ŽILVINAS KEMPINAS Interview by Veronica Roberts . . . žilvinas kempinas, tube, 2008, videotape, plywood In May, New York-based Lithuanian artist Žilvinas Kempinas held an open house at the Atelier Calder, an event that concluded his six-month residency in the studio that Alexander Calder built for himself on a hilltop in Saché, a small village in the French countryside with a view of Balzac’s house. I attended the event directly after seeing Richard Serra’s Promenade (2008) at the Grand Palais in Paris. Despite seeing the shows in direct succession, I didn’t initially connect the work of these artists: Serra is one of sculpture’s leading elder statesmen, while Kempinas is only in his late thirties. Furthermore, the disparity in their working materials could not be more pronounced: to move Cor-ten steel, Serra’s signature material, requires the herculean efforts of steel mills, transatlantic transport by ship, and the careful choreography of skilled riggers. By contrast, a single strand of loose, unspooled videotape, Kempinas’ signature material, doesn’t even register on a bathroom scale. After experiencing Promenade and Kempinas’ work in Saché, however, I was struck by their shared dedication to creating sculptural experiences rather than objects. While sculpture is traditionally thought of as a noun, Kempinas and Serra both treat it as a verb. Like Serra, Kempinas has foregone the sculptural tradition of producing contained, isolated objects on pedestals in favor of creating active spaces in which the visitor’s experience of walking and looking is as crucial as the object itself. The centerpiece of Kempinas’ open house at the Atelier Calder was a large work called Tube (2008). As I walked through the front door of the studio and approached the piece from its side, my field of vision was filled with fluttering, horizontal, black-and-white stripes. The encounter completely disoriented me. Even knowing that Kempinas works with videotape, it took me a moment to register the shiny, black bands for what they were. It was also difficult to gauge how far the bands were from where I was standing. My ability to perceive depth and distance was temporarily suspended, producing a spatial discombobulation that felt like some sort of earthly counterpart to the zero-gravity phenomenon experienced by astronauts. žilvinas kempinas, tube, 2008, videotape, plywood One of the most compelling aspects of walking through Tube came from the way that light activated the material and the space. Indelibly associated with film as an essential ingredient to the formation of the photographic image, light operates in Kempinas’ work in more unexpected ways. As I entered the tunnel of tape, the work resembled a giant sunburst; in sections of the sculpture, the light reflected so brightly that the tape disappeared. From other vantage points, light appeared to bounce off of the strands of videotape as it would off of water, transforming the strips into shimmering artificial waves. Veronica Roberts: How did you arrive at the decision to make sculpture out of videotape? ŽILVINAS KEMPINAS: The first piece that I did with tape actually used microfilm, not videotape. There was a scientific/technical library in Vilnius, and they were getting rid of microfilm—just throwing it out. I liked how the material was translucent, and I was attracted to its snake-like shape. I was also drawn to the fact that microfilm is an obsolete material. The information contained in the microfilm was presumably very important at one point, but it had become just a strange leftover artifact, a kind of industrial fossil. So I used it as a sculptural material in a couple of works in 1992. Later, I used a large quantity of 35-millimeter film rolls that were thrown away after a movie production to make my first full-room installation, Painting from Nature (1994), at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. I arranged large rolls of film on the floor in a grid and carefully pulled the central part of each roll out and up. This simple gesture transformed the rolls into something unusual: they looked like a forest of gigantic worms, translucent and shimmering, with perfectly smooth shapes. You could actually see images on each frame if you studied them up close. But if you stepped back, this micro-world of images turned into abstract forms, perfect spirals. They looked alive and dead at the same time, like coral. Movies are time-based media—they rely on a certain length of time to be perceived, but here, the film was deprived of this essential element. Time was frozen into these celluloid stalagmites. žilvinas kempinas, painting from nature, 1994, mixed media Roberts: And after working with microfilm and 35-millimeter film, what made you shift to your current practice of using videotape? KEMPINAS: One day, I pulled tape out of a VHS cassette because I suspected that it might be a very interesting material to work with: it’s super thin, super light, and totally black, so you can perceive it as an abstract line. Since you can create many different drawings with a single line, I figured that I could use this material to make different three-dimensional installations. At the same time, tape is a data carrier. Hypothetically you can have all the colors and sounds of the world in it. So, it has this capacity, this potential, just like 35-millimeter film rolls, but it’s more abstract and simpler. And then, of course, videotape is so flexible and so light that it can be set in motion using air circulation, which becomes an invisible carrier for the sculpture. Roberts: And after working with microfilm and 35-millimeter film, what made you shift to your current practice of using videotape? KEMPINAS: One day, I pulled tape out of a VHS cassette because I suspected that it might be a very interesting material to work with: it’s super thin, super light, and totally black, so you can perceive it as an abstract line. Since you can create many different drawings with a single line, I figured that I could use this material to make different three-dimensional installations. At the same time, tape is a data carrier. Hypothetically you can have all the colors and sounds of the world in it. So, it has this capacity, this potential, just like 35-millimeter film rolls, but it’s more abstract and simpler. And then, of course, videotape is so flexible and so light that it can be set in motion using air circulation, which becomes an invisible carrier for the sculpture. žilvinas kempinas, columns, 2006, videotape, plywood, nails Roberts: When did that inspiration strike? When did you first use fans to lift videotape into the air? KEMPINAS: I experimented with videotape as an art student at Hunter College. After I realized its flexibility, I made four arches out of tape, one for each wall of the room, with four fans in the center. The arches weren’t attached to the floor or the ceiling—there were just a couple of small tacks on the end of each arch for weight. The wind lifted the arches up and down along the wall. Sometimes just one side would rise, and other times, the whole arch would fly up in the air. They became live sculptures: light sparkled on the tape, there was the sound of the fans, and the arches went up and down. On the one hand, they were free objects—free from the wall and the floor, but on the other hand, they were caught by the wind of fans and looked like they were struggling to fly. I realized that after all these years of intense studies, nothing made me happier than having this silly strip of tape going up and down the wall. Then, I wanted to make the tape fly. žilvinas kempinas, flying tape, 2004, videotape, fans Roberts: And that’s what led to Flying Tape (2004)? KEMPINAS: Exactly. Flying Tape is one gigantic loop the size of the room, capable of levitating in midair, held up by the wind of several industrial fans. It’s a self-balancing sculpture that constantly changes its shape but without ever losing its circular structure. It’s a sculpture without a pedestal, and it’s not hanging from the ceiling or standing on the floor. It’s carried by an invisible element—currents of air. Roberts: How do Flying Tape and your other kinetic sculptures reflect your ideas about the relationship between sculpture and space? KEMPINAS: I didn’t want to build anything meaningful when I created Flying Tape. I didn’t have any story to tell, and I didn’t want to critique or comment on anything. I just wanted to activate space in a room. Somehow. Anyhow. And preferably without spending much money! I used gravity as a force, but instead of playing along with it, I was intrigued by the idea of fighting it, using these banal materials of unspooled VHS tape and industrial fans. žilvinas kempinas, double o, 2008, videotape, fans Roberts: I’d like to discuss the role that shadows play in your work. When I looked at Link at SFMoMA, I noticed that people were drawn to the crisscrossed pattern of shadows that the strands of videotape cast on the wall. It struck me that people might also be looking to try to make better sense of what the work is made out of and make sense of the space that the work occupies. KEMPINAS: Yes, shadows help us to perceive three-dimensional form. But I see my work as being about light more than it is about shadows. For example, there is one piece called 186,000 miles/second (2004). I wanted to make a piece that would be entirely about light. I wanted to use the casual gallery light like it was a sculptural material, like clay or wood. The work that I made looks like a net of thin pencil lines drawn onto the wall. The lines are actually shadows cast by small needles mounted onto the wall and painted white like the wall. I mounted needles into the wall, starting at seven feet above the floor, and I extended their shadows all the way to the floor. There were two existing conventional gallery lamps by the ceiling, nothing unusual. Their light created a diamond-shaped pattern of shadows along the wall, which was sharper at the top (where it was closer to the light source) than it was at the bottom. Since the painted needles were barely visible, this net of shadows became the predominant visual element. The light cast onto the wall was no longer just a simple, passive light—it became a form. 186,000 miles/second was visible during the day, when the museum was open to the public and the lights were on. But at night, this piece did not exist at all. At the end of every day, it would disappear with a click of an electric switch, at the speed of light, literally. I don’t often use shadows because I want to avoid the theatricality often associated with them. But sometimes they are just unavoidable, and it’s better that I make them contribute to the piece. Link is a good example of this kind of collaboration: the lines of the shadows on the wall cast by the videotape visually overlap with the black lines of the tape coming off of the wall. This overlap creates a subtle optical effect as you approach the work—the surface of the work starts to look like ripples. The viewer’s physical movements optically animate the piece. But, for Still, I used fluorescent tubes, which don’t cast shadows in the same way that regular electric bulbs do, so their light is very even, and there are barely any shadows on the walls. It looks like the piece is floating. žilvinas kempinas, still, 2003, videotape Roberts: Both Link and Still feature long, curved strands of videotape that drape from the walls, and yet, as you point out, they have very different visual effects. Part of that comes from the fact that light affects them differently, as you explained, but it also seems like your spacing of tape has a big impact. Can you explain how you determine how much space you want between the pieces of tape and also what the relationship is between the parts and the whole in works like these? KEMPINAS: The proportions of Link are 1 to 1.5; if the tape is 1, the gap between the tapes is 1.5. If you change these proportions, you will lose the visual effect. Link is very optical and more visually aggressive than Still because the tape has a tighter arrangement. And Still has very different features. However, there are a few things that they share that interest me, such as the way in which the strands of tape don’t read as separate elements. In both Still and Link, they become a single shape, a unified form. And it’s because of this that the work actually has a monumental presence, despite the ephemeral quality of the material of which it is made.žilvinas kempinas, tripods, 2008, aluminum Roberts: What led you to make your first outdoor sculpture, Tripods (2008), during your residency at Atelier Calder in Saché? Do you see it as more of a departure from the other works you made there, or as a continuation of your ideas and interests? KEMPINAS: Tripods seems far away from the tape works, but it’s not as far as it looks. It’s about light, or to be more precise, about catching sunlight. I live in New York where I can’t do outdoor sculpture easily. But in Saché, I had such a great space. I was also inspired by the fact that Calder made outdoor sculptures when he was working there. So, I decided to make an outdoor piece. I wanted to do something relatively light but strong enough to withstand tests of nature. With Tripods, I used aluminum rods, which I bent and curved a little, so they looked more organic. I put all of the rods in clusters of three, joining each trio at the top so that they became tripods, standing on three “feet.” I made a hundred of these tripods and had them intersect along the bottom. Like my work with videotape, Tripods is fragile and durable at the same time: the rods are only fifteen millimeters in diameter, but the way that they were joined allowed them to stand strong. Several impressive storms passed by, and nothing happened! Tripods, to me, is like a happy marriage of the artificial and the natural. It’s artificial because it’s aluminum, an unusual thing to see in a field in the countryside, but it has natural curves, which reflect sunlight and catch one’s attention from a distance, like a lighthouse. There is something slightly alien-futuristic about them, but at the same time archaic and primitive, almost tribal. Roberts: Yes, and I think that where you placed the work on the property in Saché, nestled in a grove of trees, heightened the juxtaposition of natural and artificial elements. KEMPINAS: At the beginning, I thought that I might assemble them in front of the building on the large stone platform where Calder often placed his works. But when I brought a few elements outdoors to see how tall they were and how they worked with sunlight, I placed them on the other side of the building and decided to just leave them there. Roberts: I’m curious about when you first learned about Calder’s work and what about his work you find most compelling. KEMPINAS: Calder was always so big that even the Soviets didn’t know what to do with him. Dalí and Warhol were crucified, and Duchamp was totally ignored, but Calder was present. So I knew about him early on, through books. Initially, I wouldn’t say that he was an inspiration to me because at that time, I was suspicious about everything that Soviets didn’t condemn. And later in school, I was drawn to the bad boys. But recently, because of the Calder Prize, naturally, I have been studying his work more closely than ever, reading books and seeing his works every chance I get. I was surprised by many things about him, and his works resonate with my own sense of art and art-making. I can now see that I share some similarities with Calder in my approach, even though I arrived at my work from a different direction. Roberts: Martin Puryear recently made the following observation: “The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence.” This statement resonated for me, as contradictions are such an intrinsic part of our daily lives, and they also seem to animate your work. Is that a fair assessment, do you think? KEMPINAS: I could not agree more. I see art as an accumulation of energy, and this energy is often generated by the intensity of opposites. In fact, opposites are at the very core of art-making. Traditional painting combines hot and cool colors, music uses high and low notes, architecture uses volumes and voids, poetry combines contrasting words, and so on. I am attracted to things that are capable of transcending their own banality and materiality to become something else, something more. I like the way that videotape is simultaneously delicate and durable, since it’s meant to last. I can rip it easily with my hands because it’s so thin, but I can also stretch it. Videotape is made to present the world in color, but it appears purely black. It’s supposed to be this safe container of the past, but it is destined to vanish like a dinosaur, to become obsolete, pushed away by new technologies. It’s a familiar mass-produced commodity, but it can be surprisingly sensual and can look almost alive if set in motion. It can be seen as a solid, thick, black line, but it can also disappear right in front of your eyes if it’s turned on its side. So, to me, it’s not just VHS tape but a rich sculptural material. It allows me to achieve subtle perceptual effects, which I simply would not be able to achieve with steel, stone, or any other material. I also like the play of the artificial and the natural. Even though my work is made of industrial materials, displayed under artificial light, and sometimes uses artificial wind and electricity, I am going for something fundamentally natural. Looking at one of my works can, I hope, be like watching a flame or a running river. I want people to forget for a second what they are looking at and inhabit a parallel world, where abstract things make perfect sense as long as you are willing to take the time to look. * This article was re-published in Tube (2009), the catalogue for Kempinas' exhibition at the Lithuania Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale. . . . 2008

ZION ON THE PRAIRIE Essay by Adam Marcus . . .yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 If you drive northeast of the tiny town of Eldorado, Texas (pop. 2,000) on Schleicher County Road 300, there isn’t much to see, save the occasional oil well and the limitless, low-lying brush of the dry landscape. But four miles or so out of town, as the calm monotony of west Texas ranch country begins to set in, you’ll come upon an unmarked, padlocked gate, initially indistinguishable from those found at countless other dusty turnoffs along the road. This one is different, though: in the distance, far beyond the wire mesh fence, a collection of buildings, anchored by a prominent white structure, conspicuously rises like a mirage from the otherwise vacant prairie. An agricultural complex, you might think, or perhaps some kind of industrial park. But no: inside the gate lies the site of the most recent chapter of America’s history of confrontation between fundamentalist religion and organized democracy. The gate itself represents nothing less than the front line in the enduring battle over the power of the state to interfere in private religious affairs, an unresolved conflict that, in many ways, is written into this country’s DNA. It’s a complex story of migration, polygamy, alleged pedophilia, vast sums of money, and of course, great controversy. But perhaps more than anything, it’s a story of one of the most radical and compelling utopian experiments in recent American history. The saga begins with a man named David Allred, who materialized in Eldorado in the fall of 2003 looking to buy some land. For a reported sum of $700,000, Allred secured a 1,700-plus-acre tract of land northeast of the town, completing the sale under the auspices of YFZ Land, LLC, explaining that it would be used as a corporate hunting retreat for wealthy clients of his Utah company. Upon the closing of the transaction, dozens of workers arrived almost immediately, quickly installed a small camp of trailer homes on site, and commenced construction on three large structures, supposedly hunting lodges for guests of the new ranch. But as construction continued around the clock, and as materials, equipment, and personnel continued to arrive en masse, by the following spring, townspeople began to whisper about the goings-on up at the ranch. Stoked by reports from local pilots who had flown over the property, the aggressive investigative reporting of the town's newspaper, and, most of all, by rumors emanating from an obscure corner of Utah, an alternate reality began to emerge. Allred was no ordinary Utah businessman. His company, YFZ Land, was in fact a front for a much larger entity, the United Effort Plan (UEP), a religious trust founded in the 1940s by a reclusive splinter group of Mormons, designed to consolidate assets and shield its members from public oversight. Operating under the rubric of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), this branch of Mormonism traces its roots back to the 1890 grand bargain between the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and the federal government of the United States, in which the Church agreed to forswear its controversial practice of polygamy in return for gaining statehood for Utah. Polygamy persisted, however, in the rural reaches of the new state, as certain members of the Church refused to renounce a fundamental tenet of Mormonism as established by founder Joseph Smith earlier in the nineteenth century: the belief in a direct correspondence between the number of wives a man has and his chances of gaining entry to Heaven. The FLDS was thus born as a breakaway sect in protest against the LDS’s compromise with the federal government, and its followers slowly built a stronghold in the southwestern corner of Utah, in and around a border settlement called Short Creek, now known as the sister municipalities of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah. Seeing themselves in the age-old American tradition of religious groups withdrawing from mainstream society to escape persecution, the FLDS flourished in isolation, building their own institutions and economy, amassing great wealth in the communal UEP trust. Their strategic location, straddling a state border, afforded a protective measure of jurisdictional ambiguity that shielded them sufficiently from state interference for most of the twentieth century. By the 1990s, the UEP had mushroomed into a one-to-two hundred million dollar entity, and the FLDS had become a de facto dictatorship under the reign of member Warren Steed Jeffs, who inherited control over the church and its trust from his ailing father. A self-declared prophet who claims direct descent from Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ, Jeffs quickly assumed control over all aspects of FLDS life, arranging marriages, reassigning wives at his discretion, confiscating houses, and excommunicating those who refused to bend to his will. Jeffs’s fervent insistence on expanding the scope of polygamy—he is rumored to have more than seventy wives—exacerbated an implicit problem with the practice. Within a finite population (the FLDS is said to number some 10,000), there is an equally finite supply of potential brides, and the more aggressive the pursuit of polygamy, the more rapid the logic of supply and demand takes effect. As the men turn to ever younger girls for their so-called “celestial brides,” a pattern of institutionalized pedophilia sets in. By the early part of this decade, lurid tales began to seep out of the FLDS community, particularly from excommunicated FLDS members, disenchanted with Jeffs' increasingly erratic stewardship, which attracted the attention of state authorities. Drawn by sensational stories of polygamy, pedophilia, and forced marriages, the media began sustained coverage of the sect's activities, and the FLDS was once again thrust unwillingly into the national spotlight. It was within this unstable milieu of mounting scrutiny, suspicion, and incipient internal dissent that Jeffs began to formulate his Plan B. Perhaps knowingly, Jeffs—who before long would be indicted on a host of sexual assault charges and subsequently placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list—concluded that the FLDS would need to retreat from their twin citadels and relocate their nerve center, once again escaping the public eye. But he had more in mind than merely going underground: instead of maintaining the sect’s dependent relationship with the machinery and institutions of mainstream America, Jeffs reconceived the FLDS as an autonomous sovereignty, divorced from American society and its laws. He envisioned a shift away from the lifestyle of parallel coexistence popularized by the HBO drama “Big Love,” and instead, towards an idealistic notion of a self-sustaining polygamist society that would thrive independently, outside the realm of contemporary civilization. It was at this moment, fueled by vanity, fear, and delusion, that Jeffs became a utopian visionary. temple, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 Enter David Allred, dispatched by Jeffs under the guise of YFZ Land, LLC to secure a site for a new polygamist utopia. Yearning for Zion, it would be called (hence the acronym YFZ), and it would be realized with the vast financial resources accrued by the FLDS over the past half century. While details of the design and planning of the new settlement are not known, it is evident that there was an overarching vision from the start. For unlike the towns of Colorado City and Hildale, in which the FLDS homesteads—oversized yet conspicuously unadorned McMansions—are improvisationally integrated into an existing urban context, Yearning for Zion presented a carte blanche for the FLDS to express their ideology as an explicitly architectural proposition. And while the Eldorado locals continued to refer to the site as a “ranch” even after the revelation that Allred’s corporate retreat was in fact a project of polygamist colonization, that term belies the ambition of the FLDS: Yearning for Zion is no mere ranch, but rather a city, complete with all the attendant complexities, contradictions, and aspirations inherent in any city. original three houses, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 Given the reclusive, secretive nature of the FLDS, outsiders can only experience Yearning for Zion from the air. Thanks to J.D. Doyle, a local pilot in Eldorado who has compiled photographs of the city under construction, we have a relatively complete record of its development. As the city expanded, two notable characteristics of Yearning for Zion became apparent: the relentless grid pattern of its growth and its immense scale, the latter somewhat deceptively minimized in aerial photographs. The first three buildings to be constructed, presumably residences for the first FLDS settlers who arrived from Short Creek, were built ad hoc, in a diagonal row along the north-south axis, perhaps in response to the site's topography. But these buildings were soon followed by the construction of a host of support structures—greenhouses, grain silos, maintenance sheds, workshops, and a concrete production facility—all of which were organized along a strict grid pattern, oriented precisely to the cardinal directions. The first three buildings were quickly subsumed into an ever-expanding Jeffersonian grid of the kind that so often provided the template for American frontier settlements. To date, the original residences are the only structures that deviate from the grid. cement plant, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 As construction on the city progressed, a distinctive architecture emerged. The first three buildings, each at least 10,000 square feet in size, established the FLDS residential typology: stacked log construction on a concrete base, raised porches, green gabled roofs, and consistently awkward, oversized proportions. The contrast of these buildings with their landscape is exacerbated by the odd choice to build with logs in an area of the state where there are no trees. Thus it seems that the FLDS’s intention is to invoke the mythologized American cabins of past settlers, and by extension, portray themselves as the quintessential American frontier society. In a remarkable, bizarre synthesis of formal convention (notions of what a house ought to look like) with the functional demands of a polygamist lifestyle, the typical FLDS house strives to project the idealized image of American domesticity, yet everything is scaled up in size as needed in order to accommodate the numerous sister-wives, as the brides are called, and scores of children who live inside. warren jeffs's home, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 The siting of the residences is similarly dictated by a grossly exaggerated sense of scale. Each superblock, several thousand feet square and easily equivalent to a New York City block, contains just one or two of these units. But although the American democratic ideal of a house and lawn is taken to the extreme here in Zion, the urban model is not without hierarchy. Within the first year, a large H-shaped structure was built adjacent to and on axis with the sect’s meeting house. Said to be Jeffs’s private compound, this enormous abode could easily house hundreds, and its completion marked a turning point for the church’s new Texan outpost: their leader and prophet would soon arrive. temple, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 Jeffs’s architectural ambitions went well beyond a new home for him and his sprawling family. On January 1, 2005, he materialized in Eldorado—his last reported appearance before going on the run—to conduct a dedication ceremony for a massive structure that had only recently commenced construction. This new building, the first and only FLDS temple, completed within a matter of months, was marked by a comprehensive depth of utopian vision and would become the iconic emblem of Jeffs’s Texan endeavor and the controversy that ensued. Dedicated to the Lord, Mormon temples are reserved for special forms of worship and differ from the relatively ordinary meetinghouses used for weekly prayer. Clad in white limestone quarried and cut on the property, the YFZ temple rises above a pristinely manicured grass lawn and can be seen for miles. In fact, it can only be seen from a significant distance, due to the twelve-foot-high perimeter walls that surround it. Its whiteness—in stark contrast with the drab Texan prairie—is arresting, but even more breathtaking is its scale, which taps into the small-town American imaginary of civic architecture, in which an imposing stately structure on a green anchors the town. But the incongruity of the structure is jarring in the land of “Friday Night Lights,” where visionary architecture is usually limited to high school football stadia and grain silos. temple, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 Jeffs’s audacious decision to build a major temple in Eldorado was part of his broader attempt to usurp the mantle of Mormonism from the mainstream LDS church, which has a history of constructing iconic temples throughout the world, with notable examples including those in Oakland, San Diego, and Kensington, Maryland near Washington, DC, as well as the central temple in downtown Salt Lake City. The importance of the temple dates to the earliest days of the Church, which, under the leadership of founder Joseph Smith, was settled in Nauvoo, llinois in the late 1830s and early 1840s, after Mormons fled persecution at earlier settlements in New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Smith had prophesied a Mormon Zion from the outset, and his hope was that the new city of Nauvoo would fulfill this vision. At the center of the city was a temple, constructed of white limestone, and the Mormon settlers rapidly established a civic infrastructure, complete with their own newspaper, university, judiciary system, and militia. But this first Mormon experiment in municipal theocracy was not fated to last. Smith was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob in 1844, and his followers, under the leadership of Brigham Young, fled westward in 1846, eventually founding Salt Lake City. In 1848, the Nauvoo Temple was destroyed by fire under suspicious circumstances and, to this day, remains for Mormons—both mainstream and fundamentalist—a reminder of the tumultuous origins of their Church. For the FLDS particularly, the dream of the Nauvoo experiment and its destroyed temple represents the Zion to which they yearn to return. temple, yearning for zion ranch, texas, 2005 A number of the YFZ temple’s features, such as the tablet-shaped windows and steeple comprised of a dome perched atop an octagonal drum, refer directly to those of the Illinois building; the scale, white limestone material and basilica-like proportions suggest a connection as well. Jeffs and the FLDS have always insisted on their rightful title as the true standard-bearers of the Mormon faith. But the construction of the Eldorado temple in the approximate image of Nauvoo takes this challenge to new heights by establishing an architectural bond to the structure associated with Mormonism's inception, thereby linking the FLDS cause to Smith’s utopian mission. The differences, however, between the two are also consequential for understanding the nature of utopia as imagined by the FLDS. The Nauvoo Temple, which has since been rebuilt by the LDS (2002), fits into the American tradition of neoclassical municipal building that can be found in small towns throughout the country. One could imagine such a building alternatively serving as a city hall, school, or post office. The FLDS reinterpretation departs from Nauvoo in its sloped roof, more characteristic of Christian spiritual architecture, but the neoclassical ornamental embellishments are gone, replaced by an almost abstract checkerboard field of square limestone panels, punctuated only by mirrored glass windows, peculiar features for any religious building. And, perhaps most notably, each corner is anchored by a round turret, a form typical of military fortification. The turrets are topped with crenellations that continue around the roofline, suggesting the profile of a castle or a fort, thereby producing an uncanny confusion of religious monumentality and the architecture of military defense. Like Smith’s experiment at Nauvoo, Yearning for Zion’s ambitious scope only increased the unwanted scrutiny and suspicion of outsiders, which was not conducive to the ongoing legal struggles of the FLDS. After a long period of investigation and subsequent flight, Jeffs was apprehended for sexual assault in the summer of 2006, although it is suspected that he still maintains firm control of the FLDS from prison. State authorities in both Utah and Arizona looked to Eldorado in their efforts to uncover the murky dealings of Jeffs and the FLDS, financial and otherwise. As the legal troubles escalated, it became clear that it was only a matter of time before the brewing tensions between FLDS and state government bubbled over into a more direct confrontation.The tipping point came on March 29, 2008, when a hotline in Texas received a phone call from a sixteen-year-old FLDS girl who resided at Yearning for Zion, claiming that she had been forced to marry an older man, bear his children, and endure sustained sexual assault. The state was convinced that this was the long-awaited smoking gun that would at last confirm the alleged misdeeds of the FLDS. A week later, in a dramatic and coordinated display of force, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies entered the Yearning for Zion property. SWAT teams, helicopters, and an armored personnel carrier descended on the ranch, and authorities began a thorough search of the grounds, expecting to find evidence of sustained patterns of child abuse and pedophilia. Speculation abounded that the temple—off limits to all but the most senior FLDS members—contained all the secrets and was where the celestial marriages were consecrated. The national media arrived, ecstatic and hopeful. In a now familiar story, the state Child Protective Services agency, suspecting abuse, proceeded to remove more than 450 FLDS children from the ranch, separating them from their parents and placing them in foster care throughout the region. In the following weeks, the media paraded images and interviews of devastated FLDS mothers grieving for their children. Fielding the women—with their trademark pioneer dresses, braided coifs, and strange dialect (a product of a century of cultural isolation)—proved to be a media-savvy counterassault by the FLDS. The women conveyed a sense of united desperation and undeserved trauma, but the spectacle of grief masked their stubborn refusal to compromise their polygamist principles or admit any fault. The ACLU issued a statement in tentative solidarity with the FLDS, Larry King and Oprah arrived, and the nation found itself pondering yet another potentially catastrophic standoff between state law enforcement and religious extremists. The standoff never came. On May 29, after a series of appeals, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Child Protective Services must return the children to their families, and that the state’s actions were unwarranted. It also later emerged that the original distress call was a hoax, perpetrated by a disillusioned former FLDS woman in Utah hoping to provoke exactly the kind of reaction that the phone call set in motion. Many had anticipated a rehash of the 1993 Waco conflict, in which the confrontation between David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult and federal law enforcement ended in a violent climax, but such hostilities never materialized. The FLDS emerged relatively unscathed; a handful of charges related to sexual crimes and bigamy have been handed down, but otherwise life in Zion continues much as it did before the raid. Despite the fact that the FLDS utopia in Texas was founded upon the morally taboo practice of polygamy, and despite that YFZ is, in many respects, an exercise in Jeffs’s narcissism, it’s hard to dismiss the group as simply another religious cult that built itself a compound in the hinterland. The logistical foresight is staggering; the FLDS were able to build, from nothing, an infrastructural apparatus that includes a water pumping station; wastewater treatment plant; provisions for food including agricultural fields, orchards, livestock pens, and grain silos; and education, healthcare, and security systems, while also making plans for the construction of future buildings, with the intent of supporting a population in the thousands. But like all utopian projects, this one too is incomplete and contradictory: FLDS members are often spotted in the big-box stores of San Angelo, forty-five miles to the north, eagerly purchasing consumer items in bulk. But this, in a way, underscores Zion’s place in the context of American utopian thought and American society at large, as theirs is a drive to imagine a future different from that with which they would otherwise be faced. And though it may require a temporary suspension of judgment, as the alternate future imagined by this utopia is rife with its own unsavory implications, we discount the lessons of Yearning for Zion at our own peril. With their prophet incarcerated and their financial assets now frozen in the state of Utah, the members of FLDS at Yearning for Zion persevere nonetheless. Although the anticlimactic outcome of last year’s raid, which failed to produce the violent apotheosis expected by so many, is a kind of vindication, the FLDS can take nothing for granted and remain as vigilant as ever in the defense of their way of life. For the moment, the sect exists in limbo, waiting to see how this latest round of trouble plays out, but they are still clearly guided by Jeffs’s visionary paranoia. His lasting legacy, no doubt, will be the FLDS’s renewed commitment to the nomadic strategy of self-defense that has defined Mormonism since its outset. Indeed, it turns out that the ranch land in Texas was not the only property purchased by Allred, the FLDS land scout, in the fall of 2003. He secured two additional large tracts of land in the rural stretches of the American west, near Mancos, Colorado and Pringle, South Dakota; locals in both areas have reported construction activity and the arrival of polygamist settlers. It is also rumored that the FLDS’s goal is to create a settlement in Missouri, their presumed location of the Garden of Eden. The march to Zion goes on. . . . 2009

DENISE SCOTT BROWN & ROBERT VENTURI Interview by Adam Marcus . . .venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., learning from las vegas studio, 1968, photograph (courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) "Is not Main Street almost all right?" asked Robert Venturi at the end of his 1966 manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, thereby sending modern architecture into a state of turmoil from which it has never really recovered. Venturi, his partner Denise Scott Brown, and their long-time collaborator Steven Izenour answered this provocative question with their 1972 opus, Learning from Las Vegas, which used lessons from the everyday American automobile city to critique the status quo of postwar modernist architecture. The book is often credited—or blamed, depending on who you ask—for opening the floodgates of postmodernist architecture that defined the 1970s and 80s. This past January, I visited Bob and Denise at their home of almost forty years, a 1910 Art Nouveau house in the leafy Philadelphia neighborhood of Mount Airy. Surrounded by the eclectic artifacts of their long odyssey through the landscape of the American vernacular (Warhol and Ruscha casually mixed in with old casino marquees and the like), we talked about their roots, their writing, their architecture, their politics, and their legacy. Although they have produced an exceptional body of work by any measure, Venturi and Scott Brown occupy a peculiar position in a profession that largely misunderstands and often dismisses their work: they are at once legends and pariahs. The past decade, however, has seen a steadily resurgent interest in their work, culminating most recently in an exhibition and symposium at Yale School of Architecture in January, which celebrated and reassessed the legacy of Learning from Las Vegas. Venturi and Scott Brown's work—both written and built—resonates especially with a younger generation of architects who are unscathed by and uninterested in the debates about postmodernism that consumed much of the past forty years. This new attention has shed light on aspects of Venturi and Scott Brown's practice that have, despite the architects' insistence since the start, been largely overlooked. One such aspect is their work's rich social dimension, a topic foregrounded by Scott Brown in a recently published, long overdue collection of her writings, Having Words. The common thread remains the still-revolutionary notion of "learning from" that drove the early research and continues to offer a powerful model for architects to engage the everyday "ugly and ordinary." In this sense, the most critical lesson to learn from Venturi and Scott Brown may ironically not be one of content, of the "forgotten symbolism of architectural form," so famously resuscitated in Learning from Las Vegas, but rather one of method. And at a time when the architectural mainstream runs the risk of complete detachment from the realities of everyday life, the example set by Bob and Denise, one that balances pragmatism with a healthy dose of iconoclasm, once again becomes a compelling model for challenging the status quo. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., learning from las vegas studio, 1968, photograph (courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) Adam Marcus: You have been designing, writing, and practicing together for nearly fifty years. Yet before you met, you came from such different backgrounds: Denise from southern Africa via London, and Bob from Philadelphia and Princeton via Rome. How have these backgrounds come to inform your work? DENISE SCOTT BROWN: In some ways, our backgrounds are the same. My family is Jewish, his Italian, but you'd be surprised how interchangeable our relatives are. They feel the same in many respects. We are both what I call “marginal”—half in and half out of our own groups and only partway into the dominant culture. And we share a wobbly foothold in several other groups but don't quite belong in any. This may have skewed our vision. Marcus: Denise, you've written much about your time as a student in London, after you left Africa but before you came to America. While in London, what was your connection to Team X and their nascent critique of modern architecture? SCOTT BROWN: Peter and Alison Smithson were not teaching at the Architectural Association when I was a student there, but the atmosphere of rebellion that they embodied was around the school. Last night on TV, I saw a rerun of “Look Back in Anger,” a play that opened in London in the early 1950s. When the curtain rose on a messy student apartment with a young man reading The Observer and his girlfriend in her underwear, ironing, the theater erupted in laughter as students in the audience recognized themselves. The Smithsons were engaged in a parallel probing of architectural reality. And coming from the north of England, they were no more part of the "system” than I was. Marcus: So they were marginal too? SCOTT BROWN: Yes, but in other directions. Growing up in South Africa, I was aware from childhood of the difference between the way things were and the way they were supposed to be. Concerning attitudes to daily life and landscapes (not the country’s stark political issues), the way things were was African, and the way many pundits felt they should be was English. The Smithsons were attuned to such differences of is and ought, but in the UK, it was upper class vs. lower class rather than colonial vs. metropolitan. In England, at that time, a rigid class system affected almost everything. Peter and Alison, thanks to postwar social legislation, were university-educated in a society that looked unkindly on upward mobility. Perhaps their marginality engendered their rebelliousness, but its substance was social and professional. They cried out as architects against the relocation of people from the slums of London to new towns at the outskirts, and they studied life as led on the streets of London’s East End. With my African experience, I bought wholly into such ideas, but it wasn't until I got to Penn that I found the tools for engaging with them. Sadly, the Smithsons had meanwhile decided that there was no way to engage. Marcus: They famously said sociologists have to do it. SCOTT BROWN: Peter said sociologists were going to have to extend their field if they were to help him with problems of urban rebuilding, and to some extent he was right. But he should have realized that he too would have to extend in order to use sociological information. Marcus: What about the art scene in London at the time? Were you exposed to any of the proto-Pop Art of the Independent Group? SCOTT BROWN: I got to know the Smithsons and Reyner Banham, heard Eduardo Paolozzi talk, and visited the “Parallels of Life and Art” exhibition. I managed to see the best of art, plays, and films in London—things I still feast my inner eye on—and I spent time at the ICA. But I was also a student, busy in the studio, and although I brought a Pop Art sensibility with me from South Africa and, at the AA, joined a group open to Brutalist ideas, I did not hear of the Independent Group during my time in London. And when “This Is Tomorrow” opened, I was already in Italy. Marcus: When did you come to the States? SCOTT BROWN: In 1958. My first husband, Robert Scott Brown, and I did what Peter Smithson told us to do: we went straight to Penn because Louis Kahn was there. Marcus: And when did you meet Bob? SCOTT BROWN: At a faculty meeting at Penn in 1960. But he'd seen me before that, and I had heard about him. Marcus: When was the first time you collaborated? SCOTT BROWN: We taught a course together at Penn,1962-64, and collaborated on the Fairmount Park Fountain competition in 1964. From 1960, I would go into his office, when asked, to give crits, and he would visit my studio class in the evening to do the same. We started working together full-time in 1967 when we married. ROBERT VENTURI: A major collaboration was for the Las Vegas studio in 1968. By that time, I was teaching at Yale. SCOTT BROWN: I had left Penn for Berkeley in 1965 and moved to UCLA to help start a new school there. I had a good visitors’ budget and invited various people, including the cultural geographer J.B. Jackson and the sociologist, Scott Greer, to come and talk. I had already decided to do my next studio on Las Vegas, but I thought it would be at UCLA. Then I invited Bob to visit UCLA and come with me to Las Vegas. He, I felt, of all the Penn architecture faculty, would like to see the city. Others had scorned my interests in everyday architecture and the automobile city. For them, I had been corrupted by the sociologists. VENTURI: At that time, the mid 1960s, architects were interested in Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, not in Los Angeles—the city of the automobile—and not in the everyday landscape. When we went to Las Vegas, I was really interested in Los Angeles, but I realized that Las Vegas was similar in some respects and simpler to study. Then I fell in love with Las Vegas. Then I fell in love with Denise. Marcus: What about Las Vegas attracted you at that time? SCOTT BROWN: Many things. Coming from South Africa, I saw the differences between San Francisco and Los Angeles as similar to those between Cape Town and Johannesburg or Edinburgh and Glasgow. And I was on the side of the “uglier” cities—Johannesburg, Glasgow, and Los Angeles. Later I was taught in planning school that architects who turn their backs on life as it is led, especially in the emerging auto city, are not very realistic. If you don't study it, how can you tell what kind of stance to take toward it? venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., learning from las vegas studio, 1968, photograph (courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) Marcus: Legend has it that on the way to Vegas in 1968, you visited Ed Ruscha at his studio in Los Angeles before heading to Vegas. VENTURI: We did take our students to see him, but I was sick and couldn't join the group until a few days later. I never met him—Denise took them. SCOTT BROWN: I'm very happy that Nicholas Ouroussoff wrote about this visit in his article on the Las Vegas exhibition at Yale, but he was mistaken when he said that Bob took his students to visit Ed Ruscha! Bob had the flu. He didn't join us till about a week later. Marcus: What was the biggest lesson you learned from Las Vegas? SCOTT BROWN: We often say we learned first about symbolism. It was a valuable lesson. Recognizing symbolism once again as a necessary function of architecture; connecting communication with community; showing that you can be just as functional about symbolism as about any other aspect of architecture – these were important contributions. And only the Las Vegas of then could teach the lesson of signs in vast space. That’s all gone today. But we also went to Las Vegas to study the urbanism of the automobile, and this taught us life-changing lessons about cities and architecture in other important spheres. The Yale exhibition displayed these other studies too. One team colored the plans of hotel casinos in standard urban land-use colors—gambling areas red, the color of commerce; hotel rooms yellow, like housing; and patios, of course, green. The colors revealed that, despite huge variety in their designs, most Las Vegas hotels of that era maintained the same basic relationships amongst their activities. From this and other investigations we learned, as designers, to do land use and transportation planning inside buildings. We start with the fact that where main streets cross in a town you find a market place that is also a meeting place; and we posit that this should hold for the “streets” that run through buildings and for meetings of minds. In a lab building, where the main corridor and the vertical circulation cross on every floor, we plan the coffee lounge. Here people come to rest, eat, and drink away from expensive computers. As they relax, informal communication can take place among researchers, maybe from different fields, who happen to sit beside each other. This opens an opportunity for the interdisciplinary connections needed in the sciences today. So we learned how patterns of activities are influenced by the systems of movement that give access to them; how the two patterns, activities, and movement, are inextricably intertwined; and how patterns too have a symbolic aspect—consider the terms “corner store” or “across the tracks.” We reflected as well on how physical structures relate to the activities they house and how these relationships change over time. Our ideas on generic architecture derive from this type of analysis. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., learning from las vegas studio, 1968, photograph (courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) Marcus: One could argue that the most remarkable thing about the research that produced Learning from Las Vegas is not so much the content—the discourse about symbolism and functionalism, which no doubt is significant—but more the method, the idea of “learning from.” I sense that this plays a significant part in the contemporary reappraisal of your work. SCOTT BROWN: Yes, and also important is our admonition, “Be open. Don't rush to judgment.” Marcus: What do you think we should be learning from today? What contemporary urban models do you think architects should be studying? SCOTT BROWN: Tokyo, Lagos, Shanghai, new Pacific Rim urbanism in general, but really anything. We learn from our trip to work in the morning. And as Bob says, pay special attention to what turns you on. Marcus: Let's talk about the Vanna Venturi House. It seems that many of your later projects are present in some way in that very early project. SCOTT BROWN: Almost everything we've done is in embryo there. For example, the relationship between public and private is essentially the same as in all buildings we've designed since, even the largest. In the Vanna Venturi House, the public sector spans the driveway, the front entrance, the dining room, and the "nowhere stair." It consists mainly of circulation elements, the exception being the dining room, which doubles as an entry space and announces its public nature through its marble floor. Marcus: In publications, the house has always been dated 1964. But obviously, it took many years of development leading up to that. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., vanna venturi house, 1964, chestnut hill, pennsylvania (photo: rollin la france, courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, Inc.) VENTURI: It took a long time. My mother moved in in 1964, but I had been working on it for almost ten years. SCOTT BROWN: In the student skits at Penn, Bob was lampooned for designing his mother's house over and over again, but he was teaching himself his trade. Marcus: When people talk about the house, they focus primarily on the outside—how it represents a renewed interest in decoration, ornament, how it was part of a stylistic or aesthetic revolution at the time. But you can also argue that there is much spatial complexity going on inside the house. VENTURI: Absolutely. SCOTT BROWN: It's Le Corbusier inside. Marcus: The stair, the chimney—it's very sculptural. VENTURI: Right. I was very influenced by Le Corbusier, especially the Villa Savoye, which I worship. That building has a strict-seeming exterior of abstract screens. But you can see through the long openings at the perimeter to all sorts of "stuff" going on inside and popping up over the top. Le Corbusier—and Frank Lloyd Wright too—said you should design from the inside out. Even though they were enemies, they essentially said the same thing. And in designing my mother's house, I began, like them, from the inside out. But then I realized that I should also design from the outside in. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., vanna venturi house, 1964, chestnut hill, pennsylvania (photo: rollin la france, courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, Inc.) Marcus: The outside of the Venturi House is sometimes described as flat pastiche, but there is more going on: both the front and the back have an ambiguity with regard to the thinness (or thickness) of the façade. VENTURI: You're right. Marcus: The depth of the entry is ambiguous—you see this in the Sainsbury Wing and in a lot of your projects. VENTURI: Yes, but in another sense it’s not like the Villa Savoye. Only its back and front are flat screens. Go around the sides and you see “stuff” going on. SCOTT BROWN: We used to walk around palazzos from the fronts to the sides, looking to see where the façade ended and the rest of the building began. The façade ends at the Palazzo Pitti the way ours ends at the Sainsbury Wing. VENTURI: Many of those palazzos are very busy in the front because they face great piazzas. But the sides are on narrow streets, and they are very functional there: just what they need to be. SCOTT BROWN: The façades are one or two meters deep, which is appropriate for load-bearing masonry in a high building. Away from the piazza it's a different building. And that's the same in the Sainsbury Wing. There’s an interesting historic relationship between decoration and depth. Renaissance decoration needed about a foot to do its thing, Baroque a yard, Rococo half an inch, and Art Deco can indicate seven different surfaces in a bas relief one inch deep. Poster art, taking off from Cubism and Art Deco, can suggest depth or complexity on a flat surface without use of perspective. That's where we came in. VENTURI: Then you get the façade that's made of light—of LED. Its decoration has no depth. It emits light. The façade of our second (unbuilt) design for the Whitehall Ferry Terminal was covered with LED. Approaching it from the ferry, you would have seen changing signs full of news and information. Communication helps make community—that's an important idea for us. Communication is so much a part of civic and religious architecture. People look at stained glass windows as art, and they were incidentally very artful. But essentially they told stories about Christianity to a public that couldn't read. Renaissance frescoes, too, were communicators of messages and only incidentally art. Marcus: Which of your unbuilt projects do you most wish had been built? VENTURI: One building was built and then significantly modified. It wasn't demolished, but in a way it was demolished. That was the North Penn Visiting Nurses Association in Ambler, outside Philadelphia, the first building we ever built. I loved that building. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., north penn visiting nurses association, 1963, ambler, pennsylvania (photo: george pohl, courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, Inc.) SCOTT BROWN: I would have liked to see our design for the Philadelphia Orchestra Hall built. VENTURI: Yes, our version of it. SCOTT BROWN: Our design's relationship to the street, its lit windows and lights, the views into its lobbies from Broad Street—these would have been a real joy. Marcus: What about your more recent work? You've commented on how people associate you with your mother's house built over forty years ago, but your firm has produced a tremendous amount of work since then, particularly in the academic realm. VENTURI: Yes, most of our work is for universities. So it doesn't make sense to apply the communication systems of Las Vegas to the façades of our buildings. But our academic projects are an opportunity to design loft buildings. These interest us because their interior uses change over time. The Italian palazzo is a wonderful example of a loft. It starts out as the home and warehouse of a noble family, but it might become a library or museum, even an apartment building. Flatted factories, college halls, and lab buildings could and did change constantly on the interior, and they still do. For this reason, they can’t be designed for their first use alone and from the inside out only, in the modern tradition. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., university of michigan, palmer drive complex, 2005, ann arbor, michigan (courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) SCOTT BROWN: They need another philosophy. Our Life Sciences complex at the University of Michigan incorporates ideas from nineteenth-century industrial lofts and warehouses, including our own offices on Main Street, and academic loft structures like Princeton’s Nassau Hall and Albert Kahn’s lab buildings at Michigan. Built of brick or stone, they are ample and made to last. Their simple rectangular plans, wide structural bays, and large windows regularly spaced can support various wall and lab bench subdivisions and a rational distribution of utility systems, and allow all systems to change over time. These buildings helped us form our ideas on the design of generic architecture. And their ornament, placed frugally around entranceways or at beam and column junctions, lay behind our hypothesis of the “decorated shed.” We use decoration to help relieve the boringly squat proportions of today’s large labs. In Michigan we sought continuity with Albert Kahn’s larger scale of building via a decorative pattern that suggested a giant order spanning several bays and stories. Variety can be found at an urban scale too. While designing the complex, we broadened our “land use and transportation” analyses of building interiors with studies of contextual patterns at campus and site scale. We mapped patterns formed by systems of movement, utilities, topography, water flow, and especially the linked activities of town and gown. When overlaid in different combinations, these pointed toward design, just as do the required relationships among activities within buildings. Then we followed the patterns, activity flows, and “desire lines,” to locate buildings and design routes and spaces, indoors and out, to take people to and through the campus and its buildings. These ways, passing via our complex, connect campus academic and medical sciences and cross a large declivity where a lake had been. This produced a many-layered project and medieval-like urban routes that widen and narrow as needed to give access to buildings and form outdoor sitting and meeting places. Pedestrians and cyclists gained a much-needed short cut that bridged a state highway. The result was functional efficiency and an aesthetic vitality derived from the interplay of ground floor uses and spaces rather than from buildings. The new environment grows from its context and flows where it needs to flow. It serves and relates building entryways but is not restricted by the grid of the buildings. It is so convenient that students broke down the construction fences to get to it before the projects were complete. And the decoration is the urbanism. Marcus: Tell me about the two religious buildings that your office recently completed. VENTURI: The Episcopal Academy Chapel evolved out of a long-term interest. I was educated there (class of ’44), and 60 years ago I chose its chapel as the subject of my Master's Thesis at Princeton. The new chapel has no nave. I love naves. Many wonderful buildings have naves. But the particular needs of the client led to an interesting half-circle plan. robert venturi, a chapel for the episcopal academy, 1950, thesis drawing (unbuilt) (courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) SCOTT BROWN: They didn't want people to see the backs of those in front of them. Instead, worshippers sit across from each other and see the altar and each other’s faces. Another important issue was lighting. If light shines in at a low level behind you, I see your silhouette but not you. In traditional Christian churches the windows are high to avoid this problem. You have to look up to see God’s light. This holds for our chapel too, and as in Gothic churches, our high windows are clerestories. But they follow the circular perimeter of the chapel walls. So they’re traditional in some ways and not others. VENTURI: There’s ornament on the outside. There's a steeple. It isn't literally a steeple but has two intersecting, steeple-shaped planes that rise up together. There’s not too much decoration. This is an irony, given that I have written so much about bringing ornament, symbolism, and communication back into architecture. But it didn't make sense here, because even though this is an Episcopal academy, it welcomes all religions, and the chapel embraces the spirituality of all students. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., episcopal academy chapel, 2008, newtown square, pennsylvania (photo: matt wargo, courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) Marcus: You were also designing a synagogue roughly at the same time. Did these projects inform each other at all during the design process? SCOTT BROWN: The synagogue is smaller. It's in a small town called Sunbury, Pennsylvania. It's called Congregation Beth El, and it's a red brick building like all the other civic and public buildings in the town. It's very square, a bit like a supermarket. Comparing the synagogue and the chapel is interesting. In a way, the Episcopal Chapel wanted the same thing as the synagogue: a meeting house. So the plans, in that sense, aren't too different. But the synagogue has a much larger public sector. It includes a courtyard, in which they can put a Sukkah and a community space separate from the worship space. Each building has a detached screen façade, a type invented by Bob. It gives depth to the entrance and, instead of bringing you in via a front door, it lets you percolate through an arcade. The screens allude to the architectural history of each religion, pointed Gothic for Episcopal, a Byzantine dome for Beth El. Both say that crowds can come into these public buildings from many sources and through many doors, whereas in a house or a college building, small groups would enter through a front door. And there is quite a different attitude to light. In the synagogue, as in the chapel, it streams into the worship space, but the roof light, arc, and processional of Beth El don’t combine to reinforce each other axially as they do in the chapel. The effect is to turn attention more to the worshipping group than to an individual’s aspiration toward Heaven. venturi, scott brown and associates, inc., congregation beth el, sunbury, 2007, pennsylvania (photo: matt wargo, courtesy of venturi, scott brown and associates, inc.) Marcus: You could argue that the synagogue is a classic decorated shed. The chapel, in contrast to the synagogue, stands out as being really plan-driven. It's not a decorated shed. It deals with symmetry and complexity in plan. VENTURI: No, it's not a shed. Not everything need be a shed. SCOTT BROWN: It’s still a shed-like duck, which may be the closest we can come to a duck. But, except for the front, it doesn't have decoration. It has an interesting and beautiful support structure that faintly echoes the rafters and arches of a medieval chapel. It’s quite atypical for us to use structure in this way. Marcus: Maybe that's the only time you've ever done it? SCOTT BROWN: Yes, partly because we realized that this particular client had a very good functional reason for not wanting decoration. Marcus: One of the most remarkable aspects of your careers has been your steadfast commitment to writing about architecture in polemical and provocative ways. Rem Koolhaas famously called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture the last architectural manifesto, and in a sense, he was right (although one could argue that Learning From Las Vegas is just as much a manifesto). With a few exceptions, architects today don't really stake out polemical positions. What are your thoughts about the importance of writing as it relates to design and practice? VENTURI: I don't have a theory about this. Quite simply, I wrote at that time because I could not design buildings; I could not practice. I was relatively young. I accommodated my frustrations by writing down ideas that I did not have the opportunity to project through buildings and design. If you can't do it, you write about it. People in other media can make their art more easily. Even if you're starving, you can compose music, or you can paint paintings or make sculpture. But an architect can't make buildings without a client, and you have to have a reputation to get a client. So, it was as simple as that. It derived from this characteristic of the medium. Marcus: One of the themes in your writing has been an aversion to ideology. In other words, you reject the notion that there is only one way of doing things. This relates to Denise's distinction between the "is" and the "ought." SCOTT BROWN: Yes. We believe in growing the "ought" carefully from the "is." It's an evolutionary process. VENTURI: I think the closest we come to ideology is saying that we are Mannerists. We're into Mannerism—it's complexity and contradiction. The democratic way of doing things could be defined as not ideological. SCOTT BROWN: It’s a messy way. Marcus: Could you imagine a situation where the “ought” took precedence over the “is”? VENTURI: I think so. There could be. SCOTT BROWN: We don't say don't develop “oughts.” We often tell our clients, “This is the way it ought to be.” But we take time to learn as much as we can before formulating the oughts. We don't judge too soon, and therefore, our clients tend to believe us. Yet there have been projects, the Sainsbury Wing in London, for example, for which we have needed to strongly defend what we believed we should do, saying “It really needs to be this way.” But it’s always well into the process and it results from functional and sometimes aesthetic requirements, not from ideology. Marcus: For me, architecture is always about changing the status quo. If you're building something, it is going to change what exists, in some way, no matter how small. But you are proposing a more evolutionary view of this change. A bottom-up, not top-down, approach. VENTURI: I think pragmatism is the one word that describes our approach. It’s a very American idea. Marcus: What about the more rebellious and revolutionary aspects of your career? Denise, you have written about how the social and cultural backdrop of the 1960s played an important role when you came to the United States and while you were studying urban planning at Penn. Do you see your early iconoclasm and rebellion as explicitly part of the counterculture of that time? SCOTT BROWN: Yes, but it's not that simple. The iconoclasm the social planners and we represented was to favor “is” over “ought.” Paradoxically, our “oughts” were about “is.” And we were too old for the counterculture. I could envy all those hippies with their bare feet at Berkeley, because I had grown up barefoot in South Africa. But by that time, I was a professor. I was very aware of my role as challenging that bright generation. Allard Lowenstein of the Dump Johnson movement, who was a friend of mine, asked the students, “What did you do after you marched on Washington?” That was my role—to say to them, “It's lovely having all these grand sentiments, but what are you actually going to do about it, right now?” That's what the social planners asked, too. At the same time, the backdrop of 1960s social revolution—not necessarily the hippie counterculture, but the social revolution—was very much part of where the thought came from. This ferment found its way into architecture when, after World War II, money was pumped into urban renewal to help achieve a peacetime economy. I heard about “shovel ready” projects from my professors at Penn in the late 1950s as they had been the ones who helped to select such projects during the Great Depression. Money from Washington brought social scientists into universities, and specifically to the urban planning departments of architecture schools, as urban researchers and lecturers. That's how Herb Gans and Paul Davidoff came to Penn. They left again when Nixonism and Reagonomics took the money away. But while they were with us, they were very beneficial for people like Bob and me. Marcus: You could argue that there are many parallels between that time and today. SCOTT BROWN: I think the ongoing reappraisal of us and our work is part of those parallels. Marcus: I am struck by how relevant your writings still are, and how, in recent years, it seems like there has been a surge in interest in your work, particularly among the younger generation of architects. SCOTT BROWN: We’re strongly aware of it. It's been going on a while. I think we first heard in 2003 that students at the Architectural Association in London were reappraising the Smithsons and us; everyone else they considered their grandparents. Marcus: And it's not only those who are reading and re-reading your written work. There is a whole crop of younger firms who are indebted to you, both methodologically and stylistically. SCOTT BROWN: Rem, of course, and our long-time friends and colleagues, Carolina Vaccaro in Rome, Fred Schwartz in New York, Richard Pain in London, and Francoise Blanc in Toulouse. There’s the FAT group in London; Basurama in Madrid; AOC in London who adapted our studio work topics and philosophy statements to "Learning from” projects in England; artist Mathieu Borysevic who produced Learning from Hangzhou; and Steven Song, whose “Paradigm Shift: Renovating the Decorated Shed” takes our ideas into global urbanism and new communication technologies. The world of architectural historians, too large to span here, can be represented by Stanislaus von Moos, Karin Theunissen, and Martin Filler, and our correspondence continues with architectural students worldwide, some seeking a quick fix for a term paper due in two hours. We’re very happy that creative people are adding their intelligence to the concept of “learning from” and hope it will continue. We’ve tried to bring together colleagues we see as thoughtful extenders of our ideas and to encourage them to support each other. I hope to find time to write down further forms and topics of research that have occurred to me since 1989 when I taught my last studio. Marcus: Another interesting aspect of your influence in contemporary architecture is precisely the extent to which architects will not acknowledge it. Much of the experimentation with new digital technologies, for example, leads to an architecture rich in ornament, pattern, and new and exciting decorative strategies. But few people will talk about it in those terms. SCOTT BROWN: There were times when people were happy to say that they learned from us, but they dropped us when fashions changed. I think architects come at decoration now from a structuralist viewpoint. The pattern evolves from concerns for sustainability, for example. They say, “Look at what we can do with glass to augment heat and sound isolation.” We too have generated patterns structurally, but from the social sciences, from “city physics.” VENTURI: That’s how we got them, not where we got them. SCOTT BROWN: Well, I don't know quite the difference. But we’ve also quoted from tablecloths, stationery boxes and Zipatone—everyday things that we’ve scrambled to form mixed metaphors. They generate theirs by saying “we need windows of a certain type.” VENTURI: They're not being explicitly communicational. Marcus: Right. You're describing a kind of technologically deterministic way of generating pattern. SCOTT BROWN: Yes, at least that's what they say. It’s what the early Modernists said but didn’t do. VENTURI: Exactly. That's not us. SCOTT BROWN: But a structuralist approach need be no more deterministic than a functionalist approach; and neither leads inexorably to expressionism. That’s a really old argument in Modernism. And there's another important difference—the one between Postmodernism and PoMo. PoMo is what Philip Johnson and his followers did in their commercial architecture. I'm not against commercial architecture (look at early Chicago), but their way of doing it distorted things. The postmodernism we were involved with was not an architectural style. It had its origins in popular culture, the humanities, and theology and was concerned with diversity, values, and loss of innocence since the Holocaust. Marcus: The social content disappeared very quickly with the rise of Postmodernism in architecture. SCOTT BROWN: Not of Postmodernism, of PoMo—and not only the social content. For example, I think NeoMo is a form of Pomo. Early Modern is the style the Neomodernists imitate, but they don't understand the essence of early Modernism, and they aren't thoughtful about functionalism, which they see as a boring old hang-up of the 1930s. For us, functionalism is one of modern architecture's glories and central to what we do. And both NeoMo and PoMo lack skill in handling strictly architectural elements such as scale and proportion. Marcus: One could argue that you both, ironically, are more modern than anyone. SCOTT BROWN: We think so. When I tell people of our generation that Learning from Las Vegas is in part a social tract, they reply “You’ve got to be kidding.” But people of your generation say, “We know that. What else is new?” . . . 2010

SIGILIT LANDAU Interview by Paulina Pobocha . . .sigalit landau, resident alien, 1997, mixed-media installation In 1997, Sigalit Landau’s Resident Alien I debuted in Catherine David’s Documenta X. A work about borders, Resident Alien I, consisted of a standard shipping container whose floor Landau hammered out to resemble the Judean desert. Once inside, viewers peered through a hole in the ceiling. Sticking their heads through the opening, they found themselves at the bottom of a toilet-hole commonly used throughout the Mediterranean region, listening to an Arabic-language radio station. Though not all of Landau’s projects have been this direct, her work frequently deals with issues of borders, chiefly the shifting definitions of center and periphery. These interests are in part a consequence of her biography: born in Jerusalem and currently living in Tel Aviv, the turmoil of the region impressed itself early on Landau. However, it would be shortsighted to consider this the sole impetus behind her rich and varied œuvre. Landau’s ambitions transcend such specificities. While rooted in the local, her work carries a larger weight, implicitly asking viewers to reconsider their allegiances and sympathies through transformations of the cold, hard facts of the world into beautiful, often dreadful, abstract tableaux. Paulina Pobocha: How did you become involved in video, performance, and installation art? SIGILIT LANDAU: didn’t knowingly move to video. I happened to have a few ideas, which, however I tried, I couldn’t express in still sculptures. I had a few years of experience with filmmaking and editing in my army service. I had to make educational films to help new soldiers in hard situations. This kind of creativity damaged my being, and I didn’t manage to finish my service, so I was dismissed earlier than planned, but not early enough. I always made installations. I attribute my attraction to installation to my love of the stage, a fascination with archeology, and the influence of Paul McCarthy and Louise Bourgeois. The only real performance that I’ve ever done was the sugar transformations piece at the Thread Waxing Space. It had to take place before the visitors’ eyes because sugar melts and transforms so quickly, which dictated a month and a half of thatching, spinning, and cocooning audiences in real time, for whole days. The rest of my performances have been for the camera and passers-by. sigalit landau, thread waxing space installation, 2001, mixed media, performance Pobocha: You play a lead part in the video works, and yet, despite your physical presence, they never simply read as self-portraits. Your work seems much more abstract than that, much more open-ended. LANDAU: They are not self-portraits. I am the most generic person. I don’t express myself in my roles, something that many performers feel a need to do. I have a nothingness in me that serves my works very well. I don’t see acting, representing, directing, or staging as relevant to my visual art because the figure is anyone. Also, I am able to hurt myself and exhaust myself for shoots. I could never ask this from a dancer or an actor. sigalit landau, barbed hula, 2000, video-documented performance Pobocha: This year, you had a “Projects” show at The Museum of Modern Art, which included three video works: Barbed Hula (2000), DeadSee (2005), and Day Done (2007), accompanied by the sculptures Barbed Salt Lamps (2007), which are lampshade-like objects handmade from barbed wire that you submerged in the Dead Sea, where salt accretions formed on their surfaces. The entire show was titled “Cycle Spun” (2007). Can you explain the selection process? Why did you choose to show these three videos in particular? Though the videos functioned as a triptych in their configuration at MoMA, they range in tenor. LANDAU: I think that the curator, Klaus Biesenbach, saw the pieces as formally composing a story and as a selection that stands in for my entire œuvre. The show is very dietetic and shows a specific layer of my otherwise pretty wild [appetite]. Everything that I do ranges in tenor because I respond to situations, sites, and life. In just one installation, there are whispers, screams, and five art languages. There is a formal connection, which is obvious in all of the four pieces in the cycle: they all have circles, circular movement, centers and peripheries, inner and outer spaces, and patterns that accrue from coils and radii. sigalit landau, barbed salt lamps, 2007 Pobocha: By saying that the show was “dietetic,” you reference ingestion rather than output. LANDAU: I [use many] metaphors relating to food, digestion, and cooking, and I work with the body’s entrances and exits—skin, ears, and tears, the less obvious ones. I use food, digestion, edible components, consistencies, physical phenomena, and medical terminology in order to explain. Barbed Hula, the one in which I’m in the center of a hula hoop dancing, is about the vagina and wounds in my flesh. At first, I called the work Nest. DeadSee is the one in which I am in the midst of a fruit raft being saved from the Dead Sea in a reversed Whirlpool, even though there are no whirlpools in the Dead Sea because, as far as I know, the water is too heavy, and you can’t even drown there. Some of the watermelons are wounded, and one of my eyes is inside the salt water. At first, I called this work Raft. In the third piece, Day Done, I am in a house, painting a circle as far as my arm goes around a window. The building is damaged. The house is dilapidated and crumbling. Paint won’t help it, and the black paint looks more like a black flag or a fire-and-smoke trace than a DIY job. My act turns the standard window into a hole, a wound in the building. As the video progresses and night falls, a man takes my place and paints over my black mark with a circle of Mediterranean whitewash. A midnight sun rises over the shabby gray house. In all of the films, there is drama—pain, some death, water or some liquid, a state of alarm—and in all, there is a de-dramatizing positive agent that cannot undo the harms but introduces sensuality and tenderness into life. sigalit landau, day done, 2007, video (color, silent) Pobocha: DayDone is also a work that references ritual. It is a reinterpretation of an ancient Jewish custom whereby a portion of a newly built house is left unpainted. Your video of course is a reversal of this tradition. LANDAU: The house in the video has been repaired with cement. Many cracks and holes are covered with a gray cement mass. There are more repairs than actual yellowish wall, but the person who did these repairs did not do the obvious: paint this wall to hide the crack fillings. So, the circle that I paint is the only mark of skin, or fresh paint, that this southern wall has. This is an old house in an already existing homeland, Israel. But the tradition was practiced in the diaspora before the Jews had a land to call their own. It’s a country with war, terror, occupation, and corruption, and in it is a poorly built, dilapidated, ugly, barely surviving house. The house marks a memory from the days when the Jews were land-less and mourning the destruction of the temple and evacuation into the Diaspora. The mark on the building can now be a reminder that there is still unresolved tragedy in post-Diaspora existence. The man who paints with the white roller at night is the one who wants or needs something to be forgotten. Also, he is communicating in a dogmatic way with his partner. He would do better to get on a scaffold and paint his house properly from the outside. Pobocha: Ritual comes up quite a bit in your work. LANDAU: Rituals are performances. They return in time. They live in collective memory, images, symbols, and nature’s seasons. I like to summon forgotten ones that carry ancient cultural beliefs, preserved in literature and folklore: I don’t live according to my religion’s rituals, but I am aware of all three religions [with major ties to Jerusalem]. I was brought up by people who put their religious way of life far behind them and were in a bit of an intellectual void. Pobocha: One of your most well-known works, Country (2002), is a life-sized papier-mâché installation in which flayed figures and fruit are made of the popular Israeli newspaper Ha’Aretz, a title which can be translated as “The Land” or “The Country.” Elsewhere you’ve said: “Art is an opportunity to survive the tragedy of my country,” and this is the one that deals most directly with this tragedy. Since this work, which Philip Leider compared to Picasso’s Guernica, the other works that followed have been more abstract. LANDAU: The horror and terror in Country, which referenced the Second Intifada, was replaced by melancholy in The Endless Solution. Then, my mother died while I was in the process of making DeadSee, and melancholy was possibly replaced by panic. In The Dining Hall, it was about [the Israeli conflict with] Lebanon and my daughter being born in the midst of the project’s realization. My senses are directed to the personal and local out of choice after ten years of roaming and trying work with the common denominator in mind. Pobocha: At the same time, your work is informed by feminist art practice. Barbed Hula is probably your most overtly feminist-themed piece. Do you think about your work in general as being feminist? How do you conceive of the relationship between your practice and historical feminism? LANDAU: I instinctively think of my art as feminist without running it through feminist history scans and criteria. Feminist art already made a difference for artists of my generation. When I was in my fourth-year exchange at the Cooper Union, I closely followed the show “Bad Girls” at the New Museum and took it as my starting point in a relatively easy way. I remember Annie Sprinkle and all the artists there gathered at an excellent, hilarious show. But, political-ness, for me, is a mixed position; it is hard for me to dissect the different concepts and fragments of my identity and claim one work to be more feminist than another. Pobocha: So, politics are at once diffuse and ever-present in all the pieces. LANDAU: Where does feminism end and socialism start? sigalit landau, dining hall (detail), 2007 Pobocha: Your work has to do with borders, literal and abstract. In Dining Hall, you ask visitors to offer their keys to be copied, and the copies are actually negatives, unable to open anything. In Resident Alien I and II, Barbed Hula, and Barbed Lamps, you use barbed wire, which is closely associated with literal “borders,” of course in the Israeli landscape, but also everywhere. LANDAU: Yes, the key machine produced small borderlines between the contours of the keys that the visitors handed to me and the “duplicate” keys that I produced for them: my aim was that the audience members carry with them, in their functional key rings, this dysfunctional mini-borderline and a reminder of a place beyond it, where things don’t work and don’t open like they should—a key that is not useful as a key but useful as a small memory and commitment to a home or a dream. A border is mainly and firstly a word that can be used in all directions—painful, essential, disastrous, sane, or hysterical. I [use] borders in my works—natural borders such as the sea in Dancing for Maya, Barbed Hula, and Phoenician Sand Dance, and structural borders like houses, containers, and hoops in Three Man Hula, Day Done, and Resident Alien I. I expose them, question them, and embroider roots of invisible borders in a piece like The Endless Solution (2005). Borders find themselves in the explosive fundamentals of my works. In my attempts to transcend borders, I find that they are never soft enough, as was the case in the domestic Barbed Salt Lamps. In a way, borders are the skin of places and also a rough skin to most ideas. Borders are our definitions. Borders are too thin. There is nothing to hold because we don’t see the other side of the border properly. . . . 2008

TARYN SIMON Interview by Geoffrey Batchen & Nell McClister . . .taryn simon, charles irvin fain, scene of the crime, the snake river, melba, idaho served 18 years of a death sentence for murder, rape, and kidnapping, 2002 Looking at artwork online tends to feel cheap, like cheating: Whatever aura a work might possess is usually dissipated by pixelation, miniaturization, and the cold context of a screen among millions, a webpage among billions. Looking at Taryn Simon’s work online is no exception, though it’s not exactly the aura of her work that’s lost in the translation to cyberspace. Indeed, her photographs, though sumptuous and striking, do not claim that special combination of self-sufficiency, uniqueness, and mystery traditionally denied to a reproduced work of art, be it mechanical or digital. In fact, her work might seem to lend itself perfectly to reproduction on the web where images can be matched with such a wealth and range of information about who, what, where, when, and why that they genuinely flicker into documentary blips, which is on one level the highest incarnation of Simon’s images. But it is the fickle, often mendacious nature of the web that stands in starkest contradiction to Simon’s aim, which is, even more than composing and printing images themselves, truth-telling. Simon’s celebrated 2000-1 body of work “The Innocents” began as a New York Times Magazine project; the lush Umbrage Editions book includes a commentary by lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Innocence Project, which has brought more than 100 post-conviction exonerations based on DNA evidence. Obviously “The Innocents” belongs less to the rarefied art world than to the journalistic tradition of uncovering personal stories in order to illuminate societal ills and inequalities. Yet the recitation of the case in the text accompanying the images, which often show the wrongly convicted man (and one woman) at the scene of the crime, suggests the fallibility of such ideological documentary evidence: images generated to identify a perpetrator—sketches, mugshots—are often used to manipulate the truth, whether or not there is malice aforethought. In one case, Simon focuses on the fact that a police sketch was given so much authority that the victim forgot the actual appearance of the attacker and instead focused on identifying the person who looked most like the sketch. The role of Simon’s own images could be seen as righting a wrong, except that they also slyly mislead, weaving a false narrative whose veracity is traditionally promised by the nature of the medium. We see not what the witness saw, but what the witness thought he or she saw. We see a person who “fit the description,” but was the wrong person. We see a person at a crime scene where he had years ago been “placed,” but in some cases, had never visited since the crime—never been there at all. We see a carefully constructed image geared to give the wrong impression. Such implications bump us out of the purely documentary realm where images are presented as truth. The presence of the explanatory text further exposes the photograph as limited or fragmentary rather than authoritative. Simon’s project falls under the rubric of what Allan Sekula has labeled “anti-photojournalism,” photography that aims not to capture a defining image or pretend to truth, but rather which calls to be treated simply as a language. Sekula’s works update the social realism inherited from photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, who brought the presence and the humanity of the socially invisible to public attention. Sekula wields his camera in a modified documentary style that consciously avoids overstatement, complementing his visuals with a narrative that likewise eschews the dramatic. Simon’s photographs are likewise anything but “defining,” though they are carefully composed and printed, aesthetically conscious to the extreme, and work to isolate the subject, to suspend it for a moment—to celebrate it, no matter how perversely. They are also clearly undoctored, which both amplifies the effect of the real-world information that accompanies it and emphasizes the inherent artifice of the image. Despite their high degree of finish, the photographs display a decided lack of excitement that is an important feature of Simon’s work. She has a knack for creating a kind of image that would look utterly empty on its own: not only indifferent, but forlorn. Her most recent series, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” includes a shot from a window of a modified airplane wing, a view into a news show set, and a glimpse of a projected forest on a wall. But as with her earlier work, the paragraph or two that Simon writes to accompany each image could be said to furnish each subject even more than the image itself does. We can read that the airplane belongs to a company called Weather Modification, Inc. and that the device on its wing generates silver iodide crystals that cause rain—an up-and-coming and controversial national security strategy. The television studio, it turns out, is partly a U.S.-run satellite channel that broadcasts translated American content and commentary on American policy in Arabic countries. The third image was taken at Microsoft Home, a site of intensive research and prototype development of concepts for a futuristic, fully mechanized domestic space activated by voice and gesture recognition, integrated displays, and automated mood lighting. The Home is closed to the public. Viewing one of these works involves looking briefly at the image, then looking away to read the text, and then looking anew at the image, lingering on it, drinking it in fully once it is loaded with meaning. By that point, it is practically a hybrid of text and photograph: it is charged. Simon’s brand of social realism is thus also, perhaps primarily, a form of critical practice that calls into question its own medium. In this sequential process of viewing, the movement of the two inadequate media finding their complement becomes explicit. More to the point, the role of knowledge in viewing an image makes itself felt. In light of the information given, the image changes dramatically and irrevocably: it is, quite literally, no longer unassuming. This lesson obviously has far-reaching implications. The text’s description becomes definitive. Once one has read, for example, about the CIA’s alleged support of Abstract Expressionism as a pro-American strategy during the Cold War, it is no longer possible to see the image of two large shaped canvases by Thomas Downing hanging in the CIA headquarters as in any way innocent. The unpeopled hallway fairly reeks with ideology. taryn simon, the central intelligence agency, art cia original headquarters building, langley, virginia, chromogenic color print The image/text combination does not become authoritative. On the contrary, their relation calls to mind Martha Rosler’s landmark 1974–75 project “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems,” which with a combination of image and text proposes the failure of either “system” to approach truth, be it representational or social. Both Rosler and Simon seek to comment on some unpleasant and neglected aspects of life in America: homelessness and poverty on the Bowery; racial and class injustice on Death Row; and in “American Index,” the gamut from religious and political absurdity and cruelty in the name of science to pathological narcissism, governmental paranoia, and so on. Both Rosler and Simon suspend the authority of both word and image, and in Simon’s case, there is yet a further suspension: the explicit narrative of untruth, secrecy, hiddenness, and invisibility throws the subjects themselves into question, aside from their representation. Who sees these sites? Who hides them? And what do they hide? In the secrecy and subtext of her subjects lies Simon’s subversive updating of the genre of Walker Evans-style social realism in photography. If Rosler questions the representation of a subject like The Bowery, challenging both photography and language as purveyors of social truth behind the ostensible subject, Simon chooses subjects whose hiddenness reveals much and whose mute plainness speaks volumes. Simon’s subject is not only the limitations of the visual or linguistic media, but more to the point, the contingency of truth, its ideological dimension, and especially that of its veiling. In preventing us from settling into these images, from accepting their authority, Simon does us a great service. These “unseen” sites call out for recognition for what they are. Here on view, on the record, they demand to be fully known, something that an image by itself cannot confer. The image itself does not beg to be evocative: it is what it is, and we are told what it is. But the truth is that photography can’t show us everything. We are reminded that we have to find out a lot of things for ourselves. taryn simon, nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facility cherenkov radiation hanford site, u.s. department of energy, southeastern washington state, chromogenic color print Geoffrey Batchen: Taryn, I wonder how you’d place your own photographic practice within a history of such practices? It seems to borrow equally from documentary, conceptual art, and photojournalism. Is “conceptual documentary” a term you’d be comfortable with? TARYN SIMON: I prefer to have people continually re-define what [photography] is and may be. Identifying genres in photographic practice often involves a commitment to traditional thinking. Current generations are no longer working in such clear forms [in any domain]. Everything is very quickly becoming interdisciplinary. People are continually trying to place the work in a comfortable envelope and are often confounded by what envelope that may be. It bridges a number of long-established definitions: documentary, political, and conceptual. I prefer that it float between and in and out of everything. taryn simon, white tiger (kenny), selective inbreeding turpentine creek wildlife refuge and foundation, eureka springs, arkansas, chromogenic color print Batchen: Your photographs are often studiously frontal and undemonstrative. Could you say something about your aesthetic choices as a photographer when confronted with a particular subject? Why the deadpan approach? Why color photography and not black and white? SIMON: The frontal, deadpan that you observe represents a certain reserve. In confronting loaded subject matter, I often choose to avoid any editorialized, spoon-fed emotion or angle. By doing so, my personal distance from the subject is built into the audience’s experience of engaging with the photograph. I’m avoiding a stance of “understanding” or of having knowledge that others don’t have. It says: “Here it is, and I don’t really know.” In my own work, I avoid that which claims to have a closeness with its subject. It alienates the viewer, relieves tension, and cheapens the impact. This is often something people use to critique the work. It can be seen without emotion. For me, the reserve, the distance is what the emotion inhabits. As for color, it was never a question. I always try to avoid nostalgia, although it becomes harder with the advent of digital processes. There is a very specific palette in the work, which is programmed to seduce. Batchen: How do you feel about the use of fiction in contemporary documentary photography (as in the work of Walid Raad) or abstraction or manipulation (as in the work of Andreas Gursky)? What is the function of “truth” in your own work? SIMON: Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating. My reliance on text is where I try to reign in the ambiguity. It is in this relationship that I can control and [use to] steer interpretation in my intended direction. Again, the text is reserved, like the photograph, and for the same reasons. That said, the photograph can dream and slip away into abstraction and form while the text sits fixed to the floor anchoring. taryn simon, playboy, braille edition, playboy enterprises, inc., new york, new york, chromogenic color print Batchen: Your first book, The Innocents (2003), comprised interviews with and photographs of Americans convicted of serious crimes who had subsequently been freed on the basis of DNA evidence (some of them 18 years after being incarcerated). It’s a powerful condemnation of the American justice system, but it’s also a critical commentary on the power of the photograph to distort the memories of eyewitnesses and facilitate mistaken identity. Your own photographs for this project sometimes show your subjects posing self-consciously at the scene of a crime that they didn’t commit. Could you explain your approach to this project? SIMON: Photographing the wrongfully convicted at the scene of the crime where they never were (as they didn’t commit the crime) highlights the complicated and dangerous relationship between truth and fiction in their lives and in photography. This was integral to the project’s position. Some, it’s worth noting, would not return to the scene of the crime as they didn’t want to have any familiarity with a site of which they had always claimed to have no knowledge—that by going there and gaining familiarity, it would make them appear guilty. This fear exposes the power and danger of imaging. I set up very strict parameters for myself when taking these photographs. Often, many of them fail visually in honor of the conceptual framework. My photographic choices and background selections were limited and directed by content. I wasn’t free to respond visually and aesthetically in all instances. Their self-consciousness is never posed. Subjects were very rarely directed. There is often a discomfort between them and the camera. They are standing before the very thing that initiated their traumatic history, which was founded on lies and misinterpretation. By this, I’m referring to the fact that the majority of the wrongful convictions in the book were the result of an eyewitness or victim being manipulated or mistaken in their engagement with photographs of the perpetrator. I wanted that discomfort and unfathomable conflation of reality and fiction to be evident within the photograph. The uneasy reserve should tremble ever so slightly beneath the surface. Batchen: Your most recent project, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” (2007), is the end result of a personal quest to document some of America’s most secret places, sites that aren’t typically seen by outsiders and to which photographers don’t usually get access. The fifty-seven subjects don’t seem related at first glance. Could you describe how you came to embark on this project and how you chose your sites? SIMON: After completing The Innocents, I looked back through photographs I had taken and responded to through the years. I kept returning to a photograph I had taken at The Palace of the Revolution in Cuba. I was lured by its formal qualities: the geometry, lighting, and absence of the figure. It bordered on abstraction and had a disorienting structure. This was all sharpened by the fact that it was largely un-photographed, had no popularly distributed visual anchor, and remained inaccessible to the broader public. After September 11th, I decided to look for these sites: that which is foundational to America’s daily functioning and mythology yet remains out-of-view, overlooked, or inaccessible to the American public. This was a time in which the American government and media were seeking secret sites beyond its borders. I wanted to look inward. The subjects are purposefully unrelated in a traditional form. There is a very intentional entropy in [choosing what] is photographed for this work. The use of the word “index” in the title is a play on the word, as it is glaringly not comprehensive and often chaotic. Viewers are meant to engage with subjects that have escaped their compartments. You jump from security to entertainment to science to government in a disarming and almost irresponsible fashion. By this, [the series] confronts accepted and traditional forms of ordering information, confronting the separation of the public and the experts. It reflects new orders of distribution like the internet, which challenge control. Site selection is personal, often reflecting my anxieties. I worked very hard to maintain a lack of order or any discernable formula, which is its own order, I know. I had chapter headings (government, science, religion...) and made many lists. I was always aware of one getting too heavy and crushing the chaos. Initially the choices were conceptual ones. I was looking for very specific complications, something with a quaking presence, a white noise. Then I had to consider the visual. That said, as many of these had no visual references, I had to either take a blind risk or proceed with imaginations from oral descriptions. Incidentally, the resulting images are never pure documentations of the space I encounter. There are admitted interventions in every image to make them more seductive and aesthetically successful. taryn simon, hymenoplasty, cosmetic surgery, p.a., fort lauderdale, florida, chromogenic color print Batchen: You insist that each of your photographs is exhibited or published with an extensive accompanying text. Why is this so necessary? Is photography incapable of functioning as an effective political tool without such an accompaniment? SIMON: It can be the most powerful political tool without text. History has demonstrated that again and again. Photography is a prostitute—used to promote so many agendas, both inadvertently and purposefully. The use of text is an effort to avoid other contexts, to avoid being used. It acknowledges photography’s limitations (which are often its beauty) through an effort to own its framework. taryn simon, cryopreservation unit cryonics institute, clinton township, michigan, chromogenic color print Batchen: You also do work for news magazines. Isn’t this a more effective vehicle for the kind of work that you do? Why show in art galleries? SIMON: No. The work’s impact stems from the fact that one individual is accomplishing and producing this on her own, completely independent of anybody’s choices, ideas, texts, fears, politics, agendas. Built into its reception is the impossibility of it all — that one person crossed all these lines. Working for the New York Times allows me to access that which I could never access on my own: Abu Mazen, Assad, Tsipi Livni, etc... I rarely accept assignments for anything I could accomplish on my own. Showing in museums is currently the most democratic and pure form in which to engage with the public. That’s not to pretend that one isn’t always going to be subject to certain constraints, contexts and agendas. It also allows the viewer to see the photograph in its most complete form. I shoot with a large format camera, which deserves and wants more than newsprint. Batchen: When you do show in gallery spaces, you go to a lot of effort to control the way that we encounter your work. For your recent exhibition at the Whitney Museum, for example, the walls were repainted Super White rather than their usual cream, and the lighting was turned up, at your insistence, to seven times its normal level. Each of your photographs was printed to a large scale and was hung equidistant from the next. Why go to all this trouble? What kind of experience are you looking for in your exhibitions? SIMON: More and more layers of control. Like I said before, so often photography is just passed off and used. Its author lets it slip into unintended and unexpected zones. I try to own the entire experience to whatever degree I can. Batchen: ’m wondering where we should look for the content of your work? At the photographs as individual pictures? At the combination of text and image in each case? Or should we be concentrating on the overall conceptual structure that underpins the work? SIMON: In “An American Index,” it’s in all three. You arrive at the work visually and digest it as an aesthetic object, often not knowing what you’re looking at. You then discover the text, which centers your focus and allows you to rediscover the image. The two play back and forth in this manner until you move on to the next. Their finest form is in a series, in which you jump very abruptly from one to the next. This awkward movement and disorienting structure mirrors a confused moment in American history and considers the distribution and reception of accurate information. . . . 2008

TOM ECCLES Interview by Althea Viafora-Kress . . ."wrestle" (installation view), hessel museum of art, 2006-07 During Art Basel Miami Beach 2006, I did a live interview with Tom Eccles for WPS1 Art Radio inside a shipping container at the show “Art Positions.” We talked about “Wrestle,” an exhibition that he co-curated with Trevor Smith at Bard College’s Hessel Museum, which now features more than 1,700 art works by over 900 artists, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker. If you don’t already know Eccles’s curatorial work, you’ve most likely come across it without knowing it was his. He was the director and curator of the Public Art Fund from 1997-2005, for which he organized projects featuring work by such artists as Francis Alÿs, Louise Bourgeois, Wim Delvoye, Dan Graham, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Vik Muniz, and others. Since 2005, Eccles has been the executive director of The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In this interview, we discuss the challenges of curating in private collections, a living outdoor museum like the Public Art Fund, and traditional museums like the Hessel or the Museum of Modern Art. How do curators wrestle with the multitudes of identities? How does a collection reflect the collector, the institution, the curator, and the artists? Althea Viafora-Kress: Among other achievements, you were the Director and Curator of the Public Art Fund from 1997 to 2005. If ever there was a living museum, it’s the Public Art Fund. You are now the Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College. If traditional museums are containers of art, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard is now a carrier of a living museum and a traditional museum. You’ve been entrusted with ideas and things, art, and this will be viewed and taught to future curators. Today, let’s talk about personal collections and curatorial practices, and also art about collecting and curating about collecting. Tell us about self-representation. How will you teach future curators using a pre-existing collection that was recently donated to your museum? TOM ECCLES: Collecting is a form of self-representation. You create a portrait of yourself and your interests, and then through philanthropy, hopefully will give that to a much wider audience. There’s a very big difference between having a personal collection in your own domain and putting it out into the public domain. My role is to represent that collection in a way that perhaps is not really a portrait of our donor/benefactor, Marieluise Hessel. It’s about how to work with specific choices that she made over the years. Certainly, with the first show, entitled “Wrestle,” we took a particular slice of the collection-about 5%-and yes, it says something about her, but it has to be much more than that. "wrestle" (installation view), hessel museum of art, 2006-07 Viafora-Kress: It becomes more than that. When something’s successful, it leaves the personal domain, and it goes into the public domain. You were formerly the curator of the Public Art Fund where hundreds of thousands of people walked by pieces that you installed, and now you’re contained in a museum. Normally museums are like mausoleums-the work is not alive. But your being there today makes this museum an organic, growing, evolving, curatorial process because you’re not only curating objects, but you’re now organizing principles of future curators’ visions and thoughts. How do you bring those two ideas together? ECCLES: As you put it, we now have this container. We have a new 17,000 square-foot museum. I think one of the big challenges is how we break that container open, both metaphorically and, I hope, literally. You know? Viafora-Kress: Yes. ECCLES: One of the big differences between what I was doing at the Public Art Fund and what I’m doing now, and you hit on it immediately, is that I didn’t need to go and get an audience. Also, what’s interesting in the sphere of the museum is that even if thousands of people come, there is a much more intimate relationship with the audience. I watch my audience more carefully now. Also, in curating an exhibition, one of the most important things to consider is how people move through the space. How are you really going to confront them with those works? How are you going to make those works vital in some sense? Viafora-Kress: You’re actually unpacking a suitcase of a collection, and forgive me, but you’re selling an idea or a curatorial vision through juxtapositions of an original representation of the collector herself with the representation of the curatorial team. Now you collaborated with another curator in doing this show, “Wrestle.” Was that part of the idea of the title of the exhibition or was it the juxtaposition of the pieces themselves? ECCLES: The title came first because I chose to collaborate. I always collaborate. I love working either with artists or with other curators. And in this case, we were working with a collection, so there wasn’t really an opportunity at that time to work with an artist, so working with Trevor Smith, formerly of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, we set up a kind of game, in a sense. The museum as well feels a bit like a Rubik’s Cube. We were turning, twisting, and then would throw it back to the next person and say, “Well you try it.” And then we would try another thing. And out of this dialogue came the idea of juxtaposing works. It was almost like trying a different card and a different card and trying it again and getting it better. For six months, it was a struggle, trying to do something that feels original and saying something specific about specific works. We’re in the sphere of a personal collection. This is not a universal collection. This is not the kind of collecting that, for example, MoMA is engaged in; it’s one single person. Viafora-Kress: It’s not an institutional idea. How do you make this very fine line available to a general public: Bard is an institution by definition because it’s a university. At the same time, you’re showing works that were highly personalized. ECCLES: Marieluise Hessel always had this idea that the collection should in some sense represent her time, which is in fact our time, from the 1960s up until the present, and we continue to collect today. She always had this idea, and it’s embedded in the name of the organization, “Art in Contemporary Culture.” So, the show says a lot about art. The art that we chose says a lot about our society and some of the struggles that we have in our society. We didn’t want to do a political show or a show about identity; there have been so many shows about identity, but I think that there is something in the works and in the show itself that deals with a specific idea of identity: that it’s not a given, it’s not a whole, that we’re constantly struggling with ourselves, that we’re within the fragmented self. Viafora-Kress: There are different ways of representing oneself through curatorial practices. Some people are interested in redemption, some in problem solving-in seeing new visions or new futures or even in seeing new pasts. Men tend to have museums about redemption. For example, Frick was really about redemption. He was a robber baron. Women tend to be more about self-expression. The heiress of the Post family, Marjorie Merriweather Post, has a private museum in Washington, DC, The Hillwood Museum. She allows for near voyeurism. You literally look at the shoes in her closet in her museum. It’s almost fetishistic in that sense of the idea of serialization. Around half of all of the private museums in this country have women founders, even though most contemporary art collectors in this country are men. Do you see self-representation in curatorial practice as something to do with the past or something to with the present or something to do strictly with the future? ECCLES: I think that it’s about the present actually. What you’re saying about redemption is related to “Wrestle” and the fact that Marieluise is a woman and that it’s a woman’s collection. I was struck by how many of the works have strong images of sexuality and were often very much about male sexuality. "wrestle" (installation view), hessel museum of art, 2006-07 Viafora-Kress: Could you give us an example? ECCLES: Marieluise was one of the earliest and most significant collectors of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. We have in the region of eighty works by Mapplethorpe - and not flowers! We have a number of flowers, but Marieluise also bought the “Portfolio X” at a time when nobody would go near that work. And we started with that. There were also two portraits of children. Marieluise got one portrait of a girl named Rosie and one of a boy named Jessie McBride that were absolutely stunning, but also kind of taboo, and that set off the question of whether we could we show that work now. Can we read that work now? Meaning is not static. Meaning is constantly in evolution, and the curator’s role is to tease out new meanings or to suggest new readings of works and sometimes to take some risks. One of the questions in relation to Mapplethorpe becomes whether we can look at this outside the graphic sexual nature of the work. Viafora-Kress: So it becomes form. It becomes about Modernism which equals form. ECCLES: Absolutely. And in fact, that’s part of the argument of the show. There’s a lot of figurative work, which plays into linguistic work but also into work defined by more formalist questions. And one of the largest rooms we give over to a double asymmetrical pyramid by Sol LeWitt, which then plays against a candy piece by Felix Gonzales-Torres, For a Man in Uniform (1991), which takes on the triangle. Then we look at Valie Export, a kind of prototypical feminist work showing a woman enclosed in a landscape in Vienna in the 1970s; and then you look at Mapplethorpe’s figures enclosed in boxes, and then you go back to LeWitt, and we have a piece of open cubes. So each of the works ... takes something from the surrounding works. Viafora-Kress: Sounds very athletic. ECCLES: It’s very athletic. Viafora-Kress: Visually, intellectually, aesthetically. Often when you bring aesthetics into art, you get into the realm of churches. That type of architecture, those types of ideas. But you’re bringing in the physical as well as the aesthetic; maybe there is a new principle that can be found in that curatorial practice. ECCLES: We have two central issues that we deal with: one is that we’re at Bard. We’re not in the center of the city, so people have to have a reason to come here. And the second is that we’re a school. So we try things that might not be able to be done in other places. Viafora-Kress: Absolutely... and there may not be answers. They are open-ended questions. There is even the question of whether contemporary art is compatible with a museum. Contemporary art is by living artists, and museums are institutions. They historically have been about comparing old and new like cabinets of wonder from the Renaissance. Museums are only two hundred years old in our culture. They’re a very new experience. ECCLES: It’s something which I’m very conscious of from my experience with the Public Art Fund. We did collaborate with museums. We did a number of projects with the Whitney Biennial, and we worked with MoMA on a piece called Modern Procession with Francis Alÿs. Now as museum director, I’m saying, okay can you also work with artists and get artists to challenge the notion of the museum. . . . 2008

A MANNERIST TRANSPARENCY Essay by Peter Zuspan . . .katsushige nakahashi, zero project, 2006, photographs, tape I’ve regained the ability to watch “Entertainment Tonight.” I couldn’t watch it for a while. It wasn’t that my Hollywood news index had weakened or that I’d lost an appreciation for the content. My reluctance to view the program came from a frustration with the method of its presentation. The problem was that each story, when finally revealed, would more often than not feature the same content and last the same amount of time as the countless teasers before to the commercial breaks. I felt swindled. But when a bit distracted from my disappointment, I noticed that beyond whatever capitalist agenda drives these unfortunate narrative decisions, there is actually a beautiful model of transparency in this form of presentation. The body of the broadcast is almost identical to that which lies on its flashy cover: the façade is a copy of the interior. The news magazine operates with a sort of mannerist transparency, by which inside and outside are not negotiated and theorized around a border of politicized reciprocity, but rather they are more or less simply repeated, using recognizable pop conventions of glitz, glamour, and celebrity exposure. I’m an architect. I think about architecture even while watching news magazines sometimes. Recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in looking at architecture as a problem of distraction. A subject’s experience of a building is rarely contemplative—far less so than his experience of most other art forms. Contemplating architecture as one would a painting or a photograph is an esoteric mode of vision reserved largely for academics; however, the institutional context of the gallery or the museum forces even the non-connoisseur into a contemplative position with artwork. Architecture is rarely placed in such an environment. Instead, it often provides this environment. Architecture lingers peripherally within the subject’s realm of perception, where it seeps into his consciousness as a background for other events. This kind of spatial perception requires a farsighted attention, while perceiving objects within architecture—books, paintings, photographs, and films—demands a nearsighted attention from the viewing subject. Each of these objects produces anti-spatial qualities in architecture. Each requires a close inspection and a duration of contemplative attention to comprehend it. In choosing to do so, the subject’s attention is cast away from the farsighted architectural gaze towards the nearsighted material. His attention falls into the narrative or experience of these images and thereby temporarily escapes the larger architectural space. On this level, architecture exhibits symptoms that suggest its contemplative irrelevance to the modern subject. The “Zero Project,” a series of sculptures by Katsushige Nakahashi, calls to mind the method by which architecture positions the subject in a relationship between contemplation and distraction, between image and architecture. Each work in the series is constructed from more than 20,000 close-range photographs of the surface of a toy model Zero Fighter, the historic airplane of Japan’s World War II fleet. The photographs are taped together to form a life-sized replica of the airplane. katsushige nakahashi, Zero Project, 2006, photographs, tape These sculptures use a similar technique as “Entertainment Tonight,” a kind of tabloidal repetition. This repetition is not used to negotiate inside and outside per se, but rather each sculpture takes “Entertainment Tonight’s” model of transparency and nests it in a sort of tertiary repetition, where the large iconic sculptural form, the array of photographs, and even the toy itself (represented in the photographs) each present the same referent in an ever-decreasing degree of scale. Because these different levels of material all reference the same content, any contemplative focus on any level—the form, the photograph, or the toy—offers a type of feedback. The viewer’s attention, once invested in the detail of the photograph, for instance, would easily loop back into the larger architectural scale, since the toy plane depicted in the photograph is also apparent in the larger sculptural form. Thus, due to the nested repetition of content, the project presents images in a manner that tempers their digressive contemplation. Instead of dissipating attention, distraction concentrates it by feeding back into the larger architectural scale. Beyond the repetition of content, the sculpture’s mode of production also offers a blending of nearsightedness and farsightedness. The gridded assembly of photographs constitutes an affinity between the media of photography and architecture. Architecture’s size requires that it be made of parts. The sculpture’s assembly of rectilinear photographs is stereotomic, arranged as an architectural patterning of construction that aligns itself with the orthogonal frame of the photograph. This provides a pivot for the subject to negotiate both with the photograph and the larger-scale form. Moreover, each photograph of the toy model is taken at extremely close range. These macroscopic images produce a space in which the viewers cannot imagine themselves; they cannot project themselves into the photograph as it is too shallow. This method presents an animosity towards a contemplative digression, as only the eye can inhabit the image. A productive relay ensues between the photographic and the architectural via an overlapping technique of both media: the camera zoom lens meets the architectural preoccupation with scale. The images force the eye back to the larger scale. In addition to these techniques of production, the material quality of the photographs—their gloss—adds yet another level of animosity to a nearsighted contemplative attention to the image. Gloss presents an albedo effect, a glistening reflection of light that migrates from one photograph to the next, tracing the relationship between the subject and sculptural form and linking the stereotomic assembly of parts into one topological whole. This gloss provides a surface tension to the photographic space that is a constant reminder of its material flatness, where reflected light often obscures the shallow space depicted in it. katsushige nakahashi, zero project, 2006, photographs, tape In the Zero Project, the image does not demand contemplative attention away from the architectural scale. The individual images are simple enough that they do not require intensive contemplation. They are not iconic. They do not reference anything but the zero fighter itself. And should the subject’s attention collapse into the picture-window of the photographic detail, his gaze would travel through the photograph to the “interior” space where the toy model resides, only to proceed back “outside” to the overall scale of the artwork. The project suggests a space in which the image’s life in architecture could operate outside the arrogance of formalist readings or the opposing alternative arrogance in the presumption of the subject’s popular culture awareness. The project suggests an architecture where image does not destroy space, but rather constructs it. The contemplative image still distracts the subject, but in this case, it forces architecture into the contemplative foreground. A future of architecture lies in the use of this model of repetition, one in which popular culture’s stockpile of calculated mannerist distractive techniques spills into buildings. Let the architect be swindled. . . . 2008

PAOLA PIVI Interview by Lindsay Harris . . .paola pivi, interesting, 2006, white animals In 2007, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi organized “My Religion is Kindness. Thank You, See You in the Future,” an exhibition of work by Paola Pivi in an abandoned warehouse at the Porta Genova train station in Milan. Throughout the long, narrow concrete space roamed pairs of live animals, such as horses, rabbits, llamas, and geese, all of them white. Behind the animals, a military aircraft stood upside down, poised in an unlikely position that negated the warplane’s function and rendered the sinister machine almost comical, typical of her penchant for the unexpected and the incongruous. She lived for a period on the island of Alicudi in Sicily, home to sixty-two people, and she currently resides in Anchorage, Alaska. Poetically working with the beauty of the everyday in a range of media, from performance and installation, to photography, sculpture, and drawing, Pivi uses her subtle wit to question attitudes and cultural mores. Lindsay Harris: You’ve lived in several different places—from Alicudi, a small Mediterranean island, to your current home in Anchorage, Alaska—that are removed from the major urban centers of the art world. How did you choose to live there, and what impact does the place in which you live have on your creative process? PAULA PIVI: I choose where I live following my desire to be in a certain place that excites, entertains, and intrigues me and in some way makes my life better. I moved to Alaska to have a wonderful life, and the work just happens wherever I am. Later on, my work naturally is influenced by what I see around me, but I don’t choose places with work in mind—quite the opposite. I was reluctant to move to Alaska at first as I thought, “How am I going to work there?” I've always liked places that inspire me—the nature, the mountains, the indigenous culture. The intense daylight in the summer and darkness in winter affect everything. In the summer, it’s not like a sunny day for twenty-four hours. It’s more like a sunset lasting for six hours and dawn lasting for six hours. The evening light is a spectacle. In the summer, everybody is so full of energy. And in the winter, it’s the opposite. Harris: Have these qualities of life in Alaska informed the work you’ve produced while living there? PIVI: Probably, yes, but that wasn’t my intention. Almost by default, the work absorbs something from where I am. Harris: Your pieces involve everything from live animals to photography, to objects related to physics or chemistry. To what degree do materials inspire your work, or, rather, do your ideas determine your choice of materials? PIVI: I don’t think that the materials inspire the work. Sometimes I see materials that are extremely interesting, and I wish I could incorporate them into a piece somehow, but it isn’t always possible. The materials are a necessity of the artwork. Harris: In one of the more infamous exhibitions associated with Arte Povera in the 1960s, Jannis Kounellis presented twelve horses in an art gallery in Rome. You have included live animals in several of your own projects, either physically as part of an installation or performance, or as the subject of a photograph. Can you comment on this aspect of your work? PIVI: I didn’t previously have any particular affinity for animals, but when I was living on the island of Alicudi in Sicily, a tiny island with sixty-two people and no cars because there is no flat land, there were two ostriches there. They were so incongruous. Yet, the fact that they were there held such significance. I ended up taking a photograph of them in a small boat. That approach began to multiply in my work, and now I’ve done several artworks with animals—alligators, polar bears, musk ox, leopard, just to mention a few. This all happened to my surprise. They’re the best characters—prima donnas without vanity. paola pivi, untitled (ostriches), 2003 Harris: You’ve installed pieces in traditional art spaces, such as museums and galleries, and in public spaces, including an old warehouse in the train station Porta Genova in Milan, which reactivated an unused, urban space, a public square in Salzburg, and in photographic murals on building façades that people could see from the street. How do different spatial contexts affect your artistic production, and, as far as you can tell, shape viewers’ reactions to your work? PIVI: The piece in which I was very conscious about the viewing space was one in which I installed a helicopter upside down in a public square in Salzburg in 2006. That was exactly what I wanted: a helicopter upside down in a public square, which meant that people driving in the car, riding the bus, or visiting that area of town would bump into a helicopter around the corner. That kind of unexpected encounter was really important to me. The major advantage of a gallery or museum is that the artist is protected by the architectural space and by the other people working there, like the curator or the director. That protection gives the artist a lot of freedom. The exhibition space is like a shield. When you work in a public space, you come face to face with people’s reactions. There is no filter. When I did the upside down helicopter, there was no protection there. It was in a public square, and the city of Salzburg went nuts about it. paola pivi, a helicopter upside down in a public space, 2006, westland wessex helicopter Harris: Your projects are often large in scale and seem to require a lot of hands, so to speak. Can you say something about the role of collaboration in your work? PIVI: [I work with others], but at the same time, it is rarely a collaborative process because when I collaborate with the people who make things for me, I am, in a way, the boss of the final work. Yet, it is also very important to have them contribute their input into the work. So, the final product doesn’t come only from me. Right now, I’m involved in two real collaborative projects, and they’re much more complex because I am not the boss. When you really collaborate, when you create together, fifty-fifty, it’s challenging. The first project is Free Tibet Concert: A Big Dream, a free event with talks and musical performances to raise awareness about the lack of freedom in Tibet. I am organizing this together with Karma Lama in Alaska. The second one is “...And back again,” a show I organized with gelitin at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Miami. Rather than just having our solo shows, we invited five other artists, some of whom we had never talked to before, to create seven solo shows at once. Everyone can show what he or she wants, the only theme being that we invited the artists. The gallery gave the space to us, and we invited these artists to participate. But to agree on everything, to really collaborate, is very hard work. Harris: You initially started out not in the arts, but in engineering. Could you comment on how you came to be an artist, given your background in a scientific field? PIVI: In one summer, two things happened to me that led me to discover art. One was seeing a comic strip by Andrea Pazienza, who was amazingly good but died very young, so he didn’t produce much. I could see his images in my head, and I started copying his drawings. I began to see that in his drawings, there was something beyond, and I started to see art for the first time. Around then I also saw a show of works by Egon Schiele, the first show I had ever seen in my life, in which I could see beyond the image on the paper. At that same time, I met a boy who was studying at the art academy. I guess he was the first artist I met in my life. A few things like this happened in one summer, and I thought I would go to art school myself, just for fun, like a hobby, as if I were to go to a bowling class or something. Harris: Both of the artists you mention, Pazienza and Schiele, made drawings. Drawing is also an element of what you do. Is that how ideas come to you, through sketching? PIVI: No, the ideas come to me in the abstract. To go back to the point about collaboration, the collaboration I have with the photographer is very important. I rarely take my own pictures. Most of the time I collaborate with a photographer, either Hugo Glendinning or Attilio Maranzano. I didn’t know them personally, but I knew that I wanted to work with them after seeing only one of their pictures. I was sure about their aesthetics. And when we’re there, ready to make the work, I completely trust them. We don’t even have to talk to each other. That is the most wonderful form of collaboration that has happened to me. He’s doing his job, I’m doing my job, and we don’t need to talk. Harris: So you don’t take the pictures yourself, but you come up with what should be represented and then the photographer decides how to show it? PIVI: It’s more complicated than that. I decide how to show it in reality, in the real world, and in that moment, both the photographer and I are viewers of what is happening. Then the photographer takes the picture. His aesthetics intertwine with mine. The aesthetics of one person are like a fingerprint. But both Hugo and Attilio are extremely mature art lovers who have mastered the art of documenting art without needing to assert their presence in the photographs they take. Each enjoys being a viewer and is confident that his picture bears his own signature through his aesthetic fingerprint, so to speak, even if the image doesn’t say anything about him directly, but instead only conveys my work. So, the picture is a communication device. Taking the picture is very hard work. If I had to take the picture, I would not be able to see my work. paola pivi, do you know why italy is shaped like a boot? because so much shit couldn't fit in a shoe, 2001, leather boot, 50 pins Harris: My final question stems from Francesco Bonami’s current exhibition in Venice at Palazzo Grassi, “Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution 1968-2008,” which includes a piece of yours. To what extent do you consider yourself an Italian artist? PIVI: I am proud of being Italian. When I was younger, I was ashamed of being Italian, and now I’m proud. Harris: What changed your mind? PIVI: Getting old. . . . 2009

PAUL CHAN Interview by Shana Gallagher Lindsay . . .paul chan, 5th light, 2006, installation view photo by martin runeborg Paul Chan was born in Hong Kong (1973) and raised in Nebraska. He received his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA in film/video/new media from Bard College (2002). His work in various media oscillates between the delicate and the monumental, the subtle and the provocative, connecting complex ideas to today’s mass-media-disseminated material and cunningly deploying both traditional and newer techniques to re-imagine older notions. Following graduate school, Chan produced a suite of three videos (Re: The Operation, 27 min., 2002; Baghdad in no Particular Order, 51 min., 2003; Now Promise Now Threat, 33 min. 2005) that at once articulate and blur distinctions (e.g., friend vs. foe) that we commonly use to position ourselves in the social sphere. Subsequently, The 7 Lights (2005-08), arguably Chan’s first major art-world success, challenges the common Western linkage of knowledge and creation to clarity (vs. darkness). The mesmerizing video features shadowy objects and figures that float or fall through a zone that insinuates a shaft of light from a window, and alludes at once to Biblical accounts of creation and destruction, Plato’s cave, and Alberti’s Renaissance window. Seemingly finding a more rebellious source of inspiration, Chan came out with several sexually-infused works, including Sade for Sade’s Sake, which premiered at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). The projection animates monumental silhouetted figures that alternately assemble in orgiastic frenzy and shatter through devices like syncopation and abstract formal arrangement, then disappear. Re-conceiving an otherwise non-sexual cultural terrain as a field charged with ecstasy and desire, Chan wrote Phaderus Pron (2008), a dialogue inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus, wherein the guidelines of a platonic master/student relationship are blissfully defied. Chan’s term, pron, is borrowed from “pr0n,” a masking-word devised to disguise Internet searches for pornography. Appropriating at the other end of the cultural spectrum from Plato and yet violating similar “laws,” Chan re-scripts a Law And Order episode with suggestive subtitles in the Mother of All Episodes (2009, 45 min. loop). Connected to the Sade project, Chan created fonts that compel users to generate a transgressive text. Working well beyond the traditional boundaries of many visual artists, Chan helped to organize a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005. He has written insightfully on topics as seemingly disparate as Emanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, the lyrics of the Insane Clown Posse, and the current economic recession. Shana Gallagher Lindsay: Paul, I’d like to start with a fairly basic question about your well-known work, The 7 Lights (2005-2008) To what degree was the specific imagery of the projections meaningful? PAUL CHAN: I suppose it is the degree to which one is willing to spend time with it. paul chan, 5th light, 2006, installation view photo by jason mandella Lindsay: Descriptions of the work, such as that accompanying its exhibition at the New Museum (New York, 2006) liken it to the Biblical seven days of creation, and seven lights are also mentioned in the Book of Revelations. What kind of a hold does religion have on your thought? CHAN: A surprising one. It’s surprising given that we’re now living in 2011. I didn’t think that at the beginning of the 21st century, religion would have such a hold on our social imagination. I just heard Obama’s speech last night in Arizona [the memorial for the Tucson shooting victims], and I was so struck by what was said. Two of the people that spoke were from his Administration: Eric Holder, the Attorney General, and Janet Napolitano, who is Homeland Security Director and who used to be the governor of Arizona. And as our top civil servants, they basically spoke only through the Bible. Napolitano quoted from the Old Testament, and Holder quoted from Paul, in Corinthians. They didn’t say anything else. They just quoted scripture. The implication is that religion, and Christianity in this country in particular, is the only social balm that offers any kind of solace for something like what happened in Arizona. But, we know that’s not true. Lindsay: So it seems. CHAN: Or let’s say it like this. Progress would be an image of immanent consolation. In any case, I think anyone who is even remotely interested in the present tense can’t help but see the hold religion has, here and there. Lindsay: So, perhaps more after 9/11 than before? CHAN: Here is an interesting parallel. It was only after going to Iraq before the 2003 occupation that I realized this. Historically, Iraq wasn’t a religious country. Whatever one may think of Saddam Hussein, his ambition was to create the first modern and secular Arab state, one that was neither beholden to Western colonial powers nor Muslim fundamentalists. It was only after the First Gulf War in 1990 that it became weaponized with a kind of institutional Islam, because Hussein used it as a way to mend the social fabric of the country after his country was decimated. And, so, the parallel between the social fabric ripping in Iraq, and then political orders using religion to try to mend it, in a way, parallels, I think, what is happening here. Lindsay: It’s a galvanizing factor. CHAN: Yeah, and, you know, I think the dreams of modernity are still there, but the idea that social, economic, and maybe even aesthetic progress can come from a kind of, well, immanence, as opposed to transcendence, I think, seems to be an anachronism today. It’s sad but true. Maybe it’s not sad—it’s obviously not sad for the people who believe, because it’s just prophecy, I suppose. Lindsay: You have been critical of certain social media. [Paul Chan, “The Unthinkable Community,” e-flux Journal]. You have likewise criticized recent video and new media art, and the manner of their presentation in galleries and museums. Would you elaborate on your critique? CHAN: I can. Someday. And it will be incisive and illuminating. paul chan, 3rd light, 2006, idigital video projection, table, 14:00 Lindsay: What are distinctions between your work in new media, and that of which you, perhaps, don’t approve? CHAN: I approve of all the work. I just don’t want to be around any of it. Lindsay: Do you think there’s a kind of crescendo in culture now, a sort of urgency to be “of one’s time,” that is problematic? You went to school for new media, right? CHAN: I studied film and video. New media was just in the air. Lindsay: So, was there a kind of critical view of it there, or was everyone pretty much gung ho? CHAN: I think that at the time that I went to school, new media was different from what we know of it now. In, say, 2000-2001, new media was really about the Web. Online manifestations held the promise for a kind of interactivity that was mediated by programming or different formal expressions. This mediation no longer exists. Somehow there is no longer mediation. New media has transformed into the promise of social media. And so, connections have themselves become forms of expression. Lindsay: So, you engage various media in your works: .gif format animations, projected videos, installations. Does media bear much of the meaning in your work? Is the medium at all the message? CHAN: I don’t know how to answer that except that it is something that I use. paul chan, happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization (after henry darger and charles fourier) (still), 2000-2003, mini pc, installation instructions, sparkle vellum screen and equipment specifications Lindsay:: And, if you were using a flip book, or something, for the Darger work that you did [Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier, projected digital animation, color, 17 min., 2000-2003], would it have a similar resonance? CHAN: I don’t know. When I do work, I have a flash of an idea or thought in my mind, and then I sit on it for a couple days, a couple weeks, months, or a couple of years. And if the thought sticks around, then I realize that it has the potential of being more than a thought, and that it should become something more than mindfulness. Essence becomes appearance. And how it appears, then, is the way something transforms from a thought into a thing, and then into something else. And so, I don’t care actually whether the thing is a flip book or a video or a projection. It only matters what this thought which becomes a thing can change both in the process to become something wholly other. Lindsay: Some of your videos are long projections. CHAN: Is that a compliment? Lindsay: You could say that your art makes time for itself and demands the viewers’ time. Would you discuss your interest in time? I know you have discussed it in various contexts. CHAN: Sure. First, I feel like I don’t have any… And I don’t know if this right, but it seems to me that one way to not feel like this is to make time. Lindsay: We can produce it. CHAN: Yes. When I make work, the pleasure of the making comes from how this work holds me in its time. One makes time as much as one makes work. And it seems to me that this is important because time is also what we spend to make a being of ourselves. I am constantly at a loss as to how to make more of it. Lindsay: Do you think your kind of art heightens one’s awareness of time spent? CHAN: Some people have said I have wasted their time. And sometimes, in my less successful works, I have wasted my own. Lindsay: You seem to understand your role as something of a catalyst. Am I correct in this assessment? CHAN: Who said that? Lindsay: I just see that. CHAN: Really? I guess I’d have to deny it. Lindsay: Really? CHAN: Catalyst for what? Lindsay: Well, maybe forging communities rather than networking. CHAN: It’s hard to tell the difference these days. paul chan and christopher mcelroen, waiting for godot, 2007 creative time, new york and the classical theater of harlem Lindsay: Is it? How about in your work Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, your work with students and artists down there?— it seems that this was an important aspect of the project for you—people coming together and then taking off from that point. CHAN: There were many aspects to that project. What I appreciate most about the experience was that they were all equidistant in import to what happened. Lindsay: I have another question about that particular work. I was reminded of Robert Smithson’s sites/non-sites and Hans Haacke’s politicized installations when I saw your recent installation at The Museum of Modern Art of objects and ephemera from the New Orleans project. Are you inspired by these artists? And why is this kind of documentary presentation important? Why not just show the video of the performance? CHAN: I’m interested in Smithson. Seeing his retrospective, I was surprised at how Christian his works fundamentally were. We know of his earthworks. I didn’t know his paintings. At first, it seemed jarring to see the paintings and then the earthworks. But then the more you expose yourself to them, the more you see the continuity of what is happening— especially the idea of redemption. I think that showing the video is the surest way of lying. I think video today has the feeling of it being it. And it’s not it. Lindsay: “It” meaning what it’s all about, the meaning of it. CHAN: I don’t think the props would do it either. I think the important thing is to remind people that whatever you show, this isn’t it. I think that’s as close as it gets. Lindsay: There’s always something else. CHAN: As close as it gets. Lindsay: It’s always an approximation. CHAN: Yes. Lindsay: The issue of sacrifice has come up in your comments and writings. For instance, in your talk, “Spirit of the Recession,” a privileged class unjustifiably exacts sacrifice from the underclass. You have discussed the displacement of religion onto secular behavior. Are there any particular texts that have inspired your thinking in this direction? CHAN: Our mutual friend, Bob Hullot-Kentor, of course. There are definitely others. I just guest edited an issue of e-flux Journal with an art historian and critic from the Netherlands, Sven Lütticken. It’s about the rise of right-wing populism in the US and Europe. And I write about how in this country, when things go wrong, people feel like someone has to pay. And that’s as succinct as it gets. Someone has to pay. This is the impulse to sacrifice, right? But, strangely, it’s never the people who fucked it up in the first place; it’s always someone else. And I think this impulse is not modern; but it’s also not eternal. I think thinking through what it actually means is one thing; and then finding forms that would articulate it in a way that is illuminating—finding ways to illuminate it from within would be useful. Lindsay: What is it that you value in the sexual content of your recent work? CHAN: What I value most is how it made sex for me the truer image of sex than before, which is, that it is not sex. It is entangled in such a way that it renewed a particular image of it for me. The idea of the Sade project has been in my mind for a while, and I finally took the time to do it, and in doing it, renewed a particular image of sex that, I think, is as complex and contradictory as it ought to be. paul chan, sade for sade's sake, 2009, digital projection, 5 hours, 45 minutes looped Lindsay: And how would you describe your relationship as artist with the viewer or reader—because there are the Pron texts [such as Composition as Explanation Pron where you transfigure a seminal text by Gertrude Stein as a pornographic monologue]—at the time the sexually-charged content is consumed by the viewer/reader? CHAN: I don’t know. That brings to mind an image of me doing some sort of focus group experiment, where I’m behind a one-way mirror, watching people reading it. From the sales of the books online, I would say there are no readers. And, if there were, they’re not telling me what it’s like to read it. I did do a public reading of Pron, though. And it was both tedious and pleasurable. Lindsay: Well, your voice changes that. I listened to that reading. The way you read it gave it more harmony. CHAN: Well, thank you. But, I would like to think that, if one were to have a quiet day—let’s say, riding on New Jersey Transit—and you were to start reading it aloud, one would find that the only way to make sense of it would be to make it rhythmic. Perhaps sense is nothing but rhythm? What was interesting about doing the book, and about doing Sade [Sade for Sade’s Sake, 5h, 45min. video projection, fonts, drawings, installation, 2010], was the insight that pornography and poetry both use rhythm to be more than what they are. In the work of some, this is clear. Sade, for instance, or Sappho. So, what I wanted to do with the fonts that I made, which is the “vocabulary” for the novel, was to distill the idea of rhythm-as-sex. That was the interesting compositional challenge—what happens when you charge words and phrases that are not sensical, but not nonsensical, with this compositional rhythm. Lindsay: And there it would seem that the medium is important, as you [the artist] can control rhythm [in animation] or [with the fonts] you can give some control to a user. paul chan, the body of oh ho_darlin (truetype font), 2008, ink on paper and mixed media CHAN: More and less. In the case of the fonts, they reduce your ability to communicate at the same time that they give you the chance to type what I imagine you want to say anyway. Lindsay: You seem to have transformed the idea of the archive with your website, National Philistine. You have vivified it, so it is no longer a “tomb” with “relics,” where art historians go to excavate, but rather, a forum, in which—particularly due to your readings of other people’s texts—the dead and the living connect, virtually. To what extent are your art and your archive the same? Or are they separate in your mind? CHAN: They’re not the same but they’re not separate. I put stuff online when I have time and when I feel like it. I put stuff online that is sometimes half finished, that is, in a way, incomplete. And I like it that way. It’s a cross between a half-forgotten folder, a trashcan, and a compost heap. And, to me, it keeps a particular notion of new media alive: the idea of giving stuff away. I think this is actually the one of the most interesting notions we have now. We live in a time when scarcity may not be what gives something value. Like musicians, who give away whole albums for free in order to continue working and living, we’re seeing that scarcity does not create value as much as it used to. Lindsay: A kind of potlatch. CHAN: I suppose. Being someone who came up at a time when the Web was just flowering, I had the experience of just making stuff and putting it up, and I see this as a continuation of that kind of spirit. Now, it doesn’t mean that you have to be puritanical about it. It doesn’t mean that you should give away everything; there should be some distinctions to be made. But then the question is: What are those distinctions? I think that’s constantly negotiated, and negotiable. I finally just downloaded the Girl Talk album, and it’s great. And you know, I started an e-book press, and I want to sell e-books… Lindsay: Badlands Unlimited? CHAN: Yeah, but, all the books I read are free, and are illegal e-books. And I don’t even go to see movies any more, I just download them off of BitTorrent, and that’s just the way it is. And it’s great. I always had this idea that there should be a law that if something is really popular—lets say if 50,000 or 100,000 people like it enough—that, by law, it should be free. Lindsay: You once stated that successful art is that which is memorable. What do you hope will be memorable about your work? CHAN: I said that? Lindsay: Yeah. CHAN: Where was it? Lindsay: An interview [with Beth Capper in F Newsmagazine] where you were discussing other unnamed people’s collages, bricollages, and you said that what made some stand out from others was that they were memorable. So, I was wondering what you want to be memorable about your work. CHAN: A difficult question… Lindsay: Difficult because its too broad? CHAN: No. Because it puts me in a position of telling other people what they ought to take away from the work. And so, maybe the best thing to say is: I hope that what people remember about the work is, at the least, is that it is not it. Whatever it is, it is not it. REFERENCES Chan, Paul and Sven Lütticken. e-flux Journal [http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/22] Hullot-Kentor, Robert. “Origin Is the Goal,” in Things Beyond Resemblence: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006), 1–22. . . . 2011

GOLDIECHIARI & KATE GILMORE Interview by Kristen Lorello . . . goldiechiari, controcorrente (against the tide), video , 2005 I spent much of last year in Rome, studying the city's contemporary art scene and focusing on how the city's landscape, replete with historic monuments, might provide a meaningful backdrop for critical intervention, particularly on feminist and environmental issues. Both Italian duo goldiechiari (Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari) and the temporarily Rome-based American artist Kate Gilmore create works that challenge the values implicit in a variety of social situations, each using the city's landscape as a source of both content and materials for their art. During their ten-year collaboration, Rome-based duo goldiechiari have often used Rome's historic center and outskirts as the setting for photographs treating issues related to sexual politics and the consequences of industrialization and capitalism. Recipient of the 2007-08 Rome Prize, Gilmore creates videos in which she interacts with constructed sculptural sets, often confronting physically challenging situations that must be endured or overcome, including taking an axe to a sculpted wooden heart, throwing domestic furniture from the second to first story of a building, and clawing her way up an incline on roller skates to take a cake. Destroying the intended function of common objects or revealing the ridiculous extents to which women go to achieve role that society prescribes, Gilmore places the values of the roles and objects in flux. Drawn to the common threads in their work, I interviewed these three artists this spring. goldiechiari, pic nic, 2002, c-print (courtesy of elaine levy project) Kristin Lorello: For your most recent work, Dump Queen, you have created a musical in which performer Lotta Melin sings Carmen Miranda's “Chica, Chica, Boom, Chic” among piles of trash in the Guidonia garbage dump outside of Rome. Why did you choose this performer and this setting? SARA GOLDSCHMIED: In previous works, we have always appeared as the performers. But in reality, neither of us knows how to dance the samba! This was a fundamental problem. So, we decided to collaborate with the Swedish performer Lotta Melin. She generally doesn't do this type of work, but she is a friend, understood the project, and took the role on. Working with Lotta was stimulating because she hit on what we had in mind. We researched Miranda’s films, her dances, her expressions, and Lotta was very good at reproducing the character. We have always worked with people to help us produce works, with artisans or professionals from other industries, so cooperation is often part of the work. With regards to the chosen setting, the garbage dump, we’re interested in refuse as the consequence of a certain lifestyle in a particular environment and as a material that has consequences for the future. We’re interested in the notion that refuse is something removed from its original context. Objects of consumption that once had a very strong aura of interest completely lose their captivating aspect and become trash that we don't want to regard as part of our life. This is interesting to us as a metaphor. The way that we choose to live in the West is hypocritical, and we want to spotlight those places that people do not acknowledge. There is a parallel reality that we do not know about. The garbage dump is fascinating and has its own way of functioning and a totally different economy. In the morning, the sparrows go there to eat, at lunchtime the seagulls, in the evening the crows. And there are people who work among the accumulation of the city. ELENORA CHIARI: Doing this behind-the-scenes research on the garbage dumps, we realized that they are everywhere around us, but they are never pointed out. They are always in gated and hidden places but just around the corner. Lorello: Have you been interested in refuse in past works? CHIARI: You can see this interest in our earlier series, “Bucoliche” (“Bucolics”), in which we upset the bucolic aspect of nature with a view that is totally artificial, making panoramas from what we have in front of our eyes each day in Trastevere, Rome. We made images of nympheas from our plastic bags or those of the garbage dump of Malagrotta near Rome. The idea was to allow the viewer to recognize an iconic image from French Impressionist painting, Claude Monet’s water lilies, in the trash and then to create a paradox from it. The images from Impressionism are recognizable to a large audience, and using this framework, we create a way for the viewer to access the work. Then, within the work, there are many avenues for meaning. We often work with immediately recognizable symbols or images. There’s this emphasis on that which is hidden from view in everyday life. Here, it becomes reevaluated, put in the foreground, and inserted into a language of an institutionalized form of art. goldiechiari, dump queen, 2008, video still triptych Lorello: How did the two of you meet, and how did you arrive at making work along these lines? GOLDSCHMIED: We met in 1997 at the University of Sociology of Rome in the group Orma Nomade that began as a political group and a study group of Donna Haraway's essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” After some time, we began to try out a visual arts project together that aspired to the texts that we were reading. The work was tied to an imagination of the corporal, performance, and a series of themes tied to the intimacy of the body. Lorello: The purpose was to experiment together, not to create a project tied to a contemporary art exhibition. Afterwards we began to produce works, but the experimentation lasted a couple of years as we developed our language. GOLDSCHMIED: Initially, the influence of feminism was strong, both from the point of view of texts—critical theory by authors like Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, and Rosi Braidotti—and from the point of view of theoretical experimentation. The texts led us to contemplate notions of subjectivity and boundaries between feminine and masculine, natural and artificial. Regarding the concept of institutional critique, we're interested in underlining paradoxes or creating short circuits through irony so that the spectator has the possibility of putting both that which is taken at face value and the system of art itself into question. Lorello: How does the choice to live in Rome influence your work? CHIARI: In Rome, there’s antiquity, this eternity. But antiquity is also one of the reasons that has not allowed the contemporary to develop as it has in other countries, even though there are artists, critics, curators, and museum directors here who work at a very high level. The problem is that so much money from the state goes to the restoration and maintenance of ancient artworks, and we very much live from tourism. There is little sensitivity on the part of the institutions for the contemporary. They don't realize how we are stuck and how we cannot remain that way. GOLDSCHMIED: The choice to live in Rome is very important. We have a lot of material that we are working on that is tied to the political contradictions that characterize Italy, the fact that Rome is a center of power because it is the political capital of Italy and at the same time is a historical city also tied to the power of the Vatican. goldiechiari, pic nic, 2002, ninfee, panoramiche #15, lambda print (courtesy of elaine levy project) Lorello: You have shot many works on the outskirts of the city. What interests you in these places? CHIARI: Rome is quite large, and there are a number of different parts of the city. Walking around, you realize that you can be transported to any other place in the world and you're no longer in Rome. This recognition, however, is more behind the scenes. It's fun to discover places, and it's also a kind of metaphor that there is always a behind the scenes. In some way, we’re searching for this. GOLDSCHMIED: It's also the fact that the periphery renders many cities similar to one another. The work can then be applicable to other contexts and not just Rome. This idea can even be seen in works shot in the historic center of Rome. For example, both Controcorrente and Nympheas were shot at the Tiber River, and yet, there is no way of establishing this. We eliminated every reference to history, every architectural reference that could portray Rome in its more classical image. This is because the classical imagery would have distracted attention from other elements. We were more interested in the idea of the Tiber as a polluted river that could be in Rome just as it could be in any other place in the world at this moment. . . . kate gilmore, cake walk, 2005, video Lorello: Can you discuss what you are currently working on in Rome? KATE GILMORE: I’m working on pile pieces that are based on destruction and construction. I'm looking at the architecture of the city, how it's built on top of itself, and how contemporary society exists within the realm of this ancient place. I’m working with that history in these piles, thinking about breaking and making. Take the Roman Forum, for example. It was a thriving place, was destroyed, and now exists in a whole other realm and has created something that has a totally new definition. I am working in new materials as well. In New York, I work with a lot of wood because it is a plentiful material, especially near my studio in Long Island City. In Rome, wood is very expensive, so I have had to adjust the way that I make my sets and use materials that are cheap and plentiful in Rome. Here, I have been using plaster construction blocks, so the piles appear to be made from marble or stone. I try to use the place where I’m working as inspiration. It doesn’t make sense for me to replicate my exact New York studio practice in Rome. The challenge is to try to figure out what is here in Rome and do something new and interesting with that information. kate gilmore, heart breaker, 2004, video still Lorello: How did you arrive at making videos in which you interact with constructed sets? GILMORE: When I was in school, I had professors come by my studio to look at my sculptures, but they were more interested in my personality, the way that I worked, my process, and the things that were left over from the sculptures than the actual objects. I started thinking about why the sculptures weren't working and how I could combine all of these elements to make something more successful, and I started to put myself into the actual objects and then photograph them. I made pieces that focused on the idea of displacement. I would build installations in which a female character would interact with an environment that was completely foreign to the environment that one would expect her to be in. For example, I would build a mud hut and dress up as Hillary Clinton or play a prom queen building Ted Kaczynski's shack. I then started thinking about the process of moving through time as opposed to the end result being an object. This eventually led me to video. kate gilmore, higher horse, 2008, video still Lorello: In your performances, you often reshape constructed environments, renegotiating your own relationship to the sets, dismantling the original values implicit in them. As a female artist, do you feel a responsibility to do so? GILMORE: Inevitably my work is about being a woman because I am in my work, and I am often doing these physical tasks. My outfits are usually quite female, with heels or dresses, so inevitably that's part of it. As for whether female artists have a responsibility to address these issues, I don't think it’s necessarily an obligation, but I'm interested in it. I looked at people like Marina Abramović, Valie Export, Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Louise Bourgeois, and Kiki Smith when I was growing up. Those are the people who probably made me an artist. I'm interested in taking those ideas and making them applicable to what's going on right now. There are many artists now who unfortunately don't want to have anything to do with feminist art. For me, that's almost offensive since so many women artists and women in general did these things so that we don't have to worry as much—even though we do have to worry in a different way. Lorello: Is the work Star Bright, Star Might an example of this interest? GILMORE: Star Bright, Star Might was very much about the art world. It was made specifically for the Armory Show, and that piece is about the idea that artists are supposed to fit into a specific star mold. This can also be interpreted more generally as well. How do you negotiate an environment or situation that is basically rejecting you? There are several solutions. You can back off, you can mold yourself so you can fit, or there's the solution that I usually take, which is to say: “No, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to break it.” kate gilmore, star bright, star might, 2007, video still Lorello: In many of your works, there is a physical obstacle that you set to overcome. Do you feel a sense of relief when you achieve a goal? GILMORE: In Cake Walk, yes. That was physically the hardest piece I have ever done, and it was the only piece that I almost gave up on because it was so difficult. I knew that I could get out of Main Squeeze because I built it around my body, and it was a question of putting my body in the exact position. After I do a video, there is always a sense of relief. At the same time, the situation never turns out the way that I expect. I'm constantly spontaneously reacting to an environment. I'm not an actor. I'm just dealing with this life situation on camera. There are also several instances in which I don't achieve, and the performance goes on. For instance, in Cake Walk, I finally get the cake and I throw it away, so the cake is a form of motivation, but it doesn't matter if I get it or not. Cake Walk still could have ended even if I didn't get it. It's nice to have that moment, but the piece still would have worked if I hadn’t gotten it. You wouldn't have gotten that same sense of relief as a viewer, so I'm actually being nicer to the viewer by achieving. That's why I think a lot of people react strongly to My Love is an Anchor, in which I'm stuck in a bucket and will be for the rest of the life of the video. Now I'm working a little more with loop-based videos, thinking about the idea of continual struggle. Lorello: Why do you subject yourself to discomfort in your work? GILMORE: I think that the misconception about my videos is that they're masochistic, and they're not. They're about pushing my body to a limit and trying to achieve something, using the physical to express an inner conflict. My physical relationship to objects is the most important thing to me, and making it through these challenges is what makes the “discomfort” worth it. Lorello: Have you ever imagined working with other performers in your works? GILMORE: I've been thinking about it more and more now, even though it's never worked before. I'm working on a couple of pieces that actually have men in them, and the works deal with the idea of hyper-masculinity. I've been thinking more about machismo in Rome. You can't turn your head without seeing a large male sculpture that's dominating something. You go to the Capitoline Museum, and it's all about male power in there. It's also interesting to notice how these male figures even define being a woman. . . . 2008

THOMAS ROMA
Interview by Alex Klein & Bettina Shzu
. . .
thomas roma, from "higher ground," photograph

Thomas Roma has photographed extensively in his native Brooklyn, focusing on everyday life, as found in churches, subways, streets, public pools, and elsewhere. He has had solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography and has produced numerous photography books. Roma is a professor of photography at Columbia University. This interview was conducted in 2000 by two of Roma’s former students, exploring his pedagogy as well as his art. It was originally published in the fourth volume of Museo.


Alex Klein: How did you start working as a photographer?

THOMAS ROMA: Just like anyone’s life story, mine has many versions, and I’ll start with a medium-length version. I was a trader on Wall Street on the floor of the American Stock Exchange from 1967 to 1971. In 1969, when I was nineteen, I got into a serious car accident. I hit three double-parked garbage trucks, was thrown from my VW Beetle, and sustained a serious head injury, which is a totally mundane, unremarkable event unless it happens to you. My rehabilitation in the very beginning had to do with not moving. I couldn’t lie down because of the excruciating headaches, and I didn’t have the attention span to watch television or read, so I would sit up and stare out the window.

One day, my older brother Joel came to see me, and he had a camera. I asked him to get me one. He later sold me his for thirty-five dollars, and I started photographing out the window. A few weeks later, when I was able to move, I was taken to an old department store and got a home developing kit. Something about my first pictures didn’t look right, but I kept doing it, and then, a couple months later, I bought a little enlarger. When I went back to the Stock Exchange, I started buying better equipment and bought a better camera. It turned out that my first camera was broken all along, which accounted for some of my failures. When I told my brother that later, he mumbled, “I know.” I asked him why he had sold me a broken camera, and he said that he didn’t think I’d pull through. So, I first got involved with photography by accident, and the first person I dealt with had no faith that I’d continue doing it. It seems that a lot of things start that way—by chance—and then, they become your life.

Although I was making a lot of money on Wall Street, my interest in photography was reaching a critical mass, and I couldn’t continue to do both. I realized that I aspired to something else. I was overwhelmed by photography, even though I was so bad at photographing. I ended up taking a job as a darkroom technician and teaching assistant at Pratt Institute. I left my job on Wall Street to do that, thinking in the back of my mind that I could always go back. I met some great people at Pratt, and they introduced me to other great people like Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Walker Evans. But I never showed anyone any of my photographs—not until 1973 or 1974, after I’d done a body of work with a camera that I’d designed and built myself. I saw in Camera in Paris that Brassaï had used a medium-format camera that wasn't made anymore, and I decided to make a modern version of it.

Bettina Shzu: How did you do that?

ROMA: At Pratt, there was an engineering school, and there was an old technician who kept dozens of lathes and milling machines in perfect condition. No one ever used them anymore because engineering had moved beyond them. He helped me fumble along with machines, and I learned enough to make my first camera. Later, I taught myself to do mechanical drawing from US Navy manuals, and I worked in other machine shops, sweeping the floor, watching what they’d do.

Klein: A kind of hands-on learning?

TR - I learned by watching people. Ignorance is such an important part of life. How many times have I told my students to try not to know so much? If you think you know something, you’re finished with it—there’s nowhere else to go. I didn’t know how hard it was to make that camera. If I had known, I never would have tried to do it—that would have been crazy. I would have compromised and made something less good, but instead, I made the exact camera that I wanted, the exact camera of my dreams.

ROMA: Which was?

TR - A lightweight, three-pound, hand-held camera that I could hold up to my eye that made a rather large negative, a camera that worked very quickly, basically a modern-day press camera. Then, people saw my pictures, and they wanted cameras, so I borrowed some money and went into business manufacturing cameras.

Klein: How about your photography back then?

ROMA: I approached photography the only way that I knew how to approach anything: as a job. I would get up, photograph all morning, stop and have lunch, and then, photograph all afternoon. I didn’t think that I had to wait for some inspiration. Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to write about what was going on in their lives, and I wanted to do something similar in photography. I never questioned that what I wanted to photograph was the actual stuff that made up my life, what shaped me. So, I walked around Brooklyn and photographed, and things would occur to me. I was also trying to unravel what I thought was this musical language, listening to a crescendo in Mozart, and trying to find a visual analogue to that, seeing the world as having multiple things going on, folding into each other, and still being as clear as Mozart’s music. Like listening to a piece of music, you might only be sensitive to certain things in a photograph at certain times, with different viewings allowing different meanings. I wanted to make something that was complex enough to stand more than one reading. I wasn’t interested in making jokes or illustrations. Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating—trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.


thomas roma, from "found in brooklyn," photograph

Klein: Were you in dialogue with the street photographers?

ROMA: Not a dialogue, because a dialogue happens among equals, and I was not an equal, nowhere near. I looked at everything that they did, and I did provide them with something too—the tremendous energy of someone who was paying attention. I insist on teaching Photo 1 every semester because I want to be around people whom I have to strain to explain things to.

Shzu: Could you talk about your philosophy on teaching?

ROMA: When I first started doing some teaching at Yale, I realized that I had a decision as to whether I would train people in what I knew (but I didn’t really know what I knew, because that was never really useful to me) or find a way to engage my students in my practice. I thought training had to be bad because it would be limited to what I remembered that I knew. I thought that the one thing that I could do would be to bring my own investigation to the class. So, I tried to explain what I was trying to do in my work and asked people to do that along with me, the only thing separating us being that I had done it longer.

Klein: People come out of your class with an ability to approach their own work as if they didn't make it themselves.

ROMA: I think that’s because we don’t first discuss the photographer’s motives or intentions. We only discuss what the students have done, looking at it with a cold, analytic eye. Allowing your unconscious to inform your actions and then looking at the results of your actions is exhilarating. I don't want you to say, “I wanted to do this.” After that, what’s left to say?: “You didn't do it” or “you did it.” If you have a dumb idea and you succeed in doing it, that’s not success. I could understand the attraction to trying to illustrate ideas, but I believe it’s more fruitful to allow yourself to respond to the world, at least in Photo 1. In my own work, I still allow myself to be interested in the world, knowing that just being present with a camera often changes everything around me. I’m interested in looking at the world in a new way because I have this awesome machine in my hands. Imagine what Masaccio or Leonardo would have done if they had an instrument with which they could point, push a button, and get an image. Of course, it’s very frustrating to a lot of people because we make masterpieces and rough sketches with the exact same physical gesture.

Shzu: Could you tell us why it is that you portray yourself as being anti-theory?

ROMA: We’re in the presence of what’s probably the greatest Art History department in the country. Why should I be a minor-league version of the people who do this full-time, who I admire tremendously? You cannot tell from my photographs or from the way that I teach what my appetites are. It’s very common that a jazz musician will know about, consume, and even be passionate about classical and country music, but play only jazz. For some reason, that luxury is not afforded people in the visual arts. I’m interested in all of it, including theory. What I’m against is being confused or paralyzed by theory.

Shzu: Do you find that you learn from your students?

ROMA: I think that that’s mostly false. More importantly, I remember things that I know, things that I wouldn’t remember if I weren’t teaching. But if I’m in Photo 1 class and I’m actively learning, we'd all be in trouble. I’m aware that in the beginning, there can be something unsettling about my class, in that the students are free to create the agenda. I give no assignments. In fact, I actually give a list of things not to photograph because they’re traps and the’yre just a waste of time: no mimes, no cats, no bicycle wheels in the sun casting a shadow, no fire hydrants with snow on top of them, no babies, no old people, don’t go to Chinatown and photograph fish or ducks hanging in the window. And I ask people to be sensitive to certain racial and ethnic things, to not photograph the Other. This is not a safari where you’re going around looking for the exotic. I find that it’s much richer to point the camera within the world you occupy.


thomas roma, from "come sunday," photograph

Klein: Where are you right now in your own projects?

ROMA: I have a bunch of books that are finished or almost finished. I’ve been working in the book format for a long time now. For one project, I’ve been going through every photograph that I’ve ever done, then I make selections for my nine-year-old son, and he chooses photographs to write about. He’s written about thirty-six pictures, and now, he’ll write about the experience of doing it. So it’ll be his book. The working title is You Come Too after a Robert Frost poem. But now, I’m really stretching myself. I’m photographing in ways that I never even imagined I’d photograph, and I have tremendous energy and appetite for it, which is informing my teaching. For example, I went to my machine shop and built a counter-weighted arm that floats my camera up to the ceiling and looks straight down. “What can I photograph from the ceiling?” I thought. “What does it look like after people get up in the morning?"” “Don't make the bed,” I told my neighbors, “I'm coming over.” Or, what does it look like when people are preparing a meal? Or when a kid is doing homework? I’m still learning where the frame ends, so I’m a beginner, and it’s exciting to think that I’m letting go of looking through the camera and that I'm giving more over to photography and the world. This technique keeps me from making pictures that I already know how to make. A nice thing about photography is that nobody knows who you are. Even achieving a certain amount of success doesn’t make you aloof from the world, or from the necessity of earning a living or reaching out to people. The lottery was up to 100 million dollars when I was photographing my book Higher Ground, and my brother Joel asked me if I bought a lottery ticket. “No,” I said, and he asked, “why not?” I said, “I don’t buy lottery tickets because I don’t want to win.” “What do you mean? You don’t want to win?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “I don’t want to hope to win. I don’t want to be in the condition of hope because hope is a condition of the last resort. As long as I can keep making everything I want, I don’t have to hope for anything. What would I do with all that money? What would I do if I had 100 million dollars—photograph from a limousine instead of from a train? Would I hire someone else to take the pictures? What good is that money?” What’s more interesting than your own life? Yes, it’s a struggle. And yes, when you do something dumb or expose yourself as someone with yearnings or fears, people are going to see it, and frankly, nobody wants to do that. What everyone wants to do, especially in a university, is let everyone know how smart and resourceful they are, and I can’t blame them, but it just has nothing to do with making art, as far as I’m concerned.

. . .
2000

THE SACRIFICE OF HUNGER
Essay by Shana Gallagher Lindsay
. . .
artists anonymous, hunger (diptych), 2006, oil on canvas

In 2006, the Berlin-based collective Artists Anonymous posted a tripartite work, Hunger, on the Saatchi Gallery website, consisting of a colorful diptych and an even more colorful text. The diptych has panels that differ only in color and medium, one being an oil version and the other a photograph, each featuring a trendy, young, female archer aiming her arrow at the viewer, surrounded by small fantastical figures, both child and adult, in a thicket of fecund vegetation with edible and inedible plants interwoven with less recognizable plant-like patterns. The text is a fake press release advertising two fictional charity events, one for a ghastly erotic scatological banquet to “benefit” famine-stricken children, the other a “celebrity fund raising event against child slavery” [sic] in the form of a snuff-film-inspired sacrificial bloodfest. The document is infused with publicity-speak, religious associations, and the discourse of pornography. In both text and image, Artists Anonymous suggest that Western consumer culture superficially attempts to enhance its reputation by promoting compassion for the exploited and deprived through the specularization of human suffering and the spectacularization of inept “sacrifices” on behalf of the needy. The Hunger group, in other words, is not about starvation or its cure, but rather puts forth a critique of the manner in which we sanctify desire, consumption, and spectacular violence in the media and contemporary art.

Far from being culturally outmoded, sacrifice is made in both rhetorical and performative (ritually authentic) ways on a daily basis. Hunger is informed by a theory of sacrifice involving a process of loss. As literary critic Susan Mizruchi has written, “sacrifice is the quintessential ritual form, and its mark or signature is its articulation of nostalgia. The idea of return is implicit in sacrifice, in its attempt to restore a lost relationship between humans and gods, or to atone for some spiritual offence” (Mizruchi, 466) The diptych and more obviously the text both hinge on issues of nostalgia and sacrifice.

Food is a universally sacrificed material, perhaps in large part because it is widely thought to both express and bridge the divide between gods and humans. Food is understood as a primary conduit, not just between human and divine, but also between generations (ancestor and descendent, child and adult), and between peoples because it is the most widely traded commodity. All of the Hunger components suggest such bridging. Thus, operating within the logic of sacrifice, the Hunger group commingles themes of nostalgia, nourishment, worship, and atonement with entertainment and self-aggrandizing artistic practice.

The phony press release advertises two events to take place in Africa in the near future, the first of which will be “Eat Our Left-Overs 2006,” a banquet benefiting the continent’s hungry youth to be co-hosted by Artists Anonymous and the world’s top modeling agencies. Emphasis is placed throughout on the delectable beauty of the models to be featured in the spectacle, soliciting our desire. Our future good deed (charitable donation) is sought by promising scopophilic gratification on two levels: we can freely admire the beautiful bodies of the models and take in the spectacle of their sacrifice. First, we are informed that the “exquisite” models will make sacrifices: for one month, they will starve themselves—presumably more than they normally do—in “solidarity” with the famished children, all the while becoming more aesthetically pleasing. Thus, there are two models of starvation: involuntary (the children) and crafted (the models). After a month of painful self-denial, the models will travel to Africa and gorge themselves on a lavish feast. Then, according to the Hunger press release: “Using their purified bodies as vessels of bounteous plenty, the gift of nutrition will be passed directly from their beautiful forms into the hungry little mouths desperate for every drop of nourishment they receive. Each merciful goddess filled with a different flavour of specially prepared luxury pudding will feed these famished little souls with a feast beyond their wildest dreams.” The sexy, generous models are sent as “ambassadors of good will and charity,” but the charity function might as well be called “Eat My Shit” (an expression in both English and German) because, shockingly, they will provide the children with their feast anally, and the event mutates into an eroticized scatological banquet, continuing: “Their wonderful naked forms ritually oiled and bent forward in pious prayer, displaying their celestial organs of reproduction and birth to the heavens. Behold, directly above each holy orifice, a black hole transformed into a wondrous star of nourishment and plenty. Hundreds of hungry mouths will be satisfied from this tiny opening, each starving little boy and girl licking and lapping up God’s plenteous and delicious gift.” Artists Anonymous force us to read this disgusting feast as sacramental, as communion with God: “Echoing Jesus’ miraculous conversion of water into wine, each woman’s ‘left-overs’ will be replaced with ‘heavenly ambrosia,’” which will have been previously cooked by London’s leading pastry chefs. Food is therefore ecstatically re-inscribed by the event’s orchestrators as a pan-connector, as “heavenly nectar,” a Dionysian substance powerful enough to heal the wounds of our separation from the imagined One we used to be before we were torn apart by colonialism, capitalism, and secularization. The food represents the vector that returns us, heals us, makes us whole again. It is logical therefore that Artists Anonymous locate these events (and our concerns and fantasies) in Africa as well as women’s bodies, both with their tropes of origin.


artists anonymous, hunger (diptych), 2006, photograph

In ritual, what is offered or sacrificed is also a surrogate, a substitute for the real thing; hence it constitutes sustenance and also articulates lack. In their study of ancient Indian and modern Western writings on sacrifice, Brian K. Smith and Wendy Doniger have noted: “Substitution, the use of a ‘stand-in’ in place of an ‘original’ which then ‘represents’ it is at the very heart of sacrifice” (Smith and Doniger, 189). Food (its overabundance and its lack) is both the cause of suffering and a cure in the Hunger text. It does not help much in the form of practical nourishment, but mainly as representation of, and atonement for, excessive desire. Food, therefore, has both positive and negative values, emblematic of both the rift and the healing.

The relationship between contemporary Western consumption and sacrifice exists on many levels. It is seen as a means to assuage guilt and to save us from our lust for luxury, sex, and objectification, etc. The fake press release suggests the self-serving nature of star-studded charity events that are reported in the media, often with images of young couture-wearing beauties interspersed with heart-breaking images of “the suffering,” for which a thousand-dollar meal tag (read: material sacrifice) represents for the purchasers and their admirers momentary self-denial to atone for the self-indulgence that oftentimes results in the victimization of others.

At the end of the Hunger tract, we are asked to give up a little bit more, to sacrifice just a bit of our money in order to help the enslaved children of Mali who presumably toil for our own treats on chocolate plantations. But that appeal rapidly degenerates into media hype for a snuff film for which many of the “benefited” children will themselves be victims of sacrifice. Here is the final paragraph: “Working together with a world famous Mexican based Spanish conceptual artist, we are hoping to produce the world’s largest and most opulent child snuff movie. Thousands of young lives will be sacrificed to highlight the plight of these poor forgotten children. No expense can be spared to show in detail the tortures and agonies these poor children must suffer daily. All donations payable totally tax-free to our account in Switzerland, the home of freedom and compassion” [sic]. Artists Anonymous’ reference to a “world famous Mexico based Spanish conceptual artist” is a veiled allusion to Santiago Sierra, who has made a controversial career by using underprivileged people in some of his works such as the photo-documented performance 250 cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People (1999), which featured unemployed men from Havana, hired at $30 apiece to have a line tattooed across their backs. Sierra claims to raise consciousness by his art, which often involves marking outcasts or submitting people to tests of endurance and humiliation in accordance with their social position, such as in his Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blonde, for which he bleached the dark hair of illegal non-European street vendors in Venice, or a piece that involved spraying polyurethane on the draped genitals of prostitutes, who were asked to assume various positions of sexual intercourse on the floor of an unused church. While Sierra’s subjects are usually compensated, they are quite modestly paid; conversely, his uses of them have made him a financially successful international art-world celebrity. The Hunger text is in part a parodic exposé of the hypocrisy of Sierra’s public art performances, which reenact coercive power relations with the alibi that he is involved in an act of revelation. Artists Anonymous suspect the motives of the viewers and supporters of such projects as well as those of the artist, implying that the sacrifices made by the people in Sierra’s works (including the artist’s own) do little to change the plight of those laborers, prostitutes, and drug addicts whom they represent. Instead, the performances merely augment the cult of personality surrounding the artist. The Hunger text reconfigures the specularization of suffering as sacrifice and therefore suggests the redemptive motives subtending Sierra’s popularity. Yet, by finally killing the children, the press release reduces to absurdity any notion that such spectacular sacrifices could actually ultimately benefit the victims. The text thus makes the artwork part of a project in which we perpetuate and consume the suffering of others, all in the name of redeeming our crimes against them, while we never truly deprive ourselves of anything substantial in order to remedy the situation.

What, then, is the relationship between the Hunger diptych and the text? Why does the extreme, triple-X-rated publicity text and the promise of a further sacrificial spectacle involving African children accompany the less overtly offensive diptych? The answers lie in the media, subject, and iconography of the diptych. Hunger consists of two virtually identical images bearing slightly different colors. The large panels are executed like many of the artists’ two-dimensional works, first painted in oils based on a negative image. Then, the painting is photographed and printed as a negative (of that already negative image). This reverses the tones and the colors (black to white, yellow to blue, green to magenta, etc.). The technique results in what Artists Anonymous call an “afterimage.” In the Hunger painting, the face of the woman has a nearly bleached grisaille appearance, and the vegetation and food surrounding her are mainly in an unearthly purple; in the photographic reproduction, the face becomes nearly blackened, and the plants and food are verdant.

The central figure is based on a photograph of one of the members of Artists Anonymous. She is youthful and slim and draws back an arrow in a bow aimed at the spectator. She wears tall, flat-heeled boots, a miniskirt with a geometric print, a fringed belt, and sports hair that appears to be either dreaded or braided and pulled away from her face. The figure’s face is hard to make out, and though she appears to be of African descent, the race remains somewhat unclear. She stands before a backdrop that looks like a jungle, the image evoking a fashion shot, in which the overall “look” could be described as contemporary-urban-tribal. Iconographically, the raised bow and arrow and the verdant setting conjure the ancient Greek goddess Artemis, patron of the grove and the hunt. Small-scale figures accompany her; some have wings (as did the oldest Greek representations of Artemis), while other male figures, like satyrs, have horns. In ancient times, Artemis was a fertility goddess associated with hunting as well as childbirth; she was also feared for bringing the plague. This “Artemis,” who aims her deadly arrows at us is conceived here as she was in ancient times, as both giver and taker of life.

Some of the imagery is reassuringly beautiful, while other passages are nightmarish when they beckon us to read them and then repel us as we do. Below her, to the side, a male lowers a female into liquid, “a river of ketchup,” by the artists’ own description; this gives the appearance of a baptism. On the opposite side, the man seems to lower his mouth to devour the girl who sits before him. The scene delivers a disturbing frisson when we discover the head and outreaching hands of a girl at the bottom, between the feet of the huntress, who appears to be receiving food into her open mouth from the anus of a horned male figure, reclining and foreshortened, genitals prominently displayed, lying above her.

As in the text, ancient and modern are brought together in these images through references suggesting a contemporary state of perceived disunion and possible repair. A sense of displacement from an original home and a longing to return are expressed in both works through dualities: hunger/nourishment, adult/child, human/goddess, modern/ancient, positive/negative, oil/photograph. These dyads, the works suggest, might be harmonized through ritual sacrifice. As the ancients once declared in their Artemis cult worship, Artists Anonymous sardonically repeat: lest we go hungry, we must sacrifice. But we delude ourselves (as had the ancients), as they seem also to say that in making phony sacrifices, we merely strengthen the great god of our age, spectacular capitalism, and extend its voracious appetite for more victims.

REFERENCES

Susan Mizruchi, “The Place of Ritual in Our Time,” American Literary History, vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall 2000), 466.

Brian K. Smith and Wendy Doniger, “Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification,” Numen, vol. 36, Fasc. 2 (Dec. 1989).

. . .
2008

JEFF WALL
Interview by David Shapiro
. . .
jeff wall, passerby, 1996, photograph

Jeff Wall is well known for his transparencies mounted on light boxes informed by a close involvement with the history of art. This interview was conducted in 1999 and treats some of the key ideas in Wall’s art and aesthetic theory. It originally ran in Museo, vol. 3 (2001) and has been re-published in the books The Education of a Photographer (New York: Allworth Press, 2006) and Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), the latter on the occasion of his retrospective.

David Shapiro: I have admired your work for a long time, particularly because you work both as an art theorist and as an artist. I’d like to start out by asking how that happened, how you came to be doing both.

JEFF WALL: First of all, I don’t really see myself as an art theorist or anything like that, more as a kind of occasional writer. My writing partly emerged from problems or occasions in teaching. I’ve taught for many years, my main subject being a sort of combination of contemporary or modern art history and some reflections on aesthetics. Writing things like lectures becomes a way of putting something on paper; so, that’s been one of the frameworks. The other is having been invited to write essays, mostly for catalogues. I never really had a plan to do any serious writing in fact.

Shapiro: So, it grew out of working as an artist?

WALL: Yes, and out of teaching, and so, it turned out, I had some ideas that I thought were interesting and maybe even original, and they had to be expressed in writing, since there was really no other viable form for them. So, I had to accept the fact that I have to try to write sometimes. As I said, I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t think I’m a very good writer, but I felt that the ideas were interesting enough to me that they would probably be interesting to other people, and I sort of forced myself to find a way to write. So it’s all been, in a way, circumstantial and accidental, although by now I feel like it’s a part of what I like to do; if I get time, and if I had more time, I would probably write a bit more.

Shapiro: So, you’re saying that there are certain things that can’t be expressed visually—in the form of art—that need to be expressed only through writing?

WALL: I think that there’s an intellectual element, an intellectual content to art, or an intellectual content to the way we relate to art. There’s also what we call aesthetics, which is a philosophical attempt to understand the experience of art; that’s something I’ve always been somewhat interested in, if not necessarily in an academic way, but just in a reader’s way.


jeff wall, a sudden gust of wind (after hokusai), 1993, transparency, light box

Shapiro: In the aesthetic movement of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire talked about being a painter of modern life. You’ve often said that you see Baudelairian modern life painting as a project in which you’re engaged. So, is that how you got to the medium in which you work? Do you see photography as the most appropriate medium for today?

WALL: No, I don’t. I don’t think that there’s any most appropriate medium. Photography has been an important phenomenon since it was invented, in both social and artistic ways. And it was inevitable that it would become central to art, simply because it’s a picture-making process, and art, Western art at least, is, in a very major way, about making pictures or images. But that doesn’t make photography a more appropriate medium for our times, in my view. All media are interesting, depending on what’s being done with them at the time; sometimes their field is a bit less energetic for one reason or another, but they usually come back.

The idea of the “painting of modern life,” which I’ve liked very much for many years, seemed to me the most open, flexible, and rich notion of what artistic aims might be like, meaning that Baudelaire was asking or calling for artists to pay close attention to the everyday and the now. This was still somewhat new in his time because the predominant idea about art was still that it was about treating time-honored themes in terms of the decorum of the established aesthetic ideas. The painting of modern life would be experimental, a clash between the very ancient standards of art and the immediate experiences that people were having in the modern world. I felt that that was the most durable and richest orientation, but the great thing about it is that it doesn’t exclude any other view. It doesn’t stand in contradiction to abstraction or any other experimental forms. It’s part of them and is always in some kind of dialogue with them and also with other things that are happening, inside and outside of art.

Shapiro: And you take “painter” to be figurative, i.e. you don’t paint and haven’t, right?

WALL: I don’t paint, but I began as a painter. I take the term “painter” as figurative. “Painter” can mean “maker” in that sense. It’s not limited to being an actual painter on canvas with paint, although it doesn’t exclude that in any way either.

Shapiro: Why did you move from painting to photography?

WALL: I can’t answer that. If I could answer that question, I’d know a lot.

Shapiro: Do you have any ideas on where painting is going, with the changing media today?

WALL: I think that painting is a permanent part of art, just like drawing is, because we have the kind of hands that we have, because we have the kind of eyes that we have. We’re always going to have drawing, and by extrapolation, painting. It’s a consequence of what we are as organisms. Painting and drawing cannot disappear from serious art, cannot “die,” as they say. They can go through all of the complex changes and developments that they have gone through because they are permanent. And therefore drawing is a kind of touchstone for all pictorial art, regardless, because it won’t and can’t be replaced with anything else. Painting as a medium and form cant change very much. So that makes it very interesting and very open too. If it were not so simple and flexible and beautiful, it would be changing technologically, but it’s too right just as it is to change, and so, it’s going to stay there. I’m very involved with painting, always have been and always will be, not particularly because I want to paint, but because it is the most sophisticated, ancient practice.

Shapiro: And you look more towards painting than any other visual media?

WALL: No. I think painting is important, but I think they’re all important: painting, photography, cinema, literature, sculpture. The idea that I relate somehow very especially to painting is a kind of cliché that has come to be attached to my work.


jeff wall, milk, 1984, transparency, light box

Shapiro: That you look toward particularly nineteenth-century painting models?

WALL: I know that I’m somewhat responsible for that because of some of the things that I’ve said, so I can’t complain about it too much, but the claim has gotten exaggerated. In the nineteenth century, with Manet and the others, there was such a high level of pictorial invention, such an interesting take on the now. They created something that is still very important to anyone concerned with pictures, and so, I’m keeping in touch with that, but not in an exclusive way, not as a model for my own work. My work derives from photography also, that is, photography as photography, and from other art forms. But it also comes from things that I’m experiencing directly. So, I’m trying to use the nineteenth century, in a way, as one of the frames of reference for a pictorial practice. We could say that, in many ways, we are still experiencing the nineteenth century in art.

Shapiro: About being a “painter of modern life,” I see that in many of your works. But does that hold true for a work like The Giant with its digital manipulation?

WALL: I like the phrase “painting of modern life,” but I don’t use it as a formula, as a total identity. Basically, it means using the standards that have emerged over a long time, very high standards, one hopes, and the memory that recognizes the existence and importance of those standards, and applying it to the now. That doesn’t mean that “painting of modern life” just means “scenes off the street.” It means phenomena of the now that are configured as pictures by means of this accumulation of standards and skills and style and so on. That means that there are no single themes, genres, or anything else that could be called “painting of modern life.” “Painting of modern life” is an attitude of looking, reflecting, and making. So, I think that The Giant, which is an imaginary scene, is a painting of modern life. It originated in my imagination, and my imagination is in the here and now in the same way that something I might see in the street is here and now. Baudelaire’s art ideal was a kind of fusion of reportage with what he thought of as the “high philosophical imagination” of older art.


jeff wall, the giant, 1992, transparency, light box

Shapiro: So, plausible and implausible imagery would be equally appropriate to you in terms of image-making?

WALL: Yes.

Shapiro: Alright, I guess we’ll switch gears a little. I was reading your interview with Arielle Pelenc, who said that your work has been criticized for lacking interruption, that is, for lacking fragmentation. Do you agree with that criticism? I wasn’t sure that I did. Do you take gesture and interruption to be different phenomena? I don’t really see that as a criticism if your work does lack fragmentation insofar as there has been a sort of regime of the fragment for a long time. Do you see your work as coming out of that?

WALL: I think that the demand that works of art appear immediately as fragmented, out of some kind of avant-garde and collage aesthetic background is just an orthodoxy of the times. It’s not that such a viewpoint has no validity, but that it cannot be complete, cannot define what good art is, as such, even for a moment. So, obviously, my work didn’t really look like the kind of work that was being approved of in that orthodox way. My reaction to that is that my relation to the idea of fragmentation is, in a way, dialectical in that I’m not oblivious to the whole phenomenon of what's being talked about, but I have my own take on it.

Shapiro: Which is?

WALL: The aesthetic norm of fragmentation implies that the avant-garde movements made a fundamental and irreversible break with the past. The art of the past, which is defined as “organically unified’ is art that does not want to recognize its own contingent character, its own fragile illusionism. It wants to revel in the illusionism for its own sake and for the sake of its audience, and it wants to seem to be inevitable and complete, the creation of magicians. Tearing apart the organic work of art was the accomplishment of the avant-garde, which revealed the inner mechanics of traditional illusionistic art, the stagecraft of the masterpiece. To a great extent, I agree with that process, and I like a lot of avant-garde art very much; it’s very important to me. But, I feel that it’s an unfree way of relating to it to erect it as an absolute standard against the aspects of the unified work. I like the idea of the unified work because I like pictures, and there is always a sense in which a picture exists as such through its unification. I think that the art of the past is not as unified as the avant-garde polemic needed for it to be or made it appear to be. There are always acknowledgments of contingency and a sense of alternatives in good work from earlier times, probably very far back in time. So, first, there probably is no completely unified work, outside of some very specific limits, at least none in the tradition that we’ve been talking about. But there is the phenomenon of unity in a work, the way it might be experienced as a unity, even if, when you look more closely at it, it displays or at least indicates or hints at its own contingency. That phenomenon, that moment of appearance, that moment of the experience of the work’s unity, remains important. That moment, that instant, will always be there when we experience good art, even if we are experiencing a work that rejects the whole idea of unity, like in radical avant-garde or neo-avant-garde art. So, I see the unity of the work of art as an unavoidable moment of the making and of the experiencing of any work. There is a dialectic in all of this, not two antithetical forms, each complete in themselves, one coming after the other in time and rendering the first one “obsolete”—a favorite polemical term of the proponents of the new orthodoxy. And, just as an aside, I would say that it was always my experience that the criticisms aimed against so-called pre-modern art were not terribly accurate, and they were tendentious in that by trying so hard to break away from the past, a lot of avant-garde artists and writers, critics let’s say, exaggerated the flaws or weaknesses of the art of the past so that they could get away from it. That’s just a rhetoric of the avant-garde, and the times made it necessary; let’s not live under that as some kind of law now. You look at so-called pre-modern art, whether it’s Caravaggio or Botticelli or Dürer, and it’s not as unified as those writers made it out to be. The antithesis between avant-garde art and “museum art” is less pronounced than the avant-garde wanted it to be. Older art is much richer and more nuanced than a lot of the arguments give it credit for being. It’s kind of obvious by now how adolescent a lot of avant-gardist attitudes were—the “burn the museum” attitude from the 20s, from Dada, through the 60s.

Shapiro: It’s still there though. It’s still around.

WALL: It’s still here, but it’s maybe not as dominant. Anyway, for these kinds of reasons, I could begin, in the 70s, to distance myself from that kind of avant-gardism, to try to find other qualities that would go somewhere, without in any way opposing the idea that all contemporary art has to experiment and has not to follow formulae, no matter how correct the formulae might be. I don’t think that that was accepted, at the beginning anyway, and my pictures were often looked at as a simple recovery of the Old Master artists, an unproblematic return to tradition.

Shapiro: Rather than growing out of their reaction, a reaction to their reaction?

WALL: Only slightly a reaction to their reaction.

Shapiro: I mean that in a good way, that is, not just as a reneging of their reaction.

WALL: I think that the critics, when they are triumphant, when their cause is dominant, are very unobservant. And that’s probably the case with some of the reception of what I was doing and still am doing.

Shapiro: But now, there’s a lot of what I call “monumental photography.” Surely there wasn’t when you were starting. Do you see yourself as part of a zeitgeist?

WALL: I hope not.


jeff wall, dead troops talk, 1992, transparency, light box

Shapiro: Andreas Gursky and Wolfgang Tillmans are also making a sort of “monumental photography.”

WALL: I think that there there’s a lot of big photography. Photography’s gotten a lot bigger in the last ten or twelve years, because it’s become a known thing that a photograph can look great at that scale. So, now it’s become something that everybody can do. The scale of the photograph has been experimented with for decades, but it’s now become a known and popular artistic phenomenon. I worked on it; lots of people worked on it. But I think it was inherent in the nature of photography for that to happen. It was inherent in the fact that once photography got taken more seriously and was practiced in a more experimental way—a way that was more like the way people practiced other art forms—that newer elements of its nature would appear. Classic art photography, which was very much the predominant language until about the 70s, was based upon the documentary model. And it seemed to be satisfied with a small image, related to the world of book publications. There was no interest in larger-scale photography, and there were no grounds for it. Only when people came from outside the classic domain of photography and started practicing photography did some of these things that had been neglected get reconsidered. What I think is positive about that is that photography can function in the world very interestingly as art and can be experienced as art at a larger scale. It doesn’t mean anything anymore as experimentation, but it is now freely available as one of the actual capacities of the medium. The experimental work done since the 70s has unlocked many aspects of photography that weren’t really available or had been blocked in a way by the sort of perfected aesthetic of documentary-type photography.

Shapiro: You don’t see yourself as a documentary photographer in any way?

WALL: Sure I do. I think that all photography contains an element of reportage, just by nature, and so everybody who practices it comes into relation with that aspect in one way or another. What's interesting is that there’s no one way anymore to come into that relationship. I think in 1945 or 1955, it was clear that if you wanted to come into relation with reportage, you had to go out in the field and function like a photojournalist or documentary photographer in some way; that was expected, and everyone expected it of themselves, and there was no very clear alternative. No other aspect of photography was really taken seriously, and that was great nevertheless because classic documentary photography really is photography; it really does connect to the nature of the medium. But still, it does not cover the horizon. There are other practices that are equally deeply connected to what photography is, and as well, there is no single way to satisfy the documentary demand. There’s no one way to come into this relationship with reportage. I think that’s what people in the 70s and 80s really worked on: not to deny the validity of documentary photography, but to investigate potentials that were blocked before, blocked by a kind of orthodoxy about what photography really was.


jeff wall, housekeeping, 1996, photograph

Shapiro: Do you have ideas about further experimentation in photography, or do you feel set in a medium for expression?

WALL: Well, I’ve been doing black and white now for four or five years.

Shapiro: Why?

WALL: I started doing black and white because when I first started working in color, which was in the 70s, I knew that, while color was important, it was also only one aspect of the medium. Black and white is a peculiar kind of image. Drawings, for example, with a pen and pencil, are black and white. The idea of non-color images is very old, and it really derives from the medium of drawing because if you have a piece of chalk, it’s only one color. You make the drawing, and it’s all in one color, but the world isn’t in one color. That anomaly really goes right back to the beginning of art—just having one substance to depict all the other substances. So, photography also has that in its black and white. So, it seemed to me that if you’re going to work in the medium of photography, you couldn’t just work in color; just like in the 70s and in the 60s, a lot of people trying to do new things said that you can’t just work in black and white, you’ve got to work in color. That’s true, but it’s the other way around as well. So, I very much wanted to work in black and white, for a long time. Then, in around 1988, I saw the work of a few other photographers who were working on a large-scale in black and white; Craigie Horsfield was the most important one, and I thought, God, I haven’t seen such interesting black and white work on the scale that I’ve been working on, and it gave me more of a stimulus to get involved with what I wanted to do. It took me a while to resolve some of the technical problems of working in black and white at the scale I wanted, and so I didn’t actually make any large prints until 1996. Now I consider black and white to be an integral part of what I’m doing. It seems to me just a completion or expansion of what photography is. I like to see myself as a modernist in that I’m responding to what the medium really is.

. . .
1999

VIAGGIO IN INDIA
Essay by Anna Mecugni
. . .
luigi ontani, sala indiana, installation view at museo d'arte moderna di bologna, 2008
(photo: Giorgio Benni)

There are many ways of traveling. Some people travel in their own memories, some in their own room or garden, some in their own mountains. Some travel to unknown places, through landscapes, memories, and visions that are not their own, and […] in the vast expanses of the planet and in its innumerable memories, they look for their own shadow, their own identity, their own special nourishment for existence.
-Ettore Sottsass, Esercizi di viaggio


When Italian artist Luigi Ontani left for his first trip to India in the winter of 1974-75, he was looking for what he called “a different possibility,” a place that would be “most definitely Other” from his country of origin, which was dominated by capitalism and plagued by domestic terrorism (Ontani 2003, 49). At the time, Italy was going through an extremely tough period, the so-called anni di piombo (years of the bullet), as violence escalated in the activities of terrorist groups from the right and the left, and the oil crisis of 1973 inaugurated a decade of recession unprecedented since World War II. India had been a favorite destination for hippie and beat counterculture since the early 1960s, and it attracted many artists and intellectuals from Italy including industrial designer Ettore Sottsass, painter Mario Schifano, and art historian Cesare Brandi, among others. For Ontani, India first represented the projection of an exotic desire, matured during the artist’s adolescence in the provincial town of Vergato in the hills near Bologna, reading novels by Alberto Savinio, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Giovanni Comisso on exciting travels and transgressions that stimulated his imagination, as did the late nineteenth-century Orientalist castle in Moorish Revival style, known as the Rocchetta Mattei, in the nearby town of Grizzana. Other writers who fostered and confirmed Ontani’s interest in India were Guido Gozzano, Alberto Moravia, and Piero Paolo Pasolini. But for his first trip to India, Ontani chose Pierre Loti, whom he referred to as his “literary alibi” (Ontani 2007a). Loti was a much-traveled naval officer known as a dandy and one of the greatest figures of fin-de-siècle exoticism. Ontani left for India in 1974 with a copy of Loti’s L'Inde (sans les Anglais), on the cover of which he had glued Henri Rousseau’s portrait of Loti. However, that trip was far from any dream of exotic travel. It was a long, solitary, extreme trip, a sort of “heroic undertaking,” in which he put himself through “vital, existential tests” in search of “a total loss of bearings,” as he described it to Giancarlo Politi (Ontani 2003, 49). By the end of the trip, he had shed many pounds, and his original return ticket had long expired. But he had initiated the photographic self-portrait series “En route vers l’Inde (d’après Pierre Loti)” (“On the Way to India [after Pierre Loti]”) in homage to Loti, who titled the first chapter of his book “En route vers l’Inde.”

Ontani conceived the series as an open-ended quadreria (picture gallery), a work in progress to which he has since continuously added new pieces made during many subsequent trips to India. In fact, the series was realized in collaboration with Indian photographers based in major urban centers such as Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, and Madras. The sepia-toned black-and-white photographs were painted in watercolor, according to a technique then common for photographs of marriages and rituals. Generally popular before the initial widespread availability of color photography in the 1950s, hand-painted photography still survived into the 1970s in relatively small and remote places like Ontani’s hometown in Italy. Ontani’s choice of collaborating with locals had an important precedent in the work of Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti who began commissioning carpets with world maps and square scripts from Afghan women embroiderers in Kabul in 1971. Another Italian artist who followed Boetti’s example was Francesco Clemente who started collaborating with Indian sign painters in 1976. Clemente was based in Rome, like Boetti and Ontani, who moved there in 1970, and the three were friends.

“En route vers l’Inde” is, by now, comprised of probably over one hundred individual pieces ranging from life-sized to miniature. They feature Ontani posing as Hindu deities, Greek gods, mythological characters from the Hindu, Classical, and Judeo-Christian traditions, and figures from paintings, mostly by Old Masters. The series also includes allegories and clichéd scenes, partly invented and partly inspired by Indian publications on religious, popular, and mass-media subjects. Citations are at times collaged from different sources and are rarely literal, as Ontani allows “the adventure of enacting the poses” to contribute to the creative process (Ontani 2007b). Whereas, in the 1970s, he posed alone or with animals, mostly in the studio and sometimes with a different background added using manual montage, in the early 1990s, his studio mise-en-scènes began to include younger male figures.


luigi ontani, sala indiana, installation view at museo d'arte moderna di bologna, 2008
(photo: giorgio benni)

“En route vers l’Inde” was first exhibited in May 1978 at L’Attico, the gallery run by Fabio Sargentini, widely deemed to have been the most advanced in Rome at the time and reputed for shows like Jannis Kounellis’s live horse exhibit in 1969. Sargentini had traveled to India himself in 1972, organized a Tantric art show the following year, and, in 1977, promoted a collective traveling exhibit in India called “L’attico in viaggio,” to which he invited Clemente, Ontani, and Giordano Falzoni. To my knowledge, there is no photographic documentation of the L’Attico installation of the series, but two months later, the same quadreria was presented at the 38th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where sixteen objects dotted the wall in a dynamic display, far removed from the white-cube style of hanging works discretely in a row at eye level and instead reminiscent of the experiments of the international avant-gardes: pictures were hung above, at, and below eye level, with two pieces even touching the floor. Over the course of the following thirty years, the series has been exhibited in different combinations, interspersed with always new pieces but in a consistent collage-like hanging style, reminiscent of the 1978 Venice installation and adopted by Ontani for other series, such as his 1970s photo-montage series “Tappeti volanti” (“Flying Carpets”). Recently, different versions of “En route vers l’Inde” have been shown in Italy at the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna and the Museo d'Arte della città in Ravenna.

Ontani calls his impersonations tableaux vivants or quadri-non-quadri (paintings-non-paintings). Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of these works is that they combine the different media of performance, photography, and painting. In contrast to performance trends of the time, Ontani did not use photography simply to document actions but instead intended each painted photograph as a unique work of art, similar to a painted picture. “I liked the idea of a simple pose that could become a painting without being a painting and the idea that photography could allow me to express a possibility of painting that is not bound to the painting medium,” he said (Ontani 2007b). And by that he meant the possibility of constructing fictions and visual narrative, as seen in the paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio. One of Ontani’s poses from painted figures is Autoritratto nudo d’après Chirico (Nude Self-portrait after de Chirico, 1978), after a late self-portrait of the founder of Metaphysical painting, who represented himself seated and loin-clothed like Saint Sebastian or other such Christian martyr.


luigi ontani, autoritratto nudo d'après chirico (nude self-portrait after de chirico), 1978

giorgio de chirico, nude self-portrait, 1945, oil on canvas

In Christian iconography, Saint Sebastian is the figure that more than any other has been associated with homoeroticism. And indeed he is one of the most frequent subjects of Ontani’s work and one with whom he identified early on as “a simulacrum of ambiguity”: both the ambiguity of androgynous beauty, as in a male youth, and the ambiguity of art (Ontani 2009). In “En route vers l’Inde” Saint Sebastian is featured as San Sebastiano JaipurAno (1976). The title’s word play, typical of Ontani and activated simply by capitalizing the letter “A,” gets lost in translation. Literally the title translates as Saint Sebastian from Jaipur, but in Italian, “ano” is both the inflexion to form the name of a country’s national, as in “americano” (American) and the word “anus,” hence the reference to homosexual pleasure, the Orientalist trope of licentiousness, and the conflation of sacred and profane.


luigi ontani, jaipurano, 1976, photograph

Ontani’s first Saint Sebastian was San Sebastiano nel bosco di Calvenzano (d’après Guido Reni) (Saint Sebastian in the Wood of Calvenzano [after Guido Reni], 1970), a life-size color photograph and a self-portrait on many levels, including an association with Guido Reni, a prominent seventeenth-century painter born in Calvenzano, a hamlet of Ontani’s hometown Vergato. Reni painted several versions of Saint Sebastian that have inspired homoerotic fantasies for their heightened sensuality. For example, in the 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, one of Ontani’s favorite authors, the protagonist’s encounter with a reproduction of Reni’s Sebastian prompts a homosexual self-awakening. And Mishima himself morbidly identified with Reni’s depiction, posing as Saint Sebastian in a celebrated 1966 photograph a few years before his 1970 ritual suicide by seppuku (self-disembowelment).


luigi ontani, saint sebastian in the wood of calvenzano [after guido reni], 1970, photograph

guido reni, saint sebastian, after 1615-16, oil on canvas

kishin shinoyama, mishima as st. sebastian, 1966, photograph

In the 1970s, artists such as Lucas Samaras, Suzy Lake, and Cindy Sherman, began to embrace photographic self-performance to explore issues of sexual and social identity in their photographs. Though Ontani seems more focused on investigating cultural identities via appropriation, and his work stands out for its idiosyncratic qualities, he should nonetheless be acknowledged as a pioneering figure in the context of the 1970s. Early on and ever since, he has taken up the artistic strategy of traveling in time, space, and culture, as, in his words, a way of “undertaking a journey into identity: a sort of mirage where I use my facial and physical appearance as a simulacrum for further identities” (Ontani 2003, 43).

. . .
2009

PHOEBE WASHBURN
Interview by Anna Mecugni
. . .
phoebe washburn, nothing's cutie, 2004, painted wood, pencils, sawdust, nails, chairs, tables, other mixed media

As children we have all been inventive bricoleurs, using whatever was at hand to build our own little worlds in which to act out our own rules. In Phoebe Washburn’s work, those child-like activities have been channeled through repeated and simple tasks that generate hypertrophic architectural installations made of humble everyday materials such as cardboard, newspaper, and scrap wood. More recently, Washburn has literalized the metaphor of a self-regulated universe in which chaos and control can coexist by introducing live plants into self-sustaining environments. The next step, she says, will be to open these systems to interaction with the public.

Washburn is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she studied under Sarah Sze, another practitioner of bricolage. Like Sze’s installations, Washburn’s are site-specific, temporary, and yet labor-intensive in an anti-heroic, somewhat silly way. They are also true to the process, resonating with the great American tradition of Post-Minimalist process art, which emphasizes process over object, as in the works of Robert Morris and Eva Hesse. Specific to Washburn’s installations is that they take over the gallery space in a clumsy fashion: they may be monumental in size but never in spirit.


Anna Mecugni: Can you discuss the use of recycled materials in your work?

PHOEBE WASHBURN: I became interested in collecting and using recycled materials, and that’s been a big part of my practice. A lot of my working practice is not done here in the studio. I spend a lot of time collecting materials. And I got into that in a really basic way when I was packing up an old sculpture and getting ready to take it to Staten Island to a recycling plant. It was a sculpture made out of paperback books, and I had sort of destroyed them. They weren’t readable, and I obviously didn’t want to throw them in the garbage, so I had to take them to a paper recycling plant. So I wandered around the streets outside my studio to collect cardboard boxes that were out in the garbage, and I used those to box up the books, which then I was going to take to the recycling plant. And just out of that simple task, I became interested in the idea that if I left my studio, there was a whole world outside, a whole system that I could tap into very easily, and this material was always readily available. And this was the cardboard collection that I had begun. So it came from a really simple chore, and I loved that it was something, a way to work outside of my studio, to bring the outside world into my studio, and also take my practice outside. It felt very natural and satisfying to work in this way. I have to be careful when I speak about it because it seems as though it was a pretty strong statement in terms of critiquing consumer culture and ideas of sustainability, waste, and the environment. And those things, I think, are an undercurrent in the work, but it really came from this simple chore and from recognizing [the material] as readily available and bringing it into my studio and pulling that into my process. Cardboard is an amazing material with structural and architectural potential. I was tinkering with it and realized that I could build something quite large out of it. It was nice to have this humble repeated task generate more and more material and more momentum [to build on a large scale]. So it was a slow way to creep into that, but that’s how I became interested in using recycled materials. And then while I was out on the street collecting cardboard, I saw that there was newspaper and wood, all of these other materials that were equally as generic, equally as readily available, that I could experiment with. So, I began to work with other materials as well [...]

Mecugni: Do you recycle material from one project to another? Do you have a system of collecting and storing?

WASHBURN: I do kind of have a system of collecting, and it’s not one that I established immediately. There are three different ways that I collect materials, and this is probably more specific to what I’m collecting now, which is scrap wood. I collect pretty much every day in a very natural way; if I see something, I’ll pick it up. To me, that’s the most satisfying way to collect. And if I keep my eyes open, I’ll find something every day. Another way is a little less satisfying, but I have to do it if I’m rigorously collecting for a certain project. I’ll call up certain places where I know the dumpsters get filled and establish a relationship with someone and go to empty their dumpsters before they get emptied. So that’s not quite as much fun, but it accomplishes what I need to accomplish. The third way is nice because it has to do with installation in a more direct way. If it’s possible, I will speak to the gallery or institution and ask them to collect materials on site if there’s a show that’s come down that’s generated a lot of waste in some way. I’ll ask them to reserve it and collect it, and then I’ll pull that into the project and keep it after the show comes down.

Mecugni: Could you give an example of your third method of collecting?

WASHBURN: When I was working on the project in Berlin at the Deutsche Guggenheim, they saved walls from the previous exhibition, and we also collected crates from the crating company that the museum had used for the previous exhibition, so there was a lot of stuff that was part of the recent history of the site that got folded into the project.

Mecugni: You seem interested in collecting softer materials rather than harder ones like metal. Can you comment on this?

WASHBURN: For me, scrap wood and cardboard are humble enough and generic enough that they’re not specific in a way. I’m not interested in cast-offs from specific molds in the industry or anything else that’s going to steer the project in a specific direction. Things like cardboard and wood are already very well-known; they’re already everywhere. They’re not specific in any way; they’re already here, everywhere, serving a purpose. So it’s easy to overcome the material just enough to make it my own in a way. It doesn’t require a heroic gesture to transform these materials in any way, so they’re comfortable for me to work with.


phoebe washburn, true, false and slightly better, 2003, mixed media

Mecugni: Your work seems to relate to the tradition of the readymade and the conflation of art and life, which comes from Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and on to artists like Arman. How do you see yourself in relation to these historic precedents?

WASHBURN: I don’t consider the collection of scraps readymades. It’s true that I prefer to find materials that already have a history of decisions that have already been made. And to me, that’s more interesting than ordering palettes of plywood. I prefer that someone else has already cut or painted the wood, that there’s already a history there. So, to me, that’s quite different from the readymade. I think that there are moments in some of my projects in which there’s a resonance with this idea of a readymade, and I think that those moments mostly come from the idea that some of the pieces are so supported, so self-contained, that sometimes they open up to having these external objects in them that seem to make sense or have dual functions in a way. For example, a lot of my sculptures now require maintenance because there are live plants and ponds in them and things that require real-life interventions into the pieces to maintain them. My whole practice is about not creating an illusion. In some way, the building structures are always open, so the audience can see how they are constructed and so that there is no illusion to them. So, any time there’s a moment when there has to be a maintenance intervention into the piece, that is also incorporated into the piece. So when there need to be hoses or things to tend to the environment, those things are aestheticized and become a part of the piece. So, I think that at those moments, you could say that the pieces touch on the tradition of the readymade because sometimes you see equipment in the sculpture and wonder if it’s part of the sculpture or just equipment. Sometimes there’s a dual function in the equipment that I think resonates with this idea of the readymade, but those are small glimmers [of the idea of the readymade, due] to the fact that the pieces are their own larger environments that support this and make this possible.

Mecugni: Can you discuss the relationship of your work to process art? Can you also talk about the process of making your installations?

WASHBURN: Process is undeniably a huge part of what I’m all about. In many ways, process is a way in, a starting point, a way to generate an activity that can then sustain momentum enough for other things to happen. I see what I do as based on activities that can then spin off and create other activities or allow for ideas to sprout out of this. So, for me, process is definitely at the core of what I do. And it can be described in a very basic way. When I initially started collecting materials, that was the first set of chores and rules that I was setting up for myself. And even though, when I was out collecting materials, it felt different from working in the studio, I was paying attention to that part of the process and trying to find ways for that to open up and lead to other things all along the way.

Mecugni: Can you explain how you start your projects? Do you have a system?

WASHBURN: Each project is quite different and has its own story that unfolds as I’m planning it or trying to bring things together to start a new project. I work from project to project, and in most cases, there are one or two significant things that happen in a project that I sense are the next step to the next project, and I think that [this link] goes back to the idea of working out of a process, out of a series of activities. That’s the thing that sustains me or leads me to the next project, the idea that the process continues and that there’s something that feels like it needs further investigation. Often in the middle of an installation, after mindless building and additive accumulation of small steps and nurturing, there comes a moment when I realize that the process is a means to something else. I’ve just been mindlessly pushing this thing along, and then something happens that opens it up, and it’s this new special little thing, and often that is the thing that I’m interested in for the next project. But for me, that can only happen if I can get into a process of building something that’s mindless, slow, and demanding. [After] days and days of adding to this spectacle that we’re creating, finally there’s a glimmer of a fresh idea, and I feel like I could only get to that moment if I put in all of those hours of slow grinding.

Mecugni: Do you remember a specific time when you got that glimmer?

WASHBURN: In the last project that I finished in Berlin, we were building this factory, and it was a huge structure to build. There were all these details, multiple rooms, and this machine that had to be built and running. We were creating another world in a certain way. So, I was working in the waiting room in this factory, and I realized that I wanted to put a fountain in the waiting room. It was this silly idea that visitors are on this factory tour, and they get to this waiting room and get this sort of cheesy welcome fountain. It didn’t make much sense, but I was trusting this tenuous idea I was having. So, the fountain, I was thinking, would be a champagne fountain, but because this was in the context of a factory, it wouldn’t be champagne, but instead it would be Gatorade because this was a workman’s fountain. So I installed this weird little quirky fountain in the waiting room, and I remember thinking, “Ah, I’ve finally made a sculpture here!” I remember feeling like I had mined everything down. It was like a forced breakthrough. I had created this whole false world, and I was finally trusting the logic that I had built. So the idea of that fountain is now what I’m interested in pursuing. So, sometimes those moments are pretty clear to me. It’s just a matter of getting to them.


phoebe washburn, regulated fool's milk meadow, 2007, mixed media

Mecugni: Are you working on any new projects right now?

WASHBURN: I’m working on some new ideas. And they do come from the last project. I was creating this factory world, and it had its own logic and its own set of rules, and viewers to the gallery were interacting with this world but were still viewers nonetheless. The step I’m taking from that project is that I’d somehow like to create something that has its own set of strange rules but that viewers are now interacting with in a more direct way. This new thing is possibly going to be a soda shop or some sort of context that viewers can pass through and understand a set of rules and understand it’s a different world, but they could also interact with it and have an exchange with this world. I don’t know if it’s actually going to take place in a soda shop, where there’s an exchange of a beverage, but it seems like the factory was really interesting because it was quite fleshed out and had a really clear logic [even if] it was irrational. For me, the thing that was a bit unsatisfying was that it was hermetic, still contained. If there’s a way to break through that a little bit, I think that would be interesting.


phoebe washburn, regulated fool's milk meadow, 2007

Mecugni: Do you keep track of the number of hours and days it takes you to put these installations together?

WASHBURN: I do a little bit, just to get a sense of planning for projects and to get a sense of how many people I’m going to need on a crew. Each project is really different and really depends on how many people are working and how skilled they are or how difficult the setting is. One of the most difficult installations I did was at the ICA in Philadelphia. The ramp project that I did there was really challenging because of the space. It was a really steep ramp that required assembly of a scaffolding, and taking it down and reassembling it every time, we needed to move up the ramp. For that project, I was there for two weeks with the crew. We worked normal museum hours, 8am to 6pm or something like that. The projects are labor-intensive but also simple in many ways. It’s a simple way of building, not completely free-form, but once the skeleton structure is assembled, there’s not a lot of measuring that bogs people down. It’s often something that with a ten-minute demo, I can get everyone set up to do, and people can just cruise along. So it’s nice that the work isn’t highly technical.

Mecugni: Do you use sketches and maquettes?

WASHBURN: I do sketch a lot. I sketch in a couple of different ways. I sketch weird dream-like questions and problems. I doodle and try to push ideas forward. I will also make sketches that are quite different. They’re like plan sketches. I’ll photograph the site, get floor plans, and sketch over them. I’ve never used a maquette, but I sketch out pretty clearly, especially depending on the institutions. If they need a clear plan, I photograph the site and really sketch it out, right into the space. Sometimes that’s really important because people need to know exactly how much material we need and how much time it’s going to take. So, I can sketch things out really clearly, but I also like to keep things open as well, and sometimes for my own protection, I like to not overly explain things. Working on site can be really stressful and time-consuming, so if I’m not sure if we’re going to accomplish everything, I don’t want to promise too much and then not be able to accomplish everything. So, sometimes I keep certain things to myself. But in terms of the structure, everyone on the crew needs to know what’s going on, so I’ll sketch out the structure in that respect. It really depends on the project and the space.

Mecugni: Given the centrality of process in your work and its temporary and site-specific aspects, how do you deal with collecting, both by institutions and individuals? Do you provide them with clear, detailed sketches for future reinstallations?

WASHBURN: Because I work in a site-specific and hands-on way, it’s a tricky balance when I’m considering how to recreate the projects a second or third time. So, that is a problem with my work. The process of installation is often documented, which really helps. Sketches are made ahead of time, and during the installation, things are photographed, and sometimes, short videos are taken of installing different components of the piece, but it’s really just a matter of being as thorough as possible. Obviously it would be wonderful if I could be a part of every reinstallation, but that’s not possible. So it’s a matter of being thorough and capturing every aspect of the installation. Having said that, the site steers the form and scale so much, so even if things are clearly archived and documented, if the space changes dramatically, that’s going to change the sculpture. So that’s a huge factor. It really depends on the project and the site and figuring out a way to pull all of these elements together.

Mecugni: In what ways has New York City influenced your practice?

WASHBURN: Where I live has a direct impact on what I do, and I’ve come to realize that and appreciate it more and more. It wasn’t until I did a project outside of the United States and tried to collect somewhere else that I realized how much where I live and work completely affects my practice. It’s stating the obvious, but New York real estate is so expensive that no one has any space, and no one has any storage, so stuff gets thrown out all the time so quickly and in so much quantity. That completely has effects on what I do in a direct way and has, I’m sure, steered my process completely. It was really strange and beautiful to be working outside of this environment, outside of the United States [and come to] really appreciate that.

Mecugni: Can you speak about your transition from installations with inert, recycled materials to ones with live elements? Was there a moment at some point when there was an opening up?

WASHBURN: It often seems that there was this radical jump [in my work] from collected cardboard and wood to the sudden incorporation of live plants. But to me, it was such a series of small steps that it felt appropriate. I had spent so long skimming off the other system, the recycling system and everything that’s going on around where I work. Kind of without paying attention to it, I drew from that and folded it into my practice. I wanted to create something that had its own set of rules, its own system, and its own life [...]

Mecugni: It’s striking that a number of artists today are practicing bricolage and working with accumulation. I’m thinking of American artists of our generation such as Jean Shin, Tara Donovan, and your former teacher Sarah Sze, but also older male artists from developing countries like El Anatsui and Ai Weiwei. How do you see yourself in relation to these artists, specifically the American women?

WASHBURN: There’s certainly a resonance and an affinity. I see it as a very hopeful gesture, when someone corrals and wrestles with something so that it’s transformative in some way. So I feel a resonance there. I guess I’m specifically thinking about Tara Donavan when I say this: I think that what I see as a marked difference is that she is able to do something—and this is going to sound strange—to do something spectacular with the material and she accomplishes that in an amazing way. More than just being transformative, she has complete command over the material. That is the sort of amazing beauty of it. I don’t think that I’m interested in doing something spectacular with the materials I deal with. My work is about the slow, prodding process and what can come from that more than it is about overcoming something or doing something brilliant with the material.

Mecugni: I think your work is less about the final results than about the process.

WASHBURN: I’ve been asked this before, and it’s interesting to think about. I feel like you come close to it when you say that it’s less about the result and more about the process and what comes out of that rather than having some amazing command over something. Often there are moments of surprise and discovery in my installations, but sometimes you’re looking at something that’s not that beautiful or transformative.

Mecugni: Do you think about beauty and visual impact when you work on a project?

WASHBURN: I absolutely do. To me, the visual experience is the most important thing ultimately. Maybe my definition of beauty is different, but I’m most excited about discovery as part of the visual experience and things changing over the course of that experience or the course of an exhibition. That’s what I prioritize the most. Right now, I’m really excited about this idea that you could never see the same thing twice in an exhibition. I know that may be an impossibly tall order, but I think discovery and change are the most beautiful things.

. . .
2008

ERWIN WURM
Interview by Peter Zuspan
. . .
erwin wurm, fat convertible, 2004, mixed media

Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm’s corpulent Fat Convertible (2004) is a striking object, not only for the polished craftsmanship of its fabrication, a baroque tour de force of industrial arts, but more for the ease with which it presents itself. The familiarity of both the glossy red Porsche and the swollen folds of obesity cloaks the uncomfortable combination of man and machine in a kind of easiness, in which the result is less a contemplation of formal meanings or even the satirical political overtones of gluttonous consumerism or overwrought financial markets, but most immediately, in quasi-sensational fashion, humor and delight.

The cartoon-like convertible exhibits an active anthropomorphism in which the sculpted obesity suggests an activity: The fat holds an indexical relationship to eating, suggesting that consumption constructs a kind of interior for the object. If an object can eat and swell, the object has an inside. The abject interiority of his fat sculptures and their easy presentation—eluding contemplation—are characteristics that resonate with architectural practice. Throughout his œuvre, Wurm not only metaphorically takes on architecture but often also enlists it as direct fodder. Besides his Fat House (2003), sculptures like Fat House Moller/Adolf Loos (2003), Mies van der Rohe Melting (2005), and Art Basel Fucks Documenta (2006) reference a curiously pronounced preoccupation with buildings.


erwin wurm, art basel fucks documenta, 2006

Peter Zuspan: I’m interested in thinking through your work, focusing on architectural concerns more than on sculpture per se. Your work confronts a quintessential problem of the designer and the architect: how does one make the banal contemplative? How did the banal originally enter your work?

ERWIN WURM: This didn’t happen quickly. It involved a long development. When I was a young artist, I didn’t have much money, and I needed cheap materials. So, I found myself using things which other people had discarded, materials like old boards, old cans, old clothes, things like that. And, of course, I found that using those materials automatically made the issue of the banal part of the work’s content. At first, I used my own clothes, but I could not continue to do so for long because I would have run out of supplies. So, I bought these materials very cheaply, or I got them from institutions where people donate their clothes. Once I started to work with them, I realized that I got not only the material, but also parts of the people who wore them—people who had feelings, thoughts, and passions—and this also conjured up their daily life, which raised questions about consciousness of conditions in our society, questions about health care and being overweight. Of course, these matters are, on the one hand, banal. On the other hand, they go directly to the core of every person’s psyche. My interest lies in combining these things, in mixing them up, and bringing these issues together.

Zuspan: There is something compellingly easy about your work. Through humor, basic iconic references like houses or vehicles, or even the simplicity of the parts that make up some of your one-minute sculptures, one gets it. There’s an immediacy to it. What value does the easy have for you?

WURM: I once read that [finding] the short way is the most important thing. I took this maxim to heart. For a period of time in my work, I decided to try to find this short way and express myself through it. It is a reflection of my belief in directness itself. It is the kind of directness that you can find in comics, which I often use in my work.

Zuspan: Do you consider humor more of a material or result?

WURM: First, I think that it’s a way to look at the world. Most artworks try to represent something lofty and important, but I find pathos repulsive. I want to address serious matters but in a light way. Even when we speak about illness or tragedy, for example, it should be possible to speak in a light way. Speaking in a light way is not the same as making superficial conversation or small talk but rather it is to speak in a positive, edifying way. And, of course, humor is a strong part of this agenda. When I speak about death with humor, I can eliminate the pathos because this seriousness then loses its solemnity and grimness.

Zuspan: Humor is one of the techniques that you use to mix something easy with something of strong political content. When you see the “Twins” series or the fat car sculptures, the content remains fairly accessible. Fat immediately suggests gluttony and over-consumption, themes with populist appeal. Yet, a lot of your work also makes reference to philosophical issues from the rather difficult writings of Gilles Deleuze and Theodor Adorno for example. Will you speak a bit about the concept of the easy and the difficult?

WURM: Many artists are good at making the easy difficult. I’m interested in making the difficult easy. That does not necessarily mean making it light in a stupid way. I’m not speaking about the surface. I’m speaking about the content.

Zuspan: Do you feel that there is a role for the easy in architecture?

WURM: I’m surrounded by ugly, easy architecture here in Vienna because, since the 50s or 60s, we’ve had this strange tradition of people building their houses in total ignorance of architectural principles established in the past. This is why people are unable to relate to any architects and have no sense of aesthetics. They build their houses using horrendous construction methods with prefabricated elements and materials sold in big DIY stores. It’s such a mess because in choosing and installing elements like windows, roofs, or other construction materials, people lack all sense of proportion and aesthetics, and because the DIY stores dictate the taste. That’s what I call really easy architecture—easy in a negative way. It’s horrible, and I don’t like that it’s happening everywhere. People don’t have enough money to hire architects, and they have no knowledge about rules of aesthetics and the art of architecture. Such rules barely exist anymore. It is a tragedy what those people are doing to the urban and suburban landscape.

Zuspan: One of the things that first brought me to your work a few years ago was your use of fat. Your first Fat Car (2001) is a kind of drag show in which the fat hangs off of an otherwise untouched original. Your later Fat Convertible (2004) and Fat House (2003) start to have a swelling of the interior as well, a kind of post-operative version in which the transformation is not just clothing or cladding, but a change that effects the entire anatomy. What caused the fat to turn inside?

WURM: With the first car, I didn’t think about it. But if I had thought about it carefully enough the first time, I would have also made it fat inside because the idea was to combine a technical system (the car) and a biological system (the human being or animal or whatever). And I thought that if I looked at the car from this point of view, I would have to decide where the bones would be. What are those parts of the body that don’t grow even when you're really fat?—like the eyes, the teeth, the navel, the knees, and maybe the elbows. So, I decided that several parts of the car are related to the body, equatable with bones, eyes, and so on. And then, I realized that fat not only grows outside, but it also grows inside of us. Fat also destroys the inside of the biological organism.


erwin wurm, fat car, 2001, styrofoam, polyester, car

Zuspan: Concerning your work with clothing and fat construction, do you find value in the art of sculpture to deal with enclosure rather than form per se? This is one of those classical architectural problems, as buildings are forms but ones that enclose space. The form is also a surface boundary.

WURM: Of course. There's a strong relationship between the center—inner space—and the surface. The coat pieces deal specifically with this, like a collage that brings different systems together. It’s the anthropomorphic form of the human body signified by the coat or the jacket brought together with basic geometrical forms. These forms could be a cube or a cylinder, and through this combination, something else happens: the resultant volume is only defined by the surface and not by the mass. So, yes, it’s a basic sculptural question as well.

Zuspan: I enjoyed your discussion of the technical and the biological and the idea that between them lands a process that results from noticing the parts that don’t grow. I think that the window and headlight are moments of aperture between the inside and the outside area. That’s one of the major dichotomies by which architects have always been plagued—between inside and outside. Is there something in the inside of your objects to which you give thought?—as opposed to the outside or the whole.

WURM: Do you know the cats discussed by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg? He said that what amazes him so much is that the holes in the fur of the cat are exactly where the eyes are. This is such a big coincidence. To look at reality with this strange, disturbing perspective makes it interesting and astonishing—and it can bring about something interesting.

Zuspan: Given the prowess of the computers that are used to design, there’s a degree of curvature and form-making that’s possible in architecture now. How do you make such baroque curvature? Where does the liquid meet the solid for you?

WURM: With the first car, I tried to collaborate with the automotive industry. I asked Opel, General Motors in Germany, if they could help me or collaborate. They agreed, so I drove to their big construction hall in Frankfurt, and they allowed me to use the 3D modeling computer on which they design all the new cars. I was there for a week. It was enormously expensive, but the result was not at all satisfying because those computers, I realized, are unable to construct biological or even anthropomorphic or organic forms. They are only able to produce technical forms, and that’s the reason why all these cars now look the way they look. Finally, we decided that it wouldn’t work out with the computer, so we went back to the old way of making cars: we made the forms by hand. We see the same problem with architecture because everybody who uses a computer program uses a predefined aesthetic, which very much influences the work. It’s the reason why all these buildings look like they do. They actually look the same because of the computer program that was used.


erwin wurm, fat house moller / adolf loos, 2003, resin

Zuspan: When you work with buildings, you often do so in miniature models. They fit in galleries. Yet, you have also built a full-size fat house. Architecture is almost always too big to be made of one piece. It has to be made of parts, but it still wants to be a whole in some way. Do you have advice or thoughts that you would offer an architect thinking through the puzzle of parts and wholes?

WURM: I look at architecture as a type of sculpture. I look to icons of architecture like Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, and so on, but I try to look at them from the sculptural point of view. When I look at construction drawings of houses, I find that they usually show two-dimensional images of the façades; you have to combine these mentally in order to imagine the building as a whole. When I look at works by Loos, I realize that he constructs the house in a certain way: when I see his Moller House in Vienna, it’s comprised of four or five pictures: the front façade, the right, the left, and so on—all of the façades plus the roof. I never get the idea that it’s a sculpture, which is a body of mass with volumes, empty spaces, and full spaces. I always have the impression that it’s all pictures—that façades do not reflect the logic of the interior. This is how I feel about many buildings. But in my houses, I try to reduce them or work on them from a sculptural perspective. I make little models for them, model them in clay, and therefore, they are not empty inside; they have a sculptural quality. And for that reason, it’s also possible to make these houses melt because melting, for me, is the process of slowly transforming their form into something liquid. It’s this change of medium, the hard form of a building becoming fat, which means the dissolution of order. It becomes something not anthropomorphic, not abstract, but rather amorphic. And by melting, changing into something liquid, it totally loses form. If it’s still in the process of melting, it’s like ice cream. It’s liquid in a way, but it’s softer in consistency, like a pudding that is neither too firm nor too fluid. I’m actually very interested in potatoes because they are amorphic unforms. There are thousands of different potatoes, but they are all very easily and very quickly recognizable. And yet their forms are different.



erwin wurm, fat house, 2003, iron, wood, polystyrene, aluminum

Zuspan: Considering the architectural works that you've used, I understand the Austrian connection. But why use iconic modernist buildings as fodder for your work? Why Loos as opposed to contemporary architects like Coop Himmelb(l)au?

WURM: It has historical consequence because Loos comes from the end of a specific European society, Habsburg-ruled Catholic Austria. At the end of that society, when it was breaking down, there were, all of a sudden, Loos, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, and all these people. For a long time, I was interested in working on this period. Wolf Prix, the founder of Coop Himmelb(l)au, is a very good friend of mine. We spoke about doing a project together, and I wanted to do an interview with him in the form of a house and so on.

Zuspan: Loos’s façades often suggest faces, perhaps more so than any other architect’s façades. Besides fat and sex, what are some other anthropomorphic aspects that hold value in your work?

WURM: I didn’t do the face on purpose. While making the car fat, this face appeared all of the sudden. Then, with the house, there was a face again. And then came the idea of letting the face, the car, and the house talk. So, I made a video in which the fat car and the fat house are talking.

Zuspan: Loos spent a lot of time thinking about the interior of his houses. The exterior is mostly subservient to his interior design strategy—Raumplan, as he calls it. Does this preoccupation have any impact on your work?

WURM: Regarding the material he used, of course. He created a new way of building. On the one hand, he was a follower of a nineteenth-century aesthetic. On the other hand, he was radical in the way he used traditional materials. You can easily see this in his house on Michaelerplatz in Vienna, in which he uses materials on the façade that are traditionally used in interiors. I look at his houses for their structure, not so much for their old-fashioned interiors. I collect 1940s, 50s, and 60s furniture, like that of Jean Prouvé or the industrial furniture of Eileen Gray and many others, and by comparison, when you look at furniture by Loos, it looks really dated. That’s the reason why I’m not so interested in his interiors.

Zuspan: You’ve dealt with color more in your recent work. Have you thought about the relationship between matte and shiny and the quality of materials along similar lines?

WURM: Absolutely. I recently made shiny sculptures, which were fantastic because they work like mirrors. You can reflect yourself in it, and all of a sudden, you’re a part of the piece, and in a different way from that of the one-minute sculptures. I recently made a house in which the roof is a piece of cloth. It’s like the houses from the 1940s and 1950s. They all had knitwear coasters on the tables on which they placed vases. So, the roof is one of those knits, and it’s fantastic. I spoke with Wolf, and I told him that he should make a roof like this. Maybe it’ll happen one day.

. . .
2008

KEVIN ZUCKER
Interview by David Shapiro
. . .
kevin zucker, the highest place for miles in any direction, 2001, acrylic, transfers on canvas

David Shapiro: What does it mean to make sublime art today?

KEVIN ZUCKER: There's been a transition in the concept of the sublime from an experience of an externally imposed religious state of awe and terror to an increasingly internal or psychological experience, like with what Barnett Newman was trying to do, and then more recently, into a more purely informational kind of conceptual space.

Shapiro: But you're not trying to induce sublime experiences in your paintings?

ZUCKER: Right, I'm not trying to do that. But, the idea of sublimity interests me. I'm interested in the shifts over time of what sorts of experiences our society regards as sublime.

Shapiro: So, if you've had some sublime experiences in the last year, what would they be?

ZUCKER: The movie The Perfect Storm is an amazing illustration of the way the sublime is being thought about by the people who are in the business of trying to induce it. They're recreating terrifying Thomas Cole-ish experiences of nature, which, interestingly, aren't the source of the sublimity so much as is the simple fact that it was digitally-rendered.

Shapiro: Meaning that the digital form is the source of the sublimity beyond the content?

ZUCKER: It's almost like we can try to measure the sublime in terms of gigabytes and processor speeds.

Shapiro: So, do you think that we're stuck in a situation in which the medium must be the message?

ZUCKER: I think that there's that certain feeling about the computer because it's still in transition out of its own little modernism. It's only now that we're just getting to a point where we're seeing digital work that isn't about digitalness.

Shapiro: So, you don't think that the essence of your work is that it's computer-generated?

ZUCKER: On the one hand, I'm just using the computer as a drawing tool, like any other drawing tool. But, on the other hand, we're still at a moment in which the computer is conceptually loaded. I'm dealing with a conception of a space as much, or maybe more than, a space itself. The computer is the place where those conceptions or ideals are being manufactured.

Shapiro: Meaning that you aren't interested in actual space?

ZUCKER: Meaning that the space of something like Untitled (Hallway)] has as much to do with a video game of Versailles as it does to do with the real place. I'm thinking about tensions between the generic and the specific, between an object, an image, and an idea. What's being depicted isn't something that could be literally perceived. It's so definitely mediated.

Shapiro: Is it possible to have an unmediated experience of art anymore?

ZUCKER: I don't think so, not in the conventional sense, but I don't think that really matters a whole lot at this point. Mediation is all over our experiences of art. Take Edward Hopper — he's an example of someone who, through calendars and posters, has become identifiable with the idea of alienation. You see “alienation” in glowing red letters, rather than actually having a genuine emotional experience of it.

Shapiro: But his work is, while potentially alienating, not necessarily sublime. That is, from Hopper, we might conclude that the situation of witness-to-the-scene is insufficient for the sublimity of a picture.

ZUCKER: Of course it depends on what's being witnessed. Anyway, Hopper's too picturesque and too shifty to ever really be sublime.

Shapiro: And your own paintings have no figural witnesses, but they do have the marks that people have left behind, like scrapes on the door. Are your works not about alienation? Do you think a witness is necessary to produce not only sublimity but also to produce the sentiment of alienation?

ZUCKER: I think that the sublime and alienation are two very different things. What happens when you take the witness away from the sublime? To Newman, the zip, the vertical stripe, was the figure, the witness to the void. To take the zip out of those paintings would take away their content—their sublimity. The marks of the hand in my paintings are about the witness or a connection, but at more of a remove. To me, it's a second-order thing, but it’s still really interesting, which, I guess, is a reason that I'm attracted to these processes which inevitably leave traces of their making.


kevin zucker, angels; the heads of pins, 2001, acrylic, transfers on canvas

Shapiro: How do you make your paintings?

ZUCKER: I do 99% of my drawing on the computer. Then I've got a few different processes that I use for transferring plotter prints onto a smooth acrylic surface. In the end, I wind up masking those areas off and painting around the transferred ink. The process always degrades the legibility of the information, and the areas that suffer the most are those that are transferred out of the computer; those that wind up the most "perfect" are the abstract painted areas. So, there's this constant play between something perfect and something decrepit, always with the sense that the decrepit thing was once perfect.

Shapiro: And your paintings aren't ever of specific places?

ZUCKER: Right. They're more specific as things, meaning that they have a certain thickness and a certain weight.

Shapiro: Why the inconsistency of light on these specific objects?

ZUCKER: It has less to do with inconsistency than it does with non-naturalism. Light is, like perspective, a conventional abstraction of the way we experience. The light in my paintings is not "believable," but it's acceptable, which is our standard for representation. It's our standard for video games, for special effects, for everything—we accept the convention.

Shapiro: One might guess, but wouldn't necessarily know, that you use computer-drawing programs. If you told me that you painted every inch of your paintings, I suppose I'd believe that.

ZUCKER: Yeah, you could probably convince someone that these were painted without the use of a computer, but I'm not interested in imitating painting or hiding the conventions of the computer so much as I am in colliding some ways of making and representing. What do the computer's conventions and painting's conventions have to do with one another? What do they not have to do with one another? And how can they work together?


kevin zucker, each day a new beginning, 2000, acrylic, transfers on canvas

Shapiro: Is painting by itself too historical to be viable for you?

ZUCKER: Painting's totally viable. While it may not be the absolute mainstream expression of our visual culture, it's not as though it has any "cutting-edge" pretensions either.

Shapiro: So you wouldn't make a protest painting?

ZUCKER: I wouldn't rule that out for all eternity, but given the state of things now, I can't imagine what that would look like. I can't imagine how it could be a painting.

Shapiro: So, is any art capable of catalyzing change?

ZUCKER: To make a statement like that—"this is a catalyst for social reform"—would kind of assume operating out of an avant-garde place, which is seriously problematic. You'd be back to a way of doing things that's probably beyond repair. Ideology in art is, for the time being, more about finding a place to move around within what's there.

Shapiro: You've got the ghosts of past ideologies all over your paintings. A Baroque chandelier put into a Modernist ceiling…

ZUCKER: While the grid of the floor tiling does recall Modernism, it's not flat; its perspectival depth has as much to do with Alberti and the vision of the Renaissance. It's only really Modernist in an architectural sense, and even then, only if you take it literally, which, if you do— which is one of a few perfectly legitimate ways of looking at it—then, I'm equating the decrepitude of the Baroque chandelier with the decrepitude of the Modernist ceiling. Then, it would be like saying that there was a Baroque attempt at the sublime—through excess—and later, a Modernist attempt at the sublime, which is sort of the opposite of the Baroque attempt, but they have the same sense of loss, the same sense of pathos.

Shapiro: It's interesting that the chronology is inverted here. The more obvious response to these same questions might have been to put, say, a Modernist chair in a Baroque architectural space. In any case, why do you talk about this question of the sublime indoors?

ZUCKER: I think that the idea of the sublime got brought inside a long time ago, not necessarily literally indoors, but into an internal, subjective psychological state. So, these paintings have something to say about that, but more about the place we're at now, where the sublime disappears, in spatial terms, into "virtualness," into an idea of space.

Shapiro: Maybe the real difference now is not so much the location as our option to have or not to have a sublime experience.

ZUCKER: The idea of setting aesthetic experience outside of the course of life is an old one, though. The question now would be whether doing this still works, assuming it ever did. Since the sublime experience is supposed to tap into something fundamentally unnamable, this is hard now. What would you say, "Hey, hang on, I'm going to experience awe in the face of this unnamable force now. I'll meet you at the car." Sounds dubious.

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