All images courtesy of Estelle Hoy
interview with Estelle Hoy
saké blue is published by After 8 Books
edited by Antonia Carrara
OLIVER KUPPER: Hi Estelle! Congratulations on launching your new book. As I mentioned yesterday, my colleague said of saké blue, “It’s like Clarice Lispector and Curb Your Enthusiasm had a baby.”
ESTELLE HOY: [laughing] That’s excellent. My favorite review yet. After we launched saké blue in New York with After 8 Books, Lisa Robertson asked some astute questions about satire within a text and its role in politics. Lisa is brilliant, so she doesn’t understand that some of us need time to think. Now that I’ve thought about it for a few weeks, I think satire in a text has a kind of mutant state that reverberates differently with different people. People don’t always like satire; they find it belligerent. Something I’ve maybe observed, at least in my own life, so this is by no means general, is that my least educated friends find me funnier; there’s something in that I think, and I feel artistically safer within the working-class environment I grew up in and a little bit fearful that people with a certain level of post-grad education, who’ve taken grave offense to something I’ve written, will slide into my inbox. And slide they do. I’m generally a bit scared of people. How does this relate to Lisa’s question? Maybe one answer is that satire in my work is simply a way of finding the characteristics of sociology and how to understand social forces and their stratifications. Which demographics respond to the conflicts of satire the most and revile it the most? I should do some empirical research, but I’m not in the mood.
KUPPER: When we spoke last week, you mentioned your childhood. Has growing up around sign language and non-hearing people highlighted the difference between those who can and those who can’t?
HOY: My remarks were more about method than deafness. It’s not a relationship of inaccessibility, dependence, filtration, or the progression of hearing to non-hearing entities. My interest in deafness and non-vocalized communication came from the pulsations of sign language that I grew up in, sure, which is very confronting and anything but non-vocalized. In fact, sign language is frequently accompanied by a loud, varying, staccato-type rhythm, which is not the first and most apparent association for people who’ve never been around deaf people. For me, speaking in sign and observing signed language are a few things: 1. There is a challenge to duration; words are freed from regular or irregular measures. Sign language introduces the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronic, non-communicating durations. The metric cadence, oscillations, and the non-retrograde rhythms interest me. 2. AUSLAN and ASL (Australian Sign Language) are markedly different, at least to my mind. For example, the former relies on a two-handed alphabet and ASL one, so there’s radical hermetic incoherency, and communicating across lines is not always possible. (Or desired, but that’s another political story.) Pioneers of indeterminacy and non-standards, like John Cage, with his electroacoustic music and a-typical use of instruments. My art writing methodology relishes these ideas and sensations. I don’t know why people are so hellbent on understanding absolutely everything they read. I appreciate being bamboozled, confused, out-smarted, cheated out of, or left in the dark. It’s fun and maddening. And obviously, I’m deeply concerned about those who can and those who cannot, those who have and those who have not. But it’s also wildly involute.
KUPPER: I like that you said you appreciate being ‘cheated out of comprehending.’ Can you tell us a little more about that?
HOY: Hmm, ok lemme think. So, people profit from different sounds or the absence of sound at different times. Those combinations map out the variation that causes an apparent ‘disunity.’ Par example. My partner and neighbor are infuriated by our upstairs neighbor using this weird bird machine that delivers an intensely high-pitched sound that reputedly scares crows and pigeons away. They are driven mad by it, complain endlessly, and even write to the Hausvewaltung and owner. Generally, I can’t hear it; ok, not generally; I can’t hear it. It’s precisely in this case that we can see how the absence of a punishable pulsation of sound molecules can shift beyond making cracks in homogeneity: 1. Function (I can keep working, whereas, for them, it makes thought impossible) 2. Sanity (I’m oblivious and therefore nonplussed) 3. The Organization of Time (The bird machine, in a way, intensifies the length of time. They wrestle with significantly developed audio material, which makes forces that are terminable feel interminable)
It’s a potent variable that descends briefly but elaborates on purported ‘disunity’ because I’m cheated out of something that I cannot hear and, quite frankly, not sure even exists. I’ve dodged comprehending, and I’m pretty chuffed about it. This is a long conversation that could be longer, but I’d need another half hour.
KUPPER: [laughing] Many of your texts deal with political freedom, neoliberalism, and becoming nothing. Can you talk about this?
HOY: I guess we’re kind of at the end of the acceleration cycle, and extinction is most definitely looming. Our psychical energies have been drained by this pandemic, wars, social injustice, and neoliberal frameworks; this whole recession results from psychological disinvestment. I think my focus on political freedom is an idealized expectation that the future can be better–I’m like a 7th grader who got their hands on Marx too early. I think the task of my writing is to conceptualize ways to free ourselves from the framework of capitalism, the pursuit of ‘useful’ exchange values, and our delusion that pleasure comes from consumption. Though, my new red couch is gorgeous, just quietly. My writing has never been reluctant to castigate those in positions of power or peddle the implication that there’s no alternative to capitalism.
I don’t believe that capitalism is an insurmountable structure, and it’s crystal fucking clear to me that this assumption is bringing us to the brink of extinction. We don’t have to resign ourselves to the concept that this is the sole future that our progeny can expect. Liberation can come from freeing ourselves from our obsession with economic growth. Beyond resource sharing, I’ve come to think more and more that there’s an element that could informally reframe our instinct of accumulation and expansion. It’s a proposition of ‘Mentorship.’ This will speak to the notion of becoming nothing. Stay with me:
Okay, so I call it ‘mentor-futurism,’ it’s an aggressive aesthetic, as all good political solutions should be. I hope the Greeks, Italians, or Coldplay didn’t think of this first.
The inimitable writer Chris Kraus has generously offered me mentorship, criticism, and encouragement for the past nine years, dilating my notion of neo-liberal conversion. It’s an activity born of extreme magnanimity requiring extended periods to read work, proffer criticism, and keep artists levitating just above creative defeat. The labor of time and intellectual generosity prevails, growing and expanding others but with zero expectation of return. What could I possibly offer Chris Kraus, an artistic and intellectual heavyweight, professionally? I have some great recipes she couldn’t know. Fiscal sharing and redistribution have been a notion I cherish and am good at, but I have no investment in money, so expanding on this may mean nothing. This ‘Mentor-Futurist’ rant is becoming a manifesto that’s probably already out there, but I’m always 5 to 10 minutes late to artistic-military activities. I spend a lot of time watching inter-species friendships on YouTube.
KUPPER: You’re frequently referenced as an auto-theorist or part of the New Narrative movement; however, you’ve mentioned identifying as a ficto-critic. Knowing you personally for some time, you come across as fiercely private and elusive, frequently deflecting conversation back onto the other person. Does this miscategorization bother you as an artist?
HOY: [laughing] Yes! It does. As you say, I’m a private person and, as many have described over the years, a little evasive. It mostly bothers me because the critique I’m trying to make is usurped, and I become the focus. I’m all about ideas and action. The ‘I’ in my work is a platform for examining politics and aesthetics, not a reflection on or exposition of my life. I spend a lot of time jotting down ideas in my iPhone notepad or WhatsApp conversations with friends, and 20 to 30 percent of them are solid. I focus on expanding the 20 percent, which takes an incredible amount of energy, so I’ve little left over. Also, my essay, “I’ve Been Told I’m So-So in Bed,’ doesn’t make me look terrific if people think I’m an auto-theorist.
KUPPER: [laughing] Do you think being elusive and ‘others’ focused has helped you become so successful?
HOY: Geez, you have a low bar for success. I’ve not much thought about the role of elusiveness, if that’s a word, but I certainly believe that focusing on and considering others is a way to change your art through empathy and insight. For instance, runners who jog in place at a stoplight just need to chill the fuck out. Stay with me. I mean, what’s going on there? In-place joggers at stoplights have much to say philosophically and politically, non? Hasn’t this answer gone downhill?
KUPPER: It did, ha! What is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?
HOY: I have this wildly excellent friend whose spent much time on fishing boats for someone living in Berlin. But that's another story. She came to my first madhouse apartment in Neukölln in 2014 and sat on the splintered hardwood floors with a gift she'd made me. She was maniacally pulling all these things out of her bag like Mary Poppins on heat, more and more until these little black and white frames were scattered around her. 50, to be precise. I know this because she told me exactly. She'd spent the last several months sitting in the grass at Görlitzer Park in K-berg most afternoons, drinking lukewarm Club-Mate while looking for a four-leaf clover to give to me as a token of luck for my career. It turned out she has a freaky knack for finding them, and she collected 50 individual four-leaf clovers and framed every single one in little mini squares. I made bigger frames for all of them, splitting them into three large artworks hanging on my wall where I work daily, sipping my own Club-Mate with its 400 grams of caffeine. Being wired is a nuisance but also refreshing. Although the clovers browned over the past decade, they're a floating reminder that someone out there believes in my artistic practice, and sometimes, that's all you need.
KUPPER: Chris Kraus recently interviewed you about saké blue, a mind-blowing collection of texts and a phenomenal read. She asked if you’d ever considered becoming a philosopher, and we’d be interested to hear more.
HOY: Yeah, she angles questions uniquely. I find a lot of geometry in philosophy, and its quixotic skirmishes are very entertaining. And soothing. This week, I’ve considered what we could learn socially vis-à-vis formication. Formication, the new word I learned, is this weird, imagined sensation people experience where they feel ants crawling under their skin. It’s disturbing for the person, but I like this idea of indirect and triangular things. So you’ve got: 1. The real person 2. The inexistent feeling, and 3. How those crawling feelings synthesize. Stay with me here! [laughing]
So, I’m thinking of Zionists. You’ve got a human who’s been brainwashed with a creepy-crawly agitation about another set of humans they resultingly deem a colony of insect vermin, which is a reality that doesn’t exist. It’s skin deep, this sensation, but that doesn’t mean the propaganda is superficial in any way. So, what do we have to work with here? How can we synthesize faux-feelings to restore the knowledge that ‘formication’ isn’t real? It’s imagined. It takes a lot of courage to obstruct psycho-somatic manifestations, especially when you’ve been fed this insidiousness indirectly–and directly–all of your life.
This is all very three-dimensional, which again lends to the triangle symbol. What’s fascinating and maybe even promising about a triangle is that no matter what type –Isosceles, Scalene, or whatever–the angles add, every single time, to 180 degrees. Maybe seeing socio-political formication as a triangle is promising because it leaves us with the guarantee of 180, which is another way of saying a complete about-face. We can do a 180 at any moment.
I in absolutely no way answered your question, did I.
KUPPER: Estelle, you are a total pleasure.
