Space Talk: An Interview Of Retrofuturist Designer Candice Molayem

 
sculpture: Kelly Lamb Moon, Star, Sun, You, 2015 corten steel, stainless steel, marble 74 x 34 in.

sculpture:
Kelly Lamb
Moon, Star, Sun, You, 2015
corten steel, stainless steel, marble
74 x 34 in.

 

text by Bree Castillo
photographs by Dana Boulos


A serendipitous trip through Europe was the inevitable catalyst for Candice Molayem to begin her ascent into design with her evergreen clothing line, Animal Crackers. Since its conception in July of 2020 with the intention of inspiring empowerment for her audience through wearable art, Molayem has been creating her circum-vitae of ethically-crafted garments full of futurist visions that harken eras past, sharp tailoring, and avant-garde silhouettes. Molayem transcends the norms of the traditional fashion calendar and the constant urge for the new, emphasizing on season-less collections that are made to endure and be worn year-round.

With her informal education as a seasoned, vintage designer, tattoo artist, painter, and stylist, Animal Crackers is a synthesis of all her past selves. Each collection uncovers different facets and layers to Molayem’s identity, each as true and as beautiful as the next. Her latest and sophomore capsule collection, Space Talk is inspired by her inherent need to escape reality even if just for a moment. Sewn into every piece is a breath of retrofuturism, giving life to shape, color, and full dimensionality. On May 20th-23rd, Animal Crackers will be showcasing their latest designs in their long-anticipated pop-up in West Hollywood. 

CASTILLO: How did you first discover your affinity for fashion and design? 

MOLAYEM: How did I find it? It was something I always had. My mother always tells me that. As far as I can remember I have loved clothes, fashion, and color. It is something I have always been obsessed with. Creating has always come naturally to me. My mom is an artist. Growing up, she worked from the guest house. I grew up around it. Anything creative was really encouraged, and it came naturally to me. I have never done any school or classes. I explored so many mediums. Right now we are doing a pop-up and I'm styling wigs and sculpting. I have never done that before, but I am figuring it out. 

CASTILLO: How did Animal Crackers come to be? 

MOLAYEM: I'm a huge fan of Pierre Cardin and was absolutely mesmerized by his boutique in Paris during a trip there in 2019. His muse and director of haute couture, Maryse Gaspard, happened to be in the store at the time, and she was easily the most fabulous woman I've met in my life. We ended up chatting and she assumed I was a designer. When I mentioned I wasn't, she insisted I become one. Although I had heard it from friends and family countless times over the years, it felt different coming from her. It was the nudge from the universe I needed, and Animal Crackers was born.

 
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CASTILLO: I am curious to know what your creative process is like? 

MOLAYEM: It is changing because now I am working on my third collection. So, now I have a collection to build off of and to expand. When I start designing, I am trying to create who I want to be next. How do I want to feel when I wear this? What is the energy of this next collection? All along I am collecting references and vintage, and it just all comes together in that way. Who do I want to be when I put this shirt on? 

CASTILLO: What can you tell me about your latest capsule collection Space Talk? 

MOLAYEM: I have always been very obsessed with retrofuturism and looking forward. This collection was conceived while—like everyone else—I was stuck at home, and I just really wanted to leave this world for a minute. I am an escape artist. 

CASTILLO: How do you go about taking totems from the past and ‘futurizing’ them? 

MOLAYEM: The vintage I am inspired by isn’t really practical. Making it wearable is the future, being able to wear your art. When creating the pieces, I put them on and wear them for five days in a row. In the process, I might notice that something doesn’t adhere to a modern lifestyle, In which case, I make changes to make it comfortable for long-term wear.

CASTILLO: I am constantly amazed by the way you lay fabrics to create these avant-garde silhouettes. Where do you draw from when creating your strong shapes? 

MOLAYEM: I believe clothing should have movement and I'm obsessed with shape. I look to vintage pieces and update them in ways that feel right for me. A friend has even used the word "shapes" as an adjective to describe me.

 
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CASTILLO: Creating sustainable fashion is crucial. How are you doing your part with creating environmentaly-friendly designs? 

MOLAYEM: I take so much pride in first of all creating these pieces fifteen minutes away from my house. I don’t consider the place that sews our clothing a factory. The owners I work with directly are husband and wife. I feel so good about where these pieces are getting made and supporting our local economy. The people I work with really care. My pattern maker is just downtown as well. Now, I have some new contractors on bags and belts and they are all downtown. They don’t have minimums or very high minimums, which allows us to create less excess. I don’t need to create more and have all this leftover. We are sourcing our fabrics from one of my favorite vendors, a little mom-and-pop mill in Barcelona. I also include dead-stock fabric in every collection. And although there’s not a ton of it, I love finding ways to use and reuse the leftover material from past collections.

One thing about the fashion industry that drives me crazy—and I think it drives a lot of people crazy—is how often we have new. The fashion calendar doesn’t make sense to me; I don’t understand it. I can’t follow it. It’s too fast for me. I think there has been a lot of conversation about this, and people are waking up to how messed up it is.  

CASTILLO: What do you keep in mind when creating your garments that transcend gender norms? 

MOLAYEM: I design clothing for people and don't have a gender in mind when creating. I love to blend the feminine and masculine. I’ve received great feedback on my pieces from people of all genders, and look forward to having more gender representation in my line and being able to expand my size offerings.

CASTILLO: How do you feel talking about fashion when the world is where it is right now? 

MOLAYEM: Having less of a reason to dress up has only fueled my desire to dress up more. I believe in the transformative power of clothing and love the way the right outfit can be used to channel a mood. It's an important vehicle of self-expression that has really saved my sanity in these times. I am from a Persian-immigrant family and it completely informs the approach to my work. I am committed to amplifying diverse voices and showing faces that have traditionally been shut out of the fashion world. I was not aware of any designers in my community growing up and I am honored to be that representation for a younger generation.

 
sculpture: Kelly Lamb Geo Prism (prototype)

sculpture:
Kelly Lamb
Geo Prism (prototype)

 

Photographs by Dana Boulos | @danaboulos
Interview by Bree Castillo | @bumblebr3e
Model Obianibeli Esu | @etherealchocolategoddess
Clothing by Animal Crackers | @animalcrackers.clothing
Art and Location: Kelly Lamb Studios | @kellylambstudios
Produced by BJ Panda Bear | @bjpandabear

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”

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.

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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.

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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.

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”

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.

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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.

 
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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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

 
 

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

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

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

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

 

Love & Action: An Interview Of Director Fiona Jane Burgess

interview by Lara Monro

Fiona Jane Burgess, UK-based film director specializing in music videos, commercials, documentaries and fashion films, owes much of her career success to experiencing a number of challenges. Burgess found herself having to rethink her career path at 28, a time when she was also facing the realities of motherhood and the breakup of her band, Woman’s Hour. Fortunately, her natural flare as a director, which she exercised when shooting her own music videos, determined her career segue into film direction. Since delving into the film industry, Burgess has worked on diverse campaigns that span music videos, personal projects, and working with the UK’s No.1 baby feeding brand, Tommee Tippee, as well as some of fashion’s most recognized names, including Gucci and Burberry. 

A proud feminist, Burgess is attracted to projects that empower women and provoke debate, amongst many other themes and subjects. COVID-19 highlighted the economic constraints faced by women in the workplace and their predicament of being expected to sacrifice their own economic viability to provide care at home. Burgess recently posted on Instagram around the need to empower working mothers. She spoke passionately to Autre about the response to her recent post, a new film she’s directed for Nowness X AGL, motherhood, and the collective power of sisterhood.  

LARA MONRO: It is great to be speaking with you full stop and also timely given the amazing response you have received to your recent Instagram post around women in the workplace and childcare. Did you expect this reaction? 

FIONA JANE BURGESS: My mind is blown! I am so humbled by the response. These conversations aren't new, we just so rarely have them openly. For this reason, Instagram can be a powerful platform as it provides the ability to have these sorts of debates, and most importantly, allows others to see them. The burden of childcare on anyone is mammoth. This is bringing to the forefront what it means to be a parent in the film industry, but also the workplace at large. It shows the evident gender inequality that exists and that women are expected to take on the burden of childcare. It is comforting to know what I am saying resonates with so many, but at the same time, deeply frustrating and saddening as so many women feel stuck and trapped. One message that really resonated touched on the creative industry, where for many it isn't just about a financial incentive, but it’s also driven by passion and creative need. When women are forced out of these roles, their mental health suffers as a consequence of not having a creative outlet. This can provoke feelings of guilt, that being a mother isn't good enough. I can fully associate myself with this. I am a mother, but am not first and foremost a mother. It is part of my makeup but it is not my whole, and anyone who wants to simply label me as a mother is missing the point. I have so many different needs. I don't need to just give and receive love from my children. When women become mothers their identity gets put on hold. I disagree with that. How we facilitate mothers in the workplace is an essential, ongoing, question as we work to achieve gender equality.

MONRO: You changed professions at 28, the same year you became a mother to twins and ended up leaving your music career. How did you make the jump into moving image? 

BURGESS: When you become a mother, your identity comes into question and everything is focused on the baby. I needed more of a purpose. I was left completely questioning everything after the band broke up as it was so important for me to have my work and role. Around this time a few people asked me to make music videos for them since I had for Woman’s Hour. It made sense for me to do it for the band as it saved money, but I never saw it as a profession! Then, I did it and the penny dropped! It was a really exciting time and everything fell into place. It wasn't easy though. I threw myself into the new industry, but felt so out of my depth. It is such a big industry and I had no connections. I felt alone again in it and all I had was a burning desire and a small seed of self belief—and a very supportive partner. I began my journey. I hadn't pitched before, Suddenly I was sent briefs to pitch on and had to write treatments, which I had also never done. It was a good learning curve but at the same time, after a few months of rejection, I stopped pitching. I realized that I didn't have a crew of people I trusted and wanted to work with. So, I decided to connect with creatives that I did want to work with. It evolved from there. I met a choreographer online and we self-funded a film together. I directed and edited it and this allowed me to get an idea of what my interests were and what I wanted! Personally, my experience of having children was a very traumatizing one, but it also released a crazy energy in me; a desire to have a voice and not shy away from who I am. I was much less willing to compromise on my own happiness. I think this really helped me get to where I wanted to be.

MONRO: You recently directed a short film for Nowness X AGL. It is set within the recognizable, brutalist structure of the Tate Modern and your overarching theme is centered around an anthology of feminist writings from the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement. Can you tell me more about that?

BURGESS: Yes. The [Feminist] Manifesto was a seminal piece in the feminist movement and allowed women from all walks of life to discuss their own experiences of womanhood; both positive and negative, and what they felt needed to change to create gender equality. There are so many differences between women, to collectively call women one thing is wrong. We aren't first and foremost anything. I don't have sisters (I have 3 brothers!) but in a wider context the sisters I choose—who I am collectively connected to—it felt that the manifesto tied in beautifully with what I was trying to get across through the film.

MONRO: How would you say the film embraces sisterhood? 

BURGESS: When I was invited to be part of this it was apparent that my role was not only to facilitate the technical aspect, but also to create a crew and a collective of people who would also input. It felt like the perfect opportunity to call on my sisterhood and embrace the power of our collectivity. I am so often trying to empower and connect with other female creatives, so with this film I ran with that opportunity. I didn't want the theme to be surface level, but part of the process. 

MONRO: The singer & songwriter, Lapsley, created a voiceover specifically for the film; can you tell me how this collaboration came about? 

BURGESS: I am such a fan of hers. Her album was the soundtrack to my 2020. It includes a number of songs around her experiences of being a woman, so I knew she would be interested in the theme. I sent her the Gloria Steinem quote: “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. She will need her sisterhood,” and she came back to me with a beautiful song and very powerful voiceover for the film:

“We run in cycles, chase the morning, pave the way like those before them. It's love and action and its gaining traction This beauty is beyond the surface. She reminds me of my purpose when I feel worthlessness. Its like good love, my sisterhood.”

MONRO: You worked with the choreographer Alex Green, referencing the work of 1970s postmodern choreographers Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Can you say how you incorporated their approach to dance as a visual manifestation of stability and strength through focusing on the subtlety of physical support?

BURGESS: I am very inspired by choreographers from the 1970s. If I could go back to one time it would be 1970s New York! Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer were all doing different things, but generally questioning traditional balletic gestures and adopting more everyday gestures. With Trisha Brown, I took a lot of inspiration from her Leaning Duet piece as I often think the simple ideas are the best. This is a great example of that. For me, her choreography pieces are visual manifestations of the simplicity of human support. I wanted to include the three female dancers as AGL was started by three women. And I also wanted to highlight the difficulty of holding a position for a long time, to signify stillness as a symbol for strength. I am interested in creating moments of connection between women that relies on physical balance and support; this idea that if they were to let go they would fall. I also wanted this to show physical manifestations of support structures, of invisible reliance on one another, and to show that—even without knowing—we sometimes rely on the work of others. I think that collective sisterhood is so integral to gender equality as we have a duty and responsibility to hold each other up. To push and challenge one another. In my mind, it's using bodies to embody cultural messages. Distribution of weight is quite difficult: getting the balance right is hard! The simplest things require a lot. Focus and harmony are dependent upon everybody who is involved; giving and receiving the weight, the burden and the responsibility. This is what drew me to this concept. 

MONRO: It seems you always bring a personal element to the films you work on. Your recent film for Jo Malone Hope Blooms, for example, shines a light on the charities supported by the brand (Thrive and St Mungo’s) and their horticultural therapy programmes for people who are homeless, or struggling with their mental health in some way. How do you decide on your projects? 

BURGESS: Every project is different and has varied requirements, but there has to be a personal and emotional connection. The Jo Malone piece, that was amazing, as on a personal level, I am open about having been in therapy for most of my adult life, and have benefited from being privileged enough to spend that time and energy on myself. I trained in Applied Theatre and worked in a number of community spaces; using art for social change. That is my background and I still host workshops in an adolescent psychiatric unit to support young people who are either in or out patients struggling with mental health issues. My work aims to have a positive interaction that communicates a positive experience.

MONRO: A number of your films have been shot in 16mm including High Snobiety X Gucci, Nowness X AGL and Hope Blooms for Jo Malone. What draws you to the medium? 

BURGESS: Whenever I can, I shoot on film. I would say I am leaning more and more towards just working with the medium. I am drawn to film’s imperfections, its risks, uncertainty, and spontaneity. Also, there is a tactility to the physical process that excites me. My uncle ran a photographic shop so everyone who needed film developed would go to Quick Snaps. When I was a teenager and learning about cameras—I got an SLR from him and I would take pictures of my friends/landscape—every Saturday I would drop off and pick up a roll of film. That physical exchange and process was special. Respecting the process and the time that goes into it, the physical labor—that is powerful. There is also an element of nostalgia. I will always have that connection to film as part of my history and love of cinema and photography: the physical imagery.

James Spooner and Ed Patuto On The Lasting Influence Of Jean Michel Basquiat

James Spooner. Photography: Moses Berkson, courtesy The Broad:

James Spooner. Photography: Moses Berkson, courtesy The Broad:

ED PATUTO:  I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the anti-establishment quality of the scene back then in the East village and Basquiat's work, and about how artists almost avoided mainstream success or money because it meant selling out. I was a dancer back in those days, and I just got tired of being broke. And also my parents said, “Listen, you have to go to college, because we're not going to help you anymore.” But it was definitely a Bohemian lifestyle.

JAMES SPOONER: I grew up in the DIY punk scene and I carried not only the ideals, but I was also trying to figure out how to “adult” with those ideals. I was basically on my own after high school. My first solution was to live in a squat where I only had to come up with like $60 a month to pay like the gas bill, and I dumpster dived. But when you're part of the community, it feels very normal. And then, a few years later, quite by accident, I found myself throwing parties and that turned into DJing. Party promoting gave me a way to make art all day and be out at parties, and just have the time of my life. And even with Afro-Punk, I screened the film and then that led to doing events, which eventually led to the Afro-Punk festival. But once the festival became more focused on catering to corporate sponsors, that's when I bailed. But it's always the question of like, how can I both make art, make money and not fuck anybody over along the way? Basquiat is interesting because you can hear him lashing out at various corporate interests, but then there's another side of him that very much wanted to be famous, very much wanted to make money. And interestingly that fame and money may have been the demise of him.

ED PATUTO: People ask me frequently, why has Basquiat endured? Why is he so relevant and so popular right now? A big part of it was what you’re speaking about now, in terms of really representing a lifestyle that was a challenge to the mainstream. He was very, very political. He made paintings like Irony of Negro Policemen. Or Beef Ribs, Longhorn which is in The Broad collection, that addresses commodities made by Black bodies, and labor, and the exploitation of Black bodies to produce all these products. And also Defacement, which was about Michael Stewart's killings at the hands of police for being a graffiti artist. Tagging was a crime in New York and you often heard of graffiti artists being armed with the spray can. Basquiat, through his paintings, was drawing attention to these kinds of issues that we are still dealing with today.

JAMES SPOONER: These issues within the Black community haven't changed. I also think Basquiat is celebrated in the kind of way that we celebrate basketball players or hip hop MCs that come from the streets, because again, we have this young man who became wealthy and famous, like almost overnight. And that's the dream: we've got this young, attractive guy, who's got his finger on the pulse of this electric city and he's making really smart work, and people are celebrating it both in the underground and the mainstream, which is very rare. Usually the mainstream catches onto things much later. And by the time they do, they've watered it down and disfigured it to a point where the originators don't recognize it anymore, but somehow Basquiat slid through and was able to do his thing authentically. I think for many young, Black kids seeing somebody make it is like, oh, well that gives me permission to dream.

ED PATUTO: With Basquiat, it’s the way he went from painting to his band, Gray, that was a No Wave band, to DJing. I mean, he DJs in Blondie's video for "Rapture" and DJed in clubs, including the Mudd Club downtown. He holds a relevancy that many people seek to have today, and very few people can really attain it.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, With Strings Two , 1983. A crylic and oilstick on canvas . 96 x 60 in. The Br oad Art Foundation. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

Jean-Michel Basquiat, With Strings Two , 1983. A crylic and oilstick on canvas . 96 x 60 in. The Br oad Art Foundation. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

JAMES SPOONER:  I think I was really trying to capture that energy at the Summer Happenings at The Broad in 2017, which I helped curate.

ED PATUTO: The Summer Happenings were really a way of giving people many different ways to experience contemporary art and consider the creative process of artists. When an artist is working, they're listening to music in their studio and they’re thinking about what's going on in the world. The Happenings were really designed to give a fluidity to the visual arts.

JAMES SPOONER: That was a great event we did for Basquiat. I was excited to reach out to all of these different avenues of non-visual art. We brought out The Downtown Boys and Zebra Katz. And then, you know, I thought about the nightclub aspect of Basquiat's life and we set up a punk and hip hop DJ soundclash in one of the rooms in The Broad. And we had DJ Rashida who is known as Prince's DJ and Michael Stock, who does the long-running Punky Reggae Party and Part-Time Punks in Los Angeles. Another huge highlight was Shani Crowe who is known as a hair artist. She does insane braiding art. We were trying to figure out how you can do that as a performance piece? And she was like, “Well, I've thought about braiding my hair into a whip and then whipping this white guy. What do you think about that?” I thought it was going to be a performance, but she actually whipped this guy with her hair.

ED PATUTO: I have to say that was a phenomenal expression of her anger because she did that simultaneously with a video of people from the community being interviewed after white cops had killed Black kids in their neighborhood, and they were acquitted.

JAMES SPOONER: I think that one of the most essential parts of the No Wave moment, as it relates to Basquiat, is that it's this real DIY moment. You can learn how to play as you're performing it, and a lot of punk rockers take that for granted. In the seventies, you had to be like a virtuoso before Punk. It would take years of learning an instrument before you could be in a soul group, or a disco group, or whatever. But punk and hip hop really opened that door for regular people who had something to say. And I believe that without the experiences of living in that moment and seeing your friends, or being in bands that just are like fuck it, let's play. Right? And coupled with also going to the Bronx and seeing MCs flow for the first time and like, all of that stuff. It's like, all of this was happening the first time it gave Basquiat permission to be like, well, I'm good at painting, I'm going to fucking do this. Fuck what everybody says, you know?

ED PATUTO: Yeah, I would totally agree. Hip hop was this new art form coming out of the Black community. But I felt like with hip hop, it was like, no folks, we’re going to do this on our terms, which we actually addressed in the final video with Todd Boyd, from USC about hip hop. It was a very intense moment after the seventies and the sixties, when this whole new wave of conservatism swept into the United States, Reagan—and Thatcher in England. There was a strong rebellion against that.

JAMES SPOONER: And what is the underground, if it's not reacting to something? And when you have oppressive things like Reagan, Thatcher, Trump, it makes the underground react. The underground, I'm including myself in this, we are nothing if we are not reactionary. But in turn, the mainstream is nothing if it's not pulling from the underground. So, we need each other, even though we often are fighting against each other.

 Click here to see Part 2 Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat featuring James Spooner.

Keeping It Brief: Emily Labowe and Devendra Banhart In Conversation

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Women’s underpants really didn’t make a name for itself until suffragette Amelia Bloomer created her famous “bloomers” in the 1850s, modeled after the traditional loose trousers worn by women in Turkey. It became a craze, a punk rebellion against the strict, stiff undergarments of the Victorian Age. Bloomer was also the first woman to own, operate and edit a newspaper for women. Cut to the 21st century, Emily Labowe is carrying the torch of Bloomer’s rebellion with a new line of French cut, cotton intimates with delicately embroidered flowers, cacti, and fauna. Made locally, Poppy Undies is a celebration of femininity and mindfulness. As part of the launch, Labowe has also launched a quarterly newspaper. The first issue has contributions from a global coterie of artists and friends, like Langley Fox and Devendra Banhart. In the following conversation, Labowe and Banhart discuss underwear, lockdown, and life in our skivvies.

DEVENDRA BANHART I’m interviewing the wonderful, lovely, talented, amazing, incredible in every way, billion-threat, Emily Labowe, the CEO and founder and creative director of Poppy Undies, that launched two days ago. We do know each other, but I don’t know the answers to these questions. If Poppy Undies were a film, what would it be?

EMILY LABOWE Labowe That’s a really good question. I put together a thing called “brief scenes”—ha ha, so funny—of my favorite movies that have really great underwear scenes in them. I would probably say Bridget Jones’s Diary, or Empire Records’s underwear scene is pretty amazing, when Liv Tyler takes off her skirt in her boss’s office. Pretty wonderful.

BANHART Where do you think your entrepreneurial and handmade goods making origins come from?

LABOWE I think my mom. She taught me how to embroider four years ago, during Passover, on a matzo cover, and it was so fun. As a kid too, I was always knitting or crocheting with her, or crafting. I don’t know about the entrepreneurial part, but I was selling cookies and Pocky in high school, because that was the cool thing to do. People would bring Costco desserts and sell them in duffle bags because it was public school; we didn’t have fun food. And I was like, I want to make friends, so I baked stuff and sold it, and I made a couple friends.

BANHART And you made a couple bucks!

LABOWE And friends, more importantly.

BANHART Okay, so friends are more important than bucks. How was Poppy Undies born?

LABOWE There a fair amount of niche brands that embroider jean jackets, or shirts, and I felt that intimates was a really interesting item of clothing to have embroidery on because you either wear underwear that makes you feel sexy, or you wear it for someone else, and you have a little special secret thing on your underwear.

BANHART Totally. There’s a very obvious hierarchy in clothing lines, and I think intimates are really undervalued and underappreciated in that hierarchy. It’s the most personal item of clothing you can wear, and in the same way that architecture affects the way you think—you know, you’re in a particular room, you design it a particular way, it really does affect the way you think. I think the actual cut of something that is touching you in the most intimate place, and the feel of it, the look of it, does affect how you actually feel.

LABOWE Totally, and confidence and comfort is so important. 

BANHART Why a poppy, and how did you settle on that name?

LABOWE Two different thoughts. It’s very classic: California–poppy flowers. I love poppies, and the name Poppy is important to me because it’s what I used to call my grandpa.

BANHART I love that. Very, very sweet. Let’s talk about the art newspaper that’s also part of the launch; it’s also going to be an ongoing part of Poppy. The theme of it, in terms of the short stories, the poems, the models shown alone, the negative space in the layout, seems to be one of isolation and remoteness, yet the entire mission statement of Poppy is about self-love and celebrating femininity—something that seems harder to do and more important than ever to strive for in this time of confinement. Can you speak on that?

LABOWE I think retrospectively, the experience of quarantine really influenced the line and the paper just in terms of—personally for me, I feel like I aged like five years during this time in good ways, and bad ways too. I just changed a lot, and feel a newfound sense of confidence and self-esteem, and that is really what the backbone of the line is, is promoting self-love and acceptance. In terms of you getting a sense of isolation, that’s not entirely purposeful. I wanted to create a sense of community with the line, so that’s why putting a bunch of friends together and collaborating on something adds to the whole world of the brand.

BANHART And I guess that is how we all feel, kind of alone together. Everyone has their own page, and the spacing is done in a way that everybody’s piece is honored and it’s not cluttered in any way, but we’re all part of the same newspaper.

LABOWE Exactly, yeah.

BANHART You worked with all of your friends. Could you talk about some of them?

LABOWE You have a drawing on page fifteen, and on the same page my friend Javier Ramos, who’s a chef in LA, wrote a recipe for the paper, and then my friend Jeff who laid out the paper, printed these recipe cards, it’s kind of like a postcard, but the back is a handwritten recipe. Ali Mitton did all the photography, which is from the campaign, and then I have a couple friends’ essays in there, and my friend Renee Parkhurst who’s an artist, sent me some paintings, and Langley Fox sent me a drawing. There’s a bunch of cool stuff in there. 

BANHART There’s also like a little definition of a few words.

LABOWE Oh yeah, on the gutter of each page are poems from our friend Emily Knecht who wrote vocabulary words that play into the theme of heartbreak and love, and the experience of COVID. 

BANHART I guess the other thing is soon—I’ll be doing twenty drawn-on versions. 

LABOWE Devendra is going to do a couple limited edition drawings directly on some of the pages, and that will be on the website soon.

BANHART You know that I am a practicing Buddhist, in the Vajrayana tradition, but in Zen, which is very dear to me, there’s a tradition called koans. A koan is a question that a teacher will ask a disciple and they will mull it over for quite some time. There’s actually an answer to them, and it’s kind of a test.

LABOWE But you’re not supposed to answer right away?

BANHART I guess some people probably do and maybe get it right. 

LABOWE So there’s a correct answer?

BANHART Yeah, there is actually a correct answer, but traditionally people will mull it over some time. So, I’m putting you in the real hot seat here and asking you to answer koans.

LABOWE Are you going to make a (imitates buzzer noise) if I’m wrong?

BANHART I’m going to electrocute you. Here’s the first onLabowe what is your original face before you were born?

LABOWE You.

BANHART The letter, or y-o-u?

LABOWE Y-o-u.

BANHART Nice. When you can do nothing, what can you do? 

LABOWE Everything.

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BANHART What is the color of wind? 

LABOWE Light.

BANHART Do you think that when we have a child, it will inspire you to make Poppy for kids?

LABOWE Yeah, they’re not on the website yet, but I have onesies that I’ve embroidered. I’ve been giving them just to friends right now, but I definitely want to do that on a bigger scale. I’ve just kind of been testing it out with friends who have new babies. 

BANHART As far as I know, there are some new items in the works, like mesh underwear?

LABOWE Yeah. I actually sold out of everything already, so the next drop will be the beginning of January, and there will be unisex boxers and mesh underwear as well.

BANHART And will the designs be different?

LABOWE Yes. I’ll restock what I have; that will stay the same, like the essential stuff, but the new pieces will have new designs. 

OLIVER KUPPER I guess I’ll jump in with a few questions. How has it been living and working during the pandemic?  

LABOWE I live alone, and quarantine was a very weird time because in the beginning, I wasn’t even seeing my family. It was intensely lonely, going through a hard emotional time as well, which I think influenced a lot of the paper, but I have a newfound sense of strength. And I was able to pour myself into this, which was great, so I stayed busy. Pretty much on my own, though.

BANHART I would say it’s almost like we’re just arriving at a time of adapting to the reality of how long this is all going to last. 

LABOWE Especially now that we’re back in lockdown.

BANHART Back in lockdown, and it’s such a huge shift that none of us have ever experienced in our entire existence. It’s taken all this time, for me at least, to feel like I really have to get used to this. I’m not going to be touring. I’m not going to be doing the things I used to do. We’re going to be socializing. There is this extra tremendous wave of collective mourning that is such a part of everyday life now. Mourning is so huge for the amount of people that are dying every day, and then all those people’s families that are mourning—they’re losing their loved ones every day, and obviously how different the lives are of first responders from us, which we’re kind of having to deal with ourselves in a new way, where many first responders have not had that opportunity. They are dealing with this pandemic every moment. And I’ve lost friends to this pandemic. It’s really, really strange because even mourning the loss of my friend Hal Willner feels like it’s on hiatus. I couldn’t go to a funeral. I can’t talk or traditionally mourn. It’s important to remember that whatever I’m going through is certainly being magnified by this tremendous collective mourning and suffering. It’s important to try and look at it as an opportunity for growth.

KUPPER It’s interesting. Also, a lot of us are not wearing any clothes, either.

LABOWE Right, totally. I’ve been wearing boxers and underwear. It’s that or sweatpants now that it’s a bit colder, but I feel like it’s quite relevant. The loungewear business is booming, which is cool.

BANHART I’m just in my corduroy thong, as usual.

KUPPER Any plans for edible Poppies?

LABOWE Wow. You just sparked a really great idea. Shit. I wish I could’ve done that in time for Valentine’s Day. But hey, maybe I will. What do you make it out of? There are those candies that are on strings, but also I’m imagining—remember Fruit by the Foot? If you make that for Valentine’s Day, vould you eat it off of yourself if you don’t have a partner? I’ll let you know. I’ll try it.

KUPPER My last question—do you have any tips for feeling sane during this time.

LABOWE That’s a good, good question. For me, I had a somewhat sense of it before because my usual job is so random, and I don’t have a schedule. It’s like having a routine to get you through the week, so you have your coffee, and then you go for your walk, which I should do more often. Having a routine is the number one way for me to feel sane, I think. And going to the beach, which I haven’t done in a while, and I love going to the beach when it’s cold, but I was doing that very, very frequently from March until it got a bit chilly. 

BANHART My advice is to hold space for your sadness. Hold space for your sorrow, and expand your support system. 

LABOWE For sure. Even if it’s just a phone call or Zoom with a friend. You’ll feel so much better after.

Click here to explore Poppy Undies. Purchase a limited edition of Poppy Paper with original drawings by Devendra Banhart.

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Frutti Di Mare: An Interview Of Designer Sia Arnika

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interview by Mimi Krtinić Rončević

With her SS21 Frutti Di Mare collection, designer Sia Arnika has found a chimeric pearl in the depths of a timeless Limfjord oyster. These highly-coveted mollusks were so in demand by the 16th-century King Frederic II of Denmark and his court that he declared them “crown regalia” and forbade the people of Arnika’s native Mors island from eating any themselves. While the capital city Nykøbing was a bustling port city in the mid-19th century, its population has since dwindled, and with it, much of the island’s former sense of self. Now living and working in Berlin, the young Danish designer had long regarded her former home as rather provincial in comparison to the wellspring of culture provided by a life within metropolitan Europe. However, while in the seemingly time-bending conditions of lockdown, the discovery of historic photographs from island photographers P. Raaberg and C. Pedersen provided a completely new context to the place she called home. These images that document individuals dressed in fine Victorian garb were not exactly the look of dull backwaters that was expected, triggering a renewed appreciation for an idyllic upbringing. One that included climbing trees in wild gardens not far from the fjord, returning home to experiment with new digital identities, and going out to the discos for the occasional foam party. Serving as a connection between tradition and the avant-garde, the collection is a collaboration between Arnika and Firpal Jawanda, a non-binary Punjabi artist based in London whose prints come from a practice of garment-making that focuses on South Asian chimeric folklore, language and mythology. This dialogue is taken further in the pieces created together with knitwear designer Emma Hasselblad. Her handcrafted dresses and accessories serve as a vessel to transport the idea of a living organism. Together, Frutti Di Mare is a place where both minimalism and maximalism are present. It is rooted in a dynamic of constant tension between anonymity and bold declaration, and it holds a notion of new and old existing in symbiosis with one other. 

MIMI KRTINIć RONčEVIć: I’m curious about your creative process. Do you start with a final result or do you like to go with the flow?

ARNIKA: I guess it’s a combination. I am very visual and work a lot with digital collages and with my hands. You always have a core idea you start with, and then in the process of draping, for example, it shifts into a different direction. So when you have the final product, it can be difficult to trace your exact steps, but the core idea is still present in the result. I always find that quite exciting when you are starting out; the unknown factor of where your mind will travel in the process of making the garments. 

RONCEVIC: Do you feel fashion is/should be a reflection of our times and society? 

ARNIKA: I grew up in a household where we talked politics and social issues, so for me that’s just the status quo. Being informed is sexy.

 
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RONCEVIC: I personally get a vibe of a strong, confident and independent persona from your designs, with an accent on femininity and body affirming shapes. This femininity seems more of a matter of energy, rather than representing a binary gender, something each one of us has in different amounts. Do you feel like there is a particular message you’re trying to send in regard to gender or feminism?

ARNIKA: Thank you for that wonderful interpretation. It is created around a person born in the past but living in the future. I think feminism is embedded in what I do naturally. It’s nothing I sit down and say to myself, “make it feministic.” I go with what makes me feel good as a woman, and gut instinct, I guess.

 
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RONCEVIC: What’s your take on the fashion industry; what needs to change and what are the risks a designer faces when starting out?

ARNIKA: Slow down, downsize, hold yourself and others accountable, and appreciate each other. The risks are numerous, but it’s an uphill battle when capital is low. It’s not easy to just have the ambition and the drive. But I think it is still important to try!

 
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RONCEVIC: Sustainable fashion is something that should be our future — brands must develop a more eco-friendly approach to creating, not just with fabrics and production process, but also with the business itself, in terms of creating an unnecessary desire among customers, an unhealthy speed of trends etc. Of course, consumers must do their part too. What efforts can a young designer put into making their work more green?

ARNIKA: Growing up with my wonderful parents, they are somewhat esoteric hippies let’s say, I grew up very aware about the environment, social injustices, and always keeping an open mind. They definitely embedded in me an appreciation for nature and taking care of what we have. Starting a business these days, you are a fool if you don’t try to act as responsible as possible. Being in an industry that has a long way to go, I try my best to maneuver in a sustainable way. Starting out you should really take care to think all aspects through about how to build your business. It’s so difficult to backtrack once the horse is out of the stable. Build it slow, and build it mindful.

 
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RONCEVIC: Is there an alternative way you’d like to present your collections? I’m aiming at the whole digital discussion with this question, what’s your opinion on all the novelty tech has brought us, in terms of changing intersocial dynamics and the creative process?

ARNIKA: I have just created a collection video with artistic director Filip Berg. It’s a Frutti di Mare tale that unfolds in Berlin. I think the digital medium is a great platform to explore alternative methods of submerging people into your world. I personally use it a lot in my creative process; in developing collections and concepts. But it’s a blessing and a curse really in daily life. The world has become intensely connected, but we’re moving further apart personally. We are so insanely busy that connecting with people online is more normal than in person (pre-Corona). But there is also such freedom that comes with technology. So, I guess it’s like all things in life. Use it for good only.

Existential Time: An Interview Of Gisela Colón

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Fashion As A Soft Power: An Interview Of Lindsay Jones

Mused SS 2021 Protect Your Mother, Love One Another upcycled collection

Two fashion insiders discuss the fashion industry’s pivot, and why fashion need not be considered frivolous, especially in ugly times.  

Lindsay Jones is the founder, creative director, and head designer for MÚSED. The label’s latest collection, “Protect The Mother, Love One Another” 2021, featuring upcycled and gender fluid clothing is out now. As an activist Jones sits on the board of Equality New York and works with the Ackerman Institute’s The Gender Family Project. 

Jill Di Donato is a fashion and beauty writer and professor who teaches communications and sociology at such schools as The Fashion Institute of Technology and Barnard College, where her class Is Fashion Frivolous? explores the political and social experiences of getting dressed.

JILL DI DONATO: Does it feel weird talking about fashion when the world is coming apart at the seams? There’s so much profound ugliness happening, how do you justify being concerned with things like clothes?

LINDSAY JONES: No! Fashion is a way of communicating with people. I’m reminded of les Incroyables during the French Revolution who were so punk rock and revolutionary, wearing eccentric clothing mixed with high-end jewelry from royalty who had been executed when they were redistributing the wealth. Clothing can be worn to bring people together during a revolutionary movement. It’s a soft power. Bring what you believe into all of the arts and design.  

DI DONATO: I was working on a story that profiled photographer Dario Calmese who talked about fashion with a lowercase F as being “on the ground” as opposed to the fashion industry or the fashion system. When you think of fashion on the ground, it frees you up to see aesthetics as an immediate expression of identity. When fashion gets dismissed as frivolous, there’s often sexism, racism, or classism at the root, many times. Though of course in America, where much of the economy is based on racialized capitalism, and so much of fashion is based on cultural appropriation, there’s a tension that exists if you’re not discerning.

LINDSAY JONES: It can feel frivolous because not everyone understands the relevance of the period and how it shows symbols and values. People need to express themselves in these moments and use storytelling now more than ever. That tension you were talking about, it’s the old school magazines and model casting that’s not inclusive and tied up in aspirational luxury that’s out of touch. But there’s also the new vanguard.

DI DONATO : It’s helpful to remember that people make up institutions, which is where that kind of storytelling comes in. I’ve definitely uncovered some of my biases when it comes to storytelling, especially as a white journalist. Even though there are times at work when I don’t necessarily feel my power, like if I’m answering to an editor or department chair or bound by word count and can’t always print everything a source says. I’m not intentionally trying to silence voices, although from the source’s point of view, I can see how they might think that. I’ve been working on stepping outside of my point of view and trying to be as up front about what the process entails as possible. Also, admitting when I make mistakes. How are you navigating this terrain as a white designer?

LINDSAY JONES: During a summer of protests, we had to be quiet and we needed to listen. I'm still learning more about what I can do through listening and having humility and awareness about where my help is needed.

DI DONATO : The ability to listen is so powerful, and such an impactful skill. So much of my work as a journalist hinges on listening, almost more so than writing if that makes sense. 

LINDSAY JONES: It does. And then given the pandemic, that’s sort of all we could do for a while. In New York we were forced to go inside and we didn’t know when we could come back out and that’s when I began to hand sew these pieces using recycled fabrics. It was personally cathartic and how I mentally got through that time. 

DI DONATO : My creativity came in waves. There were moments when I felt an urgency to be part of these liminal spaces of the pandemic where everything had such charged meaning, and then there were times when I was overwrought with anger and sadness and hopelessness. Being a parent, though, it comes with a whole other set of challenges—it really prevented me from stewing in the voids of those days. Figuring a way forward was always on the forefront of my mind and I’m so grateful for that. When you think about activism in a time of crisis, it’s almost more essential that it happens and people find a way to connect. 

LINDSAY JONES: In my experience, I’ve found that organized advocacy is highly effective. If you find a group you like and you like what they do, take classes and courses and trainings through them. They can help you volunteer and learn more about how to get involved. You will meet really impactful people.

DI DONATO : There’s so much good stuff going down on Zoom right now. Not to minimize these types of trainings and the type of commitment you’re talking about, and this is something different, but there were some days when having a training on while in quarantine kept up that forward momentum. More listening can never be a bad thing, right? Along those lines, do you feel like it’s okay to take joy in aesthetics right now? 

 LINDSAY JONES: Yes. In order for us to build motivation and energy self-care is essential. Wellness  is an important part of activism. Enjoying art and film is important. We need time to receive in order to give more. 

DI DONATO : You’re one of like five people I’ve seen in the past seven months. I remember the first time I walked to “town,” aka Abbot Kinney, when we met for smoothies and samples of Le Labo over the summer. It was a culture shock to me after so many weeks of isolation at the beach. I went home and cried afterwards. The feeling was a mixture of relief, I guess from the heaviness of everything, and being jolted into this life where treating myself was permissible. 

 LINDSAY JONES: People need to come together to take a break from the heaviness. 

DI DONATO : The pandemic has completely shifted how I take care of myself, and in many ways, I feel like these shifts are for the better, stepping out of the frivolous stuff we were talking about earlier and into a deeper understanding of aesthetics and self-care. What are some things that are giving you joy? 

LINDSAY JONES: Nature. 

DI DONATO : Trails I used to take for granted have become sacred to me these days. I try to find some new flower or critter to wonder at. In that way, boredom drives creativity.  

LINDSAY JONES: Yes! The mountains, and the ocean. Meditation. Baths. Tea. Special flower arrangements. I’m very into playlists. Playing music and practicing. Draping gowns [with Zac Posen in Central Park] and making art in nature, sculpting, cooking, gardening. Helping others gives me a sense of purpose. New Yorkers are happy to have a moment with each other right now. Most of the tourists are gone. People are sitting on the street again.

Click here to explore the collection.

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

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

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

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

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

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

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

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. 

 
 

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. 

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. 

 
 

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. 

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.

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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.

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 

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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

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Omer Arbel and Kulapat Yantrasast Dream Of Biological Concrete 

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The Vancouver-based designer and founder of Bocci, and LA-based Thai starchitect discuss the violence of architecture, sustainability and evolving in the age of material technology. 

Kulapat Yantrasast: Are you focusing on more installations these days?

 Omer Arbel: I love lighting, but in addition to an installation-based practice, where we do one-offs and very, very large monstrous, gigantic works that mostly have to do with light, I have returned to the architectural practice after a ten-year hiatus. What I am trying to do is cross all the disciplines and knit together a way of working where it doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial item, or a one-off, or a piece of architecture. There is a philosophy that unites all the work. And that is the idea, that a material and its intrinsic properties, chemistry, the mechanics and the physics of a material, are the generating impetus for form.

Yantrasast: So, a form flows from material kind of thing?  

Arbel: No, I just kind of tease or encourage the materials to get formed.  

Yantrasast: Isn’t that what Louis Kahn says, “You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?’”

Arbel: Yeah, exactly, but it’s already a brick. But we have to take a step back and think about clay. Or I try to find this transformation on a molecular level, and then try to see if I could allow that transformation to express...  

Yantrasast: Kind of like cooking almost? 

Arbel: Yes, exactly. I am very comfortable with that. Like cooking.  

Yantrasast: So, is concrete a protein?  

Arbel: I read the other day that concrete is the most abundant material on the planet other than water. That is kind of depressing. I have always loved concrete, concrete is the most amazing material, but it’s problematic because it produces almost ten percent of the carbon in the atmosphere. We should all stop using it, we should stop building things out of concrete, but my love for it is too great to stop.  

Yantrasast: Concrete needs a new binding agent.

Arbel: The only thing evil about it is cement. We just need to find replacements for cement. And there are, there are all these companies now using other kinds of binders. I even heard the other day that there is a biological one, like a bacteria, that replaces the cement. Imagine, so your concrete is kind of alive, you have to feed it, water it. (laughs)  

 Yantrasast: Yeah, like some kind of mushroom.

Arbel: It’s super great. We’ll see, but yes, I love concrete. I am finding ways to work with it differently. I have always been depressed by the fact that concrete’s liquidity or plasticity is not expressed in most constructions that you see. Everything is rectangular, and I think that’s dishonest in the highest order to the material’s nature, on the one hand, but also super wasteful, and expensive. So, we have worked with four or five different ways of trying to do that, developing a method of forming that allows the concrete to sort of express itself. And I want to keep going, especially with this whole idea of thinking of it as an animal instead of a liquid stone, a living organism in some sense. Then, what are the formal implications of that?

Yantrasast: It is a very classic ingredient, from Roman times even, but we haven’t evolved much from that in an age when you are 3D-printing buildings. When I saw your house, you seem to long for concrete to collaborate better with other materials. Can you talk about that?

 Arbel: So, the starting point, called 75, is this idea of trying to develop another way of forming concrete. And the thought we had was to pour it into fabrics instead of a wood framework, because fabrics stretch, and it responds to the weight of the material. In the experiments we also discovered that just naturally, because of the way a fabric stretches, it swells in exactly the places that you need it to be thicker from a structural perspective. So there is kind of an intrinsic efficiency. We developed a series of, what we call, the lily pads or the reverse trumpet forms. It is essentially a series of geotextiles, which is a woven tarp stretched between plywood ribs. Everything is organized in a radial pattern that flute up, in some instances as high as 30 ft. tall. Our approach to that architecture is to think of it almost as if they were found objects. As if I had arrived at the site and discovered these ruins of archeological remains that are sort of aggressive.   

Yantrasast: Yeah, in the last ten years, you know, people have dealt with quite a bit of that, because at the end of the day, you need a cavity, and you need the concrete to define that cavity. 

Arbel: The house is on an agricultural field. I was always moved by this Edward Hopper painting, where the field came right up to the edge of the house. So, we thought of the agricultural field almost as if it were a carpet draped over this archeological site.   

Yantrasast: You are known as a lighting designer. Is light material, and if so, what is the DNA of light?

 Arbel: This is a theme that I keep returning to, which is the idea of thickening an atmosphere. When you go to Mexico City, or a city that is very polluted, you see that the sunbeams have to go through so much particulate on the way to your eye. It’s depressing, but it’s also the most beautiful thing, and it captures the nuance of light and texture. And I think that is something I try to do in the architectural projects, but also in my lighting practice. And in the installation work, is this idea of thickening the atmosphere, almost thinking of light as if it were liquid, and trying to place many things in its way. I was thinking of the rooms as if there were giant sponges sucking in light as if it were a liquid. That might come from a childhood spent in the desert environment, where sun was abundant and syrupy, not like here where it is very crisp, a much dustier sort of light.   

Yantrasast: I remember a long time ago, I took Toyo Ito, who is a good friend and someone I admire, I met him in Japan, but we went to Thailand together, he loved Thailand. He was so fascinated by Thai rivers. In Japan, the water is so clear, almost like sake, and maybe because it’s a mountainous country,  the river is flowing quite fast to go to the ocean. Whereas in Thailand it is almost like a very thick soup. It is kind of an alluvial plain and we don’t have a lot of mountains. The water is flowing very slowly to the ocean. Because of the soil and everything, it is very brownish, sticky. And, he was blown away by the fact that even water is so different. Even though his work was sort of all about transparency and clarity, he liked that water can thicken. That also makes us human, that makes us more organic. Of course, you are making something very humane, something that people can live in.

Arbel: Because architecture is violent, I think, when it’s good architecture it has a kind of violence to it.  

Yantrasast: Yeah. 

Arbel: And to start to think of the idea of domesticity, or even the idea of coziness. These things are at odds with the violence of architecture. The best architecture is able to make the violence comfortable. 

Yantrasast: I thought a lot about that too, which comes back to the subject of order and chaos. I think the art of architecture needs to have a sense of clarity. It is monumental, it is inhumane in scale, and it has to be a manifesto of something that is not alive itself, even though it grew out of life. It has to be surreal. Look at the results of modernism, whether it is Chandigarh or Brasilia. Like you say, it is so violent, it is so out of human sentiment and logic that it’s hostile.  

Arbel: Yes.  

Yantrasast: What are some of your design principles? 

Arbel: It has been to find form in an intrinsic material quality. Like you mentioned, you can 3D print with concrete, you can 3D print with anything. It is true that in the next decade, or next two decades, we will be at a point where anything that can be imagined we will be able to create and produce in perfect fidelity, printed in any kind of material. So, imagine a world where we can make anything. What is worthwhile? What should we make? It becomes a really hard problem and so, for me, the forms on some level are born of a very specific chemical reaction, or mechanical action.

Yantrasast: So, let’s talk about sustainability. It’s a big word. 

Arbel: Yeah, there are two ways to talk about it. One thing that I think about is if we have buildings, or objects, that have a cultural relevance, that are purely made to delight people, then it is less likely to be demolished or replaced. That is the most basic sustainability principle for architecture. The second thing is the trench warfare of being involved in making anything where you have to constantly be aware. I love concrete so much but learned that concrete is just this toxic and evil material that is dumping all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What is the answer? Stop using concrete? No, you need to find ways to work with concrete, find out who is working with new kinds of concrete. We did an analysis on the fabric forming method and found that there is forty percent less embodied energy in these forms. Because fabric is just easier to stretch than wood would be to nail together. Way less materials, they are not thrown away after.  

Yantrasast: I think, when you look at the history of concrete, people were actually efficient before. If you look at someone like Anton García-Abril, who made that chapel, he put the hay in there and he put the concrete over the hay and when it was done he sent a cow to eat the hay. A lot of this really depends on these specific locations. But I love your idea of how we evolve in the age of material technology. What about your new space in Berlin? Is it like a showroom?  

Arbel: No, it’s like an old foundry. It’s enormous; it’s like five buildings. We have been active in Berlin for eight years and at the moment we occupy a courthouse. It was a derelict courthouse when we found it; 150 years old. It has been renovated and it has been, up to now, our showroom where we have been able to exhibit things. I was always thinking of it more as a library for old ideas. All our experiments end up there. We generally don’t respond to opportunities, we just produce work. And then when opportunities come we sort of match the idea to the opportunity. It served as an archive of ideas, and also as a laboratory to explore new pieces before they were ready. 

Yantrasast: Most of the objects are being made in Vancouver?  

Arbel: Yes, everything is made in Vancouver. We have a few small collaborations with glass shops in the Czech Republic, the bohemian glass region of the Czech republic. But most of the work is made in our studio. 

Yantrasast: We just announced a very big opera house in Russia, in which we have a big glass chandelier. I do like the idea of how light is not explored enough in architectural thinking. It’s always an afterthought. I was reading a book this morning about the Light and Space artists in LA. You have someone like James Turrell, you have Peter Alexander, and you have the Venice School. It did not talk about the theory; it did not talk about the execution of it. So, how has the art of Light and Space, which is so prominent in Southern California, never penetrated beyond the surface? A lot of people are now bringing music, bringing colors, and perceptions, and smells, into this fundamental art form. And I feel like that is fundamental, it is architecture. I want light to come in and, like you mentioned, the space would be like a sponge. And how is this sponge absorbing light, not just passively reacting to it? It feels like the art form of the future. Any thoughts on that?   

Arbel: It just sounds great. (laughs)

Yantrasast: Because as an architect you make space, you make objects and material. But as a lighting designer you create objects that illuminate.

Arbel: An object occupies the space. It perhaps has architectural ramifications, but in general is surrounded by empty space. But as an architect you create the outlines of the empty space. So it’s kind of the opposite approach. And I always think that architects make great sculptors or industrial designers but it does not really work the other way around. Industrial designers do a terrible, terrible job when they try to make space. And I think it is because you can’t think of a building as just a big object.

Yantrasast: Yeah, you are absolutely right. Even someone like Sottsass, who had really set a strong language, but when I see some of his houses, I’m like, “Hmmm.” But I think, as you say, this art of space and form as an architect, in a way, we are making space, but we are also making form. The Europeans tend to be better at space because they don’t have a lot of forms to build. The whole thing was already built. The Asians tend to be more form-based because there are a lot of places to build. There is almost a kind of dichotomy. But, more and more, people find difficulty with space, space is not real for most people anymore, because of digital media. Now you zoom in, you zoom out on the computer, and the scale of it is completely odd. You can’t put yourself into it. It is troubling in a sense, but it also gives you a sense of freedom.

This interview was published in Autre’s Spring/Summer 2020 “Edge Of Chaos” issue. Omer Arbel will present a new solo exhibition of architectural works in progress at Aedes Architekturforum in Berlin. From 28th August until 22nd October, 2020, the show 75, 86, 91, 94 will document a series of major innovations within Arbel’s ongoing experimental practice. Kulapat Yantrasast is a founding partner and Creative Director of wHY. He and his team are working on multiple current projects.

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

 

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. 

 

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’.

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.

 
Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles, 1989, copyright Greg Gorman

Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles, 1989, copyright Greg Gorman

 

Forbidden Fruit: An Interview Of French Duo Papooz On The Occasion Of Their New Video Release

interview and photographs

by Agathe Pinard

The Parisian duo Papooz became well known in France thanks to their summer 2016 melody Ann Wants To Dance with its sensually whimsical music video directed by artist Soko. They released their second album, Night Sketches in 2019, which encapsulates the essence of France’s warm summer nights: sipping white wine after spending the whole day being sun-kissed on the beaches of Cap Ferret (where Papooz recorded their first album), or enjoying the freshness of an ice-cold drink on a terrace with friends after suffocating in the streets of Paris all day.

This year’s summer plan might not be as sandy and salty as we’d once imagined, but we can only hope for more sexy new tracks and clips like Papooz’s latest sumptuous release. Straight from the garden of Eden, this forbidden fruit was directed by Victoria Lafaurie & Hector Albouker “in the year of Covid-19” and features goddess-like Klara Kristin, who made her film debut in Gaspard Noe’s Love. Papooz’s Armand Penicaut and Ulysse Cottin quarantined with their musical crew at La Ferme Records to prepare the new album, yet to be announced. I sat down with Papooz a couple months ago, before their show at the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles, before the world went into quarantine.

Tell me about your upbringing, did you grow up in a musical family?

Armand: Kind of, my dad’s family is made of mostly classical musicians. They all studied classical piano and went to the Conservatoire de Paris. And my grandma, on my mom’s side is a piano player as well.

I believe you both met through mutual friends and started playing together mostly with guitar…

We had some friends in common and he’s a bit younger than me. He was seventeen, I was twenty years old. Basically we used to meet up and smoke joints at this place in Paris, called Le Jardin du Luxembourg. We just started hanging out together and it was the beginning of his musical career because he had just started to learn how to play the guitar. He really dived into it for three years and we started recording songs together at each other’s house just via Garageband, you know, the software. There was no career plan, just hanging out with your mate and then it evolved from that.

You started music as a lo-fi band and Night Sketches is therefore your first studio album. How was the transition?

It’s our second studio album in the sense that the first album we made was made in a house, Ulysse’s parents’ beach house in Cap Ferret. It’s equipped with professional studio gear so we recorded music in pretty much the same way as we would have in a “normal” studio. It’s the same process. It was a bit more lo-fi but the second one we went in a really old, amazing studio near Paris called La Frette (Marianne Faithfull, Arctic Monkeys and Nick Cave also recorded at the Manor/Studios.) The transition was kind of the same, the goal is just to have a good time playing music with your friends. You’re trying to catch a moment, like photography. It’s the same process whether you’re in a little room in front of your computer or a massive studio. It’s the same way of building music, the same layers of tracks… 

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I’ve read that you spent a lot of time conceptualizing your album Night Sketches. What was the idea behind it?

At the beginning, we were working at night and long sessions, just Ulysse and me. At some point, all the songs that we’d been working on sounded a bit dark, disco-ish. So, we kind of achieved something musically before adding lyrics with the same kind of vibe and ambiance about relationships and night life and appetite for destruction, that kind of stuff. It’s like a fake concept album. We didn’t sit down thinking, let’s make an album about night life. At some point we found out that was a nice direction that we could go in. It’s a fun album. I like the vibe of it.

That was going to be my next question, you said that you start with the music first, is that what your usual creative process looks like, music first then lyrics?

Kind of. We wrote only two tracks together for this album. Normally our style of songwriting is: I get up in the morning, take a guitar or a keyboard, and I try to write a song. He does the same thing and then we show the songs to each other. There has to be some lyrics for me to show him something because I really believe that songs need to have a powerful meaning. This is why people can hum to them and chant them.

So, you both work separately and then come together…

Yeah. Normally I write a song, go to his house to show him the song, and if he likes it, we work on it. 

The video clip for You & I is inspired by the Ramen Western Tampopo, but also references Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface. Can you talk about how you conceptualize this kind of video? Are you the ones behind the making of the videos?

Yes, we’re behind every video we make. I really try to write the script with whoever we’re working. We’ve been mostly working with the same person, which is my girlfriend, Victoria Lafaurie. We just have a chat while listening to the tune and sometimes we even have an idea before recording the song. She came up with this idea of duality for this video. We could each have a twin­, which was easy for me because I do have a twin brother. Finding a twin for Ulysse was going to be kind of a drag so we had this idea of little demons and angels like you can see in Tex Avery or Tintin. We just fucked around with that concept and wrote it together, and then she shot it with a friend of ours, Leo Schrepel, a really great cinematographer in Paris.

Did you watch Tampopo right before?

No, but all of us are big movie geeks and everything we do is based on something that’s already been done. For Tampopo, the scene with the egg, we thought it was so romantic. There was also a scene with an oyster but it was a drag to try to do it. The lights warm up the oysters and it gets disgusting. It was more like an homage.

In how many takes did you get the egg scene?

I think only two because we shot on film. We try to do every clip now on film because it looks so much better, in my opinion, so you cannot redo anything. So everything was shot in one take or maybe two since our budget is pretty tight.

You shot with a Super 8?

No, that was a Super 16.

I know it’s your first time doing a US tour. That’s an interesting time to be touring here, right in the middle of the Democratic primaries. Do you keep up with American politics? Any thoughts on that? (The interview was conducted in March, a couple days before super Tuesday)

We don’t understand American politics. We understand what it means for the people of the world to have some kind of symbol. Obama was a better symbol than Donald Trump. It’s hard to understand how the system works here with the Electoral College. I do keep an eye on it though, it’s all over the press. 

I think whoever becomes the next American President is impactful for the rest of the world in some way.

Yeah, but I haven’t seen the world change that much since Trump was elected, from Paris I mean. It’s the same.

You’ve been playing on the East Coast, Canada, then Portland and San Francisco, and you’ll be heading to Mexico next. What was your favorite city to play so far?

We did a whole buckle of the States. Every city has been fun to discover. San Francisco has this kind of vibe you know, when you’ve never been there. When you see it for the first time, it’s quite amazing. California, I have to say, after going to Canada where it’s freezing, feels great.

I know you’re big fans of jazz, have you been to any famous jazz bars yet?

We went to a blues bar in Chicago. House of Blues. The tourist thing, you know, but I enjoyed doing that. We won’t have the time in LA because we’re leaving tomorrow morning.

I was wondering if you could ever see yourselves working somewhere other than Paris, or if it holds too much of the inspiration you need in a city?

I mean, I’d love to live in LA because it’s so soothing and the lifestyle is so different than living in Paris. But you know, you live where your love is, or where your friends are. America is so expensive as well.

Are there any projects you’re going to take on once the tour ends and you go back to Paris?

Yes, we’re in the process of recording. We just released a song but we’re in the process of recording an entire new album in the spring. If everything goes well, we might be back in America before the end of the year with a new album.

 

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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.

Geneva Jacuzzi Directs Romy's New Music Video For "Normal Day"

interview by Summer Bowie

Touching yourself with the same fingers you use to text might be the new double dipping. We don’t have to talk about it, but we can assume it’s happening, and who wants to be the uptight straight guy at the queer party? Speaking of queer parties, did you see the new ROMY music video directed by Geneva Jacuzzi? It’s a delicious dalliance of solicitous sex—one where the Avon lady calls, and there’s more than one lonely woman on the block in need of new rouge. In the following conversation, I had the chance to get ROMY and Geneva Jacuzzi together to discuss their early roots as artists and songwriters, their serendipitous collaboration for this video, and the significance of LA’s queer underground scene.

AUTRE: On writing your first song.

ROMY: I think I was 14 when I wrote my first proper song. I recorded it onto a 4-track that I got around that time. It was just me and an acoustic guitar. The song was about being heartbroken by a friend. It was sad and earnest. All my songs around then were. I still remember this line from it: 'the puzzle's ruined cuz it doesn't fit/we're missing the last piece, but I stole it." Not a bad line for a 14-year-old.

JACUZZI: Mine was 4-track too, but I was a late bloomer at 20 or 21. I don't think the first songs had lyrics. They were these weird instrumentals and they were very silly little dance-y ditties that could maybe possibly, but probably not really sound anything like early Depeche Mode.

ROMY: That sounds sweet. Early Depeche Mode! My first songs were more lo-fi punk/indy rock. It was '95, so it was the golden era for that stuff. But, I started making multi-layered synth compositions, no lyrics, on a Kawai K5000 shortly thereafter. I think later in life, when I get old, I'll just make instrumental music.

AUTRE: How did the Geneva x ROMY collaboration come about?

ROMY: I knew I wanted to make a video for this song, and that I wanted to work with you, eventually. I'm a huge fan of your music, your performance art and your videos, and I thought you'd be perfect for this song. I love getting to work with people whose work I love. I let directors have full reign over directing my videos. I like to be directed within my own work. It lets me curl and crawl into corners and crevices of a song that I wouldn't otherwise get to do. You are such a great director! As you put it, you direct like Ed Wood would!

JACUZZI: The entire video popped into my head immediately after hearing it. When that happens, I see it as a green light. Meant to be. I've had people send me songs and no matter how much I like the person or the music, if I don't get the visual flood, I can't take on the project. Sure enough, everything fell into place. It was so much fun. The video basically made itself.

ROMY: I had just rewatched Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, que du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles that week, which was uncanny, and the video has tinges of that, mixed with Cronenberg. And you made it all happen in no time, with the best crew. All girls. Your sister Courtney, and Christina Acevedo, and it was all just so effortless and easy.

AUTRE: What was the genesis of your band agender?

ROMY: I started agender in Melbourne in 2013. I wrote, recorded, mixed and played all the instruments on the first agender record, self (en)titled in 2013. I then formed a band so I could play the songs live. It was a 3-piece band in the early stages. Always all-girls only. The first record was super lo-fi, unhinged punk. We made a record, Fixations in 2014. We toured, I moved to LA, and decided to focus on my solo project for the next couple of years. I then reassembled a new LA incarnation of the band. We're a 4-piece now. I love my band. I love this project. I need punk rock in my life. It's a nice balance to my solo project. We have a record coming out this Spring/Summer.

AUTRE: Art institutions vs. queer underground scene.

ROMY: They both serve a purpose. Geneva, you probably know how to answer this better than me, because I don't deal with the art world so much, but obviously you have a bigger platform working in bigger institutions. I think it's important for the underground to leak out into the mainstream world, for our work to be seen and our voices to be heard by bigger audiences. That's how you change the world—from within the system.

JACUZZI: I have worked with several art institutions, but aside from having to deal with fire marshals, budgets and a gazillion emails, it's not much different than playing a warehouse party. It's always a shit show. I'm kidding. As far as the the scene goes, I think of it as an LA thing. This city is a really cool place to be right now and it's so much easier to cross over. Things are a little more laid back and open so art, music, video, performance, fashion, people...they all kind melt into each other.

ROMY: I agree. It's a very exciting time to be in LA. There's something special happening here, art-wise. Magical people and magical energy.

AUTRE: What defines LA’s queer party scene?

ROMY: There's a lot going on in the LA queer party scene. There are warehouse parties, after hours parties, big parties in decent-sized venues, parties in small bars. Each party has its own brand and sound. I think most of the time you can be sure to find good queer DJs. Being a party promoter and running parties in the LA queer scene, I can say that making sure parties are all-inclusive, represent an array of queer artists and that the space is safe, are all the top priorities.

JACUZZI: I've been lucky enough to perform at some incredible queer parties over the years, and wow! So fun!! As far as what "defines" LA's queer party scene? I don't know. Fabulous. Better dance music. [laughs]

ROMY: That's true. Better dance music for sure. To be honest, I barely go out to straight bars and parties, so queer ones are all I know. But on the odd occasion that I'm out at a straight night or in a straight space, I feel it immediately, which proves that it's still so important that queer spaces exist.

AUTRE: DIY vs. professional studio recording.

ROMY: DIY there's less pressure. DIY is just usually me, alone, recording everything, demo-ing things. There's a spirit to it that you can never recreate. And then, when I get into a proper studio, I want it to sound slicker and better but then I always end up missing something about the DIY spirit and energy. In which case, I usually do vocals in one take and it captures something, an urgent, raw, imperfect energy. And then, by the time I get into a proper studio, I overthink it too much. I feel more pressure to make something perfect. It's way more conscious and aware. I'm always trying to recreate something that the demo had. That original, organic, initial detonation.

JACUZZI: To be honest, I only prefer DIY because I get nervous writing and recording in front of other people. I'm very self conscious in that department. Hopefully I'll get over that one day.

AUTRE: Stage vs. studio.

ROMY: I like how stage exists in the moment. It's there and then it's gone. It evaporates. It’s impermanent. Where as in the studio, I'm aware that I'm recording something permanent; that exists as not just art, but artifact. The studio is painful, honestly. The stage sheds pain.

JACUZZI: I think the studio asks the question and the stage answers it.

ROMY: I love that. That's perfectly put.

AUTRE: On-stage persona vs. Off-stage persona.

ROMY: My on-stage persona is wild, it's my north-node in Leo. The Leo in my chart comes out on stage. My off-stage persona is my Virgo sun, Pisces rising. But I guess my on-stage persona is my Pisces rising too. But I feel like all the Leo in my chart comes out when I'm on stage. Something is unleashed, for sure. The on-stage Romy comes more from my unconscious self. Off-stage Romy is my conscious self.

JACUZZI: Wow! So similar. I'm a Leo, Venus and North node in Leo, and I swear, the only time that comes out is on stage. It's funny because people assume I'm outgoing and flamboyant and radical but my personal life is quite the opposite. I'm kind of a hermit. Don't go out much. Love all that cozy basic shit, ya know?

ROMY: You are very different in real life. A lot more quiet. The first time I saw you perform, it was jaw-dropping. You performed in a giant clear ball. You were like some goth punk queen in a crystal ball! I thought you'd be like Nina Hagen or something, more wild in real life. But you like hanging out with your bird in your room and don't go out much. An energy conservationist. Oh! And my Venus is in Leo too, which I love. I think it's a great placement. And it's very interesting to me that my North node, my life's purpose and direction, is in Leo, which means I'm meant to perform, and so are you, and we're demanding lovers who want to be adored!

AUTRE: Music videos in the post-MTV era.

ROMY: Do people have attention spans for videos anymore? I hope so. It seems like there aren't as many platforms for videos. It seems like the new music video is the fans' interpretation of a song. A fan dancing and lip-synching to a song. That's a new form of music video, I think. That's what Tik-tok is, isn't it? I miss the old world.

JACUZZI: I can't lie. I miss MTV in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I also admit that I'm one of those people who skims through a youtube video. I don't think it has anything to do with attention. It's choice. With MTV, you didn't really have much of a choice. You just watched it because it was MTV. A lot of those videos sucked too, but you love them now because they remind you of when videos were "new." I could talk about this all day but there's only one thing I know for sure: "Ashes to Ashes" is probably the best video ever made. It changed my life. So, I hope humans continue making music videos ‘til the end of time.

ROMY: True. “Ashes To Ashes” is such a great video. I miss the music video channels. Watching MTV, and RAGE, which is an Australian music video show that's still going to this day. You wanted to know what was coming on next. You had no control. It was a mixed bag. And not controlled by an algorithm. Someone was programming it! Also, I joke that the phrase used to be “15 minutes of fame,” now it's really “15 seconds of fame.” It's all about the 15-second instagram story. Who has 15 minutes of attention to give anyone!?

AUTRE: The timelessness of dancing vs. the relative youth of electronica.

ROMY: One day, electronic music will feel like it existed since the beginning of time. In fact, I think that for young millennials, dance music has always existed.

JACUZZI: I totally agree. It's funny. One of the first songs I wrote was a dance song called, "The Oldest Known Song." It's pretty much about the synesthesia of time and color, and fire, and dancing.

ROMY: Wow! I'd love to hear it. I think I feel some sense of synesthesia when I listen to Kraftwerk. It's like a whiff and clang of metal, strawberry, glitter, tar, cloud, twinkle, cog, carousel, greasy candy. The soundtrack to someone dancing through timelessness. Kraftwerk makes things like airports and train stations feel like they're alive and dancing.

Hybrid Forms: An Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers

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.  

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.

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. 

 
 

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.

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