Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

I recently worked on a photo shoot with arguably America’s most prominent metal band. During the fourteen hour work day, I had the privilege of witnessing these icons in action amidst thousands of objects, instruments, images and banners that celebrate the band’s nearly three decades of prominence. As the day progressed, I watched as a band member lovingly called his mom to tell her what the day holds. I saw the wife of the aging guitar player tenderly paint the balding head of her husband black in a vain attempt to preserve the appearance of youth and vitality. What was instantly apparent was the first-hand deterioration of the aggressive spirit of rebellion as it aged over decades. No one can deny the use of masquerade and theatrics in heavy metal culture, but what is rarely seen is the softer side of this unruly behavior, which was something that I was privy to that day. When thinking about this softer side of metal and its rebellious association, it occurred to me that rebellion is an act best suited in short bursts, rather than sustained in perpetuity. I recently sat down with Ben Venom, an artist fascinated with the rebellious nature of metal, black metal, the occult and southern identity, to talk about his work. Venom employs many of the symbols and images associated with these defying subcultures, and by creating handmade quilts, pillows, flags and banners, the artist is able to celebrate and mock these cultures simultaneously.

Seth Curcio: Ben Venom seems like an all too convenient name for an artist with rebellious southern identity and slant towards black metal. Is this your real name?

Ben Venom: No..Venom has been my nickname since I was a teenager. I grew up going to a lot of punk rock and metal shows in Atlanta, GA, and it came about from hanging around the that scene. Everyone had some obscure nickname, mine just stuck and never left.

Later, I started to incorporate my nickname into my artwork more and more while I was at the San Francisco Art Institute pursuing my masters degree. I was tired of having my last name misspelled (Baumgartner) in exhibition catalogs or postcards for art exhibitions. Plus, so many people already knew me as Ben Venom, it seemed like a natural progression and of course a much easier name to spell!

SC: Much of your new work uses imagery and materials that are related to black metal as the aggressive epitome of an already masculine sub culture. You physically unite imagery from this movement by sewing it together into quilts, flags and banners. Where do you derive the source material?

BV: The source material is collected from attending concerts, reading, and researching certain aspects of metal culture. For instance, Sam Dunn, Canadian anthropologist and heavy metal fan, has produced two documentaries that explore the origins of heavy metal music from early bands such as Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, to current bands like Slayer & Mastadon. I recently read Lords of Chaos and just bought Only Death Is Real (An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost). These books offer an inside look into what goes on behind the scenes or after the music dies, literally, HA! More specifically, a few pieces are directly inspired by bands that use corpse paint. Influenced by the likes of Alice Cooper, KISS, and the Misfits many black metal bands paint their faces with black and white shapes to mimic inhumanity or death. I re-design these shapes into forms that mimic faces or objects associated with metal or the occult. I was initially inspired to start quilting after seeing the Gees Bend traveling exhibition, which showcases handmade quilts from a very rural region in Alabama. I had a lot of old Heavy Metal t-shirts hanging in my closet and thought it would be interesting to make a metal themed quilt from them. The result was a 6′ x 9′ quilt constructed with over 35 vintage heavy metal t-shirts from my own collection and a few purchased on Ebay. The quilting pattern (Red Stitching) forms a Pentagram shape when viewed from a distance. The quilt is entirely hand-made using a basic sewing machine and took roughly 3 months to complete.

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"It's My World", installation view of downstairs gallery at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

It’s My World, a current group show at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions in San Francisco, is compelling in its approach to a somewhat dated subject matter: the landscape. The show successfully combines the apparent solid thesis of the exhibition: “a strong emphasis on the use of unexpected materials, abstracted forms and the examination of time” in a bid to approach issues raised by humans’ complicated relationship with the ever changing environment. The group exhibition is comprised of ten artists working in a variety of mediums: painting, video, drawing, photography and sculpture and the cohesiveness that permeates from each artist’s contribution is fantastic.

Claude Zervas, "Skagit," 2005, Green CCFL lamps, wire, inverters, steel, Wall: 70 x 50 x 1 inches; Floor: 37 x 65 x 60 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

Claude Zervas’ Skagit, 2005, a vibrant installation of Green CCFL lamps, wire, and inverters that is modeled after the Northwest’s Skagit River, and protrudes out of the wall alive and active. Zervas’ arranges the inverter cords to simulate the river’s many tributaries, allowing the installation to course through the gallery space.  Christopher Taggart’s But Now You Know You’ve Seen the Worst, 2010, changes the term “process” to an entirely new level. The image is of a car’s driver side mirror that has been recreated, and pixilated, by small cut outs of UV laminated photographs glued to a board. To call this work a collage doesn’t seem to do it justice. The precision in which Taggart is able to assemble these small, seemingly picayune pieces while at the same time inferring the motion of a driver’s view of the landscape passing him by, is impressive.

Christopher Taggart, "But Now You Know You've Seen the Worst," 2010, UV laminated photographs glued to board with pigmented archival adhesive, 32 x 40 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

If these eye- catching works draw you in, it is the more subtle pieces that will make you stay. David Wilson’s charcoal on paper drawings of public spaces serve as illustrations to his larger performance works of reinvigorating public spaces. Wilson arranges public events, or “gatherings”, within these depicted landscapes, as a way to serve as a conduit for others who have yet to figure out how to get back to nature. Sean McFarland’s series of Polaroid photographs, though small in size, are breathtaking. McFarland collages together a variety of mixed media – paint, image cutouts, etc., and then re-photographs these elements to create an entirely new image of an otherworldly landscape. These images are ethereal, elusive and affecting. Even if the image doesn’t stay with you for very long afterward, the mystical feeling it invokes within you of a lost world will.

Sean McFarland, "Plane and Land," 2008, Polaroid, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches, edition of 3; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

In my opinion, to be an artist in these contemporary times is no small feat. At this point, it would seem that there is no topic that hasn’t been broached, no genre that hasn’t been explored, and no medium that hasn’t had its limits pushed. This is the second reason why It’s My World succeeds—the ability of the selected artists to take a theme that is almost as old as art history itself and to continue to innovate upon it.  Here’s hoping that other artists heed their call.

During an admittingly rushed Friday evening in 2008, I attended the Whitney Museum during a pay-what-you-wish night. It was during the Biennial and every floor of the museum was packed with an abundance of people and art. As I made it through each floor, digesting as much art as possible in 3 hours, one artist and artwork stayed on my mind: Mika Rottenberg’s video installation, Cheese. Since that evening, I have followed her beautifully complex projects, faithfully reading about her recent exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery. So it was no surprise that when I first heard that her new video, Squeeze, was to debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I made it a point to stop by immediately and see what the artist has been up to over the past two years.

Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze (still), 2010; Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery/Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery; photo: Henry Prince

In this new video, Rottenberg continues her investigation into social and labor-based inequalities through a fragmented narrative. The grotesquely seductive video equally binds and separates the concept of labor with gender, class, and race, seamlessly merging the real with the hyper-fictional. Interlocking environments slide in and out of place. Exaggerated sounds of cutting, slicing and crunching divide and define the separate worlds, and rich, fleshy color pull them all back together. Similar to her past work, Squeeze maintains an all woman cast of characters played by non-actors, where the physical characteristics of Rottenberg’s women parallel their occupation within the awkwardly constructed environment. Women working in a rubber plant in India, mining the trees for raw substance, interact with an all female work force at a lettuce farm in Arizona. These two real worlds collide with the fictional factory constructed in the artist’s studio, serving as the main link between all of the spaces in constant flux. Walls move, floors drop, and characters blindly connect to the factory to create a new hybrid consumer product turned art-object, which is composed of blush that is squeezed from the skin of a woman in the factory, rubber, and decomposing lettuce.

Through a beautifully non-linear story, Rottenberg’s use of the absurd confronts the seriousness of her content, mesmerizing the viewer by slowly releasing a delicate flow of information through color, sound and rhythm. Each element quietly underscores the disconnect between the consumer and the production process innate to mass commerce. What results is a world which mirrors her role as a woman creating an art object, and our daily lives of utilizing a variety of products, many of which are produced through the work of people who are socially, politically, and racially removed from the consumer. Yet, while the work is far from generous, the artist subtly reminds us that we can never really separate ourselves from the lives of others no matter how distant or disconnected we would like for them to be.

Today, DailyServing continues our 7-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate program.  He is the editor of the seminal book What We Want Is Free and founder of the country’s first MFA in Social Practice. Last week he took some time to discuss utopia, democracy, morality, and the success of the projects he creates with his partner Susanne Cockrell.

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

Bean Gilsdorf: I listened to your interview at Bad At Sports and you said, “I’m not a utopian in any way” and that intrigued me.  Tell me how you’re not a utopian, working in social practice.

Ted Purves: Let’s think about what the utopian project is: generally, to design a coherent social system that satisfies all basic needs.  Thomas More created this very intense class structure, and utopia saw to the needs of the upper and middle classes.  It’s really horrifying, utopia, because it’s the idea of agreement about what a perfect society is.  We don’t live in times of agreement or tribal identity or singular religious identity. We live in a situation of disagreement and negotiation.  I’m much more interested in the notion of democracy rather than the notion of utopia, because it allows for the possibility of negotiation and change and alteration.  Democracy is about the peaceful negotiation of disagreement.

BG: Has that come up in your work, like the Temescal Amity Works, that feeling of negotiating disagreement?  Where has that come in for you guys?

TP: I wouldn’t say that we’ve actively looked at disagreement in our projects.  We’ve been working from another starting point: the position of economies in people’s lives and how exchange functions.  Even though we tend to think of ourselves as living in this highly capitalist market economy, we actually live within several different economic systems all at the same time.  Getting paid and going shopping is participating in a larger capital economy, but giving a friend a lift to the store is a different, casual kind of economy.  Not all of our relationships are of cliency and payment.  We are interested in the way people are negotiating between competing or overlapping economies within their own lives, and creating a way to see that there are different ways to view your own personal economy.  For instance, the projects about sharing fruit were about getting people to think about latent caloric energy that’s growing in the neighborhood, free of charge, at the same time that people are going out to stores to maintain their bodily lives.  It’s getting people to see that we’re living in one system where we’re working to get money to buy calories when, yet, there’s another production of calories that’s going on…

BG: …aside from that, parallel with that…

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

TP: …yeah, right under our noses, that’s not being used.  And how do you create a project that illuminates this other kind of economy?  One project I admire is The Blue House project.  It’s a really interesting counter-utopian project because it’s about creating a space for unplanning, a space for ongoing negotiation and debate in a highly planned suburb—even though the idea of that suburb wasn’t necessarily to be a utopia.  I think there is a utopian interest in most kinds of civic planning because they are based on the idea that there is a perfect fix or a mostly-perfect decision to make about how you apportion resources, how you set up where people are going to live, what people need, and what’s going to make them happy.

BG: There seems to be a kind of benevolence that underlies a lot of these projects, and I wonder if you guys think about that explicitly in your work.  Does morality enter into this at all?

TP: I don’t know if morality does because from our “negotiation-and-disagreement” mindset, morality is another sort of thing that is always going to be disparate among people, so it’s always going to be a negotiated space.  We’re interested in working with the public and in public spaces to learn what people think and how people perceive public space around them.  We start a lot of these because we don’t know everything about a situation and we’re curious about it, and we are interested in creating opportunities for research and dialogue with people.

BG: So you start with a question?

TP: Exactly. Temescal Amity Works started with questions: What is the history of the neighborhood that so many fruit trees were planted here?  How do we negotiate the idea of the developed economy of the neighborhood?  And that’s given way to a larger set of questions that we’re thinking about: how does the social imagination continue to drive people’s decisions, beliefs, lifestyle choices?  What kinds of social imaginaries regarding the rural inhabit the minds of people in cities?

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art (2008).

BG: When do you feel a project is successful?  What makes you go home and high-five each other at the end of the day?

TP: I feel like a project is successful if we have had substantive encounters with people, if we have created spaces where a kind of exchange—whether it’s family history, or talking about why something should or shouldn’t be in an art museum, or sometimes it’s just swapping recipes—some form of animated or engaged dialogue comes out, or some sort of story emerges.  It means we learn something, a story can be brought forward from that, that’s when things are successful.  Another high-five moment comes when there is something compelling to look at.  A lot of times when you see a social practice show, it’s either a room full of crap to read, or it looks like a place where they had a party and you didn’t get to go.  I’ve been to a lot of those, and they’re not satisfying!  You either wish they had just printed a book you could take home and read in your own chair—because it’s not very comfortable to sit in a museum—or you wish that you’d been at the party.  When we did Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery we had hundreds of jars of lemons on this table, and it was beautiful.

BG: It sounds like bringing aesthetics back into it is important.

TP: Yes, certainly when there’s a material expectation for it to be art.  [Lemon Everlasting] was great for us, because it got to be beautiful-looking, but it also got to do something; two things were happening in the same space.  It occupied the institution and it challenged the institution in ways that were playful, functional and aesthetically critical.  Aesthetics are important.  Obviously some artists don’t think this way.  They can just go in and do straight up exercises, and by the rules of the game that’s art too, but for us there’s got to be something else, a twist, a different way of seeing.  We’re working in public space, so we need to challenge public expectations, a kind of weirdness, wrongness, whatever that might be.

BG: Do you think of projects as iterative?  Would you want to restage that project, or do something similar someplace else?  Or have the questions been answered and now you can move on to other questions that have been formed by the outcome?

TP: That’s a great question.  I think it depends from project to project.  I would definitely say that you never answer all the questions.  The new thing we’ve been working on is this ongoing newspaper project, The Meadow Network.  We structured it in a specific way because a thing like Temescal Amity Works was such a Herculean effort that you don’t want to do it again!  We created TMN so that there was an option to have a repeatable form that could grow on itself, so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent an entire project every single time…  That only half answers the question: I think it is good to have some projects or programs that are sort of open-ended but able to be temporarily concluded, because some questions don’t go away.

Today’s article is from our dear friends at Art Practical, where Jessica Brier discusses the new work by On Kawara at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries.

It’s pretty safe to say that Conceptual Art’s moment has come and gone. Now that we are living in a period in which virtually all art is expected to be “conceptual” in some way or another, it’s refreshing to look back at the origins of Conceptual practice. On Kawara is one of the leading figures of this movement; he is particularly known for his ongoing Today series―iconic canvases painted black, each bearing the date of its own particular creation in bold white block letters. In 1997, Kawara recontextualized seven of these austere works by placing them in kindergarten classrooms across the globe, a social project he titled Pure Consciousness. Since this project existed strictly as a social experiment, the current exhibition in the small overlook gallery of San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries modestly showcases the project’s associated ephemera, including a collection of booklets created to document it and the seven paintings themselves.

Pure Consciousness booklet image of kindergarteners in Bethlehem, Palestine, with seven Kawara date paintings from the Today series in background, laid over other booklets. Image courtesy of Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute.

Kawara is largely known for his sweeping but understated gestures that mark the passage of time. Sometimes these marks are diaristic, other times matter-of-fact. The Today paintings strike me as both―they are personal, in the sense that each is reminiscent of the artist’s hand and reflective of the way he spent a particular day of his life (following his own self-imposed requirement that each one be finished on that given day). But they are also universal, in the sense that anyone can imbue them with his or her own personal associations with that particular date. Aesthetically, they are stark and exact, appearing more like prints than paintings. In this way, Kawara flirts with Minimialism, as well as with the basic principles of graphic design.

Pure Consciousness borrows its title from a quote by Leo Tolstoy; it refers to the stillness of one’s sense of self in relation to the constant passage of time. It’s a Zen-like idea that advocates for paying attention to something as basic as time passing. The title also refers to the notion that children possess a “pure consciousness,” and are more open to absorbing the ideas and images they learn, hear, and observe. This, of course, is the beauty of the kindergarten classroom, the setting for this conceptual project.

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This year, there has been a laundry list of artist curated group shows, from David Salle’s exhibition, Your History is not our History, at Haunch of Venison, to Jeff Koon’s Skin Fruit at the New Museum and the upcoming Walead Beshty curated show, Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That), at Regen Projects. Each exhibition has its hits and misses in terms of content, style and arrangement, but what is more interesting out of this trend is how each of these exhibitions question of the role of the artist versus that of the curator. The art world has consistently defined and broken the roles held within it, yet each time one of these artists assumes the role of curator, one can’t help but to take the opportunity to compare their decisions as an artist to their decisions as a curator.

Riding on the heels of this trend, four San Francisco galleries — John Berggruen Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Ratio 3 and Altman Siegel Gallery — turn over their spaces to four of their represented artists to mine their backrooms to create a collaborative exhibition.  Titled They Knew What They Wanted, this exhibition is comprised of four separate group exhibitions out of the same collection. In a similar spirit, DailyServing has invited four of our San Francisco writers to use their perspectives to discuss each of the exhibitions.

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Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel Gallery written by Julie Henson

Lee Friedlander, Egypt (1983), Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

Among the exhibitions included in this collaboration, Shannon Ebner’s curated project at Altman Siegel Gallery offers a nice mix of investigation and understanding. Basing her choices on work that “express their existence outside the locality of time and place,” the end result is a collection of work full of mystery and object-hood. Each work is disembodied from its individual history and is reduced to abstract physicality and strange, disconnected environments.

Installation View, Altman Siegel Gallery

Many of the works in this exhibition, like Lee Friedlander’s Egypt, quickly lose their context and dissolve into an exploration of time and timelessness. Friedlander’s photo becomes cold and detached in the context of the gallery. Hidden distantly behind Lutz Bacher’s strangely displaced, object living in the middle of the space, Sol Lewitt’s Untitled (2004) and Ed Ruscha’s Unit, give small, intimate spaces for an investigation into questions of objects and textures, flatness and environment.  The exhibition successfully reflects the elements within each piece, allowing the viewer to engage each unit separately rather than depending on a collection or historical context to inform the work. On first introduction, the space seems distant and emptied, but on further investigation, the parts really do become greater than the whole.

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Robert Bechtle at John Bergguren Gallery written by Seth Curcio

Richard Misrach, Golden Gate Bridge, 3.18.00, 4:00 pm, 2000 / Chromogenic print 20 x 24"

Predominantly a photo-realist artist, Robert Bechtle took the role of curator to participate in the exhibition They Knew What They Wanted at John Berggruen Gallery. Clearly approaching the role of curator as an artist, Bechtle selected a collection of works that operate as an extension of his own artistic practice. The most obvious unifying concept within the exhibition is form in space, manifest mostly as object in landscape. However, Bechtle has stated that the main instinct driving his selections are an exploration of the mundane in everyday life, or what the press release states as the “formality of the ordinary.”

Straight photographic works by artists Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander and Richard Misrach sit in proximity to the constructed images of artist Gregory Crewdson and Miriam Bohm. Prints of non-descriptive figures sitting by a suburban pool by artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders fall into a rather easy dialogue with Paul Wonner’s acrylic paintings of figures in a park.

Mitzi Pederson, Untitled, 2009 Wood, silver leaf, string, and bells 127 x 11 1/2 x 2 1/2"

The exhibition exists without many surprises or profound connections, but is interestingly interrupted through the work of sculptor Mitzi Perterson and the painter Garth Weiser. The inclusion of Peterson and Weiser complicates the exhibition through abstraction. These two artists’ work are reductive and formal, but continue to engage the greater exhibition in terms of both landscape and the mundane, adding new dimension to the exhibition and requiring the viewer to actually work to extract content through context.

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Katy Grannan at Fraenkel Gallery written by Bean Gilsdorf

Katy Grannan curates a fairly straightforward exhibition of portraiture at Fraenkel Gallery, and the work in each of the three rooms implies a connection to be made or a correspondence to be understood.  In the first room, the viewer encounters Barry McGee’s Mixed Media in Fifty-Two Elements (2010), a large aggregation of framed patterns and portraits of young men tagging walls.  Frantic and almost imposing, it’s a good start to the show but is misleading as far as what’s to come, as the rest of the exhibition is much more subdued.  Across the room, Grannan has installed a collection of small, black and white “photographer unknown” portraits.  Echoing the shape of Elements, these are arranged in an oval on the wall and invite the viewer to compare the anonymity of their makers to the young men compelled to brand, tag, mark, or initial public surfaces with their monikers.

Installation view of Fraenkel Gallery, curated by Katy Grannan.

The second room contains, among other works, N.Y.C. (2006), twelve photographs of backstage scenes of fashion models by photographer Lee Friedlander.  In the opposite corner is a life-sized sculpted human figure with no head, Manuel Neri’s Untitled Standing Figure (1957).  It’s as if Grannan wants the viewer to consider the form that is all face (the model) and the faceless form (the sculpture).  The two works make for a kind of mirror gesture, conceptually reversing what makes them meaningful.  Although these two pieces might have been moved closer, the distance allows for a connection that is less facile.

In spite of the interesting juxtapositions of the first two rooms, the exhibition flattens out in the final room of the gallery.  Among more portraits is a tight grouping of animal-themed images by Charlie Harper, Peter Hujar, Garry Winogrand, Will Rogan and William Wiley.  On the adjacent wall is a portrait done by Ms. Grannan herself (Anonymous, Los Angeles (2008)).  Here, it’s difficult to discern what correlation the curator wants us to find.

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Jordan Kantor at Ratio 3 written by Aimée Reed

By far the most interesting of these four is Jordan Kantor’s installation at Ratio 3 Gallery in the Mission. Kantor’s approach, unlike the other three, was to keep the drive simple: to “hang a show from what [he] found.” In his grouping, you will find an impressive diptych of ballpoint pen on paper by Alighiero Boetti; a Chromogenic color print of broken glass from Sara VanDerBeek; and a sculptural piece from Rachel Whiteread made up of four separate pieces of stainless steel. Even more noteworthy is Kantor’s selection of photographs, the dates ranging from 1887 to 2009. There seems to be no real rhyme or reason as to why Kantor selected each photograph beyond the fact that they create a cohesive aesthetic experience.

Alighiero Boetti, "Centri di Pensiero", 1978, Ballpoint pen on paper; diptych, 40.75 x 28.75" each, Image courtesy of Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco

This seems to be the point of Kantor’s entire directive. His professional background consists of time spent in the curatorial department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and one can’t help but notice that it must have been time well spent. Curators today seem prone to overtly themed exhibitions in a bid to justify their existence, yet, with Kantor’s contribution to They Knew What They Wanted, he reminds the viewing audience that simply loving the works can, more often than not, work. In this sense, Kantor seems to be the only participating curator able to have the confidence to know what he wanted. And for this particular viewer, I find myself wanting more of Jordan Kantor’s POV.

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What exists between these four exhibitions is more of a premise than a revelation – leaving the viewer searching for comparisons and contrasting the work of both the artist/curators and the galleries themselves. Although we are still questioning the gallery’s delineated roles, like artist, curator, exhibition, or collection, each gallery and artist alike put together an exhibition that is a quirky example of the artist’s point of view.  Yet in this case of artist curated exhibitions, we are left with a seemingly internalized and self-reflexive group.

They Knew What They Wanted will be on view through August 13th.

In a world consumed by technology, there is no doubt that countless artists have adopted many forms of new media into their work. In today’s art world, what is harder to find is an artist whose work seamlessly uses technology and image-making to show us something new about the way we understand the world around us. Jim Campbell’s work does just that. His work effortlessly combines light and darkness, flatness and space, movement and stillness, to subtly expose how we perceive imagery. I recently met with him at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco to talk about the way he makes images, how he uses technology and some of the new projects he has in the works.

Julie Henson: To start with, I would love for you to talk about your practice. One of the things that I noticed when I first entered the gallery is that your work appears to be rooted in both technology and the creation of an image, which seem to be very important parts of your practice. If you could start by telling me a little bit about how you work and about creating images?

Jim Campbell: My background before I made electronic art was filmmaking, which is completely about making images, unlike a lot of people in new media who come from painting or from sculpture. So the image has been the most important thing to me.  In fact, even sometimes a little too much so, in that I do get complaints from friends who, for example, will say that since it has to plug I should show that it plugs in. I tend to really hide everything as much as I can and just leave the image. Obviously that changed with Exploded View (Birds).

So you aren’t asking about my background but my daily practice, right?

JH: Well, I am really interested in your process of creation more than anything else, because the work is so complex and, like you are saying, the way they are made is somewhat hidden. They become very wonderful and mysterious things to look at, and I find that really fascinating.

JC: Well there are two works here that come at it from a different perspective, one would be Exploded View (Birds) and the other would be Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio. Sometimes what I do, and Exploded View (Birds) is a good example, is that I will start with an idea for a technology, like taking my relatively 2D images, and really trying to come off the wall and just pull the image off or stretch it out. And so the idea for the technology was there before the image that was going to go on the display. That probably happens about half the time, where I will have a new technology and I will try a bunch of different things in it until I get something that makes sense. Sometimes it even takes a couple of years to come up with imagery that really matches the display. Up until that point they might be real works, I might sell them, I might display them, but they aren’t necessarily the perfect match with the technology. One of the things that I say to myself is that if I can do this with video, I should do it with video. There has to be a reason that I use this low-resolution technology to do each of these works.

I have been working with what I refer to as “the curtain works” for three years maybe, and I think Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio is a good example of a pathway to this work. If you look at the work a little more than just glance at it, you’ll see that it changes resolution as it goes across.  And all of the works up until this one were like the others – they reflected off the wall but they were still grids of consistent resolution. One of the things that this technology allows for, given how modular it is, is to change where the pixels are and allow for something other than the perfect X/Y grid. And that came together with another idea that I have had for many years, which is to do a work that somehow represents peripheral vision. And that is this work. It marries one idea that is more of a concept or structural idea with the technology that I have been playing with for three years.

JH: It is interesting that you say that, because one of the things that I kept coming back to is that the image rests somewhere in between the object and illusion. There is something about your creation of an image that becomes a play between the image and your physical space, and your physical limits of being able to perceive it. One thing that caught my attention in Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio and Market Street Pause was that they almost live as abstraction until they start moving, which I find really fascinating. How do you work with the play between movement and still image or image in space, which is something that I see in all the work?

JC: One of the very first works like this that I made I tried to photograph, and about 98 of 100 pictures didn’t come out, because they were stills.  And what I quickly realized was that the way in which you perceive these images is through their movement. That is actually what that work is about. By freezing, the image goes to abstraction. It makes you aware of your relationship between perception and movement. Hopefully it freezes and goes into abstraction, but it is never really abstract because one can comprehend the image before it freezes. I have done a number of works, probably ten, that really deal with that relationship between perception, abstraction and movement. One of the ones that I think was successful was one of the first ones, around 2004, where I took an image of ocean waves moving and then gradually slowed it down until it stops completely over a 10 minute period. It starts out completely representational and ends up purely abstract. So it slowly goes from one to the other, and Market Street Pause is a more abrupt version of that. I am fascinated by how if you press pause in a video image that it stays an image, yet it in the low-resolution works, it actually becomes abstract when it pauses. This is really unique to low-resolution work.

JH: Yeah, it is a really affective way of recognizing the connection between what your brain realizes as image and what it understands as abstraction. That is the first thing that I noticed when I walked in the door, and you can really see this in Exploded View (Birds) and Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio. You started talking about it a little, but one thing I noticed was that a lot of the work has very different spaces, but they seem to be environments that the viewer relates to from a very observational or removed place. Can you talk about how you pick our imagery?

Market Street Pause (still), 2010. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery

JC: Yeah, I don’t think it is profound, but hopefully some of them become profound in terms of what I do with them.  And I say that because I am very limited (because what we were talking about in terms of the movement) in what I can shoot. The images have to be very simple in some ways and the backgrounds generally can’t be very complex because you just can’t tell what you are looking at otherwise. So I need to find these very simple images, and I use the figure a lot because the figure is an image that relates to what I call primal perception. And going back to what we were talking about in terms of movement, I believe that we perceive movement almost separately from detail and edges. I think movement is less analyzed as it’s interpreted, so these works get rid of the details, leaving open the more primitive pathways to one’s brain, and allow one to perceive things like isolated movement.

But, I think I drifted from your question.

JH: That’s ok, because this was something that I was really interested in to start with. In Exploded View (Birds) and Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio, the technology seems to be more apparent than it is in a lot of the other work. How do you feel about exposing the system?

JC: Like I was saying earlier, I tend to hide it as much as possible because it is really the image that I am interested in. But, I have done a couple of works that connect to Heisenberg, and for me, Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio does this because the display device is actually obscuring the image. The only way to look at the image is through the display device.

JH: I think that the same thing happens with Exploded View (Birds). Your ability to perceive the image is through this field or mask of lights. I find it really interesting that even as you walk around it, that the form maintains it shape. How did you find that technology to create an image in a special field?

JC: Most images that I would put in that display can’t be seen from the sides – they mostly go completely abstract. Because the birds are so small and the movement is so simple, you can see them from the side. So it is really about seeing it from the front. The image is exploded towards you by taking the LEDs and pulling them towards you. So when you look at it from far away, it looks flat – just like one of my  “normal” images. But, when you look at it from the side it becomes meaningless, which I like. It’s the same as we were talking about with movement. When you slow it down, it becomes abstract. In this case, as you walk around it, it becomes abstract.

And honestly, it was just an experiment. If I explode this image in this way, will anything be recognizable? Will we be able to tell what we are looking out, or will it just be a waste of my time? Honestly, that is what drives me to do a lot of these works. I am just really curious to know how it will turn out.

JH: With Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio, you were talking about the focus changing from the left to the right side, and I noticed that the piece actually curves off the wall. Does the change in focus come from the distance from the wall or in the image itself?

JC: It is actually in both. It is in the resolution of the image. So, it is very high resolution on the left side. It uses  50 pixels to define that side and on the right it is only 6 pixels. It is almost a 10:1 resolution change going across. It is not actually getting blurrier, it only changes resolution.

JH: That’s amazing, because it this goes right back to this relationship to your perception, and shows how little changes like that can actually make things come into view or show distance.

JC: The reason it moves away from the wall, and it is kind of a technical reason, is that the LEDs have a cone of light that come out of them. So when the LEDs are close together, they need have to be close to the wall to have their reflected light overlap. But on the far right end, where the cone hits the wall, it is much bigger, so the LEDs need to be further from the wall.

JH: It is interesting that it is a somewhat technical reason, because the shape actually mimics the sensation in the image – moving in the car. It is nice to hear that it is not only a visual tool to create an experience.

JC: Right. Well, they all go together. But in the experience of driving, as things get closer they come into your peripheral vision, which is blurry. So the technology actually reminded me of the sensation of riding in a car, and that’s why I chose this image.

JH: So since the work is so technically complex, how much of this work is made by you, or do you outsource it? How do you come across the technology?

JC: I am an engineer, so I still get trade magazines to to keep up with technology. A few media artists have told me that I cheat, because I know what I am doing in terms of the electrons moving around on the back of the board. I have three assistants plus contractors and vendors in Silicon Valley that build my circuit boards for the works. For example, for Fundamental Interval (Waves), it has nine circuit boards fabricated from my design. We take the nine and put them together in my studio to make it. But the fun part is when it is not a cookie cutter of something I have already done, like Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio. The ones I have made like this in the past, had all the strands made with the same distance between the lights, and for this one they are all different. There was no way to send it out to a fabricator to have it built. So the quirky ones and the prototypes, I definitely do in my studio.

I am working on a large-scale public art project for the San Diego Airport and so we are having all kinds of materials cut and tested for the studio, and then once we have them done, we will find a place to have this 1000-foot long sculpture fabricated.

JH: Well, what other projects do you have coming up?

JC: Beyond the project for the San Diego Airport, the most fun thing in the near future is that I am doing a large-scale version of Exploded View (Birds) in Madison Square Park in New York as part of their rotating public art program. Instead of LEDs, they will be light bulbs, and instead of one inch a part they will be eight inches apart, and instead of six feet wide it will be 50 feet wide, 20 feet high and 20 feet deep. I am really interested to see what it is going to look like because the equivalent of being ten feet away here will be 50 feet away there. There is a little nervousness that it will be too abstract and that you will really need to see it from three blocks away. I am also doing a an intermediate sized one in the lobby of the SFMOMA in 2011.

Jim Campbell’s work will be on view through June 19th, 2010 at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. In 2011, his work will also be on view at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki.