Javier Téllez, still from Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, 2008. Image courtesy Arthouse at the Jones Center and Peter Klichmann Gallery.

Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (16 mm film transferred to HD video, 27:36 minutes looped) opens as six blind people enter the deserted and drained McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, New York.  Once each is seated in a row of chairs, an elephant walks into the center of the vast concrete space.  Next, one by one, each person stands and walks over to the elephant and touches it in the round.  A voice-over plays as they take this brief journey.  Through it, we learn a bit about each person’s background, their approach to blindness and their ‘tactile recognition’ experience from feeling the elephant.  The film uses documentary methods such as narrative as it records the seemingly real event.  Yet this sense of authenticity is false; the entire experience is just a fictional re-staging of an ancient parable.  Each participant is blind, but is cast by Téllez to act out a role.

Letter on the Blind performs a difficult exercise in attempting to convey a non-visual reality through visual means.   In response to this challenge, Téllez has composed a visually restrained film that gives studied emphasis to sound.  The film has a slow, measured pace and is shot in black and white.  The decision to forgo color consciously strips the viewer of an element of sight and heightens the awareness of the dichotomy between sight and blindness.  Sound clues like urban background noise help describe the setting.  The same series of notes from a woodwind instrument play to introduce action, such as when one of the subjects stands to walk toward the elephant.  Finally, during the closing credits, each participant’s name is spoken as it appears on screen.

Javier Téllez, still from Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, 2008. Image courtesy Arthouse at the Jones Center and Peter Klichmann Gallery.

Film is a perfect vehicle for Letter on the Blind and Téllez capitalizes on its capabilities.   Not only is film a universal and increasingly accessible contemporary technology, it can reflect reality through layers of sight and sound like no other medium.  Time-based and experiential, film allows the viewer to tag along on sightless encounters.  The camera shot, as much as the spoken word, introduces each person to the viewer.  It is the camera that records each person’s eyes (or sunglasses) and carefully documents their movements and appearance.  In some ways, the limited black-and-white scheme provides visual emphasis.  It depicts the craggy maze of wrinkles and texture of the elephant’s skin in strong contrast.  This central theme becomes a compelling nonobjective exercise in grisaille during close-up durational still shots paired with spoken narrative.

Téllez’s staged encounter does not re-conceive of blindness in the context of sight-driven society.  Yet, he does reveal the humanity behind the condition.  The visceral, emotive reactions from those touching the animal are particularly poignant and the viewer is made to almost feel a part of the experience.  The elephant’s skin is described as feeling, among other things, like ‘a strange fabric’, ‘thick rubber’ and a ‘big plastic wall’.  One person finds the experience decidedly unsettling.  For another, the elephant is ‘nature’; touch connects him to her ‘beauty’, ‘power’ and ‘tenderness’.  Through seemingly candid (although scripted) interaction, blindness is presented as an alternative way of experiencing the world.  As one participant states, ‘the visual concept doesn’t exist’ for him.  It’s ‘dead’ and he doesn’t wish to have it back.

Javier Téllez, still from Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, 2008. Image courtesy Arthouse at the Jones Center and Peter Klichmann Gallery.

Javier Téllez was born in Venezuela.  He lives and works in New York.

Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See was commissioned by Creative Time and co-produced by the Peter Kichmann Gallery as part of Six Actions for New York City.  It is on view in the Film and Video Gallery at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas through July 31st.

Art and popular culture have long been fluid constructs – a truism evidenced in Aaron Ruell‘s multi-faceted career.  In addition to his photographic practice, Ruell works concurrently in popular film, in advertising and also in directing commercials.  He may not consider himself an actor, but is widely known for his role as Kip in cult-favorite Napoleon Dynamite (2004).  Ruell’s diverse interests no doubt have some influence on his photographic practice, but he nonetheless approaches it as a separate entity and a ‘precious’ means of exercising complete creative freedom.

Aaron Ruell’s hyperreal photographs are currently featured in a solo exhibition at Martine Chaisson Gallery in New Orleans.  The images, shot over the past five years with a Hasselblad 500, an H2 and a Canon 5D, feature a cross section of his photographic portraits and environments inspired by everyday observation.  The artist may wander upon subject matter at times, yet he freely admits that he leaves little to chance in a practice ranging from documenting found locations to photographing purpose built and designed sets.  This meticulous approach facilitates a descriptive formal interplay between elements such as saturated color and form, making the smallest details visible.  In this way, Ruell engages the viewer with subtle narrative – imbuing his images with a retro cinematic quality.  Environment shots such as Class or China Wall read like vacant film sets or fragments of an untold story.

The importance of setting in Ruell’s work means that even his portraits are conceived of as a gestalt.  Like a director, he casts subjects to fill roles defined by a preexisting concept.  The human presence is ultimately treated as one of many instructive props in vignettes of an imagined life.  These quiet scenes filled with self-contained subjects manage to evoke an element of the strange.  Twins, for instance, recalls a similar Diane Arbus image.  Both are slightly unsettling in their rigid poses and identical doubling.  However, Ruell steps back, situating the twins within a visual context of his own design.

Ruell has a multitude of projects currently in the works, including a feature film and two photographic series.  Listen for him beginning January 2012 as he voices Kip in the upcoming animated Napoleon Dynamite television series.

His work remains on view at Martine Chaisson Gallery in New Orleans through June 1st.

Miki (Reading Electrical Meters), 2009. Courtesy the artist.

Looking through artist Dave Beck‘s portfolio, one sees a variety of projects, which on the surface don’t necessarily mesh.  A closer look, however, reveals a consistent focus on abstract concepts, personal experiences and research.  More specifically, each of Beck’s ‘sculptural visualizations’ aims to offer insight into the complexities of the human experience.

Beck’s Nebraska City Portraits (2009) give dimensional presence to otherwise abstract data.  The series, created during a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE, features the results of the artist shadowing different community members for a day using a GPS tracking device.  These GPS plots became, in the artist’s words ‘unconventional portraits’ translated into 3D digital models on his computer.  The GPS portraits were then printed using a stereolithography machine to realize the tracks in laser-cured resin.  The final result was mounted in plexiglass shadow box – becoming a tangible visualization of contemporary technology and mobility on an individual level.

Logjam Installation View, Courtesy of the Artist.

Beck’s 3D animation, Logjam (2010), illustrates another facet of Beck’s practice: the moving image.  For Beck, the moving image is an extension of his sculpture and a means of presenting such elements in a dynamic way.  Logjam was created as a result of his 2010 residency at the St. Croix Watershed Research Station at the Science Museum of Minnesota when he spent a month living and working on the St. Croix River.  As a product of this experience, Logjam features sounds and imagery pulled from research and scuba diving excursions conducted with local park rangers.  The work is a treatise on the status of water as both a life-giving and a destructive force that evokes the ‘cyclical process of death and rebirth’.  More concretely, Beck references the logging industry.  As the logs pile up and wash away, the viewer is asked to question the affect of man versus nature.

In 2012, look for Beck’s Nebraska City Portraits on display for the first time in Nebraska City in a solo show at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.  Beck tells DailyServing that he is also currently working on a new project centered on the historic Lewis and Clark Expedition.  The multi-channel video and animation work will feature ‘… their route, the objects they used, and the chance encounters they had that determined their eventual success’.

Dave Beck currently teaches at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY where he directs the Digital Arts and Sciences Program.

Looking at Stephanie Liner’s Orbs, I immediately think of the panoramic sugar egg that had a place in the Easter baskets of my childhood.  Both are egg-shaped and feature a window opening into an interior vignette.  In fact, the panoramic egg is a product of the Victorian age as is the Queen Anne style, which is a source of inspiration for the artist.  Yet there the similarities end, for while decorative, Liner’s life-sized Orbs are created with a decidedly more subversive intention.

Liner is inspired by interiors of the historic southern United States and, in particular, the Queen Anne style – elements of which she believes contain latent meaning about the societies that created them.  The aforementioned Orb, a part of her Momentos of a Doomed Construct series, is defined by decorative and corporeal elements much like Liner’s entire practice.  Constructed of plywood and typically covered in a floral textile skin, Liner’s Orbs are occupied by a seated, self-contained female figure with billowing skirts.  In another part of the series, the artist connects the female form to furniture in a more literal way.  The figure stands with hands on hips to combine with a sculptural element set on cabriole legs in mimic of a Queen Anne wing-back chair.  Through each piece, Liner seeks to create a crafts-based visual language to address historic gender roles that she believes are perpetuated today.

The physicality of Liner’s work and its real world subject matter lends itself easily to performance, which typically accompanies her installations.  The 2009 performance for Memories of a Doomed Construct exhibit at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh gallery encouraged interaction between visitor and model.  Peering into an Orb, the viewer was met with the stare of a live female model from within – creating an uncomfortable, voyeuristic experience.  Carefully staged moments of gazing and objectification are intended to make us think critically about gender.

Liner holds a Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin at Madison as well as a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Design at North Carolina State University.  Look for Liner’s Mementos of a Doomed Construct in Out of Fashion, a group show debuting this November at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art that will address ‘the histories of fashion as vessels of time, nature and memory’.  In July 2012, Liner’s work will join 40 Under 40 at the Renwick Gallery for decorative arts and crafts in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Group on a Bench, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

Peter Granser is a self-taught artist that began his career in photojournalism – allowing for a natural transition to his current practice.  Yet the depth of Granser’s on-site, immersive research is better equated to the work of an anthropologist than that of a journalist.  Using photography, Granser documents select phenomena such as the American theme park as in Coney Island (2000-2005) or an expansive retirement community as in Sun City (2000-2001).  The artist capitalizes on the specificity of his projects by aiming to reveal layers of meaning with archetypal resonance.

Portrait 18 and Portrait 19, 2009. Courtesy the artist

With recent project, J’ai perdu ma tête (2009), Granser’s intrepid curiosity led him to a psychiatric institution in France where he took part in the everyday lives of inhabitants.  As with past projects such as Alzheimer (2001-2004), Granser walked a tightrope between spectacle and measured representation of a complex condition.  His approach is to inhabit the world he documents.  For a time, Granser lived nearby and each day followed the schedule of eating, working and sleeping.  He slowly earned trust and was able to photograph special outdoors excursions, clay figures from art therapy sessions, and private rooms.  By the end of his stay, Granser was invited to photograph individuals.

Flickering, 2009, video still. Courtesy the artist.

J’ai perdu ma tête marked Granser’s first foray into video and sound, which has given the artist a new way to present his subject matter.  In Flickering, the artist examines the marriage of function and malfunction – presenting his piece in a blackened dead end tunnel accompanied by the sound of fluorescent lighting cutting in and out.  In Forest, the pleasant sound of chirping birds is juxtaposed with an increasingly smoky wooded image.  Presented rear-projected onto wall-sized plexi barrier, the video confronts the viewer with contradiction.  Granser states that he uses video to explore the passage of time ‘by using a single camera angle (like in a photograph) without any cut’.  His video work thus becomes an extension of his photographic practice.

Forest, 2009, installation view. Courtesy the artist.

J’ai perdu ma tête, will be on view from May 12th through July 2nd at the Atelier de Visu in Marseille, France.   It will also be on view at the Guislain Museum in Gent, Belgium from June through August 2012.  Kodoji will publish the project in book form in March of 2012.

Granser has been working on a new project in China since 2008, which he hopes to have completed by the end of this year.  To keep up with the artist, visit his newly launched website.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Austin, TX based artist Amy Revier has been chosen from a group of worthy submissions to discuss the process and ideas that fuel her art practice.  With an imminent move to London on the horizon, Revier also fills us in on what’s next.

Woolly Headed, image courtesy the artist.

Kelly Nosari: Textiles, significantly wools, and the process of weaving are important elements of your practice and have potential feminist implications.  In performance work such as Woolly Headed and Yolk Yoke, you wrap and confine your body in woven textile.  Your Woven Drawing series relieves woven textiles of their utilitarian nature, giving them new creative life as drawing comprised of texture and color.  Please talk about your work in this medium and the ideas that inform it.

Amy Revier: I became interested in textiles through weaving.  The practice of weaving has such a dense relationship with ritual and placing oneself into a kind of solitary, psychological space.  Wool is a reference to that density – and it became a tool for hibernation in my performance work. I was also using wool to reference something wild and very animal. The head-wrapping performances would often become stiflingly hot and disorienting. I wanted them to waiver at that point just before something loses control, blows apart, and becomes lost. Performance was a way to become more intimate with the material – to dig into its structure and, while doing so, work in a very concentrated, obsessive manner, as weaving often demands.

The most recent work in textiles step away from performance and sit closer to drawing and painting. While living in Iceland, one of the projects I started was making portable woven drawings on handmade looms. It was during the dark winter months and making those drawings were like little daily rituals. They accumulated time, and also acted as parallels to text I was reading on otherworldly places – Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.

Woven Drawings, image courtesy the artist.

Textiles used in the recent sculptural, body-board work are rolled to resemble rescue blankets or camping equipment.  I was interested in taking what is usually a very durable, non-descript blanket and making it handwoven in the most meticulous way (hand spinning the yarn, using paper and thin steel as warp and weft). I’m also beginning to explore the idea of a body-board unit (such as Riding on the Back of Another) as an object for ceremony more than rescue – for navigating unknown or mythical territories.

KN: Looking at a work like Riding on the Back of Another or Blackfog one can’t help but recall The Pack (1969) by Joseph Beuys.  Is Beuys a source of inspiration?

AR: Beuys’ work has definitely been a reference for me – specifically in the way he weaves myth, ritual, performance, and repetitive action or objects together.  I would also say I had a strong reaction to how he places architecture and textile together.  When I first saw Beuys’ work I thought of tribal cradleboards, which was my direct reference for [my earliest board work] Blackfog.

Riding on the Back of Another, image courtesy the artist.

KN: Your series A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler depicts explosive clouds of smoke emanating from prams in otherwise quiet and empty urban settings.  Please tell us about this recent series.

AR: This series is a project that came together while in Iceland.  While on walks I quickly began to notice that prams are left outside with infants in them, while the parents go for coffee, groceries, shop, or socialize.  I found it linked to my research on the tribal cradleboards. Both cultures use an apparatus to keep the infant safe and secure while they gather food, or in the modernized Icelandic version, go for coffee and drinks. I made a daily habit of photographing these prams with infants in them, seemingly abandoned. The collaged image of the volcanic ash plumes came much later, after I had time to experience and understand the political, geological, and economic upheavals.  The ash cloud images are from Google, and are mostly of the Icelandic volcanoes that occurred in March-April 2010. But it was the apparatus that interested me most, and the fact that it became a metaphor for Iceland’s situation as a whole.  It contained something very alive and active, wild but slumbering – similar characteristics of volcanoes, and also of the unforeseen economic corruptions that caused Iceland’s devastating 2008 financial collapse.

KN: What are you working on at the moment?

AR: Currently I’m building a garment collection in collaboration with artist Natalie Northrup. Everything is built from the ground up – we’re weaving and quilting sculptural drawings, then slowly arranging the pieces together to form garments.  It’s a project that forms intersections between sculpture, drawing and painting, performance, and fashion. This first collection will be comprised of roughly fifteen pieces, installed in a space that allows them to waiver ambiguously between garment and sculpture.

I am also making woven drawings and new sculpture for an upcoming group show at Champion Contemporary in Austin, TX.

A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler, image courtesy the artist.

KN: Can you offer one piece of advice for emerging artists?

AR: I think about this when making work… a line from Eileen Myles in The Importance of Being Iceland:

One thing I was thinking about imperfection is that it’s exactly enough. It’s the beginning of something.



Untitled (Montanas), Gabriel Kuri (2011).

Armory Arts Week has become an annual event held March 3rd through 6th, centered on The Armory Show.  Competing venues have multiplied throughout the city of New York, including The Art Show, Pulse, Scope, Independent, Verge (Art Brooklyn), Moving Image, Red Dot and Fountain.  Headlining these fairs, The Armory Show 2011 continued its dual focus on both modern and contemporary art with Pier 92 focusing on the 20th century and Pier 94 accommodating nearly two hundred contemporary art exhibitors.  The fair’s limited program included Armory Focus:  Latin America, comprised of eighteen galleries highlighting Latin America’s contribution to contemporary visual art.  The Armory’s annual commission to create a visual identity for the fair went to Mexican-born conceptual artist Gabriel Kuri.  Also associated with the fair were Art Projx Cinema and Volta NY, a fair which presents solo artist booths in a smaller format.

DailyServing brings its readers highlights from The Armory Show and Volta NY.

Subway (2010), © Leandro Erlich, Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

The Armory Show: Sean Kelly Gallery

Sean Kelly Gallery in New York presented Leandro Erlich‘s Subway (2010), which placed a sterilized version of New York’s urban transit reality within The Armory Show.  It struck an apt contextual note – much like his piece, The Boat, did during Art Basel Miami Beach 2010.  Both works form part of Erlich’s video window series and consist of an architectural element combined with video.

For Subway, Erlich sets a life-sized stainless steel door within a wall and positions video as window into a subway car.  The video becomes a realistic extension of the architecture and evokes great depth to create the illusion of looking ‘through’ it extending into the distance.  Three passengers sit in the immediate car, avoiding eye contact and lost in their own thoughts.  The figures are quiet and self-contained much like the video throughout its brief (1 min. 30 sec.) loop.  The light changes as the subway bumps and shakes along its track. Renaissance paintings offered a window into another world; in a similar way, Erlich uses the moving image to depict an imagined, realistic 21st century environment.

Last Meal on Death Row 'William Joseph Kitchens' (2010), Courtesy the artist and Blaine|Southern Gallery, London.

The Armory Show: Blain|Southern Gallery

Blain|Southern Gallery in London filled their booth with a selection of work, including Mat Collishaw‘s series of C-prints, Last Meal on Deathrow.  In this haunting fact-based series, Collishaw depicts the last meals requested by recently executed American death row inmates.  Drawing largely from the state of Texas and Jacquelyn Black’s documentation in Last Meal, Collishaw examines the ritual of eating before execution in a quiet, somber way.

Content is secondary upon first viewing one of these prints.  One is initially drawn in by an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of food, silver and glass – all of which was cooked and prepared by the artist.  The viewer is lulled by an apparently reticent image before reading the caption and learning of the context.  Collishaw’s series is visually inspired by Flemish Baroque still lifes.  Such a visual influence is evident in the dark backgrounds and supporting surfaces, which provide contrast for illuminated objects.  Just as layered meaning exists within the Baroque still life, the seemingly innocuous prepared food serves to reveal deeper meaning about the societies and individuals they reference.

Trees of 40 Fruit (2009-2011), Sam Van Aken, Photo: Bill Orcutt, Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY.

The Armory Show: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY exhibited a solo installation by artist Sam Van Aken featuring his ongoing New Eden project, which filled the booth with vegetation. New Eden features a genetically altered orchard of trees or natural ‘sculptures’ that have been manipulated by the artist and painstakingly grafted to bear peach, plum, nectarine and apricot fruits.  Branches of blossoms on each tree indicate the presence of these disparate elements.  Part of the installation were synthetic mutations of grafted fruits and a display stand with hybrid vegetable seed starters.  Along the walls, prints of mixed seed packets and seed packet collages completed the booth.

While the installation initially seems to emphasize the unexpected aesthetic pleasure of genetic modification, its presence within the gallery space is intended to raise the profile of increasing scientific infringement on the natural world.  Van Aken starts a critical dialogue about genetic modification, which he views as futile.  As the artist told Art Newspaper ‘any change that you make is temporary’.  Mother nature proves stronger in the end and ultimately rejects human interference.

Cartografia Interior # 35, Courtesy the artist and Espaivisor-Visor Gallery.

Volta NY: Espaivisor-Visor Gallery
Espaivisor-Visor Gallery in Valencia, Spain exhibited new and recent work from the series Cartografia Interior by artist Tatiana Parcero.  In this series, Parcero redirects the contemporary trend of imagined geographic mapping onto the body in order to position it ‘in relation to time and place, science and thought’ further indicating that the body is ‘the container that holds everything’ including history, culture, and geography.

The ancient images appear like tattoos at first glance, which underscores Parcero’s view that the historical thoughts contained in the images are indelibly linked to the body.  The tattoo-like writings and drawings are taken from extensive research.  The artist has collected and photographed documents including pre-Columbian codices, ancient maps, cosmological charts, and anatomical engravings.  Parcero then printed her findings onto transparent acetate and layered them over intimate, corresponding photographic images of her body.  The ancient world and the artist’s own flesh visually bind and are re-imagined as one.

Winter Dreams - Table, courtesy the artist and MA2 Gallery.

Volta NY:  MA2 Gallery

MA2 Gallery displayed new and recent work by Ken Matsubara, which was recently part of Winter Dreams, a February solo show at the Tokyo gallery.  Matsubara’s Winter Dreams series is defined by his continued exploration of memory as both a collective and personal phenomenon.

MA2 Gallery’s booth was filled with small-scale mixed media works that invited intimate viewing.  At first glance, many of the objects could be readily encountered in the everyday world.  Purposefully weathered, framed shadow boxes and mirror boxes mysteriously presented moving images of simple motifs.  In Winter Dreams – Table, a ghostly, empty table covered by a white table cloth stands alone and spins.  Likewise, Winter Dreams – Cloud reveals an emanating cloud of smoke beneath a faded, silvered surface.  The artist’s emphasis on mirrors, in the form of aged, reflective surfaces points to the essence of memory as it is formed by the often hazy impression of experiences and dreams on our consciousness.  The open-ended nature of the images allowed them to be experienced by many viewers.  Finally, in Bottom of Buddha’s Hands, two shiny hands holding a crystal ball connect the concept of memory to humanity’s beginnings.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Sydney-based emerging artist Dara Gill has been chosen from a group of worthy submissions.  Just back from a project in the New South Wales bush, Gill took the time to discuss his passion for ideas, his creative process and to share his thoughts on anxiety – that omnipresent 21st century condition.

Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits), 2010. Courtesy the artist.

Kelly Nosari:  Your practice is so diverse.  You work in video, performance, sculpture, painting, sound and installation.  Where does your creative process begin?

Dara Gill:  My creative process starts first and foremost with research.  In this stage a formalisation of the research made is complied into a fluid ‘definition’ of the topic as I see it.  This normally includes the ideas of others coupled with my own ideas and this definition then informs the artworks themselves.

KN:  Anxiety is an overarching theme in your art practice.  How do you creatively engage an experience that is both personal and collective?   What is it that interests you most about this universal human condition?

DG:  Anxiety tends to sit at the top of the human emotional hierarchy, thus most emotions stem from anxiety.  It is the ubiquitous nature of the emotion that drew me towards it and its ramifications for daily life.  My yearning to understand the emotion stems from both wanting to know myself and my fellow man a little better, objectifying what is in essence subjective.  Initially my interest tended to sit with the neurotic forms of the condition, that is phobia driven anxiety, but as I discovered more about the emotion its daily ramifications became much more powerful and interesting.

Creatively engaging with anxiety, or any emotion in fact is often the hardest part, because for each it is truly personal.  Therefore the challenge of creating works that do not involve personal motifs or stories, but rather commonly shared experiences, is the trust of this creative engagement.  I always aim to communicate without relying on the texts created from my research or any over explanation of the meaning behind a work, but rather letting the work communicate through is imagery and processes.

Sisyphus Triptych #2 from Dara Gill on Vimeo.

KN:  The influence of the Greek myth of Sisyphus is evident in video works like Untitled (Sisyphus Triptych #2) or To Roll, in which you attempt a tedious or impossible task.  Please talk more about this myth and its influence on your work.

DG:  For me Sisyphus is a parable for anxiety.  Very briefly, anxiety stems partly from a foreboding sense that something is ‘not quite right’ – a negative reflection on ones current place in the world.  Anxiety is a general ambiguous feeling that something is missing or looming (Lack), and a wish (Desire) to rid one of this feeling.  The desire to change transforms into a desire to work or maintain a sense of busy-ness in order to quell anxiety.  This characteristic produces mundane work, work towards a perpetually unfulfilled and ill-defined end result.

My first point of interest within the myth Sisyphus is the mental state of Sisyphus as he completes each cycle of his task; his naive and instinctual habitual compulsion to push the rock up the hill, thinking that his toil will end once the rock reaches the summit, the horror as he watches it roll back down, and the amnesia he suffers each time the cycle continues.  Sisyphus is to constantly work towards a goal that has no foreseeable end to it, born out of a compulsion from nothing.

KN:  In much of your work, you aim not to reconcile or to perform anxiety, but to rather mischievously induce it in others.  Whether aiming rubber bands at peoples’ faces as in Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits) or surprising them with bright lights as in Untitled (Blinding Light Box) you create a very physical stress experience for the participant.  Talk more about this process.

DG:  Often the work that involves the use of people is born out of the research into the topic.  I often think that the best way to explain anxiety is to induce it in others.  For instance, in Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits) and Untitled (Blinding Light Box) I utilised one my observations of anxiety as being both a simultaneous Fight and Flight response, the effect of this causing a paralysing stillness or as Kierkegaard describes a ‘shuddering before nothingness’.  I drew a parallel with this ‘Deer in the headlights’ type moment, where the Deer is both mesmerised by the cars headlights but also fearful of its demise, both culminating again in a paralysing internal dizziness.  This motif was then manipulated into the bright lights in Blinding Light Box and the rubber bands in Rubber Band Portraits.

Untitled (To Roll) from Dara Gill on Vimeo.

KN:  You have described your work as ‘situational based research’.  I see that some pieces mimic psychological experimentation by facilitating discomfort and documenting it.  In Horror Vaccui Experiment (2009), for example, you record an unwitting subject as they wait alone in an empty room.  How do you go about this process?  What is the Knowledge Barter Experiment?

DG:  A key methodology within in my developing practice is the survey, that is, an attempt to engage with the public in situational based research where a subject responds to stimulus or a constructed environment, often with a visual outcome.  These works are performative in nature and documented through video, text, photography, and sound.  Through this process documentation becomes art object.  The tenor of these works is that of objective scientific research, but the parameters of the interaction are poetically manipulated in order for the outcome to become expressive of visual art.  The use of the survey has played a pivotal role in my investigation of anxiety, and is the tool that is used by the sciences to gain useful information on anxiety.  I wish to employ the survey in an almost playful sense, as pseudo-scientific investigation.  This methodology was used during the initial stage of my research and its findings inform more formal aspects of my artistic practise.

The Knowledge Barter Experiment was a fun side project that I always wanted to do but its connection to anxiety is very direct.  It forces a participant to actively reflect and comprehend ones own abilities and weaknesses, what they know and what they want to know.  Here they must define with some confidence their ability on a chosen topic.  This is not easy, as one attaches a value to what they know and thought they knew, and compares this to already existing teachings.  Secondary to this process is the defining of what one wants to learn.  This involves again identifying what one perceives they have little knowledge of and what they feel is valuable to know.

KN:  What are you working on now?

DG:  Right now I’m working on my next few solos that branch out into the topic of Hope and its connection to anxiety.  Hope for the most part sits in direct opposition to anxiety.  For Ernest Bloch, anxiety stems from a feeling of “something lacking and [the] want to stop it… [the] dreams of a better life”.  This hunger never ceases, “we never tire of wanting things to improve.  We are never free of wishes…”.  Friedrich Nietzsche opines that hope is ‘the worst of evils for it prolongs the torment of man’.  It is the space between such varied opinions that interests me, and the space in which I would like the work to exist.

KN:  Can you offer one piece of advice for emerging artists?

DG:  Document everything.

Flooded McDonald's Still of "Flooded McDonald's" (2009), courtesy of the artists and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Produced by the Propeller Group in cooperation with The South London Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Oriel Mostyn Gallery and the Danish Film Institute.

Flooded McDonald’s, by art collective Superflex, is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.  For this recent film, Superflex painstakingly created a life-sized replica of a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant.  Their deliberate choice to employ one of the most recognizable brands in the world offers a familiar point-of-departure for the viewer, while also evoking related issues of consumerism and corporate ascendancy.

As the Hirshhorn asserts, the artists ‘borrow the cinematic vocabulary of documentaries, ads, and disaster movies’.  This approach is accessible and appropriately complements the main-stream setting.  As the film begins, one instantly recognizes the yellow, red and otherwise neutral, utilitarian interior of the fast food chain.  The counter, menu, partially eaten food and Ronald McDonald figure are all to-be-expected.  Yet, the realism of the space is made strange by the absence of the typically crowded human presence.  The restaurant seems to have been abandoned – creating a sense of the uncanny and imbuing the film with visual ambiguity that engages the viewer’s curiosity.

Flooded McDonald's Still of "Flooded McDonald's" (2009), courtesy of the artists and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Produced by the Propeller Group in cooperation with The South London Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Oriel Mostyn Gallery and the Danish Film Institute.

Flooded McDonald’s is exhibited as a looped digital video projection, 21 minutes in length.  The film unfolds in real time and begins as it surveys the still (and empty) McDonald’s.  Water then begins to fill the space, entering from under a door.  Water, a powerful natural force, wreaks havoc without substantial visual obstruction.  It lifts and moves chairs, trays, food and drinks around the room.  It shorts the electrical circuit and becomes murky in all of the refuse.  The film concludes when the fast food restaurant is finally and completely submerged.

On the one hand a filmic quip, Flooded McDonald’s open-ended nature lends itself to deeper interpretation.  The film creates an artificial and concentrated natural disaster – an event which always points to the fragility of human existence.  (One can’t help but think of recent flooding disasters).  Furthermore, the work confronts the viewer with images of trash and destruction – highlighting over consumption and the associated waste it generates.  This waste, coupled with recognizable corporate imagery, unarguably critiques capitalist excess.  By destroying a fabricated prototype of the American way of life, the film seems to suggest a departure from the status quo.

Flooded McDonald's Still of "Flooded McDonald's" (2009), courtesy of the artists and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Produced by the Propeller Group in cooperation with The South London Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Oriel Mostyn Gallery and the Danish Film Institute.

Superflex, a Danish art collective founded in 1993, exhibits internationally.  The collective engages viewers and participants in issues surrounding globalization.  They work in film and multi-media projects that are typically realized in the real world through social intervention.  Members Jakob Fenger (b. Roskilde, 1968), Rasmus Nielsen (b. Hjørring, 1969), and Bjørnstjerne Reuter Christiansen (b. Copenhagen, 1969) live and work in Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro.

Flooded McDonald’s was on view, from January to March of this year, at Peter Blum Gallery in New York.  It has also recently shown at Oriel Mostyn gallery in Wales and South London Gallery, London, UK.

Flooded McDonald’s remains at the Hirshhorn through November 28th.  It is presented in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of the museum’s Black Box space, which is dedicated to new and recent work in film and video.

Julieta Aranda was written by Allision Gibson and originally published on 7 April 2009.

Time is an integral element of life. For me, it seems similar to the phenomenon of breathing, in that it is largely uninvestigated in any great depth by the general public, though it is collectively understood as essential to our existence. Time runs everything, and though most of us plan the entirety of our lives within its confines, we rarely experience the epiphanic moments where the concept of time suddenly hits us like a ton of bricks and for a brief moment we begin to question just how it all works and how extraordinary it is that we all follow it, with our clocks and our calendars, so faithfully.

To kick off the new exhibition series entitled Intervals at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Mexican artist Julieta Aranda will exhibit a multi-part installation that conceptually deals with the notion of time, and plays with the way it is observed as a natural progression. Aranda’s work first became engaged in a discussion about time in 2006 with her body of work You Had No 9th of May!, in which she responded to the idea of defiantly shifting the rule of time, when in 1995 the Republic of Kiribati (an island nation in the center of the Pacific Ocean) decided to reroute a section of the International Date Line that divided its islands between two different days, causing it to no longer be split. Aranda was struck by the way Kiribati challenged the zigzagging line that spans the globe, which we have historically adhered to, though it is not under any international law. Moreover, Aranda explored the idea that Kiribati had blatantly changed time to fit its own agenda, making it as subjective a concept as beauty or comedy. For Intervals Aranda has created new pieces that playfully challenge the concept of time as we know it, including an oversized clock in which the daily cycle is divided into ten elongated hours. According to the Guggenheim, “this system references ‘decimal time’: a short-lived initiative introduced during the rationalizing fervor of the French Revolution that divided the day into 10 hours, each hour containing 100 minutes of 100 seconds each.” Another piece is an image of an hourglass, as seen through a peephole. “Seen through the refracting optical device of a camera obscura, the grains of sand appear to flow upward in a startling reversal of time’s passage.”

Intervals, initiated by Chief Curator Nancy Spector, was “conceived to take place in interstitial locations within the museum’s exhibition spaces or beyond the physical confines of the building.” Julieta Aranda’s work will open the exhibition on Friday, April 10th. The entire series runs through July 19, 2009.

Julieta Aranda was born in Mexico City. She earned her MFA at Columbia University and her BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has exhibited internationally, including at Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, AR Contemporary Gallery in Milan and El Museo Del Barrio in New York.

Can’t Afford the Freeway, by Catherine Wagley, was originally published May 14, 2010 as part of Wagley’s weekly column L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast.

Elana Mann, "Can't Afford the Freeway."

In the only photograph I have ever seen of her, Kajon Cermak  looks omniscient. She is sitting in a white sedan and glancing sideways at something worthy of a half-smile. But only a half-smile. The main traffic reporter for the public radio station KCRW, Cermak has a been-there-done-that cool to her voice which softens her otherwise feisty mien. She is very good with words: “if you’re northbound on the 405 right now, forget it,” “it’s bummer to bummer out there,” “pack-a-snack folks,” and  it’s “one long, non-stop, never ending rush to stop or so it seems.” Sometimes, what she says will make me drop whatever I am doing—hopefully, I am not driving—and wonder if I’ve heard quite right. “There’s a metal bar in lanes,” she said last Tuesday afternoon, “and people are pulling up and ordering cocktails.” This made the freeway sound expensive.

It’s no small thing to be a traffic reporter in a city where a person could feasibly spend a sixth of a day on freeways (“First there was rush hour, then there were rush hours,” Cermak has said) and freeway driving  has moral undertones too–a friend of mine sees glares every-time her Mercedes 240D lets out black smoke, and even if the glares aren’t actually there, the fact that she sees them says enough. L.A. artists fixate on cars, what you drive, whether you drive, and whether you should. I don’t know of another city in which art world folklore involves Robert Irwin leaving a critic on the side of the road after said critic denied the aesthetic acumen of a boy rebuilding a hot rod: “Here was a kid who wouldn’t know art from schmart, but you couldn’t talk about a more real aesthetic activity.”

The day after Cermak turned stuck-in-smog-time into cocktail-time, I took the Red Line to RedCat in downtown L.A. and sat in one of two Subaru seats set up in front of Elana Mann’s video installation. Called Can’t Afford the Freeway, after the chorus of an Aimee Mann song, Mann’s video includes abundant car time but no drive time. Mann bends across and over car seats, sometimes merging with her car’s body, and other times fighting the car’s body. The freshly washed white Subaru Legacy Outback, sits in residential streets, shopping districts and barren lots as Mann tangles herself in the seatbelts–at one point, it’s like she’s in a seatbelt straight jacket–, caresses the headrests with her cheeks or lets herself roll head-first out the window, like a pool of lotion sliding over the  edge of the counter-top.

Lisa Anne Auerbach, 2009.

As Mann maneuvers, the soundtrack of her voice questioning Captain Dylan Alexander Mack, an Iraq war veteran who goes by Alex, plays out. Mann’s voice sounds polite, maybe even guarded, and Alex sounds more matter-of-fact and barefaced than he should, given what he says. At first, the interview seems like a distraction from the intensely physical dialogue Mann is having with her Outback. But then the overlaps between what Mann does and what Alex says become stronger: “Everyone was snaking and weaving” (Mann snakes and weaves around the gray upholstery), “you have resentment towards them because they’re the one’s closest to you” (Mann attacks her car sometimes, like when she throws herself on the hood), “I felt alone in the emotional attachment” (Mann is alone in every shot), “your car becomes a metaphor for your life” (for Mann, it seems to be a cocoon-like forum for acting out your feelings), “finally, I can steer my life” (Mann never steers the car), “I didn’t feel like I did anything for American culture” (Subaru may be owned by Fuji Heavy Industries, but the Outback is an American car; it doesn’t do anything in Mann’s video, though).

Car art has been more skin-deep than guttural lately. Artist Lisa Anne Auerbach, an adamant bicyclist,  recently bought herself a car to drive to her new job in Pomona. In response to her own digression, she knitted a green sweater. On the front, above  bicycles and happy hand-holding accordion people, it says, “I used to be part of the solution”; and on the back, which is bogged down by knitted cars, it says “Now I’m part of the problem.”  This Spring, artists Folke Koebberling and Martin Kaltwasser began rehabilitated sedans by turning them into bikes at Bergamont Station. On designated days, visitors could come watch a process that resembled a mini demolition derby. Jedediah Caesar turned a red pick-up truck  into an overgrown, inorganic ecosystem for the California Biennial last year. The pick-up felt apocalyptic.

Cars into Bicycles, 2010, Bergamont Station, Santa Monica.

Mann’s installation is too melancholic and probing to be apocalyptic. It susses out of the need for comfort and control, using the car as a proxy for trauma, war, anxiety, desire and affection. Given the emotional baggage her white Subaru carries, it’s no wonder Mann can’t afford the freeway.

This article by Rebekah Drysdale was originally published on June 8, 2009.

David Spriggs‘ atmospheric installations, such as Axis of Power, above, inhabit both the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional realm, challenging the viewer’s concept of space. The piece, which was commissioned and produced by this year’s Sharjah Biennial, is “like a scientific specimen, the power of nature appears to have been captured, isolated, and objectified within the confines of the room’s architectural space,” as captioned at the installation in Sharjah. Initially, the spiraling forms recall the eye of a hurricane or other meteorological phenomena. As the viewer walks around Axis of Power, the intriguing and methodical manner in which it was constructed is revealed.

Axis of Power consists of several sheets of transparent plastic film that have been marked with white acrylic. These sheets are then installed in precise spatial increments with aluminum tee bars and springs, creating multiple image planes. The logic dictating the placement and hanging of the sheets contrasts with the organic and ethereal nature of the work. The resulting combination is at once chaotic and controlled.

Spriggs is influenced by Futurism and Cubism, as well as digital art and cinema. He received his B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and his M.F.A. from Concordia University in Montreal, where he currently lives and works.

The Edinburgh Art Festival annually commissions new works of art and partners with the local art community to provide a strong exhibitions program throughout the city.  The 2010 EAF presents commissions of new work by artists Martin Creed, Richard Wright and collaborative partners Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.  Coleman and Hogarth’s Staged, which concluded August 15th, was produced by the Collective Gallery and situated at the City Observatory on Carlton Hill.  The artists turned the space into a multi-channel video installation described by the EAF Guide as both a ‘digital camera obscura’ and ‘a mise-en-scène’ for the city.  Capitalizing upon the theatrical emphasis of the Edinburgh Festivals, the artists included visitors in their work by projecting live CCTV footage along with pre-recorded filmic images of Edinburgh.

The 2010 EAF also commissioned intervention and performance works to take place throughout its run.  Among them is Ross Christie’s Mobile Art Market.  His environmentally friendly cycle-powered market stall travels around Edinburgh, offering up affordable prints, multiples, books and fanzines created by local artists.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents new and recent work by 2001 Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed in Down Over Up.  Down Over Up – an evocative title – is inspired by the artist’s commission to refurbish the Scotsman Steps.  Creed notes the strong use of repetition in his work, which is for him a comfortable means of approaching our chaotic world and creating some semblance of regularity.  The exhibition’s strong thematic emphasis upon repetitive, incremental changes allows one to see differences where things might have otherwise appeared to be the same.

Down Over Up is centered upon the concept of ‘stacking and progression in size, height and tone’.  The exhibition features work where Creed has stacked or piled planks, chairs, tables, boxes, or legos.  The artist also uses paint and ink to explore the theme.  Creed’s new commission within the gallery transforms the central staircase into a synthesizer and is one of the conceptual highlights of the exhibition.  Ascending and descending the staircase causes notes on a scale to sound – making visitors’ movements through the gallery take on heightened participatory purpose as they both enact and complete the work

The Scotsman Steps Commission. Artist's impression of EAF commission for the Scotsman Steps, curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery and supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Down Over Up aptly references Creed’s permanent public work commission to refurbish Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps.  The Steps, which take their name from the newspaper whose headquarters they were built to serve in 1904, are located by the Fruitmarket Gallery, connecting East Market Street and North Bridge in Edinburgh’s uniquely elevated Old Town.  The city seeks to give the Steps new life through the commission, as they have fallen out of favor due to disrepair and association with crime.  While the work has not been completed, Creed plans to resurface each step with contrasting marbles sourced from around the world.  The materials will not only infuse the Scotsman Steps with visual interest and a sense of permanence, but will also inject it with global character.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 31 October 2010.

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Richard Wright, The Stairwells Project, An EAF Commission in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Angela Catlin.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright presents Stairwell Project, a new permanent work at the Dean Gallery.  The Dean Gallery, a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1990s, was designed by Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital in 1831.  The Gallery’s staircases are among the building’s most prominent features and provide an expansive, architecturally unique background for Wright’s work.  Known for his ephemeral, wall-based painting, Wright brings this character to the Dean Gallery’s western staircase – placing the tradition of stairwell painting within the modern art gallery and presenting it in a new way.

Wright hand-painted The Stairwell Project in a physically and mentally demanding process that took four weeks to complete.  Inspired by the honeysuckle design of the original ceiling moldings in the stairwell, Wright designed an organic, abstracted flower shape.  He chose to paint solely in black – a color which points to the building’s melancholic history.  The flower motif is repeated in varying ways several thousand times throughout the stairwell.  The organic nature of the shape notably has the effect of introducing curved lines to a space that is solidly geometric.  Yet, the shape’s simplicity and its neutral color do not overpower.  Instead, the carefully varied size, orientation and placement of each flower subtly emphasizes the stairwell’s architecture and the abundance of light let in by the large windows.

Hito Steyerl:  In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl, still from In Free Fall. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

The Collective Gallery presents In Free Fall, featuring new and recent work by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.  Berlin-based Steyerl works in visual essay or film essay similar to artists such as Ursula Biemann.  This nascent documentary-influenced approach features a montage of appropriated and new footage, interviews and voice-over narrative.  Unlike traditional media, film essays facilitate the analysis of global complexities.  Through the shared language of images and information, Steyerl closely examines the economic networks which define our existence.

In Free Fall – Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Scotland – presents Journal No. 1 in addition to three related works that include After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash (a new commission).   The Crash works address the global economic downturn by focusing on an airplane junkyard located in the visually bare California desert - revealing cycles of capitalism as seen through the evolution of commodity.  The airplane, which facilitates global mobility, is a recognizable symbol of globalization and reveals a larger story.  As the Collective asserts, these works present ‘an anatomy of crashes both fictional and real’, revealing ‘unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle’.

In Free Fall concludes at the Collective Gallery on 19 September.

Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts, Staying Together (2010), oil on linen. Collection of Mr. Pontus Bonnier, Sweden. Courtesy of Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery presents Julie Roberts: Child – featuring new work by the artist.  Julie Roberts, a painter based in England, is concerned with the means through which ‘our social experience is given shape’.  In the past, Roberts has often chosen to paint the overtly sinister, drawing her to crime scenes and medical instruments.  Child – a thematic departure – focuses on gender roles, domestic environments, familial portraiture, school rooms and domestic labor situated in mid-twentieth century Britain.  As with past work, her new subject matter is underpinned by extensive research.  This allows Roberts to accurately present an entirely different, decidedly austere approach to childhood in a time period complicated by a great displacement of children into orphanages and foster homes.

While Roberts focuses on historic approaches to childhood and the family network, there is no sentimentality involved.  In works such as Staying Together or Meat and Two Veg, Roberts makes once familiar family scenes and portraiture both strange and unrecognizable.  Carefully constructed, unnatural stiffness is tempered by realism.  At the same time, historic subject matter is stylized and set against characteristic patterned backgrounds and wallpaper.  Roberts’ both stylized and informed approach to her subject matter combine to highlight ways in which society has changed over time.

Julie Roberts: Child remains at the Talbot Rice Gallery through 25 September.

life.turns.

life.turns. Uploaded submission.

life.turns. a film made by thousands of people, one frame at a time, is part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival.  Blipfoto, an online photo journal and social networking community, was commissioned by New Media Scotland‘s Alt-w Fund to create an animated film using thousands of photos uploaded by participants. People were invited to submit photographs posed in any of 8 specified stances that represent the progressive movements of walking.  Blipfoto then presented these still images in a rapid succession giving the illusion of thousands of people walking – working together to complete one another’s gait.  The resulting animated film revives the Victorian zoetrope in a new way for the digital world and presents a celebration of everyday life in all its diversity.

life.turns. was completed and presented at Inspace in Edinburgh on 26 August.  The film can be viewed online at Blipfoto.

Drew Heiztler, "for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers." Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

Drew Heitzler rephrases history in ways that seem both furtive and strangely revealing. In his most recent work, he culls characters, settings, and plots from the visual history of the still-young Los Angeles. Rearranging and re-imagining three films from the early 1960s, all of them productions in which the rebel spirit of Easy Rider seems to be slowly eating into the stylized melodrama of noir, and also gathering an expansive archive of still images from Hollywood of yesteryear, he’s created a narrative that confuses the past in order, paradoxically, to clarify the hidden truths about desire and culture that lurk beneath it.

Heitzler, who participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, recently exhibited at LAX Art and Angstrom Gallery among, other venues. for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers, his current exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery, closes January 30th.

CW: Your current exhibition makes me think of remixes and mash-ups—art forms that are about rearranging someone else’s cultural product and telling a different story. What prompted you to re-edit historical film and images?

DH: Subway Sessions and TSOYW are two previous films I made and actually shot. The first on super-8, the second on 16mm (TSOYW was a collaboration with Amy Granat and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial). In both cases I relied heavily on the tropes of specific film genres. Subway Sessions used the aesthetics of 70’s surf films to tell the story of a certain time and place, specifically, Rockaway Beach New York just prior to September 11, 2001. TSOYW looked like a 70’s biker film and relied heavily on the tropes of that genre. So it wasn’t a big step to go from using the look of earlier film genres to actually using earlier films themselves. Also, I had read a book on documentary film making by Erik Barnouw that my wife Flora found for me in a thrift store. In the book, the Soviet cine-clubs were discussed. It seems that after the revolution it was impossible for Russian film makers to get film stock due to western boycotts. What they had in abundance were western news reel and even films that were being smuggled into Russia in effort to undermine the Revolution. The cine-clubs would re-edit these films and news reels in order to create new narratives that supported their cause. I liked this idea of re-ordering an existing cultural image to better fit your own perception of the world. It’s collage.

CW: How important is story-telling to you?

DH: Story telling is what I am interested in. I love those French paintings like The Oath of the Horatii or The Raft of the Medusa. They operate like movies. They tell stories which can exist at different allegorical levels.

CW: Each of the three films that make up for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers. (Doubled ) were originally presented on their own, right? Why combine them?

DH: The combining of the films came out of a problem of exhibition. This show was originally scheduled to open at MOCA in May, 2009. Then it was postponed to September of that year and then postponed again to January of 2010 before it was eventually canceled all together. The result was that I had a long time to think about how these three films would be presented. I had always intended for them to come together as a trilogy, but as I kept messing around with ideas of how they would actually be presented in the gallery, they morphed into a triptych, becoming a whole new piece. What I discovered and enjoyed was that once the three individual narratives were doubled and superimposed over one another, they operated in a much more complex way. The individual narratives were still visible, but complicated by their interaction with one another. In other words, the lines of thought were confused, which seems to me much closer to the way we go through life. At least that seems to hold for me.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: The other day, you used the words “sticky stuff,” referring to the way the oil industry lurks underneath L.A. culture. I love those words and they’re definitely relevant to your work. How do you relate the historical, anthropological side of your project to its sticky, psychological underbelly?

DH: I think it has something to do with the problem of truth, or more accurately its impossibility. I came to Los Angeles with an idea of what I would find when I got here. It was the idea that had been presented to me, sold to me in a way. What I found was something completely different. History and anthropology work the same way. They present themselves as framing a truth while they are only presenting a perception (I was assistant to Fred Wilson for several years and I learned from him how important this idea is). However, the idea of truth is absolutely vital to our ability to exist as a society, this is common sense. Likewise, sublimation is absolutely necessary for the ego to exist within a society. There are rules to follow. Once again, the only way this sublimation works is to accept certain ideas, certain perceptions as true. But just like the oil that bubbles up into the sunny Los Angeles landscape, the sticky stuff that we sublimate, keep subterranean, or relegate to the subconscious can’t be kept at bay. It always bubbles up.

Drew Heitzler, "Untitled (Ladera Heights)," 2007. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: While the story you’re telling is ostensibly about the past, it seems really timely. As you developed this work, were you thinking of anything happening on today’s cultural landscape?

DH: Once again, I’m going to bring up The Oath of the Horatii (god, I love that painting). The painting is a depiction of a moment of Roman lore but this is not what the painting is about. It is a call to arms for a new Republic in France. This is the subtext. So while the historical anthropology that I am engaged in is ostensibly about historical power structures in Los Angeles, I believe that when the work is looked at closely, the relationships to our current cultural moment are clear.

CW: On a related note, I was reading Camille De Toledo’s Coming of Age at the End of History the other day. This passage, about a new breed of romanticism, reminded me of you: “We kept alive the idea that man was capable of acting upon History, but we abandoned the . . . heroism of the avante-gardes that imagined they could overturn it.” Thoughts?

DH: This goes back to the idea of truth that I addressed in a previous question. I feel that as we have observed how the successive avant-gardes were absorbed into the monolith of capital it became more difficult to take the idea of revolution seriously. One truth gets replaced by another truth to then be absorbed by the previous truth and none of them are true anyway.  I am quite certain that it is useless to try and overturn the dominant discourse as the result is merely a different dominant discourse. But what remains is agency. I feel that it is important as an artist to act upon the dominant discourse not with the intent of overturning it, but with the intent of revealing its contradictions; confusing it and so bringing it closer to a universal idea, which is as close to an idea of truth that I am willing to entertain.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Blum & Poe.

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