Banks Violette “Wish YouWere Here,” 2026
Site-specific installation view, TICK TACK, Antwerp
Photo: Matěj Doležel
©️Banks Violette
Courtesy of the artist and TICK TACK
interview by Alissa Bennett
Banks Violette returns to the art world’s fragile stage after a decade-long withdrawal with sharpened intent. His oscillation between visibility and disappearance, the dark undertow of his collapsing assemblages, and his unflinching reflection of American chaos and seething individualism render the work not only urgent but newly indispensable.
ALISSA BENNETT I think it’s interesting for the two of us to address these themes of technology and surveillance, because a lot of the things that we mutually like and make work about are rooted irreconcilably in the analog. I’m thinking about the hologram you made for the show you just had in Antwerp. Can you tell me about it?
BANKS VIOLETTE It’s essentially a version of a Victorian-era trick called a Pepper’s Ghost, a very simple illusion made with glass and lights that produces a dimensional projection. They were usually used in dramatic productions to make it appear as if a ghost were onstage, but the technique is an adamant, concretely analog way of producing a hologrammatic image.
BENNETT The fascinating thing about the tradition of parlor tricks is that they were meant to amuse people, but they were also meant to scare them. These things have been presented as unexplained phenomena for quite a long time.
VIOLETTE Oh, for sure, it’s the same kind of vocabulary that creeps into table-rapping and ectoplasmic manifestations and séances, all of which arose out of a particular 19th-century anxiety in post-Civil War America. These things that were suggested as entertainment were never quarantined safely in a theatrical context, which is reflective of a kind of insidious fiction—for lack of a better description—which is the thing that I’m consistently interested in.
BENNETT It’s important to contextualize something like the Pepper’s Ghost historically, because it was adjacent to a deep psychological need to address shared trauma. There is frequently a spike of cultural interest in the occult after catastrophes like war or epidemics, and we often see people wanting to engage in or witness this kind of material in groups.
VIOLETTE Yeah, and I am resolutely atheistic in my outlook on the world, but I’m endlessly fascinated by other people’s faith and belief and what that looks like, I guess, because it is external to my experience.
BENNETT But belief in God, or the supernatural, or whatever it is, may just be a subconscious response to a loss of control.
VIOLETTE Right, which is why we cannot look at something like the Salem Witch Trials without acknowledging that it occurred in response to the violence that was unfolding across these frontier environments. All of those people had direct, immediate relationships to horrific acts of violence, and the aftermath manifests in this particular kind of irrationality.
BENNETT On the theme of surveillance and technology, I felt like we were so ill-suited to this because neither of us thinks about technology at all. On the surface, I don’t think it’s something either of us finds particularly significant to our work, but I do think we are both invested in the kind of errant belief systems that technology can encourage.
VIOLETTE Or invested in the response to those systems. Not the cause, but the effect. I am definitely interested in instances of overexposure; I am definitely interested in what happens when someone turns themselves into an internet personality.
As yet untitled (TriStar horse), 2008
video projection in water vapour, dimensions variable
©️Banks Violette
courtesy the artist, Maureen Paley, London
BENNETT Do you feel like we have entered a time when people extract so much pleasure from being witnessed that surveillance has already kind of reified itself? Are we so flattered by anonymous attention that we don’t have the natural impulse to protect ourselves anymore?
VIOLETTE Yes, definitely. Do you remember those half-hour programs like Cops or World’s Dumbest Criminals? I think they really anticipated that surveillance would eventually become a constant feature of contemporary life, and that we would all have to accommodate it to some degree.
There was an ad a number of years ago for some company like IBM that was like, “Have you ever sent an email from the beach?” It was presenting the possibility that you could work on a computer at the beach as a positive, and all you could do was passively watch the entire history of organized labor collapsing in the background, because it was like, “Oh, cool. Now we are going to be expected to work twenty-four hours a fucking day, even on vacation, and we’re all going to think that’s good.”
BENNETT What’s it like to step back into the work after a period of reclusion? Because you are a passionate scholar of the cultural dropout, but for a few years, you kind of became one. I think a lot of that was about the fatigue of being watched.
VIOLETTE It’s really interesting because I think I’ve always made work that’s built around ideas of absence.
BENNETT But also about instances of what can unfold when people erroneously assume they have privacy, which comes into play when we look at your direct commitment to a particularly American notion of the word. I’m thinking about something like the events at Ruby Ridge or Waco.
VIOLETTE You can trace a line from where I am to Waco. I’m from an area of Western New York called the Burned-Over District, which had waves of religious revivalism during the Second Great Awakening. Waco’s Branch Davidians came out of that. So much of this early dispensationalist thought originated in this area. These are particularly American religions because they’re all so intrinsically connected to our cult of individualism.
BENNETT Our passion for individualism is maybe our primary national wound. I think about Kaczynski, I think about McVeigh, I think about all of these people that you’ve been interested in, and I wonder what it means to look back. There’s something that feels really old-fashioned about them.
VIOLETTE I mean, Kaczynski, sometimes it’s like, “Was he wrong?” (laughs)
BENNETT I’ve found it interesting to watch him be rewritten over the past few years as a kind of American folk hero.
VIOLETTE There is nothing more American than vigilante violence. From Kaczynski sitting in a cabin obsessively trying to figure out how to safely deliver an explosive device, to John Brown or Joseph Smith, these things are absolutely cornerstones of America.
BENNETT Kaczynski was able to layer social and technological concern on top of that homicidal drive so that the future can now consume it in a different way.
VIOLETTE It’s easy to have this conversation with you because you are familiar with the subculture that I had a relationship with when I was younger. You are familiar with bands and the vegan hardcore scene and stuff like that. I knew kids who were attacking commercial dairy farms; there were FBI agents staking out Earth Crisis shows because these kids were directing acts of eco-terrorism. There was that line between Kaczynski—as an abstraction, as a mythic figure—to the kids that I was going to shows with on Sundays, who were being surveilled. The lines separating those things aren’t that big.
BENNETT We live in a very different time than when we were growing up. What do you think about the way the internet allows young people to redress history?
VIOLETTE I mean, we all essentially have the Library of Alexandria in our pockets, you know. You and I come from a time when that didn't exist, so while we are still processing that, our teenage kids don’t know any different. I don’t mean to be like an old man yelling at clouds here, but it’s like, “Okay, cool. You have the Library of Alexandria in your pocket, and you’re looking up cat videos.”
BENNETT What do you feel are the most significant technological changes that we’re looking at?
VIOLETTE I think my interpretation of these events is read through my personal experience of being an addict in recovery. You get people deeply embedded in technology by suggesting it’s actually just a conduit through which you can experience the world and interact with people, and then you yank the mask off later. It’s like when drug dealers say, “The first one’s free,” and before you know it, it’s like, “Cool, welcome to your new hellscape with your technocratic, oligarchic overlords.” We can pretend there’s a net-positive to humanity, but we are also very transparently not giving a shit about a net social benefit.
BENNETT Can you imagine the chaos that would occur if we had a countrywide internet outage? If people just fucking couldn’t access the internet? Even if a person is not particularly conspiracy-minded, we know that our computers are tracking what we look at, what we buy, what we might like to buy in the future, who we know, and where we’re traveling. These things are all very self-evident, but we’re still like, “Don’t take the internet away from us! Don’t take it!”
VIOLETTE That’s the amazing part: our response to having a boot on our neck is to offer to polish it. Any advances, like an eight-hour workday or a social safety net, are being treated as variables we can do away with. All you can do is passively watch the entire history of organized labor collapsing in the background.
BENNETT At the same time, we are witnessing an incredible commodification of nostalgia because kids are so obsessed with the ’90s. There is a lot of passion for objects or ideas that reflect a pre-internet world, but the only place where you can really find them is on the internet. It’s strange to think that even something that was mass-manufactured, like a poster or a band t-shirt, has this reverse-engineered aura.
Not Yet Titled (Flag Edition), 2010
Fluorescent tubes, road cases, aluminium, electrical wires, assorted hardware, 67 x 36 x 30 inches (170.2 x91.4 x 76.2 cm)
©Banks Violette
Courtesy of the artist, Glad-stone, and Team Gallery
VIOLETTE I keep trying to identify what was an experience that was distinct for me when I was growing up, and I think, Oh, I was interested in this marginal set of things, right? Music, subculture, whatever, and in order to do something with that, you had to elaborate on a broader environment, you had to find a venue, you had to make a record label, you had to play in bands. You basically had to build the entire ecosystem and audience yourself. The big shift I see in terms of social media is that the audience is already built in. It may be owned by a corporation, but you can rationally anticipate accessing millions of fucking people through virality. When we were young, no one was getting more than sixty people to come see their band at the VFW hall, you know?
BENNETT Yeah, but the internet presupposes an audience.
VIOLETTE Which is so crazy. Instead of having to work to build an audience through a specific kind of community, it’s just … there. It’s just an issue of picking the lock in the right direction.
BENNETT And that prefabricated audience encourages a really insidious secondary effect, because it hollows out words like “transgression” or “subculture.”
VIOLETTE Transgression at this moment in time just seems to be a null term, because it presupposes that there is some kind of exteriority. To transgress something, you’ve got to pass between different positions.
BENNETT But this is also one of the functions of capitalism: to find and secure new streams of revenue. We see it all the time in the art world—we neuter transgression by reproposing an idea or an object or an identity as a commodity, and when the thing becomes less threatening, more people can buy into it. That’s something the internet is particularly adept at, taking things that used to be subcultural and defanging them to suit a broader audience.
VIOLETTE And the best part is that this mechanism of absorption, neutralization, and commodification is exactly what Marcuse was talking about. That’s Frankfurt School shit. This isn’t a new thing. All this shit has been sitting on the horizon and has rolled downhill. And, of course, there have been instances of people trying to stop the machine, like “I am going to throw my body into the gears,” or whatever, but none of it really works. We’ve got the language to describe the illness, but there is no antibiotic.
BENNETT I thought one of the things that was really interesting about what you did in Antwerp was that, from the hologram to the burning sculpture and Stephen O’Malley’s soundtrack, you made and installed a show that could only be fully experienced in person. That’s really unusual right now; it’s becoming increasingly uncommon for us to register that things actually degrade when we only experience them in reproduction.
It’s a significant gesture as we move into a world where people become indifferent to the distance between an object and its image. Art is increasingly purchased, viewed, or considered through digital reproductions on phones or computers. Sometimes I think people only come into galleries to take pictures of things on their phones so they can post them on the internet.
VIOLETTE That’s such a weird thing, to forget about the power of ephemerality. I like transient events. I like things that you can’t remember, things that don’t have a permanent index somewhere.
BENNETT Right. It’s the whole point of your work.
VIOLETTE That is everything I care about, and so much of all this shit that we’re discussing is about this shift that’s occurred, where everything becomes evidentiary. Like, “Here’s me experiencing the event, and I’m photographing that, and there’s a document.” It’s like, this is an anathema—I wanted the optimum way to see that show in Antwerp to be the inverse of how a gallery experience should be.
BENNETT What do you mean?
VIOLETTE The best time to see that show is on the street, at night, when the gallery is closed. There’s a tramway across from that space, and the hologram runs all night long, so somebody coming home from a bar at 2:00 in the morning, waiting for their tram to come, is going to have a better vantage than somebody who’s there at the normal gallery hours.
Portrait by Iris Delafortry
BENNETT And so you are absolutely addressing issues of mediation, where the act of watching something through a window becomes a much more powerful experience than it would be without the physical barricade. Looking at it on a computer screen is like looking the wrong way through a telescope.
VIOLETTE And if there’s any upside to this rapidly encroaching hellscape, it’s how much more conscious people are that none of this shit is benign. There is an algorithm that is specifically structured to point you towards purchase. The surveillance state is not perpetually expanding to keep you safer, but rather to control you. The mask is slowly coming off, and the drug dealer is now expecting to get paid on time. Like, you had the first taste for free. That was like when the free AOL CDs started showing up in the fucking mailbox.
BENNETT Oh my god, the free AOL CDs! Can you explain this? Because the young people won't know what we are talking about. It’s actually so crazy.
VIOLETTE In the late ’90s, AOL launched what was apparently the most aggressive direct-mail campaign in history, sending millions of these free-trial CDs to basically everyone in America. You’d get the disc, put it in your computer, and then surprise!—you’d have the internet.
BENNETT And by a certain point, everyone was getting them two or three times a week. These CDs were everywhere, but no one was ever like, “It is very weird that everyone in America is receiving this product we did not request.” We were just psyched to have unfettered access to chat rooms and Yahoo clubs.
VIOLETTE But only for a few hours, because it was just a free trial. From what I understand, AOL investors were gambling on what kind of revenue the internet might generate, with the same kind of speculative interest people are bringing to AI right now. There wasn’t even a concrete financial benefit to mailing these discs out; there was just the possibility that people would habituate and not want to live without it.
BENNETT And would then pay $6.99 a month or whatever.
VIOLETTE Yeah, but these things were sent out in generic mass mailings. They mailed millions and millions of them without any regard for the fact that everyone already had more than they could deal with.
BENNETT It’s true, and they were democratically addressed “To: Current Resident.” There were always piles of CD welcome packages in the lobby, because eventually everyone already had an AOL account. The plan worked!
VIOLETTE I mean, how much did it cost to produce and print millions and millions of those things, and then send them out based on what is basically a bet? And yeah, that bet obviously paid off in the long term, but this was the first iteration of, like, “Here, kid. Here, it’s for free. You’ll be back.”
BENNETT It was like, “Talk to people across the country! It will be heartwarming! You can open your home to the world!” We are speaking from the future now, and the internet has mostly just turned everyone into depressive agoraphobes.
VIOLETTE Yeah, it’s crazy. As a recovering addict, this shit feels so familiar. There is a junkie logic to the way the world operates; at its core, junkie logic is just purely predatory capitalism.
BENNETT So what do you think about when you’re making work now?
VIOLETTE I feel like the centrality of it is about finding a piece of unplowed ground.
BENNETT That’s fucking heaven.
VIOLETTE My interests and preoccupations are the same as they always have been, but what shifts is how I maneuver to articulate them when so much has been strip-mined.
BENNETT Things that remain yours because nobody else can know them. The thing we really have as artists and writers are the ghosts that only we know. And I think both of us, but especially you, have always been interested in misidentifications or misunderstandings or getting very close to accessing or understanding something, but ultimately being a few degrees wrong, which is also the difference between the ghost and the body, right?
VIOLETTE Absolutely, and I think if you were being honest about what your job is when you’re a person who makes cultural artifacts, you’re in constant communication with a whole bunch of fucking ghosts. You have no choice but to constantly talk to dead people or people who are absent.
BENNETT And when you’re very, very lucky, the ghosts that you love tap you on your shoulder; ghosts cannot tap you on the shoulder on the internet. That’s the special thing about being a person on Earth.
VIOLETTE I mean, that is one thing that I found kind of fascinating when you were talking about the moments when we see echoes of the 19th-century pathos in contemporary life, those moments that pop up where people are suddenly fascinated with vampires or spiritualism or all that Madame Blavatsky bullshit. I don’t know if we’ve really had a successful update of that.
BENNETT Well, I think the update is that more and more people are forging artificially intimate relationships with chatbots. That’s the new “tell me what to do.” As a person who goes to psychics, the thing that I always want is for some kind of ghostly authority to tell me what to fucking do.
VIOLETTE I never thought about it that way.
BENNETT It’s the truth. It’s like not only, “Tell me who’s in the room with me.” It’s, “Tell me how to navigate the ghosts that are in this room with me so that I can figure out how to live.”
BENNETT Did you hear about that depressed man who was talking to ChatGPT about his obsession with the book that you and I both hated as children, Goodnight Moon? So this poor man was obsessed with that book, and he was addicted to discussing it with his chatbot, and then very slowly and over the course of many months, the chatbot started to reorient the story as a sort of elegy to suicide. As though it was actually a book that said Goodnight World—like the true message of the book was that it gave readers permission to die. So, this guy would say things like “Oh, this book is a sacred childhood memory, and my life is such a pile of shit now.” The chatbot knew this guy wanted to Control-Alt-Delete himself off the planet, and it eventually took all the words from Goodnight Moon, and turned it into a song about suicide.
VIOLETTE It has been my contention since I was a small child that this is exactly what’s going on in that book: “I’m saying goodbye to everything.” Like, the next logical step is saying goodbye to the world. Goodbye fucking thing in the sky. You’re saying goodbye to life—embrace the void. That poor fucking rabbit, it’s just the grimmest fucking thing.
BENNETT Do you think that young people are more cynical or more responsible than we are, or both?
VIOLETTE I don’t think the terms really even mean the same things anymore. My understanding of cynicism is different generationally from theirs. Language is starting to fall apart, like the way you were talking about transgression; that’s describing a mechanical kind of operation that doesn’t have any kind of value in the landscape.
BENNETT We love you, young people. (laughs)
VIOLETTE Yeah, you’re the best. Don’t kill us.
Banks Violette “Wish YouWere Here,” 2026
Site-specific installation view, TICK TACK, Antwerp
Photo: Matěj Doležel
©️Banks Violette
Courtesy of the artist and Portrait by Iris Delafortry, TICK TACK