it as analogus to language or fiction. It’s all very real. Especially if you end up stuck on a sandbar in a storm. On a more metaphorical and psychological level, I suppose the obsession with water, and the element of danger that is inherent in a deep, muddy river, is related to the unknown, uncertainty, all that’s hidden, and how we make sense of the unknown.
One thing that I find extremely pleasurable about reading your work is how nice the paragraphs always look on the page. They’re given all this breathing room. They’re like slices of charm cake. They contain these constellations of disparate things: peacocks, zoos, swimming pools, maps, ladies. How do paragraphs operate for you? I would say your prose feels like it goes sentence to sentence, but it’s the field of the paragraph I always remember afterward.
My unit of composition is definitely the sentence, but I’m glad to know my paragraphs offer a completeness.
You’ve done some collaborations with poets and I may be mistaken, but I believe your focus was poetry at Amherst, where you did your MFA. Why the switch to prose at DU? It’s always sort of a silly question, but one I am forever intrigued by because it doesn’t really have an answer that can be universally applied. What’s the difference, for you, between poetry and prose?
Yes, I did focus on poetry at UMass—and though I did make my attempts with lineation, the majority of the poetry I wrote during that time was prose poetry. So I was always working with and interested in the sentence. Studying and writing poetry gave me a good training in the use of juxtaposition and understatement and image and musicality, something I may have been reluctant to try in fiction had I not had the experience of working with all of those elements when making poems. For a long time I avoided prose and narrative because I thought I couldn’t do it. I only realized I could when it became clear that it didn’t have to resemble something else, and it could (and probably should) look different than, say, a New Yorker story.
Because of my background in the poetic realm, my work tends to often be classified as poetry, although I don’t think of it as such. I’m often asked to defend why what I write is fiction (‘what makes this fiction?’ many have asked me, often with a tone of ire). And while there are certainly fundamental differences between poetry and prose, I think the focus on genre tends to limit one’s reading of a work. It can be dangerous, too, to declare something fiction or nonfiction or poetry—if it doesn’t adhere to the traditional tenets of the genres, then readers tend to dismiss it as weird or difficult. And then, of course, there’s the “experimental” label, which can also be a limiting description—especially as “experiment” implies something unfinished or tossed off, something that certainly can’t or shouldn’t be taken seriously. Yet, it’s the most convenient and encompassing term—a sort of short hand—so I understand why it’s used. But it does ghettoize the work, diminishes it in way. It seems odd to me that a lot of readers resist the idea that a text arrives at the form it needs. I suppose it’s the fear of the unfamiliar. I’m not sure the other arts have this conundrum or difficulty. Perhaps it’s because the material is language as opposed to paint or notes or light. I suppose language is hard to separate as a material because we also use it to survive in the world.
There’s a lot of musicality to the prose. It’s not eccentric rhythmically; but the words echo against each other, the placement of syllables seems deliberate. The thoughts don’t always transition in content, but almost always flow euphonically. Do you have any background in music? What sort of music do you listen to and does it impact how you play with language?
I do have a background in music, albeit a limited one. Even though I studied classical music throughout my early schooling and also briefly in college, I never felt I could become good at it. But it did give me a technical background into rhythm and, I think, maybe, how one might approach simultaneity via language (an impossible task, but one I keep trying to accomplish anyway). I think I may always be subconsciously trying to evoke the kind of fleeting emotion that only music can provide—it’s so fleeting, but it’s also so imbedded (for example, I almost always wake up with a song or melody in my head). And I love all kinds of music—classical and punk and opera and old country and and strange sound collages. I tend to listen to a lot of different things, but I also can be obsessive and will listen to a particular album or song over and over. But I need complete silence to write. I am too easily distracted by melody and lyrics.
There’s a razor-sharp clarity to your work. I notice that the texture in your proses seem to do some things that are very much major aspects of realism genre and just as often, things that are the total inverse of realism. For example, like realism, there’s this extreme precision at work; and unlike realism, there’s no attempt to be naturalistic or fulfill expectations about representation. Where do these worlds you write come from? Are they dreamt? Meditated? Whispered? Listened into? Do you know them before you write them?
I never know the world before it arrives. Some are dreamed, I know, but they get transformed in the telling and in the combining, so I can’t say I lift them directly from something known, so to speak. That said, dream logic is very important and I privilege the way a remarkable event in a dream is experienced as commonplace—every thing makes sense in a dream while we’re dreaming it—it’s only upon thinking about it or telling someone else where it becomes strange, unreal, and, also, it’s when we begin to forget it. I think I’m always trying to work with that element of fleetingness and the many versions of reality we all create, dreamed or not.
So much of your work is about dreaming or dying or dreaming after dying and about a state of consciousness that is transfixed, absorbent, mid-reverie. But the prose does the opposite to me when I read: it keeps me aware that I am reading. Every word is so important. The gaps between the sentences are like precipices between thoughts. My consciousness has to stay focused. So there’s this exciting tension there of watching a dream unfold while having to keep one’s mind en pointe. Where would you place the state of consciousness that is reading? It’s not really like watching a movie, though prose narrative and film are frequently compared. Do you think of reading as being hypnotized? As dreaming?
To me, reading and writing are so similar—there’s a level of action and agency involved with both. But reading, of course, is more something that one takes in, where writing, I think, is something that one gives out. The pulling together of ideas and images, though seems quite similar on both sides.
The temporality of your works is always very strange. It’s atemporal work, I think. Or rather, there is temporality, but it’s over and gone in a fragment of a sentence. Whole histories happen in a few words. Things disappear. There’s vanishing points and things following a longing into the distance. Then it takes whole stretches of a paragraph to look through a window, to follow the flight of a wreaking ball. But there’s always a voice that is leftover that keeps interrogating, describing, cataloguing. There’s both this posture of repose and yet, when I really follow things, there is the suggestion of a terrifying idea of how the universe is arranged. What is your fascination with disappearance?
I suppose this fascination with disappearance is related, again, to the river and deep water, but also to the way in which everyone’s existence is so tenuous. The cataloguing and interrogative elements are a way to keep track, to claim space, to say, “I was here.” And time is just strange! An hour can seem like a minute or like an entire day, depending. All of this is quite terrifying to me, and I think, again, the element of organizing and keeping a space for small things that might not seem important helps to assuage the horror of the chaos of life (which I realize sounds a bit dramatic…).
What other work from you do we have to look forward to?
I recently finished a novel, The Mayflies, which has had the privilege of being excerpted in some wonderful journals. And I’m currently working on a new novel, The Ladies. While not a sequel per se, it is a related book as The Ladies were characters in the previous novel. There have also been some excerpts of this work in progress published in some wonderful places as well.
Read an excerpt from Sara’s The Ladies here: http://www.zingmagazine.com/VeglahnTheLadiesExcerpt.pdf
Joanna Howard is the author of On the Winding Stair (Boa editions, 2009) and In the Colorless Round, a chapbook with artwork by Rikki Ducornet (Noemi Press). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters & Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in PP/FF: An Anthology, Writing Online, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills. She has also co-translated, with Brian Evenson, Walls by Marcel Cohen (Black Square, 2009) and, with Nick Bredie, also co-translated Cows by Frederic Boyer (Noemi, forthcoming 2011). She lives in Providence and teaches at Brown University.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
A fair amount of your book, On the Winding Stair, is absorbed by a world of ghosts that overlays and is not-totally-invisible to the living world. Like a transparency placed on a picture. First things first: do you actually believe in ghosts and have you ever had experiences with specters and haunted houses?
I do believe in ghosts, but they fail to appear to me. I am seeking the ones I know, but they just won’t give me the time of day. Much like how the person you like the most ignores you to the bitter end. I’m much more likely to haunt than be haunted, and to wonder if I’m being seen. Also, I believe in ghosts in the way someone who is out of your life returns in another guise, or how someone who is literally dead seems to be replicated in another person who is living, in their mannerisms and gestures, even sometimes in their way of dress. These are the most powerful encounters I’ve had with ghosts, especially since the living individual does not know he is being inhabited. So it is like a private secret.
I try to avoid what gets said on the backs of books, no matter how exciting because I want an unadulterated experience of a book. In this case, I failed because I very much like the three authors who had nice things to say on the back of your book. Gary Lutz comments on your tendency toward ghosts and says something about how your characters sort themselves between “the haunters and the haunted.” I think this is keen for a number of reasons, one of which, is that “the haunters and the haunted” describes a border, or ravine separating realities in many of the stories. What or where is the border for you between a reader’s imagination and the text?
Because narrative clarity is so tenuous in my work, the reader’s imagination is pretty vital to sort out things like progression, movement, even things that probably should be pretty straight-forward such as character or location. I often think that my characters are wandering in a shifting landscape, one that is recognizable if the reader is familiar with it, but which is also dissolving in a mist. I spend a lot of time thinking about projection, how much of our lives we spend trying to make some meaningful narrative of connection out of the very few details the people around us are willing to give up. I can create an elaborate fantasy out of very little information, so it is perhaps not surprising that my fiction ends up asking the same of a reader.
A big part of the pleasure of On the Winding Stair for me is how object-heavy these stories are and how unusual (and often outdated as technologies) objects that appear are. There’s a hurdy-gurdy, a tartan blanket, an Irish mail handcar, a caravan, doubloons, a mussel trestle, a cloissonne earring in the shape of a fish, vaudeville stage acts, pyracantha, epaulets, a poster bed veil, scrims, olive linen, a cider ruin, a pink mutt, a gourd helmet and something spectacularly called a, “misery salad.” In these rich worlds, there’s a stark relation to absence and poverty—evoked in addition to ghosts—captives, bastards and “pale, hungry girls.” There’s also a damagedness, ruined beaches, suicidal Spanish gypsies. The combined imagery makes me contemplate the beauty of decay and disintegration. Are these tensions a comment or meditation on beauty for you?
I think I am often obsessed with an object which I see as distinct in its genre, much as I like a character who is both a type and an absolute aberration of said type. In the absence of an understanding of what constitutes identity, one substitutes the material details of identity: we are marked by our material trappings in so many ways. To instill objects (or even locations) with this much burden is begging for disappointment, as objects are inevitably lost, damaged or ruined, and so these objects invoke a kind of anxiety. To fixate on a type, a boxer for instance—as in the piece I am currently working on—creates a similar problem for inevitably he can’t remain totally as such (injuries are inevitable, boxers retire young), and because I am romantic, I like to dwell as much on the former thing, the former boxer. His damage is his aberration and distinction, in this case, and it calls so much critical attention to his origins.
In addition to the beauty of ruin and decadence, I can’t ignore the possibility of a social commentary that particularly reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s association in A Room of One’s Own with poverty and nourishment to the imagination (or lack thereof). In a world and an economy where most of us have to spend most of our time working (and one’s attention in what time for entertainment is leftover is often drawn to TV or the web), what time is there for reading? I admit, that’s bit dramatic of me. But, there have been periods of my life in which I didn’t have time to read or if I did, I was too exhausted to focus my attention. To ask the question more broadly: this collection seems concerned with how imagination survives in impoverishment, so how does imagination survive in a world that doesn’t value imagination for imagination’s sake (and instead prefers imagination applied to productivity, technological ingenuity, etc…)?
This issue is of genuine concern to me, and I think it comes literally from growing up poor and filling in for material lack with imagination of material decadence, hence the obsession in my work with baroque décor and artisanal niceties. I think imagination is rarely valued for anyone other than children because it is seen as impractical or naïve, but I don’t feel this way. Perhaps because I tend toward cynicism and misanthropy, I use imagination to combat these things and to draw myself back into positive contact with individuals. These days if someone tells me I have a great imagination, I assume that they are raising one eyebrow. Imagination is connected with magical thinking and psychological projection, two things that breed awkwardness in a cocktail conversation. Beyond this, imagination is attached to enthusiasm, which is doubly awkward. For all that we dismiss things that don’t earn us money, at this cultural moment, I think the fear of having an awkward moment is much more damaging.
Just as this collection is fascinated by the object world, it is also fascinated by technology (though old technology, rather than new), I think. I think too of, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” and the world’s fascination with technology at the World Exhibition in Paris, 1900. Our (real) world is one that is perpetually fascinated by technology. And while I would most definitely not classify this work “steampunk” because it’s not (exactly) science fiction, I would suggest it grapples with a fascination with the old/vintage/antiqued and the development of technologies. How do you think the material object of “the book” will or will not change in response to technology? Is the book soon to be antiquated?
I am so tremendously flattered to have anything in my book labeled steampunk, I can barely focus on the question. I love obsolete technologies, for the same reason that I like former objects, and former character types. The book to me is always already antique, in the way that commercials are as well, because the marketing is worked into the design as artifact. Often, it seeks to trigger a past moment, and sell through nostalgia. I become nostalgic for the Old Spice commercials from the 70’s, and lo and behold, someone is already producing new retro versions of these before I even recognize the desire. Right now, there are so many book presses using retro comic or cartoon imagery, nostalgic photography, and antiqued fonts; these books are designed to look antique because it triggers our desire to own the object that is like the object from our past. It’s hard for me to imagine a movement entirely away from the book object, because there will always be those among us, no matter how reliant we become on the current technologies, who will still fetishize objects and want to possess them as such.
It seems to me too that your worlds are only possible because they’re literary—could only exist as fictions constructed of bizarre and beautiful vocabularies, although they don’t physically and logically operate too far from the margins of what we might identify as reality. There are creatures of dubious existence like mermaids and ghosts, and paradoxical, ethereal events occur. But none of these details are “absurd” in the sense that these fictional worlds are unstable. To the contrary, they seem to develop an immediate internal logic and are rather disciplined in staying true to whatever that internal logic may be. There’s a dream at work, but I am continually made aware that it is language and not experience. How important to you is it that the reader is made aware of the fact that he or she is reading, or made aware of the materiality of language?
Again, this is quite a conscious desire for me. I do believe that as writers we have chosen our medium, which is language, and should get to know it in its fluidity, its elasticity. The idea that I would try to create something in language that could be done better in film or in a visual artwork is nutz to me, although I have so many students that are going for that sort of thing. “I’m trying to write this like Frank Miller’s Sin City” they say, and they may get the flavor of the text of that work, but they fail to realize that the images of the model text were vital. I think it is fine to say I want to make something that has the effect of a graphic novel, but in language, especially if you intend to see just how to make the language do the work of image in its own right, but even that it is strange to me. I’ve just always been interested in the texture of the medium I’ve chosen.
I can never predict where a story in On the Winding Stair will end up and after reading the entire collection the stories are couched in my mind kaleidoscopically: I can’t keep them distinct, they form and reform in different patterns in my memory and I can’t locate their beginnings and endings, only their twists and tangibilities, because these stories of yours wind. Some of them seem to be able to keep going infinitely and others stop abruptly. In your writing process, how do you know when to “stop,” that is, how do you know when a story has arrived at an “ending”? What, exactly, for you, is an “ending”?
Finding an ending is the most difficult part of the writing process. For me, at this point, two things dictate endings: culmination of image, or dissipation of obsessive thought. It’s intuitive and always comes from the language. Bottom line, if I have been working with an image across a piece and it starts to feel sufficiently layered or labored, I feel I am coming to the end of something. Or, if I have had an obsessive idea or thought across the text, and it is starting to ease up, I feel I am coming to the end of something. For instance, I have an end line in which is a girl is described as “severed and refitted.” When I thought of this language, I was obsessed with it, and I wanted to find a narrative that explained to me why a girl would seem first severed, then refitted. When I had the story in mind, I worked toward the end line. Often, these obsessions of language recur later when I’m working on a new piece, and I might realize that I needed to go further in something that I’d already completed, but I am not one to go back and rework old love affairs.
Not unlike the overarching story structures, your sentences wind in a disturbing way. From the first story, “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,”: “In the center of that plain, where parched pasture grass muled, low and reedy, and sucked the humid thickness from the air till it was pinched and light and porous, a loose-ended portion of train track sat on its chalky rock pile, plank ribbed, veined with dark steel rails.” Like the warped dichotomy haunter / haunted, it seems the relationship between subject and object is mostly intact, but disturbed some. Passive objects are active (and even a bit aggressive, even if beautiful—the grass that sucks the air until it pinches), and subjects are sort of fragile, as if the train tracks are dependent and subservient to the rock pile that holds them up. What is your interest in the form of sentences?
Again, this is as much intuitive as anything. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to say something without really saying it, like trying to phrase a request to someone in which their acceptance is inevitable because it is worked into the assumptions of the language of the request, and because ultimately, I really want them to do what I want them to do. Manipulation through the medium of language. In a story like the one described above, I just wanted to overemphasize how languid and still everything was, and yet how much desire was present even in the inanimate objects, the desire to possess.
There’s a romance as well as a sense of nostalgia or grief (and even danger?) to the epigraph that gives the name to the collection: “On the winding stair / your dress rustles. / Candle burning quietly / In the dark room — / A silver hand / snuffs it out” (Georg Trakl, translated by Keith Waldrop). Trakl himself—disturbed, Bohemian, tragic, youthful—would not be out of place in the work. Did you write the collection with the Trakl poem in mind, or did you discover it later as a possible title? Given that your sentences seem to slip into the edges of poetry, how influenced or not were you by working with Trakl’s (or Keith’s?) structures?
I was hugely influenced by Trakl, especially the way a single line of his poems would often contain an entire narrative, with rich gothic elements, asylumns and castles, and these poems inevitably lead to despair and grief. I am a hopeless romantic. I was seeking a title for the collection, and kept striking out. At the time, fortunately, Keith Waldrop gave me some of his Trakl translations knowing I was a fan (of his and of Trakl). I had read an earlier version of this epigraph poem which had been translated to say “on the spiral staircase”. Of course, when I saw what Keith had done with it, I realized there was something so sophisticated and yet clear, the stair becomes active rather than the passive recipient of a common descriptor, and suddenly it said everything I wanted to say in the book.
What forthcoming works do we have to look forward to?
I’m working with an artist called Chemlawn to do something for the Kidney Press, an artist’s book in limited edition. Chemlawn does the artwork for Birkensnake magazine, and she is phenomenal, very, very strange, so I am excited to be working with her. That text is about my fixation with boxing and/or a visit to a refuge for exotic birds. I’m also trying to finish a novel, about a female filmmaker and her stable of strange actors.
Read Joanna’s Assemblage here: http://www.zingmagazine.com/joannahoward.pdf
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!