BMW Guggenheim Lab exterior view from East 1st Street, NYC (Photo: Paul Warchol)

Last winter I stood on a cold subway platform and told Y about my new crush: David van der Leer. “Who is he?” she asked, distracted. She was peering down the dark tunnel, hoping to see train lights headed our way. It was one of those very snowy late nights in New York, and we had fallen victim to the slow timetable of weekend trains. I don’t know, I said. Some curator at the Guggenheim. Y turned her gaze on me. “You don’t even know who this dude is?” she asked. I shrugged and told her I liked what he’d been curating. She shook her head. Who falls for someone’s curation?

In van der Leer’s case, lots and lots. Google him and up comes one article and interview after the other profiling either the assistant curator himself or the shows in which he’s had a hand. The man has fans. That’s how I came across van der Leer—reading an admiring write-up about the Frank Lloyd Wright show he’d assisted with and then later when I was researching Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based art collective he brought to New York last spring. Then, one warm, rainy night last June, a friend and I happened upon Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium, the first in the stillspotting nyc series van der Leer oversees. The pop-up exhibition was held in a high-ceilinged storefront in MetroTech—that curious, liminal area of downtown Brooklyn—and it featured men and women in lab coats offering spiritual and physical ministrations beneath fluorescent lights. The severe sterility of the space recalled hospitals, a nice counterpoint to the typically warm and busy aesthetic of New Age therapies. (Think here of the myrrh-scented, cluttered woo-woo shops along Bleeker, and you’ll know what I mean.)

Like elements of the Futurefarmers exhibition, stillspotting nyc roams outside of the Guggenheim’s famously curved walls. The transient and mobile quality of the installations is replicated in the BMW Guggenheim Lab, an ambitious, multidisciplinary arts showcase that will travel to nine cities around the world in six years. It launched in the East Village last fall, when the public could choose from myriad happenings—lectures, block parties, tours of toxic sites—offered by the lab, which claimed “comfort” as the topic under its microscope. It next travels to Berlin, where the lab will appear in a different incarnation in May. (Plan ahead now; Berlin is lovely in the spring.) Stillspotting nyc also continues apace this spring, extending the migratory reach of the Guggenheim, perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of van der Leer’s curation thus far. I spoke to him about his efforts with the lab, which he co-curates with Maria Nicanor, and his curatorial approach and found out why so many find the curator worth profiling.

BMW Guggenheim Lab site before construction (Photo: Kristopher McKay)

CL: Why did you choose comfort as the first topic for the BMW Guggenheim Lab to study?
David van der Leer: We were looking for themes that are slightly emotional, that people can respond to without having a big knowledge of the themes you would normally associate with cities. Domestic space is usually related to comfort, so when people hear “comfort,” they immediately think of a fluffy bed and all that kind of stuff, but not necessarily about what comfort means in a city. If we ask people very specifically what’s “comfort” in a city context, they usually respond, “Oh yes, a park along the river,” but what does it mean when you start to confront those notions?

CL: Tell us about where the lab will be traveling.
DvdL: It’s important for us to go to bigger cities and cities all around the world. Smaller cities are also interesting, but I think that’s a different project. For instance, I’d love to do a project on suburbia, but this project is built to look at metropolises around the world. Berlin is a little smaller, but, all in all, they’re quite big cities.

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“I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to … If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.”

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CL: How do you think a larger city versus a smaller city or the different regions informs the themes of each two-year cycle?
DvdL: Some of the bigger issues in cities, such as transportation and housing, become a little more sharp in even bigger cities, so that’s why it’s interesting for us to look at the biggest places. I think it will differ from city to city and will be based on what the lab team does. In New York, it was fairly abstract because the team decided to look at the city as a system. In Berlin, it will be a very different project, much more practical. Also, the public programs around it will shift and change.

CL: Urban issues seem to be of programmatic interest for curators. There was the Global Cities show at the Tate Modern in 2007 and last year the Festival of Ideas for the New City organized by the New Museum. Why or how are urban issues a curatorial concern?
DvdL: One of my frustrations if you look at this type of show is you get a lot of photography. You get a lot of diagramming and maps, and they give you a sense of the reality of cities. They almost want to say, “Okay, we understand the city,” whereas I think the complete opposite. All of those tools are very valuable and helpful, but I don’t think we understand cities at all.

I think it’s important to approach it from another end, which is why we created a project that was much more about people than about the data that’s all subjective anyway. We created a project where people would be the core element of all the conversations, and at times there are poetic moments.

Diagram illustrating one venue of the BMW Guggenheim Lab

CL: What makes you say we haven’t figured cities out?
DvdL: I don’t think we can know what a perfect city is. We know how to create utopias on paper, but utopia has never materialized. You get driven by how a city is organized, and here especially the grid system creates a fairly anxious city. You never stop. It has to do with city form and the organization of cities.

CL: You mentioned poetry a little while ago, and you’ve referenced it in previous interviews. The poetic or lyrical seems to be valuable to you. How does it show up in your curation?
DvdL: I think it’s nice when things aren’t necessarily catered to a conclusion or an answer. I like it when projects are more layered, and people need to find their way through it.  It’s basically way-finding, which I think happens with the lab, as well as in stillspotting. Futurefarmers, too. You run into things you may not have expected. That can be fairly poetic.

CL: Why is way-finding a preferred approach for you, and what do you think it offers visitors?
DvdL: Everything is so direct in how we live our lives that, for something to really have an effect, you sometimes have to do the opposite. More intriguing can be super effective. For instance, with stillspotting, we’re running two years of programming on stillness around New York. Normally, you would start off with numbers—”Noise is bad for this reason”—and we’re using that type of language, but we’re trying to get people to go to one or three or perhaps all of them and realize, “This is something I could find myself, too, without necessarily having to make drastic changes in my life.”

CL: You’re so focused on the internal architecture of the visitor. Can you speak to that?
DvdL: Things can be so, so direct. It’s fairly easy to get people to have an emotion, but these projects are less direct in terms of information. They can go to the core in a different way. For instance, with stillspotting, I could’ve made a show with fifty objects all nice and beautiful, and it would’ve been a nice and quiet show. But I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to. In the museum, it becomes abstract. If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.

CL: How do you judge effectiveness?
DvdL: Getting some emotion out of people. When you’re emotional, it’s sometimes easy to learn something, and that’s something we’re trying to get at. People respond very positively and sometimes very negatively, but I like that there is some sort of response to things. Otherwise, the type of show you referred to earlier is important and interesting, but it’s very difficult to respond to it. You pick up some information, and that’s usually it.

CL: So how would you advise someone interested in becoming a curator?
DvdL: I’m the worst example actually, because many curators are probably art historians and often know for a long time that they want to be a curator. I’m trained in urban and architectural theory and then worked for architects and ended up here not entirely by accident, but it was some sort of accident. What I’m trying to say is for some curators there’s definitely a path and it’s very logical, but it can have a little bit of a twist.

CL: Right, you don’t have the same perspective.
DvdL: Well, I share many of the same perspectives, but I’m less driven by objects. In many cases, curators are forced to think about objects. That’s the nice thing about our projects. They’re either about discussions or emotions, and often an object is a part of that but it doesn’t have to be so romanticized.

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Cielo Lutino is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor covering culture, urban, and technology topics for clients including Econsultancy, NYU-Polytechnic Institute, and Bloomberg Businessweek, where she is a weekend editor.

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All images courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Tiara, one of the film's main characters, applies make-up. Photograph by Kathy Huang.

I know very little about Islam, not much more about Indonesia, and absolutely nothing about being transgendered. These shortcomings didn’t prevent me from relating to Tales of the Waria, however, Kathy Huang’s documentary about four transgendered women in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population. Filmed in the cinematic coastal region of South Sulawesi, this sumptuously shot narrative follows four waria — a mash-up of wanita, which means woman, and pria, which means man — in their respective quests for love.

A photograph of a waria in an article about a beauty pageant proved the impetus for the film. “She was so beautiful,” says the director about the glimpsed waria, “that I wanted to find out more. I wanted to understand how a waria could exist in Indonesia, which is so heavily Muslim. I wanted to know how the religion affected them.”

Not very much, it turns out. “It’s not a big deal,” Huang laughs, a little ruefully. Indonesia accepts its waria, who describe themselves as men who have the soul, instinct, and feelings of women. They aren’t interested in sex-change operations because that would transgress Muslim teachings. “We believe that we were born as men and must return to God as men,” explains Tiara, one of the characters in the film.

With the question that piqued her filmmaking interests summarily dismissed, Huang instead focused on the story the warias she encountered wished to tell: of romantic longing and fulfillment. “They’re love stories,” says Huang simply about the woven vignettes that make up Tales of the Waria.

photo by Irfan Ady Sastera

Love stories — we know those. The older lover jilted for the younger one. The family that insists its son gives up his wild ways and settles down with the girl next door. The maiden who toils to support her loutish oaf. The familiarity of such narratives offers a common point where viewers might meet the distant, foreign characters seen on screen. No, I’ve never been to Indonesia. No, I’m not Muslim. No, I’m not transgendered. Yes, I’ve been bored, lonely, and horny. Yes, I’ve grown apart from the person who knows me best. Yes, I’ve been dumped unceremoniously. The journey the viewer takes from “no” to “yes” travels a route that connects the normal to the so-called abnormal before landing us at a place of understanding.

It’s a testament to Huang’s storytelling skills that Tales of the Waria gets us there. What, in lesser hands, could’ve been a hot filmic mess of politics, religion, and ugly –isms too obvious to name is instead a compelling documentary about the real lives of people not unlike you or me.

Catch it 6:30 p.m., Thursday, August 11, at Clearview Chelsea, where the director will be on hand for a Q&A afterward. Miss it this time and your next chance won’t be until October when the documentary joins the Asian Film Festival in San Diego. Thursday’s viewing is part of the first LGBTQ evening ever held by New York’s Asian American International Film Festival, which ends Sunday, so come show your support and let festival organizers know you want another night like it next year.

Caitlin Masley at her studio in DUMBO. (Image: Carissa Pelleteri)

Looking at Baltimore’s busted-out vacancies last weekend, with their broken, boarded-up windows and exhausted dereliction, I couldn’t help but think of a phrase the artist Caitlin Masley used when we spoke in January: “monuments to failure.” It’s an interesting description, because monuments tend to valorize failure’s opposite: success and the heroic triumphs of civilization. Beyond recognizing fallen soldiers and epic battles, monuments reserve their monumentality for the great and the good. Yet so much of life is neither great nor good, and if reality is to be preserved in statuary, isn’t it equally worth capturing the sad defeats of life? And if we were to pursue that idea, would we need to go much farther than the half-built developments littering so much of America today? Aren’t their shells evidence of stock market failure and an inability to curb our greed for more land, more profit?

Those are the kinds of questions Masley’s artworks prompt. Her sculptures, drawings, installations, and photography speak to the hoped-for futures humans conjure and then leave behind, whether in their imaginations or here in the material world. There is, for instance, “TWOTOWERSVER2,” a manipulated photo of an imaginary landscape in postwar reconstruction, and “Copperland,” a series of abstract drawings overlaid in copper leafing. In the works, dense clusters of human habitation are seen from a bird’s-eye view, with some sections darkened as if erased, the whole of it suggesting a desert landscape—El Paso at night maybe, or, more likely, bombed villages in the Middle East.

"Neo Habitat" at Smack Mellon, January 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.

We discussed her work, which was part of a group show at Smack Mellon a few months ago.  In the interlude, Masley had her second child and began preparing for the upcoming group show “Blind Faith” at NP Contemporary Art Center. Me, I worked very hard on multiple jobs and thought I would die, yet it’s doubtful my efforts were as productive as that of the prolific and talented Masley. Below is our talk.

What is it about space and place that captivates you?

I have to be a little cheesy and say it comes from my childhood. I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, which was an experimental town. I didn’t realize what kind of place it was until I went to West Virginia to go to college. After being in Morgantown a couple of months, I was, like, Oh my god, this place is so ugly. I don’t want to be here. Then I was, like, what is my problem? It made me start thinking about the kind of place I come from—where your lawn is mowed all the time and there are all these architectural guidelines. I didn’t realize everything was visually organized, so I started examining the way facades represent what’s inside them, different buildings on campus, the way things were organized. My final project was a variety of prints and paintings that addressed landscapes in an abstracted way and how one represents beauty and decay.

When I went to graduate school, I started doing a lot of work on metaphors for utopias and how there’s a direct conflict between human nature and utopic realities of—

You think there are utopic realities?

There are good tries. The realities are short-lived because human nature doesn’t allow for that. We’re not meant to live in one sort of situation for a long time. Humans are builders, and we don’t build things that have a lot of forethought and that will last over time and adapt.

New work at the artist's studio. (Image: Carissa Pelleteri)

You’re talking about futility and the ways that planning doesn’t happen. How does that relate to what you’ve got up in the studio—the bird’s eye view of cities and the space around them that they show?

These are really new works. I just did them in the last couple of months. I went in my practice from documenting and examining utopias in different ways from where I grew up, and then moved from the personal to the public, to the global from the personal. A real stopping point that led to the work I’m doing now is that I started traveling to Berlin after 9/11.

New York is quite a labyrinth. Something’s always changing. When I went to Berlin, there was history and political history in almost every building. I started realizing that America’s so young and what architecture can contain, not just personal stories or a function, but geo/socio/political issues, an era you’re reminded of every day you walk by it. That really struck me, so I started examining buildings internationally that affect the way we live and how navigate or build around, what we tear down.

When we invaded Iraq, I decided I needed to go home for a little bit because I wasn’t sure what would happen, so I started listening to the radio and making drawings from housing projects that I did in Baghdad.

You traveled to Baghdad?

I have a friend who did, who’s a photojournalist. He let me go through all his photos, and I started thinking about reconstruction [in Iraq]. I was, like, you can’t reconstruct where there’s nothing there. So I started doing drawings to let me fantasize about what I wasn’t seeing, like how to depict borders and movement, men in action, people traveling or gunfights or whatever. It’s hard because I have no real cultural connection to these places. It’s sort of a weird thing to be saying.

No, it’s not. I think it’s healthy to consider what could be. People spend a lot of time looking at what is and making comments on that, which is fine, but I think imagination is good. Still, do you think it’d be useful for you to travel to these places?

I travel a lot. I’ve been to a lot of different places, and I like traveling. My husband is French-Swiss, and we spend a fair amount of time in Europe. The borders in France, Switzerland, and Germany—there’s never anyone there. There’s a couple of big border posts but then they have these little boxes on a dirt road practically, and no one’s ever there. In fact, when we went into Switzerland from Germany, there was no one there to stamp our passport. When I went to Tel Aviv for a show a month later, they were like, “How did you get from x to wherever?” And I was, like, “There was nobody home!”

How does that affect your sense of boundaries and borders? In Europe, the idea of borders and boundaries is not an actual idea, but an actual experience, as you just described.

It’s a lot more vague in the States than in Europe, where people say, “You cannot come here.” That just blows my mind. How can you own a piece of the earth? Man creates legacy and populations to inhabit that space—that patch of dirt—to claim it forever. I can’t say I like or dislike it, but I think it’s fascinating.

Why does the idea of abandoned legacy speak to you?

I think it’s kind of amazing that people keep trying. Our memories are very short, especially in the States, whereas in other cities, they have buildings that are, like, still riddled by bullets, like in Berlin. You can’t forget, though you’re growing up and have no real connection to it. But what I’ve observed going over there the last couple of years is that, as the years pass, it’s like a folk story to kids, especially with the internet. There’s nothing that deals with borders and physical boundaries. It’s very hard for people to hold onto histories that other people hold onto. We build for our actual lifespan and then things change, whether it’s from the outside or the inside. Nature—tornados, hurricanes—will change a place, or there’s a manmade force that wreaks destruction. There are housing projects that have been started, and then people have to leave because of some political treaty—because some people in a room said you have to leave. There are these huge structures littered all over the world in different places and different countries for different reasons. They’re just sitting there. It’s like monuments to failure or a missed future.

ARTIST WEBSITE:
caitlinmasley.com

"El Triunfo De La Muerte" (courtesy Besharat Gallery)

In the early days of my nerdom, I used to stay up late before the book fairs my elementary school held, marking and then erasing, and then marking again which books I wanted to buy when the fair opened. Our teachers provided us beforehand with a catalogue of the books that would be at the fair, but my mother capped how much I could spend. It meant budgeting. I hated not being able to buy whatever I wanted, but the limitations made me appreciate all the more what my restricted dollars bought and what they could not. I would wander the stacks of books, learning titles I hadn’t known existed, and I would be grateful for my exposure to them; later I would look in the library for those I hadn’t been able to buy.

"Travellers in the time The murderer threatened. Magritte" 2010 (courtesy of Dean Project)

Attending art fairs offers the same experience. Not the art-buying part. (I’m a writer; all my dollars are restricted.) I mean the exposure to art and artists represented by far-flung galleries. Last week’s art fairs offer the opportunity to encounter artists who haven’t yet made into a museum or other institution that confers the status and cash most artists dream of. There’s something delicious about wandering the paths of an art fair and wondering which of the artists, if any, will be catapulted to household fame why.

Ah, death. So triumphant, batting a thousand in the game of life.  The only pitch it has trouble with is fame, the manmade elixir that keeps us alive in the hearts and minds of strangers long after we’ve passed from this world. By choosing Breughel’s painting (which is, after all, called “The Triumph of Death”), Barba seems to comment on the few ways we might elude the Grim Reaper—being famous and preserving our visages in images that others might gaze on in the centuries ahead.

The latter strategy slyly assumes that Barba’s work will last beyond its appearance at some art fair in New York, but given the artist’s past success—his works sold quickly at Art Basel in 2007, going for £25,000 a pop; Warhols at the same fair went for £4,000 that year—it seems a cautiously safe bet that we’ll be seeing more of the Spaniard.

"Misty Discovery," courtesy Angell Gallery

With the musical successes of Arcade Fire, Feist, and Do Make Say Think, Canada has been steadily shedding its second-country status and gaining better cultural traction globally. (Don’t know the last example I cited? Focus instead on the almost equal valuation of the Canadian and American dollars, and you’ll realize just how much our neighbor to the north has accomplished in recent years. In fact, the Canadian dollar is projected to surpass its American counterpart in value over 2011. Ouch). Canada pops up in insidious ways, too, with record labels sporting names like Secretly Canadian and, closer to home, the Ontario bar in Williamsburg.

Still, all that hoopla doesn’t mean Cannucks actually want to be in their own country. At least that’s the impression artists Catherine Bolduc and Alex McCleod leave. Both are showing at this year’s PULSE or, more specifically, IMPULSE, the second-floor exhibition that features work made in the last two years. Represented by Gallery SAS and Angell Gallery respectively, the two offer works about imaginary worlds and in the process invite viewers to consider the points at which reality and fiction meet to create the environments we inhabit internally and externally.

"The Lost Island," courtesy Gallery SAS. Photo taken by Paul Litherland.

Of the two, Bolduc more directly investigates the topic. “The Lost Island,” a multimedia piece constructed of chocolate, wax, light, and beaded necklaces of various sizes, dominates one wall of the booth, immediately confronting visitors with its scale and, erm, brownness. Like the topographic maps found in grade-school classrooms, “The Lost Island” hangs in 3-D glory, but unlike those maps, it depicts an imaginary place where inhabitants live free of poverty, famine, PMS, negative thoughts, break-ups, and insomnia, among a long list of other ills large and small that the artist catalogues.

But is such a place imaginary? The title says the island is lost, not fake, so maybe all that’s really needed is a concerted effort to discover this magical place, which (it would serve us right) is probably just off the Jersey shore.

"La lueur des neons chez Kawabata," courtesy Gallery SAS. Photo taken by Paul Litherland.

Definitely on the map is Japan, where Bolduc traveled for a residency. The works produced during her time there—watercolors of a landscape awash in vibrant reds, yellows, oranges, and blues—comment on assumptions she held about Japan prior to her arrival and how the reality of the country squared or did not square with those preconceptions once she stepped off the plane. Not surprisingly, the watercolors that resulted don’t offer a recognizable Japan, but neither do the images stand wholly apart from the corporeal everyday. One offers an expertly rendered life-size, nude female form shod in socks and slippers and surrounded by volcanoes and pearl necklaces, oblique references to Japan’s natural resources. Fantastical as the image may be, it still locates a (headless) figure in a landscape, prompting the question: what does an objective reality look like? Who is doing the looking (and imagining) in that image?

Filled with nonexistent and therefore unidentifiable locations, McCleod’s work ignores those questions altogether. His C-prints instead offer entirely subjective worlds of his own making, brightly hued landscapes caught on photographic paper. Like other visitors to the art fair, I assumed that he built the miniature trees and houses that compose the images, took photos of his constructions, and then manipulated them through Photoshop to produce the framed works on view at PULSE. Not so. The 26-year-old uses ZBrush, a digital sculpting tool, and other architectural software to create his new media works.

"Isle of the Dead," courtesy Angell Gallery

The prankster in McCleod nudges viewers toward the same mistake I made: “Isle of the Dead” appears to have a shimmering gold plastic shower curtain for its backdrop, as if the photo’s subject was made in the artist’s workshop. Of course, that would only be the case if, by “workshop,” we meant the digital space of McCleod’s hard drive. Captured there are entire universes, ones that you and I navigate on a daily basis because I assume you, like me, use Google’s street views to check out unknown corners and neighborhoods. And if in our hard drives contain such terribly real-seeming worlds, then are McCleod’s landscapes any less virtual than those depicted by Bolduc?

Decide for yourself and see both artists’ work for real through Sunday. Gallery SAS and Angell Gallery conveniently occupy booths kitty-corner from one another at PULSE, held this year at Metropolitan Pavilion (123 W. 18^th St.).

Priscilla (from the series The Last Days of W). Courtesy of the artist.

In 2004, visitors to the Whitney were greeted by “Charles,” a large-scale color photograph of a bespectacled man in coveralls standing in the wintry outside beside a house. In each of his gloved hands, he held miniature biplanes, and he did not smile. The image introduced museum-goers to that year’s biennial, but it also heralded the arrival of photographer Alec Soth (pronounced “Sōth”) to a larger public.

The art world welcomed him enthusiastically, heaping praise upon Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl, 2004) from which “Charles” was pulled. The book featured 46 photographs taken during a series of road trips along the Mississippi River and which were notable for their sumptuous detail and elegiac documentation of an iconic American byway.  Niagra (Steidl, 2006); Dog Days, Bogota; and Paris/Minnesota followed soon after and, in the jittery election year of 2008, The Last Days of W, which Soth, tongue firmly in cheek, labeled his “Big Political Commentary.”

The young talent doesn’t restrict his work to photography books alone, however. He also shoots for the prestigious agency Magnum Photos, traditionally a photojournalist cooperative, and oversees Little Brown Mushroom (LBM), a blog and small press. (The modest initiative was represented at the New York Art Book Fair at PS1 in November.) Today Soth produces the Continental Picture Show series for the New York Times and is promoting Broken Manual, a collaboration with Lester Morrison that explores the places to which monks, survivalists, and the like retreat. The first U.S. survey of his work is also being shown at the Walker Art Center through January 2, 2011, and on Wednesday, December 8, he travels to New York to speak at FIT. New Yorkers can also catch Soth at The Strand on Thursday, December 9, when he’ll be signing books.

The man is busy, but he graciously took the time to talk to me last month over the phone. I was nervous beforehand, but he’s easy to talk to and we had a good time. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

CL: Students are going to comprise a lot of the audience at FIT, and you’ve said that it was a photographer’s talk while you were in college that inspired your shift from painting to photography. What would you say to someone who aspires to your success?

AS: While it’s true that I got inspired by that lecture, I never honestly believed that I would make a living doing photography. After college I moved back to Minnesota, and it seemed impossible to make a living as an artist in Minnesota. I didn’t even pursue it as such. I had a series of regular jobs, and I thought that would always be the case and that I would follow the artwork on the side. Making a life out of it really is quite difficult, and I would hate to mislead anyone about any of that. The work is the main thing, the doing of the work. Enjoying the process should be the main thing and, in some ways, be an end unto itself.

CL: So was it a certain amount of hustle, faith in oneself, it was fun—all of the above, none of the above?

AS: Number one is dumb and obvious, but I kept working. When students leave school, they stop doing work. The numbers are pretty staggering, so I was really hard on myself about that. If I went a weekend without doing work, I really beat myself up. Your 20s are the hardest because you don’t have any money. You don’t have any experience, but you just keep pushing through that and push, too, to find your own voice. If you’re lucky, it comes around. In the end, great work—and I’m not saying mine is great—tends to bubble to the top. People recognize it. You just have to keep working.

CL: On a practical level, that sounds like pounding the pavement and going to galleries.

AS: Looking at work is important, but the self-promotion stuff is so super heated. Everyone is trying to show everyone their work all the time and trying to get things to happen when it’s premature. I use the analogy of a novelist. No one’s going to give you a book contract based on some idea you have or one chapter. The first novel you’ve got to write, and it has to be really good. Once you do that, then you can pound the pavement. It’s crazy to run around knocking on gallery doors when you haven’t really done the work.

CL: Sounds like the artist will know when he or she has reached a certain level, or do you believe mentoring relationships need to develop?

AS: That’s a good question. I came back to Minnesota, was doing work, had little shows and projects, but I always kind of knew it wasn’t the thing. The work was okay, but I hadn’t found it yet. Eventually I did Sleeping by the Mississippi and thought, “This is good.” It actually felt right. Often I think there’s this inner voice—which isn’t to say that you don’t believe in stuff along the way and you don’t doubt if something’s good—but there is a deep sense of when something is on another level.

CL: How big or little a role does intuition play in your composition? You’ve described your practice as driving around with notes on a dashboard. What makes you stop the car and say, “Okay, that person” or “That backdrop”?

AS: Oh, yeah, it’s totally intuition. It’s interesting, though, because it’s something you learn. So, you’re driving around and you see something and you photograph it. A lot of the time—and I do this to this day—I stop and photograph something because I’ve seen it before or I think I’m supposed to photograph it. Back in my brain it calls up a Walker Evans picture, and sometimes it’s real cliché. When you’re first starting out, it’s The Old Barn, and as you get more sophisticated, it’s The Lightbulb on the Ceiling. A lot of that stuff, you just do it. You shoot it and it’s okay and then after a while hopefully you start noticing things not just for those reasons, but because there’s something else that you’re really attracted to that’s more from who your mother was, where you grew up—the whole mix of your experience—and not just from looking at other photographers. That’s where it gets exciting because you’re, like, “Wow, why am I continually attracted to Goth people” or whatever it is. That becomes a route to investigate.

CL: With the ubiquity of Facebook, sites like Flickr, and smartphones with cameras, everyone’s an amateur photographer. Where does the fine art photographer sit in that context?

AS: It does change things.

CL: I’m asking because you said you have to work a long time before you realize the photographs you’re taking are being informed by a lot of other people and tradition. Now that we see so many photographs, do you think that will change the way photographs are taken? Will it make things seem more fresh, less fresh? You know what I mean?

AS: Yeah, I know what you mean. I really don’t know. It’s radical because I’m a young guy—40 is not that old—but all of my photographic education was pre-Internet. The resources are so vastly different now. It’s hard for me to know how that shapes a person.

That said, what I feel for myself going forward, is that, more than ever, it makes the individual image less interesting.

CL: You mean portraits or something else?

AS: No, I mean the singular photograph. Magnum has existed on iconic images—James Dean walking down Times Square—

CL: —the Afghani girl with the blue eyes—

AS: Yes, exactly. That pic gets picked up by these magazines, and it becomes an icon. That was how it worked. Now those pictures are made with someone’s cell-phone camera, and they’re so random. It doesn’t seem like an achievable goal anymore. Moreover, it’s not that interesting to me. It’s as fleeting as a viral YouTube sensation. What matters to me is authorship. It’s the photo book. For someone else, it might be the 10-minute online presentation, but it’s putting pictures together in a really meaningful way. That’s the only thing that matters to me.

Being a photographer is nothing. It’s like it’s anyone, it’s everyone, it’s nothing. Authorship—assembling a group of pictures meaningfully is incredibly rare.

CL: Do you see any trend emerging that might result from the deluge of images we have available to us with Flickr and people constantly posting images?

AS: There’s this renaissance of book publishing, self-publishing, do-it-yourself publishing and people wanting to assemble images together in this tactile form. People are beginning to study the language of that. Now it’s so easy to do a blurb book, and suddenly there’s thousands of these blurb books and you realize, wow, I need to do more than take 40 of my best snaps and put them together. There’s an actual art form here that I need to engage with and a language. I sense a real hunger amongst people to make books and put things together.

CL: I wonder if that’s because we have digital images. People don’t necessarily print them, but they want to hold something.

AS: The fascinating and slightly frustrating thing I find is that no one—and I mean no one—is thinking about work online in art schools. It’s really annoying. You visit a class, you get to critique, and students start pinning pictures to the wall. Sometimes they have a book, and sometimes (because they’re lazy) they’ll just show it to you on their computer. It’s not meant for online, though.

But it’s a very exciting time. It’s like the beginning of magazines. There’s a whole new language being created with tablets and different formats of presenting work. If I was 20, I would be thinking along those lines.

CL: What about small presses and Little Brown Mushroom? What motivates your involvement in that? Is it a way to diversify your income, to reach a broader audience besides gallery-goers, or for artistic control?

AS: I don’t do it for money at all. You’d have to be insane. You’d have to live very cheaply. Having just a little bit of insight into the economics of book-making, it’s very, very difficult to make money that way, so I wouldn’t recommend it for that reason. I do it as a tonic to the art world, which is a way to make money but which can be sort of nauseating because of that. You can forget why you’re doing things.

In the big business of art, I just wanted to have room to play around, make things, have fun, and collaborate with people on a scale that’s much more economical. Something costs $17 rather than $20,000, and I see some really interesting examples. This guy Jason Poland made this poster for us, and he’s this very prolific drawing guy who lives off doing little drawings. It’s that kind of intense originality in how you create your life and go about it that, to me, is really exciting. Often things happen because you don’t follow the predictable path. You just do crazy things you really love, and things can emerge out of that.

CL: With work like Broken Manual, you really admire people living not just off the beaten path, but who diverge from narrative, which is interesting because from what I’ve read about you and heard you speak about, narrative is important to you, yet it’s people destroying conventional narrative who populate your work.

AS: There’s a lot of irony because I’m an incredibly conventional kind of guy. This fantasy exists of some guy living on a raft on the Mississippi, and I’ve never been that guy. I’ve always had a regular job. I was terrified to go out on my own supporting myself as an artist. I’ve been married to the same woman forever. I have two kids. I live in a normal house. It’s really conventional, so there’s definitely some irony in promoting going an unconventional route. It’s funny. I’m full of contradictions. I really am.

CL: With Niagra, you had people write down their dreams. Do you still use letters—we’re talking about narrative, after all—or other textual devices in your work today?

AS: At the moment, no, but I’ll go back to it. I used to be well known for always talking about how photography can’t do narrative and now my only interest is narrative, so I’m painfully inconsistent on this topic as well. Stories just matter. Like, right now my daughter and I are reading this book, and this is going to sound really stupid, but you know American Dolls, right? It’s this phenomenon that’s horrific and I won’t go to the store, but there are these books about them, historical dramas. The one we’re reading now is about a former slave girl. It’s so compelling. I wanted to finish it after my daughter had gone to bed. We need stories, whereas I don’t think we need pictures. We don’t need these fragments. We need stories.

I’ve forgotten what we were talking about, but that’s what I’m talking about. [Laughter]

CL: We were talking about narrative. I was actually thinking of words on paper.

AS: Oh, right! I’m very much interested in that. Seth’s book and Trent’s book before that are experiments in using the form of children’s books, which is this combination of image and text, as building blocks. Whether it’s found material or it’s created by the artist, I’m interested in the way the two can work together because, like comics and graphic novels, there’s a sophisticated language for image going with text. Photography needs to do that. You don’t write in the form of a novel or short story. You supply much less information. It’s to be sort of very loosely tied to the image, but it can’t be too overly related to the image. I don’t understand these kinds of relationships. It’s not like you can take a course in this and figure it out, so yeah, I’ll be exploring it in one way or another for a long time.

CL: You think you’ll jump to a moving image with sound where you’re actually hearing—

AS: Yeah, I know what you mean. Mike Parr just placed a bet—or he wanted to place one—saying, “I bet you in 10 years you’re gonna make a feature-length film.” I didn’t take the bet because he might be right. For the immediate future, I’m interested in trying to solve this problem in another way, but maybe I’ll just give up. Make a movie. Like most photographers, I’d probably make a terrible movie.

CL: I don’t think so.

AS: That’s it’s own language, though, distinct from photography. It’s like saying, “I’ll just write a novel.” It’s not easy to write a novel. It requires all sorts of skills and a deep knowledge of that language. At this point, I have a pretty deep knowledge of photography and the photographic book and what can be done there. Maybe I’ll give up because good photography does drive me completely crazy, its limitations.

CL: That’s one of the things I was thinking about when I picked up Seth’s book: the literal space between the text and image where meaning gets made. I really love that. It’s different from art with words printed on it, you know?

AS: Totally. It works in a certain way in the book form, and it’s really suited for that.

CL: What are you working on now? You’ve got stuff on the LBM blog and at the Walker right now. If someone wants to see your most recent work, is the Continental Picture Show where that might be found?

AS: Theoretically, yeah. The problem is those stories are supposed to be in America, and I keep not being in America. What I’m doing these days are these little short stories, like in the Walker catalog. There’s one of these stories that’s included in a separate theme. I keep experimenting with that and releasing them in various little venues. Someday hopefully I’ll compile them together. Those New York Times stories are another version of that. Whether those ever get translated into paper remains to be seen. I’m in an experimental stage where I’m breaking things down and figuring out new ways to do stuff.

CL: I can’t find my last question. Is there anything I skipped over, and you’re, like, “Oh my gosh, I wish the world knew ‘X’”?

AS: What I’ll say is I’ve really enjoyed this interview because you researched some things and you were interesting, but the main thing is: often one becomes a photographer because of social awkwardness. It’s certainly how I got into it, and now all I do is give interviews. I get photographed much more than I photograph. I feel a bit fraudulent, and I go slightly berserkoid. I talk about photography much more than I do photography, so what I’ll say is: this may be my last interview.

CL: Oh my god, are you kidding me? Do you know how that’s going to skyrocket its value?

AS: [Laughter] I really did enjoy it.

CL: Aw, that’s sweet. I was nervous about it.

AS: You didn’t seem nervous at all. No, it was good.

CL: Hey, I found my last question. You know how you said you’re zipping around outside the United States a lot lately? The majority of your photographs have been taken here, though. In terms of regional identity, do you still feel like a Midwesterner? It seems in some ways the South has tried to adopt you as its own, what with that exhibit down South and your photographs of the Mississippi. Talk to me about American identity.

AS: I’m very much aware that I’m a Midwesterner and not a Southerner. I’m also aware that I’m from the middle of the country. So much of American culture comes out of the coasts, and I deal with the coasts to get my work out. When I’m outside of America, I’m both aware that I’m American and that I’m from the middle of America, that I’m not a New Yorker. That identity is important to me. Maybe it’s corny and old fashioned. It’s not like I’m Grant Wood with a piece of hay sticking out of my mouth, but I do identify with it. For that reason, I tend to be more interested in photographing in America than outside of it because I think I know things about the country. I understand the references and the subtleties in a way that I can’t outside of it.

images courtesy of Art Agenda

Thanksgiving is over, and the countdown is on: a month left for buying or making gifts, if you’re of the gift-giving persuasion. But time winds faster at White Columns, where the Frederick Loomis show is up for just one more week. Priorities, people. Get thee to White Columns.

It’s the first solo show in New York for San Francisco-based artist Frederick Loomis, who presents work by Edward Matthew Taylor, a fictitious character. Taylor has spent more than 23 years developing The Third Testament Project: The Genesis of the Coming Race of Human Computers, graphite works on paper portending the human-computer future that awaits us. These offerings take the form of mandalas, flow charts, tarot cards, and day planners describing the path we have taken and will take toward human-computer oneness. One matrix includes the category “visionary enablers” under which electronic music, the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and techno (“trance,” it says in parentheses besides it) fall. There’s also a drawing announcing “The DIOS Neurocontroller Firmware Processing Array” in which microchips replace cells, as well as a fake New Yorker cover featuring the DIOS Neuroprocessor. In Taylor’s world, human religions have become obsolete and replaced by the Integrated Operating System or “DIOS,” which is also the Spanish word for God.

The show is weird and funny and eerily familiar. Some of the drawings look like those that the hunched over kid in your high school math class drew of Egyptian royalty ascending to the throne (…or something…), while others resemble 60s-era astrology diagrams or engineering specs. Pages ripped from day planners lie on a table at the center of the gallery room, featuring scribblings that detail the transition of the world we know today to the tech-filled spirituality of tomorrow. The works together seem like artifacts gathered from a mentally unstable Unabomber-type who we dismiss at our peril.

Donning such a persona is affective for Taylor/Loomis because the works achieve precisely the opposite. Instead of pooh-poohing the amateur-like drawings and scrawled notes, it’s worth asking to what degree they reflect the present day. Long lines of devotees crowd Apple stores with the release of the iPad; the PC guy battles the Mac guy, like Christians clashing with Muslims. And as bioengineering continues to develop medical devices we incorporate into our unhealthy selves in order to survive, how far are we really from turning into the human-computers the show offers? See it before it goes down on December 4; the gallery is a nice reprieve from the holiday hustle and bustle.

Paul Prudence

Helen asked if I was interested in covering the opening at Devotion Gallery in Williamsburg. She knows I have an interest in electronic art and I remember shrugging and thinking, why not, even though I had never heard of generative art. That’s the term gallerist Phoenix Perry used to describe The Root of the Root, the show she curated, which opened last Friday at Devotion. Featuring works by Aaron Meyers, Paul Prudence, and Marius Watz, the show celebrates generative art, or art that relies on a system that operates with some independence (such as a computer programming language or biological process) for its creation. Prudence, a London-based artist, describes it as “controlled randomness”; although he, Meyers, and Watz establish the algorithms that power the programming, none of them know beforehand what patterns will result. For instance, using various shaders in the programming language VVVV, Prudence created audio-video images reminiscent of cellular forms. The piece is shown on a flat screen accompanied by headphones, and viewers become listeners as the forms morph and their layers—which correspond to various sonic frequencies—emit new and unexpected audio.

Marius Watz

“It’s not traditional media,” says Perry, an artist in her own right. “A painter controls every aspect of the painting. Here, that’s not the case.” Her statement suggests viewers will have some understanding of how programming operates, but “if people walk out with an aesthetic experience of the work, that’s fine,” she says. Meyers, a fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, echoes her. “I want people to have a sensory experience of the art,” he says.

Aaron Meyers

Indeed, his are the most sensuous of the show. Using custom software written with Processing, Meyer’s artworks offer patterned images burned onto plywood by a laser cutter. The works had a tactility the others, which are primarily shown on screens, lacked. The small, light boards seemed to gleam against the dark walls of the cozy gallery, and for someone who spends most of the day in front of a computer screen, like I do, Meyer’s art offered a welcome release from the digital world that’s increasingly dominating our visual experience.

Photos: 1, 2 Courtesy of Devotion Gallery. 3 Marius Watz

Picture yourself at a cemetery, picnicking on a warm, bright Sunday–not the typical image of cemeteries in October, right? (Or any month, for that matter.) Yet that’s how urban residents during the 19th century spent their weekends before the City Beautiful movement kicked in and established open spaces for citygoers to enjoy. Up to that point, urbanites used the cleared land of cemeteries for activities we now associate with public parks.

That history informed Rebecca Blocksome’s “Socializing the Cemetery,” an interactive art piece featured in the Conflux Festival that took place this past weekend. For the work, Blocksome invited the public to the New York City Marble Cemetery on E. 2nd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, where participants were asked to create a map of a randomly assigned section of the cemetery and encouraged to explain the symbols and names they used to mark their map. (The act mimics at least one service cemeteries provide: to offer a physical space where meaning and memory reside.)

Unfortunately, 10 a.m. on a Sunday is early for New Yorkers, and the piece never occurred. This is tragic, because of the poignant timing of Blocksome’s work: the cemetery is only open to the public three times a year. That festival-goers could have mapped and thus charted territory usually inaccessible to the general public raises questions about who owns memory, particularly when the cemetery, which serves as a repository for the dead and thus the past, was designated a local landmark in 1966. As land marked or recognized by the public as significant to our shared past, what does it mean that the cemetery’s gates are closed more often than not? Does it shutter history from those who would seek to claim it? And as the world becomes more populous, and as cities continue to struggle to preserve open space (for the living or the dead–try making that choice), where will history repose?

Such questions make abstract the real dilemmas facing cemeteries today: who maintains the grounds, let alone pays for the upkeep? Where should we locate cemeteries? Will they become relics themselves as more and more of us choose cremation? Grieving and burial practices continue to evolve, and fewer and fewer of us visit graveyards or, more to the point, no longer live in the cities where our friends and families are or will be buried. Despite its non-happening, Blocksome’s “Socializing the Cemetery” offers a meaningful introduction to such topics in absentia, as well as an exciting preview of what we might expect from this artist as she incorporates interactivity into her art, which has focused in the past on the book as a physical and conceptual form.

Photos: courtesy of the artist

Walking into the HQ of the Conflux Festival in the East Village, it’s easy to believe you’re at an arts festival. The white walls display squares of paper adorned with graphic designs and text in inoffensive fonts, and there are attractive and creatively dressed women and men sipping wine and the ubiquitous cheap beer that has become an unfortunate staple of art gatherings nationwide.

ecoarttech

Given such visual markers, you conclude: arts festival. Peruse the festival’s program, however, and your conviction might waver. Offerings such as Cline Delgado Kalin’s “What Kind of City Do You Want to Live In?”, which asks participants to build and then rebuild a miniature city, and Sheryl Oring’s “Happy Day,” in which the artist collects “gently used children’s clothing” from donors and then redistributes the items to low income families, destabilize commonly held ideas of art. As Eric Peterson pointed out in Urban Omnibus, Oring’s actions don’t diverge that far from what Goodwill and other charities do day in and day out, while “What Kind of City Do You Want to Live In?” cleaves closely to the design charettes and workshops urban planners are always trying to get neighborhood tenants to join.

Cathelijn van Goor "Metamorphosis"

But your confusion is, in some ways, precisely what the festival addresses: psychogeography, or what Guy Debord, famed Situationist, described in 1955 as the emotional and behavioral effects geography have on us. For instance, there in the seemingly art-bedecked Conflux HQ, you’re likely to think that you are, in fact, at an arts festival, despite pieces such as Oring’s, which suggest that uh, no, you’re at a fundraiser of sorts.

In other words, take the press you’ve read about the Conflux Festival with a grain of salt. As Christina Ray, the festival’s executive director, explained, some of the festival participants don’t identify themselves as artists, being instead architects, designers, and yes, city planners. That explanation resolves some of the cognitive static emitted by certain projects, allowing you to focus on those that provide clear signals of their artistic merit.

Turn your attention, for example, to Elizabeth Whalley and Marie Ucci’s “East Village Florilegium” and ecoarttech’s “Indeterminate Hikes,” two works in counterpoint. The first has participants document through drawing, photographs, or other means the living matter of the neighborhood; the second provides a downloadable app that users tune into to hear instructions, such as stop for 10 breaths, as they tour the East Village. Ecoarttech hopes such moments will prompt users to question what “wilderness” means in an urban setting, while “East Village Florilegium” underscores the traditional understanding of nature. Both make worthwhile the sometimes chaotic and occasionally dim spots of Conflux, which heads into its second day tomorrow.

(photos: 1 – 2 courtesy ecoarttech, 3 – 6 courtesy Pauline Tran)