A.R.T.I.S.T. S.T.A.T.E.M.E.N.T., 2011

Being a fan of Tim and Eric, and ridiculous and annoying stuff in general, when I found Dave Greber’s The Eleuthromaniacs, I was thrilled. Dave was surprised when I inquired about it, describing the series as “universally disliked by everyone who ever saw it” and told me that it was rejected by almost every film festival except Indie Grits in Columbia, South Carolina. “It’s failures were the reason I became a visual artist.” In 2009, Dave shifted his focus away from the festival scene and commercial viability. He began seeking out spaces to exhibit his work as video installations.

Idea, 2010

I’m excited, 2010 was his first installation which he describes as “a reality show purgatory.” It’s looping and repetitious dialogue inspired more loops, presenting absurd philosophy as collaged ads in his Primer, a 3-channel installation. One of two installations this year, Interior Deterious, a collaboration with Andrea Ferguson, was written about by Doug MacCash of the Times-Picyune who saw the exhibit as part of our 21st century challenge to “reconcile our craving for digital magic and our nostalgia for old- fashioned tactile hand craft.” May’s Art Forum presents a review of Spaces at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, featuring the work of rising artist collectives in the St. Claude Avenue area, and includes Greber’s parody of his own collective, The Front: on Display, 2012.

Dave Greber, Rise From Your Grave, Interior Deterious, 2012

Is it a contradiction to poke fun at the art world, you know, being an artist?

No, I don’t think it is a contradiction, rather a responsibility of the artist to critique the art-world, as it is an extension of our corrupt societal and institutional structures in general. But, I actually feel extremely grateful that there is still a “vocation” (contemporary artist) in our society where it is acceptable to channel wild spirits and are encouraged think as free as possible, albeit, as long as you can keep your shit together enough to act like an intellectual some of the time.

What is your relationship to the commercial world? Is it okay to love tv?

I worked as a freelance video producer and made local commercials for advertising agencies for a few years after college. That world was so dark. I think when you are in advertising, [you] embrace hatred. Freelancers in advertising are like atheist mercenaries fighting psychic wars in the name of gods they don’t believe in, against unarmed civilians who don’t even know there is a war going on. I felt so much guilt when I made commercials. I had to totally change my paradigm of what I imagined life was about in order cope with my actions day-to-day. Needless to say, “it’s not for me.”

It’s okay to love TV as long as you can also love yourself, your neighbors, and [the] source which gives us life.

You are a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, and you were selected for the Oxford American’s 100 under 100 superstars of southern art in their latest issue. Could you tell me what it is to be a southerner, or to make southern art?

I didn’t start making art until I lived in the South. I felt entitled to start making and showing my work because there was a really cool visual arts scene already happening here in New Orleans. I joined The Front, my art collective, through an open call, which opened up my first opportunity to exhibit my own work in a gallery. From my shows at The Front I was invited to be in Prospect 1.5 New Orleans and high-end commercial galleries like Arthur Roger Gallery, all in the course of a few years. I have always been supported by the community here. I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I don’t feel like it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Stilllives, 2011

Today’s feature is brought to you by our friends at Beautiful/Decay. Read below to find a recently released artist interview with Los Angeles-based painter Justin John Greene.

Los Angeles has always held a special place in the hearts and minds of Americans, but for most it exists in an almost fictional capacity.  Hollywood isn’t a real place – it’s a postcard, a huge sign on the side of a mountain bracketed with strategically placed palm tree silhouettes.  Certainly not a place to call home, but for artist Justin John Greene that’s exactly what it is.  Hollywood is a part of his heritage, and the work reflects that.  Born and raised in the Los Angeles area, Greene’s work is strongly imbued with the history of the most romanticized industry in American culture.

In his most recent solo show at Actual Size (an exhibition space he co-runs in the Chinatown gallery district of east L.A.) the influence of the film industry is in full focus.  You Oughta Be In Pictures is a comprehensive installation that utilizes painting, sculpture, and video to create a truly immersive experience for the viewer.  Installation may seem like a bit of a leap from Greene’s primarily two dimensional practice, but a closer look into the artist’s process bridges the gap seamlessly.  His work is a distinctly enjoyable blend of sly historical references, direct compositional tactics, and cleverly applied humor.  If you have the opportunity to see the work in person I strongly encourage you to do so.

View full interview

40,000 bottle rockets make for a lot of noise and a lot of glare. Especially when they come hurtling toward your face. On April 7, 2012, artist Cai Guo-Qiang — known for his gunpowder drawings and performative “explosion events” — opened Sky Ladder at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary location with just such an experience. Called Mystery Circle, the event was pure spectacle. Over a thousand people showed up to watch Guo-Qiang use the rockets to burn images of crop circles and a Byzantine alien onto MOCA’s side.

Danielle Sommer: This is your first West Coast exhibition?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The first solo exhibition on the West Coast.

DS: Did that influence how you conceived the work? Is there anything specific about Los Angeles or the Western U.S. involved?

CGT: So back in the mid-nineties, when I was about to move from Japan to the U.S., I had a friend who was the editor of a major art magazine who told me that the West Coast is the closest place to the universe in the world. There’s a lot of hi-tech development, and also the aerospace industry is here.

DS: You’ve said that the role of art is to provide a distance for people to see certain issues and certain events – and that that distance is necessary to find the meaning below the surface. What it is about art that creates that distance? What is the meaning below the surface of this work?

Crop Circles, computer rendering for the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder, 2012, courtesy Cai Studio.

CGT: Because the exhibition is titled Sky Ladder, there is a sense of distance between humans on Earth, and the universe and outer space. It’s also a pictorial review of my art career and the past works and projects I’ve done through the years.  With the crop circle installation, it’s a reversal of the normal perspective, where we humans are looking from outer space onto Earth.

DS: You talked about your first rocket painting being a tiny canvas in your studio. Do you still have a studio practice? Do you do things that are just for your own eyes?

CGT: I still have a studio, but when I mentioned that I was working with that canvas thirty years ago, it was in my hometown in China. Of course, now my studio is located in New York, but it’s where I conceive ideas or make sketches. When it comes to using gunpowder, because you need a permit for that, we go out to Brookhaven and Long Island.

"Desire for Zero Gravity," 2012, gunpowder on canvas, 340.36 x 1066.8 cm (134 x 420 in.), commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, photo by Joshua White, courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

DS: Jeffery Dietch said that he considers your work both spectacular and intimate.  How do you feel when you’re experiencing it?

CGT: A lot of times very anxious — very excited in anticipating the event. When that happens, I feel at one with the audience.

DS: We all jumped back together.

CGT: I got hit by a few rockets!

DS: I saw that!

CGT: You saw that?

DS: I did.

Sky Ladder is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through July 30, 2012.

Installation view of Back to the Things Themselves (Lesley Punton & Judy Spark). Image courtesy of Lesley Punton.

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world.

Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of a feature on exhibitions presented during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art that place emphasis on the process of collaboration and the subjective experience within artistic practice.

Judy Spark, Like punctuation (symphoricarphos), Graphite on paper, 2012, (with Lesley Punton White out receding – Carn Dearg to right). Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: Shall we start off by talking about your individual practices?

LP: My work has always been concerned with landscape issues. In recent years, through the process of walking, it has become more explicit in relation to my lived experience of places that are usually wild and rarely urban. In the exhibition, I have tried to create a diverse conversation between different pieces of work, exploring the limits of experience; and polarities – of night and day, light and dark, and time and duration.

Lesley Punton, Schiehallion, silver gelatin 5 x 4 contact print made after placing a pinhole camera in the summit cairn, pointing South, whilst bivying on the summit of Schiehallion to record the duration of the hours of darkness of midsummer night ’09, 2009-12, with Jim Hamlyn. Image courtesy of artist.

In the past, a lot of the lived experience of my work resulted in long and complicated processes of making. There are works that are directly durational in their actual making, such as Flurry, which marks time. A participatory work is Schiehallion where Jim Hamlyn and I made a pinhole photograph that recorded the duration of midsummer’s night that year at the summit of the mountain. These have a very direct relationship to experiences whilst actually in land. Recent works respond more to reflection and recollections of those experiences. Some have literary connections. Gravesend is the place where the narration of ‘Heart of Darkness’ starts, with Marlowe sitting and recounting the tale of his experience with Kurtz up the Congo.

Lesley Punton, Gravesend, graphite on paper, 2010. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: Could you talk about the Duration pieces? They make me think of a journey, where the days refer to the duration, or the process of making the work.

LP: The duration refers to polar night and polar day and the idea of time as something that is not quite fixed. I’ve always been interested in aspects of time – deep time and geological time – probably from the experience of spending a lot of time in hills.

Lesley Punton, Duration 2, oil & gesso on board, 2010-12 (photo credit L Punton). Image courtesy of artist.

MC: When did you start looking at the idea of the lived experience and venturing into remote places?

LP: I’ve always believed that you would make something that has some relationship to how you connect with the world. The intensity of the experience of walking and climbing mountains was something important and I became a bit obsessed with it. It felt unnatural not to do something with it.

Judy Spark, The things themselves, Two FM radios / transmitters with digital soundtracks, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: My route to making work about lived experience was through a concern with mechanisms like environmentalism that are established to get people to recognize the value of their surroundings. Environmentalism of any kind – whether related to ecology, renewable energies etc., – depends upon the scientific mechanisms that have created the problems that we’re facing in the first place. In the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve begun trying to find ways to think about how people engage with their surroundings. Conversely to Lesley, my landscapes might be right under my feet. It tends to be urban because that’s the environment I’m treading on all the time, and that’s how things come to consciousness.

MC: Could you explain the basis of your philosophical approach. It seems to be about being within a certain environment, perceiving what is around you, and letting these surface.

Judy Spark, Instructions for creating a gap, Printed text, 2011 – 12. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: A big influence was a Master’s in Environmental Philosophy in 2006 which broadened my thinking. There doesn’t seem to be much between the poles of not really caring about the place that you inhabit, and having a code of rules that are scientifically directed on how you should behave. We’re not used to working out anything in-between that is more personal. Trying to find a subjective response to things might actually turn out to have wider relevance than “just my own personal subjective response”. I became interested in the phenomenology movement and the idea of trying to describe actions or processes in a way that allows people to find something more direct and new. I think there are parallels with more indigenous or Buddhist experiences of the world which I can’t be a part of. I’d love to be, but I would only be putting my own Western perception onto them.

Judy Spark, Listening in the gap, Bound, printed text. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: I had a conversation with Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, and we spoke about the subjective experience and values. When there is an objective framework such as environmentalism, it is easy to subscribe to it because it is clear what kind of values there are. When we move to the subjective, it opens the question of whether there are still values within this realm.

LP: As much as I might prioritise a lived experience and the subjective, my relationship with the audience is more objective. I’m always looking for a distancing mechanism. The act of translation in the artwork gives the potential for objectivity or a poetics of space, which the viewer could enter into with their own subjective experience. If I thought for one second that what I was making was self-indulgent work, I would run for the hills, literally. At the same time I have no interest in creating distanced work. While my work might be incredibly minimal, I hope that there is a poetic layer that subverts that sparseness.

JS: The notion of value is an interesting one because of the distancing that you talk about. I know that I have a bit of a drum to bang in some way, but I can’t use my artwork for that and I wouldn’t want to try. It really is about putting something out there and if it allows viewers to think about their own response to things, then great.

Lesley Punton, Flurry, silverpoint & gesso on paper, 2008. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: How did you meet and what led you to decide to collaborate on this exhibition.

LP: A mutual friend was planning on hillwalking in 2004 and we started regular weekend walks.

JS: We did talk about the possibility of showing work together for years and have had many conversations. When we secured the show, I became very busy. Lesley has a young son and we both work. The collaborative aspect probably starts now in the debriefing of what we’ve done.

LP: As we have individual practices, it was probably important that we had our time to make our own work.

JS: Now that we have put our work in proximity like this, maybe this is the beginning of the next stage

LP: Walking is a very interesting way to collaborate and to build friendships. There are extended periods of silence and these are different from the conversations you have when you meet somebody in the pub. You actively experience something together. I have made some works where I have collaborated with Jim Hamlyn, my partner. The notion of collaboration is still quite new for me in the actual making of artworks together. Up until very recently I’ve not formally collaborated.

Judy Spark, Orrery (gallium aparine), Graphite on paper, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: I’m usually a very isolated practitioner. I teach in an art school and that’s maybe where I get a lot of my energy. Collaboration is something I haven’t made a decision not to do. It seems to be closely connected to that thing of value. Maybe if I meet another artist whose work or practice, or something they say to me about my work or practice, chimes in a way. Maybe it’s to do with being a friend first.

LP:  I think collaborations grow organically. I don’t think you can just put two people together and say collaborate, do it now. It doesn’t work that way.

MC: Perhaps you need a lot of trust. It starts off from conversations and knowing that those conversations can take place even without the art.

LP: …and equality as well. If there’s an imbalance there, I don’t think you can collaborate, and that’s where your idea of trust comes in.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: cymbal (cast lead cymbal on stand). Image courtesy of artists.

These interviews will be published in two editions–check back in with us tomorrow for our interview with the artists from Back to the Things Themselves. This post features In the Shadow of the Hand which is on show at Market Gallery and presents new work by Sarah Forrest (SF) and Virginia Hutchison (VH). Reflecting on the process of evaluation and critique in the development of artistic practice, both artists create texts for each other that are cast in lead. The lead is then melted and recast into an object by each artist in response to the text, forming part of a series of exchanges exploring subjective responses to an objective call, and the relationship between object and text.

MC: Could you talk a bit about your individual practice? I saw Sarah’s work in the exhibition P is for Protagonist and couldn’t help but think of that exhibition when I entered gallery 1.

Virginia Hutchison, Excerpts from 7 sunsets (temporary intervention with gold leaf, IOTA public art projects, Inverness, 2010). Image courtesy of artist.

VH: A lot of my work is site or context-specific interventions in the public realm. Quite often it is objective or brief-led. Recent projects have required interaction between the work and people, and an exchange of skills. What has become more important for me has been the dialogue in the making of the work, for example with people installing the work and having conversations about the space and the work.  Through the conversations, I’ve become interested in the different roles, of whether I am the artist, or they are the artists because they help to make the work come to full cycle. That was what made us decide to collaborate. Both of us were dealing with relationships between viewer, artist, object, audience, and how all these roles shift. I was at the point when I was really quite keen to just reflect on all the work that I was doing.

SF: My practice is much more gallery-based and I do creative writing with texts published independently of the visual work. I was in an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and my starting point for my work was the voices of objects. In the run-up to the exhibition, I was undertaking a lot of research on the voices of objects and I became so lost in theory that I almost lost myself. The work I presented, Part 1: for the voice, was a white sculpture narrating with a pair of headphones. Everything had gone white, and it was about a voice that was missing. By that point, I had a desire to move away from intellectualizing, come back to a much more subjective space, and find different ways to talk about a creative practice. That was when we began speaking about evaluation and critique, in relation to the art object. I am interested in creative writing as a response to a visual experience and I think that’s when our conversation started.

Sarah Forrest, Part 1: for the voice, (2010), installation with a framed text, a monitor playing a video, a white sculpture made of plaster, paper, wire mesh and gloss paint which had headphones emitting a female voice attached to it. Duration 10.23 minutes. Exhibited in Days, a three-person show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Image courtesy of artist.

VH: I haven’t done a lot of creative writing myself but what I like is how it made me think differently about the projects I was doing. I thought that it was important to find a way to present a narrative of the conversations I was having. When we started off, I thought it was going to be very linear, when we had text, object, text, object, and one would follow one from the other. In reality, when responding to Sarah’s text, I was thinking of my text, and I was also thinking of what object she might be making in response. So many things started to feed in, including our conversations.

SF: We started off with texts that each of us had written or appropriated that were cast into lead letters in Edinburgh. We would respond to each other’s text with an object.  The size and weight of the object was dictated by the size and weight of the texts. It was a really simple relationship between text and an object, and a playful way to work and structure a collaboration. There was a point when I was making a symbol that was in response to the the the and I was asking for advice. We spoke about ideas of repetition and rhythm, the the the being like a stutter almost, and talked about the idea of making an object like a stutter. We began to collaborate in the making of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: the the the (typeset text on paper). Image courtesy of artists.

VH: Even in the making of the work, we had to share our skills quite a lot. What I found healthy yet scary was letting go of ownership of something, as well as authorship. Although I know what texts I wrote and what objects I made, because Sarah has a text that sits with my object  – is it mine or her’s? Is it somebody else’s?

MC: I was interested in the decisions that both of you had decided to take, in relation to what you considered physical and immaterial within the exhibition space. The materiality of the objects could be very seductive just by looking at it. Yet these vanish into a two-dimensional screen. I personally found the texts very three-dimensional. One of the texts had instructions for a person to inhale and exhale and it made me feel my own body.

VH: From the standpoint of public art that I work in, issues of permanence are things I am always considering. What is permanent or temporary? It could be a day or 20 years. I like the swopping round, of the text becoming the object, and the object becoming quite two-dimensional. Once an object disappears, it has a different narrative.

SF: What is it that sticks with you when you’ve left the exhibition? What is the echo of the object and how do you narrativize that memory of the object?

MC: I think that because I’m unable to move around an object, it changes how my narrative of an experience is made. When the object is presented on a screen, perhaps it changes the way you remember it?

VH: I think definitely. Although it is projected on a lead screen, almost as the last remaining object…

SF: … and the size of the screen relates to the weight of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand (gallery image). Image courtesy of artists.

MC: An objective framework has a determined set of values. In shifting from objective to subjective evaluation, are there still values? For example, when you were talking about the conversations that had occurred, are you suggesting that for any kind of critique, there has to be a relationship between two people, or an emotional involvement?

SF: I think it’s a part of communication. For something to have value, there has to be a sharing of what is important and some kind of agreement on what things are important, which is what has happened in this whole process.

VH: I think you’re always going to have a relationship with somebody whom you’re critiquing or evaluating a piece of work. If it’s a media-driven thing then there is definitely a separation. I think that’s the problem – there is a separation when you are not encountering somebody on a face-to-face, real time situation. When you think about the context of making work, it might reveal a lot about the people that create it and how they have conversation with folk. Are they dominant in a conversation and does it reflect in their work? Does their work allow people to put their own selves into it in some way?

SF: That was always a concern with the project because it’s a call-and-response between us. We had to think about how it is interesting to someone else and not just about our personal relationship. The installation became important as a space where you can read and you can sit. I was quite aware of not becoming quite closed and this feels like an experimental exhibition. It’s the first time I’ve collaborated on an exhibition and the work, when presented, still feels very active. As soon as you present something as an exhibition it takes on a position, as a thing in the world.

Rineke Dijkstra. Montemor, Portugal, May 1, 1994; courtesy the artist; © Rineke Dijkstra.

Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the mid-career retrospective of work by the photographer Rineke Dijkstra lays out the argument she has built for more than twenty years for the intimacy and dignity of portraiture as a genre. Beginning with the portraits that first brought Dijkstra’s work to international awareness, of bathing suit–clad teenagers at the beach, and culminating with a series of images of children and teenagers posing in a park, viewers encounter subjects who are alternately self-conscious, exhilarated, stoic, or wary but always cognizant of projecting an identity for the camera.

Looking at these photographs, one notices the extent to which the close cropping of an image, a non-descript background, or the figure’s selected pose or attire inform our impressions of who these individuals are and how much of themselves they hold in reserve. While their faces are expressive, their smiles are rare; they are not trying to project idealistic personas. What comes to the foreground instead are the representations of specific moments and particular affiliations in their lives that resonate universally. Whether Dijkstra’s subjects are teenage ravers, school children, refugees, soldiers, new mothers, or bullfighters, the specific details of their individual narratives are stripped away and replaced by a viewer’s empathy and recognition for what they are experiencing.

On February 17, I had the opportunity to walk through the exhibition with the artist and discuss how these ideas of individuality and universality resonated with one photograph or another, often with the work between us a silent participant in the conversation.  The photographs’ subjects are where we have been or will be: standing at the cusp between one life phase and another or fully immersed in the attributes and behaviors of a larger group, institution, or subculture.  And whether grounded or in flux, the question “Who am I?” persists from one photograph to the next.

Rineke Dijkstra. Nicky, The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, England, 2009; courtesy the artist; © Rineke Dijkstra.

The one variation of this question emanates from the three-channel video installation, I See A Woman Crying (2009), commissioned by Tate Liverpool, in which a group of schoolchildren speculate about the 1937 Picasso painting,Weeping Woman. The portrait never appears in the video; the camera remains focused on the children as they puzzle over who the woman is and why she is crying. As viewers of this video, we sit impassively as they spin narratives of murdered ghosts and shunned wedding guests, but all the while, they are gazing outward at us. Dijsktra has turned the tables on her audience; we are positioned as the subject of the students’ observations. They express fears of death, loneliness, betrayal, and unhappiness that are intrinsic reflections of our own.

________

Patricia Maloney: There’s the photograph of a schoolboy and also those photos of the Israeli soldiers, in uniform and out, in which it seems you’re trying to find the essence of who they are, within their institutional identities as schoolchildren or as soliders. How do they negotiate for their own selves within this collective identity?

Rineke Dijkstra: Within a group or a specific situation—for instance, in Israel everybody has to commit to a collective identity [with conscription]—there is always the individual who is also longing for something else. You always try to keep your own personality. You can never afford to lose that; that’s how people distinguish themselves from each other.

Continue reading interview…

Lukasz Jastrubczak, The End, 2009. Documentation of a performance, photo: Małgorzata Mazur

Bean Gilsdorf: Let’s talk about your sense of cinema and some of the motifs that you’ve pulled from films. How do you find your material, and what attracts you to it?

Lukasz Jastrubczak: Most of my inspiration is connected directly to a specific idea in the movies. I try to take an idea from cinema and use it in a very minimal way, as simply as possible. I use materials like cardboard or fabric, because the works are props, as though I am taking the scenography from movies and putting it into reality. For example, The End was made with cardboard and helium balloons. I wanted to put the fictional sign into reality as simply as possible and recreate the final motion of the words on a movie screen. And Paramount Mountain [installed as part of the exhibition Mirage] is just the beginning of a movie, the logo. At least, that’s the inspiration but then I also connect it with the tradition of abstract geometry, the shape of a triangle and the color blue. It creates the idea of a distant mountain in aerial perspective.

BG: And you are also inspired by various artistic movements and ideas, right?

LJ: This work is all connected to suprematism and cubism in some way. Inspiration for Cubist Composition with a Jug didn’t come from the movies directly, but the idea works with Paramount Mountain. The concept is that in the gallery space you have a distant mountain, a blue triangle shape, and it’s the furthest 3D object for the viewer. But behind the mountain there is this fourth dimension, what the cubists were looking for, and there’s a sculpture of a jug there. So formally and physically there are four jugs, but the title suggests that there is only one jug. It’s one sculpture in different points of view, dealing with different kinds of dimensions, which is analytical cubism. The cubist composition becomes a four dimensional object.

BG: And this is connected to Władysław Strzeminski’s theory of vision. Will you explain that?

LJ: In 1946, Strzeminski wrote “The Theory of Vision,” which is about the perception of perspective. The idea is that until the beginning of the 20th century, perspective was mainly linear and it made an illusion on a flat painting. Strzeminski claimed that Cezanne was the first artist for whom linear perspective was not the truth. Cezanne developed the perception of reality to the maximum, and after that step everything was abstract geometry or something else. Cezanne’s work is about looking from different points of view, so you are not fixed to one point of view where all lines converge in the distance, you look from different points. For example, in a landscape you know that behind the tree there is something else, there is knowledge of other, non-visible objects in the space. Cezanne just takes all of that knowledge and makes a painting.

Lukasz Jastrubczak, Cubist Composition with a Jug, 2011. Sculpture (cardboard, spray, wood, glue), 55 x 23 x 20 inches

BG: Do you think that’s connected to your attraction to cinema? Because in a movie you can see things from different viewpoints. Unless someone uses one long shot, a scene is generally made up of shots from multiple perspectives.

LJ: Yeah, that’s the thing, that’s why Strzeminski’s theory interested me, because of the way that nowadays we see by the movies and by film language.

BG: So much of this work, Paramount Mountain, The End, is centered specifically on American cinema, and now you’re going to do this American road trip, which is a really iconic experience.  Why the United States? What is it about being here?

LJ: My consciousness of the world and the way I perceive things is very influenced by American cinema and culture. I am interested in the way we perceive the world while being influenced by pop culture and movies. Based on these two things, it can seem like the average movie viewer knows everything about the USA: what it looks like, what to expect. This is the perfect combination of fiction and reality.

Lukasz Jastrubczak, Flags on the desert, 2011. Documentation of a performance, photo: Małgorzata Mazur

BG: So what will you do in the desert?

LJ: I’m working on a book project with Sebastian Cichocki, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, who is interested in conceptual art and land art. Our idea is to create a book as an exhibition. He is sending me some texts about land art and conceptual art in America, and I will react to each. I will go for twenty days, driving from San Francisco to the southwest of America, reacting to these texts in visual form: photographs, small actions and performances. At the same time I will be realizing other works, mainly a film without a script. It’s a performatively-made movie. The idea is that we are filming the trip and the performances and installations that I will put in America. In the desert, I’m planning to install some small wire sculptures and make some performances with the fabric of the mountain.

BG: So you film this performance or some kind of action in the desert. Is the resulting movie documentation/reality or is that film a new fiction?

LJ: That’s a good question. When you document an art performance, it is supposed to be a reality. But I’m also interested in the fiction, so somehow I want to create this interesting fragile threshold between those two worlds. Like special effects in the movie, sometimes you don’t know if it’s real or not.

Lukasz Jastrubczak, The End, 2009. Documentation of a performance, photo: Małgorzata Mazur

BG: You’re so influenced by American culture and images. Do you think of yourself as a global artist, or as a Polish artist reacting to American culture? Or do you think about this at all?

LJ: I think of myself as a Polish artist influenced by American culture. But I think this Polish background is very important, because to travel in America is more exciting for me as a Polish artist, maybe, than if I were an American artist.

DailyServing contributor Allie Haeusslein had the opportunity to speak with Miller about her distinctive process and approach to wide-ranging forms on the occasion of these two exhibitions.

Liz Miller. "Recalcitrant Mimesis, " 2012 at David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO. Mixed media installation. Photo credits: Paul Winner. Courtesy of the Artist.

I’m really interested in your use of materials, which for me seem to play with notions of weight and weightlessness, ephemerality and permanence. How do you select and think about the relationship between your various materials?

My installations have recently been comprised mainly of synthetic felt with a stiffener in it—this is what most of the installation at David B. Smith is made of. I like this material for many reasons. It conveys fragility, but is actually very strong. It has multiple associations. Felt is used in crafts, but also has industrial applications. It is highbrow (fine, woolen handmade felt) and lowbrow (the craft felt that I use). I love the fact that I can start with a soft, tactile material and manipulate it in ways that are structured and architectural. Lately I’ve been referencing the silhouettes of weapons in many of my works. I like the contradiction between the softness of the felt and the violence of the source materials.

With your current exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery, you were asked to create a site-specific installation utilizing the work of Clyfford Still as a point of departure. How do you typically select the forms employed in your work?

The forms in my installations are usually hybrids. I love merging organic forms with synthetic ones, benign forms with malignant ones, contemporary forms with historical ones. Through simplification and recombination, shapes lose their original connotations and take on new and varied meanings. I manipulate shapes by mirroring, bending, and folding as well as through color choices. The manner in which a form is draped, suspended, or folded can completely change the way the viewer reads that form. Ultimately, forms gain resonance through their relationships with one another and take on new lives within the installation.

Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the Abstract Expressionist movement. I am curious to know if any of the concerns embodied by this movement have informed your work, or this project in particular.

Abstract Expressionism championed the individual gesture, and Still’s work is no exception—the idea of active, gestural mark-making is present in his large, bold canvases. Surface is also important in his work—there is intensive layering and tactile paint handling that makes his colors resonate and gives them depth. In some regards, the idea of translating an abstract expressionist’s gesture to a cut form is futile—my work only has hard edges. The gesture becomes frozen and generalized. I think this dissonance between my process and his is an interesting one.

Liz Miller. "Untitled 03 (Mimetic Deception)," 2012. Mixed media on paper 24.5 x 19.5 x 8 in. , framed. Courtesy of the Artist and David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO.

Given that the majority of your works are room-sized installations, your smaller scale works are an exciting departure; they feel like psychedelic Rorschach inkblots. Can you speak a bit about these works’ scale and their bright, bold colors?

My smaller works on paper are a very different experience—but they share many of the same attributes of my installations. Although my installations are commanding in scale, I feel like my smaller works on paper have an attitude of courage and experimentation that often is one step ahead of the installation works. They are not schematics or diagrams for the larger works, and yet invariably the kinds of decisions I am making in the works on paper end up appearing in the larger works. I’ve been playing a great deal with tension in the smaller works, and this is starting to appear in my larger site-specific projects.

The colors in the works on paper are probably truer to my usual palette than the palette of the installation, which referenced some of Still’s color choices quite specifically. Bold color is a way of seducing the viewer, of presenting them with an enticing façade. It is also a very immediate way to separate forms from their original contexts. A fuchsia machine gun part, for example, is suddenly separated from its source without much manipulation of the original silhouette. I’m very interested in how visual information is conveyed in the form of charts, graphs, diagrams, sonar, radar—any kind of mapping of information. In such mapping, intense color often is indicative of a hub of activity…or a problem. Consider storm radar imagery, for example. The more intense the color, the more violent the storm. This play between beautiful, seductive color and sinister events is something I enjoy tampering with. And certainly the amped up color gives the smaller works an intensity that belies their diminutive scale.

Liz Miller. "Ornamental Invasion" at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Photo credit: Amanda Hankerson, MIA. Courtesy of the Artist.

You mentioned an interest in violence with respect to both your formal choices and selection of color, which I find quite interesting given the incredible beauty and intricacy of your works. How has this concept informed your current or upcoming projects?

I’ve always been interested in forms that embody both beauty and violence. Past points of reference have included invasive plant species and storm radar imagery. More recently, I’ve been drawn to weapons from a wide range of historical and geographic locations. While I’ve become fascinated by the conceptual implications of utilizing their forms in my work, the initial attraction was formal. Despite the brutality of their intended use, the lethal functionality of arms is matched by an intent focus on exquisite formal beauty. When removed from a militant context, many weapons can be taken for decorative arts objects due to their intricacy and high level of craft. I find it curious that we commit brutal acts with these amazingly beautiful objects.

In addition to weapons, I’ve been looking at military configurations and uniforms. There is a highly aestheticized component to war that I am just beginning to explore. Ornament, costume, order, and precision become part of war’s visual landscape. It’s the default position to focus on imagery that is overtly violent: all the obvious dramatic tension is found there. But I’m more interested in how beauty is used to maintain a sense of authority, confidence and control in the midst of turmoil and brutality.

I’m still at the very beginning of my work with this imagery and am excited to see where I can go with it. Last spring I did a project that allowed me to explore objects related to arms and armament from the Minneapolis Museum of Arts’ collection and to implement them in an installation at the MIA. And just a few months ago I took a research trip to Washington, DC to spend more time looking at various historical weapons and uniforms and considering their potential roles in upcoming projects.

While weapon forms were not part of my recent project at David B. Smith Gallery, the linear, militant, firing-squad arrangements that I’ve been exploring in other projects come through in the linear sequences of this work, albeit in a more subtle, Still-influenced manner.

Olaf Brzeski, Hunter's Fiancee, 2006. Ceramics, wood, spray enamel

Bean Gilsdorf: You work with a lot of ethereal, evocative forms: smoke, destroyed objects, things that seem uncanny…

Olaf Brzeski: Uncanny is a good word, yeah.

BG: Tell me about that. What are your feelings toward these objects?

OB: To explain how I feel you need to know that I was born in the south of Poland, in Wroclaw. This city has a complicated history because it’s very near the border and it changed owners: Czech, Polish, then German, now it’s Polish again. Before the war it was a German city, and after WWII the borders were changed and [Poland] got it. The atmosphere there, the architecture of bunkers and tunnels, there’s a constant presence of the fear of war, even in dreams. In my childhood it was so present—my grandparents’ stories, on the television, in propaganda—I didn’t just put that away. So now I use it. Some of my work comes from this kind of sinister premonition of what might happen.

BG: Like the video installed at the Casino [one venue of the exhibition Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity].

OB: Yes, In Memory of Major Josef Moneta.

Olaf Brzeski, In Memory of Major Josef Moneta, 2008. Installation with video and plaque

BG: That work also has an anxiety to it. The visuals are sinister, as you say, and the sound heightens that. How did you come to make this work?

OB: This piece functions as a discovery. There’s the movie, which I made to look like found footage, and there’s a marble plaque attached to the wall with a porcelain medallion, it’s a piece of gravestone. So these two pieces are really like discoveries.

BG: And what is the video about?

OB: The whole situation is taking place in a partisan’s camp in December 1939, just after the war began. And this small group of soldiers is hiding and their leader, Major Josef Moneta, he’s kind of a myth, a legendary person. His face is deformed; he’s monstrous, but he’s also a kind of superhero. In America you have your superheroes and we here in Poland are watching and copying that. And I wanted to create our own Polish superhero, but acting on the border of good and evil. On one side he’s this leader, an officer, but he is scary. His acts are scary, but definitely he is a force, and in bad times his strength will come and save us. He is a savior, but it’s not clear.

BG: It’s a borderline, an ambiguity.

OB: Exactly.

BG: In Memory is not site specific, but a lot of your work is, yes?

OB: Yes, I prefer to work that way. But I like to work site specifically in a way that it looks like it’s real, like it was there for years, that it’s supposed to be there. I really like to work with museums and places with history and a context. The Casino is also quite good for that. I don’t like white cube space.

Olaf Brzeski, A Crash on the Museum Stairs, 2009. Mixed media installation

BG: So you build on the history that’s already there, accentuate it or bring it forward in some way?

OB:  I don’t want the work to be rootless. I make up stories, fictions, and these are the roots of the work. It’s like gossip, you say the words to others and the story begins.

BG: Your work is like science fiction, surreal, a parallel reality.

OB: Yes, I think about making a gap, searching for a gap that you can’t pass over, or name, or categorize. Maybe surreal is an overused term.

BG: Making a gap or finding a gap? Because they are different.

OB: In my case, making a gap. Finding a gap…it sounds more real, because reality is full of gaps. But I don’t find them, I make them, and then I name them. I make stories, to attach roots to the artwork, but I don’t want it to be part of reality. It’s a stretched possibility.

BG: Do you feel that you are a Polish artist specifically? Would you put yourself in a geographical category?

OB: I don’t ever think about it.

BG: But if I asked you…

OB: I don’t know. There is something Polish in this kind of thinking. For example, the uniforms in the movie, or just the atmosphere, but…I don’t know. I went to an exhibition and all the journalists were asking about Communism, that’s what they were interested in, like: How do you feel now, how do you work as an artist? You had this Communist past, are you released from it or does it still have an impact on you?

Olaf Brzeski, Dream - Spontaneous Combustion, 2008. Resin and soot installation

BG: And what was your answer?

OB: No, completely not, I don’t care about that! It doesn’t have any influence on me. I was born in ’75 and my consciousness was forming at the end of Communism, and apart from a couple of details I don’t give a damn about it. Completely. War is more present, more specific. Especially when you grow up in an old German city with this sinister atmosphere. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced anything like that…

BG: Well, I’ve been to Berlin and seen the old buildings with bullet holes, pockmarked from shelling…

OB: Yes, Wroclaw is full of these remains. But I mean this whole empire, this architecture: that simple, strong, monumental style of that time. Nazi style. There’s a lot of it and it creates this atmosphere of fear. So Wroclaw doesn’t feel like home. I was born there but it doesn’t feel like home. My friends and I admire the city, it’s well planned and green, it’s very easy to live there. But it doesn’t feel like home.

Whitney Lynn, Death Parties (2011) Plastic, glass, alcohol, chrome-laminated birch shelf, 21 x 36 x 6 in.

Bean Gilsdorf: How did this new body of work begin?

Whitney Lynn: It started with Southern Exposure in 2009, they had a show called “Bellwether” and they were asking artists to predict or envision the future. I was looking at the way in which do-it-yourself and sustainability movements overlap with survivalism. I started picking up these images about how to trap your own food, skin your own squirrels, eat your own rats, and those sorts of things. Then when I was doing a later project I was also thinking about containment, and I started thinking about trapping systems. I was not quite sure what I was going to do with all of it, and then there was the realization, oh, there’s a project here.

BG: Do you think of your work as post-apocalyptic? Has anyone ever framed your work that way?

WL: Maybe a little, with the survivalist stuff. I think there’s something kind of sinister about a lot of the pieces, but I think they’re funny.

BG: What are the general trends of your interests?

WL: The earlier works that were dealing with military were very autobiographical, and I was navigating my own personal history. Then things shifted, and I was thinking about how these intersections of politics or military are really interconnected into all kinds of aspects of life. That changed my focus, to see where those messy intersections or boundaries existed. For this particular show I was thinking about metaphors of traps and their relationship to sculpture.

Whitney Lynn, Prepared Position with Disturbance Ventilation and Luminous Signal (2010) Mixed media (furniture, cement, tv, fan) 7 x 8 x 4 feet

BG: Do you feel like that’s freeing, to get away from making autobiographical work?

WL: Well, it’s always connected. For me, it’s impossible to get away from some sort of personal thread. It’s extending from a different kind of autobiography. These traps are placed in a setting where there’s the possibility of a different kind of question: what’s the prey and what’s the bait, the lure? Part of the work is about futility—nothing’s ever going to be trapped with these. And that’s where I see some of the humor, too. It relates back to some of my earlier work…I made a bug-out location that would never actually survive anything. It was made for one person and had food supplies, but they were capers, so it was this empty gesture of preparation. And there were all these weapons that would never actually hurt you. It was all pretty pathetic. It was part of the question, “How can you prepare for the ultimate disaster when you don’t know what that is?”

Whitney Lynn, BOL (Bug-Out-Location) (2009) Mixed media installation with performance elements

BG: What’s next for you?

WL: One project that I’ve been doing on the side and that will probably come to the fore is street performance. I think that’s really a place of intersections and boundaries. My interest is in that area where street performance is performance art. I’ve been really obsessed with the Bush Man in Fisherman’s Wharf for along time, so I shot a video with him recently. I’m sure there will be a development that leads me back to the traps project.

BG: I can see the borders and boundaries that you’re flirting with in your work…some are more literal and explicit, like with the sculptures, and some are more subtle, just the feeling is there, but on the whole it creates a thread through the work.

WL: There’s something exciting about allowing that thread through the work, but to let it play itself out naturally. There can be these connections, but they don’t have to be calculated. For years I was like, “I make work that’s about intersections with military and political cultures,” and it was almost like I had written an artist statement and I didn’t want to write it again, and I’d better make things that fit into that. There was pressure to define myself, to say okay so I this is what I do, but I got tired of making fifteen different kinds of bunkers, that’s not all I think about. I was eliminating possibilities because I was stuck in the idea that my work needed to be concise.

Whitney Lynn, Trap no. 001 (2011) Acrylic, polished tree branch, 21 x 17 x 16 in.

BG: When you’re making the work, you’re so close to it. What feels like an enormous left-hand turn to you is, in reality, a slight detour to others. But you wonder how you’ll explain your decisions to the world.

WL: Right, yeah, and I think there’s something important about separating the making from the talking about it. I feel sometimes I have to justify what I’m doing before I even finish making and that can be disruptive. I try not to worry in advance how to articulate the work…it’s a matter of knowing that there’s a difference between the process and its final articulation.

BG: Sometimes you can frame the work loosely by saying that, for example, it’s about control: attempting to control the situation of a disaster, or the actions of another person or animal, or even the definition of an action on the street, where you decide if it’s performance art or not. And then in each new iteration of your work, you decide how it fits in—or not—to that broad category.

WL: I think a lot of the work is this attempt at control that is usurped, the rug gets pulled, in the face of all these systems, these attempts to corral, contain, or understand something. Where I find it interesting is where that’s not possible.

Whitney Lynn, Silver Equivalent (2011) Clay bricks, silver-plated steel nail, 7 x 14.5 x 23 in.

BG: Why did you title the show Sculptures Involontaires?

WL: The legend goes that Brassaï was hanging out with Dali at a café, and Dali pulled a rolled-up ticket stub out of his pocket. A conversation ensued about how you could photograph anything and it becomes sculpture: ticket stubs, and chewing gum, and debris…photographed, they look like landscapes or unknown objects. Through the photograph anything can become unfamiliar and strange. I love that idea. I was looking at traps and seeing how traps are sculptures just by themselves. I started buying traps—someone tracking my Amazon purchases would be really scared of me!—I was getting them and seeing how they function, admiring the beautiful ingenuity of them, all this creative thought that is put into something so sinister. So there’s this involuntary way in which they are already sculptures. My work here functions as traps and as sculptures. I’m loosely pulling from that idea of context, that by changing the context you can re-look at the form.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photography courtesy Robert Ochshorn.

Michelle Schultz: With your project War Veteran Vehicle - a transformed military vehicle that fires fragments of statements by soldiers and their families on the façades of public buildings – the highly personal and revealing testimonies make the subject quite vulnerable, and I imagine there are many barriers that need to be overcome to achieve this. Could you begin by telling me a little about the process that is involved and how you approach those that you worked with in the project?

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Well, those projects would not happen if I did not establish some trustful contact with the social workers who are trusted by veterans, homeless, or immigrants – places where people try to connect and try to help each other. I first present an idea, then they have to test me and I have to pass their test – they have to protect people with whom they work from people like myself, and from people like you. Then, the project and myself, we have to be tested by those who are potential co-artists. This is not easy – very often you start with rejection or destruction, psychologically speaking, of my presence and of the work. It is something coming from outside and invading them and maybe manipulating them. They must first properly destroy any doubt, and if I survive this, and the project survives this, then I show up again, and I am ready to be of some kind of service. In this process, the confidence amongst some of these people develops and they might make use of this project for their own lives, and for lives of others who cannot join the project because it’s too early for them, it’s too dangerous, too risky…

MS: Do you continue to keep in touch with the people that you work with in your projects? Are you aware of how the project has affected their lives, and the long-term impacts of it?

KW: For them, and for me, the thing in itself is the end of sometimes a year-long process of recording. Inevitably some ties develop, also among people who are part of the project who normally would not connect. So something is sustained – some of the projects continue in the sense that the network established by the project is still operational for awhile. So they help each other, but I am not part of it. My job is to disappear, it is their project. When it all somehow works for them, it is their success. If it doesn’t, it is my failure.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photography courtesy Robert Ochshorn.

MS: Now, you have initiated the War Veteran Vehicle project in various locations, including Poland, Denver, Liverpool and most recently, Eindhoven. Do you plan to continue this work in other places?

KW: Yes, but not forever. Unfortunately, circumstances demand more work in this area because there will be an enormous amount of soldiers coming back, especially in the United States. In Europe, most of the people are coming back from so-called peace missions, but it is a normal war. And it is very important that they make sure that through their words they explain that it is a war, and what it means to be at war. Also what it means to be a family of those who come back from war, or who have left for war, or who are absent because they are somewhere fighting, and in what way those families are proper war veterans themselves.

MS: Yes, some of the most powerful statements come from the families of soldiers who have come back from war, as they convey how these veterans have returned home, yet are lost to them psychologically or emotionally.

KW: An incredible amount of people are victims or survivors of secondary trauma. Each time someone comes back, he or she re-traumatises seventy-nine people according to experts who work on this in the United States. And young people are blindly signing up for the army because there is enormous amount of propaganda, a certain image and a lofty sense of mission, duty, country. This is something veterans know very well. They were processed through this war machine and they know there is no relation between the way they were before and they way they are now. And they know how much they are resented by society. In fact, they are foreigners and they are homeless in their own country and in their own homes. When they came back, they didn’t really come back, they’re gone. And the chance that this will happen is very high in comparison to previous wars because most people will come back alive, rather than dead, because of better armour and medical technologies. The fallout of them being alive, in this way, is tremendous.

In Poland, half of the people who are speaking through the vehicle are women. In Liverpool there is one woman, but it is very significant as she is speaking about almost being killed by her husband, and the husband also says that he almost killed her and he doesn’t remember. These things are not only the facts, but the fact that they are being said by those people themselves, in the open, is significant. Speaking in a public space itself is an act of incredible shift – only one percent of veterans speak in public, and almost none of the families. It is also acoustically very powerful  – it reverberates and echoes and is reflected from the blank and blind façades of the buildings and monuments that have witnessed events in the past.

MS: So the buildings and walls you use are not only a physical or practical part of the project, but an important symbolic one as well?

KW: Yes, there is an extremely thick wall that separates those who know what war is, and those who don’t. So in a way, this is an attempt to shake the wall, and crack it, and maybe make a little a little break in it. In that sense, the wall is an important word here, and the façade is also an important word, and the monument is an important word – because walls, façades, monuments and memorials are obsessed with not only remembering and saying certain things, but also with not saying a lot of things, and forgetting a lot of things about the war.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Flame, Governors Island, 2009. Photography courtesy Michael Marcelle/Creative Time.

MS: Many of your earlier projects have a very utopian drive to them – an attempt to make the world a more cohesive place by overcoming communication barriers through technology. However, with War Veteran Vehicle the overriding message seems to focus on the impossibility of reintegration for these soldiers – do you think that there is a point where technology may actually fails, or simply can’t overcome certain disconnects?

KW: Well, you say it is about impossibility, but I still think it is about possibility. Technology here, can be understood as a kind of cultural prosthetic – one can develop a capacity to speak in the process of making use of this project and bring to the open something that is repressed, maybe even forgotten. I think that this does show the possibilities of communication, and examples where people communicate something that should not happen, they communicate things that should change, that are unacceptable, for them and for the entire world. It’s a critical projection, and it’s a brave projection. It’s an act of maybe an effective contribution to the democratic process. This is something else to consider – can these projects contribute to situations and conditions under which they will not be necessary? Their function is based on the hope that they will become obsolete.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photography courtesy Robert Ochshorn.

MS: And this is what your new project, Arc de Triomphe – World Institute for the Abolition of War, is looking at more specifically, isn’t it? It is a functional and symbolic structure proposed to encase one of Paris’s most famous monuments that would work in a practical way towards world peace. Can you tell me a little bit about the ideas behind the project?

KW: War memorials, of which Arc de Triomphe is the primary example, are actually mobilising people towards the next war, and perpetuate the cult of war and cult of leaders and sacrifice. They are not saying at all what is the cost of those wars – how many people lost lives, how many families were destroyed and how many generations suffered transmission of trauma. The mobilisation of people towards war is a very simple technique, used since Roman times, that happens over and over again. It is very easy to detect the falseness and manipulation in it, but people are not educated and  textbooks don’t bring that information.

MS: So how is it that you propose we liberate ourselves from war?

KW: In fact, war should be made illegal, as much as slavery became illegal. Slavery exists, the slave trade exists, but it is illegal, which has made a world of difference if you compare to the eighteenth and nineteenth century slave trade. So while war, also, would happen here and there, it would be very different. The abolition of war, as something illegal used to deal with conflicts, requires change, a major shift of consciousness, and an undoing of relations to memorials. So we begin by creating an institute, and an awareness.

MS: Do you think there is a realistic possibility for the abolition of war in this century?

KW: It might not be finished in this century, but we are moving in this direction. It is a process. However, there is evidence that societies and nations can be without war. There is no evidence that people were inflicting mortal wounds on one another in an organized way before six thousand years ago according to all of the archaeological diggings. And Europe has done this actually with the European community – it’s pretty difficult to imagine war between Germany and France right now, something that seemed to be potentially there every year before, or Britain and France, or wherever. We have no wars in Europe – but Europe is engaging in wars somewhere else, so we have to really be careful about this – but still, we don’t have wars here and it is a big change in the planet already.

People are very skeptical or cynical about this because they say it’s being manipulated. Sure – but there is nothing else but manipulation all the time, it’s called politics, but it’s better to have this kind of politics than the ones before.

Dawn DeDeaux, The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces in an Effort to Make Sense of it All, 2011. Photograph by Michael Smith.

Tori Bush: How does it feel to leave Prospect after over five years founding and cultivating the biennial? Have you accomplished what you wanted to in New Orleans?

Dan Cameron: I’m very happy with what I’ve accomplished in New Orleans. I think that the biennial has a strong future ahead of it, and New Orleans is well on its way to being the biennial capital of the U.S., with the far-reaching economic and cultural effects that this will bring with it. My goal was to contribute substantively to the city’s recovery after Katrina, and I think I’ve succeeded. That said, there’s a real sadness, or perhaps wistfulness, in bidding adieu to a city that’s been my home for the past years, and where I now own a beautiful house that I have every intention of moving back into once my work in California is complete. The other day I drew up the list of friends to invite to my going-away party, and was very happy to discover that I now have more people I consider friends in New Orleans than anywhere else in the world, including New York, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

TB: New Orleans certainly has a way of getting under your skin and making you come back. There has always had a vibrant arts scene here but Prospect has in many ways acted as a catalyst for alternative artist spaces. How would you like to see the local visual arts community grow and develop in the future?

Gina Phillips, 2011. Photograph by Michael Smith.

DC: I truly hope that the City really gets involved in recognizing and supporting visual art in a meaningful way, instead of sitting on the sidelines or being petulant, which is what I’ve had to cope with for most of the past five years. From my perspective, the biggest problem is that New Orleans does almost nothing to support or even recognize its local visual artists, and yet they bring a tremendous economic and cultural benefit to the city, especially vis-a-vis the St. Claude district, which now constitutes the critical mass of artist-run spaces for the entire country. I also think that the sooner some local institutions and foundations begin trying to follow best practices in their fields, the better for all concerned, as I’ve encountered serious resistance to improvement in this area. When you look at how beneficial a turnover at the top has benefited institutions like NOMA and the African American Museum, it becomes clear that new blood is needed pretty much across the board. Finally, I hope that local supporters will begin coming out of the woodwork to embrace a phenomenon that most informed observers believe is very important to the city’s future as a cultural destination.

TB: Well, Mitch Landrieu, the Mayor of New Orleans has been a very vocal supporter of the arts. More financial support is needed though and Prospect has brought the attention to New Orleans that allows local artists a chance to show their work at another level. That being said, how do you see Prospect evolving in the future? What changes do you hope to see and what would you like to remain the same?

DC: We currently raise more than 90% of Prospect’s funds from out of state, which is not sustainable in the long run, and I’d like to see our fundraising and marketing on the ground locally become as effective as they are on the national and international fronts. Other than that, now that we’ve rotated to a system where’s a permanent Executive Director and rotating Artistic Directors — both of national stature –, I think we have a template that will work. I especially hope that the independent initiatives, such as the Satellites, will continue to grow, as this gives visitors a special insight into the city’s unique art scene.

Sophie Calle, True Stories, 2011. Installation view. Photograph by Michael Smith.

TB: I’m looking forward to seeing what Franklin Sirmans does as the new artistic director for Prospect 3. You said at one point that you would stay at Prospect until Prospect 5. Why did that change? Will the rotating curators ensure that Prospect will not become myopic in scope?

DC: The plan had been to begin revolving Artistic Directors as soon as possible, & I hadn’t planned to personally curate Prospect past the second edition, so that’s not really a change. The real change is that both the Board and I began to understand over the past year that bringing in a strong Executive Director who knows and understands the visual arts community nationally, and who can guide the organization through the next editions, would be far more effective than having a curator — me — trying to fill the role of Executive Director at a time when a very different skill set is required.

TB: New Orleans and Orange County have pretty diametric cultures. Can you tell me a little about how you consider art in the context of culture when in New Orleans and Orange County?

DC: It’s a bit misleading when you say Orange County, since the museum’s mission has always focused on southern California, which I think people can identify more easily. In a nutshell, southern California is where the focus of new art has shifted in this country over the past ten years, and the region where I’ll be working has a strong history of vibrant collecting and groundbreaking exhibition practice, and that’s very exciting for me. Obviously, the vernacular culture that is so rich in New Orleans does not exist anywhere else in the U.S., and I don’t expect to be caught up in any local equivalent of second lines or Mardi Gras, because it’s pretty apparent they don’t exist where I’ll be. On the other hand, New Orleans and Los Angeles have a lot in common, in that they are probably the fastest growing art communities in the U.S., so getting to feel like I’m on the cusp of something truly new and vital will be consistent with what I’ve felt in developing Prospect. What I’m probably most excited about is being back in a museum setting, doing ambitious curatorial work that, when I did Prospect, was only visible three months out of every two years.

Bruce Davenport Jr., Ain't Nothing But a Pen in My Hand, 2011.

TB: You’ve worked with OCMA before too, right? You curated the Peter Saul exhibit there in 2008. How was that experience? What do you hope to bring to Orange County Art Museum, a museum that has lacked a deputy curator for three years?

DC: Yes. The Director of OCMA, Dennis Szakacs, and I worked together at the New Museum from 1996 to 2001, and together we guided that museum to the point where it could become what it is today. There are very ambitious building plans in the works for OCMA, which was the main attraction of the job, and since neither Dennis & I were around to see the New Museum reopen in 2007, I’m very gratified that this time we’ll be able to take a project to its completion.

TB: What are some of the highlights of OCMA’s collection? Can you discuss some of the contemporary trends going on in California right now?

DC: This is a question best asked once I’m settled, since I was not asked to become an expert in OCMA’s collection prior to moving there. As far as trends in southern California are concerned, I believe that the huge success of Pacific Standard Time, a series of contiguous museum exhibitions about the art of the region, will be felt nationally & internationally for a long time to come.

Robert Tannen, Art By Committe, 2011. Photograph by Michael Smith.

TB: In 1984 OCMA launched the California Biennial. The Hammer Museum and LAXART recently announced the Los Angeles Biennial will open in 2012. How will this be a challenge to OCMA and is there a need for two geographically and temporally similar biennials?

DC: I do think there’s room for two biennials, and since it looks like the Hammer’s initiative will be a purely local endeavor, there is a clearly a lot of room for revisiting the California Biennial’s mandate, and developing something innovative to demonstrate that it’s still the pre-eminent survey exhibition in the region. Because I’ve already done so much work in these areas, I can say that I’m quite struck by how miniscule a role Asian and Latin American art plays in the programs of the LA Big Three — LACMA, MOCA and the Hammer –, and that is something I’m very interested in addressing at OCMA.

TB: Sounds like you have a framework for some potential shows. Many of your exhibits often have a stance on social and political issues. How will you continue to spur public debates in your new position?

Dan Tague, 2011. Photograph by Michael Smith.

DC: That remains to be seen. My interest in social issues in art goes back to 1982, when I organized the first museum exhibition of gay and lesbian art in the U.S.A., and social justice formed a bit part of both my eleven years’ of programs at the New Museum, and the biennials I did in Istanbul and Taipei. In fact, those experiences were essential to my deciding to shape Prospect the way I did. That said, southern California has its own world and its own issues, and I wouldn’t presume to comment on how I’ll grapple with all that until I’ve been there for a minute.

TB: You’ve been based out of New York, New Orleans and now California. Do you feel that there is unity in the American art scene or does each part of the country represent wildly different trends? Can you discuss how the globalization of the art world has affected how and where artists can work?

DC: It’s not a simple binary. For most of the 1990s, it was believed that the global trends in art were wiping out the possibilities of what used to be labeled ‘regional art’ in this country. In the past ten years, however, I think we’ve witnessed more of a decentralization — sorry, but globalization is probably the most misused word in art jargon today — of the art world, in which one or two capitals have been replaced by multiple capitals, and with that, there is now a growing awareness that a lot of significant art doesn’t take place in capital cities at all. The timing of Prospect was meant, in large part, to capitalize in that change.

Pawel Wojtasik, Below Sea Level, 2011. 360 degree panoramic video.

TB: Do you have a personal rubric of excellence you hope to achieve when curating a new show? If so, what is that rubric?

DC: In curating there is a long and hidden research phase that requires floating lots of trial balloons and shooting down most of them. What I can say is that I try to make exhibitions that will stay with people for years after they’ve seen it, and of course I want to showcase emerging of under-valued artists whose work will surprise and delight the viewer.

TB: Peter Schjeldahl recently said the artist/critic creates and affirms values to the degree of his or her individuality. Do you think this also could be said for a curator? If so, what are the values that you hope to affirm?

Ivan Navarro, UNO Fence, 2011. Photograph by Michael Smith.

DC: I think Peter’s position is a very American one in that it raises the individual above all else, but my experience traveling the world has been very different than his, and I’ve gradually come around to the idea that my self-improvement also requires the betterment of the social environment in which I live. I don’t think that art belongs to the elite class that has historically has provided all of its patronage and most of its audience, but that it belongs to everybody, and bridging that gap between the insider/specialist and the outsider/layperson has been an ongoing effort of mine for many years now.

TB: Thanks Dan for taking the time to talk. I’m sure we will see some great show’s coming out of OCMA very soon.

Feodor Voronov, "Insurgent", 2011, 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

Catherine Wagley: This morning, a friend and I were talking about abstraction that’s transcendent, but transcendentally funny, like kick-ass stand-up. I thought of you, and pulled up your “Pellucid” painting on Google as an example. It’s seriously crafted, seriously systematic, but doesn’t take itself that seriously. How’d you start working with words?

Feodor Voronov: I started working with words about one year after graduate school. I most of all wanted to step away from grad school work, which started to feel dated, short sighted and just way too safe. I initially was attracted to just the raw physical power of text, and I attempted a few pieces where I would build these circular patterns by first translating words into ancient runes and then using the result to begin the process of building a composition. Pretty soon, I realized this was all too cautious and gimmicky. So I decided to see what would happen if I just put an English word in the middle of the canvas and forced myself to deal with it being there. It seemed too simple and really goofy, but, for me, this move began a project that is now going on its third year.

CW: You told me about finding and printing out that huge list of 1000+ words–what was it called again? Something along the lines of “words that will make you sound smart but not pretentious.” That’s still your source, right?

FV: Yes, this list is my source for the current word paintings. It is a list that is supposed to enable you to write with greater accuracy and not sound too wordy. I don’t think it is really important what the list is. It’s just there and I choose from it. I scan the list and grab words that look good at the moment. I do not consider the meaning or sound when doing this, in fact, I don’t even know many of the words but I do look them up in the dictionary for my own self betterment. My interest lies primarily in their shape, look and compositional capabilities. (The meaning is something I can’t truly control and my relationship to it is pretty much on the same level as the viewers’).

CW: Yeah, I think that’s what I was digging for: “compositional capability.” It reminds me of the other term you use from John Rajchman’s book, “operative formalism.” You’re honing in on units you can work with, that can work for you. In fact, I have a really hard time picturing you tossing something out or giving up on it because it failed–do you ever do that?

FV: No, nothing is lost, ever. I just keep going until a certain point of compromise is reached. You can always bring something back to life even if you have to bury it first. I’ve got nothing to hide so restarting something is kind of pointless. I’d rather make work directly over the so-called failure, even if it is just for a point of comparison.

CW: That’s what I like about the painting of yours in my living room: the underpainting and over painting that looks more like competent problem solving then inspiration. Are you still working on raw canvas?

FV: Yes, I work on raw canvas all the time. I do not like the idea of priming a surface and getting it all ready for the act of painting. I prefer to treat it sort of like paper, where you just take it and begin working on and with it right away. Why negate the possibility of the surface by covering it in white? The act of priming is incorporated into the actual process of painting and becomes about the culmination of the marks working together to transform a given surface. Maybe I’m over thinking it; basically, priming is part of the work and gessoing a canvas to me is unnecessary.

Feodor Voronov, "Ironic", 2011, 26 X 36", Acrylic, marker, spray-paint and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: Do you like Kenneth Noland? He was a raw canvas guy.

FV: I admire his work, but he’s not someone I look at regularly.

CW: I remember, in this interview with Diane Waldman from ’77, he said he and Morris Lewis really tried to learn from Pollock but Pollock was too emotional for them, and when Frankenthaler (another raw canvas fan) came along, that was a relief. She made painting about material. Then, talking about why he initially painted his Chevron circles on mostly 6 foot squares, he said, “It turns out certain picture shapes don’t allow you to use different kinds of quantity distributions of color for different expressions.”

Maybe that’s obvious–that the shapes you choose to paint limit other choices you can make if you’re going to compose a painting effectively–but his worked looked the way it did because he really thought about stuff like that. Do words with certain shapes, maybe something with lots of round vowels in it, pose problems for you?

FV: Sure, each word is a new problem in itself. I don’t tailor the surface dimension to a particular word simply because words can be broken apart and rearranged to fit different compositional situations, which basically means there is more than one solution and that is both very exciting and challenging. But that is a big part of what the work is about: problems and solutions. I welcome problems because you cannot have solutions without them. I don’t play favorites and will not disregard a word because it has too many a’s in it, for example. I just deal with it.

CW: I like that — “I do not play favorites.” How many works have you done on paper, using Raymond Carver text? I imagine, like, “Where I’m Calling From”, being more angular than, say, “Cathedral.” Can you even sum it up like that: rounder, more angular?

FW: Well, I actually haven’t worked from those. I have done several pieces from “Will you please be quiet, please?”, both on canvas and paper. The results all looked fairly different. The pieces were really based on the rhythmic flow of words and how that can be physically restructured into a different visual situations or arrangements. But this is still just a side project at the moment.

Feodor Voronov, "Stupor", 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: The truth is, I’d probably rather no one know where the text comes from in your work, which means that question may’ve been counterproductive. I just like that you read Carver.

FV: Yeah that was a sticky one. It’s like a side conversation that wants to wander off into other worlds, so may be a scratch…

CW: You said earlier you wanted a project that wasn’t short-sighted, was more sustainable, but wasn’t safe. I want to understand that better. Sustainability and long-sightedness seems safe to me; still, I don’t feel your paintings are safe.

Or maybe this is what I mean: there are artists who do “projects”– Steven Bankhead did that painting show informed by Malcolm McLaren, or Whitney Bedford’s new paintings are all expressly about the moment a storm gathers. Then there are artists — Rebecca Morris, Peter Voulkos, Jasper Johns (though he’s gotten drier over the years) and you, I guess — looking for something to keep them going for a long time. Where does that urge come from?

FV: “Inner necessity” according to Wassilly Kandinsky. No, really, we have to make work and fit our lives in or around it, and that’s it.

Bujnowski’s work has been called flat, but I don’t think that’s quite right.  Like the artist himself, the work is unassuming but hides a conceptual—and sometimes emotional—depth.  He is concerned with thinking his way through many projects, from painting as a psychological protection from ubiquitous icons to the reuse of rejected works as a way to talk about failure.  Bujnowski’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Neuer Kunstverein Wien (Vienna), the Rubell Family Collection (Miami), and Sprüeth Magers (Berlin).

Rafał Bujnowski, Lamp Black Hexagon (1), 2008. oil on canvas 112 x 116.5 cm

Bean Gilsdorf: Tell me about the work you created for this exhibition.

Rafał Bujnowski: This piece is a memorial dedicated to Jan Gluszak Dagarama.

BG: The futurist architect…

RB: Yes. I learned about this guy from Dawid Radziewski [one of the curators].  He showed me Dagarama’s sketches and drawings, and he asked me to do something to commemorate him.  So I decided to do a very normal memorial plaque that hangs on the wall in the town center.

BG: In public space…

RB: Yes, looking very normal like many others, like you’d find for generals, philosophers, writers, etc.  But it has a hidden part, a thermometer and a temperature control so that it stays at 37.5 degrees Celsius, which is the temperature of a sick body.  It’s a metaphor for the work Dagarama did, because his projects came from a fevered imagination.  It’s a very simple metaphor.  But it’s the only monument for him in the world, and otherwise a monument to him might never exist.

BG: Do you feel like this work connects to the other work that you’ve done, the modernist canvases and the delicate fog paintings and so on?

RB: The connection is tradition and a historical way of thinking. But I’m not really a fan of any period in history, or even any music band!  It’s not in my nature to be a fan of anything specific. There’s always both good and bad.  It’s easier to be an expert…it’s easier to be a fan.

Rafał Bujnowski, Lead Window, 2011. Window, glass, lead 136 x 121 x 7 cm, 56 x 125 x 11 cm

BG: And you choose the difficult way?

RB: It’s not my choice.  It’s a consequence of how I think… Right now I’m working on these stained glass panels [exhibited in the Frieze Art Fair, London, 2011]. They’re like a window when someone has thrown a stone at it.  The project is about how to repair this window with art tools and art materials, art thinking and strategies.  I thought it would be funny to do the classic stained glass technique on a broken window.  And after I started this work I heard about the London riots, and on the internet every second picture of the riots was a broken window.  So now they are commentary.  I’m playing with the technique of old masters and using it now. But in general I’m not very reflective about my work, it’s more intuition.  I look for links between one thing and another.

BG: With this country’s religious architecture, and all the stained glass windows in the churches, I might think that you were making a statement about the religious culture of Poland.

RB: Because for you the stained glass represents church culture, Catholic culture…maybe that’s right.

Rafał Bujnowski, How to Draw the Pope, 2001. Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm

BG: And some of your other work takes religion as a subject, like How to Draw the Pope.  Do you consider yourself to be a Polish artist?  Do you think about your national identity as an artist?

RB: No, I’m not a Polish artist beyond the literal.  Maybe I’m sensitive for the things that are in my homeland, but it’s hard to be blind to your own neighborhood, yeah?  How to Draw the Pope came about because I was working in Wadowice, the town where the pope was born.

BG: So you’re very affected by your environment?

RB: I had to do it!  It was like it was attacking me, every store window had a pope accent, a pope poster, a pope gadget. It’s like a living museum.  It was self-defense!  Put any artist in Wadowice and he would react in some way…or move out!  So it’s not my strategy.

BG: And a lot of your work is black, white, and gray, a limited palette, very somber.  Is that also intuition?

RB: I don’t have a feeling for color.  It’s too big a responsibility for me.  But I’m addicted to buying color oil paints, I have a huge box, they’re waiting for the proper moment.  It’s like an obsession.  Maybe someday I will open them.