The Vanity Of An Artist: An Interview Of Legendary Artist David Hockney

text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

 

At almost 80 years old, David Hockney – who is perhaps the world’s most famous living artist – is more productive than ever. We got a rare chance to visit his busy, paint-splattered and cigarette-littered studio tucked away in the hills of Los Angeles. We had an in-depth conversation over multiple boxes of his favorite brands of cigarettes – Camel Wides and Davidoff, which he keeps cartons of in a drawer marked ‘first aid’ – just between 'sketchbooks' and 'rulers.' Hockney is an avid supporter of smoker’s rights – even in the face of the ocean of studies and laws surrounding the lethality of smoking cigarettes. Hockney can list a number of famous artists that smoked and lived long lives. Indeed, he is a true bon vivant – the last of a breed of artists that lived through multiple generations of bohemia and decadence. The only difference between Hockney and a lot of other artists is that he has survived to tell the tale. Some of those closest to him have not – a most recent tragedy was the death of his 23-year-old personal assistant Dominic Elliott. The incident prompted Hockney to move back to the Hollywood Hills from his studio in Bridlington, east Yorkshire. Whereas in Bridlington Hockney painted his natural surroundings with a glittering array of landscapes – in Hollywood, Hockney got back to doing something he does so well: portraits. What started off as a few portraits of friends in the Los Angeles art world – some transplants and some natives – soon turned into a feverish and inexhaustible obsession. This weekend at the Royal Academy of Arts, 82 of those portraits, set against a monotone blue background, will be on view. They include portraits of John Baldessari, Frank Gehry, Larry Gagosian, Tacita Dean (and her son), Benedikt Taschen and many more. Before the interview, Hockney’s studio manager granted us one hour, which was generous enough – Hockney wound up giving us two. At the end, it still felt like the iconic and legendary artist had so much more to say. The following transcript is a condensed excerpt from our conversation and pertains mainly to his current exhibition in London, which opens tomorrow. The full interview will be published in a future print issue of Autre.

OLIVER KUPPER: Do you enjoy being back in Los Angeles? Has it been productive?

DAVID HOCKNEY: Yes, it’s been very productive. I was in England about ten years, but I was always coming back and forth. I didn’t mean to stay in England. I just got working there. One thing lead to another, and I just worked. I thought, “If I’m working here, that’s fine. I could come back eventually.” We came back to do the show in San Francisco.

KUPPER: Which we saw. It was beautiful.

HOCKNEY: Yeah. We’re doing a show in Australia a bit like that in November. In Melbourne. And it’s even bigger. There are fifteen screens showing the drawing being done. With fifteen screens, it means you really see the drawing being done. Whereas on the playback on an iPad, it plays it back quick. You can’t quite see it when it gets heavy. And then there’s a show at the Tate.

KUPPER: Being back in Los Angeles, do you see any changes since the last time you were here?

HOCKEY: I don’t go out much, you see. I’m sure it changed a bit. Some things have changed. It’s still like it was. I like it. 

KUPPER: There’s a certain mystery about LA that’s always been here.

HOCKNEY: Yeah. I pointed out, it’s an acquired taste, LA. You have to stay a bit. Then, you realize it isn’t all just freeways. There’s the mountains and the plains. I enjoy going up in the mountains. Then you drive back to the nonsense.

KUPPER: You’re in the studio a lot. How often do you get out of the studio? What do you like to do for fun in LA?

HOCKNEY: Actually, the only fun I have is watching The Borgias on Netflix. I don’t really go out that much. I go to bed at nine. I read a lot. But I’m too deaf. I don’t go to the opera. And concerts. I used to go. Now, when I go, I get a bit depressed because I can’t hear that well.

KUPPER: [And] you have just finished 72 portraits?

HOCKNEY: 82 portraits and one still life. [pointing to a model of his exhibition at the Royal Academy] That’s the model of the Royal Academy.

KUPPER: These are people in the LA art world?

HOCKNEY: Yeah. There are some English people. My sister. My brother. But they’re mostly people in LA.

KUPPER: I recognize Frank [Gehry].

HOCKNEY: Yeah.

KUPPER: There are some really fascinating people in LA. It seems like there is a difference in the art world in LA.

HOCKNEY: I have said that men dress very badly. But look at the variety I’ve got.

KUPPER: Very fashionable.

HOCKNEY: Thirty years ago, there would have been more ties and suits.

KUPPER: I’m seeing some vests and bowties. You don’t see a lot of those these days.

HOCKNEY: There are some ties. That one in the yellow shirt, he said, “It looks like a refrigerator salesman.” Because of the pen in his pocket.

KUPPER: There’s John Baldessari.

HOCKNEY: I’m not really stopping. They’re all painted here. They’re all done in three days. Some were done in two days. Larry Gagosian was done in two days. He gave me two days and I did it.

KUPPER: Of course he’d give you two days.

HOCKNEY: He enjoyed it actually. The moment I got going, he really liked it.

KUPPER: It’s a bit of an honor to sit for a portrait.

HOCKNEY: Oh, I didn’t know that. When I began them, I didn’t really begin thinking I’d do this many. The first thing I painted was this one of JP. We had just come from England, and this boy died. We were all a bit depressed. I did this in July. Then, I started putting them on a platform. Then, my eyes could just be across. Otherwise, you’re looking down. And his feet just came off. Then, I made sure the feet were all in. Feet. Shoes are interesting. In LA, you get all kinds of variety. Look at your shoes. They’re rather good. I’m just going to go on. We’ll show them [in Los Angeles] eventually. They were all painted here, and they’ll stay here. I’m going to show them in London first and then Australia. Then they might come back, go to Venice. Eventually, they’ll all come back here. I think it’s one body of work really. I think if you just took one individual one, they’re okay, but when you see quite a few with the simplicity of the background, you see all the little differences. They’re all sitting on the same chair, but everybody sits there in a different way. Everybody has a little different shape. They’re all seen as individuals.

KUPPER: They’re really beautiful. And very contemporary.

HOCKNEY: I kept putting them up there. Then, I did something else for a while, and then started again later on the portraits. When I had done about 45, I thought, “Well, I could show them all.” I’m a member of the Royal Academy. So I thought we could show them in the gallery there. I suggested it to them. I could have shown them in LA, but the LA County Museum had done a few shows of mine. It’s good, but in the Royal Academy, you can do things. We decided to do it, and I just went on. 82 is the max number you can put just in a straight line. So I have to take some out. I’ll see it for the first time only when it’s there. I can’t see them all here. It’s going to be a very psychological exhibition. I’m assuming, really, the people who go will be looking at themselves. They’re looking at people like themselves.

KUPPER: Does it ever get emotional to see your work in a museum setting, outside of the studio?

HOCKNEY: Well, I have the vanity of an artist. I want my work to be seen. I don’t have to be seen, but I want the work to be seen. And I’ve always arranged that. So, when I did 45 [paintings], I realized it was quite a lot. I mean, 82 portraits is an odd thing to do. They were each done, like I said, in about three days. I worked for about seven hours a day.

KUPPER: After this exhibition, do you plan on continuing this series?

HOCKNEY: Yeah, yeah, I could go on forever, because people are interesting - I paint everyone. 

David Hockney "82 portraits and 1 Still Life" will be on view starting July 2 and will run until October 2, 2016 at Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. photographs by Summer Bowie. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

The Importance Of Being Earnest: An Interview Of Essayist And Poet Kris Kidd

 photograph by Cameron McCool

text by Keely Shinners

 

What does it mean to be honest?

For Kris Kidd, it might be the unadulterated, self-deprecating persona he projects on social media and in his essays. The day we meet, he posts a picture of himself in a studded choker and a t-shirt ripped to shreds, an ashy cigarette hanging from his lips. The caption reads, “i guess i’d have to say the greatest thing about being me is that i can show up an hour late to meetings & interviews, unshowered & w/ starbucks in hand, bc i literally have no reputation to uphold.” But if you think this is the honest Kris Kidd, you only know half the story.

Kris is not an hour late for our interview. In fact, Kris is fifteen minutes early, texting me that he’s showered and walking over before I’ve even gotten in my car. When we meet, he wrapped me in his thin, freckled arms offers me coffee and a Marlboro, jumps right into the interview as if we’ve been friends for years, just catching up on creative projects and intimate endeavors. When I’ve reached my final question, Kris says, “Let’s just talk.” So we do. We smoke, drink iced coffee, and talk about deconstructing masculinity. Our interview is cut short by a homeless man asking for a couple bucks to buy coffee. Kris jumps up, says, “Let me buy it for you,” and drops $6 on an Arts District iced latte for this random stranger.

What does it mean to be honest? Am I being honest if I am painting Kris as a “Punk with a Heart of Gold”? Still, I am withholding the complexity of what is real. Kris is not a slew of archetypes; he cannot be categorized or branded, not as a punk dream boy, an addict, a spokesperson for the millennial generation, an LA kid with a dark past and bright future.

If I can say anything truly honest about Kris, it is that he is open. On the page and sitting across from me, Kris is shedding the layers of self-preservation that weigh so heavily on our culture of self-absorption and individualism. In his new book of poems, Down For Whatever, he lays heart, mind, and body on the line. Kris’s poems blend hazy nostalgia and deep love with sharp, exigent issues like drug abuse, eating disorders, and sexual disenfranchisement. The book is a multi-faceted read, both dark and hopeful, unfeigned and well-crafted, entertaining and deeply moving.

Down for Whatever might capture a sliver of what it means to be honest. Not an honesty that is clean and shallow, but an honesty that is messy, contradictory, difficult to articulate but so, so sweet.

Kris Kidd and I sat down to talk about shedding bullshit, embracing the ephemerality of writing, getting addicted to control, and finally letting it all go.    

KEELY SHINNERS: In your new book, Down for Whatever, Poems and Bullshit, which are poems and which are bullshit?

KRIS KIDD: The bullshit was more of the blog posts. We wanted it to be four different sections, because I think I’ve grown a lot since I Can’t Feel My Face. It started out with the thought that blog posts would be a good division, because they’re all different years of my life. That’s the bullshit. There are some life lessons in there which are kind of just weird, drug-abusing things that I’ve learned. Yeah, it’s a good mixture of poems and bullshit. Some of the poems are bullshit.

SHINNERS: Is there something about having a physical copy of everything curated together that is important to you?

KIDD: That’s a part of it. I know the print industry is dying. In a way, we’re doing this print to publish. We’re not killing any trees. Well, we are killing trees, but we’re not wasting anything. I didn’t know that was an option. I’ve always wanted my first collection of anything to be printed. I want to hold it. I think there’s also something to be said about closing yourself off for a while, working on something, and getting the collection. I still post shit to Instagram all the time, like short poems. But I try to hold onto everything that I have until I have a collection of work.

SHINNERS: So you could do a little bit of both.

KIDD: Absolutely.

SHINNERS: Did you write all the poems together, or were you compiling a bunch of material at the end of a certain period?

KIDD: It started off two years ago, when I started compiling all the poetry I had written. I was so secretive about it. I didn’t really post any of that. I always thought poetry was over-emotional. With the essays, it’s really comedic and kind of jaded. I almost caricaturize myself in a way. I was scared of being that vulnerable. Once I got all of those together and read through them, I realized there was a lot more I wanted to say about what I’ve learned since. So I spent the last two years writing the other half of the book. It’s half and half.

SHINNERS: You include blog posts from 2009-2013. They are very haunting, like ghosts from your past self. Are you including those blog posts to contextualize the rest of the poems in a kind of reflectiveness?

KIDD: I think it’s reflective, for sure. Also, it’s so weird to look back. I started that blog not knowing if people were going to read it. It was more of a journal for me at the time. There’s an honesty in that that’s hard to replicate now that I know that people are reading what I do. They’re haunting for me too. It’s weird to see where my head was at those moments. Like I said, they’re really big time stamps for where I was emotionally.

SHINNERS: Are you nostalgic, or do you think, thank god that’s over?

KIDD: Both. I know I wouldn’t be this person without that kid. I wouldn’t ever do it again. [Laughs.]

SHINNERS: Why poetry rather than prose? What can you say in a poem that you can’t say in an essay, a story, an Instagram post?

KIDD: It’s kind of the opposite. The reason I was so afraid of poetry was that you can’t bullshit anything. With the essays, I can make a joke. I can talk about my father’s suicide. I can talk about drugs. I can talk about eating disorders. But I can spin it comedically so that no one’s super uncomfortable. My biggest fear with poetry is that I would be inviting people to some kind of pity party. The interesting thing about poetry is that you can only say exactly what you need to say. It’s like packing for a trip. You can’t take everything. That makes it more… I hate the word raw… It makes it more vulnerable and intimate. That’s terrifying, but I wanted to challenge myself in that way.

SHINNERS: You kind of have to put it on the line.

KIDD: Yeah. Poetry is just very different. I wanted to work on that for myself. I still see a lot of the voice of I Can’t Feel My Face in these poems, but I stripped away a lot of the manipulative behaviors that were in that book.

SHINNERS: Historically, the central distinction between poetry and prose (before they were written differently) was that poetry was meant to be performed and enjoyed in the community, kind of like theatre. Is there a sense of performance in your work?

KIDD: I only read some of these poems last year when I only had rough half of the book. I used to read the essays. Reading poetry is different. Essays are performative too, but it’s kind of like a stand up comedy routine. Again, with this being more emotional, more vulnerable, you slip into it. Especially because it’s my life, the performance does transport me back there. It becomes a performance of self.

SHINNERS: Going along with the performative aspect of poetry, poetry was a historically communal space. Like, you would go see Homer perform the Odyssey on the street. Is there acommunity that you’re thinking about when you’re writing? Or is it more individualistic?

KIDD: I think it started off as individualistic. As the blog got bigger, and as I released I Can’t Feel My Face, it really sent it somewhere else. People all over the world were reading these things. I would get messages from kids in Russia who say they can’t be themselves. It’s really amazing to hear--not even in a narcissistic way, though I’m sure that it is--it’s really amazing to hear what these kids get out of that. That became, I think, a sense of community. Now, I think I owe that vulnerability in a sense. Things that I wouldn’t have said before, I found myself saying in this book. I know there are things I have experienced that other people will gravitate toward and relate to. I want to be open for them.

SHINNERS: You reference things like the hazy glow of your iPhone screen in the middle of the night, or facetiming a friend in your poems. Even though these technological apparatuses are ever-present in our daily lives, they aren’t so often included in poetry. Why do you think it’s important to include them?

KIDD: I’ve never wanted to create anything timeless. What makes our ability to write about now powerful is that it’s right now. We’re experiencing this generation. We were the guinea pigs for things like social media. All of the digital advances have been within our millennial age group. I don’t care if twenty, thirty years from now all my shit is outdated. I think it speaks to its time. The Internet and technology have influenced all aspects of my life. I think that’s true for a lot of people. I get that people don’t want to date themselves; I totally respect it. But that’s never been a worry for me.

SHINNERS: If it’s ephemeral, you want it to be powerful while it can be.

KIDD: Yeah, and we’ll always know what the iPhone was. We’ll always know what Facetime was. Even when it becomes the rotary phone of the next generation.

SHINNERS: Addiction plays a huge role in your poems, not just drug addiction, but addiction to things like intimacy, nostalgia. What are things that addicted to writing about?

KIDD: Addiction is a weird thing. Because I write so openly about using drugs for a long time, I get labeled a drug addict a lot. I combat that, because I don’t think I was ever addicted to drugs. I definitely abused drugs. But I’ve always been addicted to control. Down For Whatever finally comes full circle with that, because I included aspects like sex, love, and intimacy. And all of my personal issues with that. I’m addicted to writing about drugs, for sure. That’s always going to be an issue until it’s not, you know? We need to talk about it. I’m addicted to writing about body image and eating disorders. Especially for young men, it’s not addressed often enough. And just sexual intimacy. This is my first time writing about my issues with that. But so many people in my life are going through the same things that I am. It’s incredibly isolating. We tend to replace sexual intimacy with sexual violence. That’s fine, but it can get dangerous. It can really hinder you from any emotional growth whatsoever. I think addiction in all forms. It does go back to control though. That’s always been my issue. Control with food, men, drugs, whatever.

SHINNERS: Feeling a lack of control?

KIDD: Something will hit me, and then I don’t have control over a situation. But I know I can control my body. If I do this, I know I can get high. When I stopped using drugs, men became like that too. I knew I could get them to sleep with me, that sort of thing. Which is not healthy. It’s all a power play. But we’re learning.

SHINNERS: You write a lot about things like cheap motels and smoking cigarettes all the time. I think that’s really authentic to you, but for a lot of people, it’s this whole American Apparel aesthetic. Like, “Oh, that’s edgy. That’s romantic.” Those places and objects are romanticized. How do you grapple with that? Is it romantic for you? Or do you want to talk about it because it’s true to your life?

KIDD: The motel reference, that was just one specific night. We had nowhere else to stay. We couldn’t afford anything else. There is something romantic about that. People tend to romanticize any sort of tragedy. Tragedy is glamorized. Poverty. Any sort of struggle is romanticized. That’s a cultural thing. We have Sofia Coppola making depression the hottest thing in the world in all her fucking movies. Lana Del Rey. These artists are great, but we are romanticizing really dark things. I hope I’m not included in that. I’ve never tried to romanticize any of it. I’ve always tried to speak on it honestly. If people glamorize it, that’s more on them.

SHINNERS: The book includes a few “Life Lessons,” which kind of poke fun at the idea. But if you had to share a life lesson, what would you share?

KIDD: An honest one?

SHINNERS: Yeah.

KIDD: The biggest thing I’ve learned in the last year is how important honesty is. And how specific honesty is. Somebody just told me recently, “Even if you’re saying the truth, if you’re omitting other things to get a certain reaction or endpoint, that’s not honesty.” I think I’ve struggled with that my whole life. Like, “I’m telling you my story. I’m not lying.” But there was still a manipulative aspect to everything that I did. In the long run, it doesn’t help. Even if it gets you what you want, that’s going to be fleeting. There are a lot of gaps. That’s hard. I’ve been struggling with that for a year. But it’s paying off.

SHINNERS: It’s hard to be honest, but people end up loving it.

KIDD: People crave honesty. It’s just rare that it ever gets that way. Because we’re all scared. It was actually a psychic who told me that. That’s such a white girl LA thing for me to do, see a psychic, but I was at a place where I needed some sort of guidance. It really hit me. That’s something that I’ve been working on.

SHINNERS: When you think about honesty, what do you imagine?

KIDD: Just totally letting go.

SHINNERS: Putting everything you have out there.

KIDD: Especially in intimate relationships. I’ve always developed really close relationships with women. I’ve always been terrified of relationships with men. I have this really close circle of girls, and those are my best friends. We’re all honest with each other. There’s nothing to hide. It’s all on the table. And I realized that’s why those relationships work.

SHINNERS: Even with guys who have supposedly undone their masculinity, do you find there’s this lingering feeling that they need to be a certain type of person? Especially when they’re with other guys? And that’s what it’s harder to be honest?

KIDD: Absolutely. I see what the masculine ideal is, and I feel like I’ve strayed away from it as much as I can. But there’s something to being socialized as a boy, as a man. You can feel, but hold it in, don’t emote it, don’t talk about it. That, as a social construct, is really interesting. That’s something I’ve always worked against. But I do feel like there’s repercussions to me being that honest because I’m a boy.

SHINNERS: I notice it in the relationships that I have with men. I don’t really have friends who are jock bros, but even my friends who are feminists and are trying to recognize masculine constructions, you get to thresholds with them every once in awhile.

KIDD: It’s so ingrained. It’s a lot to undo. It will take time. We’re making progress, but it’s such a slow burn, on all fronts.

SHINNERS: Right. And sometimes it just shifts. We think that it’s over, but really it’s the same power structure using different language.

KIDD: This reminds me of Orlando. We think we’re such a progressive country. We think that we’ve made changes, but we’re not that far from where we were. It’s great. We’ve been making strides. But we need to keep going. It’s so easy to fall back and come up against that threshold.

SHINNERS: There’s so much supposed widespread support in the mainstream media for the queer community when something like this happens. That’s really cool, and it maybe wouldn’t have happened decades ago. But there’s also so much rhetoric about, “Oh, this one stray homophobe. Our culture isn’t actually like that.”

KIDD: As beautiful as it is that queer issues are now in the mainstream, it’s also trending. We have to push past that. Trends die. And this shouldn’t be a trend.

You can purchase Kris Kidd's new book of poetry Down For Whatever here. Text and interview by Keely Shinners. Photography by Cameron McCool. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

What We Do Is Secret: An Interview With Controversial and Provocative Chinese Photographer Ren Hang

Left: muse Huang Jiaq Right: Ren Hang, photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Ren Hang’s photographs rake a dagger across the main artery of sociosexual norms and leave a glittering crime scene of bodies splayed across the frame in ecstatic and erotic forms. As a Chinese artist, this makes his work even more incendiary and provocative – even in the face of his home country’s strict censorship laws. We got a chance to interview Hang (pronounced ‘hong’) back in 2011, when his work was just gaining international recognition. Over the years, he has had solo exhibitions in almost every major city. With his current show on view now at MAMA gallery, he can put Los Angeles on that list. In a back office at the gallery, before the opening of his show, we were able to conduct a second interview and ask the controversial Beijing-based artist about his work, his explosive career and his place in the current photographic and artistic zeitgeist. Hang is notoriously media shy, because he wants the work to speak for itself. Work that is unplanned, unchoreographed and not scripted in any way. A good example is his famous “fish tank” photograph – he brought an entire glass tank full of fish into a hotel room and placed it on the bed and let his closest friends jump in; water splashing everywhere; fish scrambling for safe haven. In his images, genitals are often painted red with lipstick, peacocks meddle with sumptuous human forms and a sea of behinds form a rippling, illuminatingly sensual wave – a wave that floods your unconscious with revelrous desires. Despite his timidness in interviews, Hang has a lot of future plans. Next December will see the release of a major career monograph from Taschen – a book that he didn’t want to release knowledge of yet publicly, but is currently available for preorder on Amazon. The monograph is a collection of work that derived from numerous self-published books that Hang has released over the last eight or so years – but many of the images are from the artist’s personal archive. Hang also has plans to release a feature length film, which will be his first foray into filmmaking. In the following conversation, with his muse and lover sitting next to us, Huang Jiaq, we chat about the spontaneity of his work, his previous life studying advertising, and his rebellious attitude towards the authorities. 

OLIVER KUPPER: Is this your first time in LA? And your first solo show?

HANG: Mhmm. My first solo show. I’ve done group shows.

KUPPER: How do you like LA?

HANG: Hmm, I don’t know. Because I didn’t go out at all. I just arrived two days ago. 

KUPPER: You’ve been taking photographs for a while now. How long?

HANG: Since 2007.

KUPPER: Is that outside of school? When did you first start to pick up the camera and take pictures of friends?

HANG: It was really boring in college. That’s when I first started playing with the camera. I was around 17 or 18.

KUPPER: So you were young. What was boring about college? Was it that there was nothing creative?

HANG: In college, I was studying advertising. I found that boring.

KUPPER: You wanted to be in more fine art photography instead of corporate [photography]?

HANG: At the time, I didn’t know what I would do later. Then I built a camaraderie with my friends.

KUPPER: Over the years, what’s sort of the biggest development you’ve seen in your work?

HANG: I’m the photographer. I’m taking photos literally everyday. I can’t examine things. To me, it’s the same. But I think it has definitely [developed]. I can’t be the outsider looking at my own work.

KUPPER: Have you discovered anything about yourself as an artist through the process?

HANG: Of course. Anyone would in this position.

KUPPER: You’ve traveled a lot too because of the attention your work has gotten. You must have discovered things about the rest of the world and the way people appreciate your work. Anything you’ve learned there that you can discuss?

HANG: I didn’t think about it like this. I just kept going. Now, I feel nothing. In the beginning, I felt half-happy and half-sad. Some people say really wonderful things about it, and other people say really bad things.

KUPPER: You use a lot of friends and lovers in your work. Also, your mom has been in a lot of your photographs. Does she support your work? Do you talk about your work with her? Did she support your work in the beginning?

HANG: Sometimes, I show my work to her. We didn’t talk about my work though.

KUPPER: What do your parents do?

HANG: My mom worked in a cream factory. My father worked at the train station.

KUPPER: Growing up, who were some artists you were attracted to?

HANG: My favorite artist is Shūji Terayama. He was a sculptor, filmmaker, poet, dramatist. He did multiple things. That was inspiring.

KUPPER: Was it just photography? Was it painting, or was it art in general that inspired you?

HANG: Everything.

KUPPER: People talk a lot about censorship in your work, especially in China. But it’s really a global issue. We have it here, too. Do you see that other places? Do you see your work being censored? Do you hear people talking about your work in a way that suppresses your creative ideas outside of China, or justin China?

HANG: Yes, but I don’t care. If the police don’t catch me. Whatever you say, you say. It’s your mouth.

KUPPER: But there is no fear. You still keep taking pictures. You still keep working.

HANG: I’m not afraid. Why be afraid?

KUPPER: When you’re shooting, how much is planned, and how much is spontaneous?

HANG: I never plan at all. I only know what I’m going to photograph after everyone gets together. It’s not a huge process.

KUPPER: Where are some of your favorite places to shoot?

HANG: Anywhere. Anywhere is beautiful.

KUPPER: The sexuality in your work, has that come naturally?

HANG: It comes naturally. I never really think too much about it.

KUPPER: You’ve also published a number of books over the past couple of years. Is there an experience people can get looking at your photography in books rather than looking at your photography on the wall?

HANG: I don’t really care if they have a different experience seeing it in the book or on the wall.

KUPPER: Do you plan on shooting in Los Angeles?

HANG: I would love to. We’re trying to find models.

KUPPER: Do you have any place where you want to shoot, or just anywhere?

HANG: Nature, in a park. I’ve only been here for two days, so I don’t know LA very well.

KUPPER: In the past, you’ve had problems with galleries selling your work without your permission. Has that been resolved?

HANG: It was just one gallery. It has not been resolved. We’re still in a lawsuit.

KUPPER: How did you find out about that?

HANG: One of the buyers from that gallery found my email online and contacted me. He asked me a question about the photograph. That’s how I found out.

Ren Hang Inspiration: Shūji Terayama's Film "Butterfly Dress Pledge" (1964)

KUPPER: Can you talk about this show, and the pictures that were chosen for the show? This is a new body of work?

HANG: MAMA Gallery chose the pictures. It’s a mixture of new and old.

KUPPER: Do you try to shoot everyday?

HANG: The majority of the time, it’s everyday. The camera is always in my pocket. But it also depends on my mood, if I’m happy.

KUPPER: You probably feel really jet lagged now.

HANG: Mhmm.

KUPPER: Where do you see yourself as an artist in ten years?

HANG: I don’t know.

KUPPER: You don’t want to have those restraints thinking about where you’re going to be.

HANG: Well, even if you think where you want to be, it doesn’t really matter. Even if you think where you’re going to be, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get there or be there.

KUPPER: What do you want people to know about your work?

HANG: I don’t have a message. Everyone is going to have their own thought about something. Even if I say, “Oh, this is the message of this particular photo,” it really doesn’t matter. People are going to think what they want to think.

KUPPER: You collaborate with your Huang a lot too. You’ve worked together on a lot of stuff.

HANG: I shoot him a lot.

KUPPER: He’s sort of your muse. How do you feel about that [Huang]?

HUANG JIAQ: I don’t know.

KUPPER: That’s exciting. You guys get to make art all the time.

JIAQ: No. We don’t think we are making art. It’s just shooting.

KUPPER: Yeah, it’s just part of life. Magazines want to turn artists into artists. They won’t let them do their own thing. But you two travel a lot together. How did you meet?

JIAQ: On the Internet.

KUPPER: Were you a fan of his work beforehand?

JIAQ: No, he was not famous at that time.

KUPPER: Is it interesting to see his work develop over time?

JIAQ: Yes.

KUPPER: What are some things you’ve noticed about his work that have changed?

JIAQ: I don’t know.

KUPPER: It’s a little weird to talk about, right?

JIAQ: Yeah.

KUPPER: Because it’s also really intimate work. A lot of friends are naked, having fun. It’s difficult to talk about, because it is just your life.

HANG: That’s my idea. But a lot of people don’t agree with me. It’s expensive. [For example] why you want a big fishtank? They are hard to clean, the water. But if you want me to shoot with you, you must have this. Do you have another idea?

KUPPER: So the hotel actually used it for advertisement?

HANG: Yeah, but they almost said no to me.

KUPPER: It’s messy but exciting. That’s one of my favorite photos. Do you have a favorite photograph?

HANG: I love all of them. But after I shoot, I start anew.

KUPPER: Do you ever think about making movies?

HANG: Yeah, I would make a movie. Next year, a real movie.

KUPPER: Like a long one, a feature length?

HANG: Yeah. Maybe show it here.

KUPPER: That’d be great. It would be fun to see your images come to life in that way.

HANG: It will be very different than my photos. It’s a story of love and la la la. It’s real life. It’s not like this.

KUPPER: Even if this is sort of real life?

HANG: Kind of.

KUPPER: You wrote the screenplay? It’s a big movie, and you want to premiere it here in the US?

HANG: I think because the producers are in France it will premiere in France first.

KUPPER: That’s exciting.

HANG: You will see the movie in the cinemas all over the world, but not China.

Click here to see images from Ren Hang's exhibition, What We Do Is Secret. The exhibition will be on view at MAMA Gallery until July 23, 2016. Click here to read our previous interview with Ren Hang. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

What She Said: An Interview With Photographer Deanna Templeton

Most may know Deanna Templeton as the wife, muse and woman behind skater, photographer extraordinaire, Ed Templeton. Just the same, though, you could say that Ed is the man and muse behind Deanna. But the truth is that they walk hand in hand – sometimes literally – especially when they go on their daily stroll through Huntington Beach photographing the seaside community’s sun drenched denizens. Indeed, Deanna and Ed are truly one of the greatest artistic duos in recent memory. While their work isn’t purely collaborative, both of their identities as artists and photographers are wholly unique, dynamic and alive with a searing, youthful vibrancy.

Just recently, Deanna released a beautiful book of photographs that explores the human form under water.  One day, Ed jumped into their pool naked and Deanna grabbed her camera. The images would result in a continuing series of nudes – swimming bodies of friends, shooting gracefully through the undulating laps of the pool water, trailing bubbles behind, leaving the swimming figure abstracted and refracted in the reflection of the net-like sunlight. A limited edition version of the book comes with a number of extras, like an additional printed page, a signed print and a special cover.

Tomorrow night, Deanna will be exhibiting a more personal series at Little Big Man gallery in Los Angeles. The series, entitled What She Said, which borrows from the Smith’s track of the same name – features images of female youth (that remind her of herself) juxtaposed next to excerpts from her diary when she was a teenager. Indeed, Deanna’s photographs harken back to early punk days – a studded, spiked and tattered rebellious youth in Southern California, where she met Ed when they were still teenagers. The photographs, which were taken over the course of a 15-year period, exemplify Deanna’s own transition into adulthood and womanhood.

I got a chance to chat with Deanna before her solo show to discuss her photographic history, getting her friends to swim naked in her pool and her plans for the future, which include more collaborations with her husband Ed.

OLIVER KUPPER: I want to go back to when you first started taking pictures. I read somewhere that your mother gave you a camera as a coming home present after running away. Is that true?

DEANNA TEMPLETON: Yes, it is. It had nothing to do with my own home life. I was supporting my best friend, at the time, who couldn’t bear living at home. We were fourteen or fifteen. It was only for one night. I went with her so she wouldn’t have to do it by herself. It sucked so bad, of course. We basically just stayed the night on the street. We tried to sleep on a little patch of grass. Some guys tried to invite us into their van. By the time morning came around, she found a friend’s house that she could stay at, and I was like, “OK, I’m going home.” I think my parents were so freaked out, like “Where did this come from?” And I never told them I was doing it for a friend. So they said, “We’ll give you whatever you want, just don’t do that again.” And I said, “I would like a Canon T90, please.”

KUPPER: That’s a perfect gift. That really opened up a lot for you.

TEMPLETON: You would think that that’s a little too much camera for a fifteen-year-old girl. I didn’t deserve it. Maybe a year later, I was on the way back from visiting family in Guadalajara. I packed it in my checked luggage, and it wasn’t there when I came back. I didn’t respect the equipment. After that, it switched to a point and shoot for quite a few years.

KUPPER: Did you get any pictures out of it?

TEMPLETON: Nothing that I saved. Just shooting around high school, with a bunch of friends. I don’t think I have any from that time. I have all my negatives in books. I catalogue them in years. I have two catalogue books called “Crap.” I couldn’t bear to throw them away, but I couldn’t look at them either. I imagine that if they were still around, they would be in there.

KUPPER: What were some of the things you were interested in shooting? Your surroundings, punk shows?

TEMPLETON: I wasn’t doing punk shows, because I didn’t have a dedicated flash. It was mostly my surroundings. I would do a little bit of high school, home life. I wasn’t focused. It was new to me. I didn’t really know what I was doing. The reason why I wanted a camera in the first place was because I had a girlfriend who would shoot the punk bands at shows. I watched her develop her film, and that’s what got me hooked.

KUPPER: When did photography become an art form for you?

TEMPLETON: That was in 1998. I was still shooting with a point-and-shoot, but Ed started to see that I had an eye for it. He bought me a Canon A-1 and said, “Let’s see what you can do with it.”

KUPPER: Were there any photographers that you looked up to?

TEMPLETON: The first was Hiromix, because he did the point and shoot. He was the first that caught my eye.

KUPPER: In a previous interview, you talked about female photographers feeling alone. Why do you think that is?

TEMPLETON: In the beginning, when I first got the money to upgrade my gear, I felt like I was a part of the boy’s club. It’s always been more male-dominated. I know there’s women out there. There’s just not as many females represented.

KUPPER: Male photographers seem to get more attention, especially street photographers.

TEMPLETON: You could say that more generally about art. The Guerilla Girls movement was all about the under-representation of females in art, at galleries and museums. It’s not just photographers. Even right now, I’m going to be in a group show in Portland through the Dead Beat Club. Clint, the main guy, is really supportive of female artists. But the main core of artists doesn’t have many women. Even the gallerist asked why there weren’t more women in the show. I do feel now, the older I’ve gotten, I’ve met more women photographers, even in skateboarding photography. I don’t feel alone anymore.

KUPPER: You work a lot with Ed, your husband. You shoot a lot and collaborate. Do you teach each other lessons?

TEMPLETON: I would say there’s probably more from him on me. I’ve been very fortunate. I don’t need to go to school for photography. I have real-like lessons when I go out with Ed, just from watching him, how he works. I’ve always compared his style of photography to the way he skates. He’s constantly looking ahead. He’s always weaving in and out of obstacles to get to what he wants to get. I feel like he took that to his photography. He walks faster than I do, so I am constantly behind him. Just watching him work, it’s really impressive. I try to take what I see from him and apply it to my work. But there is something in my gut that makes me stop and run up to people.

KUPPER: You both have distinct style. I think he shoots very fast, while you take your time.

TEMPLETON: When we come back from trips, I always have one roll to his three.

KUPPER: There’s two types of photographers: people who will stop and ask, and someone who will just get in their face. Either works, but you have to have a personality for both.

TEMPLETON: He’s not getting in their faces. For the most part, he’s just passing by. You don’t even notice. He’s so smooth. The camera is so quiet. People look up like, “Did I hear something?” If there’s someone who notices and looks upset, I usually say something like, “That was so cute,” to diffuse the situation.

KUPPER: Do you think photography has lost some of its magic? Not just digital photography, but the sheer number of people taking pictures?

TEMPLETON: It’s hard for me to talk about that because I’ve never shot digital. My experiences are only with film and analogue. I, personally, think that there is a difference when I’m looking at a print. Everyone needs to do what’s best for them and how they want to work. I do want to explore and grow, but some of the new ways of photography don’t interest me. It’s good to have a wide range though.

KUPPER: People are starting to go back to film more. There’s a romance and a depth to it. I remember being able to go to the drugstore down the street and buy film for a Polaroid. You can’t do that anymore.

TEMPLETON: Maybe fine art photography will go back to fine art photography with film, because it will be special again.

KUPPER: It seems like more magazine are starting to employ photographers that use film. You just shot for Wonderland Magazine?

TEMPLETON: That was fun. I don’t know how many film photographers they used, but they were surprised by the turnaround. They were like,  “We need it now!” And I was like, “OK, I need to take it to the lab to develop them, I’ll have to scan the negs and then scan them larger.” It’s the same with Ed. Any editorials that he’s done for magazines have always been film. People are starting to want that again, which is nice.

KUPPER: I want to talk about your new book, the swimming pool book. It’s different than your previous work. How did this series come about?

TEMPLETON: It started about eight years ago when Ed decided to take a skinny dip in our pool. I decided to grab my camera and shoot some photos of him. Later, when I got my print sheets back, it looked different from anything I had ever shot. I really liked it. It was only eight frames, but I thought it could be interesting. I asked a couple of friends if they would mind swimming for me. I did a show with what I shot that summer, but I had a gut feeling that it wasn’t done yet. I kept shooting. About two years ago, a publisher saw some of the work and was interested in it. When I look back at that first show, three or four images made it into the book from back then. I really felt that it took eight years to sit with the images and explore what I liked and didn’t like in a photo. That didn’t happen until, like, four years in. For instance, if the swimmers swam more aggressively, there was a lot more distortion in the images. The images, now, are quiet and calm.

KUPPER: You were developing a new style. A lot of photographers don’t do that; they just stick to one style. It’s nice to have that freedom.

TEMPLETON: It just came with time. If I had been offered a book that first year, it would have had a completely different feel. Just so everyone knows, when I say eight years, I mean eight summers. I don’t know how to work our pool heater. The sun played a big role; in the summer time I had a longer window before the shadows would creep into the shot.

KUPPER: You’re having a show coming up at Little Big Man Gallery? What is the work you’re showing now?

TEMPLETON: The director of Little Big Man was over in my office, looking at all the projects I was working on. He really connected with a series called “What She Said,” which I’ll be presenting. It’s photographs of young women who remind me of myself when I was a teenager, either how I thought I was, or how I wish I could have been. I’m pairing each photograph with a diary or journal entry from my personal diary when I was 14 to 18. It’s personal. It’s a little embarrassing.

KUPPER: Do you have any new series that you’re working on?

TEMPLETON: Eventually, I’m hoping to get “What She Said” into a book form. Ed and I go out shooting together every afternoon in downtown Huntington Beach. We talked about doing a two volume, “his-and-her” take on Huntington Beach. We’re constantly working on it, but we don’t have a set date for that yet.

You can purchase Deanna Templeton's book The Swimming Pool from Um Yeah Arts. Her solo show What She Said opens tomorrow night and runs until July 31 at Little Big Man Gallery in Los Angeles. Portrait of Deanna by Ed Templeton. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

That's A Damn Fine Painting: An Interview With Artist Adam Parker Smith

text by Adam Lehrer

 

Painting. Multi-media. Installation. Sculpture. All of these tags have been applied to the practice of New York-based artist Adam Parker Smith. All of these tags are or have been correct in their labeling of Smith’s work. But as wild and conceptual as Smith’s work gets at times, he roots his art in the fundamentals of painting. Whether he’s making mylar balloon sculptures or putting together an exhibition of works stolen from other artists (as he did with his Lu Magnus Gallery exhibition Thanks), he’s doing so with acknowledgement of the fundamentals of painting: “I think my work can be jarring but a lot of times it is smooth and cumulative,” he says while laboring over the installation of his current solo show at The Hole in NYC, entitled Oblivious the Greek.  “The work moves well, it’s balanced, and its colors compliment it. One of the elements that make a work successful is being attractive.”


Polite, mild-mannered, and welding a distinguished moustache, Smith is humble while also knowing that he’s onto something. In past interviews, Smith has claimed that he is often short on ideas. That isn’t the case any more, and Smith says in some ways his practice has evolved past idea-oriented work. It seems that he has comforted into the idea that he is good at this art-making thing, and his voracious work ethic indicates that he wants to share his work with the world as much as possible. “I’m not saying that I have a unique gift but I’m hoping that I do,” says Smith. “There’s a possibility. I probably have a less narcissistic way of saying that…”

To clarify, Smith holds the belief that there is a difference between art that “looks like good art,” and art that is “actually good.” A smart and lucky person and can make art that looks like good art. But to make “actually good” art, one has to be gifted. He has grown more comfortable with the fact that making art might be his gift. His current show at The Hole is certainly testament towards this sentiment. Using synthetic materials (purchased with free shipping on Amazon, he adds), Smith created a range of sculptures like mylar balloons cast with resin along with fake foods, fake bronze, fake flowers, and lots of things fake. The faux qualities of the work are important to the aesthetics of and ideas contained within the objects: the materials used are always secondary to the outcome. The outcome is beautiful. These are “actually good” works of art.

Smith and I spoke at length a day before his show at The Hole opened, harping on the differences between art that “looks like good art” and “actually good” art, the virtues in cheap and synthetic materials, applying the fundamentals of painting to different mediums, the benefits of cruel professors, and what being “gifted” at something really means.

ADAM LEHRER: I was reading an old interview of yours where you said you liked the interdependency of materials and ideas. Is that a notion you still subscribe to?

ADAM PARKER SMITH: Yeah, that for me is constant. And I don’t normally like to adhere to rules, or at least arbitrary rules I make for myself within my practice because there are a lot of them. I find myself realizing the rules that I made, and then wondering if they’re necessary to abide by. 

LEHRER: Do personal rules help you push back against institutional rules or general rules within the art world?

SMITH: Well no, I mean my life is pretty conventional outside of my practice. Normally there are severe consequences for doing things in an unconventional manner. But I think when you’re making art that’s the preferred method. So what are the implications of that resistance outside of my practice? I’m not quite sure [laughs].

LEHRER: So you mean that’s the one arena in your life where you sort of get to go against the grain? I’m thinking of someone like Dash Snow, who seems to have gone against the grain in his art and his life and of course paid a price for the latter.

SMITH: I don't know, it’s hard to say. My practice takes up a large part of my life though so it’s nice. A lot of times I get to do what I love doing. I make a lot of work and spend a lot of time making work. It’s nice to be in charge of...something.

LEHRER: Going back to that original idea of interdependency of ideas and materials, how does that manifest? For this show for instance, how do you go from the original ideas to conceptualizing the materials to bring those ideas into fruition?

SMITH: Ideally, they conflate simultaneously. I got my Master’s degree in painting so a lot of times I think like a painter would. One of the big conversations people were always having involved how what you’re painting relates to how you’re painting. I felt like there always had to be that relationship for the painting to be successful so I had to use all these materials to try to find that connection. And further along in my practice I found myself getting closer to more two-dimensional painting, which has a more subtle or intellectual link between what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. So when I’m beginning to generate new ideas or developing an idea I try to think in that mode in-between the two questions, of what is it that I’m painting and how does the process relate to it. After enough practice it becomes second nature to a degree.

LEHRER: I read that you initially started making sculptures to give yourself figures to paint. But now you create sculptures to make and show sculptures, correct?

SMITH: Well there are a lot of painterly aspects (color, composition, form, line, positive and negative space) that I use in sculptures because they’re all beneficial. Although important, construction and utility are my secondary thoughts and I approach my sculptures with really simple painterly ideas.

LEHRER:  Do you often know the idea you’re trying to communicate before you put together a collection of work? Do you know what it’s going to look like but aren’t really sure how to express it?

SMITH: Ultimately I’m not interested in creating an idea-based work because I hate the idea of someone coming in and feeling finished with the work once the idea is communicated to them. In Ernest Hemingway’s Movable Feast (not that I’m really inspired by modern painting or writing because all those guys are bullies), there’s a part when [the characters] go to each other’s studios and say something like, “That’s a damn fine painting!” That’s their only critique. I want to make work that can make people say something like that. I don’t want to make a work that’s just good or pleasing. When they say ‘that’s a damn fine painting’, they’re not saying that it’s a good or pleasing painting but rather that it fulfills a place or purpose to exist in the world. However, the second you start talking about that too much the intentionality starts overshadowing any kind of magic.

 LEHRER: It’s hard to explain but I think I understand.

 SMITH: This is going to sound a lot like bullshit...but I think if an individual is a gifted writer or musician or painter, it’s difficult but not impossible to make a work that looks like what it should be. Making a painting that looks like a good painting is different from making an actually good painting. I think you’d have to be highly intelligent to make a painting that looks like a good painting. It’s possible and it happens a lot since there are lots of really smart people out there. But I think to make an actually good painting, you have to be gifted. That’s more rare. I’m listening to any sort of gift that I may have or working to find it.

LEHRER: Do you feel like you’ve found the exact thing you are gifted at?

SMITH: I don’t know, I’m making art and hoping that’s it [laughs].


LEHRER: It’s refreshing to hear that, actually.

SMITH: Or some people are just good at things. And if they just listen to their natural instincts, I think it’s possible for them to do something that they didn’t expect. You know when you see work that looks like it’s emulating good work and work that just looks like good work. I guess my point is that I try to make art in a way that comes from the gut and hope that if there is a gift, it comes through. That’s pretty corny [laughs].

LEHRER: That show you did where you stole all your friends’ art works: was that an exercise of you trying to juxtapose “art that looks good” versus “actually good art?”


SMITH: That was more of a social or conceptual project in terms of showing each theft as sort of the material I was working with. I’m not a curator and wasn’t really curating that show, even though I acted as curator in the way that I was making a painting. But with that said, all of the acquaintances of mine in the show are valued as artists and the works of theirs that I apprehended I thought were strong. As far as any further judgment on how gifted any of those artists were, there’s always a spectrum.

LEHRER: I hate to refer to the press release that The Hole put out, but I’m going to. It said something about how a lot of the imagery in these sculptures has this faux quality but in that fakeness there’s something real. Is that at all accurate in your thinking, and then if so, what is that truth?


SMITH: Painters go to the store to get paint that is a chemical-based product like zinc or aluminum. Those are the brushstrokes. Those are the elements of the composition and the composition is beautiful. Whether you’re going to propose to your partner on the beach or the parking lot of McDonalds, it’s a beautiful thing. Or if your child is born in the bathtub with monks chanting or in the backseat of a taxi, it’s still the beautiful birth of a child.

LEHRER: The outcome is still beautiful, the circumstances or materials used are less important than the final outcome.

PARKER: Yeah, so that’s just the material that I’m using right now. I like it--its accessible, it’s cheap, I can afford it, and I can order it online on Amazon prime for free two-day shipping [laughs]. But actually these synthetic materials are super technology: if you showed mylar balloons to someone 500 years ago they’d be mind-blown. And these were people sculpting beautiful figures with marble. I doubt that they’d be sculpting with marble after seeing these thin, mylar-inflated balloons that can float and weigh nothing. I think that any artist in any century ultimately would be drawn to these materials, because they’re undeniably beautiful. I think marble and bronze are incredible too. But it’s more expensive...and there’s no free shipping [laughs].

LEHRER: Your PS1 studio visit said you “Create elements to cultivate environments that are haunting, familiar, and alien." I know that the installation part of your artworks is important too, so are you trying to create a similar headspace? Should the installation have a similar quality to how you felt in the environment that you made the work in?

SMITH: No, not for me. I try to think of where the work is going to show as I’m making it. I envision it in that space and make it so that it’s appropriate for that. For instance, a lot of the work in here is way too large for my studio, so I had to put myself in this place while I was making it. So I think of the studio as a purely utilitarian place for myself. I

LEHRER: It’s always funny because I feel like journalists especially try to attach these pseudo spiritual qualities to the ways in which the artist works. But you don’t get the sense that maybe how you work or what you create changes with different tweaks and adjustments to your studio space or anything like that?

SMITH: I mean if I were to get a studio with higher ceiling I would make taller works. [laughs] Yeah, artists are like goldfish in the way they sort of expand and contract based on their environment. So it definitely affects me but living an interesting life is as important to my practice. It’s like a pressure cooker to be enriched in life and the studio space is like a small part of that.

 LEHRER: I read somewhere that you like incorporating illusion. I guess this show with the perceived weightlessness of these objects could even qualify as illusion. Do you have an intended effect for using illusion? Is it supposed to throw the viewer off or make the viewer connect with it?

SMITH: Everybody loves magic because it’s fun. We all know it doesn’t really exist but it’s fun anyway. I probably would do things the right way if I could afford it. Making undulating marble and gigantic casts of mylar balloons like Jeff Koons—that’s not a possibility for me. Much of the illusion comes from adversity: “how do I accomplish the things I want to accomplish with the means I have available?” But people like magic so it’s cool.

LEHRER: I read something about this volatile professor that you had in your grad school that lit a fire under your ass. Do you feel like you make best work under a lot of stress or duress?

SMITH: It’s hard to say because it’s been a long time since I’ve been at school and that stressed out, so I’m not sure what to compare that against. But I like to have some sort of agitation, whether it’s self-induced or an external factor. But after the initial shock of having that professor really go after me, I kinda’ dug it. It takes a lot of energy and consideration for someone to come in and lay into my work in a really aggressive manner. So I appreciated that from him.

LEHRER: Was he harsh to other classmates too?

SMITH: Not any that I knew, but I did hear he did that sort of thing to other people. He really singled me out, which made me feel even better in the end. I observed him years later with other students that were talentless in my opinion and probably his as well, and he just didn’t really give a shit about them. He would just say, “Looks good,” or whatever. Not to be egotistical again, but when he came into my studio I felt as though he saw potential. He felt obligated as a teacher to get on my ass about it.

LEHRER: It’s like that movie Whiplash.

SMITH: That’s funny because you watch that movie and walk away thinking if that guy was a bastard or was doing the kid a favor. 

LEHRER: I read that you sometimes struggle with ideas but I thought it was interesting because you’re making art all the time. So how does that work?

SMITH: Generating ideas has become less of a problem for me. I definitely do a lot of experimenting. I think you have to learn to read this new visual language that you’re speaking and it takes a while for you to be fluent in it. Sometimes I hit it right away but a lot of times I have to wait into it a little bit. To answer your question there are a lot of things that are produced in the studio that never leave. Or they take a walk into the dumpster.

 LEHRER: How do you know if something is worth showing? Is it intuitive or trained?

SMITH: I’ve never really been good at articulating those qualities. I know when it’s right for me and just rely on that.

Adam Parker Smith "Oblivious The Greek" is on view now until July 24 at the Hole Gallery, 312 Bowery, New York. Text, interview and photographs by Adam Lehrer. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Pop Music Is Not A Dirty Word: An Interview With Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor

For the past 16 years, the quintessential British electronic group Hot Chip has been releasing album after delicious album, with a bevy of catchy tracks that are pop magic at its majestic finest.  At the core of Hot Chip is a singular voice that is longing, soulful and demonically angelic. That singular voice belongs to Alexis Taylor, who this month released a new solo album, simply titled Piano, that is perhaps best described as antithetical to the grand pop balladry of Hot Chip, or even his own past solo records, but still maintains that signature wistful expressiveness. If Hot Chip is music to get high to, and to dance the night away to, Taylor’s newest album is music for reflection, introspection and soul-searching. The entire album, recorded at Hackney Road Studios by Shuta Shinoda, is simply Taylor at a piano and the reverberating notes – notes that are politely infused with his delicate, intimate vocals. Each refrain is a love letter to past mistakes, spiritual burdens, regrets and lost love. There is also a stunning cover of Elvis’ Crying In The Chapel that blends so well, it is almost in disguise. And if you hear religious incantations in the songs, you wouldn’t be so far off – Taylor calls it an “atheist's gospel album.” Nevertheless, it’s an important album that deserves a full listen – all the way to the surprise, untitled bonus track that crackles like a warbling 45 on an old phonograph, until it fades out and simmers on a low heat in your brain’s limbic system, even after the song is completely over. We caught up with Alexis Taylor at the Ace Hotel in London to ask him a few questions about pop music, Hot Chip’s place in British musical history and what he enjoys doing when music is not on the menu. 

FLO KOHL: What was your musical diet growing up? Was there a certain style of music that was always on repeat, or was it all eclectic?

ALEXIS TAYLOR: Definitely very mixed. A wide-range selection of music. I grew up in the 80s. I had heard all the massive records that were on chart rotation: Peter Gabriel, Prince, Dier Straits. Pop singles. I had two older brothers who were really into music, and my parents were really into music. My childhood was soundtracked by music, all the time. My oldest brother, Will, bought quite a lot of interesting music. I think he had good taste. He was into hip hop in the late 80s, early 90s when it was coming through. He had all the Prince records, one after the other as they were released. It meant I was paying a bit more attention to things, rather than music being this background.

KOHL: I don’t think that’s sort of normal. My parents weren’t into music at all. I didn’t become musically aware until I went to school. At home, there wasn’t always music on.

TAYLOR: With me, it was records playing, tapes playing. Both my parents occasionally played the piano. Never professionally, just as a hobby. But they could read music a bit. It wasn’t like being brought up to do music. It was just around.

KOHL: You’re often called “the soul of Hot Chip.” Did it take you a while to embrace the unique vocal style? Other electronic bands have to sample to add that soul.

TAYLOR: Maybe they do. We weren’t really trying to be like other electronic bands. We weren’t scratching our heads like, “How do we put soul into this music?” It just came out the way it came out. I don’t think people thought it was soulful in the beginning. But we were interested in soul records. That was a big influence, those older, more classic bits. But more pop than R&B or soul: Destiny’s Child, Whitney Houston. Things that were produced by Timbaland and the Neptunes. That was a new, very exciting phase of pop music that was, to us, soulful. To some people, they didn’t get it. I wasn’t the same as that northern soul. People came around to it over time. It’s still a major influence on pop culture.

For us, it was a combination of wanting to completely do our own thing, and also wanting to make records in the spirit of those people. People like other indie rock bands, hiphop artists, electronic producers, classic pop people. We weren’t able to study what they did. We just took a little but of inspiration from them and came out with something else that felt pretty far away from sounding like those. We’re not very skilled at copying. Some people are, and that’s great, but it doesn’t lead to original music. It does mean that people get where you come from. Whereas, with us, people are just confused.

KOHL: You have the DJ culture right now, these musical curators who might be very good at grabbing things and putting them together, but might not be creating something.

TAYLOR: We were influenced a lot by sample-based music: DJ Premier, Public Enemy records. We were sort of sampling ourselves, as it were. We would play loads and loads of hours of music, and then we would chop and edit, taking the best bits. It was a way of sampling. There were so many rediscoveries of little phrases that you didn’t know you played because there was so much improvising. Sometimes, I have a song that I’ve written and exactly how it goes. Other times, you’re literally just improvising things over a beat. You realize you’ve got some good things later on.

KOHL: When you first started making music as Hot Chip, where do you think music was historically in the UK?

TAYLOR: Honestly, we weren’t thinking about the state of electronic music. Maybe with hindsight, you might look back and do that. What I remember is that we seemed quite at odds as a band. We started out playing small gigs. Nobody else had five people and a drum machine, no drummer. That was a weird lineup. We didn’t intend for it to be so weird. It was just what we wanted to do. It was a way of learning how to play what we recorded. It all stemmed from recordings. We were thinking more about those R&B pop records that looked nothing like the performance on stage. We didn’t have the production value to do a Destiny’s Child-style show. And yet, that was the music that was exciting to us. We weren’t referencing the tradition of New Order or Depeche Mode. We were ourselves. I don’t know what state it was in. I know the more genuine dance music we had grown up. Joe was really into grime. I was more into UK garage. Some of the drum programming was influenced by that stuff, like a sticky record. We didn’t’ try to comment on electronic music.

We kept thinking about pop music. Maybe we went out on a limb. Pop music is kind of a dirty phrase. It came back in vogue, with Justin Timberlake when he was no longer in a boy band. It was taken more seriously. Where I was, there was a lot of resistance to that, initially. I used to work at Domino, the label that we’re on. I used to listen to all these different albums: Smog, Scritti Politti. But when I put on the Justin Timberlake album, some people were like, “We can’t deal with this.” They were form a very indie mentality. I just liked it.

KOHL: It was the sound at the time. Pop music wasn’t boy band pop music anymore.

TAYLOR: It’s funny, talking about it now. Everyone takes it for granted. That music was at the center of culture, and it has kind of drifted away since.

KOHL: Was there a community in electronic music?

TAYLOR: Gradually, we met people. Generally, they were from America. We met the DFA label, and through that James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin. I was in New York, visiting my girlfriend at the time, who was a student. I went to this talk at her university, and in the same building, there was a talk with James Murphy, Trevor Jackson, a member of Public Enemy. I just happened to bump into Jonathan who runs DFA outside the building. I was wearing a Hot Chip badge, and he didn’t know how I could have heard of that band. I said, “Oh, I’m in the band.” We ended up signing with DFA and going on tour with LCD, Black Dice, and Chk Chk Chk. At that point, there was a community of people who were interested in performing dance music live. You could see their influence, years later. Every band had a drum machine on stage. We were an indie band, but we had one token synthesizer. It began to have an impact.

KOHL: What makes the perfect pop song in your eyes?

TAYLOR: Honestly, don’t know. Still struggling to find out, after all this time. I suppose I’m interested in the song and the production combing together in an interesting way. The song could feel hooky and immediate, but it still have a strangeness to it. Like an ABBA song. There are so many things going on melodically and harmonically that are easy on the ear but interesting. Then the production will be glossy, but at the time, kind of adventurous. Those records still stand out now. A different kind of example would be a Neptunes production from the early 2000s. It may have very little in the way of long flowing melody. It will be more in the rhythm, and the hook would be something incessant or interesting in the keyboard parts. A lot of people talk about the classic pop song coming through on the acoustic guitar or piano. I don’t think that’s really true. I think it’s built on the way it was produced, the construction in the studio.

KOHL: When you aren’t in the world of music, is there something really far removed from it that you like to indulge in?

TAYLOR: I do spend a huge amount of my free time traveling around flea markets and garage sales, looking for bargains and bits of musical equipment, records, all kinds of different things. It’s not always to do with looking for music. 

Click here to download or purchase Alexis Taylor's new album Piano. Photographs and interview by Flo Kohl. Intro text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Very Little Bad Vibes: An Interview With Cult Comedic Hero Tim Heidecker

text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Most people know Tim Heidecker from his brilliant Adult Swim series ‘Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!’ and ‘Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories.’ While it’s easy to use colorful adjectives to describe his brand of humor, it’s even harder to define it. Whatever it is, he’s developed a massive cult following. He’s an everyman that blends a sort of slobbish machismo with the mind of a stoner philosopher, but there is also something sinister about his wit and irreverent spin on, well, everything. Like every great comedian, Heidecker doesn’t identify himself as one. His role in Rick Alverson’s 2012 film The Comedy proves Heidecker is a brilliant, natural actor with an ability to show a haunting, dispossessed vulnerability that encapsulates a very distinct ennui and disillusionment belonging to the comedown between youth and middle age. As he gets wiser, Heidecker exudes a certain suburban boredom – a boredom that he makes seem exciting in his new album In Glendale. It’s a true ode to the singer songwriters, like Warren Zevon, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman, who wrote about their surroundings and life with a beautiful banality. Because it’s Harry Nilsson or Zevon or Newman, it works, and just like that, Heidecker can pull it off too. I got a chance to chat with Heidecker about comedy, music, getting stabbed in the back and dream projects that haven’t materialized yet. 

OLIVER KUPPER: The new album is great, by the way. I really enjoyed it.

TIM HEIDECKER: Thank you. That’s a good place to start.

KUPPER: Yeah, compliments are a good place to start. This is your first somewhat earnest album, right?

HEIDECKER: Uh huh, whatever that means.

KUPPER: What’s it like writing songs versus writing comedy? Is there a different wavelength you need to be on?

HEIDECKER: I don’t know. Songwriting is a little more meditative. Obviously, it involves an instrument usually - singing, playing guitar, playing piano, noodling around, finding phrases and subject matter. It’s something that I’ve done for years as a hobby or a way of clearing my brain of other stuff. It can be spontaneous; you can be sitting in a car with other friends and start singing something catchy. Comedy is generally driven by a project. What are the ultimate goals of this? It involves a lot more people, a lot more collaboration. I’m very productive when I’m in collaboration with comedy. I don’t sit around and dream up amazing ideas all day long. It generally involves getting lunch or going on a road trip. It’s doing something where there’s a conversation with a buddy – Eric, Gregg [Turkington], or Doug [Lussenhop]. Someone I’m close with. Music is more singular.

KUPPER: Were you craving that singular, cathartic experience?

HEIDECKER: Not really. With this record, I had always written lots of music. Certain songs would end up in a folder on my computer. Like, I don’t really know what this is. It might not be appropriate for comedy. It’s not really funny; it’s sort of sincere. I was reluctant to share that publicly. But once the first couple of songs on the record starting coming out of me, I thought, there’s a theme here that kind of works. It might be nice to put a record out without it being couched in a joke or a character.

KUPPER: How did you team up with [Jonathan] Rado from Foxygen?

HEIDECKER: Through Chris Swanson, who runs Secretly Canadian. I had known him for a while. Those guys financed the movie that I was in, The Comedy. We were friendly. He was a big fan of our work. He knew I was doing music, and he nudged me to take a stab at making records in a more current or straightforward way. He was curious to see what I could do if I did something outside of parody, if I could be a pop music guy that was doing interesting stuff. Rado and I connected on very similar interests in music - 70s singer/songwriter stuff. I love talking about the process, how those guys got the sounds they got, and getting back to that straightforward songwriting. He just wanted to help and be involved.

KUPPER: He’s super talented. That band is really great. Who were some of the singer/songwriters at the top of that list that you would talk about?

HEIDECKER: For me, it’s Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Harry Nilsson - the greats, the big ones. I’ve been really enjoying them for the past several years now.

KUPPER: I’m obsessed with Harry Nilsson. When you decided to go in and make this album, did you feel like you had enough songs? Did you throw yourself in the studio and see what you could come up with? Half and half?

HEIDECKER: The process by which this record was made may be interesting, maybe not. Half the songs were written in a period of a month or so. The other half were songs I had written over the years; they didn’t fit into any one category. I had my little home recording studio. I would try to build up the track. You know, not just me and the guitar, but drums, bass. It’s a fun way to work, to build tracks, and getting it to sound good, but never that good. I’m not that good at it. I made a demo version of the album at home. It was in the order of all the songs, with a couple extras. I took this home demo to Rado and his garage, and we started making the songs from scratch at his place. He’s such a great piano player and drummer. We recorded on tape, and we had four or five demos out of that. But they were still demos; they weren’t what we both wanted, which was really clean studio, major-label-sounding recordings. So we took those demos, and I gave them to my band that I play with live - City City. They learned the demos, and then we went into a real recording studio. In the course of a week, we laid everything down. Very quickly, because we knew all the sounds and what we wanted to sound like. We wanted the level of professionalism and the clean sheen that those 70s records had.

KUPPER: You work with a lot of musicians. It’s like a ten-piece band, right?

HEIDECKER: Yeah, there’s a ten-piece band that I put together. It’s mostly that band, City City, and a little horn section. It’s a little bit extravagant; there’s two background singers, two electric guitar players. I could probably shave that down if I needed to. But right now, everyone just gels. They all came in and brought their own talents to the record. I’m very grateful.

KUPPER: Do you think the audience for your music is different from your comedy audience? Your comedy following is big. Will the same people come out for your music, do you think?

HEIDECKER: For right now, a large percentage of my fans will find me through comedy. With this record, we’re trying to present it to the largest group of people possible. I think some people who are coming on board either didn’t know or didn’t care for my work, but they like the music. It’s not intended just for the fans; it’s intended for people who like the music. I get a lot of, “Oh, this Tim Heidecker record is actually pretty good.” They’re surprised. Some fans who have been following me a little closer aren’t surprised because they know that I am a big music lover and music maker. That early music might be sillier, but it has the same core qualities.

"I don’t necessarily identify myself as a “comedian.” I do comedy, I do standup and sketch comedy. I make all kinds of stuff. But I don’t concern myself with what to call it or how I should be perceived...I think it’s unfortunate that we expect people to stay in their lanes."

KUPPER: It’s interesting. Not a lot of comedians can bounce between these different mediums and be taken seriously. Especially when it comes to acting. Your role in The Comedy was a really serious role. There are certain actors, like Robin Williams, whose acting is so good that you don’t necessarily think of them as a comedian anymore. Do you ever think about the implications of being too serious?

HEIDECKER: It’s a thing that’s put on us by journalists and certain people that have perceptions of what people are supposed to do. It doesn’t affect my decision making when I decide to do something or not. I generally try to do something based on the desire to do it, whether or not I think it will have quality and be successful. I don’t necessarily identify myself as a “comedian.” I do comedy, I do standup and sketch comedy. I make all kinds of stuff. But I don’t concern myself with what to call it or how I should be perceived. If anything, it’s more interesting to have different facets and abilities. I think it’s unfortunate that we expect people to stay in their lanes. Actors, musicians, directors, whatever - most of us started out just wanting to make stuff, to do something creative. There was more of a push towards doing comedy, for me. But I still have interest in lots of stuff. As long as there’s a market for it, I want to pursue those things. I also understand that there is context. There’s a challenge when someone who is usually a country singer comes out with a rap album. It’s going to be hard. But some people can do it really well. I admire Steve Martin. He can be silly, very serious and intellectual, he can play music and go on tour. I just hope that you can place this record of mine in the context of my larger body of work and say, “This guy has ideas. He has an interest in expressing himself in different ways.”

KUPPER: There’s a lot of freedom in that. If you see yourself as an artist and not specifically in one lane, you can do anything, even if there’s not a market for it.

HEIDECKER: I want to have that reputation, that you don’t know exactly what to expect when I present something. It should, theoretically make you more interested in what I’m doing next.

KUPPER: You still maintain the cult comedian aura. Is that something that you try to hold onto, or is it a natural progression of you as an artist?

HEIDECKER: It’s all just been fun, playing with identity and the media, trying to create work that leaps the dimensions of television or linear video. It’s been more fun, for On Cinema, to let those characters have a life outside the show. This record, though, is really straight. There’s really not an angle for me to be anybody but myself. If there’s something stupid, like something from the Tim and Eric Show, the work speaks for itself. Let’s just party.

KUPPER: Do you feel like you get a lot of stupid questions? Do you like doing interviews?

HEIDECKER: It depends. It’s interesting to see the spectrum of people who are interested. Our publicist works very hard to get as much press as we can. My attitude has always been, do as much as you can. You never know when someone is going to read something out of the blue, and it turns into their favorite thing. But there are so many young people doing this who don’t seem interested. Like, I had a kid come to the Decker screening, and he ran out of questions for me in, like, a minute. I don’t know if this is the best career choice for you if you can’t think of any questions. He’s like, “Yeah, my editor wanted me to talk about Trump.” He asked me three questions about Trump, and then he got tongue-tied.

KUPPER: They want clickbait.

HEIDECKER: Yeah. But generally, if there’s someone like you, someone thoughtful and interesting, I think it’s pretty harmless. It helps me figure out what the hell I’m doing. You can make stuff, but you don’t really analyze it too much until you start talking to someone about it.

KUPPER: It’s interesting how that works. That’s why real criticism is important, too. People are too focused on clickbait, and they don’t think that the most interesting thing is to analyze the work and talk to the artist to find answers.

HEIDECKER: I think some criticism tends to be very quick, not thoughtful, not researched. The negative criticism I’ve gotten has usually come without a frame of reference to me or my work. It’s a very easy, “This is just Dad rock.” I’m insecure with that person, who doesn’t know the context. It’s safer and quicker to go with a buzzword that they just heard.

KUPPER: You’re premiering Decker next week?

HEIDECKER: Yes, Friday the 17th.

KUPPER: And you’re working with Gregg Turkington again, which is great. What’s that experience been like?

HEIDECKER: Gregg and I have known each other for about 10 years now. I was such a huge Hamburger fan. I roped him into doing our show. Our wives get together. We’ve got kids who are the same age. We just share a lot of common interests. Once we started doing this On Cinema thing, it seemed like we found this endless well of material that we could keep feeding and growing and developing. We established these two characters that are so fun to write for and behave as. It keeps entertaining us, this world. And it keeps getting bigger, because we keep adding fuel to it. Also, he’s just a nice guy. I’m so grateful to do this. On the TV show, we were able to elevate things a little bit. We were doing it as a full time thing. It was one of the most stress-free, joyful experiences. Everyone doing it loves it. It’s an easy thing to make. It’s so shitty. It’s not like you’re doing tons of takes and waiting for the perfect light. There are very little bad vibes in that environment. At my age, you want to be around that kind of energy as much as possible.

KUPPER: Especially in collaborations.

HEIDECKER: Yeah.

KUPPER: It’s been ten years since you had that famous interaction with your neighbor [where he stabbed you in the back]. Do you still think about that, or is it ancient history at this point?

HEIDECKER: Strangely, I’ve been thinking about it lately. Not to pat myself on the back (and not to be ironic), when that kid did that to me, I didn’t want to press charges. It felt like such a futile thing to do. He was 19 or 20 years old. He was on some insane drug. If he was going to go to jail for a significant amount of time, he would end up way worse. He’d be a bigger problem to the world. He ought to be given another shot. Those with white privilege are treated with more leniency, and that’s not fair, but it shouldn’t be, “Let’s throw this kid in a dark cell for the rest of his life.” It should be, how can we give disadvantaged kids better opportunities? We need to look at the prison system as not the answer to our problems. It’s a heavy thing. When you’re actually faced with the choice to punish somebody, it’s a hard thing to do. If you know anything, the prison system is designed to fail. It doesn’t make any sense.

KUPPER: You have to rehabilitate.

HEIDECKER: Yeah.

KUPPER: Do you have any dream projects that haven’t materialized yet?

HEIDECKER: We’re kind of doing it all. The more of an audience you have, the easier it is to do all these things. That’s the challenge, to get the word out, to get people to tune in. The futility of that is I know I don’t have a lot of power there. It either connects with a larger group of people, or it doesn’t. To answer your question, the next record I want to do, we want to bring in some of the guys that actually played on those old records who are still around. People like Jim Keltner, those guys who are still doing sessions and available. I would love to go in with Murderer’s Row and the people who made that, just to do it, because you can. I think that adds a whole other level.

KUPPER: I look forward to that, for sure.

[helicopter-like sound]

HEIDECKER: Cool. My helicopter is here, so I guess I got to go.

Tim Heidecker's new album, In Glendale, is out now on Rado Records. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photographs by Cara Robbins. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Music is A Sweet, Sweet Drug: An Interview With Garrett Borns

Listening to the top two or three songs on [Garret] BØRNS's roster, like the insanely catchy track 10,000 Emerald Pools off his latest album Dopamine, one might get the idea that he's just another psychedelic pop balladeer making it big in the music industry. If Borns is is a pop balladeer, he's a damn good one. His work has garnered commercial and critical acclaim, he opened Coachella this year with LCD Soundsystem, and he's been touring for the last year and a half.  But listen to Borns's live cover of Leslie Gore's "It's My Party" - just him on stage with an electric guitar - and it's eerily like listening to a young Jeff Buckley, the soul in his voice, the vocal travels to the highest highs and darkest depths, and all the simple sweetness in between. We talked to the singer/musician about the soul influences on his sound, falling in love with LA, and music as a drug. 

OLIVER KUPPER: Are you playing at Louisville this weekend?

GARRETT BORNS: No, I’m in St. Louis.

KUPPER: Nice, how do you like it?

BORNS: I dig it, it’s pretty warm out there. The sun is definitely out to getcha.

KUPPER: I was just watching a live performance of you playing “It’s my Party” (by Leslie Gore). It was really good, and then I stopped watching it and was just listening to it. I started to get reminded of Jeff Buckley, not only in the voice but also his use of covers, and the way he sort of used covers of pop songs and sort of repositioned them with his voice. Like the way he did usrat Fateh Ali Khao Éth Piaf. It was really interesting­­and  was wondering what you thought of that.

BORNS: Yeah, I definitely take an influence from him. You pretty much nailed it on the head with your description of it, I just love how he can transform a song. I’m always looking toward old music to discover. I think I enjoy discovering “old new” music that I have no idea about more than discovering new music. So I try to look back through archives. I was just listening to old James Brown recordings and it’s crazy to hear the progression of his voice over time­­just how he sings and his timbre as a young singer being so much higher and almost more innocent than in his later years.

KUPPER: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And you have a great voice so it must be really fun and creative to be able to express that. Going back a little bit, how’d you get from Grand Haven, Michigan, to where you are now? Do you live in LA now?

BORNS: Yeah pass through LA. I’ve been touring for the past year in a half so I haven’t been back much or haven’t really had too much time off, but LA is my home base.

KUPPER: You probably get asked this a lot but you were into magic before, right? You were a magician? 

BORNS: Yeah, it was my first time dabbling in the performance arts, I guess.

KUPPER: And you moved from New York to LA right after vacationing in LA. What was it about LA that you liked?

BORNS: I felt like some things were kind of aligning. It was the people I was meeting and I found a really great place in the hills.

KUPPER: Were you living in a treehouse?

BORNS: Yeah, it was a guesthouse that kind of looked like a vacation home surrounded by fruit trees. I was like, “this can’t be real”. I ended up staying there for over a year even though I was supposed to be there for just a weekend. The people who owned the guest house were super lovely folks and loved music and art, and they had three young kids who played music, so it was a cool environment to be in. They’re a big influence to pretty much why I stayed in LA.

KUPPER: I feel like that’s why LA’s so magical. You find people that really get it and you have the space to sort of disappear and make your art and own music.

BORNS: Yeah there’s plenty of space to disappear into.

KUPPER: You pursued visual art before music. Did you want to go into that direction or why did music become the path you took, versus fine art?

BORNS: I think music has always been prevalent in my life. I owe it to my folks to create a wide array of genres of art growing up. My dad is a really talented artist a graphic designer, so he taught me a lot about visual arts growing up. He and I used to go to this studio every week and paint and listen to music, with this sort of Motown station that always played. That always resonates with me still today.

KUPPER: There’s something insanely magical and indescribable about that old soul music­­especially northern soul­­that’s almost indescribable. So the name of your two previous album names are “Candy” and “Dopamine”. Is there a connection between psychedelic drugs and psychedelic pop music? 

BORNS: [laughs] I guess there could be, it all depends on your taste. If the question is if I was on psychedelic drugs while making this album, then no. I was purely on the drugs my brain was supplying. But that’s not to say that you can’t enjoy music without a little aid from our psychedelic friend. 

KUPPER: And music can be a drug too.

BORNS: Absolutely.

KUPPER: Your visuals and lyrics seem really fantastical. Do you see music as way to escape from or expand reality?

BORNS: I think so. I’m always trying to make it as visual as possible. So yeah, I think it’s a way of escaping reality. It’s not like I’m searching to escape reality but I’m definitely always kind of daydreaming, so I try to put that into songs.

KUPPER: And you’ve been getting a lot of attention lately. You opened Coachella with LCD soundsystem and Taylor Swift is a big fan of your work. How are you handling with all that stuff­­or do you think about it?

BORNS: I’m extremely grateful that people have been taken to the music the way they have, and all of the fans at shows have been so gracious and giving me really nice gifts and love poems and shirts, so that’s pretty much a dream for me. I’m super thankful.

KUPPER: Are you working on an album now or is there going to be another full­ length soon?

BORNS: I’ve been pretty much non-­stop touring so not too much time to record new stuff. But once I’m done with touring in the fall I’ll be back in the studio. There’s lots of ideas.

KUPPER: And do you enjoy touring? I mean musicians sort of have to these days to make any money. But do you find it fun or engaging or creatively fulfilling?

BORNS: Yeah, it can be very taxing but also just very rewarding.

KUPPER: Any crazy tour stories?

BORNS: Every night, my friend. Every night is pretty crazy. 

Garrett Borns is currently on tour - you can find tour dates here. Click here to listen to his latest album Dopamine. Text by Keely Shinners, interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photographs by Douglas Neill. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Working In Real Time: An Interview With Multi-Disciplinary Artist Mai-Thu Perret

text by Adam Lehrer

 

Swiss multi-disciplinary artist Mai-Thu Perret understands that the most interesting artwork lives within the viewer’s mind, as an impression, memory, or dream, as much as it lives within the space that the art is presented. “I think the memory one carries of a work of art after one has left it behind, whether by turning the page or leaving the room in the museum is almost as important as the object itself,” said Perret in an email.

That isn’t to say that her work lacks aesthetic dazzle, however. Her recent exhibit at the David Kordansky booth at Frieze New York, for example, was one of the standout presentations of the fair. Through her brightly colored Roschach ink blot paintings and her female figurine sculptures, Mai-Thu communicates a narrative. But that narrative is best brought to life through the mental processes of the installation’s viewer. Perret loves poetry and writing, having received a BA from Cambridge University, but she is most concerned with creating the settings and the landscapes of the narratives of her art works as a point of genesis for the creation of art objects. The weaving together of these disparate ideas within the space often becomes the burden of the viewers, facilitating a challenging yet intellectually rewarding interplay between the artist and the viewer.

Perret is fascinated by the idea of the utopia, or, a unique landscape with a set of ideals that would theoretically facilitate a revisionist art history. Perret envisions a utopia in which the ideals and creativity of women and marginalized groups are as much a part of the conversation surrounding art history as those of men. Perhaps Perret’s best known and most labored over work, entitled The Crystal Frontier, is most exemplary of this idea. The Crystal Frontier is an imagined utopia of women living in the desert in New Mexico. Perret has built on the idea of The Crystal Frontier over her career, imagining its artifacts and furniture and fashions. The Crystal Frontier not only poses an fascinating conceptual narrative, but also has proven to be a place of contemplative creativity for Perret; one in which she can return to as a renewable source of inspiration.

Perret’s most recent exhibition at Nasher Sculpture Center, Sightings, builds upon The Crystal Frontier while connecting it to a real world community considered by Perret to be the kind of utopia that she has been imagining in her work. This utopia, a secular Kurdish community in the Syrian region of Rojava, champions female leaders and implements democratic ideals in a war-ravaged country. Perret has made eight human figures representing the women in all-female militia groups in the area.

At SOLUNA, Perret presented a performance entitled Figures in which a life-size marionette (whose body is animated by dancer Anja Schmidt) and a dancer enact an Indian mystic, a 19th-century American Shaker, a 1950s computer programmer, an Artificial Intelligence, and a journalist. At first, the dancer and puppet are separate entities, eventually merging and leaving the stage to make way for the journalist on a typewriter, played by Perret. In the style of Japanese puppetry known as Bunraku, there is no illusion concealing the fact that this is a fictional work. You can see the stage manipulations in real time. Perret asks that you accept her ideas as art without concealing the fact that this is anything other than art. Once again, Perret sets up the narrative’s background, leaving room for the viewer’s imagination to complete the piece.

Perret answered some of my questions about her ideas and work over email, discussing the narrative structure in her art, revising history to incorporate the ideas of the marginalized, and the majesty of the desert.

ADAM LEHRER: When learning about the premise for Figures, I couldn’t help but think about the Crystal Frontier. In the Crystal Frontier, women are living away from society, but forming their own society. In Figures, women are leaving their bodies through trance. It made me think of the idea that an alternative society can be a type of freedom, but liberation from the body is the ultimate freedom. Were you at all thinking along these lines when conceptualizing Figures?

MAI-THU PERRET: I wasn't really thinking about the Crystal Frontier when I was putting together Figures, but there are definitely a lot of common points and references. I've always been interested in ways one can leave one's self and identity behind. These ideas of trance and mysticism are definitely connected.

ADAM LEHRER: Your work often deals with this questioning of the manner in which art and culture is consumed, do you think that the theoretical utopias you explore could ever be possible considering the almost hyper-capitalist mentality of the contemporary art market?

MAI-THU PERRET: There is no place for this type of thinking within the art market, but the market is not the be-all and end-all and I think there are lots of people trying to find alternative ways of living and making art today.

ADAM LEHRER: In these projects, like the Crystal Frontier, does this entire world live in your imagination before you create the objects? Or do the specific objects and sculptural manifestations present themselves through the process?

MAI-THU PERRET: It's always a process, very little is fixed in advance. I set-up a broad set of parameters and then I construct what comes within it.

ADAM LEHRER: Did you ever consider writing literature? Your sense of story and narrative is really astounding even in terms of conceptual artists.

MAI-THU PERRET: I did when I was a student, but I was useless at constructing a narrative. I've always been better at imagining atmospheres or situations rather than proper stories with a beginning and an end. The open-ended space of the exhibition, where you can combine objects and moods to create a larger whole that the viewer passes through and pieces together in their minds, is probably more suited to this way of thinking. I've always been interested in experimental writing and poetry, and sometimes I think I will try to write again at some point.

ADAM LEHRER: It seems that your sense of “the utopia” is broken down into various different utopias; a choice of utopias if you will, as opposed to one all-encompassing utopia. As you said in an interview with the White Review, the Crystal Frontier’s utopia’s reasons for excluding men is different than Plato’s for excluding artists. Am I at all accurate in these assumptions?

MAI-THU PERRET: Yes, I think that's pretty accurate. The idea behind the all-female environment was to create a space where the dominant and habitual paradigm could be reversed in order for new possibilities to emerge, rather than a desire for exclusion.

ADAM LEHRER: Your work deals with the history of avant-garde within art, do you feel that this history has often been biased towards men and are you hoping to break down that history within your work?

MAI-THU PERRET: I definitely think that the history of art, like Western history as a whole, has been male-dominated. I'm interested in revisionist histories and histories that focus on forgotten or marginalized figures and realities. I like to use my work as a kind of speculative space to imagine different futures or untold stories.

ADAM LEHRER: You have discussed the idea of a desert as an ideal space or utopia because it’s outside the world, but do you ever recall being drawn to the desert aesthetically? \

MAI-THU PERRET: I absolutely love the desert, and the Crystal Frontier narrative was definitely born from my encounter with the American West. Deserts, like islands, are incredibly meditative places, and they can also be hostile and inhuman. I think this feeling of a geological space, where men are minuscule in relation to the immensity of the landscape, and where time is counted in millions of years rather than in human life spans, is important to the work.

ADAM LEHRER: Is it ever difficult to find the balance that allows your use of text and narrative to emphasize but not overshadow the viewer’s appreciation of the objects you create and present? 

MAI-THU PERRET: I'm very aware of the fact that if you give a lot of information to the viewer you risk cutting them off from the actual experience of the work and leading them into seeing only the things you have been talking about. That's one of the biggest problems with wall texts and all the didactic para-texts one encounters in museums. When I present text, it's usually in an attempt to subvert these institutional prompts and open other spaces of thoughts that the viewers can hopefully dive into. My text works are usually fictions that complicate the reading of the works rather than provide explanations for them.


ADAM LEHRER: In an interview with John Armleder, you discussed the manner in which people see art shows on the Internet, and how the experience is diminished. Do you purposefully try to create art than needs to be experienced in person in opposition to this notion?

MAI-THU PERRET: I don't think I create art specifically to counter the mediated reality of the screen worlds we inhabit today, but of course I think of my work as something that must be seen directly and which must almost be touched with the eyes to be really seen. That said, I love looking at art in books, and what's fascinating about art is that it exists both in the mind and in real space.

ADAM LEHRER: For Figures, what drew you to Bunraku and the idea of singer and musician sitting on stage as character and puppet?

MAI-THU PERRET: I've always loved the Asian forms of theater, like the Balinese puppet show or the Noh theater, where there is no backstage and no attempts at hiding the structures that support the experience of the performance. When I discovered Bunraku, I was amazed by the fact that the viewer's attention was constantly moving from puppet to manipulator, and by the strange relationship between the living and the inanimate this created. At times in Bunraku you can get so immersed in the movements of the puppet that [the puppet] seems more real than the people manipulating it, and I wanted to work with this idea. I was also drawn to the very special place the voice occupied in Bunraku, since the voice of the puppet is dissociated from it and clearly emitted by the singer who sits on the sidelines. It's not about illusionism; it’s about the way that the spectator assembles all these separate elements in his/her mind.

ADAM LEHRER: How did the experience of creating a narrative through performance and experience compare to that of creating a narrative through objects and examining those objects?

MAI-THU PERRET: In performance you are working in real time. What you create is instantly erased by new movements or actions. It's a very different type of memory and attention.  

Sightings: Mai-Thu Perret will be on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center until July 17, 2016. Text by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Annik Wetter. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE 

With A Little Help From Our Friends: An Interview With The Design Duo Behind NYC Fashion Label Private Policy

text by Adam Lehrer

 

Private Policy is the gender-neutral fashion label by two Chinese-born fresh-faced recent Parsons grads Haoran Li and Siying Qu. Only two collections in, the two designers have created a smart albeit colorful range of menswear fitted products that can also sensibly be worn by women. The clothes seem to reference V Files-approved street wear, colorful and a bit off, with a focus on high fashion tailoring and embellishment: a simple fitted turtleneck comes exaggerated by orange bondage belting, a velvet bomber jacket is equipped by fluffy tassels, gigantic fur-laden scarves adorn the shoulders of brown down jackets.

True to the Parsons fashion education, Li and Qu have a business sensibility that is not always but often lost on young designers, perhaps instilled in them through internships with the likes of Calvin Klein, Alexander Wang, and Phillip Lim. In other words, they want to be the kind of designers that make dope clothes worn to death by their well carved out customer bases. Their clothes wouldn’t look at all out of place in the underground clubs of Bushwick or the dive bars of the Lower East Side; clothes meant to be worn by an exuberantly young creative force growing less and less concerned with dressing in accordance with their private parts and income brackets. These garments are sensibly chaotic.

ADAM LEHRER: Where did you guys grow up?

HAORAN LI: We are originally from China, but we grew up in different places. I lived in Canada for high school, in Toronto. I came to New York for college. She went to high school in North Carolina.

LEHRER: Did you first become aware of fashion living in China, or did you get more of a sense of it living in Canada?

HAORAN LI: My parents are jewelry designers and were focused on art.

SIYING QU: My family: career wise, though everyone is in business, everyone has this love for fine arts. When I came here for high school, in North Carolina, I had the chance to learn more about fine arts and fashion. From there, I realized fashion would be the perfect career for me. It’s a combination of art and business. We don’t think focusing on business is limiting, but a challenge. We are fashion designers, not artists. We are designing a product.

LEHRER: You guys got a sense of what luxury meant to you personally at a young age?

SIYING QU: Yes. My mom, for example, has amazing fashion sense. She has an eye for details. She paid a lot of attention not just to the clothes, but to the details of the garment as well.

LEHRER: You guys went to Parsons. What brought you to that school?

HAORAN LI: I decided on New York because I like the style of it. It’s chill but it has unique things too.

SIYING QU: I applied both in New York and London. When I visited the two cities, New York, especially Parsons, has a very strong sense of both the design and business of fashion. I find it fascinating.

LEHRER: How did you guys meet? When did you guys realize you had a creative kindred spirit?

HAORAN LI: We were in the same year of school, but we never had class together. She was working on menswear and I was majoring in women’s. But senior year, we were working on our thesis collections, and our working tables were next to each other. That’s how we got to know each other more.

SIYING QU: During senior year at Parsons there is a lot of stress on the thesis collection. You try to pull four years of study into one collection and show not just what skills you have, but your personality, what you stand for. Under that stress, we worked next to each other. He would help me with styling. I would help him sew a pocket.

LEHRER: You did womenswear, and you did menswear. Did you find similarities in the ways you wanted men to dress and the ways you wanted women to dress?

HAORAN LI: I majored in womenswear, but my focus is in textiles. I do patterns, and I construct garments. I do very simple shapes, but with very complicated fabrics. She’s very good at silhouettes and shapes.

SIYING QU: Also, our vision for menswear has very sensible style and a simple silhouette, but with a design touch to it. When you wear this piece, you feel comfortable, you feel like yourself. But still, your piece will not be the same as something elsewhere.

ADAM LEHRER:  There seems to be a sub-cultural referring at work in the clothes, is that accurate?

SIYING QU: A major inspiration for our brand is contemporary Downtown New York City.

HAORAN LI: We like Soho, Chinatown, the Lower East Side. We like how they dress here. Our friends live here, and they inspire what we do right now.

LEHRER: It’s a menswear brand, but it’s made for men and women. Was there a decision to name it a “menswear” brand as opposed to “gender neutral?”

SIYING QU: Every silhouette and fitting so far is men’s. We mark it that way, because that’s how we fit the clothes.

HAORAN LI: After we made our garments, a lot of girls were really attracted to them. That’s how we decided to go in a genderless direction.

SIYING QU: From a personal perspective, my girl friends and I all wear menswear, for a different style. Womenswear, I think, has too much design going on, or the silhouette isn’t clean enough for me.

LEHRER: What are your ultimate hopes and goals for the brand?

SIYING QU: We have a lot of hopes. Of course, in selling. We hope to make this a stable brand so that we can bring the ideology of the dress to a bigger audience.

HAORAN LI: We want to bring the Downtown New York style to more people.

LEHRER: How do you see your customer, and how do you go about widening the space for who that customer can be?

SIYING QU: We have started to do trade shows and presentations. While we were talking to the press, we realized that our designs alone brought the customers to us. The buyers are drawn to our colors and textures, in the midst of this big New York environment.

LEHRER: Right now is an interesting time in fashion. High fashion seems to be made for a very specific person, with a very specific set of beliefs. Do you feel like you’re in a unique place in fashion that you might not have been if you graduated three years ago?

HAORAN LI: Three years ago was another story for fashion. Right now, fashion is more and more close to ordinary people. There’s less class in fashion.

LEHRER: It’s less about class and more about taste.

HAORAN LI: Yeah.

LEHRER: You guys are two collections in now, and the demand for new product has never been this substantial. Is the team just you two?

SIYING QU: For design, just us. If we need help, we have a big friend group. We love them so much. They’re so generous. It’s a good feeling. They really like the design. We have a marketing manager in China. We just came back from there. China will be another big market for us. Today, we think, as a young brand, it’s important to make a global presence. Also, from our background, being Chinese and then studying here, traveling a lot, we have that international sense. Hopefully, we’ll go to Paris next. I believe that people in Europe will have a unique viewpoint.

Find stockists and see current Private Policy collections on the label's website. Text, interview and photographs by Adam Lehrer. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

A Dark and Fluffy World: An Interview With Galen Pehrson

text by Summer Bowie

 

Watching one of Galen Pehrson’s films, like his most recent, The Caged Pillows, starring the likes of Jena Malone and James Franco, is like stepping into a psychedelic cartoon where you can’t help feeling a tinge of déjà vu – you’re not sure if it was a dream, a childhood memory, or an omen. It’s as though a mixture of real life memories and old movie scenes were plucked from your brain and rearranged into a brilliant new narrative. They’re the renderings of a world that most of us have inhabited for all our lives, but for Galen, who spent the first 12 years of his life in rural Nevada City, without access to cable TV or any other means of consuming pop culture, this world can be seen from a slightly outside perspective.

His exposure to MTV was a wild awakening that led him into making music videos and working as a cartoon artist. His harrowing tale of running away, moving to New York, studying at RISD and eventually spending the first 7 months of his life in Los Angeles at a halfway home for dual-diagnosed criminals with psychiatric disorders in South Central is one that deserves a film in itself, but it certainly set the stage for the world of Caged Pillows that he has been creating for the past several years.

Former iterations of this world are clearly seen in previous projects such as El Gato, a collection of hand-drawn, animated vignettes that was part of James Franco’s Rebel project, a multi-artist exhibition presented at MOCA during Jeffrey Deitch’s sadly missed reign. You can also see further developments of this vacuous, celestial world filled with characters that behave like humans but look like ducks, dogs, cats, wolves and mice in Mondo Taurobolium. This short film that is as much a music video for Devendra Banhart’s track Taurobolium as it is a film that carries its own, not only features the same starring cast and characters as his other films, but the score is also masterfully mixed and produced by the brilliant Noah Georgeson.

His new film, The Caged Pillows, is a short that was originally intended to be a feature, but Galen says this introduction is just a pinprick into a world that will encompass several mediums and film projects in the future. Until then, in under ten minutes, this short is a vortex of mind blowing musical and visual narrative that will be premiered this Wednesday night at MAMA gallery alongside a celebration party for Ruins Magazine, an editorial content site that produced the film and will be launching online with the premiere. We sat down with Galen over green tea in his Hollywood Hills home/studio to talk about his process, his inspiration for the film, and the meaning behind the Caged Pillows.

AUTRE: Do you consider yourself a cartoonist, an illustrator, an artist, or none of the above?

PEHRSON: I think of myself as a director. But the art is cartoon art. I more closely align to cartoon art than animation. The style is taken from my memories; when I was a kid and would watch DuckTales. I’m interested in how those worlds could mature with you. So as an adult, what would that be like? You can always trust cartoon characters. You don’t have to build up characters like you would in a film. There’s this consistent moral overtone. It’s very light. If there’s a bad guy, it’s clear he’s a bad guy. With a cartoon-style arch, you can get away with a lot that you couldn’t get away with in a shorter amount of time. It helps with the compressed stories.

AUTRE: Are you drawn to any other mediums?

PEHRSON: Cartoons are just one facet of it. I have other projects that I’m working on. I produced a bunch of audio on this, like music stuff. I see it as all under the umbrella of this world of Caged Pillows. 

AUTRE: What mediums were you drawn to when you were a kid?

PEHRSON: I’ve been painting since I was a kid. But then painting seemed pointless. As though everyone had already done everything you could possibly do with it. What could I contribute to this? It’s a medium that is so deeply covered. And it didn’t resonate very deeply with me. We’re in such a pop culture-driven society that paintings feel like something people do to remind them of the past. It seems extremely irrelevant. For me, the excitement of creation is bringing out people’s imaginations, immersing them in a different place for a while. I think that’s what the old painters did, like Heironymus Bosch. They had these whole worlds. During that time, it was very contemporary and edgy. For me, it’s trying to be innovative with technology and to create a reflection of our current society.

AUTRE: It’s interesting that you feel Caged Pillows is a reflection of the present. It feels like an ambiguous representation of what could be the present, or likely a dystopian future. It makes sense that you’re working in a medium that is present/future.

PEHRSON: I wanted to be reflective of our current society, which has fascinated me since my childhood. I was raised off the grid until I was twelve years old. I didn’t have television, electricity, any contact with popular culture. We had a Magritte book, and a few others. That was my connection to art. Besides that, we had nothing to do. I drew, painted, or played with dirt. That’s all there was.

AUTRE: Was that a conscious decision that your parents made?

PEHRSON: There was nothing else to do. We were really poor, so we had pens, paper, and dirt. It was something I always did. There are photographs of me, in diapers, smearing paint all over something. I never thought, “Oh, I want to be an artist.” Most of the time, I wished I could do something else.

AUTRE: What was your first introduction to pop culture?

PEHRSON: MTV.

AUTRE: What was that experience like?

PEHRSON: To me, it seemed so bizarre. Pop culture in general does this. Imagine landing on Earth and seeing people singing and dancing like this. That never went away for me. A lot of my work is coming from this place of being young and seeing all these images on TV. “Dress like this to be cool.” I think it’s different if you grow up with it naturally and slowly. It becomes something you adapt to. But at 12, I was like, “I don’t have the right shoes. I have to wear these pants.” There was this extremely fast rush of information on how to fit into society. Plus it was so limiting to be an individual. There were these groups you could be in – nerd, jock, bad guy, whatever.

AUTRE: When you first started watching it, did you feel indoctrinated in it? Or were you immediately critical?

PEHRSON: I loved it. I went on to do music videos.

AUTRE: How long have you been developing your style, these psychedelic, celestial, animal worlds?

PEHRSON: The first time I used the duck characters was 2005. That was for the cover of Adam Green’s Jacket Full of Danger. I didn’t know what to do with it yet. I sat around with a lot of ideas, with a very particular aesthetic in mind, for a while. In 2012, for the Red Bull exhibition, they wanted to commission an animation. So I was like, “The ducks!” That was the launching pad for it.

AUTRE: That one was very erotic too.

PEHRSON: Yeah, each one has its own experiment to it. That piece focused on the erotic. What’s interesting, all the dialogue in that is dialogue from Rebel Without a Cause, just mixed up. That was the first iteration of the characters. They’ve become more and more human over time. I think eventually they’ll just turn into humans.

AUTRE: Your work deals a lot with Hollywood, fame, and money worship. Where do you see yourself in this landscape?

PEHRSON: I have a pretty patronizing point of view. I was never asked to be a part of society. I find myself with all these rules, conditions, and responsibilities that don’t make any sense to me. I constantly feel like I’m walking through a preset maze. It’s so limiting.

AUTRE: It seems like people don’t know they’re in a maze, and that's the scariest part.

PEHRSON: Yeah, it goes back to pop culture. The best artist is not the most popular. Everything is essentially a commercial, even music, and now in art. We’re in an art renaissance. There’s so much content. But it’s all funded and propelled by how and who is making money. Art, to me, has been an honest, accurate reflection of society, without commercial interests. That’s the kind of stuff we get from design. Though they are close, design is for a purpose. Art isn’t necessarily for a purpose.

AUTRE: In many ways it seems like artists are starting to ask themselves how they can commodify their own work before they've even made it. Or a brand is already finding ways to commodify it for them.

PEHRSON: Exactly.

AUTRE: Originally, this was going to be a feature length film, but then Ruins came to you?

PEHRSON: Yeah, I was really excited. I thought of it as an introduction to the world of Caged Pillows. What started as a very linear feature film morphed and grew in many directions that go beyond the film. They gave me a lot of freedom to do whatever I want with it, which is rare and very refreshing.

AUTRE: Who are the Caged Pillows?

PEHRSON: We are the Caged Pillows. Our world is very comfortably jailed. We’re sedated, distracted by television. Everyone is on medication. Our society as a whole, Western culture, has completely driven itself away from the natural human state. That’s such an interesting topic. The Caged Pillows are us. I’m susceptible to this. We’ve been programmed to respond to what success, beauty, and happiness look like – and from a young age. The film is about that. People get these ideas, that success is a beautiful pool, a Bugatti, probably some gold chains.

That’s what the gem in the film represents. At one point, he says, “I’ve been with you since you were a baby. Touch me and I’ll go crazy.” It’s the phones, the screens, touch-touch-double-tap, the instant gratification. There’s a line, “I fed you a lifetime of lies. I can’t even look in your eyes.” The screen can be talking to you, but it’s a one-way communication. There’s no singular accountability because it’s a culture.

AUTRE: We’re all victims inflicting culture on one another.

PEHRSON: Exactly. That’s the overarching idea of the film. There’s a fantasy that we will someday break that and learn more about ourselves as individuals rather than an idea of a society.

AUTRE: Did these ideas become more pronounced when you moved to LA?

PEHRSON: Yeah, definitely. This is Los Angeles. Everyone here is here for a reason. You can separate your friends into two categories: people you would actually call if you had a problem, and people you call for a drink or to go out with or whatever. It’s not a negative thing. Everyone here is ambitious, and acceptably so.

AUTRE: It’s a superficial fame factory. Your work really dives into that.

PEHRSON: The whole film in itself is commercials and the commercials are starring so-and-so. Everything is tied to the celebrity. Even unconsciously, we’re drawn to these figures and the meaning assigned to them.

AUTRE: And the isolation on the other side of that.

PEHRSON: Yes. I made Mondo from a very personal experience. All I had been doing was sitting on a screen. The only experience I had to tell was the experience of sitting on a screen.

AUTRE: Do you ever have to go through a digital detox?

PEHRSON: Every time I finish a project, I go hiking to the Sierra Nevadas for a week. Or I drive through the desert. I go out there and there’s just nothing. I have to hear my own voice. It’s a very strong contrast from, like, literally listening to top forty while I work, because I’m so fascinated by pop culture.

AUTRE: What’s your work process like?

PEHRSON: I’ve worked twelve to fourteen-hour days for the past few years. I wake up at 4[pm], I work from 5[pm] to 9 in the morning. Working all night, I don’t see anybody. It’s all done from a very isolated place.

AUTRE: When people do voiceover, do they have to conform to your schedule?

PEHRSON: No. I do all the voices first. There’s a fun version, which is just me. I send them that version and then they work independently. This piece being so much about pop culture, celebrity, dreams of “being something,” I wanted to involve people that live that lifestyle. I don’t give them much direction. They’re collaborators. They all seem to find joy and release in it. And all the actors are able to find the cracks in the system. They are involved with other things. They appreciate the art. But still, it is pop culture. If that’s the palette we have to work with for people to see it, that’s the right medium.

AUTRE: What about the process do you enjoy the most and the least?

PEHRSON: I enjoy all of it. The hardest part is sitting still for so many hours, and the isolation of not having connection or touch for weeks, or months even. I also feel like this piece called for it. That’s what it was about. It was a bit of method animating (laughs). The best part about it is working with my friends and people I’m genuinely a big fan of. Bar none, to collaborate with a community of ideas and artists who are like-minded.

AUTRE: Is this world going to keep developing?

PEHRSON: Oh yeah. This is just the entrance. It’s a primer to a much larger narrative, extending across music, film, sculpture. There’s a whole set of stuff. As a creative person, it’s all communications – writing, music, art. Any time you can take your vision and make it work in a different medium you’re improving that communication. I think that’s so important, to set outside of one channel of expressing something. I think everybody in the project feels that way. The Caged Pillows world is going to provide a place for people who are stuck in a genre to come and do something completely new.

AUTRE: Are you excited to share it at MAMA?

PEHRSON: I’m very excited. One side is that I made the piece in isolation, as I wanted it to be viewed in isolation. I asked people to call a 1-800 number when watching the film, and I got over 20,000 messages. They’re all about people feeling isolated, feeling like an alien. There’s this disassociation from the world around them.

AUTRE: Can you tell us about Ruins Magazine?

PEHRSON: Yeah, this film is kicking off the launch of Ruins Magazine. It’s a cultural digest that focuses around urbanism and the future of cities. It’s architecture, design, prose and imagery that all somehow express the human condition in present urban environments.

AUTRE: Like a crossover between urbanism and art?

PEHRSON: Yeah, urbanism, art, and culture. And it’s an amazing set of people. I think they’re going to publish a lot of content that otherwise wouldn’t get made.

AUTRE: When does the site launch?

PEHRSON: June 1st.

The Caged Pillows will premiere at MAMA Gallery on June 1st, in conjunction with the release of Ruins Magazine, at 7pm. Follow Galen Pehrson to learn more about the world of The Caged Pillows. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Text by Summer Bowie. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Scaring Away the Demons: An Interview with Fashion Designer and Artist Christophe Coppens

One might expect someone with the credentials of Christophe Coppens – internationally acclaimed avant garde fashion designer, official milliner for the Belgian Royal Family, former theatre actor and director, burgeoning artist – to be radically unapproachable. Instead, Coppens shakes your hand warmly, orders iced tea at an outdoor café, talks about his love for cheap avocado toast and the 20s style bungalows in Silverlake. Perhaps this is why Coppens jumped the brutal, fast-paced, capitalist boat of the fashion industry circuit five years ago, abandoning his label to pursue art.

A lot of other designers have recently jumped the same ship, and have actually found refuge in Los Angeles – namely Hedi Slimane, who left Saint Laurent after an incendiary three years at the helm of the label. But there is something more to Coppens, underneath the surface of his accomplishments, even his openness. As we discuss his oscillations between different worlds, pieces from his newest exhibition, “50 Masks: Made In America,” twirl on mechanized pirouettes in the gallery window, the likes of which include: the American flag stitched into a terrifying ape mask, displaying its sharp teeth (“Trump Mask”); a mask made from a plastic bag filled with red and blue prescription pills (“Refill Mask”). The masks explore the many faces of the American cancer – mass food production, erasure of Native Americans, the oppression of women. All the while, a macabre a cappella version of: “It’s a Small World” plays on the loudspeaker. It is clear that Coppens isn’t in the art business as merely a cop-out of the fashion world. Coppens calls leaving the design industry “my freedom.” This does not just mean freedom from obligations, investors, and employees. Through art, Coppens has room to be truly controversial and avant garde, to talk about the things he wants to talk about, to make good work.

We got to talk to the artist about his past life as a star of the fashion world, his new life as a Los Angeles artist, and all the energies and excitements in between.

OLIVER KUPPER: You started out training for theatre, as an actor and a director?

CHRISTOPHE COPPENS: First as an actor, until I realized I wasn’t a very good actor. I was always fighting with the directors and teachers. So I thought, “Okay, I will direct myself.” I went to a theatre school and said, “I want to direct.” They said, “We don’t care; as long as you’re here, you’re going to act.” Through acting, I founded a small company during school, and I directed plays in the evening. I always did sets and costumes for my plays. I needed accessories – hats and stuff. I went to a lady, 87 years old, living in a small village, asking for her help in making these pieces. She said yes, so I went for a weekend. Since then, for a whole year, I went every weekend. At the end, I had a collection, and Elle Magazine Belgium sent me to Paris fashion week. I quit school.

KUPPER: So that’s what brought you out of acting and directing?

COPPENS: Yeah. I love a lot of things about theatre and performance, but I also enjoyed the process of doing something on my own and only showing it when it’s ready. It was a breath of fresh air at that moment. But everything I did then influenced, always, my work – my shows, my exhibitions, my collections, my photos, my display in stores. It’s always there, the stage, the light, and the sound.

KUPPER: You like the theatrical aspect of fashion?

COPPENS: Yeah, amongst other things. I like the impact things can have on stage.

KUPPER: You grew up in Belgium?

COPPENS: I’m from a small village near Antwerp. I moved to Brussels when I was eighteen or nineteen.

KUPPER: Did you have an early interest in fashion, or was it something that came later? Antwerp is known as the place for a lot of incredible designers.

COPPENS: I had a studio as a kid. The attic was my studio. I always made stuff, and then I invited people over for my “exhibition” or “fashion show.” I always had a little bit of a problem to choose, which is still an issue today. I like different things, which is not, career-wise, the smartest thing. I don’t care anymore. I just want to do whatever feels right. It’s all connected at the end, even though it can look very different.

KUPPER: I wanted to ask about the Antwerp 6. That sort of environment bred a lot of great fashion. Was there something in the air?

COPPENS: Oh yeah. It was super exciting to see people like Walter [van Beirendonck] and Dries [van Noten]. I was always in awe, but never in awe enough to go to fashion school, because I thought, “Oh, I’ll have to stop doing theatre and make choices.” I quit theatre school in my last year because they made me choose. Suddenly, I was in all these magazines, and they said, “Theatre or fashion.”

KUPPER: Did you ever get a chance to meet any of those designers?

COPPENS: You know, it’s a weird thing in Belgium. Antwerp is Antwerp, it’s very protective. I have very good contact with Walter, for example, but that’s the only one. Everything else is quite closed.

KUPPER: When you had your fashion label and doing the fashion week circuit, you showed a lot in Paris and Japan. Were those the main ones?

COPPENS: We showed Paris, sometimes Milan. Mainly Paris, twice, or four times a year when I had men’s accessories. And Japan was my biggest market. I showed in 150 stores, and I had a store of my own in Tokyo.

KUPPER: It seems like the Japanese were really appreciative of your work.

COPPENS: First of all, Japan is a great country to start. They like everything new. You can go really fast there. But then the trick is, a year or two later, there is something else new. Then it becomes really hard to keep it going. We did that for twenty years. To keep it relevant and to stay on top, I went four or five times a year for promotion tours, events. I really worked that market because I love Japan. I have many friends there. My collaborations there were some of the best I ever did. From my old life, that’s what I miss the most.

KUPPER: Did you like the fashion week circuit?

COPPENS: Oh no, I hated it. Also, it’s changed so much. At the risk of sounding old, when I started, it was so different. It was exciting to go to fashion week. It was rather small, also. There was this one small accessory fair, Premiere Classe, which became huge after. It became about something else. The last five years of my career in fashion, I was fairly unhappy, because it was no longer about the things I wanted to be about. There were many people who could still have a beautiful career, of course, and beautiful houses and labels. But I got stuck in this system of having to grow in order to survive. In the end, it’s all about, “They need a red scarf because Dries Van Noten has red pants, so we have to make more red scarfs.” You’re competing in these price ranges that are ridiculous. I could never afford my own stuff. You try to make cheaper stuff, to do collaborations with bigger stores, and they had stuff that was only $10. Everything was slipping through my fingers. It’s not what I wanted. I started doing all my free work in secret, because it was influencing the market and the customers. I would have people in my company say, “Don’t show that too much, it will scare away the Royal Family.” I felt trapped.

KUPPER: Speaking of the Royal Family, how did you become the official milliner for them?

COPPENS: One princess called when I was really young. I worked for the Royal Family for fifteen years. It was fun. There were two milliners of the Royal Family. I enjoyed it, but it’s a niche. It was interesting, as an exercise, because there’s so much protocol and so many rules. There’s so much that you have to think of. It’s not about you; it’s about them, how the photos will look, how the audience will take it. My best memories are with Queen Paola.

KUPPER: Did they have a specific preference of style, or did they like the avant garde aspect?

COPPENS: That was always the fight. The other milliner was very classical – well crafted, but very classical. It came in waves. I would do something that was a bit too risqué, and I wouldn’t hear from them for two or three months.

KUPPER: It seems like a lot of designers are coming to LA. What do you think it is about LA that is such a refuge? Is there more space?

COPPENS: For me, it’s all about a certain freshness. I like that LA has moved from the underdog position, culturally, after all these years. People used to talk about LA like it was culturally flat, but a lot of things could brew underneath the surface. I like that attitude. Suddenly, all these things pop up that are much fresher than other cities. The city itself is so magical. There’s so much in it, so many layers. It feels, at times, like New York in the 70s. It’s very exciting.

KUPPER: And it seems far enough away from the fashion world.

COPPENS: To be honest, the fashion world is no longer my world, hasn’t been for five years now. That’s when I quit… It’s about everything. It’s about the energy of a small restaurant and an avocado toast that is amazing, cheap, and fresh. It’s not tired. There’s no pretention here. I really like that. It would be very hard to imagine living somewhere else again. We’re very spoiled here.

KUPPER: Do you feel like you’re disowning the fashion past, or are you disowning the industry?

COPPENS: I love fashion, still. It’s just that, in my journey, I got stuck. I was in a boat that had to go on and on with stuff and obligations and banks and investors. I had no clarity or vision how to steer that boat. I had to pull the plug, which was a very aggressive and very hard. I had a high price to pay for my freedom, because I lost everything and had to start from scratch. But that was the only choice. It was that or jumping off a bridge. My assistant from five years ago, then, suddenly got a very heavy cancer. And I was like, “I’m next if I’m going to do this. This is no longer okay.” There is a big problem in the fashion world. But now, nobody talks about anything else.

About a year ago, I was asked to be the head of a master’s program at the Sandberg Institute. We start from the urgent question, “What’s next in fashion?” It’s all about those questions, from designing, to sustainability, selling, financing, consuming. We have twelve students to ask all these questions. It’s very refreshing for me to see how the young generation looks at all of these things. It’s surprising; the last thing they want to do is go to Paris Fashion Week. They don’t think like that. They stay at home, work in their kitchen, sell at their friend’s store.  

KUPPER: What’s the dream now for these students?

COPPENS: They’re very socially aware. They’re incredible. Talking about sustainability is almost out of fashion; it’s obvious. It’s incredible. We’re going to publish a book next year. Walter is involved also, and other amazing people form all over the world.

KUPPER: Do you see your fashion designs as in a conversation with the art you make now, or are they separate?

COPPENS: When I stopped, I was fairly radical in it. I was like, “Now, it’s all about sculpture and painting.” People would ask me to make accessories for them, and I would say, “No, this is my new life. This is the way I’m going to tell my stories.” I did four shows like that. But I must say now, five years later, I’m much less uptight about it. The masks could be confused with my older work, but I don’t think so. It’s not pretty. I just use this medium and my couture tools from the past to tell these stories. I could not tell the same stories in a painting; it would be way too heavy or obnoxious. I like this medium that is very light. Then, you can hit stronger. For example, one of my friends, Roisin Murphy, asked me to make masks for her tour. I’ve been making masks for the tour and these videos for the past year now.

KUPPER: Is that where the idea came from?

COPPENS: No. I wanted to do a show with masks, but it got delayed because I sent all the masks I finished to her… How do you name these things? Is it an accessory? I don’t think so. You can wear it, yes. Frankly, I really don’t care anymore. Before, I did, I know that it really worked against. Now, I think times have changed.

KUPPER: It seems like you’re distilling everything to have the ultimate freedom to create what you want to create.

COPPENS: Totally. For example, in those four years, I had some shows and did some art fairs. A big part of the art world is boring. Very unattractive, very unappealing. I was thinking, “Is this what I now want? Is this repeating the same story in a new crowd?” It’s not very interesting. I like this [Please Do Not Enter] much more. It’s much fresher and more modern. To say, “Let’s have an art show, and then we’ll have clothes out front, and then we’ll put out perfume.” That’s how we look at things. That’s how we look at Instagram and look at images all day. When I go to galleries most of the time, the life is outside and everything inside is dead.

KUPPER: There’s no movement to it.

COPPENS: No, and it bothers me. There are amazing galleries, of course. There are artists who have an amazing career who should show there, I guess.

KUPPER: What does “the Mask” mean to you?

COPPENS: A lot, actually. My father is a very respective art dealer in primitive art. All my life, I was surrounded with these skulls and brilliant masks from Borneo and Oceania. Always, when I saw a book about mask making, I would buy it. I like the idea of what the mask could mean today. Is it tribal? Is it a disguise? Today, what can you say with your mask? In a way, it’s still about scaring away the demons or trying to evoke something. I wanted to do a show about America, now that I have moved here. Masks were the first thing that popped up. Maybe you wouldn’t see it in the show, but I really love America.

KUPPER: America has a strange, conflicting history.

COPPENS: As a European, you’re raised with American pop culture – that’s how you learn to speak English, those are the songs you sing, the TV series, the movies. It’s always there. But then you move here at 42, and suddenly, you see all these other layers. You read the American newspapers; you watch the American news. So then there are all these things that are conflicting with what you were taught. There are all these things that you don’t like or understand. When we agreed to do the mask exhibition, it wasn’t the idea to do it about America. But the first mask I made was the “Trump Mask.” From there, there was no way back. I cannot make a pretty mask with pretty feathers. Then, I started making a mask about Native Americans, racism, the empowerment of women. The first group was all about the empowerment of women, even though they look very sexist. That’s the game I’m playing. I’m trying to show things that are quite obnoxious, even though that’s not my opinion.

KUPPER: How does satire play into your masks? Do you think about that?

COPPENS: Yeah, and surrealism also. It’s almost like a political cartoon, a caricature. It’s enlarging an idea. I don’t think it’s cynical, to be honest. I always try to show them in a fresh way. You might look at it briefly and say, “Oh, this is pretty and new.” But there are deeper themes.

KUPPER: If you had to design a mask for yourself, what would it look like?

COPPENS: I made three. They’re on the floor. That’s a mold of my face. I see myself cleaning. That’s my face, scrubbing the floors.

KUPPER: How did you create the soundtrack for this exhibition?

COPPENS: I always loved creating the music. My show “The Hills Are Alive” in Tokyo was about a gift store in an antique park that doesn’t exist. Like, when you do a ride at Disneyland, and you get out and buy all the stuff that you just saw. We did the store, with a cashier and everything. For that, we made a beautiful soundtrack. For this show, it went very fast. I knew exactly what kind of music I wanted. A lot of it has pop culture references – movies, TV shows, commercials. There are many weird variations on “It’s a Small World.”

KUPPER: What’s next after this?

COPPENS: There’s a second year of the school. There’s a lot of work to do there. I was asked, and I am going to do some directing in Europe; a big dream come true. Then I want to do another show in LA. I want a big, empty space; it’s an installation, experience piece. 

Christophe Coppens "50 Masks Made In America" will be on view until July 16, 2016 at Please Do Not Enter, 549 s. Oliver Street, Los Angeles. Interview and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Intro text by Keely Shinners. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

One Night In Candy Land: An Interview With The Larger Than Life Candy Ken

text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

His face splattered with Hello Kitty temporary tattoos, a chiseled male hustler body and a thick Austrian accent, Candy Ken is a Harajuku Greek God run through the sieve of a culture on digital overload. If you held a mirror to the teenage zeitgeist of the twenty first century, Candy Ken’s smiling gold grill would be twinkling right back at you. Over the weekend, the Berlin-based performer released his first official album, entitled Real Talk, and he did it as his own manager, promoter and record label. With tracks like Fuck Gender, the artist replies to his critics and Internet trolls, who are quick to label his sexual identity, with a swift auto-tuned retort: “Gender rolls are over….the new sex is what I am.” And it’s exactly that sex that has garnered the attention of the likes of fashion designer Jeremy Scott and stylist/creative director Nicola Formichetti who last year flew Candy Ken out to Milan for a Diesel campaign after seeing his images on Instagram. Formichetti also introduced Candy to Terry Richardson who shot him in the nude at his New York studio. The controversial photographer is also the subject of a song on Candy’s new album, about the attention he received from that shoot. To celebrate the release of Real Talk, an album that celebrates the prismatic lifestyle of the artist in grand fashion, Candy Ken hosted a decadent club kid party at Visions Video Bar in London. We also got a chance to chat with Candy Ken about the strange and manic universe he has created, what it was like to work with Terry Richardson, and his dreams for the future.

OLIVER KUPPER: So you wanted to throw the party as a means of saying goodbye to the club scene and for your new album, right?

CANDY KEN: The party was for my album. We performed all the new songs of Real Talk, that’s the album name. We also used the party just to celebrate all the club kids, the whole club kid scene. We got everybody down, because they support me so much. It was very beautiful.

KUPPER: Is this the craziest party you’ve ever thrown?

CANDY KEN: Definitely the craziest.

KUPPER: Your new album is your second album?

CANDY KEN: No, this is my first one.

KUPPER: This is your first official album?

CANDY KEN: Exactly.

KUPPER: But you’ve been putting out music for a little while?

CANDY KEN: Exactly. But always EPs, never an album.

KUPPER: Do you have a record label?

CANDY KEN: No, it’s all self-produced.

KUPPER: I want to go back to where you grew up in Austria. Were you always creative as a child? Were you always making art?

CANDY KEN: Yeah. Luckily, my parents supported me from day one. They always put me in art classes and drawing classes. I created art since I could walk. But, of course, it changed with the Internet and social media. I had to use the new media to express myself. I found music videos, performances, and photoshoots through Snapchat and Instagram. Those are great platforms for me to express myself.

KUPPER: When you were studying art, who were some artists who really inspired you?

CANDY KEN: David LaChappelle, Wes Anderson, Tarantino, Die Antwoord, M.I.A., FKA Twigs, Riff Raff. And then, of course, fashion designers like Jeremy Scott had a big influence on me. Nicola Formichetti, Gianni Versace.

KUPPER: And you worked with Jeremy Scott and Formichetti right?

CANDY KEN: With Jeremy Scott, we just talked over Instagram. We never met, so far. My goal is to work with him very soon. I’ve worked with Nicola a lot of times, yeah.

KUPPER: And he flew you out to Milan at one point?

CANDY KEN: Yeah, he flew me to Milan and New York for Diesel. He also arranged a photoshoot with Terry Richardson because they’re, like, best friends. That’s how I got to work with Terry.

KUPPER: What was that experience like?

CANDY KEN: One of the best experiences ever. Terry is so humble and such a nice guy. He had so much energy. You don’t expect that out of so many celebrities and photographers. He was so welcoming. He played my music, and he was like, “Oh, Candy Ken is in the house!” He was very enthusiastic and happy. He could shoot me like I’ve never seen myself before. He’s a very good guy.   

KUPPER: Were you just in Rankin’s studio in London?

CANDY KEN: Yes, yesterday.

KUPPER: That’s a pretty big deal too.

CANDY KEN: Yeah. I want to make a name in London. I think I need more exposure in Europe. Mostly, I get booked in Asia. Last time, I was in Tel Aviv and Mexico, but not that much in Europe. I really want to work with photographers in London. Rankin Studios was really, really great.

KUPPER: When did you become Candy Ken?

CANDY KEN: I feel like I’ve always had Candy Ken in me. But I was not able to express myself until two years ago. Before that, I always had it in myself, but you get pulled down by society. You’re not sure of yourself. You’re not confident to really go for it. I didn’t get my confidence to express Candy on the outside until I moved to Berlin.

KUPPER: Were you part of the club scene in Berlin?

CANDY KEN: Not really. I’m more into the London club scene. In Berlin, it’s very dark. I’m very colorful.

KUPPER: That makes sense. Tokyo is probably easy to fit into as well.

CANDY KEN: Oh yeah. They really appreciate me in Asia.

KUPPER: We’ve been watching a lot of your videos on YouTube. There are a lot of beauty and workout tips, as well as music videos. Some of them feature your younger brother. Does he look up to you?

CANDY KEN: Yeah. He’s ten years younger than me. We’re really good friends. We have a really strong relationship. He gives me a lot of shit. He is a good source of criticism. It is good to have siblings, because they tell you things that might offend you if a friend said it. If it’s family, you can really get it. He is very critical about what I do, and he teaches me a lot actually. I’m travelling a lot, so I’m very happy if I can spend time with him in Austria. I’m really thankful to have him in my life. He’s very supportive.

KUPPER: Does he have some of the same interests as you?

CANDY KEN: He’s definitely interested in art. We both really like the same kind of movies, like Grand Budapest Hotel, that Wes Anderson look. We also listen to the same music.

KUPPER: That’s amazing. You said that your parents were supportive of your art. Are they supportive of what you’re doing as Candy Ken?

CANDY KEN: Yeah, definitely. At some points, I had to warm them up. I think they want me to be secure. They want their kid to be successful. But they are very supportive. I’m very lucky. Being Candy Ken is something that’s hard to take in for a lot of people. It works with provocation, nudity – it’s really out there. For my parents to accept that, I’m very lucky. But I also teach them a lot, I feel like. They got to know Terry Richardson. They’ve been introduced to 2 Chainz and Lil’ Wayne.

KUPPER: You’re introducing them to culture. They probably really appreciate that.

CANDY KEN: Exactly.

KUPPER: Speaking of rappers, especially American rappers, do you want to collaborate more with people in the U.S.?

CANDY KEN: Yeah. I feel like American rappers are similar to me because they don’t take themselves too seriously. I really appreciate people in the music industry who don’t take themselves too seriously. That’s why I’m a big fan of Lil’ Wayne. Even his name, to use your social disadvantage in a fun way – that always impressed me, since I was a kid. I really want to work with American rappers. 

KUPPER: A lot of press is describing you as “post-gender.” Where do you see yourself on this spectrum?

CANDY KEN: As an artist, I have to work with society and what happens around me. I cannot ignore what happens around me. It’s not a coincidence that I’m from Austria. The gender role is very important. Growing up in Austria, there are a lot of things you’re allowed to do, but there are also lots of things you’re not supposed to do. I feel that I have to work with this gender problem, because it affects me too. What is my role as a male in society? How do they want me to be? I love opening people’s minds and waking people up, making people more acceptant and tolerant.

KUPPER: That’s a really important message.

CANDY KEN: I’m also living that a lot of people can’t live in their life. I’m expressing myself, trying different outfits, hair colors, shoes. That’s what a lot of people want to do, but they can’t because of their job, their family, or their friends. Most people put this cage over themselves. They could do everything, but they’re too afraid to fall out of the whole system of getting money, being secure, having family and friends. You think you lose all of that if you change something. I need to show everybody that I can be all of what Candy Ken does and still be accepted and loved by a lot of people, and the right people. Most people try to impress the wrong people. I tried to impress the wrong people for such a long time. If you want to impress all these people, you’re not following what your passion is. Once you really go for what you like, you will find people who have the same hobbies and passion. It’s so much better. You should really stop trying to impress stupid people.

KUPPER: How would you describe your new album?

CANDY KEN: It’s really from the heart. It’s very honest. One song is called “Fuck Gender.” One song is called “I Love Blue.” One song is about the Terry Richardson nude photos that came out. One song is about the Candy Crew. Every song, you get into what I’m thinking, how I see myself, how I deal with society’s problems. It’s very new. It’s not about stupid breakups and a love story like all these albums right now. It’s more about society and stereotypes and stuff like that, things I have to work with.

KUPPER: Do you have plans to tour in the U.S.?

CANDY KEN: If they want me, definitely. I am actually going to LA and New York for two months this summer. We are organizing music videos. We are doing a Kickstarter right now. We’re trying to do a very crazy, colorful David LaChapelle music video in LA. I hope I can perform that month in LA and New York. But I have no agent and no management.

KUPPER: If you could describe Candy Ken in three words, what would those words be?

CANDY KEN: Kawaii, yummy, and explicit.

You can stream Candy Ken's new album Real Talk here. See more photos from the album release party at Visions Video Bar in London here. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photographs by Flo Kohl. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Write here...

On the Hunt for Conservation: An Interview With Photographer Dylan Johnston On The Great Burmese Python Hunt

Can Florida Eradicate the Invasive Burmese Python?

Text by Michael Adno

 

Just outside Everglades City, lies a vast expanse of wetlands and narrow service roads lined with dense flora matched by an incomparable eco-system of animals. There is undoubtedly no other place in the world like the Everglades, but the way in which the State of Florida and the Federal Government has treated the area in recent years is indicative of a painful apathy towards how to best preserve this irreplaceable resource or to abate the effects of climate change.

Nearly a year ago, President Barack Obama visited the Everglades to stress the importance of making climate change a priority within his administration and for pertinent officials to take note. This also came at a time when the Obama administration stood to benefit by prompting—then Republican presidential candidates—Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio to acknowledge the urgency of conservation on a national platform. Unfortunately, both demonstrated a frightening insensitivity to the need for conservation efforts in Southern Florida, possibly hindered in their campaigns’ ties to big sugar companies in the state.

The Everglades have been affected adversely by agricultural development, the influx of invasive flora and fauna, as well as the passivity of the state’s environmentally-deft administration. One of the most hard-pressed issues facing the area, is the over population of the non-native Burmese Python, introduced to the environment by exotic pet-keepers who released their increasingly difficult to care for pets. Now the park has become littered with the sit-and-wait predator that has thrived in its environment but at the cost of a great deal of other species such as birds, alligators, and small rodents which play instrumental roles in the homeostasis of the Everglades.

Dylan Johnston has documented the Florida Python Challenge, one of the Florida Wildlife Commission’s more successful attempts to eradicate the invasive and evasive snake, for the past three years. In 2013, he began the project after mention from a friend in Sarasota, only a few hours from the river of grass, and has worked on the project since, immersing himself in the unforgiving environment that is the Everglades. Johnston, from Ft. Pierce, has worked on plenty of projects and assignments in his home-state, detailing the life of working in junkyards to rigging ballyhoos while trolling for pelagic species in the Gulf-stream just off Southern Florida’s east coast. It’s safe to say that Johnston has an immense amount of investment in working towards sustainable conservation, so I caught up with him recently to detail some of the finer points of his project, N 27º/25º. 

Michael Adno: How did you begin this project? And what was your approach?

Dylan Johnston: I first started working on it in my senior year of College [2013]. A dear friend mentioned the python challenge, and it sounded compelling to me, so I went down and took a look. I went down just with a large format camera and eight sheets of film. I shot those eight sheets, and then I decided I would go back next week and really dive into it. The hunt is directed toward eradicating this invasive species [Burmese python] that kill and adversely effect the native species in the Everglades. So after that first trip, I wanted to bring a level of awareness to the issue as I’m a native Floridian. I wanted to help protect Florida in a way, if I could. That first trip opened my eyes, and I realized I wanted to keep working on the project from that point.

Adno: What was your method? What were you looking for in making these photographs?

Johnston: There’s a lot of different areas of the Everglades, some that don’t allow hunting whatsoever, but during January and February there are certain areas that allow hunting but only for the Burmese python of course. I would just drive those roads. I didn’t know any hunters, especially when I first started, so I’d look for camps of hunters and try to meet people, which would involve me staking out the place and waiting for somebody to come by. I’d try to tag along with them if I could. Sometimes, I’d walk with them for three, four hours. Sometimes, I would take their photograph, and they would take off afterward. I was looking for hunters rather than snakes though, because if I could find a hunter then I could find a snake more easily. Most of it was driving around aimlessly, taking my car as far as it would go into the woods and possibly travelling by foot if I saw something further down the road where my car couldn’t go.

Adno: How did you approach your subjects and present what you were doing?

Johnston: I had an elevator pitch, a short thirty second bit. I would either say I’m shooting an assignment or explain that I was trying to bring awareness to this issue. I would of course try to help on the hunt—in any way that I could. But I’m good at bullshitting with strangers I realized because of this project. I’m good at meeting somebody and talking shit with them, forming a quick relationship. Also, I would feel it out. Some guys didn’t want me there, so I would try and make an image and then tell them to, ‘Have a good day. Have a good hunt.’ It was usually just a matter of feeling people out, and if I seemed welcomed, I would tag-along. Sometimes, I’d be allowed to follow them around the entire day.

Adno: Do the hunters have a concern for conservation or are they more interested in hunting and the opportunity to hunt a snake?

Johnston: When I first went, during the 2013 season, there was a lot more people hunting than in 2016. I met a lot of good-ole-boys, more rednecks, who were out there for the thrill of the hunt, just to say they killed a python. It was a good mix though. Some were out there for the trophy aspect but a lot were also there to help the Everglades.  It’s also a bragging rights type of story. I would say ninety percent were there to help and understood it as a serious issue that deserved more attention. In 2016, I think I only saw one raccoon and no other small animals. It was unbelievable. The snakes are eating everything and contributing in part to the area’s fragility.

Adno: How well supervised is the event? How much can people get away with?

Johnston: If you find a python in the wild, you can kill it, no questions asked. The Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC), wants you to report it so they know the size of the snakes and where they were found, but it’s really just limited to where you can use a gun. Like in the Big Cypress Preserve, you can’t hunt, except during the first two weeks of the hunting season when they lift the ban specifically for python hunting. So if you find ten snakes on your property, you can kill ten snakes, but they just ask that you report it. During the hunt, there’s restrictions on what species of snakes you can kill, and it’s limited to the Burmese python. If you kill a cottonmouth and are caught, you’ll be disqualified and fined. FWC patrols the areas, but they rely heavily on word of mouth via other hunters. When I was there, one group saw another group come across a rattlesnake and kill it pointlessly, so they let FWC know etc. Like I said before, some are just there for bragging rights or to kill a snake, but most people are there to help. On the second day of the season, an FWC officer actually shot and killed a sixteen-foot python, which may have won the challenge if he wasn’t banned from participating. But more to the point if you or I were there, we could legally kill a python.

Adno: You don’t need a tag or permit to hunt pythons?

Johnston: There’s permits for the competition/challenge. They give you a list of rules and instructions etc. It costs twenty-five dollars and gives the FWC a sense of how many hunters are out there or how many guns are in the area roughly. That ensures that the people participating in the hunt know what they’re doing. Grab them this way. Transport them like this. You can’t hunt here etc. It’s also a way to make people more aware of the risks involved. Snakes are everywhere not to mention gators, but keeping hydrated is also a concern there.

Adno: Have you heard any horror stories or particularly compelling stories about python hunting?

Johnston: Well, I haven’t heard any horror stories, but one of the groups that I met up with—called the Swamp Apes, managed by this guy Tom Rahill—is an interesting one. He organizes this hunting group made up of veterans, mostly with post-traumatic-stress disorder. And he does it weekly, bringing in a ton of snakes. If he feels like going hunting, he’ll go that night and call a few people. There’s a lot of other people who go out and specifically target pythons, but it’s not as organized as the Python Challenge. Essentially, they only need a permit for the guns they use and to be in an area where you can use a gun. The state officials who look after the area just want it to be done humanely. They don’t want people to stab or prolong the death of the snakes, so they often encourage people to capture them and then bring them into a designated drop-off station alive.

Adno: How do you personally see the python challenge?

Johnston: I see it as helpful. They’re not putting a big dent in the snake population, but they’re helping in other ways by bringing light to the issue that the Everglades is extremely fragile. I mean one clear point they’ve made is that the invasive population of Burmese pythons began with people who owned exotic pets and released them here in South Florida. And now they’ve taken over the environment, wiping out bird populations, gators, etc. I believe the hunt is helpful just for conservation, but the Burmese python is just one of many invasive species that have been introduced in Florida.

Adno: Are you drawn to any of the other invasive species that Florida has?

Johnston: I met a few people who were hunting monitor lizards when I was there, but I didn’t spend too much time with them as it was a completely different story. I’m actually dying to work on a story about lionfish in Florida. The Florida Keys are littered with them, and fisherman are required by law to kill them if caught or sighted while diving. I actually ate some of it during the python challenge. It’s pretty good. I’d eat it again.

Adno: What would you like to see happen in the Everglades?

Johnston: It’s sad, because it is truly the only environment in the world like this. So between the water output from Lake Okeechobee and the snakes, it’s a natural catastrophe aided by people. It’s so difficult to clean that place up. It’s a natural filtration system that’s being wiped out. It’s a great area for enjoying the place recreationally whether it’s hunting with regard for conservation or the air-boat culture, so I don’t think they should limit that any more, but eliminating the invasive species should be a top priority. I want people to enjoy it as it is and not to cause anymore harm if that’s possible.

Adno: Do you think of the people who enjoy the Everglades recreationally as proponents of preserving the environment?

Johnston: Yes, most of the people I’ve met are absolutely invested in trying to protect the place. We mentioned Tom Rahill, bringing in a few snakes a week, getting out there when he can. The people who are out there for the thrill of the hunt or the trophy, they go out for a long weekend shoot some guns, drink some beer, and they play no part in it. If they bring some snakes in, great, but they usually don’t.

Adno: What’s the Everglades like now?

Johnston: It’s all farms, very small towns, and still ‘old Florida.’ In Everglades City and Chokoloskee, a lot of immigrant laborers make up the communities there. It’s just acres and acres of crops with quiet small towns that revolve around hunting, fishing, and farming with an influx of agricultural jobs.

Adno: What do you think the ultimate reward for these hunters is?

Johnston: It’s a cool story to have. To catch a Burmese python is bragging rights. A lot of people do just want to help out, and if they can help out and have a story, that’s even better.

Click here to see more from Dylan Johnston's python hunter series. Text and interview by Michael Adno. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

 

The War Back Home: An Interview with Creative Polymath Nina Ljeti

Nina Ljeti is prolific. She is a writer, filmmaker, actress, and musician. Just a few of her many projects include: starring in films directed by and alongside James Franco; co-writing and co-directing the feature length film Memoria with Vladmir de Fontenay (which is out in theaters now); performing in her band, Nani; and shooting a biopic about Jerry Garcia. She has the creative output young artists have wet dreams about. But Nina Ljeti is prolific in another sense of the word. She is the daughter of Bosnian immigrants (who came to Canada at the start of the Bosnian Revolution) and a high school punk stoner; a film buff who loves Titanic and Coppola alike. Her richness isn't just in practice; it's in spirit and history as well. We got to ask Ljeti about memory, filmmaking, ghosts, and getting to play Patti Smith. Read it here.

Autre: You were born in Bosnia and Herzegovina just before the Bosnian War. Do you have any memories of that time? Did you grow up there? What was that like? 

Nina Ljeti: No. We left in 1992 when I was still a baby. We immigrated to Canada- my parents had never been there before and they didn't know the language. They were in a completely foreign setting, and they left everything they had and worked for to start a new life for me. I remember the daily struggle my parents dealt with just so we could eat and survive. And I remember them watching TV every night for any news of the war back home.


Autre: When did you know that you wanted to act and make films? Was it acting or filmmaking first? 

Ljeti: I started off wanting to be an actress/singer in high school, but I was also making films at the same time. I made my first movie when I was 14. They went hand-in-hand for me. As a kid, I was also writing a lot- poetry and short stories, mostly. I don't really act so much anymore- I'm primarily a director now. 

Autre: You've written and directed a number of films as well as acting, including co-writing and co-directing for Memoria. What's it like to be behind the camera? Do you prefer writing and directing to acting, or is it nice to be holistic in that way? 

Ljeti: I enjoy directing way more. The only time I really perform as an actress is if I'm collaborating on a project with James. My true passion is writing and telling stories- I love writing scripts and songs.  All I do in my spare time is read and write.  

Autre: What was it like co-directing and co-writing Memoria with Vladimir de Fontenay? 

Ljeti: I love Vlad. When we made Memoria he was much more experienced than I was as a director, so it was wonderful to learn from him and he was very supportive of me. He's my baguette. 

Autre: Memoria seems like your classic bilungsroman - a teenage guy struggles to find meaning amongst friends and family that "just don't get him." Did you find this was your connection to the film as well? Did you empathize with Ivan? What is your coming-of-age story? 

Ljeti: I connect with Ivan a lot. I wrote the script and a lot of the characters in the film are based on kids I knew in high school. My coming-of-age story is pretty classic. I got bullied a lot. I liked punk and thrash. I was overly sensitive and always skipped class to hang out with kids who 'understood me better.' I wrote a lot in my diary and smoked pot everyday at lunch but still got the best grades. I was also really depressed and sad all the time but, who wasn't? 
Memoria also has a great deal to do with memory (hence, the title) - is elusiveness and subjectivity.

Autre: What connections do you see between memory and writing, or memory and filmmaking?  

Ljeti: As a writer and filmmaker,  I draw from my memories as the main source for my work.  I always notice that small details will change in how I remember something---- I think to keep the feeling I felt in that moment alive so I never forget (i'm talking about memories of love) and then this memory will replay in my head over and over even after I've used it (and this part is torture).  

Autre: You've worked with James Franco on Rebel, Memoria, and the upcoming film Zeroville. How did you two meet, and why do you think so work so well together? 

Ljeti: We met at NYU seven years ago. It's really rare to meet someone who shares your passion for creating and exploring. He's the only person I met who is as curious as I am. I think that's why we continue to work together- there's always something new to try. 

Autre: In Zeroville, you play Patti Smith. That's amazing. Did you do anything to try to get into her head? 

Ljeti: I was just performing on stage as her, so I really just tried to emanate her performance technique. This bit of study did help me a lot with performing in my band (that I sing and write the lyrics for).  

Autre: Zeroville deals with the ghosts of cinema, how they can haunt us despite their fictions and weave their magical thread into our daily lives. Have any films affected you in that way? 

Ljeti: Titanic. I watched it when I was 6 and it set a very unrealistic standard of love for me. Also Coppola's Dracula. I wish vampires were real. And I wish Disney movies were life. And that Marlon Brando could live forever.

Autre: Along that same vein, Hollywood can be kind of this ghostly, mythical place. Have you found that in your time in Los Angeles? 

Ljeti: No, I haven't found any ghosts in Los Angeles. All the ghosts I've seen are back in New York. That's where my heart is. 

Autre: What projects are you working on now? 

Ljeti: My next film is the biopic of Jerry Garcia, which I wrote and will be shooting this July. I also have a band called Nani, and we're going to be releasing our first EP sometime this year. 

Memoria, written and directed by Nina Ljeti and Vladimir Fontenay,  is out now in select theaters. Text and interview by Keely Shinners. photographs by Kevin Hayeland. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Love Is Something Heavy: An Interview with Mixed Media Artist Sara Rahbar

Sara Rahbar is an artist who bravely transverses borders and permeates boundaries. Though often labeled an “Iranian American artist” (her family fled Iran in 1982 during the beginning of the Revolution), she prefers to relocate herself in a collective humanity. Transcending genre, her work ranges from photography and paint to textiles and sculpture. Rahbar’s work reflects this permeability, combining seemingly antithetical ideas – American flags sewn together with traditional Middle Eastern fabrics, hearts made out of military backpacks – in a beautiful and generative juxtaposition.

At the same time that Rahbar moves fluidly between varying geographies and ideations, she maintains immovable strength in herself and her work. She says, “I love strong things.” Here, she’s talking about working with bronze in sculpture. But this statement speaks to the artist’s attitude towards art, selfhood, and humanity at large. In a world where pervasive pain and violence can feel crippling, Rahbar is able to find peace – by going vegan, by thinking critically, and namely, by concretizing our anxieties through art.

Sara Rahbar will be showing new work from now until May 6th at NADA in New York City for Carbon 12 Dubai Gallery. We got to talk to the artist before the opening about exploring identity, documenting history through art, and communicating emotion in the age of superficiality.  

OLIVER KUPPER: Your work deals a lot with conflict and identity loss. This sense of tumult has really seeped into your upbringing. Do you have really clear memories of leaving Iran during the revolution?

SARA RAHBAR: No, I really don’t. I have blacked out a lot. I left Iran when I was like four and a half or five. And I can barely remember anything from that whole time period. In the beginning people just assumed that my work was about identity because my first body of work was the flag series, but I wasn’t thinking about identity  at all when I made them, it was always about so much more than that for me.

KUPPER: That’s really interesting.

RAHBAR: It’s more about what I’ve witnessed. I’m recording, like a camera, this history that’s happening around me. I don’t think much about my identity. I don’t care much about it, to be honest with you. The only time I care about it is when I am being labeled. Being labeled as “Iranian American” really bothers me. I just don’t feel like I’m any of those things. I’m just a human being living on the planet earth.

KUPPER: So at that age, you really had no memory of that. The art you’re making now came from a later period. And it was just a circumstance.

RAHBAR: I don’t consciously try to bring anything back into my work. Iran is such a faded memory for me. The last couple of times that I was there, I felt so disconnected. The memories are gone and it doesn’t feel like home. I’ve stopped going back. I don’t remember anything enough to actually be able to use it in my work. But there’s something there. The memories are gone, but the feelings are left. There’s a lot that is subconscious – frustration, anger, fear, confusion. But I’m definitely not trying to mesh any two cultures or identities together, I just follow my instincts when it comes to my work.

KUPPER: How old were you when you started to communicate your ideas through art?

RAHBAR: I think I started drawing when I was very little. I think that i was around five or six years old. I remember collecting stuff and drawing. Of course, I didn’t think it was anything serious. I just always liked making things.

KUPPER: You were being creative.

RAHBAR: Yeah. I think it was an instinct.

KUPPER: Were your parents really traditional, or did they support you being creative?

RAHBAR: They weren’t very traditional. My mom, and my brother were always very supportive. At the same time, I don’t think anyone really understood what the hell I was doing or why, including me. There definitely was a fear of, “How the hell are you going to be able to support yourself doing this?” I wouldn’t say anyone was religious, traditional, or conservative. Nothing like that at all.

KUPPER: It’s rare when a kid wants to become an artist.

RAHBAR: Unless you have a family that has a background in the arts, it can be be kind of scary thing. It’s hard to imagine how you’re actually going to sustain yourself from doing this.  There is a lot of unknown, like everything else in life.

KUPPER: What did your parents do?

RAHBAR: My mom was a social worker in Iran. She worked with runaways and abused children. But when she came to the US with my father they went into the restaurant business. You have your degree when you’re in your home country, and you come to a new country and you have to start from scratch. When we came here, we had nothing, and my uncle owned a restaurant. So that’s where my father went to work. It was easy and it paid the bills for a family of four. And later on they eventually went on to own their own restaurant.

KUPPER: Well, Americans love to eat. You open a restaurant, and Americans will be there to eat the food. 

RAHBAR: [Laughs.] Yeah, you figure, it’s a basic necessity…

KUPPER: You went back to Iran, and you worked on a really interesting photography series. What did you discover about your return and this work? What did you discover about yourself?

RAHBAR: That was when I finished school. And by “finished school,” I mean I ran out of money. So I had to figure some things out. I didn’t understand what it meant to have a body of work, or to do a series. I just knew that I had to find my own voice. My first instinct – and I always go by instinct – was to take a plane right from school in London to Iran. Everything happened like a domino effect. It was the 2015 election, so there was a combination of influences. First, I would go into the studio with all these things I had collected – costumes, objects and decorations that were used for horses and donkeys, random things I’d find in flea markets. At the same time, I was documenting the elections with sound and photography. For some reason, the camera was the first thing that I picked up when I went there. I always painted and drew, but it wasn’t enough for me. So I figured, I’ll do photography, sound, and projection. Painting always left me feeling like I needed more. Also, in Iran, I had a lack of space, so it was just easier to photograph. Everything was so new and different. I kept going back and forth, photographing and documenting. Now, when I look back on it, I think, “What the hell was that?” Not the stuff on the streets with the election, but the stuff in the studio. I don’t know what the hell that was. It was just about objects and color. I was trying to sort some things out. I’m more connected to the sculptures I’m doing now. I feel like the photographs were me trying to resolve something in my head.

KUPPER: Or it was an experiment.

RAHBAR: That period was very experimental. I was also super young. This was ten years ago. It was very raw. Like, “I like this. So I’m going to put it on my head and take a photo.” But then again I was just following my very basic and immediate instincts, and I still am. [Laughs.]

KUPPER: Did you ever feel like what you were doing was going to be censored while you were there?

RAHBAR: For sure. But I always knew that I would leave eventually. There was always this angst and discomfort that I felt when I was in Iran. I was always reminded somehow that I was a foreigner and a woman, and this always made me feel very uncomfortable. So I always knew that I could never show the work there, or stay there long term.

"There are so many different elements at play– violence, workers, pain, love; it’s the human condition.  Being alive on this planet and trying to go from one day to the next. I don’t really think it through too much. It’s instinctual. It comes from what I’m witnessing around me."

KUPPER: Is that why you left, to be able to show that work?

RAHBAR: No. It was like a relationship that comes to an end. It just ran its course. I remember waking up and being like, “I’m done.” I’m getting a plane ticket and not coming back.

KUPPER: Interesting. And you went to New York after that?

RAHBAR: Anywhere can be your home; it’s for you to decide what “home” means to you. You can restart anywhere.  And for me, New York has always felt like my home.

KUPPER: Did the flag series become before or after that? Or during?

RAHBAR: I made my first flag for my graduation project when I was still in London. It was right around that time of the crazy chaos of 9/11. I never thought that in 10 years I would make 52 flags.

KUPPER: As a mixed media artist, what do you enjoy about each medium that you employ, and what are some of their limitations?

RAHBAR: I can’t think of too many limitations. I love bronze, and I love wood, and there are so many different kinds of wood and bronze, and so many different techniques that can be used, I’m learning more and more every day. I didn’t specifically study art. So I don’t have any specific technical skills. I make things and I learn as I go along. And I don’t think that that is necessarily a bad thing. I make mistakes, I figure things out and I don’t let anything stop me, I keep moving forward no matter what. And I like that freedom. Sometimes, it’s a limitation and it can be frustrating. With bronze especially, because it’s expensive, definite, and time-consuming. But I feel like it’s good to make mistakes, learn and make your own way. Sometimes the mistakes are the best things that can possibly happen, good things can happen when you let go and let things come on their own, naturally.

I always knew that I was going to do sculpture. Working with textiles, painting, and taking photos, always felt safer for me somehow, it took me a while to make that jump to bronze and wood. I had to work up the courage, but now I feel completely free.

KUPPER: There’s a lot of freedom, but you also have a lot of control over your materials. It seems like control is also an integral part of your work. Would you say that’s true?

RAHBAR: I have issues with control. It’s a very strong underlying theme in my work– guns, police nightsticks– objects that hold things down, hold things together, and contain things. I use these objects a lot. It definitely stems from my childhood. I don’t like to feel controlled. I have issues with police and authority. It comes through in my work.

KUPPER: What can we expect with your new work being shown with Carbon 12 at NADA?

RAHBAR: It’s new work. I’m recording a history that is taking shape and form around me. There are a lot of old tools and guns used in these works.  They are like these historical sculptural totem poles. There are so many different elements at play– violence, workers, pain, love; it’s the human condition.  Being alive on this planet and trying to go from one day to the next. I don’t really think it through too much. It’s instinctual. It comes from what I’m witnessing around me. And If I sit there and analyze it too much, I will kill it.

KUPPER: It’s hard to live sometimes. It’s a very intense world.

RAHBAR: [Laughs.] Not to be depressing and negative, but that’s how it is.

KUPPER: It seems like we have art to be able to put those pieces together, like a psychological puzzle.

RAHBAR: Exactly.

KUPPER: Which is why your work is so interesting. Is your work about finding peace or coping with war?

RAHBAR: I would like to find peace. I find peace when I’m making the work. I was definitely not at peace when I was younger. I’m getting closer to it as I get older. As long as I’m working, there is peace within me. I’m very aware, that when I’m not working, I’m uncomfortable in my own skin. The work makes me feel comfortable, and allows me to be able to be with myself, and the world around me. My work is very therapeutic for me. It saves me from myself time and time again.

I’m very sensitive, I don’t like seeing humans or animals in pain. I’m a vegan, and it upsets me tremendously when I see animals being slaughtered and tortured. Images of war upset me, violence kills me, sometimes it feels like we are constantly trying to kill and eat everything around us. And there is so much happening at the same time, that it’s easy to become overwhelmed and feel exhausted and paralyzed.

KUPPER: I agree with you. There’s a lot happening.

RAHBAR: You just want to hit pause, and tell everybody to stop what ever it is that they’re doing.

KUPPER: You just want to stop and have a moment to think, and get people to consider what they’re doing.

RAHBAR: Humans behave very badly. We are constantly attempting to kill off each other, this plant and all the living things that live on this plant with us.

KUPPER: The animal torture, the war– with the Internet, you have so much access to what’s going on. It gets even more intense because you can’t hide from it.

RAHBAR: Exactly. I go on Instagram, and I get so overwhelmed sometimes. The images, the videos – there’s so much access and information. And just because you aren’t looking at it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.

KUPPER: Do you have any other series that you’re working on? Or are you continuing to work with these materials? Do you have a dream project you want to work on?

RAHBAR: I feel like bronze is my dream material. I love strong things. Glass makes me super uncomfortable. Lace, soft fragile things make me uncomfortable. Bronze makes me so happy. I feel like I found my material. And mixing wood and bronze together, that’s my happy place. Right now, I’m working on a lot of isolated body parts in bronze.  I read this quote the other day by Benjamin Alire Saenz that really got to me: “Love was always something heavy for me. Something that I had to carry.” …That hit me supper hard when I read it, and It has been the inspiration for the body of work that I’m working on currently.

Bronze, on its own, can feel cold, but when I combine the bronze with wood and the objects that I collect, it softens it some how. Making objects with bronze and wood, that’s my happy place. 

You can see new work by Sara Rahbar at Carbon 12 Dubai's booth (4.05) during the NADA Art Fair in New York from May 5 to May 8, 2016. Intro text by Keely Shinners. Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photographs by Arash Yaghmaian

Chaos Theory: An Interview With Multifaceted and Legendary Artist Nick Waplington

Talking with photographer and painter Nick Waplington is akin to viewing and pondering his work. There is a lot of information to sort through. But if you can find some order in the onslaught of ideas, or the “chaos” as he likes to call it, you will find a perspective wildly and almost enviably unique. The subjects of his conversation are as varied as those within his photographs and his paintings. While Waplington’s work has dealt with environmental concerns, rave culture, the creative processes and inner struggles of the late Alexander McQueen, and (as in his paintings) his own inner monologue, a 40-minute conversation with Waplington darts around discussions about his creative process, international politics, the contemporary art world and the business surrounding it, and even skateboarding.

It’s sometimes difficult, as a journalist, to dilineate between being a journalist and a fan. And I am a super fan of Nick Waplington. He was one of the photographers that radically altered my perceptions of the form, and it was difficult to not lean all my questions towards his photographic practice even when now his paintings are a large part of his artistic output, especially with his incredible exhibition of recent paintings at These Days gallery in Los Angeles entitled, ‘A Display of Panic in a Moment of Absolute Certainty.’ In that, it’s important to note that Waplington is not simply, “Nick Waplington the painter,” or “Nick Waplington the photographer,” but that he is “Nick Waplington the artist.” All the mediums he works in (also including video, computer-generated imagery, sculpture, and found material) become part of a cohesive, if almost manically diverse, body of work. While his photos reveal an almost poetically chaotic point of view on Waplington’s external world, his paintings offer the viewer a look inside his internal world allowing us to examine his beliefs, thoughts, and emotions. “I’ve been making art daily since I was 15-years-old.” Now, I’m nearly 51,” says Waplington. Ultimately, what you get is this large body of work that progresses. A lot of artists, especially photographers, have a short phase. To stay fresh, and to not make the same work over and over, is a challenge.”

The These Days exhibition is a result of Waplington living in Los Angeles for the past year and devoting his entire practice to painting. As with his photography, the paintings are sensitive to the environment that Waplington created them in. They are exploding in color and contrast, mimicking the city’s consistently beautiful weather in the face of global climate challenge. There is a glorious randomness to the imagery, almost as if Waplington finds himself searching for beauty amidst cultural marginalization Waplington and I caught up via Skype while he was at a skate park in England with his son.
 

NICK WAPLINGTON: This is the only spot where I can get Wifi in the skate park.

LEHRER: Are you skating right now?

WAPLINGTON: Yeah, I’m skating with my son.

LEHRER: That’s fantastic. I wish my dad skateboarded with me.  He was always trying to get me to golf, and then would get frustrated when I couldn’t make the shot.

WAPLINGTON: [Laughs.] It’s a nice day here.

LEHRER: I’ve been looking at your paintings, and they’re beautiful. First, I was really curious, do you feel like you artwork is reflective of the environment you created it in? I ask because I felt like your early photographs had this chilly, muted feel to them. While your paintings, which were primarily done in Los Angeles, were more bright, exploding in color and contrast. Is that at all accurate?

WAPLINGTON: Well, these are not the first paintings I made, but I can’t help but be affected by [the LA] kind of environment. The light really influenced my time in LA. I have an outdoor studio that I enjoy painting in. I’ve been immersed in painting since I’ve been in LA. There’s a flow [to my paintings]. Ideas move from one painting to the next. Everything is a progression like that.

LEHRER: And you like Los Angeles?

WAPLINGTON: Yeah, yeah. I’ve lived there before, so for me, it’s very easy to get back to where I left off.

LEHRER: Do you feel like you’re the type who can find something to love about every type of place you go?

WAPLINGTON: Yeah. I find everything interesting. Being in different places for long periods of time - I really feed off that. In my life, I’ve spent extensive periods in Sao Paolo, Zurich, Los Angeles, Sydney, London, New York… I’ve used that as a catalyst for making work. It’s always good to throw everything up in the air every once in a while, you know?

LEHRER: Absolutely. One thing I’ve found most compelling in your work is that there always seems to be, at least to me, a central conflict driving it. With the McQueen photos, there was this contrast between this masterful artisan at work and a guy struggling with exhaustion and massive expectations. With West Bank, there were obvious political conflicts inherent in that region. Are you purposefully looking for these conflicts?

WAPLINGTON: I have all sorts of problems. I certainly wouldn’t want to do therapy to straighten myself out. I deal with my own personal edginess. Often, within my work, there’s a kind of autobiographical stream to it. All the projects – including McQueen, to a certain degree – were characters similar [to me] in some respects. The title of the McQueen book refers to my working process as much as his.

LEHRER: I feel like that’s why you’ve been so successful. Your subjects are so varied, in painting and photography. But they all feel a part of one, definitive vision. Is that something that you strive for?

WAPLINGTON: Yeah. I’m always trying to order out some chaos. I’m not an artist that has one thing. I can’t really understand that limited scope. “I’m a geometric artist… I’m a body artist…” You know? I’m always looking for the next thing – reading, meeting people and finding new things to make work about.

LEHRER: I feel like it’s almost implemented by the industry. Even on the media side of things, I like to write about everything – music, art, news, fashion, whatever. But I have editors that will tell me to stay in my lane, to pick one thing and focus on that. I can’t imagine ever writing about one thing.

WAPLINGTON: That’s the problem with the galleries. They want artists who are known for a type of work. Collectors want to collect a type of work. There’s a narrowing of perspective. It makes it harder to sell work. But in the long term, it makes the work much more interesting. I haven’t allowed my work to be defined by people other than myself.If people like it, they like it. If not, it’s okay.

LEHRER: So it’s not Nick Waplington, the Photographer AND Nick Waplington, the Painter? It’s just Nick Waplington, the Artist?

WAPLINGTON: I just see it all as my work. I don’t need to separate things.

LEHRER: I feel like These Days was an appropriate gallery choice in that way because they do anti-establishment stuff. Your work’s core has a sense of, “I’m going to do what I want.”

WAPLINGTON: It’s not a gallery that’s functioning in the art world, as such. It’s basically a space where they put on shows that they like. It It was interesting to take over the space and use the space as functioning for the art world, even though it’s not known for having art world shows. We like that. I like that side of Downtown. I’ve been interested in Downtown [Los Angeles] since the late 90s when I was living in Eaglerock. I was going to a lot of rave parties down there at that point. 

LEHRER: Yeah, for sure. LA, at that time, was really defined by skateboarding and surf culture.

WAPLINGTON: That’s changing too. But all these new concrete skateparks are popping up. I try to get to Glendale skatepark whenever I get a moment. At my age, if you want to keep skating, you have to skate. 

LEHRER: I see some of these guys, like Andrew Reynolds, frontside flipping twenty stairs at age 38. How are his knees not collapsing right now?

WAPLINGTON: I saw a video of a 55 year old Lance Mountain kickflipping a table. It’s crazy. 

LEHRER: I don’t want to get too off on a tangent, but I remember when I was really into skateboarding in the early 2000s, and the first Flip video came out. I remember thinking, “This is the best that skateboarding is ever going to be.” I watch a video now, and the kids who are skating now are sorcerers. 

WAPLINGTON: Yeah. But you have a generation of kids who are growing up with concrete skateparks. My son is 11, and he’s here every day he can be here. Obviously, they’re going to be doing all sorts of shit that wasn’t possible 10 or 15 years ago. 

LEHRER: I wanted to talk to you about the chaos you refer to in your work. Is this chaos an internal or external chaos?

WAPLINGTON: I am dyslexic and left handed, so everything is slightly chaotic with me. I’m drawn to the fringes of society, in the world in general, but especially in LA. Republican states have been sending all their homeless people on buses to California. I’ve been quite influenced by these very large tent cities that have been growing along the freeways, as you go down towards Long Beach. I’ve been hanging out there and vibeing off that a little bit. I’ve been thinking about how these things compare with the 1940s when people were moving from Oklahoma and Tennessee to California, and they were living in the LA River in tents instead. Somehow, it seems like America is in need of a New Deal again, as you were lucky enough to get with Roosevelt. There’s a strangulation of the economy right now. It doesn’t transpose itself directly into the work, but there’s a psycho-geographical feel to some of the paintings. 

LEHRER: It is an interesting time to live in the US. It feels like the US it at a huge crossroads. A good portion of the country wants to move forward – vote for Bernie Sanders, get universal free healthcare, raise the minimum wage. And then there’s this other half that is completely reactionary and places all the blame of minorities and immigrants.

WAPLINGTON: There’s a contradiction in the GOP point of view. They want to bring down the trade barriers that exist between America and the rest of the world, so there is a mobile free trade area. But then they want America to be separatist from the rest of the world and still have the higher stander of living. They don’t want to engage with the rest of the world; they want to use the rest of the world as a production facility. If they’re going to remove the trade barriers, they’re going to have to engage with everyone else. They can’t have it both ways, but they don’t really understand that. It’s interesting times, definitely. 

LEHRER: What feels more at peace for you in art? Is it photography or painting?

WAPLINGTON: I like doing both, I really do. Maybe as I get older, I might be out there taking pictures less than I am in the studio. But I’m still taking pictures all the time. I had this book a couple of years ago, the Patriarch’s Wardrobe, in which I combined photograph and painting. Now, I’m making a new body of work that includes some of the paintings in the show. I’m going to combine photos and paintings again. I might add text, too. I’m very much a solo worker. I don’t have a team of people working with me. Everything that’s made by me is really made by me.

LEHRER: I really loved the Brooklyn Museum exhibit you were featured in, ‘This Place.’ I included it an article for Forbes about the best exhibitions of the winter. I got a weird email about it from a publicist. I wrote something about it being political, and she said, “No, no, can you take that out? It’s not political.” I was thinking, “How can anything about the West Bank be not political?” I want to know what your take was on that experience, and if you think politics can be removed from a discussion about The West Bank.

WAPLINGTON: I don’t think politics can be removed, but I tried to make work that wasn’t dealing directly with politics. I wanted to make work that had connectivity and time to it. I wanted my work to be a catalyst for dialogue about the West Bank. I want to make work about Jews in the West Bank that wasn’t about conflict with the Palestinians. It was, “Here is the landscape. Here are the Jewish people. What do you think about that?” The sculptural element was adding the Palestinians into the equation in a hidden way. It reminded me of being in South Africa during apartheid, when they managed to hide black people away somehow. I know that it’s very contentious to compare the West Bank to South Africa, especially amongst Jewish people, but the parallels are there, unfortunately. I am Jewish, you know that?

LEHRER: Yeah, I’m Jewish too. I don’t think, from a moral standpoint, that I can totally condone the hiding of an entire group of people who have lived there forever.

WAPLINGTON: Yeah. It’s just not fair, this collective punishment. I really believe that it would be possible to make a kind of deal that was to everyone’s advantage. I think it’s really doable and possible. There’s this idea that the other group will just go away at some point. It’s ridiculous.

LEHRER: It’s insane to me that Bernie Sanders is our first Jewish presidential candidate. He just said that he would support a two-state deal, and he was called anti-Israel by every publication in the country.

WAPLINGTON: Yeah. Well, the West Bank is the biblical land of Israel. They’re not going to give it up. Let’s be honest about that. I think the two-state solution looks great on paper, but it seems impossible. It’s not going to be split, so it’s about finding a solution with both groups of people within one state, in my opinion.

LEHRER: It does seem like that. The optimist in me wants to think anything is possible, but I haven’t been there.

WAPLINGTON: 25% of the people in Israel are Arab. I just believe that if it’s one state, they might as well incorporate the West Bank, give everyone the vote, and have a constitution that gives people their rights. They can be called Israel and Palestine. Why not? We already have a country with two different populations. Half of Malaysia is Chinese and secular, whereas the other half is Muslim. And they make it work. I think if they do it, after a few years, they’ll be wondering what all the fuss as about.

LEHRER: Once peace is actually achieved, people start to realize, what was the fighting for? This is so much better.

WAPLINGTON: I believe it can be worked out. People think I’m crazy for believing that. 

Nick Waplington "A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty" will be on view at These Days LA until June 5, 2016. Text and interview by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Flo Kohl. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Dark Aesthetics: An Interview With Actor Anton Yelchin and Kate Parfet On Their Photographic Collaboration

Today on Autre, we present a photographic editorial by actor Anton Yelchin – who stars in a new movie called Green Room as a member of a punk band that is forced to battle violent white supremacists after witnessing a murder – and model/photographer Kate Parfet set in a desolate landscape in Joshua Tree. Eschewing the traditional late sixties vibe that most photographers try to achieve in the desert, Yelchin and Parfet went for a darker and grittier aesthetic that harkens runaway fugitives playing with a camera at their hideout. We thought it appropriate to ask them a few questions about the shoot, their collaborative process and how photography is different than their respective "day jobs."  

Autre: How did you both discover and become interested in photography?

Kate Parfet: Growing up, I spent several summers on a lake in Vermont at Lochearn Camp for Girls; an attempt to socialize an introverted preteen without a list of extracurricular passions.  While I didn’t take to waterskiing or the proverbial basket weaving as expected, I did take to taking photos of inanimate objects on the disposable cameras I’d buy at the canteen. I’d process the images in town, collage them and make into small zines.

Anton Yelchin: At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood. Somewhere, there are albums filled with prints of roses, like a backlog of unused images for air freshener ads. I only started to take photography more seriously and shooting more aggressively a few years ago.

Autre: Kate, you are also a model, what do you get from being behind the camera that you can’t get from being in front of it?

Parfet: While I like the collaborative process of working with a full team on a more traditional editorial shoot, I use the camera to snap the world felt and seen in my head. Anton tends to shoot more portraits and I gravitate towards the in between moments.  We’re both incredibly obsessive with detail and like to control the elements of the frame - light, positioning and color balance.  I’m must admit we’ve talked ad nauseam about how many stops to push a photo.  Funny enough I still don’t think we’re any closer to our answer.

Autre: Anton, you are an accomplished and talented actor, but also a talented photographer, do you feel like you can express yourself differently with a camera opposed to being a mark or taking directives?

Yelchin: Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.) I've always liked the idea of lining images up into a kind of "story" but without any particular beginning, middle, or end, which is more in line with what I think of narrative anyway and is something that Kate and I bonded over. I think the beauty of images is that they are by definition fetishes and every image (banal or not) as a fetish holds within it the promise of a sensuousness that (without generalizing) at least I, as a human being, am drawn to. I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium.

Autre: Who are some photographers or artists that you are both inspired by?

Yelchin: I think what inspires me is in a constant state of flux...it's easier to stick to photographers and perhaps cinematographers, though the great medieval, Mannerist, and Baroque painters of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and German origin are a constant source of inspiration, along with select modernists like Dali. Hieronymous Bosch holds an especially tight hold on my imagination. Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Jacob Holdt, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin, Philip Lorca de Corca...images in Cassavetes films, the new Romanian Cinema and the work of DP Oleg Mutu...the cinematographer Michael Chapman. I've always loved Brassai's images of prostitutes at night. I've recently been very influenced by the images in the old AtomAge magazines. Kenneth Anger's work.  The list goes on. I already sound like an ass so best to stop there.

Parfet: I too am inspired by Nan Goldin and other contemporaries like Todd Hido, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Alec Soth. The work of poets Angela Rawlings, Susan Howe and Gretchen Mattox, to name a few, give me a roadmap in my head for the images I seek out when attempting to step outside myself and try a new direction.

"....Kate and I agreed that it would be more interesting to bring some of our personal tastes into a setting that hasn't generally been aligned with that aesthetic. The desert also makes me think of aliens, and aliens make me think of glam rock and glam rock inevitably makes me think of leather and leather makes me think of...well..."

Autre: When you are both shooting each other, do you communicate or is it intuitive?

Parfet: We tend to have a shorthand and a very intuitive feel for each other and for the images we want to create, so beyond small directions...it's quite easy and intuitive. A lot of people go to the desert because it’s the perfect place to shoot something that looks like it was taken in the late sixties, but you two went for grit opposed to glamour, why is that?

Yelchin: We both agreed on the sentiment that we are opposed to the banality of post '68 imagery that seems to pervade everything these days. For lack of a better term, I'm utterly turned off by all the hippy shit (I can envision Kate nodding enthusiastically in agreement.) We like Surrealistic Pillow as much as the next guy (begs the question, does the next guy even like Surrealistic Pillow?) but are opposed to stripping '68 (and other modes) of whatever transgressive attitudes it had at the time and using it and them purely as an aesthetic, which by and large is an action almost impossible to achieve with anything these days given the overwhelming prevalence of the Image in our culture and how everything becomes an advertisement for some mode of being. That being said, I think Kate and I agreed that it would be more interesting to bring some of our personal tastes into a setting that hasn't generally been aligned with that aesthetic. The desert also makes me think of aliens, and aliens make me think of glam rock and glam rock inevitably makes me think of leather and leather makes me think of...well...

Autre: Both of you shoot predominantly on film, or entirely on real film, do you think there is something lost in digital?  

Yelchin: I like film because it brings you very close to the absurd reality that you might spend a day shooting and not get a single image that you like or works, and you won't really know for a few days at least as you wait. It connects you and grounds you to a material reality and a patience that seems lost with digital. I also think the grain texture remains forever different, and in my opinion, what I find to be more beautiful.

Parfet: I just echo the sentiment really. The film process slows the brain against the immediate gratification epidemic of the digital age.

Autre: Anton, when you are on set, do you pine to get back out and shoot pictures or do you bring your camera with you when you shoot a movie?

Yelchin: I usually bring a point and shoot with me so I can go out on the weekends and shoot a bit. I used to bring more cameras, but I'm also an Ebay nut so sometimes I'll order something if I'm really pining for it when I'm on location.

Autre: There is something very real, almost dark, about both of your aesthetics, where do you think this comes from?

Parfet: I think acknowledging darkness is an important and natural part of self-exploration. My images help me process certain complex emotions instead of internalizing in an unhealthy way. 

Yelchin: I've always been drawn to a certain kind of dark aesthetic in cinema and in film, to what's abjected or considered abject. I've been tremendously influenced by noirish cinema whether that's Von Sternberg or Scorsese in the 70s or Lynch, etc.  

Autre: What’s next?

Yelchin: More film! Hopefully more ideas, more work. Trying to learn, trying to see differently.

Parfet: Playing in the unchartered waters of digital images. Helping set up a new photo studio concept in Tokyo’s Daikanyama district. Would like to get back to the desert at some point.  

You can see more of Anton Yelchin's photography by following his Instagram page. You can follow Kate Parfet here. Green Room is out now in theaters. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

 

 

Pushing Boundaries: An Interview With Claire Barrow

text by Adam Lehrer

UK-based fashion designer Claire Barrow has always married art and fashion in a way that feels proper. While most fashion labels re-interpret graphics by their favorite artists, Barrow has used her garments as a vehicle for her own images.

Born in Stockton-On-Tees, UK, Barrow found herself seduced by the sounds and imagery emanating from her local record shop as a teenager. While her classmates listened to Top 40 and wore their school uniforms, Barrow listened to bands on the atonal side of the rock spectrum (from Slayer to Sonic Youth) and found her own style by deconstructing and adding flair to her own school uniform. “I would wear all these ‘80s earrings. I would put patches on. I cut my tie,” says Barrow. “Getting into music, I just preferred metal and punk. I was finding my own records and being fully immersed in it. Music became my entire life.”

Barrow moved to London in 2008 to study fashion. Even though she already was making pictures, fashion seemed a more realistic career than being an artist. “There was a fashion course at my college, so I did fashion.”


From the beginning of her practice in fashion, Barrow illustrated on the garments she created. Those images, steeped in iconography of radicalism and sub-cultures, have made her one of the most exciting designers on the London Fashion Week ticket since she debuted her collection at Fashion East for Spring/Summer 2013.

But Barrow is a tireless creative and it was only a matter of time before she would grow interested in seeing her imagery take life on canvas. The exhibit ‘Claire Barrow: The Bed, The Bath, and The Beyond” that was on view at London’s M. Goldstein Gallery from April 17 to 24 found Barrow rendering the most private aspects of daily life, from taking a shower to using the restroom, and examining the ways in which we renew and revitalize ourselves in lack of spirituality and religion.

Claire Barrow and I spoke over Skype to discuss the exhibit, but also what it means to maintain a fashion brand in this exhausting system, why she is re-evaluating her place in this system, and her hopes of uniting a whole world of creative mediums under the Claire Barrow brand.

ADAM LEHRER: So many of your garments can stand alone as artworks. Were you interested in being an artist before you became a fashion designer?

CLAIRE BARROW: No. I wanted to be a fashion designer. Fashion seemed more realistic than being an artist. I wanted to be trained in how to make garments.

LEHRER: Does the interest in fashion come from creating something with an application? You can wear clothes and engage with garments in a way that you can’t with art.

BARROW: I don’t think I thought about the bigger picture. I’ve always illustrated the clothes I’ve made. I’ve enjoyed it. But now is the first time I’ve ever done canvases, which is really fun.

LEHRER: I’m sure. How does it feel in comparison?

BARROW: I think it’s a lot more confrontational. When someone wears clothes, they can hide. Namely, it changes for each viewer and wearer. I present models with their hair and makeup done. There’s a whole [aura] around it. People take what they want from fashion and use it in different ways. Plus, people need to wear clothes. With art, they’re just looking at that one thing. People can’t really interact with it. They can’t interrupt it in any way. It’s different.

LEHRER: Does it feel more vulnerable to have your images hanging on a wall than it does when making clothes?

BARROW: It feels equal. It’s hard to make clothes because you have to worry about everything – the fit, money, time. I don’t know the art industry quite yet, but it feels like you always have to prove yourself in the fashion world. There are so many people trying to do it. With the art, I don’t feel as much of that. That might be because I’m in an interesting position, having my own gallery show now. It might be different for me.

LEHRER: Everyone always talks about this connection between fashion and art. Usually, it’s just a brand taking an artist they like and turning their work into prints. Whereas, I feel like your garment work has been a vehicle for art. Do you agree with that?

BARROW: Yeah, I think so. I want to be taken seriously as an artist. Each garment is a whole presentation with its own concept. The concept that I just did was the “retrospective,” which was taking references from every era from history rather than one. Each garment made up the bigger picture.

LEHRER: I know you are friends with Reba Maybury (editor of outsider art and body mod mag Sang Bleu). I follow all your friends’ Instagram accounts. Your fashion brand is tied to these more subversive projects. Do you feel like a part of a loosely affiliated collective?

BARROW: Yeah, maybe. I feel like it’s coming to the surface now. There’s always been a strong group. We’re also just hanging out together, doing whatever. So that’s good. I actually want to come to New York.

LEHRER: To live or to visit?

BARROW: To live for a bit, I don’t know. Maybe three months.

LEHRER: People associate New York with being the most commercial in terms of fashion. At the same time, we have these really extreme brands – Ekhaus Latta, Moses Gauntlett Cheng. There’s this whole new thing going on that might fit in with what you’re doing.

BARROW: I think I’ll come and hang out with some of those guys. London feels a little stale at the moment. But that could be me right now.

LEHRER: People always talk shit about the city they live in.

BARROW: I feel like people don’t like London anymore. It’s so expensive. There’s less opportunity for young people. It’s harder because we have to pay huge student fees now. We’ve got really shit government at the moment.

LEHRER: We’re in a similar boat.

BARROW: No, because Bernie will win.

LEHRER: I hope so. Also, about the show, I want to talk to you about what your idea was around the “cleansing aspect” of the shower.

BARROW: I feel, personally, that I don’t hold onto anything sacred. I don’t have many beliefs. The only one I kind of have is self-preservation. I worry about social situations. It’s this social thing, rather than religion. I don’t have that much faith. But it’s not pessimistic. The characters in it are quite cute, and I wanted it to feel quite cute. It’s quite commercial, like cartoons in an advert or something like that.

LEHRER: So you’re not religious or spiritual at all?

BARROW: No. But I hate saying that. It makes me feel really sad and guilty. My parents made me go to church every day until I was 12. Some kids saw me going to church and started picking on me about it. It was weird.

LEHRER: So the shower is cleansing yourself of all the bullshit around you?

BARROW: It’s cleansing yourself of yourself and getting reborn every day.

LEHRER: You said your first reference was the anxiety of modern British life. Where do you think that anxiety is rooted?

BARROW: Social. People worry about being accepted, being normal, and fitting into a certain social scene. That seems like the main concern for young people right now, rather than worrying about what’s going to happen to them after they die. Now, we know everything, so it’s all about worrying about yourself.

LEHRER: That’s interesting. Now that we know that we’re going to be dead, all we worry about is who we are when we’re alive, who thinks we’re cool. Running a fashion brand and putting an exhibition together at the same time is a ton of work. Where do you think that work ethic comes from?

BARROW: I know how hard it is to do the two and continue making something good. I work as hard as possible. I don’t take it for granted. I haven’t had a family that has gotten me into places. I came from the north and I’ve tried to make it on my own.

LEHRER: I just read an interview you did with Eloise Parry in Heroine Magazine. You two talk about bonding over a Slayer patch. It got me thinking about your work. Aside from a few designers, when brands reference underground subculture, it’s always the same stuff. A Peter Saville graphic here, a Bowie reference there. You seem to really know music and subculture. Do you ever feel at odds with your interests and what most high fashion is trying to express?

BARROW: I think if you know about subculture, you know what people are not going to like and what you should use. One should respect that genre and subculture. People will be like, “Punk fashion: that’s what I’m trying to do,” and it doesn’t look punk anymore. But that’s a good thing! That’s real punk, rather than going for something that looks like “punk.” That’s real subculture.

LEHRER: When you look at Chris Brown wearing a studded leather jacket, you think, 'how punk could a studded leather jacket actually be?'

BARROW: But that’s the thing. ‘70s punk fashion isn’t punk anymore. Being punk now is being creative and new. It’s trying to push boundaries.

LEHRER: Do you think the Internet is collapsing subculture, combining and spreading it out? Do you think it’s a good thing that the focus is more on the individual? Like, someone can go online and find out about every type of music and decide what they like.

BARROW: I think so, yeah. I think it’s hard to create and be a part of a subculture now. It’s all nostalgia. There’s no music subculture now that has come from completely nothing, maybe Trap. It’s all about the individual. I think it’s a shame not to be an individual in this world.

LEHRER: You seem like someone who likes to fill up her head with different culture. Have you always been like that?

BARROW: Yeah, ever since I was 14. I was very quiet. My parents only liked popular culture and chart music. I started dressing quite strange at school. I would wear weird things with my uniform to dress it up a bit.

LEHRER: What were the first metal and punk bands you liked?

BARROW: I used to really like Carcass, when I was like 16. That was quite strange. One of them is from where I’m from. I liked New York Dolls. I liked Black Flag. I liked Sonic Youth. All the classic ones, I think.

LEHRER: To me, it seems like the name Claire Barrow could be associated with a wide scope of creativity. It couldn’t just be a fashion brand. It could be art. I know you said you want to do performance. Would you ever see your end game as the name Claire Barrow being associated with a whole dearth of culture and creativity?

BARROW: Yeah, that’s what I’m going towards now. I’m actually skipping a collection. That’s going to be weird. Everyone’s going to be mad, which is fine. That’s my life. I just want to do a bit of everything, honestly. And that’s so scary. It’s hard to make any money if you haven’t got a set job. But I want to go into different areas now.  

LEHRER: The fashion calendar feels like it’s going to collapse anyways.

BARROW: I don’t know if it will. People say it, but how could it actually collapse?

LEHRER: I know. People keep buying clothes.

BARROW: Half the fashion industry consists of these really commercial brands that no one’s heard of, but they have really rich customers. To rich people, there’s no problem.

LEHRER: There are so many amazing designers coming out of different cities. It’s a tragedy that we have this calendar that doesn’t seem conducive to new talent.

BARROW: The biggest problem is the new talent. How can you fund it? Let’s see what happens. That’s kind of why I want to take a break, to figure out that sort of thing. How could I do a couture thing where I only show a few pieces? It’s kind of a way to get your power back.

LEHRER: Did you find that painting for art gave you more ideas for fashion?

BARROW: It's made me feel the opposite. It’s given me more ideas for art.

Click here to visit Claire Barrow's site to view current collections and stockists. Text and interview by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Flo Kohl. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

What Will Become of Us: An Interview With The Bonnie Parker of Photography Julia Fox

text by Mike Krim

 

I first met Julia Fox two years ago in Manhattan. As I scanned the floor trying to figure out how much longer I felt like subjecting myself to $20 drinks and if “operation get rich girlfriend” was going to become an actual reality, I noticed from the corner of my eye a gorgeous brunette with an hour glass figure draped in sparkly diamonds, controlling her little corner of the room. As I thought to myself, “who the hell is this chic,” I immediately noticed her Man Ray tribute tattoo, inspired by his photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse with a violin grill superimposed on her back. I walked over, introduced myself, and immediately she informed me she was in the company of an African Prince. She filled my glass with expensive champagne and for whatever reason we discussed abortions, which offered an amazing and entertaining five minutes. Operation "get rich girlfriend" was a Benghazi-like failure, but at least walked out with a new number searing a hole in my pocket. Moving forward, Julia has been nothing short of controversy and success over the last couple years. She has been featured on various fashion sites featuring her clothing line Franziska Fox with co owner Briana Andalore, she has made Page 6 multiple times, and self published her acclaimed photo book Symptomatic of a Relationship Gone Sour: Heartburn/Nausea, which chronicles three relationships that have had a significant impact on Fox’s life; both of which have became instant cult classics amongst the zine world and collectors. With all this going on, Julia packed up her bags and left New York City to go to Louisiana for the last six months where she has been playing outlaw in the blue bayous with Salem's John Holland and Jack Donoghue, only to return with a new solo photography show curated by Richie Shazam and a new book titled PTSD, which will open and release May 1st at Magic Gallery in Manhattan. Below, I got a chance to ask Fox about the dangerousness of her work, drug use, gun play and PTSD. 

Autre: Let’s first start out with what made you leave NYC?

Julia Fox: I wanted to be scared. I forgot what that felt like. I hadn’t been lost in so long. I hadn’t tried anything new.  

Autre: It seems like you’ve lived many lives and you’ve explored a lot of these lives through your photography, why do you think the camera has been such an important tool for documentation?  

Fox: It definitely has. A camera tells the truth. It's such an honest tool and so very humbling. 

Autre: You explore sex, prostitution and drug use, why do you think these things are so fetishized in culture?  

Fox: Because people are attracted to things that are forbidden. 

Autre: Sexual images these days are being repressed and exploited on social media daily and porn is becoming more violent each year and considered the norm. Your work tends to showcase both worlds. What effect do you think this is having on young adults learning and exploring sexuality?

Fox: A woman is taught to be silent and to sweep things under the rug when things get messy. When she does speak up she is labeled a "drama queen" or a "crazy bitch.”  I think there comes an immense sense of power in expressing the truth about violence in love and during sex….exposing ones vulnerabilities and creating a dialogue surrounding different sexual and emotional experiences….women have urges. Women have fetishes. Women don't always have to be the sweet innocent ones who only have sex when they're in love. Women can exploit men as well as the other way around.  In my new book I explore my sexuality with a few prostitutes, male and female, gay and straight. 

Autre: What is it about you that allows people to feel comfortable having their most intimate and dark moments documented in your photography?

Fox: I'm an active player in the game so when I'm taking pictures, the camera is being passed around and I just want people to have fun.  I also know when not to take pictures. Some things shouldn't be documented, they're too special or sensitive. It’s gonna sound corny but it's more about the memories than it is about the pictures. The book [PTSD] is more for me, Jack, John and Harmony. So we can look back at it 20 years from now. It's just a scrapbook, really. 

Autre: Most photographers stay behind the lens, which gives them a safety net, especially when it comes to being judged, they can conclude that they are “simply documenting”. You on the other hand, are participating within your photos; may it be sex, drug use, or anything else for that matter. What are you trying to convey or is it simply “this is take it or leave it”?

Fox: My main concern isn't how I'm being perceived. My main concern is being transparent. I'm a huge part of my own creative process. Most of it couldn’t have happened if I wasn't actively participating and I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth if I was “simply documenting”.  I would feel like a fraud and coward if I hid from the viewer and I never ever lie. 

Autre: You have stated recently that you do not want to be grouped into the “feminist” art sub-culture that is trending these days, or for any group for that matter. Can you explain the importance of creating your own lane? 

Fox: I want my work speak for itself. I don’t want to label myself as anything; I feel like, in doing so, I would be limiting the impact that my work might have regarding other issues. I would rather leave it open to interpretation. Some may find what I do empowering, others have told me its demeaning. I’m not sure and I don’t have a right answer. 

Autre: Your previous book Symptomatic of a Relationship Gone Sour: Heartburn/Nausea was really successful, what was it about that book that really hit home with people? 

Fox: In today's culture, dysfunctional/abusive relationships are so frequent (with friends and lovers), that people minimize the significance of these major traumas. Truth is, it's agonizing and a lot of times the people going through it feel alone and helpless. Sometimes you begin to question if you will ever be the same again. Anyone that picks up that book isn't alone anymore. I ripped my guts out on that book so that they wouldn't be. 

Autre: It seems like you were always drawn to the darker side of culture, what about this dark side is so tempting and was it a panacea for your own psychic torment? 

Fox: I'm just drawn to what I know. I find comfort in chaos and I feel at ease around drug addicts. I'm not sure why this is. I tend to really adore people who are suffering. They are so beautifully broken and poetic. I think I just like to find beauty in unsuspecting places. That's how I survive, by taking something awful and turning it into something spectacular. 

Autre: You post a lot of pictures of you and your gun, do you use your gun for protection? 

Fox: I like to say that my gun is my dick. In that it's so phallic in both its appearance and its significance. When I had it on me, I felt the same security that a man must feel. As women when we are born we are given this diamond and then taught to defend and protect it for the rest of our lives. When I have the gun, all that goes out the window. I'll just kill anyone that comes for it. In Louisiana it's customary to have a gun. Most people have one on them or in their car at all times. I didn't really have a choice. I'm not bringing a knife to a gunfight [laughs].

Autre: Tell us about PTSD and what you want people to walk away with after viewing your show?

Fox: I would love if I could inspire at least one person... Maybe inspire them to speak up. I would love if I could inspire someone to take something awful that they always hide and expose it under a beautiful light Or maybe just inspire someone to pick up a camera. Or inspire someone to travel with no real destination. Inspire someone to become friends with someone they wouldn't normally. I just want to inspire someone to try something new, really. 

Autre: How did you meet Richie Shazam and what was the curation process like for your new show? 

Fox: I met Richie in high school. We met at a party. I was in a fight with this guy and he threw an ashtray at me and I lost it. Richie always recalls that moment as the moment he realized he wanted to be my friend.  Richie is so professional and the most thorough. He never disappoints and has never half ass'd anything. When he told me he wanted to do this with me, I didn't think twice. I think anyone would be dumb to pass up anything with him. 

Autre: What’s your favorite saying in Italian? 

Fox: It's not really a saying but this one phrase pops up in my head all the time: "Che ne sará di noi?" Which means "what will become of us?" I ask myself this referencing my generation and the young people. We are so fucked! 

Julia Fox's show PTSD opens May 1st 6pm to 9pm, at Magic Gallery, 175 Canal Street, 5th floor May 1st. Text, interview and photographs by Mike Krim. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE