The Parapsychic Sculptor: An Interview Of Corin Johnson

interview by Lara Monro
photographs by Mattea Perrotta

Artist Corin Johnson has spent over thirty years traversing the art world with his exceptional stonemasonry and wood carving craftsmanship. Corin has collaborated with some of the world's most renowned visual artists including Paul Noble, as well as focusing on his own practice (which includes drawing, modeling, and unique stone, marble, and wood carvings), the work is varied with a unique and colorful story behind each piece. Recently, he has found himself locked down in his studio with the musically-acclaimed Nick Cave. They met in the ‘90s when the musician reached out having seen a bust of himself created by Johnson; a commission by a Cave fanatic. During lockdown, the duo have formed a creative bond and partnership. 

Confident with his craft, there aren't many materials Johnson hasn't mastered; marble, resin, wood, and ceramics, to name a few. His creations range in both size and style as do his commissions: from large-scale marble portraits and restoration projects that include the Clarkson Memorial, a celebration of Thomas Clarkson, a central figure in the campaign against the slave trade in the British Empire, to salvaging intricate antique tiles. His own projects include kitsch porcelain bird sculptures and a wood carving of his beautifully large and shaggy sheepdog, Charlie. 

Growing up, Corin was introduced to the Spiritualist Church through his Grandmother. His interaction with mediums was informative as he recalls members of the congregation foreseeing his future working as a sculptor. While he no longer follows the Church, his fascination with Parapsychology has been hugely informative in both his personal and professional life. Regular Zoom meetings with mediums and guided meditations leave him with strong symbolic imagery, which help to harness his spiritual and creative growth. Johnson’s effortless eccentricity is encapsulated by all of his unique philosophies and ideologies, and perhaps exaggerated by his love for different stones and the varying qualities and powers they hold (he often finds different types in his jacket pockets).  

Situated in South London’s Camberwell, Corin’s home and studio, both within a 5 minute walk of one another, are evident displays of his personality. Inviting Autre to document both, we explored the art works sporadically placed in his pink entrance hallway, blue sitting room with solitary piano and kitchen, where opera music plays and tea mugs with cold coffee from yesterday are set amongst Mexican Masks he picked up on his travels in Oaxaca. Every now and then, faint sounds of the painter decorator upstairs are heard over the radio as Corin speaks about his relatively unknown practice and love for collaboration with others. To accompany the interview, Autre partnered with the American visual artist, Mattea Perrotta, who documented the interview with her film camera. 

LARA MONRO: Did you jump straight into sculpting and stone carving from school? 

CORIN JOHNSON: I left school and didn't want to do an arts foundation course. I wanted to learn the skills and not just the theory; to understand how to be a good draftsman and how to create sculpture. I actually went to a career centre and they said to me that someone had been looking for sculptor apprentices. They set up a meeting and I went to work for them. I still use them to source my materials today. It is here that I met Faith Tolkien, the granddaughter of J. R.R Tolkien. While I already had a bit of experience with stone carving, she taught me so much more. The sculptor, Michael Black introduced me to Faith. He also became a mentor of sorts when it came to my sculpting career. He created the big empress head sculptures around the Bodleian Library and worked with lots of weird and wonderful metals. One of my first sculpture jobs was working with a woman called Rachel Shorter. She had transitioned from a man to a woman. Before she went through the change, Rachel had been a stone carver. She had a huge amount of knowledge around the craft. It was hard back then to be taught the sculpture skills. She really showed me the ropes. She had a basement where she made dresses for dolls. It was a pretty niche and unique experience. She would occasionally lace my food with a bit of magic mushroom. 

MONRO: How long have you been in London?

JOHNSON: I've been here for a long time, about thirty years — mainly in the South. I used to be in Kennington. My first place was in Russell Square, a nice squat. It's all very posh now but it was more rough and ready then. Near Great Ormond Street. I went to art college in Kennington. 

MONRO: Who did you start out working with when you took on stone masonry and artist collaborations?

JOHNSON: I used to work with a guy called John Buckley who did these mad sharks coming out of roofs — he does mad pieces. Skellington lovers is one of his new ones: a smashed up old barn in the middle of the countryside. It is a cool thing to come across. 

MONRO: You seem to work with a number of varied materials. Which is the main one you find yourself regularly returning to?

JOHNSON: I always seem to return to stone. 

MONRO: You work with a lot of other artists. How do you separate your practice with the collaborations? 

JOHNSON: I find it organic. I love working with different people and ideas. I find it a bit boring having one idea. I like the collaboration and how it provokes and develops ideas and visions. Each project is my project too — I always put my heart and soul into it. I’ve worked with Paul Noble on a number of series. His turds, for example, were for the Turner Prize. He came to me with the idea and had made some maquettes that we changed and developed a little bit. I work with clay, wood, resin, anything really — a bit of bronze here and there. I see it as a form, rather than the material. I do love stone and marble. I enjoy natural materials and wax. I do quite a lot of mold making as well. 

MONRO: Do you find it difficult going between mediums say stone and marble and then wax or wood? Do you have to switch your brain to different modes for the varied materials you work with?

JOHNSON: A little bit. It takes a while to get into the flow of working with a certain medium, I guess. To get good at it, it takes a day or two sometimes to get back into the flow. I find that with stone — you work away at it and suddenly the flow is there. It just clicks and almost feels like it does the work itself. 

MONRO: Do you find it a cathartic process?

JOHNSON: Yes, but like anything, it has its highs and lows. 

MONRO: Over the years you have worked on an abundance of projects and collaborated with a number of artists and institutions. Can you tell me a bit about where your work has taken you and who you have worked with? 

JOHNSON: I spent time on Indian reservations, worked and lived with sculptors in Africa, California, taught at a sculpture school in China and London, and worked amongst some of the best Italian marble sculptors in Italy (Pietra Santa) to produce sculptures with Paul Noble. The project with Paul was for Gagosian Gallery and nominated for the Turner prize. I also worked to make a huge limewood meditation tree for Ibrahim El-Salahi for Somerset House a couple of years back. I also used to work with the top letter carver / calligrapher called Richard Kindersley. What I learnt with him stuck and I ended up doing the memorial for the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, for Westminster Abbey and worked as part of a team of three on Lady Diana’s memorials at Althorp. I have worked very successfully with the Architect Peter Inskip on very classical projects for many wonderful grand houses. I have done quite a few animal projects, a huge, red stone fox outside a museum near Lewis, a pair of Ounces in Country Derry and a pair of Yale’s for St John’s College Cambridge (I also did a series of about 8 gargoyles for them).

I have also worked with Nick Cave. I designed and sculpted the infamous Nick Cave Warracknabeal Equestrian Monument Marquette. This was meant to be placed in his hometown. It was shown in a few exhibitions. 

MONRO: How do the collaborations come about? They seem very organic.

JOHNSON: With Ibrahim El-Salahi, I was showing with Vigo Gallery, doing a series of kitsch granny statues of birds in block marble. They knew I was in an exhibition with Marcus Harvey — he was curating a show and asked me to do a piece, at Kings Place, so I did a massive wood carving for that and they saw the work and asked if I’d work with Ibrahim. With Paul Noble, he put the word around for marble sculptures and came to my studio. Then Nick came about because a guy I was living with asked me to do a wooden head of Nick. He was growing weed and his best mate was a huge Cave fan. He commissioned me to do this head and somehow Nick saw it. He found my dad's number, called him, put me in touch, and we met. 

MONRO: I read that you and Nick met in a club?

JOHNSON: I met him one night in a club. I was with a girlfriend and we had had a bit of a tiff. This guy came up behind me and said, “Corin, do you want a drink?” He invited us to his table and that’s when he first talked about doing the horse sculpture. 

MONRO: You have been working with Nick at your studio over lockdown?

JOHNSON: Yes, on a ceramics project! He first came to the studio to make work for his online store, Cave Things, then we started experimenting, and our creative collaboration began to grow organically. 

MONRO: Where do you get your material from?

JOHNSON: From all over! Sometimes I buy the wood green or at timbre yards, or other sculptors will give me material. The one with the couple was given to me. The marble I use is from Italy, usually. The ones I did with Paul were from there — we travelled together to Italy and chose the pink stone. I’m doing another big pink marble piece at the moment actually. Made a cat for Susie Cave recently for her fashion label. 

MONRO: Your house is filled with beautiful art and trinkets. Can you tell me a bit about where they have come from? 

JOHNSON: I was lucky enough to meet an artist called Peter Snow when I moved to London. He was a painter, professor of art at the Slade, and a set designer for theatre: he did the first Waiting for Godot with Beckett and he introduced me to lots of wonderful artists including Craigie Aitchison, who I collaborated with. I have drawings by Euan Uglow, Georgina Starr, Paul Noble, paintings by James Johnston (ex bad seeds musician), Harry Pye, Rudolph Valentino, and John Buckley. 

MONRO: What do you think of the art world? 

JOHNSON: Generally, I don't find it that easy to be a part of. There seems to be a lot of politics, but I can't complain too much. I have worked with some of the biggest blue chip Galleries and it has always been enjoyable. The collaborations have been good, but your talent isn't necessarily nurtured unless you are selling. The money-driven, commercial side is quite tough. I would be keen to work within the arts more, if I can, as my own entity! It would be nice to dip my toe in!

MONRO: You were introduced to the Spiritualist Church by your Grandmother. Would you say that your interaction with this alternative faith has influenced your work? 

JOHNSON: Yes, I definitely think I have taken much from Spiritualism and that it has influenced my work, kind of like the healer sculpture. However, I wouldn’t call myself a Spiritualist. More accurately I would say I have always been interested in Parapsychology; always looking into different faiths such as Buddhism, Sufism and reading about different esoteric teachers like Gurdjieff, Paramahansa Yogananda, Paul Brunton, as well as reading about things like cases of people remembering a previous incarnation or learning about tribal beliefs about things like ‘Dreamtime’ exploring and ancestor spirits, such as American-Indian beliefs. 

I think the more moral (following the teachings of Jesus) side of being brought up with Spiritualism might have encouraged me and fed into some of my public work, like the statue of St. Andrew for Exeter College Oxford, the two statues of Christian martyrs on the front of Westminster Abbey, and the panel for Wisbech of Thomas Clarkson. 

MONRO: What are you working on at the moment? 

JOHNSON: I am currently working on several projects, including another collaboration with Edmund de Waal and am assisting Nick on the ceramic sculpture project I mentioned before. I have also done six studies of Grace Jones that are in her private collection. I am a judge for QEST that is the Queen’s charity for supporting artists, makers and people who want support starting up with interesting careers. I recently produced a series of multi-colored marble birds (including a pair of budgies, a goldfinch and a magpie with an egg) that were inspired by old-fashioned granny ceramics (Beswick birds). These were mainly shown with Vigo Gallery. I also recently created a limestone hare, which is currently with Messums Gallery.

Queer Blood America: An Interview Of Artist Jordan Eagles Who Is Battling Blood Inequality

Queer Blood America, 2021
10.75” x 8” x 2.75” in.
original 1982 Captain America, blood of queer man, collection tube, blue nitrile gloves, plexiglass, UV resin

interview by Oliver Kupper

In the face of a national blood shortage due to the COVID 19 pandemic, the FDA still continues its discriminatory policy that place limitations on gay and bisexual men from donating their blood. In 1983—at the dawn of the AIDS crisis—a lifetime ban was implemented. In 2016, the policy was updated to allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood only if they have been celibate for a year. In 2020, in the face of a dire blood shortage, the policy was updated to three months. There are currently no celibacy requirements for heterosexual blood donors. For artist Jordan Eagles, blood is a source of fascination, power, spirituality, and a source of life—particularly queer blood. Incidentally, blood is also a medium in a practice that amplifies the call for blood equality. On the occasion of Pride Month and ahead of World Blood Donor Day, New Discretions presents QUEER BLOOD AMERICA, a continuation of Eagle’s body of work that juxtaposes American superhero comic books and vials of queer blood. In his newest work, the artist places a vial of queer blood into a laser cut section of an early AIDS era Captain America where the hero "Battles Baron Blood!" with the blood of a queer donor. The work has been digitized into two unique NFTs, which are available now on Foundation. In the following interview we talk to Eagles about his exploration of blood and blood equality.

Oliver Kupper: At the heart of your practice is the amplification of the idea of blood equality, and at the same time, blood inequality. When did you become so fascinated with blood? 

I like that you use the word “fascinated” because there is, without a doubt, unique properties and energy in blood that is captivating. I can remember, even as a young child, always being wide eyed at the doctor’s office watching the blood move through the tube. It was, and still can be, so mesmerizing and beautiful. I began working with blood in 1998 as a way to explore the connection between the body and the spirit. It was a very philosophical journey trying to better understand where inside my body the soul lived and what part of me was purely flesh, or if it was all actually connected? These early works raised a lot of questions about existence and preservation. The concepts behind the queer blood works, specifically addressing discriminatory blood donation policy and blood equality began in 2013.

When did you first align the idea of using blood in your work with the iconography of comic books, particularly the role of the super hero?

February 14, 2018. It was the night of the Parkland shootings. A few days before that I had received from eBay an original copy of an Action Comics from 1971 were Superman is getting a blood transfusion from the citizens of metropolis. I did not buy the book with any intention of making art with it. I just was attracted to the cover of Superman vulnerably laying eye closed and lifeless with massive tubes in his arms and with what seems like an infinite line of people willing to try and save the hero. But the night of that shooting, maybe because it was also in Florida, it brought back many emotions from the Orlando massacre from only a couple years prior where in addition to the horror and tragic loss of life, so many LGBTQ individuals couldn’t even donate blood to help save lives in their own community.

That night it just came to me in a momentary flash that I should enlarge the comic book cover to be larger than life-size, turn it grayscale and splatter it with blood and not use any resin, no preservation, just let the blood seep into the paper and dry. I didn’t realize at the time that this initial work would spawn a new series of appropriating other pop-culture and historical documents, each with a unique narrative relating to blood donation and HIV/AIDS, and pairing them with blood from particular LGBTQ+ donors would create new entry points for policy conversations.

So often communities come together during tragedies and heal together through the selfless act of blood donation. Heroes save lives of people they often don’t even know. And this is so true with blood donation. Sharing your blood with somebody in need, someone you probably will never meet, is a selfless and heroic act. 

One of the editors of the Superman plot, Dorothy Woolfolk, stated that kryptonite was introduced into the storyline because she felt that Superman’s invulnerability was becoming boring—why do you think comic books have taken on these strange reflections of society? 

Generally speaking, there is something very appealing about mystical superpowers and how heroes usually triumph over the evil villain. Because comics are created by artists and writers (and editors) and are often dealing with the issues of their time, even when it is very subtle or intentionally subversive. I am most interested in how an image or storyline, paired with a certain donor’s blood, can serve as a prompt to reexamine history and consider the current moment.

The celibacy requirements for blood donations are astonishing, that even in the face of a national crisis and blood shortage, the FDA is essentially saying that they would rather let people die instead of accepting queer blood—while at the same time forcing queer men to essential divulge their sexual activity—what does this say about the politics of human rights?

The FDA’s blood donation policy has always been discriminatory. Even when they changed the policy in 2016, from a lifetime ban to one year of celibacy, it had no basis in science. Even with further modifications during the most recent pandemic, the changes are still not rooted in science. It is clear that there is such an inherent fear of queer bodies and our fluids, that the stigma and illogical terror clouds scientific judgment.

Speaking of politics, the current head of the FDA, Janet Woodcock, was in charge of a lot of the early trials for an AIDs vaccines, but it seems like there were tons of regulatory roadblocks and barriers with their trials, particularly politically motivated regulatory barriers, do you have hope in her leadership when it comes to blood equality and the hopes of finding an AIDS vaccine?

It will be amazing when an HIV/AIDS vaccine is fully developed. It is fantastic that there is treatment and preventative measures available such as PrEP, but a vaccine will be amazing. I am particularly encouraged that Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who is a blood donor in the Blood Mirror sculpture, was recently appointed as the CDC’s Director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. He is a visionary in this field.

What is your advice for people who want to take an active effort in breaking down the stigmas around blood donation, especially blood donated by gay and bisexual men?

Is there blood being donated by gay and bisexual men? I think the policy, for all its recent change, is completely designed actually to NOT have gay blood enter the supply but to make it seem more accommodating.

Understanding some elements of science is important, such as someone who is HIV+ and undetectable cannot transmit HIV through sex. A lot of people don’t understand what that’s all about. Breaking down the stigma around HIV/AIDS is a good start. Ultimately, looking at person as an individual and recognizing our common humanity is crucial.

Can you talk a little bit about the NFT, is this the first time you have created an NFT—what do you think about the future of digital art and the blockchain, especially in regards to activism?

QUEER BLOOD AMERICA (PRIDE) and QUEER BLOOD AMERICA (Black/Red) are my first animation and NFTs. They are based off a new  work in which a Captain America, from 1982, is laser-cut to hold a tube of queer blood preserved in resin. With animation, I’m excited that I can represent blood in a new way, that I can’t do with my physical works, yet the source is real blood. It is also interesting to me to work with something so organic in a digital universe. I’m very intrigued by this very particular cultural moment and connecting it to a social justice as a way to open more dialogue about these crucial health and equality issues. This is all unfolding rapidly and it has great potential, beyond being another way to express oneself, but to connect with organizations and an international community.

Click here to explore QUEER BLOOD AMERICA.

Honoring The Murkiness: An Interview Of Estefania Puerta & Abbey Meaker On Curating The Ephemeral

Brian Raymond
Tree Hollow Composition, 2021
Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork
Run time: 10:00

interview by Summer Bowie
photographs by Abbey Meaker

Is it in our nature to make art? Is art inherently ephemeral? Is there a boundary between art and nature? How can we look to nature as a blueprint for the art that we make? These are all questions that come up as I consider Land Chapters, the inaugural exhibition by Artist Field, a platform for projects that respond to and engage with natural environments. Curated by Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, this exploration of the boundary between nature and self is a deep dive into the works of 16 artists split into three chapters. The first chapter is comprised of installation works that can be found deep in the woods of Richmond, Vermont on the Beaver Pond Hill Property. The second chapter comes in the form of a tape with recordings from six different sound artists. And the third chapter is a print publication with text from seven additional artists. All together, these works serve as an attempt to embrace all of the hard-to-pinpoint expressions of art within nature that so often fall under the towering shadow of negated space left by the Land Art movement.

BOWIE: How did the two of you meet and what was the inspiration behind Land Chapters?

MEAKER: ​I can't remember how we met, but I've known of Este and her work for years now. We live in a small community and her work has always stood out to me. We connected more deeply when I interviewed her on the occasion of her first solo show in New York. She talked about 'romancing wounds' and we discovered a shared obsession with psychoanalytic theory, specifically Julia Kristeva's work. More conversations about art and books led us to Land Chapters. She asked if I wanted to co-organize a show on her and her partner's land, and it seemed like the perfect setting for Artist Field's inaugural project. Collaborating with Este on this has been so natural and thrilling. 

PUERTA: I became aware of Abbey through the amazing work she was doing with Overnight Projects. I wasn’t living in Vermont at the time and it was so refreshing and exciting to see independent curatorial projects that Abbey was doing from afar. It gave me hope that maybe Vermont could be a site of contemporary art and critical thinking and not just a place for hermits and landscape painters. 

BOWIE: What can we learn from the Land Art of the 20th century, both positive and negative?

PUERTA: I think the Land Art category is vast and uncontainable in many ways, The overlaps tend to be that it involves earth materials that were traditionally unconventional to the art world at the time, a form of negation to the commercialization of objects and materials via their eventual decay or change in organic composition, exploration of spaces outside the white cube as sites for installations, and a questioning of worth/value in the materials used to produce art. 

From these general standpoints, came so many different approaches. I think the Arte Povera movement paved the way for artists to open up their practice to the kind of multimedia, materially dense, and organically varied forms we see today. It has allowed bigger questions around how we deal with materials that are not meant to be controlled and it has continued the discourse around the boundaries of what we consider art and where we deem it to exist. 

With that said, so many histories have been erased in the categorization of “Land Art,” as though these American men in the ‘60s were the first to create objects, installations, and spaces with earth material. Abbey and I really feel that addressing this kind of erasure and inherent violence to the way that white western art categorizes such a dense history with so many people, so many species, so many territories is a type of critical reckoning to anyone interested in contending with “Land Art” today. I’m not saying that we by any means filled this gaping hole with this exhibition, but rather that we quickly felt that attempting to categorize “land,” “nature,” “human relationship,” was in many ways at the risk of erasing and conflating something that truly feels uncontainable. And we felt it important to honor that murkiness and the wide web that it can create across people, instead of continuing to pretend that Land Art was a movement that mostly centered itself around cis white men performing heroic acts of intervention onto a vast landscape. 

I think it is possible to address this movement and the ways that it subverted the art world, while simultaneously opening up the conversation about the erasure of many people, especially BIPOC, queer people, and women in its history. 

Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri
Sun Belly; The Big Star That Feeds Us, 2021
Mixed wood scrap, aluminum, paint, and plaster
1.5 x 3 feet

BOWIE: This exhibition takes place on unceded land of the Abenaki Nation. How has their relationship to the land informed your approach to this project? 

PUERTA: It didn’t and nor are we at all any authority to speak on behalf of the Abenaki people and their relationship to the land. We dedicated Land Chapters to the Missiquoi Abenaki in the humbled acknowledgement that they are the original protectors of what we call today, Richmond, VT where the exhibition partly took place. Our acknowledgement of their existence, of the fact that this land had been violently colonized and taken from the Missiquoi Abenaki does not give us any privileged insights or knowledge of their existence and continued ways of living on this land we call Vermont today. What has informed our approach to this project are the ways in which giving space and power to the different names and histories that a land holds feels like a more honest uncovering of the entangled and ultimately complicated relationships any of us have to what we call home, land, nature, history, relationship. 

We look towards the histories here on this piece of land we are standing on as a starting point, as a way to say, “there is so much more here,” but we of course are not the arbiters of any culture and believe in the sovereignty of the Missiquoi Abenaki people to define their own terms and speak for themselves. 

BOWIE: Both of you create work that explores your relationship to nature, but in very different ways. Abbey, can you talk a bit about that relationship and how it’s captured on film? 

MEAKER: My work reflects a deep curiosity about atmospheres, the feeling or intangible qualities of a particular place, its history, the influences that inform it. How these mysterious aspects are connected to my own intangible spaces, memory, and sense of time. Cinema, photography—these are imaginative ways of seeing, of creating a dual sense of place, a feeling that within this world, there is another more illusory place. Curiosity about whether one’s interiority informs the atmosphere of a place and how it is translated visually. I work with film because of its materiality; it becomes a physical record of a time and place, absorbing the light and energy of a particular moment. For me, this primeval phenomenon is experienced most potentantly in the natural world. 

In a more traditional sense, I’m interested in natural compositions found in forests, particularly floodplain forests, which I’ve spent the last year and a half exploring. Each year the rivers flood, and the trees are sculptured and re-sculptured by water, a knowable conducting force that influences the growth of the Silver Maples and Ostrich Ferns. A curiosity about the ways in which we influence and are influenced by ‘the land’ is at the core of my practice and of Land Chapters. 

BOWIE: In contrast, Este, your sculptural works are made from a combination of natural materials and found objects. Can you talk about the role of nature as both subject and medium?

PUERTA: Nature in my work is about questioning what we deem as natural and alien, how our own bodies and earth can be our home and our prison, and all the slippery contradictions that nature holds. How it can heal us and kill us, how it both provides for us and takes us away. Nature has felt like the perfect archetype for the ways in which language fails us because language tries to hold clarity and structure in a way that nature cuts through and becomes excessive and complicated. 

More formally, I am really interested in using that same kind of slipperiness to how we identify and name something and what its purpose can be. I tend to blur elements of nature both in its operations and appearance into body-like structures that also incorporate furniture materials, found objects, as well as more conventional art materials. These forms become proposals of bodies/environments that have evolved from the social ills of our world to become their own self-sustaining, migratory, empowered agents. They become their own worlds just as much as they become their own bodies. Nature is a reminder of how much we can adapt and how much we must protect ourselves. 

BOWIE: What was the curatorial process like?

PUERTA: It was really organic and everything felt like it clicked into place so perfectly! It was a collaboration between Abbey and I, thinking of artists and writers who would lend a unique and important perspective around the curatorial prompt that was basically about addressing their relationship to nature in whatever way each person identified. 

We had very little back and forth with the contributors and made it clear that we had complete trust in what they were making, and wanted to be open to their exploration. In our invitation we were explicit about the ethos behind this project being about a more gentle response and collaboration with the land around them, instead of the historic, heroic interventions and every artist we invited already worked within that ethos. 

Letting go of a certain expectation felt important early on and embracing total trust and availability for conversations is a more natural way that Abbey and I work as curators. Both of us being artists, we intimately know the work and intention that goes into an art practice and the kind of freedom and support that is needed to nourish that practice. 

At the end of the day, we love artists and wanted to make sure our contributors felt that love and support. I think that is important to say, because often a show solely focuses on the type of work an artist makes, or why they make it, but how is that artist doing? Are they feeling supported in their practice? Are they truly being valued? How do we make the curatorial process one of support and not one of extraction for the artist? There are so many behind-the-scenes dynamics, and so often artists are the ones that suffer the brunt of a lot of hustling and feeling slightly demeaned along the way. Our process was slow, deliberate, immensely grateful, and apologetic if we felt a bump on the road. And we feel that that deliberate intention is felt in the project. Of course, every artist and writer contributed something that far exceeded any expectation we could have. 

Enacted prompt from Angus McCullough and Ashlin Dolan
Contact Kit, 2021
Birch bark, grape vine, stone, moss, typed instructions in a plywood case
20 x 16 x 6 inches

BOWIE: There’s such a multi-sensorial aspect to the curation. Works that you can see, hear, smell, and taste. Was the sensory aspect something you were considering in the curatorial process?

MEAKER: There’s something about being outside in a natural setting that attunes our senses to the world around and inside us. We wanted the experience of the work to reflect this. To attempt to communicate that we belong to this place; it doesn’t belong to us. We are part of this vibrant ecosystem, not separate. This is the throughline of Land Chapters. 

PUERTA: And yes! So many senses involved. Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri contributed Sun Belly, a functional solar oven and artwork that beckons us to collaborate with the sun as our main source of heat and cooking potential. Recipes were also contributed by Lily and will be included in the Land Chapters publication. We will be baking sun bread in the oven and offering it to visitors. 

The sound pieces will have their own designated listening spots scattered around the property where you can hear the sounds inside trees, a cabin, in a hole in the ground, and within the ferns.

The writing pieces in the publication also hold many senses. Sonia Louise Davis contributed a score to be performed by anyone anywhere, which is rooted in deep listening and feeling yourself in a space. Honestly, each piece beckons a couple of different senses at once, and I echo what Abbey said about just being in a natural setting; your own body is a heightened orb of senses where the heat of the sun will emphasize the smell of the chanterelles and the echo of a sound piece in a tree feels like a distant howl. 

Jordan Rosenow
Four by Eight, 2021
Galvanized corrugated steel, rebar
4 x 8 x 4 foot units (dimensions variable)

BOWIE: Abbey, you’ve curated and presented work in a number of untraditional locations. I’m thinking about a former coal plant, a former orphanage, an airstream turned library, a corn field on the cusp of reverting back to a wetland. Why eschew the white cube?

MEAKER: I have nothing against the white cube, per se. It has its place, particularly in a commercial sense. I can appreciate that in this setting the work has a clean platform, visually and conceptually. But I am personally interested in and excited about ephemeral, experiential artworks, when the setting creates a larger context and more holistic experience. 

The first show I ever organized was in the orphanage you mentioned, An Order. I had spent three years exploring and photographing this space, which had sat untouched for 30+ years. My maternal grandfather and his brother lived there in the 1920s. I never met either of them, so the process of being in this space was a way for me to piece together an unknowable history through the act of making pictures. At the end of my time there, I was curious how other artists might respond to this place: what would their line of thinking be if they approached it with more critical distance than I had? 

BOWIE: What are the challenges and benefits that come with presenting work this way, as opposed to hanging a frame on a wall?

MEAKER: In this case, working in the woods, a half mile up an old logging road, we mostly had to contend with the elements; the changing environment informed the timeline and many of our decisions. We started planning this in January when the land was inaccessible with snow, and now, within just a couple of weeks of sun and rain, the ferns have unfurled and everything is wild and lush. One of the most meaningful aspects of Land Chapters has been connecting with this place in such an intimate way, coming to really know and see it change over seasons. 

And the challenges have less to do with location and more to do with the lack of institutional support, especially here. It’s a real hustle to organize a group show like this, to navigate the logistics of a unique site, insurance and liability waivers, fundraising to pay artists, designers, promotion etc. If you don’t have enough support, much of your energy, attention, and resources are going to the mechanics of the exhibition. It becomes more challenging to balance curatorial responsibilities with organizing. I don’t know that I’d have it any other way, though. It allows us a certain freedom, as we are not beholden to donors or collectors. Artists can experiment and push their practice in ways they may not have otherwise. All that said, we have been so lucky to have a tremendous amount of community support. Friends and colleagues have generously donated their time and talent to help with design and aspects of organizing that two people simply can’t manage on their own. It has truly been a collective effort. 

PUERTA: We had to think about nature as our collaborator and saboteur. Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya’s work, for example, has a sculpture that is made of cat bones and we have to be very diligent about when it is installed and when we must bring it back into the cabin because a coyote or other animals would absolutely destroy it. Not to say that Ruben may not be interested in this potential collaboration, but it does become a question of how do we protect the intention and how much do we allow our surroundings to take over, and each work addresses that differently. 

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya
Tres Tristes Gallos pa el caldo de las tres de la tarde, 2021
Yucca husk. All sourced material from the Rio Grande River, in an area that borders; Texas, New Mexico, and Juarez, Mexico.

We have another artist, Devin Alejandro-Wilder who uprooted a cacti cluster from Texas and sent it to us to be transplanted in the woods of Vermont. With their piece, it was very much the intention to actually root a non-native plant into the soil of Vermont and see what would happen, see how much care and maintenance it would need, see how it would respond to its new surroundings and how its new surroundings would respond to it. So much of Devin’s piece is about this type of migration and otherness that occurs when introduced to a new space, a new territory that has been historically deemed as “unviable” for you. So, we document their piece often, notice how it changes and adapts, and are mostly humbled by the resiliency of this plant and the symbolism it holds. 

BOWIE: This project is a lot more expansive than just an exhibition. There are installation works on view, a book, and a tape of field recordings. Ultimately, what do you want people to take away from this work?

MEAKER: We see Land Chapters as one exhibition, experienced in three unique spaces, or chapters: installations on the land, the book, in which there are contributions from artists who are not part of the installations, as well as the tape of sound works. They are all connected by the curatorial prompt Este and I provided, but are unique spaces experienced differently, with different senses. For those that are able to experience this project, we hope it finds its way into your own relationship with the world(s) around and within you.

Devin Alejandro Wilder
T R A N S P L A N T, 2021
Nopales/ Opuntia engelmannii var. Lindheimeri, soils (native and mixed), pea gravel, rocks, cardboard
36 x 36 x 50 inches

Land Chapters is on view June 4-6 @ Beaver Pond Hill Property in Richmond, VT. Contributions to the exhibition include installations by Devin Alejandro-Wilder, Angus McCullough, Ashlin Dolan, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Jordan Rosenow, and Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri; recordings by sound artists Wren Kitz, Ivan Forde, Brian Raymond, and Stephanie Wilson; and text by Chief Shirly Hook, Alan Huck, Wes Larios, Travis Klunick, Sonia Louise Davis, and Rachel Vera Steinberg.

California Dreamin': An Interview Of Artist Cole Sternberg On Conceiving The Free Republic Of California

Cole Sternberg
the official flag of the free republic of california, 2020
Ink and stitched applique nylon
48” x 72”

interview by Michael Slenske

“The nation is an artwork and we the people are the artists.”
-Susanna Dakin

In 1984, artist and social activist Susanna Dakin set out to prove not only that nation building is an art unto itself, but that we as citizens are more compelled to take part in its creation than we might like to think. Almost four decades after Dakin pounded the pavement from coast to coast as a durational performance art piece, artist Cole Sternberg has applied the lessons he learned in law school to a radical reimagining of California statehood in FREESTATE, his agitprop public movement via exhibition at ESMoA. A variation on the traditional idea of secession, his proposal includes an invitation to all nations and all other states within the US to join. And unlike Dakin’s performance, Sternberg does not place himself in the role of a delegate, but rather a draughtsman, or perhaps a professional dreamer. The project is part constitution, part policy and budget reform, part sculptural installation, part digital revolution, and part public education extension in civics, complete with a sleek visual identity and merch game, all scored to the tune of “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas.

SLENSKE: So we walk into the exhibition and it starts with the gift shop.

STERNBERG: Normally a museum is one large room. And the curator and I had this idea to break it up into three. It’s a loose, reverse chronology of the origin story of the Free Republic. This first room looks like a store, or maybe it’s a graphic design office, or a sort of minimalist canvasing office. You don’t really know, and people who have been to the museum are like wait, what happened to the museum? And nothing’s for sale, so it’s just a little confusing, which I like.

SLENSKE: So nothing is for sale.

STERNBERG: No.

SLENSKE: But there is a shop—you can buy stuff, but not here.

STERNBERG: Just online. Online exists as its own art piece, really. This is one component of this broader idea of a Free Republic.

SLENSKE: So, this is more like the propaganda room.

STERNBERG: Yes, totally. It’s the propaganda room. Most importantly, it’s meant to engender this idea that something big is about to happen, or is happening. And then on the website, you can download any of this information. The budget’s one of the things that, with coronavirus, got much more dialed in. Originally I thought, I’m going to do a screen print or a painting of a math equation of our new budget surplus, and that’s it. Then the show got postponed, and I was sitting in the studio and I thought, well okay, what could we spend this money on? How much would it really cost for universal healthcare, or higher education for everyone, or for more low-income support, or our own EPA, and all of these different things? And it was shocking to realize how many things we could fit in that budget surplus. And the way we get a budget surplus is we provide all the services that the federal government currently does, but there’s a differential in that money because for every dollar we give the federal government in taxes, we get about 75 cents in so-called services, Kentucky gets $3 for every dollar they spend, so that creates a big surplus. Then, the military budget is so crazy that I thought, do we really need this? If we cut our military budget by three quarters, California would still be in the top fifteen militaries of the world, but that adds another hundred billion annually to our budget, so that pays for everyone to go to public or private higher education of any level, pays for the universal healthcare, pays to over double our low-income support, pays to have an EPA that’s four times as big as the US EPA, and a $60 billion transition fund annually, which would eventually go away once we’ve transitioned. I would like us to not really do that, but to have the number ammo to fight for a more pacifist, less war-mongering existence. It’s about $15-20 billion dollars to pay for the higher education of California. That’s it, and California contributes about $200 billion annually to the US military.

SLENSKE: Tell me about the seal. Why this design scheme?

STERNBERG: The State of California seal is almost the same. Creatively, you want to go more wild, but I wanted it to be confusing and make people think maybe this is real already. I reversed Minerva, the goddess. She’s looking in the other direction. It used to have thirty-one stars, now it only has one. There used to be an unknown building in the Hills that some people think is San Quentin—I don’t think it is, but either way I thought eh, we don’t need it. And then the text. I left “Eureka” because I like the idea of Eureka; it’s not tied to any racism of the first Anglo settlers here. And that’s it. It just exists like that. On the website now, there’s a graphic design high school class that all made their own seals. They could make it all about equality, or all about sustainability—the specific issues of the show.

SLENSKE: There’s kind of this theosophist bent. Have you seen Can’t Get You Out of My Head, that new Adam Curtis documentary? It’s this idea of how, in the last hundred years, any sort of meaningful society has caved under the pressure of capitalism from Mao Zedong, to Putin. So, I think of that and I think: are there any more possibilities right now or no possibilities? What do you think?

STERNBERG: There are possibilities. My aspiration for this is just a little bit of movement in the right direction, you can’t have everyone suffering and have it not crumble, and capitalism seems to just lead back to feudalism. So, it has to go in a different direction. This is the only real document in this room. I mean real like, that is fabricated, that is California joining the Paris agreement, and I really geeked out on these types of documents. Like, if everything happened, they would look like that. I went to the first impeachment hearing, and that was my ticket. I didn’t want to comment about Trump because this isn’t about Trump; it’s about these systemic American issues that we’ve never addressed, or solved, or anything, but I did want to touch a little on that, and impeachment is treated totally differently in my Constitution.

SLENSKE: What’s the difference?

STERNBERG: There’s a High Board of Impeachment which is run by a non-partisan body, and the Attorney General plays a big role in it, but the Attorney General is an elected position and not an appointed one. So, I pulled part of the presidential cabinet away from the control of the President because I didn’t see why the head of the EPA should be chosen by the President. I don’t think the President should have that much power, so I pulled a few things back, one being the Department of Justice, and another the EPA and another the State Department.

SLENSKE: You’ve done a lot of different types of experiential work, from dealing with your grandmother’s TV den, to being on this maiden voyage from China to Portland—why do this? Was this in the back of your mind for a while?

COLE STERNBERG: Well, whenever McCain named Palin his running mate, I was living in Budapest with no painting studio. I was mainly painting at the time, and I just thought, America’s really annoying me at the moment. I’m going to write this book about California having a coup d’état. So, it was a stream-of-consciousness thing. It was 350 pages, and then I didn’t read it. I didn’t go back and edit any of it, I just kept writing. I got home here, and read the first ten pages and I was like, god this is horrible, and I put it in a drawer. Then, cut to about two and a half years ago, the curator of this museum who is a good friend, came over and we went through a list of my ideas that had been floating around, and this was one of them. He said, you should pursue that one in this era of the crumbling of democracy. Cut to now—it’s developed into this huge thing where it’s not really about secession. The secession is just a guise to get people to listen to the ideas, really. I went to law school, and I’ve used that knowledge and anger about certain things in the works in certain ways, but I’ve never directly used that in this show. In terms of writing the Constitution, I said, “Oh, I can use what I studied and now I’ll have the confidence to at least draft documents in a way where I know they’re pretty close to the correct thing.”

SLENSKE: Did you have practicing lawyers go over them?

STERNBERG: Well, I did with the Constitution. I technically had three lawyers. Two just to review it, and another reviewed the Spanish translation, and a dear friend of mine is a Catholic priest who went to the London School of Economics and has four graduate degrees from Cambridge. He’s this super smart, thoughtful person, so I had him review it, too. His was actually the only substantial change.

SLENSKE: What was that? 

STERNBERG: He said, “You should consider adding a public bank, and I didn’t realize this. I knew check cashing organizations are a huge rip-off, but I didn’t know the depth of not having access to banks through our society. North Dakota is the only state with a public bank, ironically for their anti-socialism views, and it’s been around for 90 years, and they love it. The access to a public bank is great ‘cause there’s no drive for profit of that bank, so in the Constitution I added that we’ll have a public bank, when you’re born or become a resident or a citizen, you get an account, you can cancel that account if you want, and if you’re born here you get a savings bond for an amount determined by Congress, and that’ll mature until you’re eighteen, so it gives you access to the banking system that a lot of low-income places don’t have, or have at such a high premium that it’s inaccessible. That was his main change. The lawyers corrected a few typos. They couldn’t find any critical things.

SLENSKE: What’s going on over here with this record player console thing?

STERNBERG: This is the audio centerpiece of the whole show. I wanted to add a couple of sculptural components in general.There’s a bibliography on the website of about sixty books. This one I picked–well, de Tocqueville is obvious, and he mentions everything we’re talking about today. He’s like, “this attempt at democracy is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’ll work given the structure of voting and that it’s founded in slavery.” And then, Joan Didion, her family were some of the first settlers to Sacramento from the East Coast, and she tells about that journey to Hollywood. So, that was sort of a romantic and dark view of California. John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra was his first book about California.

Installation view
courtesy Mark Knight

Cole Sternberg
a caged bird meant to fly, 2020
Various woods, thermal transfer and acrylic on finished wood panel, steel, brass, ink on paper, serpentine rocks, internal speaker system
57” high x 31.5 wide x 23.25 deep (56” wide when open)

Cole Sternberg
high tides, 2020
Wood, steel nails, paper, ink, concrete, acrylic, watercolor, thermal transfer, linen and finished wood panels
48” x 60” x 30” (approximate)

SLENSKE: So, they’re almost like foundational texts to what California is in the mind of folks?

STERNBERG: Totally. And a little bit of nation building, and a little bit of insanity, because Kerouac’s Big Sur doesn’t help with the story of California very much, but in the end, he’s standing on the beach in Big Sur, which is arguably the most beautiful place in California, or the world, speaking gibberish because he’s gone nuts. So, that’s just kind of a joke of mine about me and this whole idea. And then, these are Serpentine rocks, which are the official rock of California.

SLENSKE: There’s all these fictional documents, it’s a construct itself, even though any Constitution is the same way. You made it before this moment, too, but it feels like it was made in this moment.

STERNBERG: That’s the crazy part. It actually makes me feel so proud of certain things like the Constitution, because I was trying to draft something that would be an infrastructure, and then current events come and crash into it, and hopefully it resolves those things properly. I’ve always been doing things simultaneously, and I’ve always been writing. Two years ago, I wrote a letter to Gerhard Richter every day and mailed it to him.

SLENSKE: What happened to that?

STERNBERG: I made three copies of each letter, so I have two copies, and I know it’s the right address for him, they all went to him, he never responded. I created a bunch of rules for myself, too. I never mentioned his art, or my art, geographic location, rarely a proper name. It’s like you jump into the middle of a real friendship when you read it. I think I just make all of this stuff anyway, format-wise, and this just dramatically highlights that part of the practice. 

SLENSKE: That’s amazing. How long did that go on for?

STERNBERG: It was a year. Every day.

SLENSKE: What year?

STERNBERG: Oh, 2017. I picked a lot of generic things, so January first it started, December thirty-first it ended. I made letterhead that was foiled and embossed with my name and everything, but then so was his name and address, and the same with the envelopes, so they could only serve one purpose: to go to him. But very generic looking, not like an artist’s letterhead. I had a portable printer that I carried in my backpack, and my rule was just that it had to be in the mail before midnight. I think I was in seven countries and fifteen states or something during that [project], and for two weeks I was in Berlin, which I just thought was funny because he might be like, oh shit, this guy’s getting close based on these stamps.

I picked Gerhard intentionally, thinking he’ll never write back, I like him as an artist, I know he’s a grumpy old man—like, if I wrote to Jasper Johns, he’s a friendlier guy. At some point someone would have written something back. So it got more and more freeing, too. It was more of a diary; I didn’t care.

SLENSKE: Do you feel like this project here is trying harder to find a response, in a way?

STERNBERG: It does feel like I’m yelling into a tunnel, whereas before, with Gerhard, it was more just talking in a tunnel. I wouldn’t care if the Gerhard letters got out now that I’m done with them. During the process, I don’t know if I would’ve wanted them out.

Cole Sternberg
structural assistance, 2020
Ink on paper
13” x 19”

SLENSKE: What’s this? Is this the LA Times?

STERNBERG: Yeah, that was in 1910. The LA Times was bombed. There’s three painted things like this in here where I’m starting to fix damage, but they all deal with multiple issues at once. This one, you think oh, okay, it’s against violence and terrorism and for free speech, but also the bombing was by two union members who were mad that the publisher was anti-union, and that allowed the anti-union movement in California to really push toward not having unions. We have less unions even than other states in America, and this is one of the big marketing things they were able to do to accomplish that, which is a huge bummer.

SLENSKE: Then, what’re these paintings?

STERNBERG: These all work together. These are paintings and screen printing together. You know the water wars are a big thing in California, and with how we’re going to be sustainable, we have to treat water differently than just wasting it all the time. The main reason desalination systems haven’t worked historically is the energy was too expensive to justify doing it, but we’re close to the point where batteries can store solar and wind at a large enough level where theoretically, you put all the solar panels in Death Valley, store it somewhere from there to give to Santa Barbara, take the water in and desalinate it closer to Santa Barbara, so it’s something where we’re really close to that technology.

SLENSKE: So, what’s going on in this last room?

STERNBERG: This is more of the beginning. It’s more like a traditional museum or gallery. You can breathe a little easier in here. So, it’s more grandiose thoughts of freedom and escape. It’s also a kind of strange assortment of things. This feels like a very Anglo-American, faux tough-guy, property rights-driven kind of a thing. It’s a gate from a barn, like a ranch. It’s on a little bit of a slant because it was on a road with a slant, and it’s decaying. This gate is easier to move, it’s already being torn apart, so it’s a similar feeling in a way but maybe more motivational because it’s so easy to get around it.

SLENSKE: It also seems like it’s been breached.

STERNBERG: Yeah. This is a piece of a California live oak. I was trying to save the live oak, but it looked like a peace symbol and a slingshot to me. I liked that there were still worms eating away at it. It’s kind of an homage to Pierre Huyghe.

SLENSKE: And then, this is the Turner-esque moment. Are we going out into the sublime or not?

STERNBERG: Exactly, and that’s funny. No one said Turner yet, but I also have never really used this rich of an orange. It feels really Turner-esque in that color palette. Yeah, it’s more romantic.

SLENSKE: Explain the flag real quick.

STERNBERG: I’m not a huge flag person, I don’t care how they’re designed necessarily, but I thought well, we need a flag to highlight how big the dream is. Baby blue is more like peace and the UN and diplomacy, green is the environment, and a darker blue feels to me like the Pacific. The original flag of Mexican California was just a red star in the middle. I like not changing the seal completely. I like that one sort of shoutout. I used to love the verified flag—our California state flag—but the people who designed it weren’t the best people. I didn’t think there was a point in continuing it.

SLENSKE: So basically, the end and the beginning are in this room.

STERNBERG: Yes. We thought about reversing the whole order, but it felt more interesting this way.

SLENSKE: Well, in a certain sense, to start a revolution, you need the marketing. Then, this is the documentation and the meat, and back here it’s sort of, where do we go next? 

STERNBERG: Kind of a reward. This is the nicest feeling room.

SLENSKE: Do you want to present this to California Congress? Do you want the mayor and the governor to see it? The Attorney General?

STERNBERG: Oh, for sure. I’m going to send Gavin Newsom a letter.

SLENSKE: I’m sure he’d welcome that right about now.

STERNBERG: [laughs] I’m going to send him a nice bound version of the budget and the Constitution, and I started to think California could amend its Constitution. It’s not going to have any federal law effect, but why don’t we just do that, just as a statement? I think that’s what I’d propose first to him. So, not seceding or anything, but hey, we have an old, California Constitution that has many of the exact same flaws as the US one; why don’t we just change it? I feel like people kind of forget about the California Constitution.

SLENSKE: I love this idea of reading the US Constitution and then reading this as a comparative analysis. Going back to big money, with issues like universal healthcare, the approval rating is through the roof, but it never happens. It’s the market that’s always going to fight back against these things.

STERNBERG: Healthcare, for instance. We pay the most of any country per person for healthcare, and we’re forty-sixth in the world in life expectancy. You could spend less money, more money goes into the economy, which then duplicates itself. So, you could talk in the language of capitalism even with people’s lives and healthcare in a way that should motivate them to change. I wrote an official letter to the head of Goldman Sachs a couple months ago. It’s this playful thing, like the Richter letters, but then it says, “You have all these clients. You have portfolios; they’re supposed to be diversified, and they call it a diversification quilt. But if you have a quilt and you take out one patch, you can still stay warm, and the one patch you should take out is natural resources.” The historical reason they wouldn’t is it makes clients money and clients don’t give a fuck, but now it doesn’t make money. It’s the worst performing patch in the quilt the last few years, so I can speak to it in the natural, rational way, but also the monetary way. If you had put that into wind and Tesla, you would’ve quadrupled people’s money. Instead, you lost seventy-five percent of people’s money in that quilt, so maybe we can move on from that to everyone’s benefit. Specifically for him, it’s his fiduciary duty. I’m trying to talk in the words of capitalism because it makes sense for capitalists to make these changes.

SLENSKE: Maybe that’s part of the amendments. Money talks.

STERNBERG: I mean, it does, and it’s just crazy when you think of how no one, Biden or Trump, or whoever—we don’t talk about cutting the military budget. Ever. It goes up every year even if we’re not in a war, or if we just finished a war, it still goes up the next year, and we’re seven times the second largest military, which is China, in spending annually.

SLENSKE: The thing about spending so little on health and education outcomes is that you have to have a big gun if you’re undereducated and sick all the time.

STERNBERG: Totally. It’s a barbarian concept of society.

FREESTATE is on view through September 18 at ESMoA

Both Sides Of The Street: Jason Stein On The Art Of The Auction

MOTOROLA
50XC Radio
1940
marbleized green and butterscotch catalin
height 6 1/2in (16.5cm); width 9 1/2in (24cm); depth 6 1/2in (16.5cm)
US$ 5,000 - US$ 7,000
£ 3,600 - £ 5,100
€ 4,200 - € 5,900

interview by Oliver Kupper

Jason Stein, Director of Modern Decorative Art and Design at Bonhams, grew up in the world of astrology and birth charts in Los Angeles’ growing New Age scene. His mother was a co-founder of The Aquarius Group, and his father was a department store manager. This amalgam wound up being a perfect formula for his work in the secondary market, first as an intern at Sotheby’s and finally at Bonhams where he is immersed in a universe of rare and beautiful objects that span movements, thoughts, trends, and design history. Ahead of this week’s Modern Design | Art auction, which has a focus on rare Bakelite radios and Mexican surrealist artists, like Leonora Carrington, we spoke to Stein about his fascinating role as design guru at Bonhams, avoiding fakes, and the return of maximalism. 

OLIVER KUPPER Let’s start at the beginning. Your mother was a well-known astrologer and your father sold clothing. Is that right?

JASON STEIN My mom founded this organization with her friends called the Aquarius Workshops. In the ‘50s, my mother and some of her astrologer friends would go up into Laurel Canyon. They were taught astrology by this woman named Kio, who was this incredible personality, and she imparted everything she knew upon this group of women. And then Kio died really young. So, my mother and others carried on the tradition and created this organization that defined the criteria and started vetting for people getting into astrology. They had all sorts of courses. They also had a magazine called Aspects. So, I grew up in this house where until maybe weeks before my mom passed, people would come every Tuesday, and she would assign birth data to work up a chart. People were always around coming for charts. She had so many clients.

KUPPER And this was on the cusp of the New Age scene in Los Angeles.

STEIN It was definitely in line with Bodhi Tree, which was this metaphysical bookstore that was on Melrose. She was one of the people on file there. And my dad was a retailer. He worked his way up to managing these midsized department store chains that are no longer around. So I grew up doing inventory essentially.

KUPPER So, both those things tied into your interest in art and cataloging.

STEIN Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we would go to exhibits when they came out—usually at LACMA. Often it would be some sort of blockbuster that would come through town, or some of my mom's friends were into collecting, and would tell us about openings.

LOT 122
WIFREDO LAM (1902-1982)
Untitled
1957
watercolor and ink on paper, signed 'Wi Lam' and inscribed 'PARA MI AMIGO LODI/MARACAIBO 1957' lower right
sheet 14 x 9 3/4in (35.5 x 24.7cm)
US$ 10,000 - 15,000
£ 7,300 - 11,000

KUPPER And you knew you wanted to get into the auction world when you went on a trip to the South Pacific?

STEIN I went to Cal State Northridge, and I started off being a radio and television film major, and then switched to speech communication. I wanted to have a broader major in case I didn't stay here or wanted to do something else, but I was not thinking about art or auctions at all. It really was on this trip that all of that happened. We went to Tahiti, and Bora Bora, and Moorea. When we were out on Moorea, among these garden huts, I met this guy who ended up being a very senior specialist from Sotheby's that had just quit his job. He and his wife specialized in Early European Works of Art, porcelain and glass at Sotheby's. So, I would just listen to their stories of the auction business, and after talking to them, I really was in love, and I could not stop thinking about these jobs they were leaving behind. When I got back to Los Angeles, there was a woman named Kathy Watkins and she was the local Sotheby's rep in Beverly Hills. Kathy had amazing energy, grace, presence, and she really radiated. We talked once or twice, she invited me over for a meeting, and I was even more captivated. I had never been in this environment at all, and I just wanted to be there so badly. After the meeting, she invited me to come back and meet the whole office. Kathy was the head of decorative arts, and I interned there for a little under a year. Then I went into contemporary art just to see what that was like, but I really felt more drawn to furniture and decorative arts. Then from going on field trips with Kathy to Butterfield and Butterfield, which became Bonhams, I became an intern here, and that’s how it started.

KUPPER Would you say there's a defining difference between the two auction houses?

STEIN Sotheby's, and really Christie's, both of them were small branch offices in California but were primarily based in New York, whereas Butterfield and Butterfield was a full-scale, fully-operating, local auction house that had no large presence elsewhere. It was an old California auction house from San Francisco that was founded in the 19th century off of Gold Rush era money. It really had options in a myriad of categories, whether it was furniture and decorative arts, or even books and wine.

KUPPER How do you define the difference between decorative art and fine art for someone who might not know the difference?

STEIN So, fine arts I typically think of as paintings, prints, photography, and sculpture. Then in the decorative arts, we would have furniture pieces, objects, textiles, and applied arts that are outside of the fine art worlds. The lines are a little blurry these days because there are certainly designers or makers that I offer in what you might call a modern decorative art and design sale, but also could be sold in a contemporary art auction.

In recent years, there are a lot of people in the ceramics world that go back and forth, like Betty Woodman. We recently had this Betty Woodman triptych in our auction in January and interest really came from both worlds, whether it was design collectors or contemporary art people. And I know when you go to the art fairs, Woodman is shown at Art Basel on one side and Design Miami across the street.

LOT 103
GEORGE NELSON (1908-1986)
High Action Office Architect's Desk
1964
for Herman Miller, walnut and ash, polished aluminum, chrome-plated steel, laminated plastic, vinyl, with foil circular manufacturer's tag
height 44in (112cm); width 65 1/2in (166cm); depth 32in (81.2cm)
US$ 2,000 - 3,000
£ 1,500 - 2,200

KUPPER I've been seeing ceramics cross between those two lines over and over again these days.

STEIN Yes, there are a lot of ceramicists crossing the lines, but there are also makers in other media, like Ruth Asawa and Diego Giacometti that have been embraced by fine art collectors, and the same applies to non-ceramic artists like Ruth Asawa too. Certainly her pieces could easily be offered in a designer sale, but it's firmly in the contemporary art scene at this point. And Giacometti too.

KUPPER So, I want to talk about the appraisal process. Is there a specific formula to the appraisal process? Is it provenance? Is it historical significance? Is there a formula that you have?

STEIN There are so many things that go into evaluating a piece. First, you can look at the artist or maker just as a launching point. And what is it specifically? Is it a piece that is recognizable as being the work of a certain maker, designer, artist, or is it atypical? You're looking to make comparisons based on other examples that have come up in the past. You also look at the condition and authenticity. And, as you mentioned, provenance — the history of owners — is key, especially with certain designers and makers. We ideally would love to know all of the steps from where the piece started. So, it's often a fact-finding mission when tracing the lineage.

Other things that I look at will be the aesthetic quality of a piece. How beautiful is it? Certain pieces in a designer or maker's body of work really will speak to you and collectors more, whether it's a piece of furniture that is carved in a particular way, or has a certain patina. I mean, look at the world of Tiffany lamps. After this, I spend a good portion of my time on various databases doing comparisons and looking at similar examples that have sold in recent years and come up with a value range. If there's a piece that is a particular kind of Tiffany lamp, like a floral Tiffany, I would look at what sort of flower that is, and I can judge based on that and other lamps that have come up internationally on the market over a two-to-three year period. And I look at the color choices, and I'll look at the diameter of the shade, and then sort of plug the data in to see what the presale estimate was, versus what the item ultimately hammered for, and also I keep in mind factors like buyer's premium. So, I look at how close to an auction house's appraisal a piece ultimately sold for. If they've exceeded the estimate, or if it didn't sell, I have to reevaluate an estimate range and come up with a new one.

KUPPER In terms of authenticity, have you dealt with a lot of people trying to offer fakes? And how have you gone about discovering them?

STEIN You know, most people that would have something that is fake, or let's say it looks like there’s a spurious mark, may not know that they actually have something that is a reproduction. The lion's share of those people come to you in good faith. They probably inherited the piece or they acquired it. And in my position, you really have to do the due diligence and evaluate the piece, both internally with our team of specialists that have great collective knowledge, and on occasion, you could seek outside counsel from people who specialize in particular artists or designers. There are vetting committees for particular makers and you just go through the process and let the committee decide, and then we convey that news to our client.

KUPPER Especially with multiples or furniture, it seems like it could be tricky.

STEIN One thing that I specialize in is custom works of interior design—often pieces that came out of a particular commission, whether it was an interior designer doing a full house commission, or an architect that would also design the furniture for that house. That's when lineage is so important. Back in the day, if you were working with a really big interior designer that was doing a custom design scheme, working throughout the house, there were invoices that would list everything out. So, whenever someone comes to me with a piece and one of these invoices from the fifties or sixties, it's amazing because you have what you need. No one is going to challenge it. But sometimes I've seen pieces that are meant to be by a particular person, and sometimes you have a feeling that it's not. Then, you really have to go through, and you're doing lots of comparisons, and looking at the materials, and how something was built, and it's a very different approach than if something doesn't have the backstory.

LOT 17
TIFFANY STUDIOS (1899-1930)
Crab Inkwell
circa 1902
patinated bronze, shell, with glass liner, stamped 'TIFFANY STUDIOS NEW YORK 23547 L1' with maker's monogram
height 3 1/2in (8.8cm); width 8in (20.3cm); depth 8in (20.3cm)
US$ 7,000 - 9,000
£ 5,100 - 6,500

KUPPER There's been some interesting trends in art and design furniture over the past decade. Mid-Century made a huge comeback and then Memphis. What do you think people are hungry for now?

STEIN Over the last year or so, I am really seeing a return to the Arts and Crafts movement. When I got into the business in Hollywood, there were very big collectors of the Arts and Crafts movement—circa 1908 Craftsman. There were really some of the most important collections. Some of them lived here in California, whether they were from families that inherited them or in the industry, who acquired the best examples. So, like you said, with Mid-Century, they came in, and a lot of people shifted their focus and Mid-Century became the most desirable for several years. It's truly remarkable that recently I've been seeing pieces from Arts and Crafts—furniture or ceramics—bring several times the estimate.

KUPPER Who are some examples in that movement that are making a comeback.

STEIN: Certain types of Grueby [The Grueby Faience Company, founded in 1894, was an American ceramics company that produced distinctive American art pottery vases]. Also, you’re seeing Newcomb Pottery [Newcomb Pottery, also called Newcomb College Pottery, was a brand of American Arts & Crafts pottery produced from 1895 to 1940], things that are rare and unusual. So that is something that has been forming, I'm truly seeing it in the results. And there's definitely a reinvestigation for certain people. We're certainly looking at Art Nouveau and Deco—there is some activity in the early century. And then, all the while, other pieces made by hand, the American Studio Craft Movement—things that are truly hand-worked at the studio, whether it's in ceramics, think like [Otto] Natzler, or in woodworking, California and [Sam] Maloof, East coast, [George] Nakashima, or like Northern California makers, like JB Blunk, like Arthur Espenet Carpenter, or like Jack Rogers Hopkins from San Diego's scene.

KUPPER Yeah. It seems like the Mid-Century thing was overexposed and burned people out a little bit, because there's so much 20th-century decorative arts to explore and there seems to be a return to maximalism in a weird way.

STEIN So, there is the "more is more" sort of aesthetic. I worked on Tony Duquette's estate years ago, until he passed away, and I was in charge of the estate auction that was done at the time. Tony was definitely one of the great maximalists who would incorporate an early 18th-century piece with something 1960s, and for me, that was a great education.

KUPPER In terms of the collectors that come to Bonhams, are they mostly LA collectors or is it global?

STEIN Truly global. In non-COVID times, there are fun, opening night parties and previews that are going on. There's a lot of energy to the environment at the campus because it's a main building and an annex across Curson, and we'll often exhibit together. I'll have my modern design and art set alongside prints and multiples. On opening night, our clients will go back and forth. So you have people that certainly can come from all over LA or Southern California, and people will occasionally fly in from elsewhere. But it is global.

KUPPER How would you define your own personal taste in decorative arts? Do you have an era that you specifically gravitate to?

STEIN When I started, I was much more pure or minimal, and now I think I call it “textured modernist,” because there are pieces that you collect along the way that ultimately I am layering. So, I like to mix, whether it's Scandinavian modern furniture with ceramics or textiles from Mexico. I like silver. I like studio ceramics, whether they're Japanese studio or American studio. I'm pretty open about that. 

KUPPER There's an auction coming up. Is there a specific theme for that lot?

STEIN Well, the title is Modern Design and Art and it includes all of the great modern movements. You'll see Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, Art Moderne, Mid-Century Modern, Post-Modern, and Contemporary design. We also have an art component in a sort of 360-degree view, how you put together an environment. This sale is a two-session auction. I also have this capsule collection that came in of radios. It's rare Catalin and Bakelite radios. Bonham's has been the auction house to offer some of the most important collections of rare radios that have come up over the last ten to twenty years. You hardly see things like this, especially coming all together, and the impact is big. For that, I think it’s exciting and unusual. And it would be for someone who is truly a radio collector who wants to add a particular piece to their collection, or someone who wasn’t even part of the radio world and wants to add to what they collect. These radios are largely ‘30s and ‘40s. The most important radios are called Air Kings, and the sale has several in really special colors. They were done in 1933 by a designer named Harold Van Doren. We also have a solid Latin American section in paintings. 

KUPPER I saw the Leonora Carrington Chipmunks. Those are really exciting.

STEIN Yeah, we have Leonora Carrington, and there’s a cool surrealist component to the sale. We do really well in this sale category in offering Latin art. I sold a painting a while back in a sale that is certainly a mix of design and art that broke records for a particular Argentinian artist. We hold the world record for this artist, Romulo Maccio, in modern design and art sales. We love Latin American design and art, and whenever we can, we incorporate it into the auctions.

LOT 118
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
Chipmunks Commuting (About to Commune)
ink, pencil and crayon on paper, signed 'Leonora' lower left and titled upper center
image 9 3/4 x 7 1/4in (24.8 x 18.4cm); sheet 10 x 8in (25.4 x 20.3cm)
US$ 5,000 - 7,000
£ 3,600 - 5,100

LOT 116
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
Study for The Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess
circa 1965
pencil, pen and sepia ink on paper, signed 'Leonora Carrington' lower right
image 8 3/4 x 9in (22.2 x 22.8cm); sheet 10 x 13 3/4in (25.4 x 34.9cm)
US$ 4,000 - 6,000
£ 2,900 - 4,400

KUPPER Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about collecting decorative arts?

STEIN Well, it's always, buy what you love first. Buy pieces that really speak to you. Then you can honor that work, and have pride of place, and you can really enjoy it. When you truly have an association with an item, then it just sort of builds from there. And of course, do your research and contact folks that are specialists; people that do what I do. I'm always happy to tell someone who's starting about a piece and how it relates to other items. I'm always happy to be a guide.

Bonhams’ Modern Design | Art Auction will be held tomorrow, March 25, starting at 10:00 PDT with lot 1 and features an important collection of American radios.

LOT 256
FADA
652 Radio With Insert Grill
1945
blue and yellow catalin
height 6 3/4in (17cm); width 10 1/2in (27cm); depth 6 1/4in (16cm)
US$ 3,000 - 5,000
£ 2,200 - 3,600

LOT 211
HAROLD VAN DOREN (1895-1957)
Rare Air King 66 Skyscraper Radio
1933
molded mint green plaskon with white knobs, globe insert
height 12in (30cm); width 9in (23cm); depth 7in (18cm)
US$ 15,000 - 25,000
£ 11,000 - 18,000

LOT 272
KADETTE
K-26 Clockette
1937
dark blue catalin
height 7 1/2in (19cm); width 8in (20cm); depth 5 1/4in (13.5cm)
US$ 8,000 - 10,000
£ 5,800 - 7,300

LOT 287
SPARTON
500C Cloisonne Radio
1939
blue enameled front with yellow catalin cabinet and chromed metal accents
height 5 1/4in (13.5cm); width 8in (20.5cm); depth 5 1/4in (13.5cm)
US$ 6,000 - 8,000
£ 4,400 - 5,800

The Credible Image: An Interview of Anna Weyant On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition Loose Screw

Anna Weyant
Buffet, 2020
Oil on linen
36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

interview by Bill Powers

Falling, living, laughing, touching—the still, subdued, painterly fantasies of Anna Weyant sway to and fro from the warmly resplendent hues of the Dutch Masters, to the madness of Otto Dix, to the gold of an Instagram selfie’s golden hour. The work, much of it created under the shadow of a global pandemic, are prime moments of a zeitgeist suddenly hollowed by the screeching halt of life as we know it: backgrounds are blackened out, clouds obscure, and curtains drape with muted uncertainties. Everything is vague and everything is a warm oblivion, like the sand of an hourglass exploded and the grains took the shape of a world that resembled its former self. But time doesn’t stop on a dime, it lurches, chugs forward with ghostlike animation even when your foot is on the break, which is what makes Weyant’s paintings so exciting—brushstroke by brushstroke, they are full of that potential energy. In the following interview, Bill Powers and Anna Weyant discuss her upcoming show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles.

BILL POWERS: Tell me about your solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

ANNA WEYANT: The show is called Loose Screw, which is also the name of the first painting I made for it. Some people assume it’s a self-portrait, but I was actually thinking about Ellen Birkenblit’s screaming woman series, that type of silhouette. I liked the title because it’s kind of a joke on me, but when I told my mom she was like, “Honey, don’t ruin your show with such an ugly name.” Sorry, mom.

POWERS: Why are most of your paintings some shade of sepia?

WEYANT: I don’t want to be distracted by color. I prefer a more muted palette.

POWERS: Do you ever worry about being too close in your painting style to John Currin?

WEYANT: I wish. He’s so much better than me. I remember going to a book signing he did at the Marc Jacob’s store on Bleecker Street. When I got to the front of the line, John asked me if I wanted the book inscribed to anyone in particular. I was so starstruck that I just smiled like an idiot and said nothing.

Anna Weyant
Loose Screw, 2020
Oil on canvas
48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Anna Weyant
Cloud Hill, 2020
Oil on linen
48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Anna Weyant
Unconditional Love, 2021
Oil on canvas
72 x 48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

POWERS: I ask because a painting of yours like “Slumber,” the shape of the figure’s mouth reminds me of the central figure in Currin’s Thanksgiving painting, the oval of the lips.

WEYANT: It’s such a different scenario, though. My painting is of a woman having an orgasm in her sleep. I was nervous it might be too cheesy, so I folded her arms across her chest almost like she’s laying in state, funerary. A little creepiness can save a painting sometimes. And then the gravity of the candle flicker behind her is off which makes you question the reality of the narrative.

POWERS: You have made some paintings of very young girls: one stuffing her bra, another in underwear. Do you worry about the sexualization of children?

WEYANT: I think of it more along the lines of a before and after picture or a Clark Kent vs. Superman situation. I can remember being a little girl and wanting boobs and craving the power of womanhood. I imagined a level of agency and confidence that I would one day inhabit, which—if I’m being honest—eludes me even now. So those paintings are about looking back. And then, sometimes I like to make companion paintings so the girl stuffing her bra might be the same person we see in my painting “Head,” which is heavy on cleavage.

Anna Weyant
Falling Woman, 2020
Oil on linen
48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

POWERS: And there was a hot stove composition you made two versions of.

WEYANT: Well, I did a drawing that was almost like a PSA of a young girl’s finger burning on a hot coil. Then, for the painting of the same scene, I made it a woman’s index finger only she’s really pressing down on the hot stove as if to assert it’s her prerogative to hurt herself.

Anna Weyant
Untitled, 2019
Colored pencil on paper
15 x 11 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery

POWERS: Do you always make a study of the painting first?

WEYANT: I make a sketch, but it might not be rendered in great detail. And, of course, the image can change as I develop the narrative. I wanted to make a painting of a woman falling down a flight of stairs. It started with an Edward Gorey picture of a girl tripping down this very grand staircase. In my painting, I dressed the woman in more formal attire and I cropped in tightly. She appears upside down, almost like a Baselitz figure, only the pose is meant to be naturally-occuring, not intentionally flipped as he does. The idea was that artifice can’t prevent you from making a complete fool of yourself. Even in a Balenciaga dress, there’s still a chance you might face-plant down a flight of stairs holding a glass of champagne. I guess embarrassment can be a real equalizer in that way.

POWERS: I loved the still life of flowers you made with a straw sticking out of the bouquet.

WEYANT: I could paint flowers all day long. I thought it was interesting to add a straw like someone was trying to suck the water out of the vase. If you look at that painting as memento mori then the addition of the straw is almost an accelerator to kill the flowers faster. In another still life, I cut all the buds off the top so it’s like a murdered bouquet with just beheaded stems sticking out and a sharp knife resting on the table beside them. Of course, all cut flowers are dead and there’s an inherent violence in how they became so. The first flower painting I ever showed with Blum & Poe was called “JAWS.” It was such a traditional painting that I found it unnerving. And I always liked that line from the movie about there’s something in the water. The sinister can often be masked by beauty or even tranquility.

POWERS: Your first solo show in 2019 was called Welcome to the Dollhouse. Was that meant to be an overt reference to your own childhood?

WEYANT: I did make a dollhouse painting, but more as an homage to Robert Gober. Memories by nature are a kind of container. And I love when you see dollhouses in murder mysteries or horror movies. They are never used as symbols of comfort. It’s always a bad omen somehow. And it’s weird how when you paint something in miniature it creates a kind of emotional distance that lets you get freakier with the particulars: a set of legs poking out from under a bed.

POWERS: Who would you cite as contemporary influences on your work?

WEYANT: I mean, we already discussed John Currin. I named a painting John once after him, only it was of a little girl with a candelabra. I was referencing a painting he had made called Anna so I thought of it like an inside joke—you know, trading names—even though it’s impossible for anyone but me to get the joke. And even then, it’s not very funny. The other artist I think about a lot is Francesca Woodman, the mood of her photographs and how she captured a woman’s body, the bends and folds against the light.

POWERS: You did a portrait of the painter Cynthia Talmadge for your first solo show as well.

WEYANT: Yes, I worked as her studio assistant one summer and I always thought she had a timeless look about her, like she could have been transported from the 1940s. I love when people have a sensibility about them that reminds you of some bygone era. It’s rare.

POWERS: How do you decide if a work is successful?

WEYANT: I think it needs to feel credible as an image. Often humor is another good indicator. I made a painting of a white pencil snapped in half and called it “Lines” because at first glance it looks like two lines of cocaine. Art is my drug!

Loose Screw is on view by appointment March 23 - May 1 @ Blum & Poe 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles

Anna Weyant
Stepped on a spider, 2020
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery

Existential Time: An Interview Of Gisela Colón

interview by Summer Bowie

I conducted this interview with Gisela Colón on November 19, 2020, just after a mysterious obelisk-like structure was discovered in Utah’s Red Rock Country, and just days before the discovery was announced. Exactly when this crudely bolted, John McCracken-like monolith was initially installed is a mystery. That it was found by state employees counting sheep has been described as the most 2020 thing of 2020. Since then, multiple monoliths of varied fashion have been appearing and disappearing around the world, leading to a magnifying force of everything from commercial opportunists, to alien conspiracy theorists, to a Christian military LARPing crusade. Meanwhile, Gisela has been installing her solo exhibition, EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future, of monolith and rectanguloid sculptures created in quarantine from optical acrylics and aerospace carbon fiber. Her unique sculptural language embodies the way that time expands, retracts and collapses. Her two short films express the anxieties that result from isolation and inertness. Her inquiries into the laws of physics address non-linear time flows and they provide the viewer with a sensory and intellectual experience in the grand cosmic sense of time and space. In essence, these “organic minimal” forms inherently attract a diversified coterie of forces that might point toward all the reasons we could be feeling our fragmented world suddenly culled together by a mysterious ping.

SUMMER BOWIE: You studied economics in Puerto Rico, and then you came to Los Angeles to study law, but how exactly did you realize that your career would be at the intersection of art and aerospace technology?

GISELA COLÓN: I grew up in Puerto Rico and I went to University of Puerto Rico, studying economics with a minor in political science, but I was a painter very early on with my mother. We painted for years together, since I was four or five years old. I made paintings of everything around me in Puerto Rico, which is a particularly diverse biological region. So I painted still lifes and landscapes, spent a lot of time hiking in the rainforest, on the beach–I was exposed through my Puerto Rican upbringing to a really vibrant, alive biological world that’s at the root of all of my work. That’s my primal source where I go back to everything. When I graduated from university, I came to Los Angeles to study law, not because I was fascinated by law at all, but because I grew up fairly poor. It was survival mode: if I study law, I will be able to understand society and how society functions, especially as a woman growing up in Puerto Rico. It wasn’t easy, I lost my mother at twelve after she went through a terrible divorce with my father. There was a lot of violence in the men around me, everybody carried guns. So for pragmatic and practical reasons, I studied law in my twenties, but I kept on going back to the painting, and the art, and thinking, this is what I love doing. I created so much art in my youth and I want to continue to do it, and it worked its way into the right time.

BOWIE: Your work draws this very seamless connection between science and art. It seems like you’re constantly fusing the artistic sensibilities of your mother with the scientific ambitions of your father.

COLÓN: You just hit the nail on the head. I was brought up with both science and art very actively because my dad—being a PhD in chemistry—he always had all of these chemistry sets around, and we experimented with crazy things. My Puerto Rican grandmother was a pharmacist, so in her closet she had all of these medicine bottles and syringes lying around. I would grab them and start taking stuff out with the syringes as a kid and go inject the banana leaves, and then take the banana leaves and cook them in a pot. We were always making concoctions and chemistry things, and so it was really a duality of this art and science as a child that now I combine again. 

In fourth grade, I wanted to be a paleontologist and dig up dinosaur bones because it was so fascinating, looking at the rocks and the minerals. I went through that on my own, loving the earth and loving the kind of archaeological vestiges, or past history of our existence on Earth. 

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

By fifth grade, I started really studying outer space and science, and I was just fascinated by the moon. I’d spend hours looking up at the moon and the sun and trying to identify the planets at night in the sky, and I said I want to be an astronaut. I remember my mother saying, “You can be whatever you want to be, but if you’re an astronaut, you’re never going to be able to get married and have kids.” It was the traditional woman’s view of the world. That wouldn’t have deterred me per se, but it made me think twice–do I really want to go and do this? Then by sixth grade, I was back onto loving the art. It was just as a child, going through all the different progressions and iterations of your thoughts and your environment. Put it all in a soup pot, and then years later it comes out.

BOWIE: It seems a great many layers of your identity were established at a very early age. A lot of artists emulate other artists early on in their practice, and your earliest works were often compared to many Light and Space artists like Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin, but was there a defining moment when it felt like your works were really your own?

COLÓN: Oh yeah, absolutely. When I first started painting, my earlier influences were more like the Latin American Op Artists that I had studied in books because I’m self-taught, so I would read about Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Soto, and all the traditional Latin painters, and then I became friends with a lot of the Light and Space contingency of older generation artists. I read all of Robert Irwin’s manifestos on perceptualism, and then I really got into minimalism and started spending a lot of time in Marfa studying Judd and Flavin and Doug Wheeler, John McCracken, and on and on. There was a phase there in the middle, what I call my transitional phase. When I first started working with plastic, I started painting the plastic similar to Kauffman, that was my springboard. Then, within a very few short months, I said, “this is not my thing because I have to pursue something different that has not been done before.” 

That’s when I started experimenting with these new optical materials. There’s no paint involved, and it was like I had this eureka moment where I would form a piece, and then I’d put it on the floor, and I’d put something underneath it, and then I’d form another layer until I struck upon this whole layering of materials, which created a prism. It’s the point of view of a woman and of a Latinx artist, because that’s the other dimensionality. It really pisses me off when people say, “Oh, you’re a second generation space artist.” No, I’m not! Not even fifth generation, for god’s sake. It’s been sixty years. I am a Latin woman in the 21st century using modern materials that had never been used before and creating my own language, my own vocabulary, which I’ve titled organic minimalism. It’s a new and different interpretation from the point of view of somebody who puts life and this whole Latin point of view in their objects.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

BOWIE: Another thing I think that struck me is the way that your works are often considered a feminist take on Finish Fetish, and yet I’d say there’s a rather loud expression of femininity that has gone almost unrecognized in the works of say, Billy Al Bengston or Peter Alexander, et al.

COLÓN: Don’t even get me started on that topic because I’ve written a whole essay on this—not published yet—but have you studied Craig Kauffman’s work? Pink bubbles...think about this, the titles. Bubbles. He made dishes, he made donuts. There were all these things that belong in the kitchen. It was the purview in that era of women, and most of his colors and his glitter—oh, his flowers contain glitter—so if you look at all the titles, flowers, dishes, donuts, loops—you know loops that look like a piece of clothing hanging on the loop? Like on a clothesline? To me, his entire oeuvre, when I look at it, is made by a woman, except that he was a man. 

I’m taking the masculine, like these monoliths, which have destructive references to projectiles, bullets, rockets and missiles, and feminizing it; softening it to the world. I reference Judy Chicago a lot in this process because her atmospheres from the 1970s are precedent. Basically, what she did is she put these colors out into the world that were the feminine impulse and softened things. I’m putting these impulses of women, and you could say femininity, but it’s really more feminist. It’s saying, “I can tackle the purview of men. I can tackle these forms and, as a woman, be fluid in the gender approach to my work. I can do all this and still be strong and create meaningful work.” It’s this fluid gender spectrum that’s embedded in the work, because when you look at some of my more organic forms, they’re vessels for life, like cells or things that generate life.

BOWIE: It’s really interesting because they have a very phallic shape, and yet at the same time, those nuclei are almost like the yolks of an egg.

COLÓN: Well also it could be phallic penetration, or reproduction—some people say they see a womb and the seed of a baby, or life inside. It really fluctuates fluidly between genders. It’s really oscillating between masculine and feminine. I can take anything; I can go from masculine to feminine and back. 

BOWIE: There’s something to be said about the subtlety of such a subversion. At first glance, the works feel anything but political. You’re experiencing them on such a sensational level, moving around them, watching them change, and it takes a while for all of the implications to set in, which is really nice. You have to sit with it for a moment while it all sinks in.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Rubidium Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

COLÓN: What you’re getting at is the whole topic of beauty as a concept in art, and beauty is a bad word. You’re not supposed to make beautiful art, or you’re not supposed to make art that is attractive to the eye, but there’s a wide range of artists that are abstractionists that have made beautiful work, like Sam Gilliam. They’re finally getting recognized as people realize it’s okay to make beautiful work with an undertone of political statement that’s not always specifically identified, but it’s there by virtue of its existence. It’s there by virtue of the fact that the artist that is making it is making this kind of work. That’s the political statement.

BOWIE: You make works that change color and form as the viewer moves, and these qualities are highly sensitive to the environment that surrounds them. Are the environmental conditions of the exhibition space something that you consider before or after making the work?

COLÓN: I never considered it before because I make the work knowing that it is a variable and mutable object and that it will alter depending on where you place it and who’s looking at it. Now, I do like presenting it in the proper lighting. Obviously once it gets into the commercial gallery setting or the museum setting, I want to make sure that everything is lit properly so that the viewers can really experience the full spectrum, but the works are alive. It’s kind of like they’re alive and they do things sometimes that you’re not expecting, so they have a life of their own. 

BOWIE: And when people collect the works, do you prescribe the conditions of the environment they’re displayed in at all?

COLÓN: I would prescribe a proper lighting, but it’s really up to them. It’s their work. If they want to experience something a little differently, that’s them. I’ve had collectors who have said to me, “Oh my god, during the day it looks one way, and in the middle of the night, I walked around the living room, everything was turned off, and all of a sudden the thing was glowing at me.” It’s really up to the collector to enjoy it, and that’s part of the perceptual experience that it really is in the eye of the beholder, it’s participatory. The ultimate enjoyer of the work completes the experience.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Gamma Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

BOWIE: I don’t think your work is ever acknowledged as performance, but there’s a performative aspect to it because the object is always performing in relationship to the viewer and the environment.

COLÓN: It is, but what I think you’re hitting on is the element of time. Performance is time, but in this case what you encounter is a real sense of memory. You can have a memory of an object, and have that picture in your head, and then encounter it at a later time and it changed completely. So, the performative aspect even goes beyond just the moment, but it involves memories and the capturing of ideas that will resurface later on. This whole concept of collapsing time, existential time, is woven into that participatory aspect that you’re talking about.

BOWIE: How has the use of a time-based medium such as film made it easier or more challenging to address the non-linearity of time?

COLÓN: Well in fact, that was the greatest kind of paradox. Here I was talking about this stasis and paralysis and inertia, yet the only way of communicating it effectively was through this time-based medium, which takes you through the feeling quickly. So it was a paradoxical thing, but I enjoyed doing it. I think it’ll be effective.

BOWIE: When you’re making a work that changes with your every movement and that changes with the environment, how do you know that it’s done?

COLÓN: It’s a real visceral feeling. You know how, at some point when life started in the little cesspool of hot water, and there was that initial ray of light that came through the pond, and somehow that first cell started—that primeval, primordial spark of energy? I can feel it because that’s what I look for. That’s what I tap into when I’m making these pieces. When it’s completed is when I finally look down at it and it glows back at me like it’s alive. Then, I have that recognition that we have in ourselves. I say we’re all composed of stardust. We go back eons and eons into the universe, before time, so we have that instinctual knowledge, and a lot people don’t access it, or they don’t tap into it, but I always talk about how you can feel that if you just quiet the noise around you, get off of Instagram, and just really focus for a minute. You’ll feel what it is to be alive because it’s in your cells. I use the elliptical form a lot and that curvature which is present in our cells. Even our DNA strands involve movement, so this whole concept of movement in art is present inside us. We never stop moving; our cells never stop multiplying. I know when a piece is ready because I can feel it in my cells.

BOWIE: We are so used to experiencing time in this way where we take little snapshots of things, and we think of life happening in these blocks, when actually it is this amorphous, constantly moving thing. Looking at it like still images helps us to understand the world around us, but when we can’t give into that deep time, to that cosmic time, we lose our ability to instinctively feel when things are arriving or going.

COLÓN: Absolutely, because you don’t experience the passage of time absent change around you, which is why the quarantine was so nerve-wracking. There wasn’t much moving or changing, yet time was passing, and so yes, it’s that whole tapping into the cosmological realm that I think we really need in this day and age, just to check ourselves. I think a lot of my work, at the core, tries to address that; to bring certain feelings about in the people who view it, to go to that primeval source of life. The cosmological realm just fascinates me. There’s so much out there, the unknown, and I feel like we’re all searching for something, and nobody really talks about it, but it’s right there. All you gotta do is go out at night and look up in the sky, and when you really look at the stars and the moon–I know it sounds kind of superficial, but it’s not. When you really take it all in, it’s magnificent, what’s out there for us to access that we just don’t see every day.

EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future is on view through January 3 @ GAVLAK Palm Beach 340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334

Art Of The Divine: A Conversation Between Rikkí Wright & Kilo Kish

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Rikkí Wright and Kilo Kish are two of the eight artists exhibiting in this year’s edition of Womxn in Windows, a socially distant group show that clearly presaged the conditions of our current moment in its first edition last year. Visitors are invited to walk along the storefronts of Chung King Road in Chinatown and watch short films through each window with scores that can be accessed via QR code. Founded and curated by Zehra Ahmed, this year’s artists were invited to exhibit work that examines the intertwined relationships between culture, religion, and society. These films remind us how womxn have relied on faith and on each other as well as on a desire for equality, understanding, and the power to make the right choices for ourselves. In both Wright and Kish’s films one observes an intimate relationship with the spiritual, however from highly contrasting perspectives and with completely unique aesthetics. Wright is a photographer who makes films and ceramics, and whose practice includes explorations of gender and faith in the Black community. Her film, A Song About Love is a spiritual reckoning on the different forms of love in this world, from human to divine. It is a moving collage that combines interviews of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and bell hooks with the soul and gospel stylings of D.J. Rogers and more. Most notable is the way that she delicately stitches these intellectual and emotional anchors with a personal thread of vulnerable, self love that manifests directly in the undressed body of the artist as it moves languidly to the music. Kish is a singer-songwriter and visual artist who makes films and music videos. Her film, Blessed Assurance: a dream that I had, is presented as a multi-room installation that takes on a new life as six individual visual pieces, each framed in their own windows. It’s a captivating mix of recorded video overlaid with punchy, low-fi graphics, and an animated church reminiscent of a two-bit video game that transports the viewer to their own physical and spiritual dimension, somewhere between the space Kish imagines and the sky above. These varied approaches to understanding the relationship between art and the divine are reflective of their very different backgrounds and core disciplines. The following conversation is an in-depth look at the role of the body in self-portraiture, the effects of the pandemic, uprisings and election that have dominated this year, and the value of tapping into your intuition.

KILO KISH: Do you think it’s possible to fully find yourself as an artist, or is it an ever-fleeting thing? 

RIKKI WRIGHT: I think the latter. I came to photography initially, and then filmmaking. It was kind of by way of exploring and trying to understand who I am and where I came from. My mother passed away when I was two years old, and I didn’t grow up having that figure in my life. I think that once I got to a certain age, I was trying to find parts of my feminine self or the parts of womanhood that a mother gives to her child that I was lacking. But, in the midst of trying to look for photos of my mom and my childhood home, I wasn’t able to find a lot because I think the mother is the person that keeps all of these heirlooms together. That’s what brought me to wanting to create images and knowing how to make tangible evidence of something that happened in a way that just proves that that time existed. So, my work really revolves around trying to fill in that gap, around my family, and the Black family, and there are so many conversations and things that I’m trying to understand in my work constantly. It’s just ever-flowing. 

KISH: Yeah. I kind of felt that after watching your piece. It had that nostalgic quality of opening up a scrapbook, like an old scrapbook at your grandma’s house and being like, “Oh, this is Uncle Joe!” And I agree; I don’t know if you ever fully find yourself as an artist, and if you do, you just kind of move on to the next thing that’s exciting for you. If you do find something–and I attribute this more to making albums–it’s like you’re asking questions and trying to find parts of yourself that you want to explore further, and by the time you actually put the album out, you’re already onto the next thing. 

WRIGHT: That’s what’s so amazing about being an artist and having the ability to express yourself in however you do that—being able to have these conversations through your work, or just working through and processing the questions that you have. Toni Morrison talks about that a lot. All of her books start with a question, and she’s pretty much trying to answer that for herself, and strongly going, I make this work for myself first, and whoever comes to it to connect with it and is able to explore that question within the work, that’s an amazing added bonus. 

KISH: Totally. I was thinking about that a lot recently, because I was nervous in general about social media—it just doesn’t leave that space for questions. You’re presenting yourself in a way that is who this person is, but sometimes that’s tough because we are portraying, and we’re using our bodies, and we’re using figures of ourselves to play a role or explore ideas that we don’t know the answer to yet, and I think a lot of times artists get stuck in this spot where they’re like, that’s who you are! No, I was just using my body in a space. 

WRIGHT: Yeah, yeah, I mean that’s my approach in the self portraiture within my work, and also in the film, I present it as: that body is my body, but not me. It’s a form for all of the Black women who are experiencing, or have experienced this stuff with their sexuality or their spirituality, the suppression or oppression of it. So, I’m using my body to speak on behalf of others sometimes, or to create a character that represents something I’m trying to express. Maybe not even an actual person, just a being.  

KISH: Or even an idea, or a question. 

WRIGHT: Yeah, that is interesting. And also with being on Instagram and social media and having to present yourself as an artist. I started out as a photographer. I always see myself as a storyteller, a visual storyteller. I’m a visual learner. I grew up in a very religious household, so most of the music I know that’s not Catholic music is from watching films. That’s when I realized I want to say more with the images that I’m making. I feel like the moving image could add to what I’m actually trying to say, and I tried not to transition into filmmaker. I feel like there was also a resistance in conversations I was having with people trying to hire me for jobs. They were asking, “So, are you a photographer, or are you a filmmaker?” I do a lot of pottery as well, ceramics, so I’m trying to figure out how to merge all selves as an artist. I feel like sometimes, social media doesn’t allow you to do that. 

KISH: I agree. It’s a very daunting space because it’s centered around branding. What do you do? What is your thing? If you find your thing and just keep doing more of that thing, people will like it and share it, and I think when you’re exploring, it’s difficult. You’re like this is my music, but we’re also having this art show that’s going on right now. Do my fans of my music care about my art show? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m sure someone does, but is that this audience? Having gone to art school, and then jumping into the music industry, it’s such a difference. We’re selling a product in the music industry; we’re not ​selling​ art. As much as you want to think about it like, oh this is my art, the people in charge of it do not think of it that way. They’re thinking, okay, there’s nothing fine about this. We’re selling songs, let them be catchy, and that’s that. That’s not my doctrine at all, so it’s very difficult to try and merge the different parts of yourself, and I think now, after doing it for nine or ten years, just making art and trying to support myself off of the things that I make, I learned that I have to accept the output and stop trying to make myself fit into what people expect. 

WRIGHT: I’ve been reading this book by Saidiya Hartman, called ​Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,​ and it’s about Black women right after the Reconstruction period. Black women moving over from the South to New York and trying to break out of this role of servitude that’s put forth, like Black women can’t do anything but be in the kitchen. But I think it speaks to the fear and anxiety of trying to do all of these things, or trying to incorporate different mediums into my practice, because I’m trying to tell the same message. I just know that I have different modes, or my body wants to do this instead of take a photo, so I feel like that has really empowered me. People are receptive; there’s an audience for each thing that you do. 

KISH: Yeah, totally. How do you know what to work on from day to day? Do you just feel it? 

WRIGHT: In the past eight months–how long have we been in quarantine? I feel like I was trying to stay on this roll of I need to be doing this, or I need to be doing that. Recently, I’ve been shooting a lot more, feeling inspired to connect with other people and shoot, but I also feel like I’ve just been sitting. I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve been trying to wrap my ideas around the one project that I do want to finish. It’s a documentary I’ve been shooting for the past two years with my grandmother in Alabama, telling the story of the American food race and how certain foods came here. It’s about memory as well. My grandmother is going through the early stages of dementia and what we shared growing up was being in the kitchen together. I could call her, and she could tell me a recipe on the drop of a dime, but that is diminishing slowly, and I’m feeling compelled to document this and to have conversations about intergenerational relationships. In the midst of me prepping for that, I’ve been working on so much self work, so much work within my family, having more open conversations, and relationship growth. I’ve been nurturing the relationships I do have. It’s been beautiful that my work brings me to that type of place because it’s all self work as well. I’m going home to Alabama for a month in December, and I’ll be finishing filming with my grandmother and staying on the farm out there. That work feels good, especially for the moment. It’s me connecting with my family, and that’s so important right now during this pandemic. Things are so unknown–the future, this election coming up. 

Self-portrait by Rikkí Wright

KISH: Yeah, I just want to get through this election, and I’ve been having similar things, just working on my relationships here and figuring out where I’m at creatively because this is the longest I’ve sat in one spot, but I’d been burnt out and it feels good to be able to slow down and just be like, so why am I doing this again? I feel like it’s so easy to get in those patterns of getting things done, and you’re working on autopilot, and then you’re like, do I actually feel for this work right now? Is this still a question for me? Because sometimes life just answers questions when you’re in the middle of a work process. That whole problem was just answered by me sitting down for two months. I was working on an album, and it was about American themes, and I got bogged down with this entire quarantine. It was so intense, and I was just like, I don’t know if I really want to...I’m already over it. 

WRIGHT: The priorities shifted as well. There’s an importance for certain work to be out right now and to be seen, and certain conversations to be had. Sometimes it’s time to put that on pause and have it for a different space. I’ve really enjoyed connecting with my family because they’ve shifted into a wider awareness—a wider political awareness as well. Connecting more with the stories and lives of people in my family, it’s like, oh, this is happening because of this larger systemic thing that’s going on. That’s why I love experimental filmmaking: because it allows the freedom to be as open as possible and just put whatever you’re feeling out there. I feel like right now, I’m really into having conversations with people in my life and sitting with that idea of reimagining what our future can look like if we look at what’s been going on. 

KISH: I feel like it would need to be an entire reimagining of the United States, just an entire reimagining of the whole way that it runs. The whole quarantine has helped to reconnect me with a lot of social issues and things that are going on within our community. I tend to isolate in general. I stay home, I do a lot of things alone, I like to live in my own world. I don’t watch that much. If everyone’s in love with a show, I generally don’t watch it. Being forced through a really fucked up thing and then jumping into life with everyone else again, it felt crazy in that moment when we were doing all the protests, and volunteering, and doing petitions, and doing all this work. In a way, I felt more connected to people than I have in a really, really long time. 

WRIGHT: For sure, because there was a collective consciousness, and I feel a shift in the strength that it had. I feel like right now, everything has been put out in the open, so people are more receptive to actually having the conversation. Because actually turning away from things is so frowned upon in this moment, and hopefully forever. I’ve been having conversations with some of my very close friends that I’ve never had before, and I’m just like, wow, very interesting to know this is your experience. That also informs the type of work I want to create. Experimental film is not commercial or high commodity, but I feel like that’s resistance as well. I feel connected to the work that has always been fighting for change. That’s why Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Maya Angelou are people that appear in my piece. They have been guides. It’s very important to make sure that I’m addressing that in the things that I create. Not that it’s my responsibility, because it’s been addressed many times over.

KISH: I agree. Just being able to see all the different industries and all these different Black artists saying how they’ve been affected. In your own self-centered version of your life, you feel like you’re the only one that these things are happening to, and I think that’s part of the divisiveness of the whole thing. You’re supposed to feel like you’re alone in it. Having seen everybody with their different versions of the same story, which was really depressing, I was able to realize that everybody has the same idea of what I’m making—not that it’s necessarily my responsibility, but I feel the need to share these different views and perspectives of what Blackness can be, and about what family can be, or what these different parts of connectedness are. I’ve been doing that, but I didn’t realize I was doing it until this whole thing happened. I feel like there’s all kinds of Black girls, and I want to make alternative music, so I’m just going to do that the whole time. When people were like, “You should only make rap music, always”, I was like, “No, I’m going to keep doing this other stuff.” So, I think there’s always been that rebelliousness when people try to put you in a box of what you’re able to achieve. It also comes down to what you were saying before with wanting to do experimental filmmaking, whereas someone might tell you that you should just direct music videos, or something. 

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

WRIGHT: Exactly. Yeah. And starting in this space of experimental filmmaking, when I am approached for any type of job, people are open and knowing this is what they could possibly get from me based on what they’ve seen, and usually people are only coming to me if they’re open to being on the same page as me, which I’m really grateful for. 

KISH: It’s nice to be strong enough to–and I think it does take mental fortitude and grit to be that vulnerable with the different practices, because your film from the show was super vulnerable. It’s very powerful in that the body itself is so powerful. What you’re willing to share is a statement in itself. I was going to ask you: how do you not talk yourself out of doing things that you know might be scary for you creatively? 

WRIGHT: The way that I grew up, I always had this need to protect myself. I was just out in the world. Whoever could watch me and my sister would, or we were bounced around from different family members, and so there were a lot of different opinions. I was just like, I’m going to go crazy if I have to adhere or just be what you want me to be. I’m just going to do me, and don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness, and do it. I think I kind of lived by that, and it inevitably is a part of the way I come to art. You have that fear, but in my experience, even having that one person, a friend, or somebody from your family give a critique, that helps me in a way. It was worth it for me to just do it. 

KISH: I feel the same way. I feel like the curiosity of what could happen outweighs the fear that you might have about it. I just want to see what happens, even if it doesn’t do well by other people’s standards. What is the role that spirituality plays with you now because you said that you had a very spiritual upbringing, but I wonder, now, after having grown up in the Church and all that, how do you feel about it? 

WRIGHT: Organized religion is not necessarily where I think I can connect spiritually. I have the experience of losing my mother at the age of two, and in 2017 my father passed away on my birthday, so the people who brought me into this physical life are both in a spiritual realm, and I’ve just felt a spiritual connection, a motherly connection, since I was a child. I have always felt like there’s guardian angels, or I definitely feel connected to my ancestors. That’s just something that’s not even by choice. I know that even in some of the work that I create, it feels like somebody needed that to be done. I don’t know if it was my grandma, or who. So, in that sense, I really am big on remembering our ancestors and making sure that I have altars on my mom’s birthday. Images are also huge for me. Sometimes I can just be transformed or taken back to a place, and that feels almost spiritual as well. There’s a scripture, Do this in remembrance of me (1 Corinthians 11:24), and I think about that often. We’d do communion every first Sunday where everybody drinks the wine and takes a little piece of the cracker in remembrance of Christ’s blood and body. It’s kind of intense actually, but we do it so casually. It’s a very honoring ceremony, remembering Christ’s sacrifice, and I think that’s how I approach remembering my ancestors, and remembering the fight of just being here in this country, or just making it; our survival. 

KISH: Yeah, wow. It’s like a weaving of your experiences and your life, and all the little bits that inform your life. I had a strange upbringing where I was the only Black person in my whole school and I was in a gifted program. I was this little Black girl who was moved around all these different classes, and if I think of my younger self, it definitely informs the way that I approach work now. It’s very in my own world, and it’s in my own space. I have friends in fashion, but I’m not a fashion girl. I do music, but I’m not a music girl. I do art, but I’m not an art girl. I’m always this separate thing that’s in the Venn diagram overlapping everything else. I think everybody’s experiences create how they make work, and I guess spiritually, I believe similarly to what you said–there are things guiding and protecting and moving you in the right path, and if you’re able to tap into intuition, or whatever you want to call it, you kind of know: that doesn’t really feel right for me, I don’t know why, but I’m going to sidestep. I always feel that with all the projects that I do, and I think during COVID, I’ve just not really heard that voice as much. I’ve kind of just been sitting down. 

WRIGHT: I think that the uncertainty of the world has an effect where you feel like you don’t have much control, and that’s why sometimes I’m like I have to stop. I have to get off social media, I have to sit with myself and listen to my own thoughts. There’s so much being thrown at us all day long. It’s really a lot, and I really do think that affects being able to hear yourself. I haven’t done this yet, but a lot of my friends have taken social media breaks for a couple of months during the pandemic and are just working on their own thing, and it’s been great. 

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

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This year’s exhibition of Womxn in Windows is on view through November 15 in Chinatown Los Angeles on Chung King Road, as well as New York in partnership with the Wallplay Network - 321 Canal Street, Chinatown London in partnership with Protein Studios - 31 New Inn Yard, and Hackney Shanghai in partnership with Bitter - Jing’an District. Additional films can be viewed by Christine Yuan, Everlane Moraes, Ja’Tovia Gary, Kya Lou, Rémie Akl, and Sylvie Weber—artists whose backgrounds span the United States, Brazil, Lebanon, Taiwan, the Dominican Republic and Germany. Follow @womxninwindows, @rikkwright and @kilokish on instagram.

Touching Everything & Holding Nothing: An Interview of Artist, Abolitionist & Facilitator Brianna Mims

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interview and portraits by Summer Bowie

Brianna Mims is a polymath if I’ve ever seen one. Along with a lifetime of training in myriad dance forms and becoming a multidisciplinary movement artist, she can likely be found speaking publicly on the role of the NAACP and transformational justice in the abolitionist movement, or walking runway at any number of fashion weeks, or developing curriculum for children to feel safe in moving and communicating freely. Then again, she might just be researching the efficacy of our local welfare system, or brushing up on her Arabic. When she’s done with all of it, she takes a step back and acts as a facilitator who intricately creates a neural network of every last disparate interest by assigning it to the appropriate person within her community. She is currently an organizer-in-residence at the Women’s Center For Creative Work, and her current project, Letters from the Etui is an amalgam of art, abolition, education, and support. It is a tender space where the carceral state can be felt, both at home and abroad.

SUMMER BOWIE: You describe yourself as an artist, facilitator, and abolitionist. Do you feel like the order of those labels matters at all, or are you equally all of them?

BRIANNA MIMS: The order of the labels do not matter. They all feed one another. 

BOWIE: You don’t seem to compartmentalize your work at all. Can you talk about the way that you prioritize the balance between art and policy reform?

MIMS: The art that I make that’s overtly political is cultural work. It’s about shifting culture alongside policy so that we are creating sustainable change. Most of the work includes a direct call to action on a policy level. However, it is important to me to create various access points to the conversations because the work isn't merely political. It's personal, interpersonal, cultural, and spiritual. 

BOWIE: How did you personally become connected to the work that you do? On the artistic and political sides?

MIMS: Artistically, when I joined the Justice-LA Creative Action team. I learned how to marry both sides of myself and I had the chance to learn from and build with people while doing so. My work in the policy realm is simply a result of my understanding for the need for change on the policy level. What happens on a policy level and within the abolition theory/scholar space really informs my art.

BOWIE: What is the Sarah’s Foundation?

MIMS: It is a program I started at the Salvation Army in Jacksonville, FL when I was in high school. I used to volunteer at the center with my mom and one day I noticed a lot of new residents that were children. I offered to teach a dance class to the children on Saturdays and it grew into a program that included dance, tutoring, and mentoring. The program continued for a couple of years when I left FL and moved to LA. The dance class that I was teaching developed over time into a movement and self-reflection class; It became a bit more rooted in somatics and conversation. I have taught this class for various time frames in Philadelphia for Resources for Human Development and in LA at Union Rescue Mission, Malabar Elementary, Crete Academy, and Santa Fe Springs Correctional Facility.

BOWIE: That really speaks to your emphasis on creating various access points. There’s a phrase you seem to resonate with about touching everything and holding nothing. Can you explain what that means to you?

MIMS: Yes! Many people have recently been asking me about that exact phrase!!! The quote came from the book Instinct by TD Jakes. I read it when I was in high school and was really moved by it. I attended a talk he had about and he began talking about the keys to his success. If you don’t know, TD Jakes is typically known as a pastor, however, he wears many hats that expand across many different fields and has built an empire. He said the key to his success was his ability to juggle in a multitude of jungles. He said in order for him to do that he had to “touch everything, and hold nothing.” At that time in my life, I only considered myself a dancer and I was defined by what that meant, by what my career was supposed to look like...dance company..or commercial route. When reading the book I began to acknowledge there were parts of myself that I wasn’t nourishing: gifts, skills, talents. So when hearing that quote I committed to not being defined by being a dancer and to nurturing all of my skills, gifts, and talents. At that time, I didn't even know if I had other gifts. For me, that quote has layered meanings. My relationship to it changes by the season. I love to continuously unpack it. Right now, it is a reminder to listen and honor the wisdom of my instincts. It is also a reminder to listen for when to let go. This can be physically letting go of something, but it's also about not holding on to the idea of what I think something is supposed to be; especially in regards to the work I create, or this idea of who I am, or what I’m capable of doing. I often say a lot of the time my work evolves outside of me because once I let what needs to come through me flow, the project is outside of me and I have to let it go and be what it is supposed to be. 

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BOWIE: Speaking of projects, what is the #jailbeddrop series, and how did you get involved?

MIMS: #jailbeddrop was started by Patrisse Cullors and Cecilia Sweet-Coll through Justice-LA. It began as an art series to support the initiatives of the organization. The first one happened in September of 2017. They put 100 jail beds in front of the LA Board of Supervisors office. For the second major drop, fifty artists were given a jail bed. We all created pieces of various mediums and the day before Christmas in 2017 at the same time, we activated different cities within Los Angeles County. I was in Manhattan Beach with my collaborator Jullian Grandberry and we shared a movement meditation piece. After those major drops, there were several smaller drops and I was unconsciously building upon ideas that would later turn into the performance and installation that has been touring LA. For my senior project at USC, I wanted to expand on the movement piece that I had shared in 2017, so I put out an artist call at the university. I knew that I wanted to work with architecture students so I had a friend reach out to them separately. That's how Minh-Han, Georgina, Bindhu, and Adam joined the project. I knew I wanted the architectural installation to be interactive. However, I didn’t know exactly what that looked like… and I think this is where the concept of “touching everything, holding nothing” comes back into play in the way I led. I had to trust all of my collaborators' individual knowledge and skill sets to really contribute what they were supposed to, not merely what I imagined them to do… It’s always interesting to find that balance between letting go of my idea of what I think they are supposed to do and guiding them so that the work is aligned. The first year we did the project we supported Measure R, it was our call to action. The work has grown so much since the first iteration at CAAM and we have shared the work at many places in LA. I’m very grateful.

BOWIE: How was the Letters from the Etui project originally conceived?

MIMS: The last #jailbeddrop, which was the first time the project had an entire gallery space, included a series of workshops. A professor at Cal State LA attended one of the talks and reached out to me afterwards about a video series he curated with his students. The animated shorts that are featured in Letters From the Etui are from a collaboration Professor Kamran Afary led with his students at Lancaster State Prison and animation students at Cal State LA. The videos were supposed to be displayed in a gallery at Cal State LA, but due to COVID, it could no longer happen. So, he handed the videos over to us to present. I didn't know how to present them, so I had them for a while before the concept developed. 

Then, Mandy Harris Williams from the Women's Center for Creative Work reached out to me about an organizer in residency program. She asked if I had any ideas around anything I wanted to create/organize and I had a couple, however, they could only facilitate things that were happening online; so the video series was my only option. Mandy said that we could present them on their own website and that some sort of programming should also happen. Those were my starting points. Once I began to organize the workshops and get the bios from the folks inside, it started to move on its own. It was really hard for us to come up with the name. We sat on the phone for hours brainstorming and nothing was coming up. It wasn’t until I had the idea to create merch to raise money for folks that are currently incarcerated that things began to make sense to me. 

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As I was thinking about what we could sell, I was opposed to creating t-shirts and tote bags. We ended up deciding to create and sell envelopes in a very beautiful way. I was thinking about things that were relevant right now and I started thinking about the things people hoarded at the beginning of quarantine and the whole vote by mail drama that was happening. I had a lot of very bizarre ideas like selling eyelashes! After talking with my team, envelopes stuck. I asked Han to draw some sketches for an envelope series and she suggested I reach out to one of the #jailbeddrop artists we’ve worked with in the past. I called Chris and he loved the idea. He told me that when he was incarcerated he used to draw on his envelopes and the folks on the outside would sell the envelopes and send the money back to him. Once the prison found out he was making money this way, they banned him from being able to send out envelopes with drawings on them. That was the moment of confirmation for me. We further discussed the significance of letter writing for incarcerated folks. I took this information back to my team for our name brainstorming process. We finally came across the word Etui via Hans' roommate. An etui is a small box where you keep very small and precious items. The word is derived from its old french root word ‘estui’ which means prison. Again, the work was moving on its own. It gets even better, Dr. Afary referred me to one of his family members to do a workshop, Frieda Afary. She does a lot of abolition work in North Africa and the Middle East. When I got on the phone with her she mentioned that she had been translating letters from Iranian political prisoners into English. As we talked more about the concept of the project and the significance of letter writing to system impacted folks, we thought the letters would bring a very important layer to the conversation of letter writing apropos system impacted folks. 

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BOWIE: We often talk about the effects of incarceration on the incarcerated, but what does it mean to be system impacted?

MIMS: I define system impacted people as folks who are currently incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and the loved ones of those who are or have been incarcerated.

BOWIE: When you talk about creating a safe and tender space, I can really feel that in the way that tenderness plays a role in the act of letter writing. What is it about this form of communication that is so important?

MIMS: Yes, what you witness in Letters From the Etui is the various ways letter writing is used: to connect with loved ones, to self reflect, to advocate for yourself or others, etc. For incarcerated folks, for a long time, this was their main form of communication. For many folks inside, it still is their main form of communication. It holds a different kind of significance when you have been away from folks for so long and you don’t know when you’ll be able to see them again. For me, letter writing is very precious because you can really take your time and be intentional with your words, it's also easier to communicate hard things because you are not in a live conversation and seeing the other person's immediate reaction, and it is something that you can keep forever. 

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BOWIE: The workshop series component to the project also encompasses a lot of different topics, from current propositions on the ballot related to prison reform (J, 17, 20), to #metoo behind bars, to somatics and wellness. On a personal level, which of the workshops are you looking forward to the most, and why?

MIMS: I am personally looking forward to Prentis Hemphill’s workshop and Frieda Afary’s workshop. I am obsessed with Prentis’ work and I have never attended any of their workshops so I am excited to learn from them firsthand. In regards to Frieda’s workshop, I am super excited to learn about the abolition work that is happening in North Africa and the Middle East. In my studies around the carceral state in the US, I have learned about the connections to the carceral system here and the occupation in Palestine. I have been studying the occupation and learning Arabic. I began learning Arabic before I learned about the connections between the systems and have continued to do so. I love finding the cultural, historical, and present through lines between the regions in my studies. 

BOWIE: It seems like the disciplines you explore are limitless. It’s like a kaleidoscopic constellation of connections that you make. Who are some of the artists and activists who inspire the work that you do?

MIMS: d. Sabela Grimes, Patrisse Cullors, Maytha Al Hassen, Jade Curtis, Moncell Durden, Jessica Litwak…these are the people that first come to mind.

BOWIE: From your vantage point, what are the strengths of the artistic communities within Los Angeles?

MIMS: The fact that a lot of the artistic communities that I am a part of are very communal in the way in which they work. I have and have watched so many other artists get things done with very little resources. The artists here really work as a family. However, artists need funding!!!

BOWIE: Yes! This is essential if we want to keep germinating more ideas and more culture. Are there any other future projects you can talk about in the works?

MIMS: Yes, I have so many ideas right now!! I am finishing up a film that I have been working on with Giselle Bonilla. This project is very different from my previous works. It is really just me doing whatever I want. It’s an experimental film. However, for me, it doesn’t seem disconnected from my work because I really believe we have to include the conversation of play and pleasure into our abolitionist frameworks. Play and pleasure as a guide for strategy… play being the highest form of research. Play and pleasure as a personal guide. I read Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown recently and she talks about the knowledge and guidance that comes from leaning into our desires and the erotic. We also have to prioritize play and pleasure as things that are essential to our well-being and not something we have to work tirelessly to deserve. And this film is just me playing and leaning into desires that bring me joy...like setting my tits on fire.

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Follow Brianna Mims on instagram @bj_mims and go to lettersfromtheetui.com to learn more about the project. Sign up for their online workshop series: Oct 22, Nov 5, & Nov 21

Romancing A Wound: An Interview of Estefania Puerta

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portrait and interview by Abbey Meaker

Estefania Puerta is a Colombian immigrant womxn whose interdisciplinary art practice transcends genre. Experiential installations featuring sculpture, video, scent, writing, and performance are steeped in layers of psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and profound insights into language, memory, ritual, and time. 

In early fall, after months of trying to connect, Estefania and I caught up on my back porch, listening to the trees, watching the light change. The pandemic made it challenging to get together, but she was also busy in her studio preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition Womb Wound, opening this Sunday, October 11th at Situations in New York. 

Hearing her describe this new body of work and the ideas investigated within it, I knew we had to sit down more formally—a perfect reason to delve more deeply into its transporting complexity. Her work evokes one’s own process of recollection which condenses, displaces, and plummets us abruptly into the forgotten (or misplaced) recesses of our past. 

ABBEY MEAKER: You’ve titled this body of work and your upcoming exhibition Womb Wound. You explained in a recent interview with Rachel Jones that this title represents an extended investigation of healing, of birthing something, being the holder and nurturer that then becomes wounded. This is definitely a universal paradigm: what does it mean to be rejected by a society that relies on those who have been cast out to sustain itself? And what happens when the rejected refuse the parasite?  

ESTEFANIA PUERTA: I’m glad you brought up the extended metaphors of wombs and birth. I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it. 

“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

MEAKER: Healing is an ongoing and sometimes unpredictable process, but ‘being healed’ of something implies a fixed state, yet all life forms are in a constant state of becoming. What value do you see in the act of nursing a wound, or ‘romancing a wound’ as you poetically put it, if it can never fully recover but instead continually evolves? 

PUERTA: Many of the ways in which I describe what I’m thinking about in the work just ends up feeling web-like instead of linear. Even thinking about the idea of romancing the wound—what does it mean to ease pain in a way that’s not healing it but enticing it into submission. I think healing is a constant state of becoming empowered in all the complexities that a wound offers, whether it be rage, sadness, pain, forgiveness, empathy, resentment, trauma, acceptance, etc. If healing is a portal into these complicated states then the wound is this fountain, a source, an opening and a flowing sting that keeps us in the simultaneity of being  animals and highly conscientious beings. I find that the wounds that I carry have also become what nurses me; they offer me a space to be truthful in the complexity of my experience being alive. The value I see in romancing a wound is thinking of it as taming a wild beast and knowing how to slow dance with it instead of trying to fight it away. 

MEAKER: You have said that this work is very personal, especially with regard to the family history and mythologies you’re mining. Even within this personal thread, the feeling of disconnect from family and the attempt to piece together fragments of an unknowable history is something I deeply connect with, albeit for very different reasons. 

PUERTA: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I feel like it's something that many of us, if not all of us, can relate to: the erasure of our own history and these glimpses we may have: moments of vulnerable truth that are obscured by a murky mystery. In my family there are moments of clarity that I have about the ways in which we exist—the characters in my family and the mystery about who they are, who they were. These histories get erased but manifest in other ways. I romance around these murky mysteries and create different signifiers to dwell with a bit. 

MEAKER: It’s interesting, the function of remembering. Memory has so much to do with one’s sense of self and the forging of their history. If we can’t remember, we create stories, stand-ins. 

PUERTA: Yes, for sure. But I think that’s the thing about the self referential vs the identity politics around it all. That is definitely a part of it and inevitable because we are all political bodies in this society. But I realized a lot of what I was dealing with was a personal, familial connection and the way that has been impacted by politics, but getting more into the heaviness around it. In some ways I feel like dealing with the political was my way of avoiding the familial and realizing that it’s something I actually want to deeply understand. I wanted to find a soothing place within that unknown. I’m always thinking about a family member and each of the pieces I make become homages to them and reflections in this really subtle way. There is a correspondence that I feel like I have with my family. In that they do become these mythological creatures to me that hold powers and different codes to a family history that then becomes a world.

MEAKER: Kind of a way to commune with ancestors.

PUERTA: Yes, but they are usually people that I have known or know. But they do still feel like ancestors to me because of that moment of unknowing them. There’s something about, especially older family members, that feel like they are both here and in some deep past that I don’t have access to. 

Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

MEAKER: This familiar/unfamiliar quality imbues your work with a sense of the uncanny. The sculpture titled Mija is particularly reminiscent of a body. It has an interior architecture, a bone structure. It has the qualities of an organism in that it’s alive and dying. It has a vibrancy and vitality but also shows signs of decline: dying plants against glowing water, soft and fleshy material edged by muddy mop-heads. Can you talk about these provocative, paradoxical qualities? 

PUERTA: Thinking of the too-muchness of all these materials, the excess in both ways of fleshy softness and the raggedy edges. I think of the mop heads as a filter, both in their material, cultured significance and also as a proposal and simulacra of cilia and other filters that exist in nature. My dad was a janitor for the majority of my life and I have a lot of love and fond connections to this material; riding on the floor buffing machine that felt like a giant, gentle beast as my dad was its tamer, guiding it across the floor. At the same time, I feel that sharpness in how immigrant labor can be almost fetishized in the U.S, how immigrants are seen as the filters, the holders, the purifiers of what others do not want to deal with. How these mops literally hold the muck and grime and how I think of them as tendrils protecting the soft interior of this sculpture. The guiding term I was thinking about for this piece was “creature comfort” and thinking of bodies that need regeneration, that are not just beat down and exhausted but are actually resting, re-generating, feeding themselves, finding comfort. Some referential inspirations are the feminine grotesque and the goddess of fertility, Artemis. 

“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

MEAKER: I’m thinking about flowers: they are prized for their external beauty and arousing scent (how they satisfy us); yet once picked, the flower wilts, browns, drops its pedals, leaving only a rotting, stinking tuft that is hastily discarded by its once devoted admirer. 

PUERTA: We remember a beautiful flower but not the decaying flower. I’ve been thinking about the idea of a fruiting body. Fungus as a fruiting body, flowers as a fruiting body, the body having its own potential to fruit in these dark places. The operation of nature within all of that. Not just the appearance of it but what does it actually do and mean and how do we identify with these processes.

MEAKER: Your sculpture Enrejada is similarly dichotomous. Spilling out of a grid-like structure lined with ears made of wax, are tendrils of pink fabric, hair, and a coiled umbilical cord. This feels like a raw, traumatic memory. Bits and pieces disconnected and out of place, trying to find each other. The burden of remembering and forgetting. 

Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

PUERTA: Hmm interesting, yeah, as you know, I am really interested in psychoanalysis and its poetic and very real history as it relates to hysteria and women’s experiences. Trauma is described as this type of repetition, a loop that you play over and over again but can never find the ending to it.  I do think this piece plays with that notion of repetition, the over emphasis of something that cannot be forgotten. But perhaps for me, the pain attached to trauma isn’t as present for me, I was thinking more of familial lineages (there is a spice blend in the sacks that my mother uses) and also what it means to be a sentient being. I made the ears during a time when I was in deep turmoil and a creative block. A friend read my tarot and saw an image of a tongue licking flowers and instructed me to get out of my head. I was talking myself in loops and what I needed to do was be present, to listen to the earth around me in a much more embodied way. As she read my tarot, I had this material in my hand with no purpose and instinctively started making ears, they felt beautiful and cathartic in my hands, they felt right and that just led me to other ideas of these pieces typically being seen as their primary sense of existence. We talk a lot about the gaze in a visual way, but what if a sculpture can hear you? What does it mean to have empowerment through another sense? To have auditory sentience and being-ness in the room and offer the act of listening to the “talker,” instead of the “viewer.” In that way, this piece actually feels really therapeutic or healing to me.

MEAKER: What has it been like making this work during a time of incredible tumult, fear, sickness, unknown, radical uprising? So much of what has been hidden has now come to light. 

PUERTA: It has been both my refuge and sanctuary, as well as the sharpest mirror reflecting the darkest parts of my soul. The part I may not have been ready to deal with. Making art always feels like you’re putting your hands into a void and hoping that whatever you’re holding onto or making gives something back to you that is nurturing. It was a hard, weird time to try to define what would be nurturing and whether it was even something worthwhile to define in this moment. And then coming back to the romantic and true feeling around art being its own space that, for better or worse, can keep us grounded in a different reality that isn’t always a hyper-politicized and materially cruel place. I realized that I am a valid person and that I am worthy of existence and expressing my existence. In that aspect, I feel so grateful I had this show to work towards; to have a mirror I had to constantly face, to ask the hard questions and get to the other side of it, where I feel more empowered than before. 

Womb Wound is on view from October 11 - November 15 with a reception on Sunday, October 11, 12-7 PM @ Situations in New York

It's Not About Me: A Conversation Between Photographer Greg Gorman and Patricia Lanza

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Andy Warhol, Los Angeles, 1986, copyright Greg Gorman

“For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn’t answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired. I like each picture that I take to be a testament to the individual character of my subject.”–Gorman

Greg Gorman is an iconic Hollywood photographer and master of portraiture. Over his fifty-year career, he has photographed the most recognizable faces from the entertainment industry and music world. This retrospective book, It’s Not About Me, published by teNues, showcases many images never before published, and is a tribute to his long successful career of photographing the famous and the notorious with a distinctive approach and style. From Kirk Douglas, Eartha Kitt, Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Al Pacino to Viggo Mortensen, Diane Lane, Iggy Pop, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Liza Minnelli, as well as Mark Wahlberg, Halle Berry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sharon Stone, Michael Jackson, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro and Marina Abramović – to name just a few

Patricia Lanza: This will be your 12th book publication. What was the impetus for making this retrospective book, It’s Not About Me.?

Greg Gorman: I felt that I had a lot of work that had never really been explored. I think one of the interesting things, being seventy-one, and having shot portraits for the better part of 50 years, is going back and looking at the work with a different eye, a different point of view. I think it's been quite challenging looking at work that I may have dismissed many years ago and finding pictures that I wouldn't expect. What I was looking for was a comprehensive overview of my career, revisiting and publishing pictures that have never been seen before, including color imagery for the first time.

Lanza: What is the time period for this book and how many images did you edit from your archive?

Gorman: The book covers 50 years of my career. It took me three and a half years to create the book. I did a solid year of editing. I'm an intense person when I start on something- I go full tilt. I had 160 large boxes in cold storage where I probably belonged, and I would bring them home one or two at a time. I set up an editing bay at my desk in my bedroom where I have a beautiful view overlooking the city. I didn’t want to edit in my office. I moved everything upstairs with a light box, slide pages, contact sheets and a grease pencil- something the younger generation are probably not familiar with. I spent the better part of a year working feverishly. When I was in town, I was definitely editing.

Lanza: What was the editing process? How many images did you review?

Gorman: Thousands upon thousands of images at the very least! I narrowed it down to roughly a thousand images; scanning the balance of what I didn't have already scanned That was the film, just looking at my analogue work, not even any of my digital work, which began around the year 2000. For the film work, I settled on about a thousand pictures. I edited for a solid year; taking the next year off thinking about where I wanted to go with this project.

So it was about three and a half years, almost four years before the publication of the book. I really took my time with it. Then it became a question of which images made sense. The irony was that much of the early work showed me how my career had evolved. I reviewed a lot of the early work and regrettably saw a lot of pictures of major players which were not lit in the style for which I became known , however that is the evolution of an artist’s work.

My style began to change around the time of my shoot with Tom Waits in the late 1970’s. My signature style focused more on the relationship between my highlights and shadows. Thanks to my brilliant art director, Gary Johns, we were able to incorporate some of the overly lit early works into creative, interesting photographs by positioning and cropping . He has been a friend of mine since the seventies. He's done a lot of my books, including the campaign for l.a.Eyeworks. 

Lanza: Your book has many portrait pairings. How did you arrive at this?

Gorman: That's the genius again of Gary Johns. I think that he did such a beautiful job editing and of putting pictures together.

In fact, sometimes from a humorous point of view, sometimes from a logistical point of view they paired well together. But I think the pairings make our book kind of fun. Normally you would not see them together, like pairing Barry White and Betty White for example. However many of the portrait pairings have meaning and poignancy. Some of the portraits needed to stand on their own on- deserving a double page.

Lanza: What are some of the most defining moments in your career? What would you say were the big breaks?

Gorman: Certainly early on, getting the likes of Dustin Hoffman on the movie, Tootsie, as the special photographer, was a big break. Barbra Streisand calling me up one day when she was recast in a film called All Night Long at Universal. Knowing that I was the special photographer on set, she wanted to know how I was planning on photographing her. The sign of a true professional. Having these big names in my portfolio early on in my career certainly didn’t hurt. Having David Bowie and Bette Midler, by my side added more credibility as well.

They thought, Oh he's shooting David Bowie… he must be a pretty damn good photographer. I was just lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time. And certainly a big defining moment in my career. In another arena, my editorial days with Interview Magazine, was a big plus . I think that was a breakout for a lot of photographers that were working around that time. During the period of Robert

Hayes, as the editor in chief of Interview, this was a significant moment. Another defining moment in showcasing my signature lighting style, was the l.a.Eyeworks works campaign. .

For the l.a.Eyeworks campaign I created some of my most iconic portraits. And for sure, my most famous picture of Andy Warhol. He called me up one day after signing a deal with Ford models and asked me if he would be a good candidate for one of their advertisements, since the adverts appeared monthly in Interview Magazine. Shooting the campaign became a challenge for me because this was before celebrities realized the value of a personal endorsement. 

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David Bowie, Los Angeles, 1987, copyright Greg Gorman

Lanza: You have degrees in photojournalism and fine art cinematography. When did your work evolve to portraiture?

Gorman: I have an undergraduate degree in photojournalism and a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking from the University of Southern California.

I started my career in photography when I borrowed a friend’s camera to shoot  a Jimi Hendrix concert. I fell in love with photography and enrolled in a course at the University of Kansas. The only photography course they offered was a course in Photojournalism. My passion has always been people. I went through the School of Photojournalism at K.U., but then moved to California to finish my degree in film. However, when I graduated from film school, I realized that I would enjoy a career more in still photography than as a film maker in the movie business. I always cherished more that one on one relationship with people.

 Lanza: How did your education in cinematography or filmmaking affect the development of your still photographic style? 

Gorman: That's a great question. And you know, no one's ever really asked me that during an interview. My career in lighting has come full circle. And the answer is when I got out of film school I suddenly didn't have the money to be able to afford buying strobes (electronic flash). So when I first started shooting I used, one K quartz lights and two K quartz soft boxes.

I started out with those continuous lights, but once my career took off, I realized that I needed more power to capture my imagery. I turned to electronic flash which I used for most of my career. You know, I was shooting a lot, and I eventually bought a Six K HMI Arri light, with a ballast for a very modest price of $30,000. It was very heavy and on a huge stand.. So today I've come full circle, and I shoot with LED Rotolights, including the new Titan X2, my favorite light. I like it because not only are the skin tones stunning, but there is enough power to back it up.

In 2000, I started shooting digital. I couldn't believe how well digital saw light in low luminance. BUT you have to understand that at the beginning of digital, I was still shooting with a Hasselblad because digital cameras, were represented by a three–megapixel camera. I turned to digital, and shot with the Canon EOS 35mm cameras, when the file size became larger and the technology became more sophisticated.

Lanza: What is happening with you now, having this long career in photography?

Gorman: In the last nine years, my passion for shooting commercial assignments started to diminish. I have been focusing more on teaching and education. However, just recently my excitement for shooting re-emerged. Not being a fan of medium format since the Hasselblad days ,I always preferred the 35mm digital cameras. 35mm was always a good fit because of how I shoot, with a little bit more spontaneity, and with a high ISO, which you need with the LED lighting. The higher ISO gives you a more film–like quality. Then I started watching NOBECHI Creative Live series online, of which I am a lecturer. I heard about the medium format Fuji GFX100, a 100–megapixel camera. A week ago I was sent the camera to try out. I printed and read the 350–page manual. Justin Stailey of Fuji said that I was probably the first person he knew, that ever read a camera manual. When you have a multitude of choices and settings, I thought it best to read the manual and understand how the camera works before starting to shoot.

Frankly when I started shooting with this camera, I was blown away. The camera, which looks imposing because of its size was not heavy, and with all the controls at your fingertips it was a great match for me! The Fuji lenses are great. I am very excited, as I have a couple of special projects in mind with big prints and back to my classic black and white style. AGAIN, I have come full circle with my camera of choice and gone back to shooting medium format with the Fuji GFX 100 and the Rotolight TITAN X2 by my side! The perfect combination for studio portraiture!!

Lanza: Of all the famous people that are in the book, It’s Not About Me. Who was the most surprising in a photo session? What was one of the most interesting stories?

Gorman: Certainly meeting David Bowie was a big moment. Of course I was anxiety ridden because he was such a hero of mine. He possessed a wicked sense of humor and consequently was fun on set.

Bowie was so smart and sophisticated. He basically knew that photography was a necessary evil as part of the marketing program. When Bowie would have a project coming out, he would call, and we would shoot for two or three days. We made sure we covered all the magazines and press media releases, to help him avoid other photo sessions with other photographers.

Those times have really changed. For example, I shot Tom Waits, for the first time for an album cover for three days in the late 1970’s. I'd start at about seven or eight o'clock in the morning picking him up at the Tropicana Hotel on Santa Monica Blvd. We often shot till midnight–something you would never see today. The last time I shot Tom Waits was well over 10 years ago. He gave me 30 minutes at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Rosa. I took him  out back where there was a railroad track to get the pictures for the required pages for the London Sunday Times. Today with digital, everything's a rush. In some ways, digital has been fantastic, but in other ways, it's been a demise because everybody knows it can happen as quickly as we speak.

Lanza: Let's talk about the book what is happening this year in that regard?

Gorman: The book, published by teNeus, It’s Not About Me, is coming out in July in Europe and August in the States. I have a show coming up this fall with the Fahey/Klein gallery – the actual dates are dependent on the current situation. Most of my European dates orchestrated by Anke Degenhard have been put on hold until we know better the current state of affairs. However my press for the book has been diligently moving forward thanks to my brilliant Press Agent Nadine Dinter. Many of the photographs in this book, stem from original assignments, advertising campaigns, personal shoots and work associated with the motion picture industry.

Often after these assignments, we would separately make our own set of pictures. Our more private moments. Most of the color and black and white images featured in this publication came from that body of work. I put all my energy into the talent and tried to take a back seat, putting their imagery front and center and thus, the title, ‘It’s Not About Me’.

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Throughout Greg Gorman’s star-studded portfolio entitled, It's Not About Me, you'll find the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp at the beginning of their careers, as well as the iconic posters Gorman created for films such as Scarface and Tootsie, record covers for David Bowie, and magazine covers for Andy Warhol. Foreword by Sir Elton John. Afterword by John Waters. Preorder here.

Patricia Lanza began her career at the National Geographic Society — first as a photo researcher, then as a photography editor, followed by eight years as a contract photographer. She began working for the Annenberg Foundation in 2005, researching an idea and writing an initiative on the uses of photography. In 2009, the Annenberg Space for Photography opened. As the Director of Talent & Content, Lanza is responsible for creating and carrying out Wallis Annenberg’s vision through themed programming and photographic exhibitions.

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Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles, 1989, copyright Greg Gorman

Angelic Bodies: Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

According to Neitzche, everything returns to the wheel of the cosmic process. At the beginning again, and again, you will find “every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more.” In this eternal cycle, great subversive seers and mystics, like Genesis Breyer P’Orridge, come around rarely. Her pain and her pleasure is a shared agony and ecstasy, which P-Orridge has ameliorated with her epiphany of the pandrogyne, from which the artist has escaped the bounds of either/or binaries into a more angelic, divine gender. Part shaman punk and part hermaphroditic angel, P-Orridge has been led by a series of these outer body visions. From the founding of COUM Transmissions, which challenged British society with blood-soaked performances and general anarchic disruption, to Throbbing Gristle, which brought industrial music into the modern lexicon, to the acid house of Psychic TV, to finally finding love in a dominatrix named Lady Jaye. On the occasion of her first solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist visits Genesis at home in New York, where she is fighting stage IV leukemia, to discuss her many life-altering epiphanies.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST How is your archive organized?

P-ORRIDGE Just over two years ago, I had complete kidney failure. My fiancé [Susana Atkins] is Spanish. She came here with a multiple-visit visa and I got sick just after we met. She looked after me because I had to have somebody with me all the time. The last time she came to New York, she organized all the photographs and put several thousands into sections, subjects, and separate little boxes and drawers. Now I can ring her up in Spain and say, “Where are the pics of Lady Jaye peeing in the street,” and she’s like, “Box #6 in the drawer on the left.” She knows where everything is, she has a totally photographic memory.

OBRIST Is your archive digitized?

P-ORRIDGE No, I don’t have any money to digitize. I don’t take grants; I have no income because I can’t do concerts.

OBRIST Can you tell me about some of your recent gallery shows?

P-ORRIDGE I had a show open last recently in Miami at the Nina Johnson Gallery that’s called Closer As Love. I don’t really take any notice to be honest, I’m more concerned with staying alive. I mean, it’s great that there’s interest. It reminds me of Derek Jarman when he was diagnosed with HIV. He said to me one day when we were sitting in his flat, “You know Gen, once they know you’ve got some kind of terminal illness, they’ll suddenly say they appreciate what you do.” And he said, “I’ve never had offers of money to make films like I’ve had since they knew I was dying.”

And then of course, as soon as everybody heard that I was potentially terminally ill, I get exhibitions and people suddenly say they appreciate my body of work, and I sort of think, “Well, thanks for telling me that forty years too late.”

OBRIST Well, I sort of think there’s some other reason. It has something to do with you anticipating what’s happening now in the world?

P-ORRIDGE [laughs] Yeah, of course. I’m being deliberately cynical. I just thought what Derek said was interesting. When I came back from the hospital last time, my editor­­­­—because I’m writing my autobiography, he said, “You’ll never believe this. While you were in the hospital I got a phone call from the New York Times wanting a quote for their obituary.” And I went, “Really?” He said, “Yeah it’s a bit weird, isn’t it? It’s already written and they’re just updating it whenever you’re sick to make it seem current.” So, they’re all waiting. There’s all these vultures waiting to go, “Oh, what a shame Gen died.” [laughs] It’s strange isn’t it?

OBRIST When did you have the pandrogyny epiphany?

P-ORRIDGE Apparently, in the ‘70s. Jarret [Earnest], who curated the show in Miami, found an old interview where I was talking about panthropology in the ‘70s, so it’s always been there in my mind as an ultimate theme. It was more about logic, observation, and considering human behavior. There seems to be what has sometimes been called original sin. There seems to be a flaw in human behavior. For example, how could there ever be a Second World War? We’ve maimed each other, killed people we love, destroyed things we like. Why would we do that? We could never do it again. That was stupid! But we do it again and again.

OBRIST It’s like Nietzsche’s eternal return.

P-ORRIDGE And so, I wanted to think, how could we change that? If there’s no either/or, there can’t be the other, and that can’t become the enemy because there is no other anymore. So, if the two become one there’s this divine unity.

OBRIST So, then you will have peace?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah.

OBRIST So, it was actually a peace movement in a way?

P-ORRIDGE Sure, I’m a child of the ‘60s.

OBRIST And how did you begin? Because last time we spoke, you told me that it kind of all began when you were fifteen, discovering Max Ernst. 

P-ORRIDGE [laughs] Oh that was just the collages, really. The idea that you could take images of so-called “reality,” and then create one that never existed. This was an incredibly powerful aspect of creativity that sometimes is buried in commerce now. In fact, to me, art has always been spiritual. Always. And ultimately the art that really matters has to lead us towards the salvation of the species, otherwise what’s it telling us?

OBRIST How to fight extinction?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, so I’m seeing these threads unfold more and more. I can remember when I was about eight or nine, watching my mother brush my sister’s long hair, and thinking, how come I can’t have long hair? And the answer was, because you’re a boy. So, at that point I saw that there was some misfiring in the logic. It was just an inherited, conditioned concept that didn’t make sense. And of course, as the ‘60s unfolded more and more, things that didn’t make sense, that were negative, were revealed and exposed for the insanity that they are. I’ve never changed my utopian view—that we have to work towards the species becoming one organism. No nations. No countries. No tribes. No either/or. No binary. We’re all human beings.

OBRIST So, it’s a very holistic idea?

P-ORRIDGE Absolutely. We truly are an artist who doesn’t just say that life and art are the same. From the very beginning, there has been no separation. That’s why I kept everything. That’s why I have an archive.

OBRIST Besides your autobiography, what books are you doing?

P-ORRIDGE We did a book on Brion Gysin that just came out.

OBRIST Brion Gysin brings things to your beginnings as well, because the other thing that seems so relevant in terms of your practice is this fluidity—painting, poetry, drawing, art, performance, music—you have so many dimensions. Poetry, as you told me last time we spoke, is quite at the beginning. And there are, of course, these two key influences, [William] Burroughs and Brion Gysin in validation of your entire creative and cultural engineering practice. How did you come to poetry, and why Burroughs and Gysin?

P-ORRIDGE I was at one of those horrible English private schools, I had a scholarship. It was called Solihull School. One day in English class, my English teacher said, “Stay behind after class.” And I thought, oh no. What have I done wrong? I must’ve got a bad mark on my essay. Then, he had this piece of paper, and he scribbled on it, “On The Road, Jack Kerouac,” and he said, “I really think you’ll appreciate this book. Try to find it.” My father used to travel a lot with his job, so I said to him, “Could you try and find this book when you’re driving around?” And one day he came home and he had a copy. He found it in a bargain bin on the motorway. And that changed everything again.

OBRIST On The Road was a bestseller then.

P-ORRIDGE It changed a lot of people I know from that era. But when I was reading it, what fascinated me about it was that it’s about real people. Although it’s written almost like a fiction, it’s real people. Who is Dean Moriarty? Who is Old Bull Lee? Who are they? I found out that one of them was William Burroughs. So then, I hitchhiked to London and went around all the old shops. I couldn’t find anything by William Burroughs back in ’65, ‘66. And then, I went to Soho, to the porno shops, and I remember I got Jean Genet and Henry Miller, because they were considered dirty books. And lo and behold they had Naked Lunch, since it had been prosecuted for being obscene. So, I bought the only copy, well actually I stole the only copy that they had. I read that and thought, wow, it’s a bit like Max Ernst. This is someone changing reality again. Reality isn’t linear.  Time isn’t linear. It’s in a state of flux and chaos and again, the creative being has the ability, the right, and the opportunity to change reality. And that’s what I want to do because the reality I’m in isn’t one I enjoy. So, it’s a second liberation. For me, art is always about the big questions.

OBRIST Gerhard Richter says, “Art is the highest form of hope.” What would be your definition?

P-ORRIDGE Did he? Wow. I don’t have one because it’s always changing. I don’t think I’m on record as calling myself an artist or a musician. I have said I’m a writer, and I love to write, but it’s shamanic to me. I always say this to people at lectures, “What’s the first book of the Bible? Genesis. But what’s the other title of that book? The Book of Creation. What does that mean?” The first thing god does is create. That means creation is holy work. So, to be an artist or creator is to be using divine systems to get closer to a purer reality, and a divine perception of existence to go as deep as you can.

OBRIST It’s interesting, your first mentioned public appearance starts with Throbbing Gristle, but you did things long before.

P-ORRIDGE Oh, fuck yeah.

OBRIST So, when was the first public appearance of your work?

P-ORRIGE 1965. It was a street performance. I’m a great believer in not just sitting and complaining, but taking action. So, at this private school, we came up with this idea—I’d discovered Japanese haiku. We wrote lots of different words on cards by hand, and then on a Saturday, with two or three friends, we went around the town, which was a really horrible, sterile, suburban place, and we left them in the gutters, ashtrays, waste bins, just on the floor. We made this beautiful litter, and the idea was that people picked it up thinking, what’s this? They were accidentally writing a poem. It was written about in the local paper, then it got mentioned on BBC radio, and then I was asked to give talks at the local church.

OBRIST It’s interesting that you then became part of collectives of groups. How did COUM begin?

P-ORRIDGE We’d left the Exploding Galaxy, David Medalla’s project, and decided to hitchhike around London. So, I went and saw my parents. They moved to a town near Wales named Shrewsbury and they just started their own business. I said I’d help in the office typing invoices and stuff, and one day I went with them for a drive through Wales. I was in the back of the car and it was a sunny day. I had my head on the window of the car, I closed my eyes, and then all of a sudden, I was next to the car. My consciousness was flying along next to the car. But, it was passing through the hedges, nothing actually blocked me, I could penetrate the physical world. That happened for about twenty minutes, or so. All the while, I was hearing voices, seeing images and symbols, and one of them was ‘Cosmic Organicism of the Universal Molecular,’ and ‘transmission.’ COUM Transmissions. When I got home, I wrote everything I could remember down.

OBRIST These were all written as text?

P-ORRIDGE Scribbled in notebooks. Some of them still exist. One of the words we received was cosmosis.

OBRIST Like cosmos and osmosis.

P-ORRIDGE Exactly, and it was the positive transfer of energy from one being into another, like in a plant, but between beings. That the whole universe was smaller, and smaller, and smaller particles until there were no particles. In a way, it was a precursor to quantum physics, though I didn’t know anything about quantum physics. And so, I felt that not only was it this true epiphany, but that it was my lifelong task, my mission, to proselytize the core ideas of that for the rest of my life.

OBRIST It was like a manifesto?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah.

OBRIST What was the epiphany of Throbbing Gristle?

P-ORRIDGE Oh, there wasn’t one. That was just logic, and observation, and deduction. I was looking at music and thinking, god I haven’t bought any records for two or three years, and why haven’t I? Because it’s not satisfying. It’s not teaching me something I didn’t know. So what am I gonna do? I guess I have to make music that does satisfy me. Because that’s the COUM approach: if it’s not there, then make it.

With music it was: What is music? Music is sounds. There’s no good or bad sounds, there’s just sounds. What is a rhythm? Something that happens at least twice. That’s it, that’s all it is. What do we got that we can make sounds with? We looked around our basement and we had a broken bass guitar, an old violin, and an old drum kit.  We bought a guitar from Woolworth’s for 15 pounds, and Cosey said, “It’s too heavy.” So, we sawed off the extra wood and asked, “How’s that?” and she said, “Much better.” Chris Carter built his own synthesizers, Sleazy was totally into tape recorder experiments à la Burroughs, and I was really into writing lyrics that were based on love stories and rhythm and blues, American rock, and so on. Something that was English and about my experience in post-war Manchester. By process of reduction, you end up with what’s left and go, that’s what we have.

OBRIST The best producer is a reducer.

P-ORRIDGE Yes, of course. When I was once asked to remix “Test Dept,” because they were having real problems, I went and erased all but three tracks and it was fine. Throbbing Gristle was very much conceived in the same structural way. Then, I thought it has to have a name that has nothing to do with the history of rock music. I thought factory because of Andy Warhol, but that’s too obvious. I was talking to my friend Monty and he goes, “Gen you keep saying the word industrial. You keep saying industrial this, and industrial that.” 

OBRIST It’s a very Manchester word.

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, of course. I was talking about the factories in Manchester and all the steam trains being cut up when they were obsolete. So, I went, oh yeah, it’s industrial music. That was September 3, 1975. Then, it was a matter of convincing the rest of the world that what we were doing was a really good idea. [laughs]

OBRIST There was another epiphany in ’81, and that’s Psychic TV.

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, that was towards the end of COUM Transmissions. I’d started having, for lack of a better term, shamanic, out-of-body experiences. I’d been speaking in tongues. I’d been having astral travel where I’d lose my body completely, and I was in other dimensions; as if I’d taken psychedelics, but I hadn’t. It had gotten so intense that I thought, I can’t do this in public anymore, but I do still want to explore this. So, I started to explore those rituals in private. 

OBRIST Rituals are important because Tarkovsky said, “We live in a time bereft of rituals and we need to reintroduce rituals,” and you’ve done that a lot.

P-ORRIDGE Absolutely. They’re always there in my life. From ‘75, when we started Throbbing Gristle, COUM was still going on, but in private. By ‘81, I didn’t want to do Throbbing Gristle anymore and we stopped. I thought we saw it out, proved we could invent a genre of music, and convinced the fucking world that it’s a good idea. So, why do it anymore? What else is there to do? Our fans are really into Throbbing Gristle, and they dress like us, and they write to us, share stories about their life. What would happen if a group took that as raw material? Thinking, we’re like you too, what can we do together? Through conversations with Monte Cazzaza and Sleazy, we developed my idea of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

OBRIST Yeah, that’s very relevant because Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth is of course a hybrid. It’s a fan club, a ritual, a cult. Bodily fluids played a role, didn’t they?

P-ORRIDGE [Laughs] Well, we sat there—myself and Sleazy—and said, “We need a ritual.” Through my exploration of Austin Osman Spare and other rituals I’d been doing, I knew that the orgasm was the key. That at the moment of orgasm, all the different layers of consciousness are all linked up for a moment. The juice of orgasm, whether it’s male or female. And then hair. We liked the idea that those are all the things that, normally in magic, you’re not supposed to let anyone else have. So, we got people to send them to us as an act of trust.

OBRIST You also recently went from 2D to 3D. Can you tell me about your shoe sculptures?

P-ORRIDGE Oh, the shoes. Yeah, I love making shoe sculptures. We were making them just for fun. All the shoes belonged to sex workers, strippers, dominatrices, hookers, and topless go-go dancers. In those black boxes are a lot of little materials—we keep them sometimes for twenty years before they have a purpose. The crystals are from the chandelier of Lady Jaye’s grandmother who died. Everything is connected to life.

OBRIST Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of Lady Jaye’s passing. How did you meet?

P-ORRIDGE We met in a dungeon. A friend of mine, Terrence Sellers, had a dungeon on 23rd Street and a little apartment off to one side. When we came to New York, we would stay there. So, I’d been out with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein at this club called Jackie 60, and I’d done a load of ecstasy. Those were the days when it was still legal, still pure. It was three in the morning and I didn’t want to wake up Terrence, so I went in the dungeon, put a sheet over me, and went to sleep. That’s what Lady Jaye saw when she came to work. She was a dominatrix there. She thought I went back to sleep but I didn’t. I was in the dark. I was watching this doorway and the other room was lit, and she was walking back and forth in what we knew straightaway was a real 60’s outfit and a Brian Jones bob. Then she started to get undressed and put on fetish clothing. Out loud I said, and I felt embarrassed saying it because it so was not like me, but I said, “Dear Universe, if I can be with that woman that’s all I want for the rest of my life.”

OBRIST Oh wow, you knew immediately. She was a nurse too, right?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, she was a nurse as well. She was fascinated with the human body, it’s limitations, and the fact that it’s really just a lump of meat, of material. She said, “It’s a cheap suitcase that carries around our consciousness.” One of her other great sayings was, “See a cliff, jump off.” She was truly fearless. We’ve never met anyone so truly fearless about everything and anything.

OBRIST When did you decide on the idea of your bodies becoming one? Because it’s so important now, how did this epiphany happen? 

P-ORRIDGE It turns out that it began in the ‘80s, in terms of the theory. It’s the same problem of the either/or, a universe that has an either/or is malfunctioning. And it seems very likely that the whole point of existence is to return to unification, divine union, a realization of similarity. The first thing Lady Jaye did before she took me out was dress me in her clothes, put makeup on me, and decorate my hair with jewels. We said to each other, “I wish I could consume you. I wish I could just literally hold you, and we would melt into each other, and become one.” It was that true, unconditional, infinite desire that is inexplicable but incredible. We thought about why we feel that way, why we’re so desperately in need of becoming each other, or at least becoming one more? We thought of Burroughs and Gysin, as always, and The Third Mind. When they wrote and did cut-ups together, they weren’t by William or Brion, but the product of a third mind, this other being. We thought, what if we cut ourselves up, and became one new being? And that’s the pandrogyne.

OBRIST Lady Jaye had surgery on the chin to match you?

P-ORRIDGE And the nose and under her eyes.

 OBRIST And you took hormones but it didn’t work out?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah. She took male hormones and it made her aggressive, and we took female hormones and it made me cry all the time. [Laughs] We said, “At least we can say now to some degree we do understand the monthly effect of the hormones shifting.” It’s really odd when you suddenly cry over nothing, and feel shattered and upset. So, what we did was shave off all our body hair, so we were newborn babies, and for the first part of that day we wore diapers as well. Hair contains time, and people can take a piece of hair and figure out what drugs you’ve had, and certain things that have happened to you. We wanted to start fresh, so we became babies.

OBRIST Twins.

 P-ORRIDGE Little twins, yes. Then we started looking for confirmation in the myths and cultures of the world.

 OBRIST Because hormones didn’t work, you went into ketamine? Why did ketamine work better than hormones?

 P-ORRIDGE Who knows why it worked for us? Different things work for different people. But over two years, we did it every day. In fact, we would load a needle up and put it at each side of the bed, and whoever woke up first would inject you while you were still asleep, so you would wake up high on ketamine. We would do it all day and we learned how to navigate it. We didn’t do huge amounts so we were completely lost...

 OBRIST Do you have any unrealized projects? Dreams? 

 P-ORRIDGE Yes. We’d really like to set up a COUM collective. Not a commune, but where each person who’s deeply involved has their own yurt, or whatever, and then a main building that’s a resource for archives and technology, workshops and so on. It’s a think tank for alternatives. 

 OBRIST And what’s your advice to a young artist?

 P-ORRIDGE Don’t try to have a career. Be creative. Be a creator. 

 OBRIST The exhibition in Los Angeles was called Pandrogyny 1 and 2?

P-ORRIDGE For two locations. One at Tom of Finland, and the other at Lethal Amounts. At the Tom of Finland house, they keep it as it was when he lived there. When you do an exhibition, what you put there goes amongst all his things, so that one is mainly sculptures. It has things like “Tongue Kiss,” which is two wolf heads, and the tongues have been replaced with knife blades.

 OBRIST It’s crazy that this was your first show in LA. What’s your relationship to the city?

 P-ORRIDGE I never had one really. I would never live there. To me, it has a strange atmosphere. It’s like it has a big cave underneath, with a dark energy in it that you can fall into by mistake. It doesn’t suit me at all. Mainly the art world has tried to ignore us for years. It’s really important for young artists to step away from that and look at examples of mail art and chapbooks.

OBRIST Generosity? 

P-ORRIDGE And generosity. Sharing. Roxy who was just here, a young artist and musician, she said that she’s always amazed how by generous I am, giving things away. And I say, “Well, what am I supposed to do with it, hoard it? To what end?”

OBRIST That’s a very important motto for the new decade.

P-ORRIDGE Sharing and generosity. Absolutely. 

A Conversation Between Maurizio Cattelan and Sasha Grey

SASHA GREY I first met you on a desert island in the Mediterranean where cell phones only worked at any one of the three restaurants on the island, and the group we were with did everything together. There was no daily plan, we followed only the rhythm of the island, and the house we were in (yours) was minimal to the bone. No Internet, no TV, no modern distractions and the common area was outside, or on the stairs leading to the kitchen. A few friends seemed assaulted by the setup. I guess you could call it a tech detox; it was like hitting a reset button. It really forced people to socialize in a way that used to be normal, only a decade ago. Do you see this as a social experiment?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Yes. I arrived in Filicudi 30 years ago. There were only donkeys back then, on the island. There was no water, electricity, phone lines or cars. Things started improving 15 years ago when water and electricity finally arrived. This made a huge impact. The island though, was resistant to change. Cellphone reception is still sparse and not easily accessible. Every summer, I wonder why I itch to go back. The sea is all there is. There are no attractions and only a handful of local restaurants and bars. There is no structure on this island. It is deserted and very quiet. The silence is what I like. It slows everything down. It helps me pay attention to the little things. Simplicity runs this island. It sends me back to my childhood, when everything was new and amazing. 

SASHA GREY You left instagram with a final post encouraging people to create something wonderful outside of social media. Much of what you do is a satirical statement to get people to think and reflect, and we are all aware that social media is not always the best tool for that. Did you feel you had a responsibility to step away?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I started "The Single Post Instagram" page to feature a new story every day, keeping it to just one post on my feed at all times. I don't like the idea of saving posts. It is distracting and it makes me feel vulnerable. I was active for a year and a half. It was not easy but it was fun. I enjoyed engagement through my captions and photos. It was great until I stopped learning from it. That was my end. I prefer to fill my existential anxiety with other things like meeting friends, reading, working and visiting galleries. At this point, I would rather sit and watch a construction site. It is more exciting to me than scrolling through Instagram.

SASHA GREY That being said, Toilet Paper, the magazine you co-founded does have a social media presence and it undoubtedly feels like you. How closely does the Toilet Paper crew work together on each issue? 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Toilet Paper is my extended family. The magazine is a collaboration with Pierpaolo Ferrari and a very large number of people with many different skill sets. We never know what we are getting into. It is always a surprise. We are like parasites, hunting for anything we can suck on with nothing precise in mind. It is truly magic. 

SASHA GREY Economics have always dictated art in one way or another, and tend to follow class structures. What advice would you give to young artists that don’t come from the top of the hierarchy who struggle with equal representation within these social structures, especially when many young artists struggle to pay the rent?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I came late into the art world. I had many jobs that taught me how to survive. I had no experience or professional training. It is all about believing in yourself, working and obsessively learning. Do what pleases you and stick to it. My advice is to be humble and generous with your ideas. There is something to learn from everyone/everything. Go out and see as many shows of all types. Good luck will come to you if you are good-hearted and positive. Lastly, never make the same mistake twice, make it five of six times...just to be certain.

SASHA GREY How do you deal with doubt?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I doubt myself all the time. I consider it a friend of mine. It grounds me and I question myself a lot. In the end, I always go with my gut. I move forward even when I feel like I am skating on thin ice. I have come to find: the thinner the ice, the less I doubt myself.

SASHA GREY Of course, we'd like to know the physical and conceptual process of how “Comedian” came into existence on a wall at Art Basel Miami. I heard that it was something that you have been thinking about for a while, but was installing the sculpture at the fair or using fresh produce impromptu?  

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Up until a certain point. My first attempt was with an eggplant. As you know, it did not work out. This piece took a year. It became an obsession. I produced many replicas, out of different materials. Nothing captures the essence of a banana like a real banana. It’s easier to forge money, I promise you. 

SASHA GREY Were you surprised by the frenzy or do you consider the frenzy part of the art? Is there a relational aesthetic component to the sculpture?  

MAURIZIO CATTELAN  Once a piece is presented, the artist is no longer in charge. It has to talk directly to the public. It has to charm and defend itself. Sometimes there are events that make a piece more interesting. “America” is the perfect example. A fully functional toilet made out of 18-karat solid gold. It attracted thousands of visitors at the Guggenheim and it made an appearance at the White House. It was last seen at the Blenheim Palace, stolen on the opening night of my show. Sort of like an unwritten surreal heist movie.

 SASHA GREY The banana is rife with a lot of symbolism, is there a sociopolitical undertone to sculpture?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN All ideologies have symbols. An elephant, a donkey, a hammer and sickle…. Perhaps it is now time for the banana to find its own republic.

SASHA GREY Someone ate the sculpture as part of a "performance," the gallery seemed visibly upset by this, but were you? 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN No, not at all. It was the right time. The banana was going bad and needed to be replaced.

SASHA GREY What are your feelings about art fairs? 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Unless to be killed, never take a cow to the slaughter house.

SASHA GREY Autre's new issue deals with some of the prevalent themes of the past decade including the magnified impact of influence in the digital age—whether that's social influence or political influence—how do you think this has affected art and the way that artists approach their work, whether personally or in general?  

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I always wonder what the Renaissance would have been like with the existence of Photoshop and social media. Would The Pieta and Mona Lisa be the same pieces we know today? Each age has its own tools and obsessions. The success of an artist used to be validated by gallery shows and museum appearances. Today the most interesting artists engage directly with the audience. Like selfie-driven installations. Things that are easy to post and understand. Readily available to fill the growing demand of content for the media. I think aesthetics play a huge role when it comes to art. Like any successful model, it’s important to be photogenic, attractive and easily reproducible.

Click here to purchase this interview in print! Comes with a special peel-able banana sticker.

Hybrid Forms: An Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers

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Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

interview by Summer Bowie

How does a country like Vietnam, absent of a black community, develop a rich brass band tradition with roots in the American South? How did the British flag inspire a Ghanaian tradition in textiles that is steeped in magical superstition? What do Aimé Césaire, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Emma Goldman all have in common? To find the answers to any of these questions you’d have to ask none other than the multi-disciplinary, head honcho of hybridity, artist Christopher Myers. His practice is as much about connecting the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Greece with those of Judeo-Christian scripture, as it is about connecting the migrations of syncratic practices across the globe and throughout history. His most recent solo exhibition, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort in Los Angeles primarily features hand-sewn flags depicting a wide array of syncratic allegories that in many ways define the globalized, contemporary psyche. These are the mythologies that form the foundation of our collective truth (though we know them to be fiction), and the forgotten legacies that have silently burrowed themselves deep into our cultural fabric. These narratives that inform us and define us find their way to us via oral traditions, dramatic performance, visual art and the printed page, and within all of these disciplines you will find Christopher Myers, obsessively studying the origins of every fiber, the intricacies of every pattern, and the channels of commerce that facilitate it all.

SUMMER BOWIE: Your new show, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort LA features primarily quilted tapestries fabricated in Luxor, Egypt. How did you find these artisans, and why textiles?

CHRISTOPHER MYERS: I was doing research for theater design. I worked with a collaborator, Kaneza Schaal, on a piece about the Egyptian Book of the Dead in 2014. And as part of the research for that book, I went to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. That trip was a gift of a trip. Luxor is a place that has been alive for generations and generations with culture, with religion, with spirituality, with all of the things that we all care about and love. And, while I was there, I ran into these fabric workers who work in the tourist trade. Because, the language that I speak most fluently is the language of speaking to other artists about making things, we quickly got into those conversations: what is the work you’re making, the years of training that go into hands that can sew so deftly, and the ways in which the tourist works aren’t really satisfying to them. So, we started to work together on work that is basic craft, but can speak to not only the traditions that I come from—traditions that are often relegated to poor people, or to women, or to people of color—but also to the other history that I’ve now encountered: from contemporary thinking and performance art, to work in other countries that I think this work is in dialogue with. 

I’m thinking especially of Asafo flags, which are a hybrid form in Ghana. The Ghanaian people, when they were colonized by the British, they saw the British parading with their flags and they saw these flags as a kind of magic that was used to exert power over them, and they thought, “we know how to make this magic. We can sew our own.” So, they made flags for parading, for teaching about their own specific identities. And, I love all of that work. Work that takes what the West has given us and then transforms it into art that speaks to the entire world.

BOWIE: In regard to those identities, it seems like you explore a lot of narratives and mythologies that are shared between several different cultures. So, a lot of the stories you are telling with these flags are stories that your fabricators are already familiar with as well. This is such a shared language.

MYERS: Absolutely. If you travel to places in which the pathways of tourism are less trod, you’ll find that the things that overlap in the venn diagrams of our identities end up being these larger myths, these bigger stories about what it means to be human, about ways of talking, about our relationship with the Divine, or our relationship with nature, or our relationship with the mass of humanity, and I think those are the overlaps that I’m particularly interested in. If you grow up like me: Catholic, but super involved in some super syncratic practices, you realize there’s a relationship between a god like Horus in ancient Egypt and the baby Jesus. I’m interested in the syncratic impulse and the mixing of mythologies.

BOWIE: Your sculptures explore the roles that men of African origins have played at various points in history. Can you talk a bit about the generational lineage and its relationship to labor and bondage that you’re referencing in these pieces?

MYERS: One of the things is that there are obviously syncratic impulses that people understand. You see images of God across cultures. But then, there are ways in which our cultural migration, our cultural instinct shows itself. So much of the iron work of the Old South was derivative of the West African iron workers who were forced to migrate here and were enslaved as highly skilled labor in the States. So, the techniques of iron work—the patterning of the wrought iron rails of New Orleans that we associate with upper class housing—are actually patterns that are borrowed from West Africa. I’m interested in those cultural mixings. For example, a collar that is filled with candles; I think a lot about the idea that so many of the people who were actually making shackles during the slavery period in the United States were West African imports. Black people who did the labor of building shackles—we were forced to build shackles for our brothers and sisters. I’m also fascinated by the idea that we did that, but there had to be moments of resistance, even if they were just symbolic. Moments of telling another story, and that is what’s most exciting. Similarly, I’m always interested in the way that no change is ever simple. No bondage is ever without complication.  

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Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

BOWIE: The rat cage mask—with its reference to vaudevillian sideshows, the bondage of both the human and animal performers involved—it feels like it really calls into question the opportunity for resistance. 

MYERS: And what’s interesting to me is that those stories are complicated, always. The 1980s were some of the last vestiges of that kind of performance. There was a guy who had some kind of bone deficiency in which his limbs were severely compromised, and he displayed himself as The Frog Man throughout Texas, and at some point a human rights group got wind of this and sponsored a very strident protest to this practice—without ever having consulted the guy. And the guy said, “If it hadn’t been for my life as a performer, I would still be selling pencils from a moving cart in Texas, but instead I’ve seen the world.” And, I think that we have to look at all of these stories and complicate them. To understand that nobody is that perfect victim that we want them to be. 

BOWIE: You started illustrating your father’s children’s books in the ‘90s. Did you initially learn the art of storytelling through him?

MYERS: My first storytelling coach would’ve been my grandfather, who didn’t read a word of English, but was the best storyteller that I’ve ever known. He didn’t read at all, he didn’t read a word of English, he didn’t read anything but he was a great storyteller. That is part of what I mean by coming from a tradition of artists, makers, and creators who may not be recognized by any kind of mainstream world. Of course, my father was a writer. Him being a writer, he was taking some of those things he learned from his father and translating them into a form that could be read, that was legible to others as an art form. But make no mistake, we were all very clear that the chief storyteller in my family was my grandfather, and that we’ve all just been trickling down from his talents.

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

BOWIE: You pull references from all over the world and across time. Your wide array of disciplines is just as disparate. Is there a common thread at all?

MYERS: I love making things. I have a slight addiction, maybe it’s a problem, I’m sure it would be diagnosable if someone had a word for it. I believe that stories really do change the world. Today, I was in a classroom in Queens, a place called Central Queens Academy Charter School. In that room, 50 or 60 children whose families have come from all over the world, from Tibet, Nepal, Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and China, and every one of them is a hero, they are their own Odysseus. I live in this world in which there are stories around me, there are stories that can change the world, and my job is to find the form, and to usher these stories into the world in a kind of public way. At this moment, I’m preparing for a play that will be produced off Broadway next week that I’ve written about migrations, Cartography. It’s a theater piece for young people thinking about the challenges of migration. The thing that is central is this idea of trying to fight the tide of forgetting that is so often imposed on all of our stories of migration. 

BOWIE: In 2016, you presented work alongside Pollock, Warhol and Billie Holiday at Cooper Gallery in a show that explored the intersection between jazz music and visual art. Can you talk about the genesis of that piece?

MYERS: I think that one of the things that is interesting about being African American is the idea that we are some of the original hybridized people. We are some of the first people in the world to kind of have defined identities on that hyphen between two cultures. And jazz is absolutely the central exemplar of that hybridity of mixing European instruments with tonal patterns and rhythms that are from the continent. That being said, that specific set of pieces is a piece that was born in Vietnam. 

So, I was living in Vietnam, and early in the morning you hear jazz music kind of wandering through the streets. Like, yo man, where’s this jazz music coming up to my apartment from the street? I ran outside and what I found was a brass band tradition that intersected with other brass band traditions like New Orleans jazz, but it’s used for funerals. So, in the morning you see all these funeral marches and jazz bands, and there were moments of  recognition because the form is so indebted to African Americans. So, I began to make a series of uniforms and instruments for this funeral march that would go from Saigon to New Orleans. What was shown at the Cooper Gallery was a piece of that series of instruments that I built with instrument makers that were from Vietnam. It was subsequently made into a film via my friends who were called The Propeller Group, a Vietnamese-American art collective. We were very excited to take this work that is centered on levels and levels of hybridity and cultural movement, and to literalize some of that hybridity, to make almost mythical beings of the instruments, chimera and hydra of trumpets, French horns, and cymbals. That was the center of that piece. And, for real, I think that when you look at so much of the work that we love, it comes from cultural collision.

BOWIE: How exactly did jazz make its way to Vietnam if there’s not a black community existing there?

MYERS: Right, that would be an obvious question for me. What I found was that it comes from the French. James Reese Europe was an African-American bandleader for the military during World War I. He brought jazz to Europe, he brought it specifically to France, so the French took up this brass band tradition in their colonization of Vietnam, who then picked up this tradition that’s been handed down, and handed down, and handed down. What was fascinating was asking the musicians in Vietnam, “Where did you get this tradition from?” And they said, “We don’t know!” This is what I’m talking about in terms of the currency of forgetting, the tide of forgetting, and I’m hoping in some small way can help to stem that tide. 

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

BOWIE: How did your appreciation for Vaslav Nijinsky come about?

MYERS: I’m interested in histories of colonialism. So, Nijinsky as a young Polish talent was taken up into the Russian system and his kind of cultural mix, having been colonized. There’s this thing called drain theory that happens as a result of colonial powers. They take the great talents from the people they are colonizing, and those people become these hybrid figures, people like Nijinsky or Aimé Césaire, or Senghor. So many great poets and intellectual figures are hybrid figures that have been educated in the West, but have come back home and tried to find ways to resurrect their own traditions. Nijinsky is so different, especially because at some point he kind of succumbs to the mental stress and was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was thirty, and never danced again after having revolutionized the world of dance. But, when you read his journal—he kept a meticulous journal—for six weeks just as he was turning the corner of mental health, and when you read that journal you can see how so much of what was affecting him were the cultural pressures of his time; the split and hybridized identity. At one point he writes, “I’m a Negro. I’m a Chinese. I’m a Red Indian. I’m a White.” And he has kind of lost himself, and lost his own sense of his identity. Not only the colonial experience he’s undergoing, but also the ways in which he is replicating the colonial gaze as a dancer. He also dances as other ethnicities. He dances as a Thai, or as an Indian, and that kind of hybridity, and revealing in his journals was and continues to be very inspiring to me.

BOWIE: Do you think the art world would dance more [socially] if they worked more with dancers?

MYERS: Well, the first thing I would like to say is I very much appreciate your recognition that the art world is abysmal when it comes to dance. So, I think that firstly, the art world has some of the worst parties because of this dance aversion. And I also feel like the art world needs to start to back up their imagination of themselves as being global by getting out of their houses, and I mean that both metaphorically and literally. More and more they’re realizing you see the same people in seven cities. I’m not particularly interested in that party. I wish that more of them would come to some of the events that I continually gather. I’m interested in experiencing things and places that could touch you and change the way you see the world. Hopefully, that’s what the work is doing too.

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Drapetomania is on view through February 8 at Fort Gansevoort Los Angeles, 4859 Fountain Avenue. Follow Christopher Myers on Instagram @kalyban

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Soft Power: An Interview Of Nathaniel Mary Quinn

text and interview by Adam Lehrer
portrait by Kyle Dorosz

In the late artist Mike Kelley’s 1993 essay on visualizations of Freud’s “uncanny,” a term referring to the feeling of confronting something simultaneously alien and yet familiar, he connected manifestations of the sensation to memory. “This sensation is tied to the act of remembering,” wrote Kelley. But Kelley also made the claim that the uncanny sensation is typically one of dread or muted horror. And to be sure, many of the art works that Kelley wrote about in regards to the uncanny and showed in the exhibition he curated based on his text; Hans Bellmer’s anatomical dolls, Cindy Sherman’s photographs of fetish dolls (partially influenced by Bellmer’s constructions), Ron Mueck’s hyper-realist figurative sculpture of a teenage girl in a black swimsuit, etc; are connected by horror. But is it possible for an object, or an art object more specifically, to evoke the uncanny in a positive light? Can an uncanny artwork actually uplift the viewer or make him/her aware of his/her alterity and connection to the universe at the same time? Historically, I would have said no. But that was before I came to know and love the work of New York-based artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

Quinn’s work, renderings of bold and psychologically dense painted and drawn portraits, often look like collages upon one-dimensional viewing. Quinn depicts the human face with a network of symbols that often illustrate the humanities and complexities of his subjects infinitely more than a realistic rendering of facial attributes ever could. It is upon closer inspection that these fragmented faces are actually created with oil and pastel paint applied through a highly skillful technique of using certain oils to prevent the component parts of the portrait from bleeding into one another. The result is a very peculiarly uncanny image.

From one perspective, the fragmentations and symbolizations of human faces can feel strange and disorienting. But Quinn’s work is also deeply humanitarian. He himself has lived an incredibly painful life, having lost his mother and been abandoned by his father at a young age, and has emerged at the other end as one of the most important artists of his generation. It’s not that his work suggests anything close to the neoliberal dictum of “pick yourself up by your bootstraps,” on the contrary, it suggests that all humans are connected by our traumas, our sadness, and our pain. But this notion in Quinn’s work isn’t horrific in the sense that the uncanny is usually understood to be. Going back to Kelley’s essay, Quinn’s work does evoke troubling memories but it also addresses the fact that we all are haunted by uncomfortable memories and finds beauty in the universal nature of trauma. Quinn’s work is an uncanny that makes you feel more connected to the world than isolated from it. Perhaps this emotional resonance is what has pushed Quinn’s work beyond the confines of art world insularity and into the spotlight of mass recognition and, evidently, major collector interest. “Even when people look at something that might be alien to them, or even disgusting, abject, uncomfortable to look at,” says Quinn. “They know they are looking at something with a real emotional resonance to it.”

When I last spent time with Quinn in 2017, he was on the cusp of major art world success. And now, after having been signed to Gagosian Gallery in April and about to be the subject of his first Gagosian solo show in Beverly Hills, that success has undeniably arrived. Over the last two years, Quinn has been pushing his practice deeper into an inner psychological space. The work that will be on display at Gagosian plumbs the depths of his psyche. More and more, his work seeks to render his own insecurities and difficult remembrances. The kernels of self-doubt that are omnipresent but often left unspoken are filtered into Quinn’s pictorial space. The aesthetic of the works that will be shown at Gagosian hue closer to abstraction than works made by Quinn in the past, generating a space of empathy and consciousness raising for both artist and viewer alike. “What does it look like to make a work that renders an insecurity?” asks Quinn. “I would say this: empathy and vulnerability are tools in my practice as important as charcoal and pastels. This is what I’m pursuing.” 

Quinn’s first Gagosian solo show, Hollow and Cut, will feature thirty-six works ranging from 16x13 inches to 96x48 inches. Talking to Quinn by telephone, he is equally excited and restless. This is a monumental point in his career: his first solo show with the world’s most profitable gallery.  He understands what the weight of a show at Gagosian, a gallery subject to praise and criticism in equal measure, holds for his future. But he also is filled with an immense sense of pride, and he has earned it: Quinn has emerged as one of the most important contemporary painters in the world. “You want to make sure you come out strong,” he says of the impending opening. “But you can't think about the public when making your work. Your concern has to be your practice and creating.”

ADAM LEHRER: So, last time we were together you were on the cusp of success. Now you're on your first solo show with Gagosian.

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN: The good thing about Gagosian is you can create the bedrock of a career that you want. They have the resources to materialize that for you. Larry, c’mon man, he has relationships with all the museums, the directors, even if they have somewhat of a...

LEHRER: Weary relationship...

QUINN: Yeah, they have to deal with him. He's like the emperor. Gagosian generates up to a billion dollars every year in art sales. David Zwirner is number two and they earn 500 million dollars. I was in a different place the last time we met, I was growing. Now, here we are again, man, with Gagosian Gallery. I can't believe it.

View fullsize

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN
C'mo' And Walk With Me, 2019
Black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, oil pastel on Coventry Vellum Paper
50 x 38 inches / 127 x 96.5 cm
© Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Photo: Rob McKeever
Courtesy Gagosian

LEHRER: What is the psychological impact of knowing that you are at the top of the art world food chain, so to speak? Is it pressure-inducing or is it freeing to know that so many more people are going to be seeing your work?

QUINN:It is freeing on one hand because of the gallery’s resources. As of five years ago, I had to pack all my own work. I remember [my wife] Donna and I used to ship it all out ourselves. We don't do that shit anymore. That's exciting.

In regards to the pressure, I think it would be fair to say that I feel some pressure. Any time you're making art in the public sphere it will present some pressure. If you're the kind of artist like myself, engaged in the exploration of the self, or finding ways to lay your wounds and memories bare and trying to make that visual, it presents pressure. But that is then coupled with the fact that it's Gagosian Gallery! Now, there are collectors interested in the work for any number of reasons. You start to think, “What would happen if someone finally places my work on public auction?" But you can't worry about it. Some collector is always going to be seduced by the alluring nature of generating a large profit off the work.

With that, I'll tell you, I'm very excited. For me, it's a big deal man. I think it's quite an achievement.

LEHRER: I'm psyched for you. Given these last few years, your work has obviously evolved a bit. What would you say distinguishes the works in this show compared to works of the past?

QUINN: This [show] is very personal. It’s called Hollow and Cut. When you remove whatever you've been taught to believe in, when you have cut and hollowed out all the exterior layers, what remains? This show is a courageous pursuit of excavating my internal self. I have deeply rooted insecurities. I don't talk about it much, but I don't feel worthy sometimes. These works are reflections of my fears and doubts. I did a piece called “How Come Not Me.” It's a small work on paper. When I was in high school, we had a thing called Parents’ Weekend. At that point my family was gone from my life. And I'd think "How Come Not me?” Until this day I struggle with that.

These ideas, these insecurities about my life or my looks, are tied into the actual creation of the work. I'm constantly pushing my practice. For this show I knew that I had to move to that next level in my work, so I used a more abstract approach. Even doing that was very challenging because you go through high school, college, grad school and you are making art the whole way through and then you find yourself making art a certain kind of way. That doesn't mean the work you are making is a real reflection or what you can do; it just means you've been trained or conditioned to make art in a certain way. But to make work that is closer to where you are emotionally in and of itself requires a lot of courage and doggedness. You have to go for it. l. 

LEHRER: Yes, this reminds me of that quote by the great pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran "Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself." In a sense you are tapping into this inner turmoil, or chaos, to boldly visualize your psyche, and push yourself further into the art making process.

QUINN: Yes, that’s perfectly placed. For example, normally in my work I would draw an eye, or a nose would represent a nose, but if I'm trying to articulate these deeply embedded insecurities within me, my fears and my doubts and a sense of unworthiness, then what I am trying to articulate is not actually definitive. It's not a real figure. It's an affectation. How do you visualize that? I'm not saying I achieved that in the show, but I've made progress from work one to work thirty-five. By the time I got to the 35th work, it began to take on the kind of abstraction I had been aiming for. It feels much more palpable to me, much more honest, much more real. Much more free. Most people don't want to be free. They want to comply. And fall in line. Freedom requires real courage. You have to fight to be free.

LEHRER: Despite the often uncanny aesthetic in your work, you have broken out to a mass audience. What do you think it is that enables people who aren’t so versed in the avant-garde to connect with your work?

QUINN: Let’s go to Beyoncé. I love Beyoncé. She makes great songs. She’s a superstar. We all know this. Then you got Mary J. Blige and she can't sing anywhere near as well as Beyoncé. And, although she can't sing that well, she's good! She's not Beyoncé, or Aretha, but what she does is real. Potent. Visceral. You know what she's saying and how she's saying it is honest and pure. But when you present something real, people believe it. 

LEHRER: Is this bravery, this courage to find freedom, something you are constantly looking for in art across all media?

QUINN: I think it's important to understand that you can't grasp the scope of humanity within one tradition of art. You have to look at all of it: comedy, film, poetry, reading essays and books. Public speaking. Not just art but all forms of work and all traditions of creation must be dealt with and confronted or perused at the very least. So I'll look at a Dave Chapelle; this guy works very hard to be free. Because this guy's fighting for his right to speak his mind as a comedian, his first job is to be funny. And in addition to being funny, he's a cultural critic. He observes the culture, and criticizes it, and tries to portray it in a different light. 

I look at the works of artists like Yue Minjun, Adrian Gheni, or Neo Rauch because they have a certain freedom in their work. So many artists are afraid to confront who they are. They continue to feel empty in the face of their achievements. Why is that? [Art] isn’t just technique, skill and rendering, it is an activity in which empathy and vulnerability are necessities. I'm not just moving the needle in my work; I'm moving the needle in me. I'm not a walking Instagram page. I'm not putting up a highlight reel. This is real life. No one is happy all the time. It's impossible. I want to use the work to push back on this era’s values. An era where people are ashamed to be real. 

LEHRER: In your portraits you often shun direct representations in favor of symbolic representations. But these symbols seem to illustrate the depths of you and your subjects’ complexities infinitely more than a direct rendering of physical attributes ever could. Your ability to use symbols to pierce the symbolic order and address the... 

QUINN: Make no mistake, I like to think that every artwork I make has some representational element. But there's still evidence [in this show] of me taking that courageous step forward to push beyond traditional forms of representation. We should shoot for a higher ground. A higher level. The first comedians would walk down the street and slip on a banana peel, and that was funny. That's surface comedy. But deep human comedy is where the fragility of men and women are brought to the surface. That's deep comedy, the kind that Dave Chapelle engages in. That Pryor engaged in. I wanted to make art like that.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn “Hollow And Cut” will be on view until October 19, 2019 at Gagosian Beverly Hills. 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, ca 90210

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NATHANIEL MARY QUINN
Jekyll and Hyde, 2019
Oil paint, paint stick, gouache, soft pastel on linen canvas, diptych
14 x 22 inches
35.6 x 55.9 cm
© Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Photo: Rob McKeever
Courtesy Gagosian

The Decorator's Home: An Interview Of Marco Castillo On Cuba's Incomplete Aesthetic Revolution

Interview by Oliver Kupper
Portrait by Summer Bowie
Install images courtesy of UTA Artist Space

Marco A. Castillo’s The Decorator’s Home – his first solo exhibition in the United States after 26 years in Los Carpinteros collective – is a microcosm of the dichotomies and failures of modernism’s utopian ideals. Amid a raging Cold War that extended far beyond the US and the USSR, modernism infused a tinge of fascism disguised as national pride in the name of aesthetics, whether it be the folksy arts and crafts dreams of Frank Loyd Wright, or the concrete and rosewood pavilions of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. Cuban Modernism offered the same sense of freedom and hope in an embargoed state of isolationism and Marxist fervor. Needless to say, the movement didn’t last long – it sputtered out in the tropical miasma of communism’s last island holdouts. In A Decorator’s Home, Castillo captures this fervor: the dreams of space travel, the dreams of high-minded aesthetics, razor sharp lines, rich wood, and rare materials. All of this is imbued with the paranoia of a global race to the cosmos, and the coded languages of spies trading secrets while their Cuba Libre’s sweat into hotel coasters. In the back of the exhibition, a solemn and heartbreaking film, called Generation, is a symbolic six-minute epitaph for Cuban Modernism’s ambitions, it’s lonely siren songs of paradise, and youth crashed on the shores of their aspirations. In the end, Cuban Modernism’s shipwreck wasn’t due to lack of demand or desire. It was the sense of control that the architect’s of The Revolution – namely Fidel Castro and Che Guevara – needed in order to legitimize their violence and delusions of grandeur. As the movement died, many of the buildings were converted to hospitals, schools, and public works facilities. We got a chance to speak to Castillo about his exhibition, curated by Neville Wakefield, and about his own take on Cuban Modernism’s successes and failures.

OLIVER KUPPER: Where did the name for the show, The Decorator’s Home, come from? 

MARCO CASTILLO: I had been doing research on Cuban Modernity, and there was this generation of designers at the beginning of the revolution that got involved in creating a new static for these people that were going to be the future of this country and the future of the world, because Cuba thought that they would convince the rest of the world to become communist. This needed to have an aesthetic. 

KUPPER: It’s funny how revolutions need an aesthetic.

CASTILLO: This generation designed most of the objects we were supposed to use, like furniture, and also interior design for the spaces, for the workers, for the buses, for the hotels, and for the farmers. But at a certain point, the government stopped being interested in that.

KUPPER: Was it too ambitious?

CASTILLO: I think it was the mood of Fidel Castro. He got radicalized, he got very into Soviet politics, and he militarized the country. And so the static artists became an enemy because they were the creative people. 

KUPPER: Yeah, a little utopian.

CASTILLO: Yes, too liberal. In the seventies, there was censorship for writers. The government destroyed the movement, the design, and the taste. 

KUPPER: How many years was that?

CASTILLO: Twenty years, I would say. In Cuba you have Art Deco, Art Nouveau, but I’m fonder of this utopic moment. People were importing resources from the human past. For the colonial time, they were based on identity and they mixed it with the high-quality design from the northern country.

KUPPER: The northern influence is in your pieces, too.

CASTILLO: Yes, what I’m doing here is basically because this movement was interrupted. This stirred a frustration in all of us; we couldn’t have a complete aesthetic revolution. I behaved like an interior designer at the time, creating my own objects. They are not furniture, and they are not art. They are something in between. 

KUPPER: Object-art.

CASTILLO: Yes, this creates a lot of influence in them. They look like decoration.  

KUPPER: At times it reminds me of Brasília. 

CASTILLO: Yes, except the Brazilians use rosewood, and we use mahogany. Cuba has the most beautiful mahogany. It’s darker than the rest. Also, we have a little bit of the Soviet influence over furniture—more practical. The Brazilians were more like peacocks, more exaggerated at times. 

(walking over to another piece)

KUPPER: What’s that?

CASTILLO: This is the type of wood people use to make cabinets. It smells so good. 

KUPPER: When did you start using caning?

CASTILLO: It was after the Cuban movement. I realized they were using this old material to do things that were very modern. Also, they were doing a lot of screens. There was a very tropical feeling in every piece of furniture—very delicate—you couldn’t really read it immediately. For example, they use a combination of mahogany and white surfaces. It would remind you of a coconut. I did the same here (walks towards screen). I designed the outside of it. I made it white, so it looks a little bit like pieces of coconut. A screen in a very important place called Salon de Protocolo El Laguito, the Protocol Room of El Laguito, inspired this. There is a huge screen that reminds me of this one, but it doesn’t have the alphabet. I added an alphabet because it was sort of an addiction of the Cold War.

KUPPER: Coding…

CASTILLO: Yeah, people really wanted to know these codes; there was lots of paranoia. (laughs) What are they saying? It became almost like art.

KUPPER: Would you consider there to be a Brutalist element to any of these pieces as well?

CASTILLO: You know when you’re dealing with this socialist element, Brutalism is always there. This (pointing to a caning piece with stars) reminds me of our monuments. This is pure Brutalism. 

KUPPER: This is very symbolic.  

CASTILLO: It represents a little bit of the revolution. I come from a country that had a lot of fun—a beautiful, turbulent country. Cuba was very rich in the beginning, but not after the revolution. I represent that as a circle. Simple, beautiful, perfect. It turns into a star, which is a very complex, geometric figure. At the same time, it reminds me of the back or the bottom of a chair. 

KUPPER: What about the rifles?

CASTILLO: The whole exhibition evolves from more abstract work to the more committed, symbolic, and engaged with the later alternative reality. It’s easy for me to imagine that an artist or a designer could have made a poster creating optical art with rifles as a monument, as a creative item. It never happened, and I never saw it, so I made it. 

KUPPER: Was it a military aesthetic?

CASTILLO: There was a moment of militarization. I had to start learning shooting when I was thirteen, and I got these preparations every year until I was eighteen. 

KUPPER: You weren’t going to join the army?

CASTILLO: No, it was not for me. (laughs) I don’t even like weapons. It just fascinated me—the shape of the rifle when you buy it creates a completely different object; it turns into something else. This is an American gun. I think it’s the Springfield. 

KUPPER: It’s a pretty common rifle.

CASTILLO: My grandfather had it. It’s the rifle I always saw when I was a child. He was a hunter. You know what we hunt in Cuba? Guinea chicken. 

KUPPER: What’s a Guinea chicken?

CASTILLO: It’s a beautiful animal.

KUPPER: Not like a Guinea pig?

CASTILLO: No (laughs), it’s a chicken, but it’s so beautiful. It’s a very strange animal. It looks like it’s from a patisserie.

KUPPER: Interesting.

KUPPER: (gesturing towards the sculptures across the room) These definitely remind me of the Cold War shapes—space-age shapes. 

CASTILLO: Totally, because all these amazing designs started in that era. 

KUPPER: It was the beginning of these explorations with satellites and this idea of our future in space.

CASTILLO: The future would be space, the future would be socialist, the future would be capitalist, which there was a big doubt about—there was a fight about it.

The Decorator’s Home is on view through July 13 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Allegiances And Convictions: A Conversation With June Edmonds And Luis De Jesus

Interview By Luis De Jesus
Introduction By Summer Bowie
Photographs courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

When tasked with defining America, the forefathers of this country attempted to create a union that, though forged in rebellion to an oppressive regime, was ultimately funded by slave labor. By declaring this land a union where all men are created equal, only to deny representation and basic civil liberties to all who are not white men, the framers of our constitution bequeathed to us a contradiction that we are still working to correct today. Almost 250 years later, with the divisive nature of our political system and a multitude of bifurcation points within each party, it seems that defining the American identity has become nearly impossible. While interviewing June Edmonds about her series of flag paintings that comprise Allegiances and Convictions, the current exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Owner/Director Luis De Jesus observed that the colors of the American flag were lifted directly from its British counterpart—it seems reasonable to suggest that our flag is due for an update. Vertically oriented, Edmonds’ flags vary from one to the next in color and pattern. They employ the primary hues of red, yellow, and blue, the three colors necessary to create a full spectrum of brown skin tones. During a recent public conversation between Edmonds and curator/writer Essence Harden hosted by De Jesus, an insightful teenage art student asked about the literal and conceptual roles that labor plays in the surrounding artworks. The student noted the meticulously painted smaller stripes that comprise each of the larger flag stripes, and the uniformity of each performed painted stroke. In person, these paintings certainly provoke questions about all aspects of American life, including the shrinking labor force that is so often leveraged by politicians on both sides of the aisle for personal gain. In an age when the average American seems illiterate or oblivious to abstraction and the power of art, it seems that the emblems to which we are asked to pledge our allegiances are in need of redefinition, and that definition necessitates an honest reflection of who we are: multi-hued, multi-faceted, of varying size, and in constant flux. The following conversation between Luis De Jesus and June Edmonds was conducted this past April at her studio at the Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, CA, in advance of her first solo exhibition at the gallery.

LUIS DE JESUS: You’ve said that the idea of the flags came to you in a dream in 2017, six months after you returned home from an artist residency in Paducah, Kentucky. What was it about that place, that landscape, that inspired your dream?

JUNE EDMONDS: Being out there, there is a different relationship to the flag. There is also that additional flag. Paducah is pretty much a progressive island within Kentucky, but outside of it is not. While driving to Memphis one day, I saw on top of a hill a Confederate flag as big as this wall. So, if you’ve got a Confederate flag that big in front of your house you really want the world to know something.

DE JESUS: So that planted this idea, this question in your mind about the flag.

EDMONDS: ...and about the power of flags, and what flags communicate, and how flags are appropriated.

DE JESUS: And the fact that you were on that land, you were in a place that played such a big role in the Civil War.

EDMONDS: Applying to Paducah I thought, “Okay, I’m going to No Man’s Land.” I’m going to a place no one’s been to before. But after Trump was elected and America started taking on this new tint, going to Paducah became a whole other idea and I was apprehensive. I was at a party and someone joked, “Well, at least you’re gonna be close to the Ohio River, because if it gets too deep you can swim across.” That sort of planted the seed in my mind. It’s really kind of meaningless right now, but that really meant something at one time. It became really interesting to me—the thought of being on that land 150 years ago. So, I started doing some research and I learned about Margaret Garner. I named the triptych “Ohio Story” after her. Her life is what inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved. It’s about this woman who was a slave that was as close to the Ohio River as I was at the time.

Story of the Ohio For Margaret, 2017. Courtesy of artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

DE JESUS: How long were you there for?

EDMONDS: One month.

DE JESUS: That visit had a big impact on you. When you came back it stayed with you for a long time, it permeated your daily reality and your dreams, obviously, because you had the dream about these flags some months later, which kind of kicked off this whole project. Tell me about your use of color in these flags because it’s very specific. It’s very different from an earlier body of work, the mandalas inspired by your meditation practice. Is this something that just came naturally? Did you say, “I’m going to paint these flags; I’m going to create a flag.” Did the colors happen naturally or was it something that you had to think about and it was a conscious decision—your decision—not to use bright colors?

EDMONDS: Oh, it was conscious all the way. There are two things that inspired the color. The flags that came to me in my dream were black, but I was already thinking about using skin tones—brown skin tones. “Unina,” a painting I started in Paducah, is evidence of that. When I came back to LA I looked at another painting I started the year before called “Primary Theories” (2016), which used primary colors in brown tones. The idea is that all skin tones come from these particular primary colors that I was using in those works. If life started in Africa, then all skin tones come from that African skin tone. And then I thought back on how African black skin tones are referred to colloquially. You’ve got yellow—you know, we use that term. We use the term red, meaning this sort of Indian black skin tone, and we talk about really dark skin being blue black—primary colors. Those are the three colors that we use to talk about skin tones, to describe somebody that lives down the street.

Unina, 2017. Courtesy of artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Claudette Colvin Flag, 2019. Courtesy of artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Primary Theories, 2016. Courtesy of artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

DE JESUS: This is not something most people know about—unless you’re Black. I’ve never heard of this before.

EDMONDS: I’m really surprised! You being from DC and all!

[Laughter from both]

DE JESUS: Yeah, but I think Black people talk with each other differently.

EDMONDS: Of course, absolutely. When I think of the flag, I’m not going to do red, white, and blue. I’m doing red, yellow, and blue. I’m using the primary colors but still these are primary colors to brown. Very, very loosely, more and more and more loosely, I do consider that. I do consider that orange to be a red, or I consider that purple to be a red violet, or I consider that green to be a blue green. So, it just gets looser and looser.

DE JESUS: We’ve been asked, does she ever create horizontal flags? What’s behind the decision to keep these flags vertical?

EDMONDS: Okay, so two things. First, I dreamt them that way. The second thing is I wasn’t inspired by Jasper Johns, but I am inspired by Jasper Johns–the idea came to me independent of his flags–but I welcome the juxtaposition of those flags. With that said, his are horizontal and I want to keep mine distinct.

DE JESUS: And, typically, that’s how most people identify Johns flags—horizontally.

EDMONDS: These flags are standing for something, so I’m gonna to keep them standing.

Installation view of JUNE EDMONDS: Allegiances & Convictions, 2019. Courtesy of Luis De Jesus os Angeles. Photo by Michael Underwood.

DE JESUS: Also, a vertical has references to the standing figure. Seen together like this they sort of become these signposts. Each one has something to say that is unique to it.

EDMONDS: Cool. Do you feel that it abstracts them more?

DE JESUS: Well, that’s something I really love about them. I’ve had to point out to some people that they are flags. They don’t necessarily read them as flags, though some people do. Once I point it out they see it. I love that about it; it’s not obvious. You have to contemplate it a little more. But then the titles give it away.

EDMONDS: So that’s what I like: more abstracted, for it to come to you, and not be immediately legible.

DE JESUS: I have another question for you: have you ever felt that you were creating a new American flag?

EDMONDS: I’ve been thinking about this statement. It’s such a big idea that I shied away from it when you first asked me. But over the days I’ve been thinking, “Well, what are you painting for anyway? What are you doing this for anyway? Don’t you want to shift some ideas?” A new American flag says that we are shifting the idea of what something stands for. I accept that now.

DE JESUS: I love it! You’re embracing it now. I mean, it’s very powerful! To me, this whole idea of interpreting the flag in these colors, in these forms, is very provocative. As people in the art world we can appreciate it on a certain level. But a person who may not have that same connection or perspective may respond very differently. Their response may be similar to yours when you saw that Confederate flag outside of Paducah. They may look at your flag and say, “Oh man, that scares me!” It’s not just that you are making your own statement about the American flag, but you are proposing something quite radical here. It’s like you said, it’s an opportunity to really look at what this stands for, to think about its history, how it has impacted people—not just Black Americans—but all ethnicities who have come to this country, who embrace the flag, who embrace the country, and yet are always going up against things that keep them out, keep them from becoming fully realized Americans.

Installation view of JUNE EDMONDS: Allegiances & Convictions, 2019. Courtesy of Luis De Jesus os Angeles. Photo by Michael Underwood.

League of Six Nations Flag, 2019. Courtesy of artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

EDMONDS: I listen to a lot of audible books. One of the last ones I listened to is, The Rebellious Life of Ms. Rosa Parks. You hear about this person who came before Rosa Parks, who didn’t get up, but nobody knows her. Claudette Colvin was 17 years old and months before Parks did what she did somebody told her to get up from her seat. At the time she was studying government in school and she replied, “Don’t you know what the Constitution says?” I thought that was so powerful! So, one of these flags will be named for her.

DE JESUS: I consider what you are doing quite radical. All of your flags are becoming the new American flag. This constant change happening, the shift in colors from band to band and from flag to flag—this is not a static object, but something that represents evolution and change and progress.

EDMONDS: I like that. It’s sort of becoming.

DE JESUS: It’s always becoming, always working towards the goal, the ideal. What you said about the colors made me think of the stripes and the stars, how the design and meaning came from the tradition of European monarchies. The colors are from the British flag. We brought those ideals to this country and it became part of our own design. Yet, the ideals never became fully realized.

EDMONDS: Those colors were intended to stand for something. They probably said: “Okay, this is what it’s going to be. Red means valor. Blue means courage,” or something like that. But the flag is used to validate: this is what’s acceptable and this is what’s not acceptable in America, under this flag. If a person, behavior, or thing is not acceptable, it has no courage, it has no valor... and we all know that’s bullshit. This is important to me.

A Conversation With Adam Miller And Devon Oder, Co-Founders Of The Pit, About The Gallery’s History And Fifth Anniversary.

Interview By Agathe Pinard
Photographs courtesy of Adam Miller

While most newly created galleries couldn’t make it through the hard reality of the art market in Los Angeles and pass the fateful milestone of the first two years, The Pit is about to celebrate its five year anniversary this month. I met with the co-founders and artists, Adam Miller and Devon Oder, for a chat at the gallery’s location in Glendale. As they gave me a tour of the three gallery spaces that make up The Pit , Adam stopped to point out a literal pit on the ground. “Here is The Pit,” he told me. In the forty-five minute long conversation that followed, we retraced the history of The Pit, talked about the benefits of doing it yourself, and pictured LA’s forthcoming art scene.

AGATHE PINARD: Can you tell us a little bit about the artists you’re currently showing?

ADAM MILLER: In the main gallery is Hilary Pecis, she’s an LA-based painter, and this is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. In The Pit II is Dani Tull, he’s been working in Los Angeles for many years, and has exhibited internationally. He makes sculpture, installation, and paintings. Hilary’s work is more of a painter’s painter practice: depictions of still lives, snapshots from Los Angeles, moments of her daily life; whereas Dani’s work is more conceptual. A lot of his work deals with mysticism, new age philosophy, and religions. In the zine shop, we have ceramics by Jennifer King, also a Los Angeles-based artist. Finally, in the back gallery, otherwise known as “The Pit Presents,” we have a group exhibition that was organized by Left Field, a gallery from Los Osos, California.

AGATHE PINARD: I heard that before running a gallery you were a musician. Can you talk about that a little?

ADAM MILLER: I moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to get my MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; that’s where Devon and I met. Previously, I was living in Sacramento where I was involved in the music scene. I moved there when I was eighteen and was already playing in punk bands, and then I moved more into garage and ‘60s revival music. But there was a real DIY ethos in Sacramento. Everyone ran record labels, booked their own tours, organized shows in alternative venues like laundromats, old theaters, and backyards, people made their own t-shirts, etc.. So, when I was young, that’s how life was, and when I was in bands, oftentimes, I was the person who did all that.

DEVON ODER: Of course, he did. As you’ll find out, he gets a lot done. (laughs)

ADAM MILLER: I do a lot of things. That’s basically how I learned to silkscreen. We’d make our own t-shirts in the bathroom of our apartments. During the four or five years I was living there, I helped set up my band with a record deal in Germany, and we were able to tour Europe. When I was in that band, I played the bass and I got a deal with the company, so they were sending me free bass guitars to play while on the road and things like that. So, pretty early on, I realized the benefits of doing it yourself, being super active, and not waiting for people to discover you or do things for you.

AGATHE PINARD: Were you going to school at that time?

ADAM MILLER: During that period of time, I was studying at Sacramento State University majoring in graphic design with a minor in fine art. Which also comes into play because I did a lot of the graphic design for the bands. Now, I do it here for The Pit. After two years, I switched to major in fine art and started organizing art shows at warehouses and underground venues in Sacramento. My first art show was at Kevin Seconds’ coffee shop, from legendary punk band 7 Seconds. Since I didn’t write the music, I felt like there was a shelf life to playing in the bands. I just started feeling less fulfilled playing music because I wasn’t fully expressing myself, and I had less control over it. So, I dropped out of all my bands and decided to apply to grad school. Getting into grad school was my real initiation to the fine art world. In Northern California, there was a bigger sort of graphic, street art component that related to the music scene, so I had been more involved with that.

When Devon and I were in grad school, we really wanted to figure out the LA art scene. We weren’t dating yet, but we both started working for the artist Sterling Ruby. She was the first office employee and I was the second studio assistant. So, while she was doing a lot of logistical, behind-the-scenes stuff for his exhibitions, I was doing fabrication, shipping, and installation while finishing grad school.

We finished grad school in 2008, the economy collapsed, a lot of the galleries in Los Angeles went under. So, I just kind of fell back on the way I was doing things when I was in bands. I started finding alternative spaces around Los Angeles and I would curate a group show. At that time, I’d put my own work in the show, and people were critical of that choice because hardly any artists were doing it. And every time I organized a show, I would make a zine and we would silkscreen the covers.

DEVON ODER: And it was also about extending our community. When you’re in graduate school, you’re in a super tight bubble, and then when you get out, you’re in your studio and you’re kind of twiddling your thumbs. The shows were really this great way to do a ton of studio visits and expand our world.

ADAM MILLER: Devon worked for Sterling Ruby until we opened the gallery in 2014. I worked for him until 2011, and then I decided I wanted my day job to be completely out of the art world. So, the other side of me as a person is that I’m involved in animal rights activism, so I worked for PETA in their grassroots campaigns for five years.

DEVON ODER: And he kept being like, “Let’s open our own space, let’s open our own space!” And at the time, it freaked me out.

AGATHE PINARD: So how did the idea of creating the gallery finally come together?

ADAM MILLER: It was a mix of things. We had done a lot of these shows for like five years and there weren’t many artist-run spaces still in operation in Los Angeles at the time. In 2013, Laura Owens opened 356 Mission, and that was radically inspiring. I think that’s when I was like, “I want to open a space.” I was so inspired to see an artist of her stature taking control of her own career, doing things for the community, for other artists to do things beyond just their own studio, their own practice, their own career, but to think more expansively about what an artist can do for the greater LA art community. Seeing someone just do it, and really shake off the judgment that people had about an artist showing their own work—that you shouldn’t organize your own shows— … Just get rid of these old ideas of what artists should, and shouldn’t do, and just be like, “I’m just gonna do it, and fuck it.”  I thought it was so amazing and we started to look for a space about six months later.

DEVON ODER: So, we had this building as our studios, the part that you’re in right now, and we kept on thinking, “If we open our own space, how are we going to do that with day jobs, with our studio practice, and then another lease?” All of these things were adding up. Then, we were talking to our landlord about some ideas that we had and he was like, “Well, I’ve got these garages and I’ve just had my junk in them for over twenty years. You can have them if you clean them up.”

ADAM MILLER: It took us nine months to remodel and fix up the space; it was really crazy. The building had been a cabinet maker’s business at some point. So all the walls were covered in cabinetry and pockets of storage stuff that had just been gathering dust, and there was a dropped ceiling, broken windows, molded walls. It was a big undertaking.

DEVON ODER: We were wondering if this even could turn into a nice, pretty gallery?

AGATHE PINARD: You’d have to be pretty imaginative.

ADAM MILLER: It was 2013 when we started building the gallery. Most other galleries were still in Culver City, Hollywood, and Downtown was the new place where galleries were cropping up, but no one was located as far east as us. So that was another thing; we wondered if anyone would ever even come here.

DEVON ODER: When we opened it wasn’t a commercial gallery; it was a real artist project space. We did group shows curated by us, as well as by other artists. We did that for a couple of years.

ADAM MILLER: Yeah, we were several years in before we even had any public hours. I think we did two years of appointment-only.

 AGATHE PINARD: At the beginning, in 2014, The Pit was a project space for wide-ranging group shows. Five years later, The Pit now has three galleries and a zine shop. Can you talk about the evolution of the project?

ADAM MILLER: We’ve slowly been able to take over more and more of the building.

DEVON ODER: Adam’s whole motto is if there is any available space you need to do something with it.

ADAM MILLER: What happened with The Pit II is that someone living across the street had a fancy car and just stored it in there. Every day that we would be here working he would pull it out and wash it in front of the gallery. It was a really funny scenario. This older guy would take his shirt off and wash the car, wax it, and stuff.  Anyways, eventually he sold the car and didn’t need the space anymore.

DEVON ODER: And we always said right when we met him: “if you ever want to give up that garage, we’ll take it.”

ADAM MILLER: The first Pit II show opened in February 2015, so we were a year and a half in. That was the first time we ever did a solo show. We had only done group shows up to that point. That was a big moment for us because it  really shifted the direction of the gallery. We started finding that working with one artist for a longer period of time on a solo project was so rewarding. Doing group shows was such a different experience. Group shows are really, really fun, but when you work with a friend, or someone who becomes a friend, you help them realize this vision; this big thing for their career—which is a solo show. It just feels like such a monumental thing in an artist’s life and it just feels more collaborative. Then somewhere along the line we started doing art fairs and became more commercial, started selling things, and I was able to leave my day job at a certain point.

 AGATHE PINARD: The Pit Presents, one of the exhibition spaces, hosts galleries from other cities in a series of residencies and swaps. Can you talk about the initiative behind it?

ADAM MILLER: The back gallery (The Pit Presents) was three single car garages that we took over. A laundromat was using them for storage. The landlord asked if we’d want to take another chunk of the building and we snatched them up because, in my mind, if any space is available we should do something interesting with it.

DEVON ODER: We had no plans on expanding at that point.

ADAM MILLER: To be frank, at the time, we weren’t making enough sales in order to take on more overhead. So, we thought let’s just remodel it and we’ll rent it to another gallery. Then we’ll have a neighbor, and we can have shared openings and parties together. That was our initial idea. So we built it out, made it really nice, and started looking for someone to rent it. We got the space in 2017, and September 2018 was the first show. We were contacting people about renting out the gallery and we were speaking to a friend of ours who runs a gallery in Mexico City, who had an idea to run it as a collaborative. So he and four other gallerists from Latin America rented the space, and they called it Ruberta, which is the name of the street that we’re on. Each gallery got to do one show throughout the year. During that time The Getty was doing the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which had an emphasis on Los Angeles and Latin American connections in contemporary art. They rented the space, created Ruberta, and then their exhibitions and projects were promoted through the Getty and associated with Pacific Standard Time. So, it was a really amazing thing. That was only going to be one year. It ended last summer and we were trying to think of what to do with the gallery moving forward. I’m the primary salesperson, and we don’t really have the staff or manpower to fully program and sell a third space year round. We were trying to think about what was successful with Ruberta and how to start doing something similar, but in-house. So, basically we could insure it, staff it, and have a little more control. An issue with that was that they were all out of town, and had very limited hours. People were constantly asking us to open it up and we were uncomfortable doing that because it wasn’t our space, and we couldn’t speak intelligently about all the art, all the time.

That’s when we decided to do The Pit Presents, which is almost like a residency. We invite other galleries, whom we select, they put on a show, they program it, and they sell it, in most cases.

AGATHE PINARD: The art market being what it is right now, which aspects of founding a gallery have come most naturally, and which have been the most difficult? 

ADAM MILLER: Well, the financial aspect is probably the most difficult. The best part is working with the artists and having a platform to support them. It will always be my favorite thing about owning a gallery.

DEVON ODER: The hardest part is being a business person.

ADAM MILLER: We’ve had to figure out how it worked. I think we have a different business model than most galleries. To be frank, that’s why we’re in Glendale: keep our overhead as low as we possibly can—and part of that is being outside of the normal gallery hubs. That’s why we now do so many shows at a time. We’re always trying to think outside the box. I would say that a normal gallery’s business model is to have a really nice space with fairly high overhead, and then do one show at a time of pretty expensive artworks, and depend on selling enough of that to cover everything. That’s the opposite of us.  We keep it as low as we can, and we have lots of different opportunities for sales at various price points. We also sell shirts, artist books, limited editions, and host a lot events to keep people coming back to the shows and spend time in the zine shop.

DEVON ODER: Which allows us to be able to keep doing experimental things that might be more difficult to sell.

ADAM MILLER: You have to offset those with other things and figure that out. Budgets and profit/loss reports… that’s the not fun part, but it’s an important part that you have to learn.

AGATHE PINARD: How does an artist-run gallery compete with, and cohabitate with, much larger, blue-chip galleries, and such? What’s your relationship to them?

ADAM MILLER: Our roster of represented artists focuses primarily on emerging artists, but we work with a fair amount of larger, mid-career artists. So, usually, when we work with a bigger artist, we’re trying to see how we can collaborate with their bigger galleries to make it successful for everyone. We do really well with getting press for artists; they’re able to do more experimental projects that they might not be able to do in a bigger space that has a different type of overhead.

When we work with a bigger artist that’s been showing in a bigger gallery, I almost feel like we become their PR machine. Ideally, we’ll get them a lot of press. We have done quite well with certain artists, where they’ve been showing at great galleries, but maybe things have slowed down a little bit, and then we’ve been able to do a show with them and get them press by really pushing things hard on social media and through our networks. And the year after that, we’ll see that they have two or three shows with different galleries and they’re being taken to different fairs. Not that we are exclusively responsible for that, but I think we can help re-kickstart things and get a different audience to look at the work.

DEVON ODER: And then, we get to work with some of our idols; people we admire. That’s been so exciting.

AGATHE PINARD: You just participated in the first ever Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles earlier this year. What was the experience like?

ADAM MILLER: It was an amazing experience for us, really great. It felt like a real validating moment—being one of the artist-run spaces. We were by far one of the smallest galleries there. The reception was wonderful. We did incredibly well both in networking and sales. It was also super good exposure for the artists. From a sales point of view, this is the strongest year the gallery has ever had, and a lot of it goes back to starting the year off so strong with that fair.

DEVON ODER: For a young, small gallery like us, fairs are the trickiest thing ever because they’re so expensive to do and if they don’t work it’s hard to recover. But when it does work, it can be so beneficial. Frieze was invitational and we just felt very great being there. It had a good vibe, good energy.

ADAM MILLER: It really felt like the LA art scene was championing us a little bit, it was really nice. We felt like the underdogs who made it to the big leagues or something. As Devon was saying, for us one fair can be a quarter of the year’s overhead. So, if we take a big hit on a fair, it can completely screw us up financially for the year, so we have to be very careful.

DEVON ODER: The artists that we represent tend to be emerging, so we have to sell more pieces because the price points tend to be lower.

AGATHE PINARD: How do you envision Los Angeles’s artistic landscape in the future?

ADAM MILLER: I picture it continuing to spread out away from the hubs in Hollywood and Culver City and Downtown. Galleries will start being more independent, in terms of looking elsewhere for lower overhead, rather than clustering together. I feel like when galleries cluster together it ends up driving up the rents in those neighborhoods, and eventually they leave looking for new spaces, and in the process a number of the galleries will close because it’s expensive to get a new space and move your business. I hope that there will continue to be more artist-run spaces. There are a plethora of young artist-run spaces now, which is amazing, and I hope that more will continue to open. We need more new galleries too, not just artist-run spaces, in particular we need more smaller galleries.

DEVON ODER: What’s so exciting now is that I feel like there are so many artist-run spaces again. So many artists are doing interesting things; it feels very active. Los Angeles just feels so active and free. People are opening spaces wherever. There’s artist-run spaces opening in Alhambra, Pasadena, everywhere. That’s exciting, it creates more opportunities for artists and allows for more diverse practices to thrive.

AGATHE PINARD: I also feel like the DIY movement that Adam was talking about in Sacramento is going strong right now in LA. I have friends opening mini art galleries in their backyard shed; they just remodeled the whole thing and made a tiny gallery that can maybe fit five or ten people at the same time.

DEVON ODER: Yes, if you’ve got the space, just use it! I love apartment galleries… just utilizing the space, just getting the work seen, and having that accessibility is really great.

 AGATHE PINARD: What’s coming up next for The Pit?

DEVON ODER: Our five-year anniversary is next month, so we’re throwing a huge party. We’ll have a solo show by Benjamin Weissman in the main space, who is an artist that we’ve known and loved for years. He taught both of us at Art Center and we now represent him at The Pit. In the Pit II, Jaime Muñoz will be curating a  group show. Tyler Mako will be in The Pit Presents. In our zine shop, we will be doing a solo exhibition by Christina Tubbs which will also be a benefit for the Exceptional Children’s Foundation Art Centers. The ECF Art Centers are a series of four professional art studios located across Los Angeles County that create artistic opportunities for artists with developmental disabilities. We are very excited to be able to support this amazing non-profit and to showcase the work of one of their talented artists.

ADAM MILLER: At the party, we will have a performance by KISK, a KISS tribute band, which includes the artist Jon Pylypchuk. He is a good friend of ours and a supporter of the gallery from the beginning. 

DEVON ODER: He was in our third show here at the gallery. He’ll be performing, we’ll have food trucks, our friends will be DJing, so please come!

A Voyage Into Sight, Sound and Surf: An Interview Of Filmmaker Chris Gentile

Interview by Agathe Pinard

Self Discovery for Social Survival is the surf/music feature film born from the collaboration of Chris Gentile from New York-based surf brand Pilgrim Surf + Supply and Keith Abrahmsson from the record label Mexican Summer. Together they started this ambitious project to connect surf, sound and sight and make a film that would satisfy most senses. World-renowned surfers including Stephanie Gilmore, Ryan Burch, Creed McTaggart and Ellis Ericson joined musicians Allah-Las, Peaking Lights, Connan Mockasin and MGMT ’s Andrew VanWyngarden on this surf journey starting from a secret spot in Mexico, to the southern atolls of the Maldive Islands, and ending in the cold waters of Iceland. The film is narrated by a man who is often referenced as the godfather of American avant-garde, the late Jonas Mekas. I had the chance to talk to the artist, photographer and film director Chris Gentile about the making of his first feature-length film, bringing together artists and surfers, and working with Jonas Mekas.

AGATHE PINARD: I wanted to start by asking about the meaning behind the title, Self Discovery for Social Survival, can you explain it?

CHRIS GENTILE: When we started to conceptualize the film, myself and Keith Abrahamsson from Mexican Summer, we were thinking a lot about music and its relationship to surfing. Surfing is this activity, this pursuit that people engage in and that kind of helps people detach from what they’re do day-to-day, give them some contemplative time to sort of go inward and we were trying to come up with this name, and along the way I came across an old book that was written for climbing, for people who would free climb and climb up mountains. It was basically a book that gave people a pathway to overcome fear. The book was titled Self Discovery for Social Survival. Keith and I both felt like that really resonated with the spirit of what this film was about. Surfers are constantly looking for that open and free space to have a moment in nature, where two forces are meeting each other and the surfers are in the space where the energy that’s coming from nature is dying and being born at the same time. We felt like this title had a lot of metaphoric possibilities and decided to go for it. It’s a mouthful, it’s a big title.

PINARD: This is an ambitious project that mixes surfing, music and animation done by the in house designer of Mexican Summer…

GENTILE: Yes, Bailey Elder but also Robert Beatty, who’s an independent artist and illustrator.

PINARD: How did the idea/project come together ?

It was evolving the whole time we were making the film, it was a very open-ended and experimental process. The one thing that I really wanted to maintain was an open-endedness with everybody involved. So there are multiple points of influence that went into the filmmaking. I didn’t give the surfers any directions while they surfed. We travelled together, we picked these particular places, and they were reacting to the waves that were there for a two-week period of time, and the cinematographers were reacting to the way the surfers were surfing, positioning themselves to get the shot that felt right. I really left a lot of that control up to them. The musicians who were involved were on these trips and they were in the water and surfing the same waves that the professional surfers we travelled with were surfing. They have a first experience and perspective on what was going on. The idea was to let them go back into the studio and have complete creative freedom over the music that they wrote in reaction.

PINARD: What about the animation?

GENTILE: When that came into play, we showed a rough cut to Bailey and Robert. Then Keith Abrahamsson picked a couple of songs that he felt were appropriate to transition from one location like Mexico to the Maldives. To put a song and an animation that would kind of be like a mental palette cleanser, Keith came up with these two fantastic songs. One was an archival song from the seventies, “Void Spirit,” and the other one was a song that was made by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma for the film. Jefre isn’t a surfer, he wasn’t on the trip but he made these beautiful compositions inspired by the idea of being under water, being under the ocean. So, those tracks were given to Bailey and Robert along with the access to this footage, and they reacted and created these animations. Everything was very independent to one another, every aspect of the film. I kind of kept everything on track and helped people when they need my help, but really it was exercise––relinquishing ego and control, and letting everybody’s influence come in and affect the overall project.

PINARD: That’s funny, last week I interviewed Connan Mockasin and we talked about the trip he made to Iceland for the movie, and how he was impressed at the beginning to be around these professional surfers like Stephanie Gilmore who’s a seven-time world champion.

GENTILE: One of the things that I had to do was to think deeply about the personalities that we were going to introduce to one another on these adventures because most of the people didn’t know each other. And taking a surf trip, you don’t know what you’re going to get. There’s no guarantee that the waves are going to be good, or that the weather is going to be good, or a tire may go flat. You may miss opportunities or you may get opportunities that you would never expect. When we went on these trips I had to think about how the group would feel and I was just going off my own instincts and my own guts. The trip to Iceland was really special because it was a group of really different people. They all had a sincere admiration and appreciation for one another. Everyone became fast friends. Iceland was interesting because we were traveling all over that country chasing these storms and these waves. Sometimes getting them and sometimes missing them, but we spent so much time in these vans just traveling across this incredible landscape. Everyone got a lot of time to know each other, more so than on the other trips because on the other trips it was a lot more surfing, people were getting tired, it was different. Iceland was the one where I think the actual chase for the waves was the beauty in that trip, more so than the wave riding.

PINARD: For the movie you took some surfers and went on a trip to Mexico, the Maldives and Iceland, which one was your favorite ?

GENTILE: That’s a great question. I mean, I’ve been to that spot in Mexico so many times and it’s one of my favorite places on the planet. I loved the opportunity to go down there with that group of people, but I have to say the Maldives was really unique and special, because we had this group of Australian surfers together that were kind of like a brotherhood. That trip, we were on a boat, the whole entire time, on an old, old boat. It travels really slowly, had a lot of character and a great captain and a great crew. It was not posh by any means, it was kind of a busted boat. But it was so fun because everybody was just excited to be around each other, find waves, fish. The kind of boredom that you experience on these boats, these guys were wild and doing the most hilarious stuff. Some of it we couldn’t put in the movie it was crazy, drunken backflips off of the boat completely nude at like 3 o’clock in the morning. It was incredible, very memorable.

PINARD: The film is narrated by the late, legendary Jonas Mekas, it might have been the last project he worked on...

GENTILE: I know that Jonas filmed his life every day, so I’m sure that that footage is truly his last work. On this project we were so fortunate to have him agree to come and narrate. The words are Jamie Brisick and Jonas read them. It was so special to get to meet him and experience his humility and his generosity, it was fantastic. If it weren’t for Jonas, I don’t think we could have made a film like this. He’s had so much influence on me as a young artist throughout my life. He gave us, me and the rest of the people at Mexican Summer, everyone, he truly gave us the license to make the film. So, to have him narrate it was an honor, it was so special.

PINARD: How did you get him to work on the project?

GENTILE: Keith Abrahamsson is really responsible for that. Keith presented him with this idea and had already been working with Jonas on a couple of other things, helping him with his archives. They had a working relationship together. Keith asked him if he would be up for narrating the film, and explained to him what it was, and I think it was so strange that he thought it was worth doing. It wasn’t very difficult. He got in a recording studio with him, drank a couple glasses of wine, and I think in one or two takes he nailed the narration. It was great.

PINARD: The movie will premiere in LA this Saturday, are you excited? How do you feel about it ?

GENTILE: I’m a little nervous, I’ve never directed a film before. I’ve made a lot of short films, experimental films, but nothing that’s feature-length, and at this scale, and this level of production. I’m so grateful to have the experience. I’ve learned a lot from it. I’m really excited to see it in front of an audience, see the reaction, see the bands perform live to it, it’s going to be so special.

Self Discovery For Social Survival will premiere in Los Angeles this Saturday June 15 at The Palace Theatre with a live score by Connan Mockasin, Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT and Allah-Las

The film is out digitally on June 18 and available to pre-order now at https://geni.us/SDSS .

The Meme Is A Virus: An Interview Of @jerrygogosian

interview by Summer Bowie

Misery loves company, and the art scene is full of miserable people. In our vast, virtual memetic culture, @jerrygogosian is dissecting the great unregulated art market and its strange ecosystem of fear, lies, and egomania. Everyone knows she, or he, is on the inside, but the constant guessing only fuels the fire: Who is @jerrygogosian?

 SUMMER BOWIE: You’re making memes about a very niche world that takes itself very seriously, but do you think it’s the very fact that you’re allowing serious people to laugh at themselves that makes it resonate so deeply?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: At every level of the art world I’ve ever occupied, I like to remind myself that I’m not curing cancer, disarming landmines, or figuring out what to do with nuclear waste. When I was an intern, there was this other intern that would cry everytime we got bitched out by the director of the gallery. I would stand there holding my breath and pinching my leg so I wouldn’t burst out laughing. Like I’m spending my time working for you, for free, on menial tasks so you can go to Nobu for lunch and get a pedicure in before your event tonight at MoMA and then you talk to me like I’m an imbecile and expect me to obediently serve you? LMAO. I might just make a “few more mistakes. Oops!” I’ve always been irreverent to the art world structure, especially the hierarchy because it is genuinely absurdist.

BOWIE: Which of your posts has garnered the most engagement, and do you have any theories as to why? 

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: People love the character profiles that I write. They’re all amalgamations of real people I know in the NYC and LA art world. I don’t have to try to be witty or smart. As we all know, the more you observe it, reality trumps fiction any day. For every character profile I write people either comment “that’s me” or “I know her.” Despite these descriptions seeming pretty specific, there are some overarching caricatures in the art world that may or may not have been articulated until now. Some people have accused me of being harsh on my characters and I’m just like “no, no, that’s like the combination of four people I love.” I write about each one with so much affection. We’re all idiosyncratic and predictable at some point. I think it’s cute.  

BOWIE: Have you noticed any topics that trend more than others?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: Like any good propagandist, I’m tapping into an unconscious, herd mentality system of fearful, false beliefs. In essence, this page wouldn’t function without insecurity. People are obsessed with the following: exclusivity, FOMO, class, financial competition/disparity, and the art world pecking order. Ironically,for me to make these memes, I’ve got to be pretty honest with my own internal dialog about the art world. I don’t exclude myself from insecurity, but I’m highly sensitive to what it looks and sounds like because ultimately I’d like to spiritually transcend this rung of middle school hell. The realer the post, the bigger the response I receive. Insecurity is trending on the semiotic level disguised as cultural cache, flippant coolness, excessive wealth, recklessness, art world privilege, and jet setting.

BOWIE: Like anyone who indicts with mockery on the Internet, you’ve received both praise and angered criticism for your posts. What are some of the assumptions people make about your identity or perspective?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: I keep trying to remind people that Jerry’s page is not the court of public opinion. I’m one person putting images to text based on my lived experiences and observations. If it read any other way, it would be disingenuous. I’m not going to larp in the digital realm to please every demographic that comes across

To date, I’ve been called a misogynist, racist, sexist, a MAGA supporter, a white feminist, a classist rich bitch, an art bro, and the list goes on. Bare with me here, but there is some major “Yanni/Laurel” cognitive dissonance going on politically which spills over into the art world. I’ve had to nicely try to explain to people in my DM’s that if they can’t decipher the court jester pointing his finger at the king and calling him an asshole, then I really can’t help them develop a sense of humor.

BOWIE: Do you take any of those criticisms into account, or do they affect your perspective in any way?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: Someone attacked me the other day for not investigating whiteness enough. I had no good response other than to challenge them to make a funny art meme page which they felt better “investigated whiteness.” What else could I say?

My skin is pretty thick from all the angry gallerists I’ve worked under. I can also play rhetorical gymnastics like the best of them. At the end of the day, none of these people know who I am IRL. They can project their feelings onto this fictitious character, but alas, it’s all micro-fiction coming from one subjective experience. My therapist tells me I’m not responsible for other people’s feelings. She's making more money than me, so I’ll respect her authority.

BOWIE: The role of the art critic has changed dramatically now that we live in a world dominated by social media. I constantly hear the critics referencing art history, theory, and words of wisdom from venerable curators. However, this is a rare occurrence with artists or even gallerists. Do you feel like artists and gallerists are still reading criticism—apart from what’s written about them personally?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: I don’t think people honestly read art criticism anymore unless they’re in grad school or they’re an actual art critic. I think people use art journalism like Yelp reviews, skimming it over for a few names and key buzzwords before clicking over to PornHub. I mean with rare exceptions, isn’t most art journalism and fluffy “critique” pay to play at this point? Don’t get me started on Artsy, Artnet, ArtForum, Art in America, etc. In the “deep fake” state we live in with 24-hour news media cycles and all-consuming social media platforms, I’m not sure you can really trust anyone other than yourself to truly be critical.

BOWIE: Your Instagram handle is clearly an amalgam of @fuckjerry, Larry Gagosian, and Jerry Saltz. How do you feel about these titans of the Internet and art world, and what do you think the future holds for them?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: I’m sure they’ll all be human centipeding in hell, but in this life they’re living like gods. Larry Gagosian is the scariest man on earth and I wish he was my father. I’d like to inherit his empire and then slowly, but surely, dethrone half of his artists and celebrate alternative versions of the art world narrative. His gallery has constructed what most people believe contemporary art to be through market manipulation and monopolization. I admire and resent him for that achievement.  @jerrysaltz I met a few times in NYC. One time he walked up to me and asked me if I was (me IRL) and I said “Yeah, why?” He said, and I quote, “You’re a real artist, ya know that? You know how to frame perversion and that’s a gift.” I’d have wet my panties if  John Waters or David Sedaris had said that to me, but I guess that was my Jerry Saltz review and I’ll take it. He’s got charisma and hates Trump, but he could tone down the pussy stuff on his Instagram.

BOWIE: I want to talk about the phenomenology of the 21st-century meme. Do you think it’s a sign of human advancement that we’ve whittled complex ideas down to a few words and an image, as opposed to a short fable like Adam & Eve, or is it a reflection of our devolution that the average reader no longer has the capacity to weigh the many complexities of our world?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: I love this question! First off, never underestimate the power of a cave man’s grunt, Cesar’s thumbs down, or a death stare as powerful and effective forms of communication. Simple is always best. Why should the efficacy of a meme be classed any different? If anything, it takes high forms of cultural literacy to put together the puzzle of each piece of micro-fiction that writes each joke.

I think there is an art to reading and writing memetic language that reminds me a lot of “reading people, style, or situations” a la Paris is Burning <3 If you can keep it real, do it fast, and crack the funniest joke it feels like a genuine discourse (on Adderall.) It’s semi primitive in its output, but highly effective for spreading information quickly and sharing sentiments.

BOWIE: Do you feel like you have any agenda when it comes to your participation with the art world?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: I used to want to be Larry Gagosian’s arch nemesis, but I’m a little more zen about it these days. My only agenda is to make people laugh and give people a gentle reprieve before they’re demeaned for misprinting a price on a checklist while working for minimum wage or being asked to give a collector free psychotherapy on a sales lunch.

Some of the lesser liked, but very real memes tend to be about my spiritual connection to art and my inability to escape it. Despite all the shit I talk, paintings regularly make me cry, I read poetry out loud, real artists are angel/aliens I’m blessed to know, and I watch long, boring European cinema with great delight; allowing it to depress me for days. I am a sap who loves art more than anything else in the world. It has completely taken over my life.

So my agenda is basically to just talk about all my complicated feelings to an audience that needs a chuckle.

BOWIE: If there were one thing you could see change within the art market, what would it be?

@JERRYGOGOSIAN: Only one? (sigh, ok) I’d cancel fake art. Andy Warhol was a genius, but I think he was intentionally misread by a bunch of morons who basically turned the zeitgeist of contemporary art into a market-driven hoax manipulated by charlatans. People, in earnest, are always telling me they want to “start the career of a fake artist” and I’m like “why don’t you give a real artist a fucking chance?”

And don’t get me started on the CIA creating abstract expressionism as a ploy to play Cold War espionage games and then I’ve got people telling me there’s something wrong with me when I feel nothing at the Rothko Chapel. I’ve sat there and done the staring thing for long enough. I once licked a Rothko in Washington DC. It did nothing for me.

CANCEL FAKE ART. Buh-byyyye.