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.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Michelle Schultz: Most of the materials you use – clay, fabrics, even the music – have a strong sense of malleability and fluidity to them, but in A World of Glass, the focus is on a very unyielding material that is both fragile and, I find to be, quite threatening – could you speak a bit about the significance of the glass for you?

Nathalie Djurberg: What this entire project is about is fragility – and transparency – and while it can be perceived as threatening in the way that it stands on the table, for me, it is almost like a shipwreck that has been washed up on a beach and reassembled again. It is almost apocalyptic. That is also how I made them, taking things that I could find – glasses, plates, and bowls – assembled them, worked on them with clay, and then had them moulded and casted.

Hans Berg: There were all these ugly parts – some things were just a pile of clay, made with the hands, and then you stuck glass on it, but then, through casting, it is turned into this crystal clear, fragile figure. I think that’s where you will find a connection between the frightening and hard stuff, and how fragile everything looks – when it is transformed.

I think that glass has so many different layers – it is about, like the title suggests, how the world is really fragile, but then the films are also about the fragility of the mind, or the transparency of the mind. At the same time that it is fragile, the large amount of glass almost makes it baroque as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, installation view, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre. Photograph by Andy Peake.

MS: Much more of your recent work is immersive installations, as opposed to singular videos that stand on their own – was this a purposeful decision that was made?

ND: Yes, I had the idea about three years ago, about the same time as I started working on the piece we showed in Venice at the Biennale, the Experiment (2009). However since it has taken such a long time to realise it, the outcome is very different from the original idea. But we’re planning on making something small and singular after this.

MS: An animation?

ND: Well you have to go where the ideas take you – if I get really excited, and have an urge to see it, it means that I have to make it. What we are going to work on after this is something different – I am making visuals for Hans’ music, which is a mix of club music and the music he makes for my animations. I am excited about that, since it can be shown in a context where there is not just people who are used to looking at art, but also people who don’t usually look at art.

MS: It will be very interesting to see how these videos differ, as right now the visuals comes first and the audio is composed afterwards – but now it will be the music that initiates the work.

ND: It will be possible to work in a different way as well – in a more abstract way, and to really explore that.

HB: I always thought that art and music were really more connected, but they are not. And this is a very unusual occasion I think – that we have a show with Haroon Mirza at the same time at Camden Art Centre, who also works in music that is more towards the pop side, like mine. Usually, no one in the music world knows anything about art, and no one in the art world knows anything about music, so it is nice to try and bridge that gap.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Also, the music that I do for the installations and the films, it’s not difficult, it’s not sound art, and I think that’s pretty unusual as well. The sound or music for video art, is often very strange, people make it extra strange, so it’s extra ‘arty’, and I don’t really do that so much.

MS: For this exhibition, did you find it difficult to make one piece of music that fit with all four videos simultaneously?

HB: In the beginning, yes. At first I thought I would make four different tracks – one for each film – that would fit together. But then I started, and I was thinking, and I locked myself in the closet. We both work at home – Nathalie has one and a half rooms for her studio, and I have a corner in the second room. So I locked myself in the closet, with glasses, vases and water, and recorded all the samples for the music.

The music turned out so minimalistic, and when I looked at all four films, it turned out that it fit, so I choose to use it for all four – because, in the end, four different soundtracks would go against the whole idea for the whole installation, which is very minimal itself.

ND: What the music also does is bring the concept of the glass out everywhere. You can stand in the corner and still hear the glass clinging.

MS: It really does serve to immerse you in glass.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: Now, in your videos, often the distinctions between humans and animals are blurred – I have seen a man turn into a dog, a woman takes a tiger as a lover and a bear become the captor of a child. And in these new videos, the divisions between humans and animals are quite inconsequential as well.

ND: I think we are more similar than we like to think, at least at some level. But using animals is mainly a way to express something – sometimes it is easier to work with a metaphor than to work with an actual person – and sometimes that’s stronger. If you use a puppet that is a human being, there is so much baggage that comes with how it looks and the clothing.

MS: But the animals always have their own traits that accompany them as well.

HB: Yes, if you use a wolf, you get a certain set of ideas coming with that animal.

ND: But it is almost the same as the way that you use clothes on a puppet – if you choose not to clothe a puppet but you use it naked, then you can’t determine what part of society it comes from, or even the country. But with every layer of clothing you put on, you determine how it is seen. So using no clothing on a puppet makes it more open to interpretation. With animals it becomes more of the idea of the trait than the actual trait – if you use an animal, it is more of a symbol.

MS: With your videos, I have always found myself highly attracted to them and disturbed at the same time – and I think what is really engaging, and intriguing, about your work, is that there is a very precarious balance between horror and humour – one never dominates over the other, at least for long.

ND: [laughs] It’s a balance.

It’s also the medium of animation that really invites you to ridicule something. Sometimes that can be scary when I am in the studio – I have to forget that there will be an audience, otherwise I might be too shy to do something that I really want to do. And sometimes I wonder if I am allowed to turn this into humour? But it is almost impossible not to, it is really just there. And I think it is comical – you have to look at things with comical eyes. It’s about making it bearable.

And it’s not always that intentional – it’s where the puppets take you as well. I work with these heavy subjects, but then it is still these tiny little figures, which become caricature as you enhance some things, and disenhance other things. Just in doing that it becomes much more comical.

The good thing that animation can do is it can make you stay – even when you otherwise would have walked away. And it might approach you from a different angle as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: When you are making your films and you are looking at the characters, do you create entire lives for them? I know when I watch the films, such as We Are Not Two, We Are One, with the fusion of the boy and wolf, or in this exhibition with the bull in the shop of glass, I am always curious about how they got there and construct stories in my head about what happened before – do you ever think about this?

ND: [laugh] No, but I like that you think about it.

Sometimes, when I really enjoy working on a film, I think a lot about the persona, but more how it exists right now, and in comparison to myself. One really old film that I made is a charcoal animation of a wolf – in the beginning he is just standing there on the white paper but the more I work on him the more particular he becomes, and I give him more and more personality. While I was making this, during the night when I would go to sleep, I would think a lot about him, and eventually during that animation I started making him talk about me.

MS: Do you think you will ever return to making charcoal animations?

ND: Yes, that is kind of what I am going to do with the videos for Hans. It is going to be in colour, with crayons and paint, but it is still going to be two-dimensional. When I do have an idea that does not fit with clay, an idea that fits only in two dimension, then I make a charcoal animation. But that urge and those ideas do not come so often – there is a bigger urge to do three-dimensional things.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Ornament, 2010. Building decorations, emulsion, conservator

Bean Gilsdorf: Some of your projects respond to Modernism. How did that part of your work begin?

Katarzyna Przezwanska: I think it was natural because in Poland there are a lot of Modernist buildings, it’s our natural environment. It’s also disappearing and underrated.

BG: And for one of your projects, you worked with your own space, your own apartment.

KP: Yes, I designed it to be a space that is functional, by using visual divisions done with color. It’s an artwork, but it’s alive. It’s not fixed or finished, so when I need to change something, I do it. It’s an open project. In my work, the colors usually come from the surroundings of the project. In every project each color has a meaning or a story. It’s not always necessary that the viewer has to know why, but when I know it, it works better.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Desk, 2010. Aluminum, blockboard, enamel, acrylic paint.

BG: You made a fountain for the exhibition Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity, now exhibited in the lobby of the Centrum Kultury in Moscice. Is that work site specific or could it go anywhere?

KP: No, I wouldn’t put it anywhere, I wanted it to be in a space that people use. Initially I wanted to put it outside, but it wouldn’t work because of the wind and other things. Before the [Centrum Kultury] building was renovated there were some nice pools outside, so I thought it would be good to bring water back to that space. The building has very big windows, so I used some of the ochre and green colors that you see in the surrounding area, a synthesis of the environment.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Fountain, 2011. Concrete, polyurethane paint, water.

BG: Your projects involve color, design and function. In their initial conception, do you think only about the visual aspects, or do you think about the materials? Do you conceive of projects in terms of craft, or just in terms of their visual nature, or are those things together for you?

KP: I think about these things together, but it’s hard for me because I didn’t study these subjects in school. For example when I was designing the desk for myself I had to check and re-check every measurement, every dimension, to make sure it would be comfortable to use.

BG: And do you think of yourself as a Polish artist, as a global artist, or do you not think about it at all?

KP: I don’t think about it at all, but I do think only a Polish audience or people who know the specific aesthetic of Eastern Europe might pick up on some things in my work. It’s not of central importance that you get those things, but the understandings of my work might differ, other people will get other things from my work…not everything that I planned, but it’s always like that.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Bench, 2009. Pallet, emulsion paint, garbage bags, hay.

BG: What’s in your future?

KP: In the future I would like to do more projects that are useful. For example I would like to work with architects to make things that are less pure artwork created for the gallery and more like creating a city landscape, or a building interior, or furniture or clothes. Things that are closer to use. I consider the art world to be a bit too hermetic.

Installation of Heather and Ivan Morison's Dream Workshop; image courtesy of It's Our Playground

The Builders is a “living exhibition” that runs till 30 October 2011 at The Market Gallery, Glasgow, and unfolds from interventions by a group of artists working in sequence. Heather and Ivan Morison first list the materials and tools that form their dream workshop; Neal Beggs creates new works in the gallery for seven days using only what is found within the workshop, and Nick Evans displays these works in a final exhibition. The Builders is a project by Camille Le Houezec and Joey Villemont, also known collectively as It’s Our Playground (IOP).

Magdalen Chua: How did IOP come about, and do you have your individual artistic practices?

It’s Our Playground: We’ve never done curatorial courses and have been trained as artists, with our personal artistic practices. We see exhibitions as an artistic practice, not just reserved to a certain number of people trained to do exhibitions. In France, curatorial practice is not something often heard of, although some art schools are starting to have classes on curating.

We noticed that the exhibition, as a subject, was not part of our programme, and we turned our studio in the art school (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges) into an exhibition space.

For every project we’ve done, as seen in The Builders, a work is produced. We really like to be surprised, and not just select works. As we both come from an artistic and not an institutional background, we prefer working with an artist, not just with his work.

Maybe there is a relationship with our own practice. Camille only produces work when there is the chance for it to be exhibited. We know that artists have to produce and want to work with them on it.

We have never approached an artist for one specific piece. It is always for a project, and the collaboration is always central to our practice. We want to find our own place in this process and do not want to be just spectators.

Heather and Ivan Morison's Dream Workshop; image courtesy of It's Our Playground

MC: Why are you called It’s Our Playground?

IOP: We see the exhibition space and gallery as our playground and there is a strong idea of playfulness in our work. This is not in a childish way or about doing ridiculous things. It is about a free approach without boundaries or constraints. When we started having our online projects, it changed the way people saw what IOP was about, as they could play with the way works were being displayed. Even in our personal work which is very serious, there is also irony. IOP will stop the day we don’t find it fun.

MC: Could you describe your residency and what parts of the residency were important in leading you towards The Builders.

IOP: We submitted our proposal to The Market Gallery in January this year. Our project focused on the socio-economic context and we wanted to prove that the cuts and lack of money was not a reason not to make good shows or good pieces of art, and not to be ambitious.

We started to think about what form art could take in this context, and about processes and performance as a cheap way to make art. We thought of inviting artists to live in the gallery through a living exhibition that would also reflect the contexts outside the gallery.

During the residency, we had mentors, Francis McKee and Sarah Lowdnes, whom we had exchanges with that brought a dynamic to our practice.

We also presented an exhibition on our website, The Survivors, the Explorers, the Builders, which were the sketches for The Builders, and a way to put the research into a certain form. This is the first time our online projects have led to something real.

Third day Neal Beggs is in The Builders, using the resources from Heather and Ivan Morison's Dream Workshop to create works; image courtesy of It's Our Playground

MC: How did your online projects begin and how are they a part of IOP?

IOP: The online projects started as a channel and place for both of us to work together, when Joey first came to Glasgow.

Once, Joey went to Frieze Art Fair and sent Camille 400 images to make a selection for an online exhibition. Called To the museum – curating Frieze Art Fair 2009, we played the curators for the fair, and the project was borne from a reflection on the way images of art appear online and how documentation seems to replace the work in our mind.

When Camille arrived in Glasgow, it was difficult to open a space and a website was a platform for projects. It was a way to curate internet images, texts, videos and give them a new life. From the beginning, we wanted something quite quick, and to have an exhibition every two weeks.

We contact the artists whose images we use, if they have a website, or email address, or through their galleries. We have also started inviting others to create online projects on It’s Our Playground.

MC: The phased nature of the exhibition, where one artist kicks off the building process which another artist continues, makes me think of collaboration but also constraints based on the parametres set by the preceding artist. What were your considerations for the exhibition?

IOP: Everyone in this project has different constraints. Heather and Ivan Morison had the constraints of the budget and space, while Neal has the constraints of the materials and seeing his work used by someone else.

Constraints are not bad, and in fact, create stimulating conditions. It is not about what you can’t do but about what you could do.

Similar to evolution and civilization, you have the first people coming on the island, explorers developing and the builders using what others have created. That is the process for the different levels of the show – bringing materials on the land, building it, and arranging it. In a sense, it could be interpreted as a satire on the world of art. There are people making artwork and those exhibiting it, but at the end it is a team of builders, as collaborators and part of a chain reaction.

Neal Beggs' Open Studio Day; image courtesy of It's Our Playground

MC: Why did you choose to work with these artists?

IOP: Heather and Ivan Morison’s works evoke the primitive and mysterious, and we were sure they would bring strong materials. We chose them to begin the exhibition as we knew that they were busy and the only thing we wanted was the list of materials indicative of their dream workshop, which was quite easy to get.

We knew Neal and trusted that he would respond to the project in a way that would surprise us, being efficient, dynamic and generous. He is also a survivor, and has climbed the Mont Blanc.

We invited Nick Evans because we have an appreciation for his work. He is an artist in Glasgow who has shown an interest in building and displaying exhibition furniture, paying strong attention to the plinth and wall drawings, as evident in his collaboration with Lotte Glob in the The Erratics at the Mackintosh Museum.

We also have in mind for this exhibition concept to travel to different places, with new builders and other artists.

This interview took place during the stage of the exhibition where Neal Beggs was creating works from Heather and Ivan Morison’s dream workshop, and I had the chance to speak to him.

First day with Nick Evans displaying works created by Neal Beggs; image courtesy of It's Our Playground

MC: What was your reaction when you heard about the project?

Neal Beggs: I just said yes, why not. Sounds like an interesting project and I was excited to play around with materials that I didn’t know what they would be before, and without the stress of thinking about what it is you would make.

Generally, when somebody suggests a project, unless there are warning signs, you do say yes, that sounds like good fun. People don’t ask you to do a project unless they think you are appropriate for what they have in mind.

Often artworks come into existence because of the opportunity, when a curator says I would like you to be in this exhibition. There is a sense that this project emphasizes that happenstance aspect, where we respond to the pragmatism of our context. I will be doing an open studio where I will talk about the works that are in progress.

Nick will take what I’ve done and do exactly what he wants with it. I’ve tried to make things in units. I have an idea of how I want to arrange it. Nick will arrange it in a totally different way, or he might not even want to use it.

"Shoemaker's Dialogues" at the Guggenheim, New York. 2011.

Allie Haeusslein: Perhaps the best way to contextualize the projects we will discuss is to talk a bit about the birth Futurefarmers. Can you identify some of the key issues or influences that sparked the creation of the collective?

Amy Franceschini: It wasn’t something that was created, which I think is important; it sort of became – and it is always becoming. But it really came out of a design studio in the 1990s, in which I was doing design work. At that time, I had to start collaborating with lots of different kinds of people – programmers, engineers, copywriters, photo editors, and researchers. So, the studio became filled with all of these different thinkers who were sharing the space. That ethos of collaboration was really exciting. And then, we started to get asked to do art projects by museums. I wanted to keep that multidisciplinary ethos going.

AH: The collaborative spirit you’ve described really seems evident in your project at the Guggenheim this past March. Can you describe the genesis of this project and how you feel it responds specifically to the New York City environment?

AF: The exhibition was part of a new series called Intervals, which is supposed to show artists who’ve never had a solo show in NYC. They ask artists to respond to the building in a way that it hasn’t been used before and for the exhibitions to be short.

When we went there, we were like “what do we do at the Frank Lloyd Wright museum in terms of speaking to the building? And what do we say in New York? What do we say on this stage that has such a spotlight on it?” What we felt in our several site visits was that Manhattan, specifically, has changed so much over the years. We felt like the soul of it had gone, like that thing of New York wasn’t as strong as it had been before. Maybe it’s out in the other boroughs, but Manhattan is starting to feel like a caricature of itself. How do we respond to that? That was part of the starting point.

Conceptual sketch for "Soil Kitchen." Drawing by Dan Allende.

We found this story about Socrates going to visit a shoemaker named Simon outside of the Agora. Socrates was involved in the politics of the Agora and was fed up with it and wanted to find people who were thinking in a way that wasn’t about power and control, but more about questions and wonder. We wanted to recreate the situation of Simon and Socrates meeting and it all just kind of fell into place. We had this idea of remaking a cobbler’s studio. There’s this curved bench in the bottom of the rotunda in the museum – its a place that is still free. Something that we always try to do is find a place where people don’t have to pay entry fee so that you get a diverse audience. We proposed to extend that bench and turn it into a cobbler’s bench and frame the sitting area on the bottom floor and turn it into a cobbler’s studio. That was our base for several excursions we did with different types of thinkers who we asked to respond to the story we found about Socrates and Simon. We met in 6 different places around the city. And then, we did a book called Soul/Sole Sermons that went along with the project that is printed in soot ink. Part of the project was to go on an excursion and collect soot from all these different boroughs in the New York area and make ink out if it. And we created a pair of shoes that had letters on them and printed texts commissioned by three writers in both the streets of New York and in a book.

AH: This idea of collecting earth or something of the place seems to be a recurrent theme in your work. I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about this idea and how it fits in with your recent project in Philadelphia, Soil Kitchen.

Select photographs from "This is Not a Trojan Horse," 2010.

AF: We all fetishize history, and maybe lost histories or unidentified histories. I think that the earth is the greatest archive. The landscape is an archive. With the case of Soil Kitchen and the soil sampling shoes and the soot collection in New York it’s about collecting this matter that has a lot of information in it that maybe we can’t see at first glance. But if you take it into a lab and get it tested or examined, there is quite a lot of information in there.

With Soil Kitchen, the specific context there was really exciting. The city of Philadelphia called and said “we want to be the greenest city by 2015 and we want to commission a work from you that happens during the Environmental Protection Agency Brownfield Conference.” We proposed to take over an abandoned building and open up a soup kitchen for the duration of the conference and ask people to bring in their soil samples in exchange for free soup. The Environmental Protection Agency had their labs there and did testing on the spot, which is really rare. The scientists tested it and then consulted with each person. That was the hi-tech soil science. Then, we had students from two different universities doing more of a nutritional test to see if there were contaminants in the soil; 80% of the soil was not contaminated. This secondary test was a really beautiful test where these scientists got people excited about soil. They did tests where they would put different volumes of water into soil and then the soil would separate into different substrates and you would realize “the soil I have has 8 different kinds of rock and silt and clay in it” and you could see it separate in front of your eyes.

AH: I think this connection to place also plays into This is Not a Trojan Horse, which considers the fate of traditional farming given the modernization of agriculture in the Abruzzo region of Italy. What drew you to this region in particular and to the “Trojan Horse” as a point of departure for this project?

AF: That project was inspired by Cooley Windsor’s story called “Epios, A Sculptor,” a story about the architect of the Trojan Horse and this imagining of what that sculptor thought when he was commissioned to make the Trojan Horse. Cooley’s story was always sitting in the back of our minds. We were asked to do a project in Italy as part of a residency program on a farm where the person who runs the residency, Gaetano, wants to revive his grandfather’s farm. He is bringing artists there to regenerate an excitement on the farm and in the region about farming because local youth are leaving in herds to go to the city.

Amy Franceschini, Michael Swaine & Ignacio Valero. Selected photograph from "A Variation on the Powers of Ten," February 17, 2011.

So we built this horse and went to 12 different villages and farms. We used the horse as a symbol of a time passed and a projection of the future. In this region 20 years ago, there were still wild horses running. So the horse is a very familiar icon. To scale it up and have it human powered was a spectacular invitation to engage with it. We just showed up in villages and didn’t know if it was going to work. At first, we’d sometimes go to a village with a maximum of 100 people and go in front of the church. And people would just look at us like we were freaks. But then the kids would come up and start engaging in the horse because you could run in it. That would invite the older population to come. It gave people a way to think about the future of that region and of farming. Many people kept saying, “this is a gift. We’ve actually stopped imagining what the future of farming is here because what we see is so dire.” So it gave people a platform. Inside the wheels of the horse was blackboard paint. We asked people to write down their ideas of the future of farming. And we interviewed different people about their memories of farming. As we would roll into the next village, those statements from the previous village would be presented to the next village. I think that that project was inspiring because it was outside of a museum context and it didn’t have the same pressure. We were fortunate that this man commissioned the project with such open-ended expectations.

AH: So what is next for Futurefarmers?

AF: One of our recent projects, A Variation on the Powers of Ten, is continuing on. It will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012 and in Sweden, at a museum called the Bildmuseet. And we’re working on a public art project in Norway that we’re still trying to figure out. It’s a really long public art project – four to six years long. So we have a lot to think about.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice.

Catlin Moore: Let’s start with the book, Modernity in Very General Terms. This piece spans the course of ten years’ worth of writing and research for you, and also serves as a tutorial for your  exhibition currently on view at Ambach & Rice in Los Angeles, Conclusion to the Big Ideas. For those unfamiliar with your work, how are the concepts in the book incarnated in the exhibition, or are they? Is this a relationship you have forged in previous bodies of work?

Alon Levin: I wouldn’t really call the book a tutorial, it is more of a collection of notes to myself. I made the book before I made the work for the show, and I included the book to serve similarly in the context of the exhibition: as a companion piece that is on the one hand a work in and of itself, but that at the same time provides a kind of background to the rest of the exhibition.

CM: Some sections of the book are more minimal than others. For example, “An Introduction to Europolis” consists of incredible detail, empirical evidence and formulas, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” is more allusive.  Why the variation in presentation, and how does that manifest in the tangible artwork?

AL: All the texts and works within the book were originally made with different intentions. Some segments were written to myself, some to friends, some for publication, and still others as works [of art] in and of themselves. “An Introduction to Europolis” was a work that was published in dot dot dot in 2004, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” was part of a reader that accompanied an installation in 2010. Since the book was not written at once or in any linear way, it is as fragmented and seemingly under construction as the rest of the work in the exhibition. Both the written and the physical work range from the severely abstract to the absolutely concrete, while dealing all the while with whatever issues are of interest to me. In that sense, they don’t seem so at odds with one another to me. They are two poles of a language that sometimes clash and sometimes merge.

Book view, courtesy of the artist.

CM: The book explores the experience of finding patterns and relationships within power structures and modern realities. Did you unearth data or information that caused you to view your practice differently? What is alluring about parameters, rules, taxonomy and thematic patterns in modern culture to you?

AL: Maybe it is my background—between countries, cultures, schooling systems, and nationalities—that drew me toward the subject of power structures. I had many run-ins with bureaucracy, and never did well with authority.  I went to six high schools in three different countries.  At a young age I had already decided that power was assumed through symbols and costume and was not to be trusted. I suppose my strong distaste for hierarchy is the reason for my obsession with it. I can’t locate any ideological shift as of yet, but the constant confrontation with ‘modern reality’ in its many incarnations of administration has undoubtedly informed my practice.

CM: Do you find yourself employing irony or humor as a means of illustrating these points?

AL: I don’t see my work as being nearly as serious as its subject supposes it is.  Maybe because power and its structures are so severe, I try to approach the work with a kind of humor. I don’t mean to illustrate some joke or have a punch line, but I do think it is important that people recognize the irony and can see the subject with some distance. I think the subject (and my practice) can use a little mockery.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Some of the text is purposefully nonsensical in its evaluation of social patterns and successes.  Why is this an important attribute to highlight?

AL: I seem to make things just as nonsensical as the quest for a social pattern.

CM: Can you explain the notion of “objects attempting to understand themselves?” Is this an intended parallel to the human condition?

AL: It’s a little hard to give an explanation about that. I was meaning this more as an intuitive thought rather than a scientific analysis.  Obviously, things do not become aware of themselves. So let me give you another somewhat cryptic anthropomorphic thought: I am thinking of an elephant trying to hide behind a skinny tree, not being aware of its own dimensions.

CM: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is perhaps my favorite section of the book. What was your goal here, and how did the concept manifest itself in the exhibition?

AL: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is a series of collages from images published in an entire quarter of the New York Times. It is a somewhat absurd reorganization of all these images by theme or subject. I started collecting the images without a clear idea of what I was going to do with them with the intention of somehow making sense of it all in the end.  When I started sorting everything, some groupings that emerged were very concrete: such as “International protests” and “American protests.” Others, on the other hand, were simply collections of recurrent gestures and tendencies. Examples of these are “Men with one hand I and II,” “Men with two hands I and II,” “Three men,”" Men with ties I, II, III” or “Verticals.”

In some ways the current show is like a quarter report, though one that spans a longer period of time and is not particularly methodical. Some things have been omitted, while many new things have been added. The show is a kind of rearrangement and reinterpretation of thoughts, ideas and actual physical works. This is particularly clear in the work Untitled, ‘The Everything of an Almost Future I – V,’ 2011. This tower-like structure houses a collection of sketches I made for a series of painting cut-outs that were based on Malevich’s work. These sketches were used in preparation for an installation I made last year and now are restructured as an exaggerated archival shelving unit.

CM: Focusing on the art itself, much of your earlier work included color, both as an organizational illustration of your practice and an aesthetic choice. This show is quite minimal and stark.  How does that choice function for you?

AL: Though the show may give a first impression of being minimal, beyond perhaps the aesthetic relation to minimalism, I think the work is anything but. The objects in the show have an overload of layers, both in the physical sense and conceptually. Rather than ideas being reduced, they are in fact expanded and all layers of the process are kept transparent. Be it the stacks that hold the piles of frames so that they can be painted, the earlier paint job still shown on the edge of an object, or simply the expanded history of modernity in the two-volume, custom-made, print-on-demand Wikipedia-book, Modernity in Very General Terms, 2011, that serves as a balancing foot to the object in Prospects of Validation IV, 2011.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Many of the works feel deconstructed. In your evaluation of constructed societal practices, was this a tongue-in-cheek decision, or purely compositional?

AL: Definitely not purely compositional.  The deconstructing starts in my initial dealing with a subject matter; this is later translated into the process and thus is still evident in the resulting physical structure. Deconstruction (and my general demeanor, I’m afraid) is usually perceived as a rather serious matter, so I am glad you asked.  And yes, I mostly mean it to be tongue-in-cheek!

CM: Despite exploring the very notions of genre and boundary, your work defies common art historical references. There is no nod to abstraction, realism or the like, but it does remains conceptual. Was this an organic development in your work?

AL: Well, just as I have a resistance to power, absolutes, and definitions in the real world, I suppose I avoid it within the realm of art. Any one genre with its doctrines or manifestos is fun to investigate, but mostly to then push off of, not to adopt or join. I don’t want my work to belong to something that is already defined, or to be read from any singular perspective.

CM: You’ve referred to your works as a stage.  How does that hold true?

AL: I guess I say “stage,” because the work often functions as a model for something else: something bigger, or something real. In the meantime, the work itself is more of a prop, part of a somewhat theatrical version of societal operations.

Levin’s current exhibition is on view at Ambach & Rice through October 8, 2011.

Colorado-based artist Mike Womack’s show Spectres, Phantoms, and Poltergeists opened at the Chelsea gallery ZieherSmith on September 15.  DailyServing’s Carmen Winant had a chance to catch up with him this weekend to chat about his practice and the new work.

Mike Womack, "Spectres (Asteroid Ida)," 2011 c-print, 20 X 30 inches. Photo courtesy ZieherSmith.

Carmen Winant: What is your background in fine arts? Are you trained in sculpture and is that how you would define your practice?

Mike Womack: I’m trained as a painter. In fact, I didn’t start making objects until after graduate school at Pratt. And I currently teach at the University of Colorado in the painting and drawing department. So, I would say: using the vernacular of painting, I make sculpture, installation art, and work within digital media. Above all, I am interested in creating the circumstances and contexts to look at images.

CW: The work seems to engage a certain tenderness, or even magic, with the modern machine and its capabilities.  I think the darkness of the gallery and the sound of the motor add to this romance. Can you speak a little bit about your interest in using motorized systems in your work, or I should say, as the subject of your work?

MW: My interests in creating mechanized imagery are definitely sentimental. I have been accused of being a willful romantic, and I must admit, that is really dead on. I’m fascinated with how technology constitutes imagery. I am idealistic – I want to fall for ideas, to be romanced by them in spite of knowing better. But there is a unavoidable complication within the interplay of technology and phenomenology of media; I am at once in awe of technology, and at the same time made to feel curious and suspicious of it. In this way, I am of two minds: I look at my iPhone and think it’s a miracle. But in the same moment, I want to take it apart, interrogate and look at it from multiple perspectives – to understand, technologically and philosophically, just how we have evolved to this point.

Mike Womack, "Spectres (Muybridge 1)," 2011 c-print, 17 X 28 inches. Photo courtesy of ZieherSmith.

Another example of this divide can also be found in the exploded diagram of how to construct an IKEA couch. You don’t need to know much to understand its mechanics. But suddenly there is a shift into a vastly different kind of technology that surrounds us, like, for instance, electrons moving though silicon products (like a vacuum tube), which rapidly becomes harder to grasp.  There is a kind of slippage between the late industrial revolution’s innovations and forms in building to the digital age. The space between the two is my interest; I usually have one foot in the mechanized world – making things with prescribed naivety – and one foot in trying to tackle more complex things and how they function.

CW: The ways that your work often makes kinetic energy visible through light strikes me as really photographic – which is partially why I asked you about your training and background. Your choice to use Eadweard Muybridge images in the Spectre series also made me more curious about your interest in referencing photography.

MW: I am less interested in the history of photography and more interested in the where the camera aligns and misaligns itself with how we see. I don’t take photographs for my work, but I will often look through the camera lens to see how the values will translate, and how the camera unravels light and creates aberrations.

For the Spectre series, I used black and white moving images to make them into the opposite: color stills. This was really the reason I went back to the very first “moving” image (which never had color to begin with) to attempt to reconstitute the image by applying contemporary filters to it, to both unravel and enhance it. I was also drawn to the early Muybridge images as they were taken with late industrial era technologies, which I keep returning to, and which reference a certain nostalgia.

Installation Shot from Mike Womack's Spectres, Phantoms and Poltergeists. Photo courtesy of ZieherSmith.

CW: Have you read John Keats‘ assertion that Isaac Newton was ‘unweaving the rainbow’ in his studies to understand light? In Lamia, Keats wrote, “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.” Your own work literally unravels the RGB matrix.  Do you relate to Keats’ idea? A fundamental conflict between art and science in experiencing the world?

MW: The final stanza in Walt Whitman’s volume Leaves of Grass speaks to this polemic: “The spectacle of looking at a morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” I’m interested in Whitman for this reason, and have investigated him in this show. I’m fascinated by these conflictual approaches in seeing; of course, there is beauty in knowledge, but must we unravel every natural mystery, and do we dilute them in the process?

To return to Whitman: my piece Threshold at the front of the show is very much about this considered, complicated act of looking. Whitman was a humanist, an advocate for tearing down intellectualism in the arts in favor of a phenomenological experience of the nature world.  Looking, for Whitman, was chief over ideas. The piece is comprised of a bluestone taken from the stoop in front of Whitman’s former Brooklyn home displayed simply on a low, wooden table; it has been transformed into a piece of art by its displacement. In becoming conceptual art, Threshold questions and undermines Whitman’s very principles, demonstrative of a kind of contained, internal conflict that runs throughout the show.

The blue screen piece is a good example of this, too. It is meant to emulate the blue screen of a television set that isn’t getting reception (static no longer exists, as there is now no transmission). In addition to creating a surface of both transmitted and reflected light, I also wanted to reference monochromatic painting. I made the piece on aluminum and then coated the paint with industrial grade reflective beads, used on top of the painted road dividers to cause a reflection when hit with head beams. The result is a halo-inducing color field stuck somewhere between Yves Klein blue and Derek Jarman’s 1993 monochromatic film “Blue”.  In making this giant, undulating sculpture, I am caught in this struggle between the experience of looking – both suspicious of, and appreciative toward, its potential.

This is the hardest I’ve ever made my viewers look at my work, the nearest to abstraction, the least demonstrative. Ultimately, everything in that show is about the act of looking.

Spectres, Phantoms, and Poltergeists is on display at ZieherSmith from September 15 through October 15.

Aideen Barry, Spray Grenade SG08/3#02, 2008; aluminum, brass, steel; 8.25 in x 3.25 in, edition of 5

Bean Gilsdorf: You often use the home as a site for your work.  What informs your sense of unstable domesticity?

Aideen Barry: I suppose there are two main parts that inform the work.  In 2006 I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifested out of living in “Celtic Tiger Suburbia,” these estates  of cookie cutter homes that grew up out of the [Irish] boom of the ’90s.  It’s a very un-Irish landscape—and unlike in the past when you knew your neighbors and cared for each other—suddenly you didn’t know who your neighbor was.  The domesticity that I’m interested in came out of this space.  I was living in one of these houses and all of the people in the estate were all obsessed with materiality and being perfect and clean.  And this is where my anxiety manifested itself; I would spend all my time cleaning my house in order to fit in with my neighbors.  I wasn’t sleeping, so then I was more anxious, and I would stay up late cleaning even more to alleviate the anxiety.  And I would look out the window and that was what all my neighbors were doing!  And I tried desperately to fit in.  That’s definitely what drives a lot of the work, this veneer of perfection—but underneath there are cracks, something that’s not right.  I’m really interested in Freud’s notion of the unheimliche, the uncanny, something that can be familiar and strange at the same time.  For Levitating I spent seven days jumping while [filming] cleaning, so as to create the illusion of levitation.  And the spray grenades were a way of merging advertising on “the new war” which is the war on germs.  I took the familiar grenade and also the familiar cleaning spray and bastardized them together to create this seductive object.

Aideen Barry, "Heteratopic Glitch," detail view, 2008. Image courtesy of Anne Ffrench/Aideen Barry

BG: Talking about fear and landscape makes me think about Heteratopic Glitch.  That work changed the landscape, and inside the plastic balls the women were in a potentially airless environment.  At first it seems beautiful and playful, but then you are afraid for these women.

AB: It is potent with anxiety, that space.  They can’t puncture the ball or they’ll sink.  No one really knows what might happen.  That’s something I’m really conscious of in the work, that there’s an expectation or anticipation, but the future is a bit ambiguous.  In those works that involve a landscape I like to push beyond the realms of possibility; you don’t expect ten women to be able to walk on water…

Aideen Barry, "Heteratopic Glitch," panoramic view, 2008. Image courtesy of Anne Ffrench/Aideen Barry

BG:…it’s a fantasy…

AB: That aesthetic is important to me, the phantasmagorical, where something can behave in the most absurd and sublime way. In the 1980s we had only two [Irish] TV channels, both run by the state which was effectively bankrupt at the time. As a cost-cutting measure they would buy eastern European animations from Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, etc…films by Jan Lenica, Jan Svankmajer, Walerian Borowczyk, and others.  The Irish TV censor didn’t see them as anything but children’s cartoons, but in actuality they were extremely dark, politically-motivated visual protests. Some of the scenes are so violent, and yet they could be seen as only a chair and a table moving around in stop-motion. The aggression and anxiety in these films really informed my aesthetic and my motivation with material and technical application.

BG: That darkness is so customary in your work.  I’m thinking of your video Possession where scissors attached to locks of a woman’s hair cut the lawn, and a pile of food travels down the table into her mouth…it’s partly normal, and partly macabre.

AB: Yes, I’m definitely looking at the domestic object and turning it into something fantastical, turning the garage door into a bread cutter and so on, and looking at other anxieties like eating disorders.  That’s also informed by the gothic.  Ireland has so many gothic writers: Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and they were informed by Irish mythology.  That’s rooted in my practice, too, playing with the familiar.  The housewife in Possession is familiar, but there is a slippage between what’s real and what’s perceived to be real, a kind of madness.

BG: The stop-motion also serves to reinforce the repetitive nature or drudgery of everyday existence, but elevates it into this level of fantasy.

AB:  And the stop-motion makes the body jerk in an unnatural way.  The familiar, the drudgery is there but it has a different pace.  It’s faster, like a Buster Keaton film.

BG: You’ve talked about the work coming from a place of anxiety.  When you finish a project, how does it feel to step away from it?

AB: I don’t think it’s cathartic.  I don’t think it relieves the anxiety, I think that’s always going to be there.  I had to acknowledge that a couple of years ago, I just recognize the signs and I know how to control it so that it doesn’t spiral completely out of control.  I think the best part is to acknowledge that it exists.  Mental illness is a taboo subject in Ireland.  I’m sure it is here, too…I’m sure you’re not supposed to have a breakdown, there’s something wrong with you and therefore you’re damaged!  But I acknowledge that I am damaged.  Every now and again I go off my track, and the best way to put myself back on track is to make a comment on what set me off in the first place.

BG: And in all of this, do you think if yourself as a feminist?

AB: Feminist theory is as important now as it’s ever been.  Remember that in Ireland, we didn’t have a sexual revolution the way you did here [in the US].  People forget, but birth control only became legal in Ireland in 1995, we only got divorce eleven years ago.  But it’s beyond Ireland, it’s global.  All the references that I had when making the animations, you can totally see them in Desperate Housewives, women who are married to their property and who play a role in a restrictive society.  Not much has changed in that regard, so a comment has to be made.  And as a woman working in the art world you can definitely say the glass ceiling remains, and you have to challenge all those conventions by making a comment about where we are now.  The feminist critique is very much prevalent in the work.