In conversation with Lola Arias
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Can you give a short overview of your practice, specifically how you became interested in the theatrical?
Lola Arias
I studied literature and theater, and I started to write poetry, fiction, and plays. Then I began directing my own plays. I was interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of theater, which is in itself a mixture of literature, visual arts, music and acting.
My first plays were more conventional so to say (a fictional story performed by actors) and then I started to be more interested in exploring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. I did a play called My life after with a group of people who were born during the military dictatorship in Argentina, whose parents were part of the guerrilla or policemen or exiled intellectuals. And from then on, I did several projects based on previous research and performed by all kinds of people: Bulgarian immigrate kids, street musicians, beggars, prostitutes, policemen, veterans of a War. These projects are theater plays but also urban interventions, installations and video installations.
WNG
A lot of your work juxtaposes the intensity of a historical event with the levity of retelling or re-enacting this event. In the re-enactments you reveal the mise en scène of stage production, elements that would typically be off camera, i.e. booms, light stands, markers, fans etc. What was your impetus for giving the viewer access to the surrounding scene?
LA
I see the re-enactment as a way to travel in time, to bring the past into our present. Whenever we talked about history we think it’s something that happened in the past to someone else, but the past is inside every one of us every single moment of our lives. In the case of war veterans, this can be traumatic because they are reliving their war experiences in their daily lives. Sometimes a flashback of the war interrupts their routine, bringing back the image of a dead body or the sound of a bomb or a missing friend.
When I re-enact the past with people, I try to show how difficult it is to bring back something that is gone. So, instead of pretending that we know how it was, like a realistic representation would do, I prefer to show how we try to stage it. When you see the elements of the mise en scène, you also see that it’s an attempt to recover the experience.
WNG
Your performers regularly break the fourth wall, and while doing so they seem to take on a rather dry, emotionally removed rendition of their story. What drew you to using this theatrical trope and what emotional response do you hope to evoke from viewers as they experience your work?
LA
When the performers are on stage or in front of a camera reconstructing something of their lives, they have already gone trough a process of rehearsing, rewriting, and transforming the experience into a story. And for that, they have to take a distance from their own experience to become the storytellers and not the victims of their own fate. I think a good storyteller has to stay neutral to allow the audience to become emotional.
WNG
Can you speak about the relationship between personal memory and historical fact? Something that struck us was the factual nature of the diary piece beside the more personal selections of your other performers.
LA
I see the diary as a frame for all the other re-enactments. The diary of this soldier is a very detailed summary of facts: 13.45. I ate one plate of food, 15.02. We shot down a plane…. Everything is at the same level: the banal and the important. In this dairy there is no subjective narration, just facts ordered by time. But in the list of facts you can also see how a soldiers is trying to document every second of his time in the war, maybe to feel that he can control something or that he can put away the fear or maybe just to help him not to forget. All the unspoken experience of the war is in between the laconic lines of the diary.
When I asked the veteran to read it again he was shocked. He kept this diary for 35 years and he read it all in 40 minutes for the film. There are moments when you see in the tone of the voice how he has doubts whether to say something or not. The act of reading was his re-enactment, his way to go back in time.
And all the other re-enactments are one day in the big diary of the war that could be written by all those who went there. One single moment that stayed in their memory until the present. The other stories are a good contrast to the dairy. In each of the short videos we explore what war has done to these men.
WNG
You have such a unique way of storytelling across your practice, with both personal stories of your own and others. I wonder, who are some artists that have inspired you in working this way?
LA
So many artists. Do you want a list? Robert Smithson, Sophie Calle, Harum Farocki, Ana Cristina Cesar, Sei Shonagon, She She pop, Avi Mogravi, Silvia Plath, Rabih Mroué, Chantal Akerman, Federico León, Tim Etchells, Karl Ove Knausgard, Clarice Lispector, Rimini Protokoll, and so on and so on…
In conversation with Lise Haller Baggesen
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
How does your work respond to the pressures and politics that surround the female body?
Lise Haller Baggesen
Ideally, I would like to replace pressure with pleasure and politics with culture and take it from there. I believe the next feminist wave must be all about women’s right to pleasure — the pleasure we take in our bodies, our sexuality, motherhood, leisure, and professional and intellectual pursuit. I realize that is utopian, but I think this is a good starting point.
I sometimes wish the (art-)world was as interested in women’s CULTURE as they are in women’s BODIES. The female body appears so ubiquitously present in the cultural canon, but more often than not as a representation through the male gaze. By female culture, I refer to all places in which females assert themselves in a way that challenges that gaze. I am talking about the female voice, for example. How do we give the female voice a space to resonate, within our broader cultural field?
Frequently women are infantilized in the arts, by being seen and not heard. It is something that can happen when male critics (like Jerry Saltz or Dave Hickey — self declared feminist and ladies man, respectively) butt in and try to mansplain ourselves back to ourselves. Guys, I know you are only trying to help, but sometimes speaking from that kind of authority can come off as a tad paternalistic. Sometimes the most feminist thing a man can do is to shut up and listen!
That said, serious and mainstream art criticism is another field in which female artists are grossly underserved; what does it take for a female artist to get into Art Forum? (Does she have to wear a strap-on dildo, for example?) It happens, of course, but when you crunch the numbers the odds are not in our favor. Micol Hebron’s recent Gallery Tally project, makes it perfectly clear that — although we have come a long way since the Guerrilla Girls tallied up major institutions and coined the slogan “Does a Woman Have to be Naked to get into The Met?” — baby, baby, we are not there yet!
But back to your question: how does my own work respond to all this? I am somewhat weary of the female=body/male=head dichotomy, which is why I increasingly focus on the female voice within my work, through writing, audio, etc. My most recent project HATORADE RETROGRADE is my own personal “all woman show” — a femi-futurist adventure for which I commissioned an all female cast to write for a motley crew of female protagonists. I figured, since I had free hands with the show, the least I could do was to make sure it would pass the Bechdel test with flying colors!
WNG
Can you describe how you arrived at the idea of “Mothernism” and what it means to you?
LHB
Mothernism started out in the spring of 2013, as my Master’s thesis in Visual and Critical Studies from the SAIC. I had initially enrolled in the program as a mature student with the intention of shaking off that “mama-artist-syndrome” but found myself increasingly frustrated with the way my maternal experience was nixed when I brought it to the table — during discussions on feminist, gender and queer theory, for example. So I had to ask myself: “Am I the only person here, who finds this relevant?” before deciding “Hell no! If this is such a taboo, it must be because it touches a nerve. So, if nobody in this room wants to talk about it, I will write my thesis on it, and then we will talk about it.” That it has resonated with so many outside our classroom I had never dared to dream about — but I don’t mind at all!
The word “Mothernism” is an elision, associating both the good stuff — like mothering and modernism — but it also has some negative connotations, like sexism, ageism and abled-bodyism, which are often directed at the maternal body. This body freaks a lot of people out, to be frank, in myriad ways the stereotypical “female body” doesn’t. I mean; it probably has stretch marks, for starters. Scars. Not to mention an (oceanic and slippery) interior. So, it’s a little different.
WNG
In your work you address the “mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse” and in a portion of your audio from the Mothernism installation you note an experience of visiting a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and asking yourself: “So, how does a MOTHER get bad enough to get inside the museum?”
Curiously enough, there seems to be an immense pressure on women in general to become mothers, yet there’s almost an air of criticism when women artists choose to become mothers, as if motherhood will take away their artistic ability. Can you elaborate on your personal insight into this conflicting issue?
LHB
I am really glad to hear you acknowledge this! It feeds into so much of what I am describing above, as the reason for me to write my thesis, and later my book, on the subject. Mothers in the art world are measured with an astounding double standard. Whenever you complain about the challenges you are facing, you are met with the counter argument that mainstream culture adores mothers and idolizes motherhood. First of all, that is not entirely accurate; consumer culture adores and idolizes every aspect of our lived experience that can be compartmentalized, consumed, and sold back to ourselves — but that of course is not the whole picture.
It is comparable to saying that mainstream culture adores Black culture, because it idolizes Black sports heroes and pop singers, and because everybody wears Nike sneakers. Or to tell queer and trans folk they are represented by, say, Caitlyn Jenner and television drama like “Transparent”. Then, imagine Black and queer artists being denied both authorship of their own experience and denied access to examining it in relation to the cultural canon, because, “everybody outside of the art world loves you, and in here we have different rules.” That happens to mothers all the time.
WNG
Have there been any significant artists who are also mothers that have inspired you along the way?
LHB
I am a painter, and as you can imagine the traditional painting canon does not include a lot of mothers (although some real motherfuckers)… so I spent my formative years as an artist as a “cultural necrophiliac” — meaning that I fell in love with a lot of dead guys. But I have no regrets — when you are in love, you’re in love — and I still adore the works of, say, Courbet, Manet, Munch, and Gauguin. People will tell you they were “just” a bunch of misogynists, Johns, and sex-tourists — which they factually were — but I hate that kind of essentialism. Spending time with the actual work (inside of the actual museum which is where you will find it) will reveal it to you in another complexity, giving you an event horizon that is longer than five minutes. One friend of mine once said to me “seeing is not believing, but it’s a practice,” and another (my yoga teacher) told me to “do your practice and all will be revealed.” I am of the conviction that you can learn a lot about yourself, from artists that have little in common with yourself — or maybe more than you think — and that all will be revealed if you practice returning that male gaze of the art historical canon, unflinchingly.
I was thinking about all this, as I was walking through Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry retrospective at the MCA; his is a brilliantly wrought argument for Black representation, and he always keeps his eyes on the prize — but the “female problem” cannot be solved through (visual) representation only, and if we think so we may be painting ourselves into a corner. There has always been plenty of female flesh on view in the museum, as we discussed earlier — hence the importance of making the female voice heard. These days, Jerry Saltz is hailing Kim Kardashian as the new Andy Warhol, but we cannot keep reinventing ourselves within the same critical paradigm — it’s a dead end. If visibility is power, why is Pamela Anderson not in office yet?
But back to your question: as part of researching “Mothernism” I have, off course, actively been looking to mother-artists for inspiration. Those mentioned in the book include Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Cicciolina (who I consider a great performance artist). Perhaps not your typical mama-artists, but then again, the point of the book was to challenge this stereotype.
Last year (2015) I saw two extraordinary retrospectives of female artists, whose lives, in many ways, were defined by the maternal. Firstly, Paula Modersohn-Becker, who tragically died from an embolism shortly after giving birth to her first child (a daughter), explored the mother-child relationship in a series of intimate portraits and also painted the first naked (!) and pregnant self-portrait. (Something I was blissfully unaware of, when I did the same thing during my first pregnancy, almost 100 years later.) And secondly, Sonia Delaunay, whose baby blanket for her son was credited as her first abstract work of art.
I found it very inspiring how these two great artists clearly thought of themselves as “avant-garde” while totally redefining what that means (which I suppose is the very essence of being avant-garde?). Through these weighty exhibitions, they were being acknowledged as such — all the while critically (and playfully) positing the question to the viewer: “what happens to the avant-garde, when the mother laughs?”
This question (cleverly framed by Susan Suleiman) which was central to “Mothernism” is related to a broader one: “how do women think of themselves as avant-garde” — which in turn became the inquiry question for HATORADE RETROGRADE.
WNG
Your piece in Your body is a battleground is extracted from the immersive Mothernism installation. It reads: “The Motherhood Welcomes Planned Parenthood,” and I appreciate how loaded that phrase is. I would think some people might find motherhood and Planned Parenthood at odds with each other when there’s such strife between pro-choice vs. pro-life advocates. What does the sentiment of this phrase mean for you?
LHB
I made that banner last fall, when Planned Parenthood was under a lot of strain. Fraudulent videos were being released about their practices, and they were threatened with de-funding from the political side (we all know which side (!)). It just infuriated me how low some people will go, in order to defame this institution and the important work it does, including abortion.
The banner was included in my Hi(gh) Mothernism installation for the Elmhurst Art Museum Biennial, in the museum’s Mies van der Rohe house. In many ways, this iteration of the show was centered around the “suburban mom,” and I thought it would be fun to make a banner that looked like it could be announcing a street festival, bake sale, or homecoming, in the “Mother Hood” — but with a subversive swag. I was at first a little worried that it would be too strong for a suburban audience — but then realized that my worry was entirely based on my own presumptions about suburbia.
At its core, Mothernism is about female reproductive rights. But those rights do not begin and end with the decision to terminate your pregnancy in the first trimester. Female reproductive rights include sexual education (and not the “abstinence only” kind), access to birth control, access to healthcare for the mother and child, access to affordable daycare and schools etc. etc. Only if these factors are in place can a woman make a truly informed, and truly personal, choice to become a mother or not.
The so-called pro-lifers… don’t even get me started on those, so I won’t… but, I think the pro-choice camp could be ready for a little self-reflection, and within that, a reexamination of the advances of the feminist movement. The current wisdom is based on a second-wave dichotomy of “destiny” and “choice.” Lean-in-feminists will have us believe that individuals who have made the “private decision” to reproduce, are solely responsible for carrying out this decision — but this is a neo-liberal privatization ideology in extremus — whereas in fact we have a collectively shared responsibility toward the next generation.
The assumption that motherhood and Planned Parenthood are at odds with each other is widespread, while in reality mothers make up the majority of people seeking abortion services. (The numbers fluctuate, but an oft-quoted ratio is 60% mothers to 40% non-mothers). I guess that has a lot to with mothers knowing what they are getting into themselves, and also, with what kind of world they want to put kids into — and that is, perhaps, not one where women are reduced to mere breeders, or where they are forced to choose between motherhood and a career.
Lastly, there is a time to Mother, and there is a time not to. From my own experience I will posit that I was better equipped to take on motherhood at thirty, than I was at seventeen. That said, if we stopped slut-shaming teen moms — and instead became the global village it takes to raise the children of the world — maybe they would have a better shot at parenting, so I’m just putting that out there!
WNG
I’m interested in how in the audio/text piece of this project appears as a collection of letters all signed “Love, Mom” — a small but comforting phrase most of us have read time and again in our lives. What are your thoughts on the passing down of wisdom and experience between women, especially in the relationship between mother and daughter?
LHB
I walk my daughter to school every morning. I sometimes think I don’t have the time to do that, but I always feel like I don’t have the time not to do that. She doesn’t kiss and hug me goodbye in front of the other kids anymore, so I don’t know how long I will still get to do it — but on our way we sort out the world situation.
Mothernism is all about intergenerational feminism — as is HATORADE RETROGRADE, albeit with a very different flavor. Where Mothernism was a nurturing umami, hatorade has a more synthetic, bittersweet bite.
It all comes down to this collective memory, and how we pass it on: what do we savor and what do we chew up and spit out? Every single wave of feminism has a complicated relationship with the last one, and this current one seems to have a complicated relationship to itself — which makes it compelling, and self-reflective, but also somewhat navel-gazing. It’s a bit like grandmothers axe: if one generation replaces the head, another the shaft, is it still grandmothers axe? And should we use it to dismantle her house? Since we already have the right to vote, does that mean the suffragettes can teach us nothing?
This is why I favor the f-word, although many have suggested it is outdated, alt-modisch, a “kill-joy;” Feminism has a history we need to acknowledge, which is why we have to call it by its proper name — everything else is a euphemism.
In conversation with Iris Bernblum
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
The title of our current show, Your body is a battleground, is in reference to a well-known Barbara Kruger work. Feminist artists of the 60’s and 70’s, like Kruger, largely opened the doors for women to make the work we make today. Who would you say has been a strong female inspiration to you and your work?
Iris Bernblum
This kind of question has always been interesting to me, in the past I’ve always been hiding a kind of secret guilt about the fact that their have been very few women that have strong influences on my work. The strongest art influences on me for many reasons that I’ve only come to terms with recently have been primarily gay men… and a few straight ones. Namely, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Ugo Rondinone, Nayland Blake, and Paul McCarthy. I’ve been recognizing recently in the studio how much they’ve sunken into my language — as a woman — as an artist. Part of this, at least for me, seems to stem from the gender fluidity of their work, the woman is present in it I feel, I am in there. Not explicitly, but the ways in which identity, the psycho/sexual, vulnerability and personhood are performed in their work speaks to me. Of course there are women I greatly admire and have certainly been influential, Reineke Dijkstra, in the way she makes vulnerability powerful, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann, but there seems to be a space in the queer dialogue, the female dialogue that I feel is unaddressed and perhaps in some way I’m speaking to that.
WNG
Women are faced with unrelenting pressures about our bodies — how we should dress them, what we should do with them, whether or not we should be allowed to choose what happens to them, etc. How does your work respond to these pressures and politics that surround the female body?
IB
Much of my work speaks to anxiety and the release of tension, within the body, within the mind. I like to think I create a space that embraces the body, with all its beauty and disgust, I want to acknowledge it all, put it out there, like an invitation. I think vulnerability is political. We are not given permission to be so, especially not women, we are never allowed to let our guard down, not about our bodies, our sexuality, our existence in the world, I like to imagine I give that permission.
WNG
In our image-based culture, we often see anti-abortion protestors using very explicit and exploitative images to elicit reactions. How do you think visual art might be able to counter those images?
IB
That is an interesting question… the first thing that comes to mind is with beauty. That we are all human, that we all have our shame, our weaknesses, it seems to me that these people with their soap boxes, their ideas about what is ‘right and wrong’ are some of the most terrified people out there. I would love to think that visual art could speak to their hearts — make them vulnerable — throw them off track so perhaps they could see beyond the rhetoric they have fed themselves.
WNG
In your circus themed works, I find the relationship between pressure and performance really interesting, especially when comparing the role of the clown to the role of the woman. Can you expand on that a little?
IB
Yes I recently had a studio visit where I was complaining that so many people ask me to perform, expect it when they look at my work, and it’s always just made me feel guilty for not meeting their expectations. But this visitor put my mind at ease by telling me I am absolutely not a performer, I am that nervous space right before the performance! I am endlessly grateful to this person who saw straight into me. The clown for me represents so many things. It’s been used repeatedly by male artists to exemplify a kind of shame; I think of Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy. Clowns, within the framework of my special circus, speak to a kind performance anxiety, the beginning of a kind of transformation, something to assist in the release. A decidedly female release. A good one.
WNG
Your piece in Your body is a battle ground is a text piece written using clown make-up on a mirror and reads, “Put the words in my mouth” That’s a really impactful phrase, and I love the way it works with the topics addressed in the show. What was your goal with this piece in particular?
IB
This piece came from my intense desire to speak back. To subvert the seemingly submissive message this sentence contains. It’s a kind of dare. Too many people out there telling women what to do, how to think, how to be, and nothing is ever right. Try me…
In conversation with Mary Helena Clark
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Your film The Plant is featured in The Way The Mystic Sees. This self described spy film creates an immersive environment for the onlooker. As there is a sense of embodying the movements of the camera by the individual, the work provokes ideas of being followed and intruded upon. What is the emotion you were trying to create by juxtaposing the sounds of the hustle and bustle of life with these specific, unidentified characters?
Mary Helena Clark
Foley — the post production art of manufacturing sound effects to sync with an image — and bad foley in particular, were influential to the film’s sound design. The film is about the slippery truth in observation, the overlay of fiction on the observed, and sound that doesn’t quite match with the image does a lot to raise questions of its veracity or authenticity, both tricky ideas. Sound/image relationships become a kind of perceptual test. What is sensed as unnatural? What falls apart or into place when we register the construction of an observation? A key sound in the film is the distortion from wind on the mic that adds to the chaos of the street scene, points to the recording devices, and, like cinema verite style camera work, adds to the documentary claim of the image. If you listen closely you’ll hear inhales between the final “gusts” of wind, a bit of a curtain reveal. When making The Plant, I was interested in tricks-of-the-trade dealt with as a conceptual strategy.
WNG
You are very intentional about the imagery you integrate into the work. The use of sequential images shot in ‘non-modern’ visuals places the viewer in a different environment and time, while simultaneously raising questions of who is being watched and followed today. Is this fluidity and interconnection of time integral to your piece?
MHC
All of the images were shot in 2011 and 2012 in Chicago on 16mm film. The format plus the telephoto zooms take the images out of the contemporary and allude to 70s films like Coppola’s The Conversation. I’m using the visual reference to access the tropes of the spy and thriller genres, more than to comment on temporality. I wanted to make a film that’s built around searching, inquisitive point-of-view shots. It is a question of who is being watched, but also one of complicity. Are those who appear in the film acting for the camera or are they unknowingly enlisted into it?
WNG
The Plant considers both sound and its absence, which creates moments of introspection for the viewer. Furthermore, the use of shadows and the walking stick act as metaphors for the physical presence of surveillance, which references cinema noir. Are you using these tropes to illustrate the more physical presence of surveillance as something more nefarious?
MHC
The physical presence that I was interested in was the body behind the camera, whose role shifts from observer when the film is capturing images on the street, to producer when the film’s images are directed and arranged. In a contemporary sense, I think of surveillance as totalizing capture, a large net of looking to be sifted later. The Plant uses a surveilling eye in a more subjective and conspiratorial way, asking how we make meaning. The line of what is or isn’t conspiratorial is both an abiding theme of the genre films The Plant references, and of the monomaniacal thinking artmaking requires. The problems of filmmaking are the problems of how you negotiate an abundance of things, constructing meaning in a way that threatens to impose the Paranoid’s (and also the Detective’s) rigorously ordered fantasy upon the orderless world.
WNG
Often people create avatars as a way to mask their identities. However, there’s an anonymity about architecture which is also a tool for which to lose oneself or the other. Do you see the building as a symbol for concealment? And for who — the designer, the dweller, or the passerby?
MHC
The film was designed around the image of a tower, as fortress, panopticon, prison. I was interested in using the architecture of Marina City as a repetitive visual field that I could disrupt with the man waving from the balcony. I wanted the facelessness of the building interrupted by a single figure. It’s a blot, an ambiguous gesture that interrupts the image and begs for interpretation. We can wonder if the person is signaling us, or surrendering, or if we’ve “intercepted” a signal for someone else. The issue of being in or outside of a network of meaning is central to the film, and anonymity of those observed and of the person looking keeps the ricochet of signal and search going.
In conversation with Max Guy
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
An extension of your previous work, you contributed a series of steel masks to The Way the Mystic Sees. How do you posit these—as disguises, or something more ceremonial?
Max Guy
This trio was described by a friend as a “punctuation” to my ongoing series of cut-out masks, which is currently a collection of around 100 or so iterations of masks that I started in 2017. Those were prototypes for a larger mask, cut from extruded Styrofoam, that I’d used in a performance. At that time I was interested in performing with the mask, so the material was more ergonomic, and the method of cutting out prototypes from paper was also a quick way to iterate. The decision to cut these from steel, and paint them in primary colors was also an ergonomic decision in a way. Steel is rigid so it can communicate a kind of flatness, and is magnetic, so it’s easy to hang. Primary colors came more intuitively as well in this case.
I don’t see them being used as a disguise at the moment, but I also wouldn’t completely abandon the idea. The three masks exhibited are more ornamental. If you can call the examination of the masks a ceremony, then they might be ceremonial masks. I’ve visited a lot of homes and tourist destinations where masks are treated as souvenirs, and divorced from any ceremony (other than their exchange). I grew up in New York City, in a home decorated with masks that were purchased as souvenirs and alienated from the traditions in Africa and the Caribbean that birthed them. Maybe for some people they hold a symbolic value as some sort of link to their past, but my fascination with masks came from the horror in gazing at these stoic, disembodied faces on the walls of my home. I saw them in my therapist’s office growing up and took comfort in the fact that if I couldn’t look him in the eye, I could look at them. For the moment, I’m happy to look as these masks formally, and to think about a face’s distinct social implications.
WNG
Cut forms feature heavily in your artistic practice. Is this a way to represent malleability of the art object, of that which it conceals, or which it may even project?
MG
I cut silhouetted forms, and my impulse to cut is a separate one from my use of outline or silhouette. Cutting-out a is a reductive action and I don’t know if looking at a silhouette is always reductive. As you said, we project/add quite a lot on/to a silhouette. I like the different things you can do with a cutout: you can circumscribe, circumnavigate, omit, divide, trace. Blades, lasers, water-jets, these are an entirely different set of technologies that are used to cut things from whatever happens with the use of silhouettes, outlines, stencils, etc.
For me, silhouettes imply shadows, concealment, projection, as you said. They evoke different cognitive and psychological principles. My favorite silhouettes are Kara Walker’s, because with them she’s able to make the viewer assume races, sexualities, racial hierarchies, inferred acts of violence, and all with one color.
Silhouettes and concealment are used in motion capture studies for CGI and surveillance — I don’t think that cutouts really have anything to do with this. I can build out from a silhouette, its flatness leaves a lot to be demanded, whole other dimensions. But when you cut something it’s already a three-dimensional material.
WNG
You frequently use color in your work, both semiotically as a way to impact the viewer. How does the use of, in this case primary colors, tie in with the notion of surveillance? As a method of distraction, or something much more engrossing?
MG
I don’t really have a color theory, and as I said before, the use of primary colors was more functional in this case. Red, blue and yellow are fundamentally unique from one another and my hope in usuing them was to distinguish each face, despite similarities in outline and cut forms. In this way, I was interested in creating characters out of each face. I like work that can use color evocatively in this way.
WNG
You’ve previously mentioned an interest in pareidolia, and how it’s used to build facial detection software. As our society becomes (amazingly even more) image-based, do you believe that the opposite can be taught — the face as an unrecognizable form as we become more detached from those around us?
MG
Facial recognition is a social thing — on a personal note I don’t know if I would want to learn how to un-recognize a face. The BBC series The Human Face, is a really fun show with John Cleese that goes into all of the reason humans need to be able to recognize a face and its myriad expressions. I read somewhere that 1 in 50 people live with Prosopagnosia, a disorder that leaves people unable to recognize faces. The painter Chuck Close has it, and probably also had a hand in how image-based our society now is.
One of the things I think about the most when making these masks is how in a number of years, I read more about artificial intelligence and machine learning than the mapping of the human mind, the kind of studies of empathy, and the functions of the brain. Even if this was dilettantish reading, the leap (and clear path) from cognitive science to machine learning has me very uneasy. Facial recognition technology — as an offshoot of artificial intelligence — is, to quote a friend, “a scientifically unsound cover story for expanding the surveillance state.” Out of paranoia I fear that even technologies used to un-recognize, to ignore, certain faces might be used in some sinister way. I hope that we’re not learning unlearning facial recognition!
In conversation with Meredith Haggerty
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Can you tell us how you developed Tiny Retreat, an album of audio tracks specifically produced for Rebuilding the Present? How did the process evolve through the collaborations and conversations you had with many of the artists in the exhibition?
Meredith Haggerty
Holly Cahill, the exhibition's curator, expressed early on that she wanted the show itself to invite people to slow down and observe. I was inspired by affinities between her ideas and time I’ve spent in walking meditation with my husband. When we lived in Chicago, we’d go to a retreat center called Windhorse in rural Wisconsin for self-guided meditation retreats. The center is in a beautiful area with lots of rolling hills, and between sittings, we’d take turns leading each other on silent walks. At dinner one night, we talked about how being guided through the landscape was such a highlight for each of us. It gave us a chance to actively observe a space unfolding without fully navigating things. It felt like watching a film or listening to music.
I’d been playing with the idea of recording guided meditations for some time, and Rebuilding The Present seemed like the right space to begin that work. As I began to compose instructions, it became clear that I wanted these meditations to respond to the Weinberg/Newton Gallery space and the works in it. But since I now live in Chapel Hill, I needed to find a way to do it from afar.
I researched the space and the artists, but felt the need for even more connection. I asked Holly if she and I and perhaps some of the artists in the show could talk about our studio practices and the work going into the show. I am so grateful for their engagement because those conversations shaped tiny retreat. We talked about life experiences that informed our studio practices, ways in which audience interaction with our work is meaningful to us and things we would like to see happen with our work. It felt right to me that guided meditations that invite close engagement with the show were inspired by heartfelt, thoughtful conversation with artists in the show.
WNG
You received your MFA from the University of Chicago and later worked there in mind-body medicine teaching and implementing campus-wide curriculum and programing over a 10 year period. Can you share more about your experience as an artist working in mind-body medicine and how it may have informed the guided meditations in the exhibition? Where do these tracks veer from your experiences in the field of medicine?
MH
It is important to include that besides visual arts, I also have training in mind-body medicine including massage therapy, yoga, somatics and meditation. All of these combined allowed me to develop such a program.
The program at the University of Chicago began in Student Health. There, I worked alongside physicians and nurse practitioners to create complementary clinical care rooted in mind-body practices to help students manage stress and pain.
It was this work that led to yoga and meditation programs in campus chapels, galleries and conference rooms and then eventually to a curriculum at The Pritzker School of Medicine. I was constantly taking apart and reworking mind-body instructions and practice to fit into a variety of spaces and meet the needs of the particular group. It was lovely to work creatively with each space. The site-specific nature of that work kept me connected to my art practice even though there was this whole other career. It felt natural to continue working with those themes for Rebuilding the Present.
At University of Chicago I kept my work within the scope of the scientific literature on mind-body medicine. This happened naturally because I was reporting to physicians who understandably wanted this program based in science. It remains a great foundation for me. Rebuilding the Present was a permission to open things up and bring in themes as they were being explored by the artists with whom I spoke. Wander without moving and object holding pattern are meditations in tiny retreat that both incorporate moments of contemplation that, as far as I know, don’t have any literature suggesting they are tools for stress or pain management but are certainly rooted in awareness and agency and interwoven with instructions that do reflect the science of mind-body medicine.
WNG
It would be wonderful if you could walk us through one of the tracks you developed with an artist(s) in Rebuilding the Present and give us some insight into how their work influenced the recording? What do you hope that the visitors to the exhibition or the listeners on SoundCloud may take away from the album?
MH
First settle in is a track that was inspired by all of the artists with whom I spoke. The instructions begin with an invitation to find a comfortable place and position and then bring attention to other immediate surroundings by looking around. These instructions were drawn from our shared interest in installing work and inviting others to spend time with objects or ideas with which we have spent time, physically manipulated and developed a relationship with.
Then I invite observers to close their eyes and scan their body for sensations from breath, posture and tension. This part of the exercise is about noticing things that we typically take for granted or ignore, which is another theme that came up in each conversation. All of us were interested in the kind of intimacy that allows us to notice nuance. Whether it’s a slight variance in color or texture or a shift in the use or appearance of an image or object, each of us is curious about how layers unfold in our work and ways of inviting the audience to process this.
We then open our eyes and return to looking practice. The meditation closes with a tactile practice, similar to the beginning and my hope is that the track offers an opportunity to connect with the space in a way that consciously deepens over time and includes some stuff going on internally.
WNG
These works pair art and meditation to form the work itself. How do you negotiate the relationship between the two? Is meditation an important part of your practice?
MH
They certainly overlap, but they are quite different practices. A practice in studio art is, at the end of the day, at least partly about production and assessing what you make. Meditation practice, while not passive, often includes stepping back and noticing our urges to produce or judge situations then sitting with those qualities or exploring them within their larger context.
In this way, just like any life practice paired with contemplative work, meditation and art-making can inform each other. If I try to boil down my own experience, each practice contains the opportunity to notice my habits and avoidance strategies. From there, I can choose to work in a space closer to my heart and move into the other practice from that sweet and tender space. For me, the practices in tandem are like a friendship where both parties can totally be themselves and that honesty, with all the expressed messiness, vulnerability and weakness, strengthens the friendship and supports the individuals.
There are some intersections where I cannot distinguish the practices so well. Both seem to be sensory-based platforms that connect us to our immediate space including our internal landscape. Both practices require presence and a willingness to stay and return even when things are boring, fruitless or failed. Also, sometimes people think about starting an art practice or a meditation practice but don’t do it. I imagine we’ve all done this many times. We have an idea for a book or some paintings or we’ve read that meditation can help with a work or health-related goal but we let it sit there as an idea, something for the future. There can be lovely creativity in thinking about making art or meditating, but only if it leads us to starting where we are with whatever we have. Any practitioner of either form will tell you that some irreplaceable, juicy stuff happens only when you start practicing and you have to keep diving in.
Also, I don’t know if it works this way for others, but for me, metaphors, stories and images arrive more easily and take on more significance when I make space for and listen to the landscape beyond my own constant chatter.
In conversation with Jaclyn Jacunski
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
You have two installations in Bold Disobedience, By Ways & Means and The Super Local. Can you speak on the issues that both works are addressing?
Jaclyn Jacunski
By Ways & Means is a system of pathways made of chain link fences. The fence is devoid of color, scaled down, and abstracted by a repeated pattern. It is a gritty and sobering architectural object surrounding private property, which becomes especially charged when taken out of context into the gallery space. The layout of pathways overlaps and shifts in scale, becoming visually complicated. The pathways and shapes are syncopated around the gallery in addition to a relief sculpture that is installed on a wall, appearing in struggle, pulling away as the chain link is bent and misshapen.
The project merges the atmosphere of the socioeconomic melting pot of Chicago. It is embedded with narratives of the city’s landscape, following a trip from home, through a neighborhood, to school. The work signifies systems that shape communities and lead the audience to consider issues of class and race, which lie beneath capitalist systems. The fence is an architectural object that folds in multiple meanings beyond gentrification. It also speaks to spatial justice, alluding to the prison industrial complex and restricted borders. The fences fashion a relational experience of walking through intimate experiences and spaces in Chicago.
The Super Local was created from west side neighborhood newspapers. The papers hang from library newspaper poles in vertical rows on the gallery’s wall. The top of the installation holds local papers then and gradates downward with paper designs I manipulate by blending and blurring images, which fade away. The papers give voice to the west side area’s lower-income residents, working as both formal and conceptual points of departure for the work. The papers recede into color fields, pulling from the newspaper’s color printing, ranging from a light tone to a dark shade while at the same time redacting and amplifying in intensity.
This installation responds to the sheer density of negative media coverage that creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense and aggressive. Citizens of lower income neighborhoods have to participate in these constructs everyday. The local community newspapers provide a counter point of view to the dominant narratives of how one sees Chicago’s west side. Mainstream media builds off of negative stereotypes, which often seem unreasonable to the lived neighborhood life. This local reporting communicates perspectives that are often overlooked — celebrating local achievements, talented people, creative events, strengths, and joys of community life.
WNG
Many of your works center around the urban landscape. What made you choose this subject matter, and how does it connect to the overall ideas of community and collective voice? The Super Local highlights local newspapers from specific Chicago neighborhoods that you have gradually blurred and degraded. It shows how, as a city, we often do not see these as growing, breathing neighborhoods, but instead are left with only a dying image. How do you think the youth community can help fix this? And through your artwork, how do you think you might be able to change it?
JJ
Every day, Chicago’s urban landscape is the space where I live and physically move through, and I use the experience as a type of research to interpret. It maps out forms and languages of our communal life that we build together. For me, the landscape and the built environment reveal poetic evidence that engages our senses and physical experiences in the world. This evidence helps me to gain understanding of our histories, psychologies, and relationships to power and institutions. I am inspired by the politics of space and the land as spatial justice. I look to it as a means of understanding power and how communities create their own narratives, finding spaces of freedom in the face of segregation and inequality.
I think activating spaces to take on meaningful issues and challenging dominant culture, as the Mikva Challenge curators have done at Weinberg/Newton Gallery, is one way to fix dying neighborhoods. Bold Disobedience shows the type of work that takes on reshaping our city and how people on the local level can essentially transform their neighborhoods and create a new construct within the urban environment. Things like engaging in community-building and cultural activities bring people together: organizing art events and music shows and open mics, making publications that take on issues to build understanding. There are super practical ways to heal our city by volunteering to rehab houses and bikes, help grow food, and mentor kids. In addition, it is important to be brave and speak out, analyze power, call representatives, and take action by organizing people to come together for change.
I hope in my work that I can connect with others in new, thoughtful ways, to build new connections and open up intelligent ways to move in the world. I see art as a kind of elixir or energy force that helps make change possible because it works through the senses and outside rigid systems.
WNG
How did you get interested in art? I wonder how you were able to combat the negative opinions associated with pursuing a career in art. I know many youths who would love to study art as a major, but outside factors often affect their decision.
JJ
I do not remember a time in my life when I was not interested in art and making things. Art has always had a place in my life. Looking back, I understand now it is not really a decision I chose but a vocation that is part of who I am. My practice really developed in high school, I worked a lot on drawing when my dad was struggling with an illness. I spent a lot of time at home working on art while spending time with him. When I went to college I began very practically on a pre-law track, and then took art and art history as electives — I loved the classes, then just never turned back and worked for my BFA.
It was hard for me growing up in a rural farming community where there was not access to the arts. The people in my life just did not understand that world or how to support me — it just did not make sense to them. They were so proud that I made it to college and were worried I was throwing away a huge opportunity to have a stable life. I will admit I did not always win against the negative opinions and gave up a few times but came back. When I was not working as an artist I was not in line with who I was. Yet, it was also hard to know where I belonged in the art world and to use my talents.
I think studying art is incredibly valuable and fulfilling. However, I encourage youth who want to take it on to work with mentors, and to build a supportive community. Art degrees are really what one makes of them. It can be easy to get by and not push the work. One needs to be self-driven, ambitious, have curiosity, and enjoy working independently.
WNG
What drives you as an artist? Are there any organizations you work with who are passionate about the same issues your work addresses?
JJ
I am in a constant search for understanding and constantly placing that search into form. I am driven to examine issues of inequality, power, and justice. Currently, I am working in North Lawndale to bring arts programming to the west side for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I love working on grassroots and community-level projects. I volunteer at West Town Bikes, support several women’s empowerment organizations, and am very involved in community art spaces like Spudnik Press.
WNG
What does “community” mean to you?
JJ
“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” This is a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. that influences my own views on community. I see community as a way of affirming that reality is made up of parts that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that humans are dependent upon each other. Community defines our relationships with one another and to the Earth. It is the courage to love and care for people as we love and care for our own families. It is a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love.
WNG
In your work Start Together, which exhibited at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2016, you talk about the fence as being an indicator between the rich and the poor throughout the city of Chicago. Can you expand on that?
JJ
I was thinking about value and how the city of Chicago cares for some communities differently than others communities. How does poverty happen and what systems sustain and support inequity? In Start Together, I created a labyrinth of orange plastic fencing, a material that litters empty west side lots. It seems to be draped everywhere. Though it is a material that one typically sees in other places as well, in Chicago it often lands in bulk on speculated land and outdoor spaces that are left behind and uncared for. Those who enter the labyrinth I created contend with the dizzying pattern and maneuver in a complicated space. The material holds clues about the way Chicago neighborhoods are valued along with how we feel valued in the city. It addresses complications of property in any neighborhood. It also highlights the underlying tensions from the changes or necessary changes not happening in a community.
WNG
Further, how does this observation make you feel about the future of Chicago, and even the U.S.?
JJ
I believe that together we must work for change, furiously.
In conversation with Anna Elise Johnson
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
In describing your work, you talk a lot about the power of images and their ability to reinforce social, political, and historical norms. Can you tell us about the specific kinds of imagery you use in your work and where you find it?
Anna Elise Johnson
I continuously collect images produced since the end of the Cold War that support the advanced-capitalist ideology we call neoliberalism. I look for photos that mark the historical shift towards the notions that freedom is best protected by free markets, and that government should be small and function only to guard market freedom and private property. I have gathered imagery from the last thirty years of political and economic negotiations, as well as from the protests and upheavals intended to counteract such negotiations. My sources for these images include the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization photo archives, the State Department’s Flickr page, news sites from around the world, and Google image searches for specific negotiations and protests.
WNG
What comes to mind when you consider the image of power?
AEJ
I think of power in the Foucauldian sense that power is to be found everywhere. It operates from the top down as well as from the bottom up. I do not believe that there is a single image of power but rather that multiple images appear as nodes in the network of operations of power. Images are produced intentionally to support oppressive power structures, but because power is everywhere, images can also be used as emblems of resistance to challenge those structures.
In my recent work I have been contrasting staged photos produced by those in power with unstaged photos of people protesting in the streets. These protesters have no access to the restricted centers of global decision-making nor, for example, can G-8 summit participants hear the sounds of the protesters outside. Furthermore, the images of such summits that enter the news and history books have nothing to do with protest but instead represent carefully controlled messaging. In my artwork, I have been rearranging and manipulating various aspects of these representations of power— two men in suits shaking hands, along with the rugs and architecture and all the trappings of wealth surrounding them.
WNG
Your acrylic collages are such unique objects. They are layered and complicated in a way that is at once seductive, yet visually confusing. Can you tell us a little bit about how you began working with this medium and why you chose this form to support this particular content?
AEJ
I started working with the content in this kind of photograph in graduate school at the University of Chicago. I was working with oil paint at the time, painting croppings of images fairly photo-realistically, then repeatedly masking off half of that painted image with strips of tape and repainting the image on top of it in a different tone. Then I pulled the tape strips to expose an image repeating itself in slightly contrasting and offset layers. After graduate school, I received a Core Program fellowship in Houston, where I decided to make the layering more obvious but at the same time more complicated by using digital prints applied to multiple transparent acrylic sheets bonded with clear resin. Using this technique, I was able to make the layered images exist in three-dimensional space, allowing the viewer to appreciate and understand each layer individually and in relation to the others. Making the work thicker and more dimensional also allowed the viewer to decipher and unveil images layer by layer based on the viewer’s physical position in a manner that wasn’t possible on the flat surface of a painting.
WNG
You often put great emphasis on the hands, i.e. gestures, handshakes. In some of your earlier collages you extract the entire figure, leaving on only the hands, and your works in Sapphire, Blue Suit and Two Suits, prioritize the hands at the forefront. What do the hands signify for you?
AEJ
The hands in the two pieces in Sapphire both communicate clear and recognizable gestures. In Two Suits, the hands are grasped in the tight grip of a handshake staged for the original propagandistic purpose of the photograph – to symbolize a political agreement. In Blue Suit, one hand’s pointer finger touches the opposite hand’s pinky, implying, “I am making a point.” I filled the silhouette of the suits with a collage of objects from their mis-en-scene, forming a visual barricade out of the constituent elements of the photograph. In other work, I have often left the figures empty as negative silhouettes, while including as positive elements their hands and ties. The individuals in these photographs often over determine the legible narrative of the image. By removing them, I expose the props and mechanisms that contribute to their strategic messaging.
WNG
It was fascinating on opening night to watch your performance, Another Encounter. I was surprised by how much it mimicked the layered, luminous style of your sculptures. For those who were unable to attend, the performance consisted of you projecting gesturing politicians onto yourself while attempting to align your face and body with their’s. Simultaneously, an audio recording played of the politicians’ language spliced with a recitation of Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity. There’s so much that can be said about the relationship between gender and power. Can you describe that relationship in regards to this piece?
AEJ
I wanted to do a performance that more directly placed me as a queer woman in relation to these suited, male politicians whom I’ve been using in my work and to think through what my actual, corporeal relationship was to their performance of power. The video clips of the politicians that I projected onto my body all came from the Charlie Rose Show, and I chose segments in which they were speaking about how to project and maintain power within a globalized world. The Judith Butler speech that I interjected brought together her ideas of gender performativity with her ideas about precarity. In other words, she combined her idea that gender is not innately within us but is enacted through a continued performance with her ideas about how certain populations become precarious, to show how precarity is linked to the presentation of gender norms.
During the performance I aligned my body in relationship to the gesturing politicians projected on top of me, and I was continuously trying to keep up with their gestures as I watched myself in my cell phone that was live streaming my image to the other side of the gallery. Sometimes their faces morphed completely with mine and other times I was too slow or moved in the wrong direction and the projection misaligned to show my own eyes, features, and body. Judith Butler suggests that because gender is a performance (and we have to continuously re-perform gender), there is also the possibility that the presentation of gender can fail to repeat and come undone in unexpected ways. By mirroring the gesturing male politicians, I hoped to draw out these possibilities. I think the performance succeeded as a confrontation and reinforced the messages of my sculptural art.
WNG
Do you have any future projects in the works you can share with us? I’m curious if all of the wild media representation surrounding this year’s presidential election has influenced you in any way.
AEJ
Toward the end of the presidential campaign it seemed as if discussions of politics revolved entirely around Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as if our minds had been overtaken by these two figures who completely dominated the news media, our Facebook feeds, and our imaginations. Now that Donald Trump is the president-elect, all the imagery surrounding politics, at least this week, only reinforces the trauma of the Trump win. All the direct racism and misogyny that he spewed during the campaign, and in turn the methods that artists and comedians used to parody or critique him, did not suffice to convince voters of the terrible choice they were making by voting for him.
At the beginning of the week when I started doing the Instagram takeover for the Weinberg/ Newton Gallery, I was thinking about focusing on the theme of iconoclasm and expressing my rage through the destruction of Trump’s image. The day after he was elected, it felt somewhat cathartic to see citizens obliterate a Trump piñata or burn a giant effigy of his head, but now I just do not want to see him at all. I’m feeling at the moment that I’ll have to use methods that no longer treat the kind of imagery immediately connected to a closed discourse about what politics can mean, but instead what they now do mean. I have been going to protests all week and taking photographs. For this week anyway, instead of searching for imagery of all the global negotiations that I normally collect, I’ve been focusing more on images of upheaval and protest.
In conversation with Asa Mendelsohn
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Your contribution to the exhibition is a HD three channel video titled Instrumental, which echoes throughout the gallery. As someone whose work focuses on the intimacy of power structures, this reflects the solitude of the guards on film, especially when coupled with the singing of “You Will Be Found” from the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen. Airport security, and airports in general, are places of anxiety on a number of levels, yet Instrumental is almost a reestablishment of autonomy by the subjects. Was that the intention of this piece?
Asa Mendelsohn
While I was working on this, a friend shared a text by Simone Browne, who refers to the airport as a “security theater.” That made a lot of sense to me, as a way to describe the intricacy of the security work that takes place at the airport — where long checkpoint lines, escalators, scrolling info screens, build a fragmented, moving stage — but also as a way to describe how that people who work in these spaces are enlisted as its actors.
When and where is it possible to claim autonomy from the state, or from your manager? The instability of autonomy is normal, and is its own kind of horror. I wanted the work I did at the airport to address that instability. In that way it felt important to include not just sequences of singing, but the moments leading up to song, and the moments after, waiting around, setting up.
There’s a moment right before Joe starts singing “You Will Be Found” when you can hear the airport music in the background. Joe’s getting ready to start singing, but at this point we’ve been filming for awhile and he’s already warmed up, waiting for a second camera. He starts singing along to the airport. He laughs: “I wish I knew this song.”
WNG
There’s a lot of “dancing” in the piece, whether seemingly more choreographed (as with the wheelchair) or in subtler fashion (I’m thinking of the movement of the escalators). Were you thinking about these actions as something that occurs by happenstance in an airport, or as motion with which to pair with singing?
AM
Tieri’s dance with the wheelchair was actually a lot less directed than the sequences on the escalators. It was more spontaneous. He started dancing that day as a way to loosen up, in order to sing, and then his cumbia moved across the floor. We were filming at the far end of Terminal 2 near an area closed off for construction, and it was relatively quiet. There happened to be these wheelchairs, and having already gotten over there, Tieri took one as a partner. After he did this once we were like yes of course, so then he did it again. That was one of the days it was just me and him working together, and we’d already met a few times, so I think it was more possible to feel out the space. The image of Tieri pushing the empty dancing chair came through that process of play. The shots on the escalators were a bit different, these aspirational moments of music video choreography that I included in iteration, to show the process of trying to make the image.
WNG
Being in their day-to-day job, were the security guards more comfortable performing in front of their colleagues, or did you have to goad them a bit? Were any permissions involved, in terms of their bosses consenting to their being recorded?
AM
There were a lot of permissions involved, and separate conversations with each performer about what kind of singing they’re into, what they needed to feel comfortable. I knew I wanted to work one-on-one with people, so the process of directing was pretty idiosyncratic and came out of conversations. With another performer, this guy Lou who’s actually a retired TSA agent who made a cameo at the airport to sing Frank Sinatra songs, we created a karaoke setup in a food court. I ended up being most interested in how these two performers, Joe and Tieri, bounce off each other, so I edited the three channel version of the work to feature their songs.
I was granted permission to film there within the framework of creating a public artwork, commissioned by the airport. I had support from curators and security managers across the different companies working under the umbrella of airport security. I was able to work with performers while they were on the clock. A single channel version of the work was on view in two locations for a year, on the same monitors that display ads for Clinique or CNN or whatever. There’s a real tension in the work for me, between my intention to talk about about precarity and alienation, and what I think the airport liked about my proposal — the possibility to humanize airport security, make it more musical. I’m interested in that tension — is it legible viewing the work now, in the gallery, in the context of a show about surveillance?
WNG
Considering the above, what do you intend to address next in your work?
AM
While I was working at the airport I made a performance with security staff at the Blanton Museum of Art at UT Austin, that felt pretty directly related. For the duration of a free, mostly musical public performance event, gallery assistants roved through museum spaces, narrating what they observed. Their voices were miked and carried across the museum mezzanine and lobby, while also running through a voice to text software displaying fragments from four performers speech on a monitor. Like at the airport, at the museum I was interested in the seams of a performance, and how the labor of security procedures might be re-ordered by their seams.
Recent collaborations have involved working with voice in different ways, writing screenplays for operatic voices, and I have been working with an amazing singer, Hillary Jean Young, on the score for the film I’m working on now. The film is pretty different in form than anything I’ve made before, a feature-length essay reflecting on relationships between coalitional organizing and passing, and between activism and fantasy, looking, in part, at the legacy of a grassroots movement that successfully resisted private military development in Southern California in the mid-2000s. I’m editing right now, working through really challenging questions about my own voice.
In conversation with Cheryl Pope
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Your ongoing project JUST YELL encompasses a range of media that uses cheerleading as a conceptual base. Can you tell us about how you decided to merge issues of gun violence with this form?
Cheryl Pope
Yelling is what cheerleading used to be called and I was immediately taken by this as its connection to histories of call and response, protest, protection, excitement, and celebration. This encompassed what Chicago and the United States needs: the calling out and the reacting to injustice, as well as the celebrating of difference and the excitement of coming together with pride, respect, and honor to be together.
Cheerleading also comes with a voice of command. The cheerleaders role is to direct the audience, bringing them together and unifying their voice so that it is louder as a community, rather than as individuals. This places the voice of youth in a position of power, commanding and suggesting what they think the city should be yelling.
For the past 5 years, I have been using the aesthetics of all American varsity sports to discuss issues of inequality, systems that abuse power, and racism. For me, the varsity aesthetics, along with classic and muscle cars from the 1950-’70s, hold the ideals of the “American Dream.” Sports also tells the history of race in the United States, basketball and boxing specifically. Because athletics are celebrated and offered nationwide, it is also a very accessible framework which just about everyone can read. And most important, varsity aesthetics embody the rudimentary characters we need: team, pride, honor, and respect. They celebrate the individual with the small name on the front of the jacket while emphasizing the team on the back of the jacket. For me this brings forward the need for the individual and the community to exist as one.
WNG
Working so closely with youth seems to be of pivotal importance to your practice. I imagine it is rewarding for the young people you work with to feel like they are being encouraged to raise their voices, but more so, there’s something very powerful as a viewer to hear these concerns straight from the youths that are most affected by the ramifications of gun violence. How did you begin collaborating with young people as part of your practice?
CP
It is a complete honor for me that young people are interested to collaborate with me, and trust me with their bodies and voices. We perform many different contexts for many different audiences, traveling together and meeting new people, I try to be extremely thoughtful and communicate with them about each opportunity.
I am most interested to collaborate with them because they are the future. They feel, notice, question, and react. They often see what adults cannot, and it is they who are the coming leaders.
WNG
One of your works in This Heat is a 2 hr 54 min video piece titled One of Many, One. This slow and repetitive video is at once heartbreaking and captivating. I’ve seen many people sit with it for quite a while at the gallery. It’s a resounding message of the weight of grief and loss, as well as a reminder of the immanent threat of violence towards communities of color. I’m curious, how did you conceive of this particular way to describe these ideas?
CP
The RIP shirts are very common amongst youth as healing objects to honor, respect, and process the lives of loved ones lost to gun violence. Many of the youths I collaborate with knew several, which means they have several shirts. I thought about what it feels like to carry this loss, and had an image of putting on all the shirts at one time. Justyce lost seven friends, and I thought of her petite frame wearing all 7 shirts at once, and how this might communicate the weight, the swollen pain, and the unprocessed sadness that she carries. From talking with them, I heard their fear that they could be next. I imagined that when they saw the shirts, they might see theirs, and together this idea emerged for the video.
WNG
Have you ever installed any work from this project in schools? If so, what was the response?
CP
Yes, I installed the banners from the project called A SILENT I at Lindblom Math and Science Academy in Englewood, Ontario College of Art and Design and also currently have banners installed in the Athletic Center at Kenyon College. In both cases the text on the banners is written by the students of the school, however what I discovered is that when a viewer confronts the banners, they assume that I, as the artist am the author. Upon learning that the voice is reflective of a community, often one they are involved in, their interpretation and relationship to the work shifts. As they recognize themselves in the text, they are also seeing the other, experiencing the feeling of being both an individual and part of a community.
WNG
What would you say is your overall goal/intention with this body of work?
CP
I wouldn’t say JUST YELL is a body of work, but rather that it is a series of reactions, it is a movement, a framework to come together and bring together. At the foundation are intentions of equality, justice, and protection. It’s about bringing forward the voice and truths of the people, acknowledging the felt experience, and documenting these testimonies in order to instigate change and record a more just history.
WNG
Can you recount any particularly memorable moments while making JUST YELL?
CP
Because respect, trust, and hope are at the root of JUST YELL, each of our exchanges are so powerful, so revealing, and felt that memorable moments are abundant. It’s really about slowing down to listen deeply to one another, and when one does, you feel the memory of each moment as it is unfolding.
In conversation with Alison Ruttan
Weinberg Newton Gallery
How did you first become interested in addressing violence and its relationships to human nature through your artwork?
Alison Ruttan
I have always been interested in trying to decipher human behavior. I suppose it relates to growing up in multiple environments and cultural customs that I had to negotiate. As an adult, I have been interested in the ways culture and biology determine behavior. I am particularly drawn to the kinds of behavior that are part of patterns of learned behavior and those that are seemingly hard wired. I made work about sex and appetite for many years but switched to looking at aggression soon after 9/11. I use my art practice to try to understand the deep anger that fuels aggression. I have looked to fields like evolutionary biology, feminism, political science and history as sources of my inquiry. My most recent work has concerned itself with the state of endless war.
WNG
Our partner organization for this exhibition, Facing History and Ourselves, approaches history through the lens of identity and the individual. I feel your work does this in a unique way even without depicting any people. Through focusing on the destruction of urban homes, and often placing your sculptures upon or within domestic furniture, we’re constantly brought back to the effects of war on community. Can you tell us more about your choice to focus on civilian structures as opposed to civilians themselves?
AR
It is the feminist side of me that led me to the war work. I often feel that those who start wars (mostly men) are driven, (at best), by principles that often exclude consideration of the cost paid by those who have to live with the consequences. Chris Hedges writes in the book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, writes about the terrible seductiveness of war and the problem with the idea of “heroism” that war promises. I was very affected by the images I saw on the nightly news during the war in Iraq. I was also very distrustful of my own countries involvement in the Middle East. I did not think we knew what we were doing.
Initially I was working in video and photography in related projects exploring the origins of violence. When I began the ceramic work, I initially tried to include people in the wreckage but I quickly saw that it too easily pointed to the emotion you should feel but left little opportunity for a more reflective experience. By removing the people and presenting only the shell, the remains of a home, it points to those who are now gone. The building most damaged are often built in “The International Style”, a type of architecture found in cities all over the world. Many of the buildings look like the same kind of homes we also live in. In the more recent work that integrates home furnishings with the suggestion of rubble or shattered buildings, my intention was to point to a domestic life lost.
WNG
As spectators, removed from the direct impact of warfare, we may see photographs of ruin and devastation but we can often become oversaturated with the images we encounter through our screens every day. Do you think the physicality of your sculptural installations provides the viewer with a heavier impact than the photograph is able to?
AR
We live in news world that largely focuses on one sensational story at a time. I think that when people see blown up cities night after night they begin to lose their shock. Andy Warhol speaks about repetition as having a numbing effect. Sadly the horror of these images can become ordinary. In my work, I think the physicality and intimate scale invites you to peer inside to maybe understand more, the craft of how they are made also distracts your attention, but I believe the distraction holds your attention and your thoughts are allowed to linger as you move between the various emotions that the pieces elicit.
WNG
In your piece, All Down the Line, you show a row of nine buildings — each one more crumbled than the next. This piece in particular hints at the passage of time and the perpetual state of unrest, as I can imagine one building slowly collapsing after the other. I wonder what role does time play in your work? From the fact that some of the ceramic structures you build are based off of images of specific buildings which may no longer be standing, to the fact that you personally have to painstakingly construct that which is destructed.
AR
The time I am describing is gone, these sculpture represent an in between state, neither livable or bulldozed over into empty lots. They are records of a sort, as each building is based on source photographs of specific buildings. This particular scene of the white row houses, all the same, looked like dominoes falling, I wondered how it might be to live at the end of the block that was hardly touched. Perhaps later or even now, new cities will begin to build on these same sites and the events will become just a memory.
WNG
You mention on your website that you began the ceramic work as a way to understand something that was beyond your own experience, starting from a place of empathy. What do you feel you’ve learned or helped others learn throughout the making of this work?
AR
In some ways I have learned nothing that points to making any of this better. I have learned that we don’t learn from our mistakes very well. Maybe that is something that should make us more wary, more cautious. I have tried through this project to make myself more knowledgeable about the history of this region. That is the least I would expect from those eager to start wars. I am trying to humanize these events, to help people empathize with those who have been caught up in them. To see themselves in such circumstances. I am horrified that the US, has let in only eleven Syrian refugees this year. I see this work as contributing to the work of many artists, journalists and concerned citizens who are trying to keep these issues visible. It is especially important now, when our attention is continually diverted by the antics of a president who dismisses the value of being an informed leader, preferring to rely on his instincts instead.
In conversation with Deborah Stratman
Weinberg Newton Gallery
The Illinois Parables draws on events that are driven by faith, technology, and exodus. These events are particularly emblematic of the complex history of Illinois. How did you narrow down to the eleven events featured in this film? What was the selection process like?
Deborah Stratman
I was trying to speak about as much as possible with the fewest possible moves. Working towards a maximalist minimalism. I didn’t know at the outset that I wanted eleven parables, but I knew twelve was wrong — too many Christian and calendrical associations. I settled on eleven because it’s a prime number, so irreducible, but also a little unsettled or imbalanced. That destabilization is a central theme in the film — it affords a kind of uncertainty that allows room for thinking. I tried to focus on historical events that were both extremely local, and political in their specificity, but also general or allegorical, able to rhyme with similar events across time. I wanted to avoid the most commonly re-told stories, like the great Chicago fire or ole’ Abe, and to avoid too many Chicago-based stories. Otherwise I would have tried to cram Studs Terkel and Harold Washington into the mix. A guiding principle was the idea of “thin places,” but rather than exclusively in the Jesuit sense of a place where the border between our world and the spirit world is thin, I was thinking about thin boundaries between sites with a heavy past but seemingly benign present.
WNG
Our partner organization, Facing History and Ourselves encourages people to examine history with the context of their identity. Are the events that you selected common regional knowledge? Were the local residents that you were engaging with generally aware/knowledgeable of the events?
DS
I think some of the histories might be common knowledge, but many are not. Most everybody knows Enrico Fermi had something to do with the critical mass equation that led to the first nuclear bomb, but maybe not that he was doing his experiments in Hyde Park. Many people will have heard of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, but maybe they won’t have known how Ed Hanrahan and the States Attorney’s office created their own false version of events for the nightly news by building sets in their offices and re-enacting the raid. Probably quite a few people have heard of Nauvoo, but maybe not that Joseph Smith who is a prophet to the Mormons was martyred there. And I think far fewer would know how less than a year after the Mormons had been run out across the Mississippi, which was then the edge of our country, Etienne Cabet and his Icarian followers moved into the freshly vacated village to start their own socialist utopian community. There was one person I met in Macomb who knew the story of the alleged pre-teen ‘firestarter’ Wanet McNeill. And around Murphysboro, quite a few people knew of the Tri-State Tornado (to this day, the deadliest in US history). There seems to be general familiarity with the Trail of Tears, though I think most people might not have known where specifically the purged Cherokees and other first nations peoples passed through Illinois. Or that more died in our state than in any other during those years of forced exodous. Folks around Alton know about the Piasa Bird legend because they’ve been repainting that mural for a century or more. But I’m not sure how many know that it’s in reference to a mural that Fr. Jacques Marquette and Joliet saw and recorded on their river journeying. And I’d guess most people don’t know Michael Heizer produced a land art work in Illinois, or even who he is for that matter.
WNG
Parables is an interesting term to use — implying that there are lessons to be learned from the past events, and it gives the film theological overtones. The pacing of the film encourages the viewer to have a meditative experience with the depicted scene. How did the idea of “parables” influence the pacing of the film and the cinematic style?
DS
Yes, I used the term ‘parable’ for its embrace of the allegorical, or the archetypal. I’d say my parables are more secular ones, but definitely invested in ethics. I want them to resonate with other histories and places. The pacing and style aren’t directly connected to the concept of parables. This has more to do with making a film that is extremely dense, and needing to provide space for people to ruminate and drift.
WNG
Can you speak a bit about the use archival footage in the film? How did you decide to use the original footage or to re-enact certain scenes? Was it based on the availability of existing footage?
DS
I’ll answer this more broadly by saying that I was interested in what version of events, or modes of presentation, we tend to trust more than others. That’s why the film is so packed with different types of material, archival and otherwise. There are newspaper headlines, paintings, enactments and re-enactments, voiceovers, interviews and archival films. My choice and alternation of these have more to do with a desire to keep shifting the register of evidence, than about access or availability.
In conversation with Marilyn Volkman
Weinberg Newton Gallery
You contributed not only a video piece, but a performance to The Way the Mystic Sees. As both are complements, how do you feel the performative aspect helps the viewer understand your NEO- CRAFT project? May you explain a little about the project first?
Marilyn Volkman
Immediately, I have to say it’s hard for me to speak about NEO- CRAFT outside of NEO- CRAFT. It’s about fully buying into the moment. NEO- CRAFT is experienced in real-time, so the video for The Way the Mystic Sees functions as a prelude to the event. At the same time, it’s an excerpt of one of the most didactic moments of the performance, which is about human connection being replaced by online connection. This ties back to the conversation of surveillance and data because I think most people feel like giving away their data is the most urgent risk we face in terms of privacy. But there’s also another gigantic danger, which is losing our capacities for human connection. That’s what the video is actually referring to. Data protection and human connection are both really important, but in NEO- CRAFT I try to talk about the latter as the most alarming of the two.
And about the project itself…
NEO- CRAFT is a fully integrated system of philosophical thinking tools allowing art producers to proactively engage with systems of power by utilizing the expressive potential of art for personal and social gain. Focusing on the creation of meaningful art experiences, the philosophy of NEO- CRAFT does not propose specific outcomes, but re-imagines the values of professionalism in free market economies with a special interest in creating ties between contemporary capitalism and developing arenas. NEO- CRAFT reaches the public through seminars, interactive workbooks, one-on-one sessions and takeaway objects.
WNG
In the performance, you take on the character of self-help guru of sorts. Have you had any training as an actor? Did you use any person(s) as a model for your presentation method?
MV
My automatic thought when you ask this is about who should answer. It’s going to be me, but that’s how I think about performance in relation to art. The way I see it — an artist is not always the best person to answer a particular question. Acting for me is about finding the right mouthpiece to explore an idea for an audience. For NEO- CRAFT, the right person emerged as a motivational speaker pretty early on. Around that time I was also working a sales job, reading a lot of self-help books and I was very much into watching youtube videos of evangelical preachers. Immediately I felt a lot of parallels with the art world and figured it was a good idea to create a more obvious cult experience for artists. One that could lead to a new, or uncommon way of asking questions in art contexts.
But to answer your question… Yes, I do have training as an actor. I majored in theater on a whim after pulling out of an ROTC scholarship, but only for a semester. Sometimes I still act in theater productions in the Netherlands when I have time. In reality though, I owe that training to my mother and her side of the family. They’re all storytellers, actors, drama teachers and basically eccentric South Texas personalities with deep character. They taught me how to craft speech and stage presence in relationship to a particular audience from an early age. The first theater productions I was in were directed by my mom. So acting for me happens on a very biological level. It’s how I grew up.
WNG
You live in the Netherlands. Is the tech-savvy entrepreneur as prevalent in Dutch culture as it is in American culture, or do you find the critique you’re engaging in to be more pointed toward Silicon Valley and its cultural exports to places such as Germany and China?
MV
Well, they are really tech savvy in the Netherlands. In terms of surveillance, it seems like everything is monitored, at least at a government level. You have to register where you live, you have a national identity card that links to a database and tracks pretty much everything about you. It’s common knowledge that the government is watching you. Someone told me once that they received a letter letting them know their phone calls had been monitored for months during an investigation on a neighbor. So in a sense, they might be more tech savvy in terms of surveillance in the Netherlands, but from what I understand, it’s the government doing it and not businesses. Europe considers data protection by companies as a fundamental human right. So the tech savvy entrepreneurs exist, but I think they feel less free to do what they want than their counterparts in the US.
With NEO- CRAFT, there are multiple levels. When I think about surveillance and technology, whether it’s the government or a business doing it, it’s this sinister behind the scenes way of exploiting a public that I’m thinking about. NEO- CRAFT externalizes this by introducing a guru who takes advantage of the audience out in the open by selling behind the scenes secrets of how to do it yourself. This of course is tongue in cheek, because the end of the performance is about human connection. But you may also leave wanting a NEO- CRAFT t-shirt, so the way I engage with exploitation is by taking on the performative vernaculars of con-artistry to get at deep human need.
One other parallel is that all of these techniques that companies use to take your data and make money are algorithmic. NEO- CRAFT works in a similar way. I’m constantly taking note of how people react to certain elements of performance, speech, or gesture, and then use those ‘algorithmically’ to steer the audience through a narrative arc, ending with real questions about what it is we’re doing in that space.
Last week, I did NEO- CRAFT for the first time in China. It’s still very fresh, but something that surprised me was that the performance seemed to come across as more sincere. That might have been the limitation of my translations or the shift in context, but maybe it also had to do with Shanghai being a setting where projections of limitless entrepreneurial growth aren’t as absurd as they might seem elsewhere. I have a lot to think about.
In conversation with Lola Arias
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Can you give a short overview of your practice, specifically how you became interested in the theatrical?
Lola Arias
I studied literature and theater, and I started to write poetry, fiction, and plays. Then I began directing my own plays. I was interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of theater, which is in itself a mixture of literature, visual arts, music and acting.
My first plays were more conventional so to say (a fictional story performed by actors) and then I started to be more interested in exploring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. I did a play called My life after with a group of people who were born during the military dictatorship in Argentina, whose parents were part of the guerrilla or policemen or exiled intellectuals. And from then on, I did several projects based on previous research and performed by all kinds of people: Bulgarian immigrate kids, street musicians, beggars, prostitutes, policemen, veterans of a War. These projects are theater plays but also urban interventions, installations and video installations.
WNG
A lot of your work juxtaposes the intensity of a historical event with the levity of retelling or re-enacting this event. In the re-enactments you reveal the mise en scène of stage production, elements that would typically be off camera, i.e. booms, light stands, markers, fans etc. What was your impetus for giving the viewer access to the surrounding scene?
LA
I see the re-enactment as a way to travel in time, to bring the past into our present. Whenever we talked about history we think it’s something that happened in the past to someone else, but the past is inside every one of us every single moment of our lives. In the case of war veterans, this can be traumatic because they are reliving their war experiences in their daily lives. Sometimes a flashback of the war interrupts their routine, bringing back the image of a dead body or the sound of a bomb or a missing friend.
When I re-enact the past with people, I try to show how difficult it is to bring back something that is gone. So, instead of pretending that we know how it was, like a realistic representation would do, I prefer to show how we try to stage it. When you see the elements of the mise en scène, you also see that it’s an attempt to recover the experience.
WNG
Your performers regularly break the fourth wall, and while doing so they seem to take on a rather dry, emotionally removed rendition of their story. What drew you to using this theatrical trope and what emotional response do you hope to evoke from viewers as they experience your work?
LA
When the performers are on stage or in front of a camera reconstructing something of their lives, they have already gone trough a process of rehearsing, rewriting, and transforming the experience into a story. And for that, they have to take a distance from their own experience to become the storytellers and not the victims of their own fate. I think a good storyteller has to stay neutral to allow the audience to become emotional.
WNG
Can you speak about the relationship between personal memory and historical fact? Something that struck us was the factual nature of the diary piece beside the more personal selections of your other performers.
LA
I see the diary as a frame for all the other re-enactments. The diary of this soldier is a very detailed summary of facts: 13.45. I ate one plate of food, 15.02. We shot down a plane…. Everything is at the same level: the banal and the important. In this dairy there is no subjective narration, just facts ordered by time. But in the list of facts you can also see how a soldiers is trying to document every second of his time in the war, maybe to feel that he can control something or that he can put away the fear or maybe just to help him not to forget. All the unspoken experience of the war is in between the laconic lines of the diary.
When I asked the veteran to read it again he was shocked. He kept this diary for 35 years and he read it all in 40 minutes for the film. There are moments when you see in the tone of the voice how he has doubts whether to say something or not. The act of reading was his re-enactment, his way to go back in time.
And all the other re-enactments are one day in the big diary of the war that could be written by all those who went there. One single moment that stayed in their memory until the present. The other stories are a good contrast to the dairy. In each of the short videos we explore what war has done to these men.
WNG
You have such a unique way of storytelling across your practice, with both personal stories of your own and others. I wonder, who are some artists that have inspired you in working this way?
LA
So many artists. Do you want a list? Robert Smithson, Sophie Calle, Harum Farocki, Ana Cristina Cesar, Sei Shonagon, She She pop, Avi Mogravi, Silvia Plath, Rabih Mroué, Chantal Akerman, Federico León, Tim Etchells, Karl Ove Knausgard, Clarice Lispector, Rimini Protokoll, and so on and so on…
In conversation with Lise Haller Baggesen
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
How does your work respond to the pressures and politics that surround the female body?
Lise Haller Baggesen
Ideally, I would like to replace pressure with pleasure and politics with culture and take it from there. I believe the next feminist wave must be all about women’s right to pleasure — the pleasure we take in our bodies, our sexuality, motherhood, leisure, and professional and intellectual pursuit. I realize that is utopian, but I think this is a good starting point.
I sometimes wish the (art-)world was as interested in women’s CULTURE as they are in women’s BODIES. The female body appears so ubiquitously present in the cultural canon, but more often than not as a representation through the male gaze. By female culture, I refer to all places in which females assert themselves in a way that challenges that gaze. I am talking about the female voice, for example. How do we give the female voice a space to resonate, within our broader cultural field?
Frequently women are infantilized in the arts, by being seen and not heard. It is something that can happen when male critics (like Jerry Saltz or Dave Hickey — self declared feminist and ladies man, respectively) butt in and try to mansplain ourselves back to ourselves. Guys, I know you are only trying to help, but sometimes speaking from that kind of authority can come off as a tad paternalistic. Sometimes the most feminist thing a man can do is to shut up and listen!
That said, serious and mainstream art criticism is another field in which female artists are grossly underserved; what does it take for a female artist to get into Art Forum? (Does she have to wear a strap-on dildo, for example?) It happens, of course, but when you crunch the numbers the odds are not in our favor. Micol Hebron’s recent Gallery Tally project, makes it perfectly clear that — although we have come a long way since the Guerrilla Girls tallied up major institutions and coined the slogan “Does a Woman Have to be Naked to get into The Met?” — baby, baby, we are not there yet!
But back to your question: how does my own work respond to all this? I am somewhat weary of the female=body/male=head dichotomy, which is why I increasingly focus on the female voice within my work, through writing, audio, etc. My most recent project HATORADE RETROGRADE is my own personal “all woman show” — a femi-futurist adventure for which I commissioned an all female cast to write for a motley crew of female protagonists. I figured, since I had free hands with the show, the least I could do was to make sure it would pass the Bechdel test with flying colors!
WNG
Can you describe how you arrived at the idea of “Mothernism” and what it means to you?
LHB
Mothernism started out in the spring of 2013, as my Master’s thesis in Visual and Critical Studies from the SAIC. I had initially enrolled in the program as a mature student with the intention of shaking off that “mama-artist-syndrome” but found myself increasingly frustrated with the way my maternal experience was nixed when I brought it to the table — during discussions on feminist, gender and queer theory, for example. So I had to ask myself: “Am I the only person here, who finds this relevant?” before deciding “Hell no! If this is such a taboo, it must be because it touches a nerve. So, if nobody in this room wants to talk about it, I will write my thesis on it, and then we will talk about it.” That it has resonated with so many outside our classroom I had never dared to dream about — but I don’t mind at all!
The word “Mothernism” is an elision, associating both the good stuff — like mothering and modernism — but it also has some negative connotations, like sexism, ageism and abled-bodyism, which are often directed at the maternal body. This body freaks a lot of people out, to be frank, in myriad ways the stereotypical “female body” doesn’t. I mean; it probably has stretch marks, for starters. Scars. Not to mention an (oceanic and slippery) interior. So, it’s a little different.
WNG
In your work you address the “mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse” and in a portion of your audio from the Mothernism installation you note an experience of visiting a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and asking yourself: “So, how does a MOTHER get bad enough to get inside the museum?”
Curiously enough, there seems to be an immense pressure on women in general to become mothers, yet there’s almost an air of criticism when women artists choose to become mothers, as if motherhood will take away their artistic ability. Can you elaborate on your personal insight into this conflicting issue?
LHB
I am really glad to hear you acknowledge this! It feeds into so much of what I am describing above, as the reason for me to write my thesis, and later my book, on the subject. Mothers in the art world are measured with an astounding double standard. Whenever you complain about the challenges you are facing, you are met with the counter argument that mainstream culture adores mothers and idolizes motherhood. First of all, that is not entirely accurate; consumer culture adores and idolizes every aspect of our lived experience that can be compartmentalized, consumed, and sold back to ourselves — but that of course is not the whole picture.
It is comparable to saying that mainstream culture adores Black culture, because it idolizes Black sports heroes and pop singers, and because everybody wears Nike sneakers. Or to tell queer and trans folk they are represented by, say, Caitlyn Jenner and television drama like “Transparent”. Then, imagine Black and queer artists being denied both authorship of their own experience and denied access to examining it in relation to the cultural canon, because, “everybody outside of the art world loves you, and in here we have different rules.” That happens to mothers all the time.
WNG
Have there been any significant artists who are also mothers that have inspired you along the way?
LHB
I am a painter, and as you can imagine the traditional painting canon does not include a lot of mothers (although some real motherfuckers)… so I spent my formative years as an artist as a “cultural necrophiliac” — meaning that I fell in love with a lot of dead guys. But I have no regrets — when you are in love, you’re in love — and I still adore the works of, say, Courbet, Manet, Munch, and Gauguin. People will tell you they were “just” a bunch of misogynists, Johns, and sex-tourists — which they factually were — but I hate that kind of essentialism. Spending time with the actual work (inside of the actual museum which is where you will find it) will reveal it to you in another complexity, giving you an event horizon that is longer than five minutes. One friend of mine once said to me “seeing is not believing, but it’s a practice,” and another (my yoga teacher) told me to “do your practice and all will be revealed.” I am of the conviction that you can learn a lot about yourself, from artists that have little in common with yourself — or maybe more than you think — and that all will be revealed if you practice returning that male gaze of the art historical canon, unflinchingly.
I was thinking about all this, as I was walking through Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry retrospective at the MCA; his is a brilliantly wrought argument for Black representation, and he always keeps his eyes on the prize — but the “female problem” cannot be solved through (visual) representation only, and if we think so we may be painting ourselves into a corner. There has always been plenty of female flesh on view in the museum, as we discussed earlier — hence the importance of making the female voice heard. These days, Jerry Saltz is hailing Kim Kardashian as the new Andy Warhol, but we cannot keep reinventing ourselves within the same critical paradigm — it’s a dead end. If visibility is power, why is Pamela Anderson not in office yet?
But back to your question: as part of researching “Mothernism” I have, off course, actively been looking to mother-artists for inspiration. Those mentioned in the book include Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Cicciolina (who I consider a great performance artist). Perhaps not your typical mama-artists, but then again, the point of the book was to challenge this stereotype.
Last year (2015) I saw two extraordinary retrospectives of female artists, whose lives, in many ways, were defined by the maternal. Firstly, Paula Modersohn-Becker, who tragically died from an embolism shortly after giving birth to her first child (a daughter), explored the mother-child relationship in a series of intimate portraits and also painted the first naked (!) and pregnant self-portrait. (Something I was blissfully unaware of, when I did the same thing during my first pregnancy, almost 100 years later.) And secondly, Sonia Delaunay, whose baby blanket for her son was credited as her first abstract work of art.
I found it very inspiring how these two great artists clearly thought of themselves as “avant-garde” while totally redefining what that means (which I suppose is the very essence of being avant-garde?). Through these weighty exhibitions, they were being acknowledged as such — all the while critically (and playfully) positing the question to the viewer: “what happens to the avant-garde, when the mother laughs?”
This question (cleverly framed by Susan Suleiman) which was central to “Mothernism” is related to a broader one: “how do women think of themselves as avant-garde” — which in turn became the inquiry question for HATORADE RETROGRADE.
WNG
Your piece in Your body is a battleground is extracted from the immersive Mothernism installation. It reads: “The Motherhood Welcomes Planned Parenthood,” and I appreciate how loaded that phrase is. I would think some people might find motherhood and Planned Parenthood at odds with each other when there’s such strife between pro-choice vs. pro-life advocates. What does the sentiment of this phrase mean for you?
LHB
I made that banner last fall, when Planned Parenthood was under a lot of strain. Fraudulent videos were being released about their practices, and they were threatened with de-funding from the political side (we all know which side (!)). It just infuriated me how low some people will go, in order to defame this institution and the important work it does, including abortion.
The banner was included in my Hi(gh) Mothernism installation for the Elmhurst Art Museum Biennial, in the museum’s Mies van der Rohe house. In many ways, this iteration of the show was centered around the “suburban mom,” and I thought it would be fun to make a banner that looked like it could be announcing a street festival, bake sale, or homecoming, in the “Mother Hood” — but with a subversive swag. I was at first a little worried that it would be too strong for a suburban audience — but then realized that my worry was entirely based on my own presumptions about suburbia.
At its core, Mothernism is about female reproductive rights. But those rights do not begin and end with the decision to terminate your pregnancy in the first trimester. Female reproductive rights include sexual education (and not the “abstinence only” kind), access to birth control, access to healthcare for the mother and child, access to affordable daycare and schools etc. etc. Only if these factors are in place can a woman make a truly informed, and truly personal, choice to become a mother or not.
The so-called pro-lifers… don’t even get me started on those, so I won’t… but, I think the pro-choice camp could be ready for a little self-reflection, and within that, a reexamination of the advances of the feminist movement. The current wisdom is based on a second-wave dichotomy of “destiny” and “choice.” Lean-in-feminists will have us believe that individuals who have made the “private decision” to reproduce, are solely responsible for carrying out this decision — but this is a neo-liberal privatization ideology in extremus — whereas in fact we have a collectively shared responsibility toward the next generation.
The assumption that motherhood and Planned Parenthood are at odds with each other is widespread, while in reality mothers make up the majority of people seeking abortion services. (The numbers fluctuate, but an oft-quoted ratio is 60% mothers to 40% non-mothers). I guess that has a lot to with mothers knowing what they are getting into themselves, and also, with what kind of world they want to put kids into — and that is, perhaps, not one where women are reduced to mere breeders, or where they are forced to choose between motherhood and a career.
Lastly, there is a time to Mother, and there is a time not to. From my own experience I will posit that I was better equipped to take on motherhood at thirty, than I was at seventeen. That said, if we stopped slut-shaming teen moms — and instead became the global village it takes to raise the children of the world — maybe they would have a better shot at parenting, so I’m just putting that out there!
WNG
I’m interested in how in the audio/text piece of this project appears as a collection of letters all signed “Love, Mom” — a small but comforting phrase most of us have read time and again in our lives. What are your thoughts on the passing down of wisdom and experience between women, especially in the relationship between mother and daughter?
LHB
I walk my daughter to school every morning. I sometimes think I don’t have the time to do that, but I always feel like I don’t have the time not to do that. She doesn’t kiss and hug me goodbye in front of the other kids anymore, so I don’t know how long I will still get to do it — but on our way we sort out the world situation.
Mothernism is all about intergenerational feminism — as is HATORADE RETROGRADE, albeit with a very different flavor. Where Mothernism was a nurturing umami, hatorade has a more synthetic, bittersweet bite.
It all comes down to this collective memory, and how we pass it on: what do we savor and what do we chew up and spit out? Every single wave of feminism has a complicated relationship with the last one, and this current one seems to have a complicated relationship to itself — which makes it compelling, and self-reflective, but also somewhat navel-gazing. It’s a bit like grandmothers axe: if one generation replaces the head, another the shaft, is it still grandmothers axe? And should we use it to dismantle her house? Since we already have the right to vote, does that mean the suffragettes can teach us nothing?
This is why I favor the f-word, although many have suggested it is outdated, alt-modisch, a “kill-joy;” Feminism has a history we need to acknowledge, which is why we have to call it by its proper name — everything else is a euphemism.
In conversation with Iris Bernblum
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
The title of our current show, Your body is a battleground, is in reference to a well-known Barbara Kruger work. Feminist artists of the 60’s and 70’s, like Kruger, largely opened the doors for women to make the work we make today. Who would you say has been a strong female inspiration to you and your work?
Iris Bernblum
This kind of question has always been interesting to me, in the past I’ve always been hiding a kind of secret guilt about the fact that their have been very few women that have strong influences on my work. The strongest art influences on me for many reasons that I’ve only come to terms with recently have been primarily gay men… and a few straight ones. Namely, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Ugo Rondinone, Nayland Blake, and Paul McCarthy. I’ve been recognizing recently in the studio how much they’ve sunken into my language — as a woman — as an artist. Part of this, at least for me, seems to stem from the gender fluidity of their work, the woman is present in it I feel, I am in there. Not explicitly, but the ways in which identity, the psycho/sexual, vulnerability and personhood are performed in their work speaks to me. Of course there are women I greatly admire and have certainly been influential, Reineke Dijkstra, in the way she makes vulnerability powerful, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann, but there seems to be a space in the queer dialogue, the female dialogue that I feel is unaddressed and perhaps in some way I’m speaking to that.
WNG
Women are faced with unrelenting pressures about our bodies — how we should dress them, what we should do with them, whether or not we should be allowed to choose what happens to them, etc. How does your work respond to these pressures and politics that surround the female body?
IB
Much of my work speaks to anxiety and the release of tension, within the body, within the mind. I like to think I create a space that embraces the body, with all its beauty and disgust, I want to acknowledge it all, put it out there, like an invitation. I think vulnerability is political. We are not given permission to be so, especially not women, we are never allowed to let our guard down, not about our bodies, our sexuality, our existence in the world, I like to imagine I give that permission.
WNG
In our image-based culture, we often see anti-abortion protestors using very explicit and exploitative images to elicit reactions. How do you think visual art might be able to counter those images?
IB
That is an interesting question… the first thing that comes to mind is with beauty. That we are all human, that we all have our shame, our weaknesses, it seems to me that these people with their soap boxes, their ideas about what is ‘right and wrong’ are some of the most terrified people out there. I would love to think that visual art could speak to their hearts — make them vulnerable — throw them off track so perhaps they could see beyond the rhetoric they have fed themselves.
WNG
In your circus themed works, I find the relationship between pressure and performance really interesting, especially when comparing the role of the clown to the role of the woman. Can you expand on that a little?
IB
Yes I recently had a studio visit where I was complaining that so many people ask me to perform, expect it when they look at my work, and it’s always just made me feel guilty for not meeting their expectations. But this visitor put my mind at ease by telling me I am absolutely not a performer, I am that nervous space right before the performance! I am endlessly grateful to this person who saw straight into me. The clown for me represents so many things. It’s been used repeatedly by male artists to exemplify a kind of shame; I think of Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy. Clowns, within the framework of my special circus, speak to a kind performance anxiety, the beginning of a kind of transformation, something to assist in the release. A decidedly female release. A good one.
WNG
Your piece in Your body is a battle ground is a text piece written using clown make-up on a mirror and reads, “Put the words in my mouth” That’s a really impactful phrase, and I love the way it works with the topics addressed in the show. What was your goal with this piece in particular?
IB
This piece came from my intense desire to speak back. To subvert the seemingly submissive message this sentence contains. It’s a kind of dare. Too many people out there telling women what to do, how to think, how to be, and nothing is ever right. Try me…
In conversation with Mary Helena Clark
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Your film The Plant is featured in The Way The Mystic Sees. This self described spy film creates an immersive environment for the onlooker. As there is a sense of embodying the movements of the camera by the individual, the work provokes ideas of being followed and intruded upon. What is the emotion you were trying to create by juxtaposing the sounds of the hustle and bustle of life with these specific, unidentified characters?
Mary Helena Clark
Foley — the post production art of manufacturing sound effects to sync with an image — and bad foley in particular, were influential to the film’s sound design. The film is about the slippery truth in observation, the overlay of fiction on the observed, and sound that doesn’t quite match with the image does a lot to raise questions of its veracity or authenticity, both tricky ideas. Sound/image relationships become a kind of perceptual test. What is sensed as unnatural? What falls apart or into place when we register the construction of an observation? A key sound in the film is the distortion from wind on the mic that adds to the chaos of the street scene, points to the recording devices, and, like cinema verite style camera work, adds to the documentary claim of the image. If you listen closely you’ll hear inhales between the final “gusts” of wind, a bit of a curtain reveal. When making The Plant, I was interested in tricks-of-the-trade dealt with as a conceptual strategy.
WNG
You are very intentional about the imagery you integrate into the work. The use of sequential images shot in ‘non-modern’ visuals places the viewer in a different environment and time, while simultaneously raising questions of who is being watched and followed today. Is this fluidity and interconnection of time integral to your piece?
MHC
All of the images were shot in 2011 and 2012 in Chicago on 16mm film. The format plus the telephoto zooms take the images out of the contemporary and allude to 70s films like Coppola’s The Conversation. I’m using the visual reference to access the tropes of the spy and thriller genres, more than to comment on temporality. I wanted to make a film that’s built around searching, inquisitive point-of-view shots. It is a question of who is being watched, but also one of complicity. Are those who appear in the film acting for the camera or are they unknowingly enlisted into it?
WNG
The Plant considers both sound and its absence, which creates moments of introspection for the viewer. Furthermore, the use of shadows and the walking stick act as metaphors for the physical presence of surveillance, which references cinema noir. Are you using these tropes to illustrate the more physical presence of surveillance as something more nefarious?
MHC
The physical presence that I was interested in was the body behind the camera, whose role shifts from observer when the film is capturing images on the street, to producer when the film’s images are directed and arranged. In a contemporary sense, I think of surveillance as totalizing capture, a large net of looking to be sifted later. The Plant uses a surveilling eye in a more subjective and conspiratorial way, asking how we make meaning. The line of what is or isn’t conspiratorial is both an abiding theme of the genre films The Plant references, and of the monomaniacal thinking artmaking requires. The problems of filmmaking are the problems of how you negotiate an abundance of things, constructing meaning in a way that threatens to impose the Paranoid’s (and also the Detective’s) rigorously ordered fantasy upon the orderless world.
WNG
Often people create avatars as a way to mask their identities. However, there’s an anonymity about architecture which is also a tool for which to lose oneself or the other. Do you see the building as a symbol for concealment? And for who — the designer, the dweller, or the passerby?
MHC
The film was designed around the image of a tower, as fortress, panopticon, prison. I was interested in using the architecture of Marina City as a repetitive visual field that I could disrupt with the man waving from the balcony. I wanted the facelessness of the building interrupted by a single figure. It’s a blot, an ambiguous gesture that interrupts the image and begs for interpretation. We can wonder if the person is signaling us, or surrendering, or if we’ve “intercepted” a signal for someone else. The issue of being in or outside of a network of meaning is central to the film, and anonymity of those observed and of the person looking keeps the ricochet of signal and search going.
In conversation with Max Guy
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
An extension of your previous work, you contributed a series of steel masks to The Way the Mystic Sees. How do you posit these—as disguises, or something more ceremonial?
Max Guy
This trio was described by a friend as a “punctuation” to my ongoing series of cut-out masks, which is currently a collection of around 100 or so iterations of masks that I started in 2017. Those were prototypes for a larger mask, cut from extruded Styrofoam, that I’d used in a performance. At that time I was interested in performing with the mask, so the material was more ergonomic, and the method of cutting out prototypes from paper was also a quick way to iterate. The decision to cut these from steel, and paint them in primary colors was also an ergonomic decision in a way. Steel is rigid so it can communicate a kind of flatness, and is magnetic, so it’s easy to hang. Primary colors came more intuitively as well in this case.
I don’t see them being used as a disguise at the moment, but I also wouldn’t completely abandon the idea. The three masks exhibited are more ornamental. If you can call the examination of the masks a ceremony, then they might be ceremonial masks. I’ve visited a lot of homes and tourist destinations where masks are treated as souvenirs, and divorced from any ceremony (other than their exchange). I grew up in New York City, in a home decorated with masks that were purchased as souvenirs and alienated from the traditions in Africa and the Caribbean that birthed them. Maybe for some people they hold a symbolic value as some sort of link to their past, but my fascination with masks came from the horror in gazing at these stoic, disembodied faces on the walls of my home. I saw them in my therapist’s office growing up and took comfort in the fact that if I couldn’t look him in the eye, I could look at them. For the moment, I’m happy to look as these masks formally, and to think about a face’s distinct social implications.
WNG
Cut forms feature heavily in your artistic practice. Is this a way to represent malleability of the art object, of that which it conceals, or which it may even project?
MG
I cut silhouetted forms, and my impulse to cut is a separate one from my use of outline or silhouette. Cutting-out a is a reductive action and I don’t know if looking at a silhouette is always reductive. As you said, we project/add quite a lot on/to a silhouette. I like the different things you can do with a cutout: you can circumscribe, circumnavigate, omit, divide, trace. Blades, lasers, water-jets, these are an entirely different set of technologies that are used to cut things from whatever happens with the use of silhouettes, outlines, stencils, etc.
For me, silhouettes imply shadows, concealment, projection, as you said. They evoke different cognitive and psychological principles. My favorite silhouettes are Kara Walker’s, because with them she’s able to make the viewer assume races, sexualities, racial hierarchies, inferred acts of violence, and all with one color.
Silhouettes and concealment are used in motion capture studies for CGI and surveillance — I don’t think that cutouts really have anything to do with this. I can build out from a silhouette, its flatness leaves a lot to be demanded, whole other dimensions. But when you cut something it’s already a three-dimensional material.
WNG
You frequently use color in your work, both semiotically as a way to impact the viewer. How does the use of, in this case primary colors, tie in with the notion of surveillance? As a method of distraction, or something much more engrossing?
MG
I don’t really have a color theory, and as I said before, the use of primary colors was more functional in this case. Red, blue and yellow are fundamentally unique from one another and my hope in usuing them was to distinguish each face, despite similarities in outline and cut forms. In this way, I was interested in creating characters out of each face. I like work that can use color evocatively in this way.
WNG
You’ve previously mentioned an interest in pareidolia, and how it’s used to build facial detection software. As our society becomes (amazingly even more) image-based, do you believe that the opposite can be taught — the face as an unrecognizable form as we become more detached from those around us?
MG
Facial recognition is a social thing — on a personal note I don’t know if I would want to learn how to un-recognize a face. The BBC series The Human Face, is a really fun show with John Cleese that goes into all of the reason humans need to be able to recognize a face and its myriad expressions. I read somewhere that 1 in 50 people live with Prosopagnosia, a disorder that leaves people unable to recognize faces. The painter Chuck Close has it, and probably also had a hand in how image-based our society now is.
One of the things I think about the most when making these masks is how in a number of years, I read more about artificial intelligence and machine learning than the mapping of the human mind, the kind of studies of empathy, and the functions of the brain. Even if this was dilettantish reading, the leap (and clear path) from cognitive science to machine learning has me very uneasy. Facial recognition technology — as an offshoot of artificial intelligence — is, to quote a friend, “a scientifically unsound cover story for expanding the surveillance state.” Out of paranoia I fear that even technologies used to un-recognize, to ignore, certain faces might be used in some sinister way. I hope that we’re not learning unlearning facial recognition!
In conversation with Meredith Haggerty
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Can you tell us how you developed Tiny Retreat, an album of audio tracks specifically produced for Rebuilding the Present? How did the process evolve through the collaborations and conversations you had with many of the artists in the exhibition?
Meredith Haggerty
Holly Cahill, the exhibition's curator, expressed early on that she wanted the show itself to invite people to slow down and observe. I was inspired by affinities between her ideas and time I’ve spent in walking meditation with my husband. When we lived in Chicago, we’d go to a retreat center called Windhorse in rural Wisconsin for self-guided meditation retreats. The center is in a beautiful area with lots of rolling hills, and between sittings, we’d take turns leading each other on silent walks. At dinner one night, we talked about how being guided through the landscape was such a highlight for each of us. It gave us a chance to actively observe a space unfolding without fully navigating things. It felt like watching a film or listening to music.
I’d been playing with the idea of recording guided meditations for some time, and Rebuilding The Present seemed like the right space to begin that work. As I began to compose instructions, it became clear that I wanted these meditations to respond to the Weinberg/Newton Gallery space and the works in it. But since I now live in Chapel Hill, I needed to find a way to do it from afar.
I researched the space and the artists, but felt the need for even more connection. I asked Holly if she and I and perhaps some of the artists in the show could talk about our studio practices and the work going into the show. I am so grateful for their engagement because those conversations shaped tiny retreat. We talked about life experiences that informed our studio practices, ways in which audience interaction with our work is meaningful to us and things we would like to see happen with our work. It felt right to me that guided meditations that invite close engagement with the show were inspired by heartfelt, thoughtful conversation with artists in the show.
WNG
You received your MFA from the University of Chicago and later worked there in mind-body medicine teaching and implementing campus-wide curriculum and programing over a 10 year period. Can you share more about your experience as an artist working in mind-body medicine and how it may have informed the guided meditations in the exhibition? Where do these tracks veer from your experiences in the field of medicine?
MH
It is important to include that besides visual arts, I also have training in mind-body medicine including massage therapy, yoga, somatics and meditation. All of these combined allowed me to develop such a program.
The program at the University of Chicago began in Student Health. There, I worked alongside physicians and nurse practitioners to create complementary clinical care rooted in mind-body practices to help students manage stress and pain.
It was this work that led to yoga and meditation programs in campus chapels, galleries and conference rooms and then eventually to a curriculum at The Pritzker School of Medicine. I was constantly taking apart and reworking mind-body instructions and practice to fit into a variety of spaces and meet the needs of the particular group. It was lovely to work creatively with each space. The site-specific nature of that work kept me connected to my art practice even though there was this whole other career. It felt natural to continue working with those themes for Rebuilding the Present.
At University of Chicago I kept my work within the scope of the scientific literature on mind-body medicine. This happened naturally because I was reporting to physicians who understandably wanted this program based in science. It remains a great foundation for me. Rebuilding the Present was a permission to open things up and bring in themes as they were being explored by the artists with whom I spoke. Wander without moving and object holding pattern are meditations in tiny retreat that both incorporate moments of contemplation that, as far as I know, don’t have any literature suggesting they are tools for stress or pain management but are certainly rooted in awareness and agency and interwoven with instructions that do reflect the science of mind-body medicine.
WNG
It would be wonderful if you could walk us through one of the tracks you developed with an artist(s) in Rebuilding the Present and give us some insight into how their work influenced the recording? What do you hope that the visitors to the exhibition or the listeners on SoundCloud may take away from the album?
MH
First settle in is a track that was inspired by all of the artists with whom I spoke. The instructions begin with an invitation to find a comfortable place and position and then bring attention to other immediate surroundings by looking around. These instructions were drawn from our shared interest in installing work and inviting others to spend time with objects or ideas with which we have spent time, physically manipulated and developed a relationship with.
Then I invite observers to close their eyes and scan their body for sensations from breath, posture and tension. This part of the exercise is about noticing things that we typically take for granted or ignore, which is another theme that came up in each conversation. All of us were interested in the kind of intimacy that allows us to notice nuance. Whether it’s a slight variance in color or texture or a shift in the use or appearance of an image or object, each of us is curious about how layers unfold in our work and ways of inviting the audience to process this.
We then open our eyes and return to looking practice. The meditation closes with a tactile practice, similar to the beginning and my hope is that the track offers an opportunity to connect with the space in a way that consciously deepens over time and includes some stuff going on internally.
WNG
These works pair art and meditation to form the work itself. How do you negotiate the relationship between the two? Is meditation an important part of your practice?
MH
They certainly overlap, but they are quite different practices. A practice in studio art is, at the end of the day, at least partly about production and assessing what you make. Meditation practice, while not passive, often includes stepping back and noticing our urges to produce or judge situations then sitting with those qualities or exploring them within their larger context.
In this way, just like any life practice paired with contemplative work, meditation and art-making can inform each other. If I try to boil down my own experience, each practice contains the opportunity to notice my habits and avoidance strategies. From there, I can choose to work in a space closer to my heart and move into the other practice from that sweet and tender space. For me, the practices in tandem are like a friendship where both parties can totally be themselves and that honesty, with all the expressed messiness, vulnerability and weakness, strengthens the friendship and supports the individuals.
There are some intersections where I cannot distinguish the practices so well. Both seem to be sensory-based platforms that connect us to our immediate space including our internal landscape. Both practices require presence and a willingness to stay and return even when things are boring, fruitless or failed. Also, sometimes people think about starting an art practice or a meditation practice but don’t do it. I imagine we’ve all done this many times. We have an idea for a book or some paintings or we’ve read that meditation can help with a work or health-related goal but we let it sit there as an idea, something for the future. There can be lovely creativity in thinking about making art or meditating, but only if it leads us to starting where we are with whatever we have. Any practitioner of either form will tell you that some irreplaceable, juicy stuff happens only when you start practicing and you have to keep diving in.
Also, I don’t know if it works this way for others, but for me, metaphors, stories and images arrive more easily and take on more significance when I make space for and listen to the landscape beyond my own constant chatter.
In conversation with Jaclyn Jacunski
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
You have two installations in Bold Disobedience, By Ways & Means and The Super Local. Can you speak on the issues that both works are addressing?
Jaclyn Jacunski
By Ways & Means is a system of pathways made of chain link fences. The fence is devoid of color, scaled down, and abstracted by a repeated pattern. It is a gritty and sobering architectural object surrounding private property, which becomes especially charged when taken out of context into the gallery space. The layout of pathways overlaps and shifts in scale, becoming visually complicated. The pathways and shapes are syncopated around the gallery in addition to a relief sculpture that is installed on a wall, appearing in struggle, pulling away as the chain link is bent and misshapen.
The project merges the atmosphere of the socioeconomic melting pot of Chicago. It is embedded with narratives of the city’s landscape, following a trip from home, through a neighborhood, to school. The work signifies systems that shape communities and lead the audience to consider issues of class and race, which lie beneath capitalist systems. The fence is an architectural object that folds in multiple meanings beyond gentrification. It also speaks to spatial justice, alluding to the prison industrial complex and restricted borders. The fences fashion a relational experience of walking through intimate experiences and spaces in Chicago.
The Super Local was created from west side neighborhood newspapers. The papers hang from library newspaper poles in vertical rows on the gallery’s wall. The top of the installation holds local papers then and gradates downward with paper designs I manipulate by blending and blurring images, which fade away. The papers give voice to the west side area’s lower-income residents, working as both formal and conceptual points of departure for the work. The papers recede into color fields, pulling from the newspaper’s color printing, ranging from a light tone to a dark shade while at the same time redacting and amplifying in intensity.
This installation responds to the sheer density of negative media coverage that creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense and aggressive. Citizens of lower income neighborhoods have to participate in these constructs everyday. The local community newspapers provide a counter point of view to the dominant narratives of how one sees Chicago’s west side. Mainstream media builds off of negative stereotypes, which often seem unreasonable to the lived neighborhood life. This local reporting communicates perspectives that are often overlooked — celebrating local achievements, talented people, creative events, strengths, and joys of community life.
WNG
Many of your works center around the urban landscape. What made you choose this subject matter, and how does it connect to the overall ideas of community and collective voice? The Super Local highlights local newspapers from specific Chicago neighborhoods that you have gradually blurred and degraded. It shows how, as a city, we often do not see these as growing, breathing neighborhoods, but instead are left with only a dying image. How do you think the youth community can help fix this? And through your artwork, how do you think you might be able to change it?
JJ
Every day, Chicago’s urban landscape is the space where I live and physically move through, and I use the experience as a type of research to interpret. It maps out forms and languages of our communal life that we build together. For me, the landscape and the built environment reveal poetic evidence that engages our senses and physical experiences in the world. This evidence helps me to gain understanding of our histories, psychologies, and relationships to power and institutions. I am inspired by the politics of space and the land as spatial justice. I look to it as a means of understanding power and how communities create their own narratives, finding spaces of freedom in the face of segregation and inequality.
I think activating spaces to take on meaningful issues and challenging dominant culture, as the Mikva Challenge curators have done at Weinberg/Newton Gallery, is one way to fix dying neighborhoods. Bold Disobedience shows the type of work that takes on reshaping our city and how people on the local level can essentially transform their neighborhoods and create a new construct within the urban environment. Things like engaging in community-building and cultural activities bring people together: organizing art events and music shows and open mics, making publications that take on issues to build understanding. There are super practical ways to heal our city by volunteering to rehab houses and bikes, help grow food, and mentor kids. In addition, it is important to be brave and speak out, analyze power, call representatives, and take action by organizing people to come together for change.
I hope in my work that I can connect with others in new, thoughtful ways, to build new connections and open up intelligent ways to move in the world. I see art as a kind of elixir or energy force that helps make change possible because it works through the senses and outside rigid systems.
WNG
How did you get interested in art? I wonder how you were able to combat the negative opinions associated with pursuing a career in art. I know many youths who would love to study art as a major, but outside factors often affect their decision.
JJ
I do not remember a time in my life when I was not interested in art and making things. Art has always had a place in my life. Looking back, I understand now it is not really a decision I chose but a vocation that is part of who I am. My practice really developed in high school, I worked a lot on drawing when my dad was struggling with an illness. I spent a lot of time at home working on art while spending time with him. When I went to college I began very practically on a pre-law track, and then took art and art history as electives — I loved the classes, then just never turned back and worked for my BFA.
It was hard for me growing up in a rural farming community where there was not access to the arts. The people in my life just did not understand that world or how to support me — it just did not make sense to them. They were so proud that I made it to college and were worried I was throwing away a huge opportunity to have a stable life. I will admit I did not always win against the negative opinions and gave up a few times but came back. When I was not working as an artist I was not in line with who I was. Yet, it was also hard to know where I belonged in the art world and to use my talents.
I think studying art is incredibly valuable and fulfilling. However, I encourage youth who want to take it on to work with mentors, and to build a supportive community. Art degrees are really what one makes of them. It can be easy to get by and not push the work. One needs to be self-driven, ambitious, have curiosity, and enjoy working independently.
WNG
What drives you as an artist? Are there any organizations you work with who are passionate about the same issues your work addresses?
JJ
I am in a constant search for understanding and constantly placing that search into form. I am driven to examine issues of inequality, power, and justice. Currently, I am working in North Lawndale to bring arts programming to the west side for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I love working on grassroots and community-level projects. I volunteer at West Town Bikes, support several women’s empowerment organizations, and am very involved in community art spaces like Spudnik Press.
WNG
What does “community” mean to you?
JJ
“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” This is a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. that influences my own views on community. I see community as a way of affirming that reality is made up of parts that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that humans are dependent upon each other. Community defines our relationships with one another and to the Earth. It is the courage to love and care for people as we love and care for our own families. It is a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love.
WNG
In your work Start Together, which exhibited at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2016, you talk about the fence as being an indicator between the rich and the poor throughout the city of Chicago. Can you expand on that?
JJ
I was thinking about value and how the city of Chicago cares for some communities differently than others communities. How does poverty happen and what systems sustain and support inequity? In Start Together, I created a labyrinth of orange plastic fencing, a material that litters empty west side lots. It seems to be draped everywhere. Though it is a material that one typically sees in other places as well, in Chicago it often lands in bulk on speculated land and outdoor spaces that are left behind and uncared for. Those who enter the labyrinth I created contend with the dizzying pattern and maneuver in a complicated space. The material holds clues about the way Chicago neighborhoods are valued along with how we feel valued in the city. It addresses complications of property in any neighborhood. It also highlights the underlying tensions from the changes or necessary changes not happening in a community.
WNG
Further, how does this observation make you feel about the future of Chicago, and even the U.S.?
JJ
I believe that together we must work for change, furiously.
In conversation with Anna Elise Johnson
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
In describing your work, you talk a lot about the power of images and their ability to reinforce social, political, and historical norms. Can you tell us about the specific kinds of imagery you use in your work and where you find it?
Anna Elise Johnson
I continuously collect images produced since the end of the Cold War that support the advanced-capitalist ideology we call neoliberalism. I look for photos that mark the historical shift towards the notions that freedom is best protected by free markets, and that government should be small and function only to guard market freedom and private property. I have gathered imagery from the last thirty years of political and economic negotiations, as well as from the protests and upheavals intended to counteract such negotiations. My sources for these images include the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization photo archives, the State Department’s Flickr page, news sites from around the world, and Google image searches for specific negotiations and protests.
WNG
What comes to mind when you consider the image of power?
AEJ
I think of power in the Foucauldian sense that power is to be found everywhere. It operates from the top down as well as from the bottom up. I do not believe that there is a single image of power but rather that multiple images appear as nodes in the network of operations of power. Images are produced intentionally to support oppressive power structures, but because power is everywhere, images can also be used as emblems of resistance to challenge those structures.
In my recent work I have been contrasting staged photos produced by those in power with unstaged photos of people protesting in the streets. These protesters have no access to the restricted centers of global decision-making nor, for example, can G-8 summit participants hear the sounds of the protesters outside. Furthermore, the images of such summits that enter the news and history books have nothing to do with protest but instead represent carefully controlled messaging. In my artwork, I have been rearranging and manipulating various aspects of these representations of power— two men in suits shaking hands, along with the rugs and architecture and all the trappings of wealth surrounding them.
WNG
Your acrylic collages are such unique objects. They are layered and complicated in a way that is at once seductive, yet visually confusing. Can you tell us a little bit about how you began working with this medium and why you chose this form to support this particular content?
AEJ
I started working with the content in this kind of photograph in graduate school at the University of Chicago. I was working with oil paint at the time, painting croppings of images fairly photo-realistically, then repeatedly masking off half of that painted image with strips of tape and repainting the image on top of it in a different tone. Then I pulled the tape strips to expose an image repeating itself in slightly contrasting and offset layers. After graduate school, I received a Core Program fellowship in Houston, where I decided to make the layering more obvious but at the same time more complicated by using digital prints applied to multiple transparent acrylic sheets bonded with clear resin. Using this technique, I was able to make the layered images exist in three-dimensional space, allowing the viewer to appreciate and understand each layer individually and in relation to the others. Making the work thicker and more dimensional also allowed the viewer to decipher and unveil images layer by layer based on the viewer’s physical position in a manner that wasn’t possible on the flat surface of a painting.
WNG
You often put great emphasis on the hands, i.e. gestures, handshakes. In some of your earlier collages you extract the entire figure, leaving on only the hands, and your works in Sapphire, Blue Suit and Two Suits, prioritize the hands at the forefront. What do the hands signify for you?
AEJ
The hands in the two pieces in Sapphire both communicate clear and recognizable gestures. In Two Suits, the hands are grasped in the tight grip of a handshake staged for the original propagandistic purpose of the photograph – to symbolize a political agreement. In Blue Suit, one hand’s pointer finger touches the opposite hand’s pinky, implying, “I am making a point.” I filled the silhouette of the suits with a collage of objects from their mis-en-scene, forming a visual barricade out of the constituent elements of the photograph. In other work, I have often left the figures empty as negative silhouettes, while including as positive elements their hands and ties. The individuals in these photographs often over determine the legible narrative of the image. By removing them, I expose the props and mechanisms that contribute to their strategic messaging.
WNG
It was fascinating on opening night to watch your performance, Another Encounter. I was surprised by how much it mimicked the layered, luminous style of your sculptures. For those who were unable to attend, the performance consisted of you projecting gesturing politicians onto yourself while attempting to align your face and body with their’s. Simultaneously, an audio recording played of the politicians’ language spliced with a recitation of Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity. There’s so much that can be said about the relationship between gender and power. Can you describe that relationship in regards to this piece?
AEJ
I wanted to do a performance that more directly placed me as a queer woman in relation to these suited, male politicians whom I’ve been using in my work and to think through what my actual, corporeal relationship was to their performance of power. The video clips of the politicians that I projected onto my body all came from the Charlie Rose Show, and I chose segments in which they were speaking about how to project and maintain power within a globalized world. The Judith Butler speech that I interjected brought together her ideas of gender performativity with her ideas about precarity. In other words, she combined her idea that gender is not innately within us but is enacted through a continued performance with her ideas about how certain populations become precarious, to show how precarity is linked to the presentation of gender norms.
During the performance I aligned my body in relationship to the gesturing politicians projected on top of me, and I was continuously trying to keep up with their gestures as I watched myself in my cell phone that was live streaming my image to the other side of the gallery. Sometimes their faces morphed completely with mine and other times I was too slow or moved in the wrong direction and the projection misaligned to show my own eyes, features, and body. Judith Butler suggests that because gender is a performance (and we have to continuously re-perform gender), there is also the possibility that the presentation of gender can fail to repeat and come undone in unexpected ways. By mirroring the gesturing male politicians, I hoped to draw out these possibilities. I think the performance succeeded as a confrontation and reinforced the messages of my sculptural art.
WNG
Do you have any future projects in the works you can share with us? I’m curious if all of the wild media representation surrounding this year’s presidential election has influenced you in any way.
AEJ
Toward the end of the presidential campaign it seemed as if discussions of politics revolved entirely around Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as if our minds had been overtaken by these two figures who completely dominated the news media, our Facebook feeds, and our imaginations. Now that Donald Trump is the president-elect, all the imagery surrounding politics, at least this week, only reinforces the trauma of the Trump win. All the direct racism and misogyny that he spewed during the campaign, and in turn the methods that artists and comedians used to parody or critique him, did not suffice to convince voters of the terrible choice they were making by voting for him.
At the beginning of the week when I started doing the Instagram takeover for the Weinberg/ Newton Gallery, I was thinking about focusing on the theme of iconoclasm and expressing my rage through the destruction of Trump’s image. The day after he was elected, it felt somewhat cathartic to see citizens obliterate a Trump piñata or burn a giant effigy of his head, but now I just do not want to see him at all. I’m feeling at the moment that I’ll have to use methods that no longer treat the kind of imagery immediately connected to a closed discourse about what politics can mean, but instead what they now do mean. I have been going to protests all week and taking photographs. For this week anyway, instead of searching for imagery of all the global negotiations that I normally collect, I’ve been focusing more on images of upheaval and protest.
In conversation with Asa Mendelsohn
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Your contribution to the exhibition is a HD three channel video titled Instrumental, which echoes throughout the gallery. As someone whose work focuses on the intimacy of power structures, this reflects the solitude of the guards on film, especially when coupled with the singing of “You Will Be Found” from the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen. Airport security, and airports in general, are places of anxiety on a number of levels, yet Instrumental is almost a reestablishment of autonomy by the subjects. Was that the intention of this piece?
Asa Mendelsohn
While I was working on this, a friend shared a text by Simone Browne, who refers to the airport as a “security theater.” That made a lot of sense to me, as a way to describe the intricacy of the security work that takes place at the airport — where long checkpoint lines, escalators, scrolling info screens, build a fragmented, moving stage — but also as a way to describe how that people who work in these spaces are enlisted as its actors.
When and where is it possible to claim autonomy from the state, or from your manager? The instability of autonomy is normal, and is its own kind of horror. I wanted the work I did at the airport to address that instability. In that way it felt important to include not just sequences of singing, but the moments leading up to song, and the moments after, waiting around, setting up.
There’s a moment right before Joe starts singing “You Will Be Found” when you can hear the airport music in the background. Joe’s getting ready to start singing, but at this point we’ve been filming for awhile and he’s already warmed up, waiting for a second camera. He starts singing along to the airport. He laughs: “I wish I knew this song.”
WNG
There’s a lot of “dancing” in the piece, whether seemingly more choreographed (as with the wheelchair) or in subtler fashion (I’m thinking of the movement of the escalators). Were you thinking about these actions as something that occurs by happenstance in an airport, or as motion with which to pair with singing?
AM
Tieri’s dance with the wheelchair was actually a lot less directed than the sequences on the escalators. It was more spontaneous. He started dancing that day as a way to loosen up, in order to sing, and then his cumbia moved across the floor. We were filming at the far end of Terminal 2 near an area closed off for construction, and it was relatively quiet. There happened to be these wheelchairs, and having already gotten over there, Tieri took one as a partner. After he did this once we were like yes of course, so then he did it again. That was one of the days it was just me and him working together, and we’d already met a few times, so I think it was more possible to feel out the space. The image of Tieri pushing the empty dancing chair came through that process of play. The shots on the escalators were a bit different, these aspirational moments of music video choreography that I included in iteration, to show the process of trying to make the image.
WNG
Being in their day-to-day job, were the security guards more comfortable performing in front of their colleagues, or did you have to goad them a bit? Were any permissions involved, in terms of their bosses consenting to their being recorded?
AM
There were a lot of permissions involved, and separate conversations with each performer about what kind of singing they’re into, what they needed to feel comfortable. I knew I wanted to work one-on-one with people, so the process of directing was pretty idiosyncratic and came out of conversations. With another performer, this guy Lou who’s actually a retired TSA agent who made a cameo at the airport to sing Frank Sinatra songs, we created a karaoke setup in a food court. I ended up being most interested in how these two performers, Joe and Tieri, bounce off each other, so I edited the three channel version of the work to feature their songs.
I was granted permission to film there within the framework of creating a public artwork, commissioned by the airport. I had support from curators and security managers across the different companies working under the umbrella of airport security. I was able to work with performers while they were on the clock. A single channel version of the work was on view in two locations for a year, on the same monitors that display ads for Clinique or CNN or whatever. There’s a real tension in the work for me, between my intention to talk about about precarity and alienation, and what I think the airport liked about my proposal — the possibility to humanize airport security, make it more musical. I’m interested in that tension — is it legible viewing the work now, in the gallery, in the context of a show about surveillance?
WNG
Considering the above, what do you intend to address next in your work?
AM
While I was working at the airport I made a performance with security staff at the Blanton Museum of Art at UT Austin, that felt pretty directly related. For the duration of a free, mostly musical public performance event, gallery assistants roved through museum spaces, narrating what they observed. Their voices were miked and carried across the museum mezzanine and lobby, while also running through a voice to text software displaying fragments from four performers speech on a monitor. Like at the airport, at the museum I was interested in the seams of a performance, and how the labor of security procedures might be re-ordered by their seams.
Recent collaborations have involved working with voice in different ways, writing screenplays for operatic voices, and I have been working with an amazing singer, Hillary Jean Young, on the score for the film I’m working on now. The film is pretty different in form than anything I’ve made before, a feature-length essay reflecting on relationships between coalitional organizing and passing, and between activism and fantasy, looking, in part, at the legacy of a grassroots movement that successfully resisted private military development in Southern California in the mid-2000s. I’m editing right now, working through really challenging questions about my own voice.
In conversation with Cheryl Pope
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
Your ongoing project JUST YELL encompasses a range of media that uses cheerleading as a conceptual base. Can you tell us about how you decided to merge issues of gun violence with this form?
Cheryl Pope
Yelling is what cheerleading used to be called and I was immediately taken by this as its connection to histories of call and response, protest, protection, excitement, and celebration. This encompassed what Chicago and the United States needs: the calling out and the reacting to injustice, as well as the celebrating of difference and the excitement of coming together with pride, respect, and honor to be together.
Cheerleading also comes with a voice of command. The cheerleaders role is to direct the audience, bringing them together and unifying their voice so that it is louder as a community, rather than as individuals. This places the voice of youth in a position of power, commanding and suggesting what they think the city should be yelling.
For the past 5 years, I have been using the aesthetics of all American varsity sports to discuss issues of inequality, systems that abuse power, and racism. For me, the varsity aesthetics, along with classic and muscle cars from the 1950-’70s, hold the ideals of the “American Dream.” Sports also tells the history of race in the United States, basketball and boxing specifically. Because athletics are celebrated and offered nationwide, it is also a very accessible framework which just about everyone can read. And most important, varsity aesthetics embody the rudimentary characters we need: team, pride, honor, and respect. They celebrate the individual with the small name on the front of the jacket while emphasizing the team on the back of the jacket. For me this brings forward the need for the individual and the community to exist as one.
WNG
Working so closely with youth seems to be of pivotal importance to your practice. I imagine it is rewarding for the young people you work with to feel like they are being encouraged to raise their voices, but more so, there’s something very powerful as a viewer to hear these concerns straight from the youths that are most affected by the ramifications of gun violence. How did you begin collaborating with young people as part of your practice?
CP
It is a complete honor for me that young people are interested to collaborate with me, and trust me with their bodies and voices. We perform many different contexts for many different audiences, traveling together and meeting new people, I try to be extremely thoughtful and communicate with them about each opportunity.
I am most interested to collaborate with them because they are the future. They feel, notice, question, and react. They often see what adults cannot, and it is they who are the coming leaders.
WNG
One of your works in This Heat is a 2 hr 54 min video piece titled One of Many, One. This slow and repetitive video is at once heartbreaking and captivating. I’ve seen many people sit with it for quite a while at the gallery. It’s a resounding message of the weight of grief and loss, as well as a reminder of the immanent threat of violence towards communities of color. I’m curious, how did you conceive of this particular way to describe these ideas?
CP
The RIP shirts are very common amongst youth as healing objects to honor, respect, and process the lives of loved ones lost to gun violence. Many of the youths I collaborate with knew several, which means they have several shirts. I thought about what it feels like to carry this loss, and had an image of putting on all the shirts at one time. Justyce lost seven friends, and I thought of her petite frame wearing all 7 shirts at once, and how this might communicate the weight, the swollen pain, and the unprocessed sadness that she carries. From talking with them, I heard their fear that they could be next. I imagined that when they saw the shirts, they might see theirs, and together this idea emerged for the video.
WNG
Have you ever installed any work from this project in schools? If so, what was the response?
CP
Yes, I installed the banners from the project called A SILENT I at Lindblom Math and Science Academy in Englewood, Ontario College of Art and Design and also currently have banners installed in the Athletic Center at Kenyon College. In both cases the text on the banners is written by the students of the school, however what I discovered is that when a viewer confronts the banners, they assume that I, as the artist am the author. Upon learning that the voice is reflective of a community, often one they are involved in, their interpretation and relationship to the work shifts. As they recognize themselves in the text, they are also seeing the other, experiencing the feeling of being both an individual and part of a community.
WNG
What would you say is your overall goal/intention with this body of work?
CP
I wouldn’t say JUST YELL is a body of work, but rather that it is a series of reactions, it is a movement, a framework to come together and bring together. At the foundation are intentions of equality, justice, and protection. It’s about bringing forward the voice and truths of the people, acknowledging the felt experience, and documenting these testimonies in order to instigate change and record a more just history.
WNG
Can you recount any particularly memorable moments while making JUST YELL?
CP
Because respect, trust, and hope are at the root of JUST YELL, each of our exchanges are so powerful, so revealing, and felt that memorable moments are abundant. It’s really about slowing down to listen deeply to one another, and when one does, you feel the memory of each moment as it is unfolding.
In conversation with Alison Ruttan
Weinberg Newton Gallery
How did you first become interested in addressing violence and its relationships to human nature through your artwork?
Alison Ruttan
I have always been interested in trying to decipher human behavior. I suppose it relates to growing up in multiple environments and cultural customs that I had to negotiate. As an adult, I have been interested in the ways culture and biology determine behavior. I am particularly drawn to the kinds of behavior that are part of patterns of learned behavior and those that are seemingly hard wired. I made work about sex and appetite for many years but switched to looking at aggression soon after 9/11. I use my art practice to try to understand the deep anger that fuels aggression. I have looked to fields like evolutionary biology, feminism, political science and history as sources of my inquiry. My most recent work has concerned itself with the state of endless war.
WNG
Our partner organization for this exhibition, Facing History and Ourselves, approaches history through the lens of identity and the individual. I feel your work does this in a unique way even without depicting any people. Through focusing on the destruction of urban homes, and often placing your sculptures upon or within domestic furniture, we’re constantly brought back to the effects of war on community. Can you tell us more about your choice to focus on civilian structures as opposed to civilians themselves?
AR
It is the feminist side of me that led me to the war work. I often feel that those who start wars (mostly men) are driven, (at best), by principles that often exclude consideration of the cost paid by those who have to live with the consequences. Chris Hedges writes in the book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, writes about the terrible seductiveness of war and the problem with the idea of “heroism” that war promises. I was very affected by the images I saw on the nightly news during the war in Iraq. I was also very distrustful of my own countries involvement in the Middle East. I did not think we knew what we were doing.
Initially I was working in video and photography in related projects exploring the origins of violence. When I began the ceramic work, I initially tried to include people in the wreckage but I quickly saw that it too easily pointed to the emotion you should feel but left little opportunity for a more reflective experience. By removing the people and presenting only the shell, the remains of a home, it points to those who are now gone. The building most damaged are often built in “The International Style”, a type of architecture found in cities all over the world. Many of the buildings look like the same kind of homes we also live in. In the more recent work that integrates home furnishings with the suggestion of rubble or shattered buildings, my intention was to point to a domestic life lost.
WNG
As spectators, removed from the direct impact of warfare, we may see photographs of ruin and devastation but we can often become oversaturated with the images we encounter through our screens every day. Do you think the physicality of your sculptural installations provides the viewer with a heavier impact than the photograph is able to?
AR
We live in news world that largely focuses on one sensational story at a time. I think that when people see blown up cities night after night they begin to lose their shock. Andy Warhol speaks about repetition as having a numbing effect. Sadly the horror of these images can become ordinary. In my work, I think the physicality and intimate scale invites you to peer inside to maybe understand more, the craft of how they are made also distracts your attention, but I believe the distraction holds your attention and your thoughts are allowed to linger as you move between the various emotions that the pieces elicit.
WNG
In your piece, All Down the Line, you show a row of nine buildings — each one more crumbled than the next. This piece in particular hints at the passage of time and the perpetual state of unrest, as I can imagine one building slowly collapsing after the other. I wonder what role does time play in your work? From the fact that some of the ceramic structures you build are based off of images of specific buildings which may no longer be standing, to the fact that you personally have to painstakingly construct that which is destructed.
AR
The time I am describing is gone, these sculpture represent an in between state, neither livable or bulldozed over into empty lots. They are records of a sort, as each building is based on source photographs of specific buildings. This particular scene of the white row houses, all the same, looked like dominoes falling, I wondered how it might be to live at the end of the block that was hardly touched. Perhaps later or even now, new cities will begin to build on these same sites and the events will become just a memory.
WNG
You mention on your website that you began the ceramic work as a way to understand something that was beyond your own experience, starting from a place of empathy. What do you feel you’ve learned or helped others learn throughout the making of this work?
AR
In some ways I have learned nothing that points to making any of this better. I have learned that we don’t learn from our mistakes very well. Maybe that is something that should make us more wary, more cautious. I have tried through this project to make myself more knowledgeable about the history of this region. That is the least I would expect from those eager to start wars. I am trying to humanize these events, to help people empathize with those who have been caught up in them. To see themselves in such circumstances. I am horrified that the US, has let in only eleven Syrian refugees this year. I see this work as contributing to the work of many artists, journalists and concerned citizens who are trying to keep these issues visible. It is especially important now, when our attention is continually diverted by the antics of a president who dismisses the value of being an informed leader, preferring to rely on his instincts instead.
In conversation with Deborah Stratman
Weinberg Newton Gallery
The Illinois Parables draws on events that are driven by faith, technology, and exodus. These events are particularly emblematic of the complex history of Illinois. How did you narrow down to the eleven events featured in this film? What was the selection process like?
Deborah Stratman
I was trying to speak about as much as possible with the fewest possible moves. Working towards a maximalist minimalism. I didn’t know at the outset that I wanted eleven parables, but I knew twelve was wrong — too many Christian and calendrical associations. I settled on eleven because it’s a prime number, so irreducible, but also a little unsettled or imbalanced. That destabilization is a central theme in the film — it affords a kind of uncertainty that allows room for thinking. I tried to focus on historical events that were both extremely local, and political in their specificity, but also general or allegorical, able to rhyme with similar events across time. I wanted to avoid the most commonly re-told stories, like the great Chicago fire or ole’ Abe, and to avoid too many Chicago-based stories. Otherwise I would have tried to cram Studs Terkel and Harold Washington into the mix. A guiding principle was the idea of “thin places,” but rather than exclusively in the Jesuit sense of a place where the border between our world and the spirit world is thin, I was thinking about thin boundaries between sites with a heavy past but seemingly benign present.
WNG
Our partner organization, Facing History and Ourselves encourages people to examine history with the context of their identity. Are the events that you selected common regional knowledge? Were the local residents that you were engaging with generally aware/knowledgeable of the events?
DS
I think some of the histories might be common knowledge, but many are not. Most everybody knows Enrico Fermi had something to do with the critical mass equation that led to the first nuclear bomb, but maybe not that he was doing his experiments in Hyde Park. Many people will have heard of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, but maybe they won’t have known how Ed Hanrahan and the States Attorney’s office created their own false version of events for the nightly news by building sets in their offices and re-enacting the raid. Probably quite a few people have heard of Nauvoo, but maybe not that Joseph Smith who is a prophet to the Mormons was martyred there. And I think far fewer would know how less than a year after the Mormons had been run out across the Mississippi, which was then the edge of our country, Etienne Cabet and his Icarian followers moved into the freshly vacated village to start their own socialist utopian community. There was one person I met in Macomb who knew the story of the alleged pre-teen ‘firestarter’ Wanet McNeill. And around Murphysboro, quite a few people knew of the Tri-State Tornado (to this day, the deadliest in US history). There seems to be general familiarity with the Trail of Tears, though I think most people might not have known where specifically the purged Cherokees and other first nations peoples passed through Illinois. Or that more died in our state than in any other during those years of forced exodous. Folks around Alton know about the Piasa Bird legend because they’ve been repainting that mural for a century or more. But I’m not sure how many know that it’s in reference to a mural that Fr. Jacques Marquette and Joliet saw and recorded on their river journeying. And I’d guess most people don’t know Michael Heizer produced a land art work in Illinois, or even who he is for that matter.
WNG
Parables is an interesting term to use — implying that there are lessons to be learned from the past events, and it gives the film theological overtones. The pacing of the film encourages the viewer to have a meditative experience with the depicted scene. How did the idea of “parables” influence the pacing of the film and the cinematic style?
DS
Yes, I used the term ‘parable’ for its embrace of the allegorical, or the archetypal. I’d say my parables are more secular ones, but definitely invested in ethics. I want them to resonate with other histories and places. The pacing and style aren’t directly connected to the concept of parables. This has more to do with making a film that is extremely dense, and needing to provide space for people to ruminate and drift.
WNG
Can you speak a bit about the use archival footage in the film? How did you decide to use the original footage or to re-enact certain scenes? Was it based on the availability of existing footage?
DS
I’ll answer this more broadly by saying that I was interested in what version of events, or modes of presentation, we tend to trust more than others. That’s why the film is so packed with different types of material, archival and otherwise. There are newspaper headlines, paintings, enactments and re-enactments, voiceovers, interviews and archival films. My choice and alternation of these have more to do with a desire to keep shifting the register of evidence, than about access or availability.
In conversation with Marilyn Volkman
Weinberg Newton Gallery
You contributed not only a video piece, but a performance to The Way the Mystic Sees. As both are complements, how do you feel the performative aspect helps the viewer understand your NEO- CRAFT project? May you explain a little about the project first?
Marilyn Volkman
Immediately, I have to say it’s hard for me to speak about NEO- CRAFT outside of NEO- CRAFT. It’s about fully buying into the moment. NEO- CRAFT is experienced in real-time, so the video for The Way the Mystic Sees functions as a prelude to the event. At the same time, it’s an excerpt of one of the most didactic moments of the performance, which is about human connection being replaced by online connection. This ties back to the conversation of surveillance and data because I think most people feel like giving away their data is the most urgent risk we face in terms of privacy. But there’s also another gigantic danger, which is losing our capacities for human connection. That’s what the video is actually referring to. Data protection and human connection are both really important, but in NEO- CRAFT I try to talk about the latter as the most alarming of the two.
And about the project itself…
NEO- CRAFT is a fully integrated system of philosophical thinking tools allowing art producers to proactively engage with systems of power by utilizing the expressive potential of art for personal and social gain. Focusing on the creation of meaningful art experiences, the philosophy of NEO- CRAFT does not propose specific outcomes, but re-imagines the values of professionalism in free market economies with a special interest in creating ties between contemporary capitalism and developing arenas. NEO- CRAFT reaches the public through seminars, interactive workbooks, one-on-one sessions and takeaway objects.
WNG
In the performance, you take on the character of self-help guru of sorts. Have you had any training as an actor? Did you use any person(s) as a model for your presentation method?
MV
My automatic thought when you ask this is about who should answer. It’s going to be me, but that’s how I think about performance in relation to art. The way I see it — an artist is not always the best person to answer a particular question. Acting for me is about finding the right mouthpiece to explore an idea for an audience. For NEO- CRAFT, the right person emerged as a motivational speaker pretty early on. Around that time I was also working a sales job, reading a lot of self-help books and I was very much into watching youtube videos of evangelical preachers. Immediately I felt a lot of parallels with the art world and figured it was a good idea to create a more obvious cult experience for artists. One that could lead to a new, or uncommon way of asking questions in art contexts.
But to answer your question… Yes, I do have training as an actor. I majored in theater on a whim after pulling out of an ROTC scholarship, but only for a semester. Sometimes I still act in theater productions in the Netherlands when I have time. In reality though, I owe that training to my mother and her side of the family. They’re all storytellers, actors, drama teachers and basically eccentric South Texas personalities with deep character. They taught me how to craft speech and stage presence in relationship to a particular audience from an early age. The first theater productions I was in were directed by my mom. So acting for me happens on a very biological level. It’s how I grew up.
WNG
You live in the Netherlands. Is the tech-savvy entrepreneur as prevalent in Dutch culture as it is in American culture, or do you find the critique you’re engaging in to be more pointed toward Silicon Valley and its cultural exports to places such as Germany and China?
MV
Well, they are really tech savvy in the Netherlands. In terms of surveillance, it seems like everything is monitored, at least at a government level. You have to register where you live, you have a national identity card that links to a database and tracks pretty much everything about you. It’s common knowledge that the government is watching you. Someone told me once that they received a letter letting them know their phone calls had been monitored for months during an investigation on a neighbor. So in a sense, they might be more tech savvy in terms of surveillance in the Netherlands, but from what I understand, it’s the government doing it and not businesses. Europe considers data protection by companies as a fundamental human right. So the tech savvy entrepreneurs exist, but I think they feel less free to do what they want than their counterparts in the US.
With NEO- CRAFT, there are multiple levels. When I think about surveillance and technology, whether it’s the government or a business doing it, it’s this sinister behind the scenes way of exploiting a public that I’m thinking about. NEO- CRAFT externalizes this by introducing a guru who takes advantage of the audience out in the open by selling behind the scenes secrets of how to do it yourself. This of course is tongue in cheek, because the end of the performance is about human connection. But you may also leave wanting a NEO- CRAFT t-shirt, so the way I engage with exploitation is by taking on the performative vernaculars of con-artistry to get at deep human need.
One other parallel is that all of these techniques that companies use to take your data and make money are algorithmic. NEO- CRAFT works in a similar way. I’m constantly taking note of how people react to certain elements of performance, speech, or gesture, and then use those ‘algorithmically’ to steer the audience through a narrative arc, ending with real questions about what it is we’re doing in that space.
Last week, I did NEO- CRAFT for the first time in China. It’s still very fresh, but something that surprised me was that the performance seemed to come across as more sincere. That might have been the limitation of my translations or the shift in context, but maybe it also had to do with Shanghai being a setting where projections of limitless entrepreneurial growth aren’t as absurd as they might seem elsewhere. I have a lot to think about.