Oliver Warden, Untitled Box 2.0, 1993-2011. Photo credit: Josephine Phong, 2011.

A young woman rounds the corner and catches a glimpse of her reflection in a full-length mirrored box. Attracted to this, she stops to make sure her bangs are okay, and notices that the mirror also has a switch, at perfect doorbell height. Curious, she flips the switch, only to immediately jump back, letting out a half scream, half laugh. She might be going crazy, she thinks, but she swears she just saw her reflection change into that of a man’s.  Intrigued, she presses the switch a second time, and registers the flashing image of him again. Sure enough, inside the two-way mirror is a man, about 6’, standing at the ready, in a grey suit with a black tie. He has the appearance of James Bond, but the moxy of Elvis Presley vis-à-vis Andy Warhol’s prints. This man also has an identically placed switch on his side of the mirror. While the young woman can turn on the light, revealing the man, he has the power to turn the light off. The young woman giggles, fascinated by her power, yet she still feels the need to touch the switch again, and sees the opportunity to compete; a game ensues. She continuously turns on the light, as fast as she can, trying to reveal the man, to find out who he is, and what he looks like. He is calm and quick to the switch; she is relentless. She giggles more and more, and he remains stone cold 007, intensely staring into her eyes. You can see he is sweating, somewhat annoyed yet maintaining his authority, which fuels this woman’s sadistic tendencies even more. Who will win?

Eventually, she grows tired of hitting the switch so many times, hoping to tire him out, hoping to see him give up. He finally breaks, and the two individuals share a moment of recognition. She backs away, and he turns the light off, deviously waiting in the dark box for the next person to discover the game. The man is Oliver Warden, a Brooklyn-based painter, photographer, performance artist, and videogamer (of all things).  The performance, Untitled Box 2.0, is a concept that was originally devised in 1993 (as Untitled Box) while the artist was in school, and realized for the second time nearly 20 years later in November 2010 at Physical Center, a night of performance and installation at Former Convent of Saint Cecilia in Brooklyn, NY. The piece was performed most recently at School Nite, an exhibition in partner with the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas in May 2011, in Manhattan. Untitled Box 2.0 is a piece that speaks directly to the viewer’s most immediate feelings of art viewing: surprise, mystery, and humor. From another point of view, Untitled Box 2.0 is about many things: pop art, masochism, the Internet & social networking and analogous topics like voyeurship and surveillance, as well formal themes such as the artist/viewer interaction.

Firstly, it is inescapable to draw comparisons of Oliver Warden’s performance in Untitled Box with Andy Warhol’s screenprinted paintings of Elvis Presley, posing as his character, Pacer Burton, in The Flaming Star (1960). Both men are positioned in an at-the-ready stance, feet slightly wider than shoulder-width distance, one hand drawn (either with a pistol or to flip the light switch), and sporting a wide-eyed, determined gaze. Warhol, the master of Pop Art, explored pop culture through celebrity iconography and multiplicity in advertising. Warden, on the other hand, is not working within with these themes; rather, the majority of his body of work deals with pop technology, such as gaming, virtual reality, and social networking. Therefore, only formal comparisons can be drawn, however the similarities are undeniable.

The Edge of the World #3, 2005, Inkjet Print on Archival Paper, 30x40"

Oliver Warden (b. 1971, Cleveland, Ohio) is a multidisciplinary artist, working both in the realms of contemporary art and technology. When online, he goes as his avatar name, ROBOTBIGFOOT. The majority of his body of work is inspired by and culled from his experiences in the virtual world, as he spends about 40 hours a week inside the realms of Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and various independent titles. It can be said that Warden essentially, and by 21^st Century definition, lives in two worlds: online and off. His paintings, ranging in size of 1 ft to 21 ft canvases, are made by a unique process of pouring Galkyd onto canvas laid horizontally in his Bushwick studio. The semi-transparent and glossy layers build over each other in intricate and elaborate geographies, creating an effects-driven and technologically mediated super-world. His cameraless-photography is created on his computer, in virtual spaces. One series that I find especially innovative shows the “edge of world” in the video game Tribes; Warden literally played the game until there were no more challenges or objectives to complete, and after reaching the literal end of the map (where the playable area stops), he took thousands of screen shots. The results are works on paper, presented as pixelated photographs.  His performance pieces are the third factor of his work, creating a complete balanced and intentional body. Inspired by his interactive experiences, he built a body of work around notions of privacy, voyeurship and control.  Stalking people in Central Park at midnight and “capturing” them on video, living in a school wall for a week and pulling covert ops at night and sitting inside a chair as unknowing sitters sat on his lap, all challenged and occasionally broke the rules of engagement and participation.

The Great American, 2007, Oil on Canvas, 144x108"

How is Untitled Box 2.0 different in 1993 and 2010? How did it change over the years, and why is is relevant that Warden first performed the piece in 1993? The piece was conceived at the cusp of the Internet-era, before terms like social media, tweeting, and skyping was common language. The idea was inspired by a culture that was exploding with hype about interactivity, and increased immediacy in national and international communication. Today, there are countless scholars writing novels and textbooks about extracting a movement or shift in contemporary thinking and philosophies in the Internet age. 20 years ago, we were wondering what possibilities the Internet would bring; today, we are wondering how it is adversely impacting our society, and how far it’s going to go. In the early 90s, most people still had private lives, or rather, one life. Today, in 2011, we have our real lives, and our virutal lives. We have our real address, and our email address; our job history, and our google-search engine history; our real friends and our facebook friends. Most dramatically, in the nineties, most people could only imagine the possibility of  meeting strangers in chatrooms, calling a friend via videocam, or being able to meet up with (real) friends, in physical spaces, by ‘checking in’ or ’shouting out’. It was the beginning of a millennial phenomenon to put oneself out into the virtual world, with little concern for privacy or emotional repercussions.

At the beginning, these ideas were novel, intriguing, and we waited with impatience. Today, there is a general feeling of paranoia with applications like foursquare, facebook, or Chatroulette; if you are present in the Internet community (even the most in-active kind of member), you are never alone, and you can never be alone. With Untitled Box 2.0, Warden reduces interactivity to its most essential components: on-off, you-me, inside-outside. The result is something everyone can understand and participate with – a base language, a fundamental duality, a bit code.  Like a computer code that is written between the artist and participant, our interaction makes the work have a life, and therefore content, that exists for as long as the two parties work to keep it alive. Essentially, Untitled Box 2.0, is about the Internet and social media at its most fundamental form: we are reaching out to each other, at a distance, but who has the control and how do we know when is the right time to stop?

You can learn a lot about a person by seeing how they interact with Untitled Box 2.0. Even though the viewer can turn on the light in the box whenever they want and how often they want to, Warden acts as the ultimate eye. He can watch people in the room when they can’t see him, he can watch their reactions, and hear what they have to say.  He can see the viewer/participator, even when they aren’t even aware that he is inside the box. He can see their reaction, their facial expressions and body language, their insecurites and their character. They make themselves vulnerable to his surveillance (although, as a participant has control of the switch, it is easy to prematurely conclude that one has control over the artist). Often, he loses this power to aggressive participators, sometimes for minutes on end. The result for him is a bombardment of light and noise and burning 500 Watt lamps, which sometime reach a tortuous state.  Warden however stays silent; so many viewers forget or fail to acknowledge that he is listening to them. On facebook, there is a questionable and interesting feature called Poke or Poking.  It allows you to call someone’s attention by virtually “poking” him or her.  In a way, it feels like Warden is humanizing the facebook experience, by making this “poking” function real and physically participatory. The resulting experience creates heightened emotions, both in excitement and awkwardness, embarrassment and empathy.

Oliver Warden will be performing Untitled Box 2.0 twice this week, on Sat, Oct 29 at the Gowanus Studio Space from 9pm – 4am and again on Mon, Oct 31, at The Delancey, from 8pm – 1am. Additionally, his paintings can be seen in two upcoming group exhibitions, at Allegra LaViola, Die Like You Really Mean It, opening on Oct 26, and at Camel Art Space, in Space Over Time, opening Nov 4.

Go to Freight and Volume and see this show in its last week!

Check out the rad animation Andrew did: Talking to a Fish

Andrew Guenther has exhibited widely in New York, LA, and internationally, including: “Standing in Water up to the Shins, Your Foot Looks at a Minnow and Says,’Look What I Have Become!’” at David Castillo Gallery, Miami, and “The Slap of Bird Shit On Wet Pavement” at Mogadishni, Copenhagen. Guenther was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois, studied undergrad in Wisconsin and Rome and received his MFA at Rutgers in 2002. He curated an artist’s storefront space, Arts Tropical, in Brooklyn for a few years. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and is a proficient urban gardener who grows his own tobacco, berries, and grapes.

"Shared Frequencies"

Kabir Carter is a performance and installation artist based in NY. His work could be described as an eloquent study on the interactions and interpolations between sound, space and the body.  I was introduced to his work while doing research for the book Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves and I was intrigued by the physicality of his creative method as well as his attentiveness to the spaces he uses for his work.  Kabir Carter will be performing tomorrow Tuesday, October 18th, at the Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves book celebration at Issue Project Room.

"Report"

When did you start to develop a sensibility about space in all its different manifestations (public, private, indoors and outdoors). What was the first interaction/experiment or project that sparked this idea in your head and consequently in your work?

What set me to actively consider space in my own work was Shared Frequencies. Several years ago, I received a grant to go out on New York City sidewalks and set up a loose array of radio scanners, signal routers, and analog synthesizer modules atop a pair of folding tables. My first few realizations of the work required me to rethink my relationship to sound in space on the fly.

I determined ways to make small monitors project reflective and resonant sound that could be heard within and alongside the energizing high SPL auditory events that blanket urban locales. These and other challenges that I faced while presenting Shared Frequencies in public outdoor spaces led me to better consider architectural acoustics, and how our bodies move through sound and space.

The correlation between sound and space plays a very important role in your work. In the equation between a sounding space and a transformative sound, which of the two is more prevalent?

My use of sound requires space – or at least the idea of space as it applies to a medium – in order to be tangible and concrete. And in terms of sound, space is largely perceived by what it carries, or what demarcates it. I’m interested in how both sound and space can be shaped by transformative energies, and I look for ways to highlight how a signal chain can extend into architecture, and in and out of one’s body.

"Report"

Space would need to be included in such a chain as well. So signal, space, landscape, architecture, and body would all fall along in a variably arranged series of modulated possibilities. Additionally, I feel that sound in the visual arts is at once liberated by its mutable nature, and complicated by its partially formed discursive condition – as something that historically grows out of mostly experimental music practices, and is inscribed with artists’ wholly or partly decoupling from that history and adopting trends originating from late twentieth century visual art practices. Returning to the question, such a correlation will yield very different values depending on where one chooses to stand in relation to these two histories.

Do the advances of technology corrupt our relation to our surrounding environments, the spaces we inhabit and interact with or even reality to some extend?

That’s a rather complicated question – if we are considering acoustic technology, I think it remains a concern that media technology is, historically speaking, partly bequeathed to us through the military. In this light, one might appreciate experimental music practices that are centered on what Friedrich Kittler termed the “abuse” of such technological systems. Part of media arts collective Mobile Image’s eighties era manifesto also merits repeating here: “the counterforce to the scale of destruction is the scale of communication, and… our legacy or epitaph will be determined in many ways by our ability to creatively employ informal, multimedia, multi-cultural, conversational, telecommunications and information technologies.”  Today, we seem to be very much enmeshed in a struggle with and against media technology, and perhaps that is the least that we can hope for – a doubled movement with and against technology.

"Soft Errs"

You have at times used  radio as a source material in your installation work and performances. What is it that you find appealing in this sound source?

While I’ve mostly stopped using radio in my work, my initial attraction to it was as both a source and a site. So in Shared Frequencies, radiophonic signals and radiophonic space are both considered as performative materials that can be worked with over time. I gradually extracted bodily behaviors from my experiences with Shared Frequencies to generate a series of works that focus on how one’s body can be used to move radiophonic sound events through multiple sites or physical locations. And after working on a few projects without using radio technology, it became clear to me that my interests were more closely aligned with sound and space in general, and not so much with a particular and singular kind of signal source or set of propagating conditions. If anything, I attend to spaces that are inhabited by bodies, and among these, spaces for listening to dance music tend to excite me as a listener far more than radio does. But I do expect that I will continue to try and work with its airchain in the future.

Artist Website: kabircarter.com

Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves Book Launch Event:  free103point9.org/events/3657

Second to None

Ry Rocklen has developed a language that is poetic and unique. His originality is an accomplishment considering the thousands of artists who used found objects in their work. Ry inserts old objects with his artistic mojo, giving them new life in a different realm. Perhaps you caught his previous outings in New York City at Marc Jancou in 2009 or in the Whitney Biennial of 2008. Rocklen’s latest New York show is up at Untitled on the Lower East Side until October 16th.

Brent Birnbaum: You could not escape the media letting us New Yorkers know this 9/11 was the 10-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Your current show opened on September 7th and one of the first works you see upon entering the gallery contains a large weathered American flag. A few threads gently touch and hover above the ground. In another sculpture titled Dreams of Liberta, a pillow with an American flag image is used. Was the 9/11 anniversary something you were conscious of when preparing for this show?

Ry Rocklen: In the wake of 9/11 the American flag bled into the fabric of our everyday lives, its colors and design found in a host of objects important to us as Americans and as people. Through pens, pillows, towels, bandannas, clothing, and flags we celebrate our great nation and remember the tremendous loss brought about on that day. I am excited by all these permutations and the liberties taken with the flags design in fitting whatever object it is adorning. With “A Touch of Grace” I was intrigued by the idea and form of a flag that hangs the length of the pole and comes as perilously close to the ground as possible.

"A Touch of Grace"

BB: You are not surprised when you see a sculpture involving trophies anymore, yet they are rarely used successfully. Your giant trophy sculpture, Second to None, is the most
successful I’ve seen. How long did it take to collect all the trophies used?

RR: Trophies, not unlike American flags, have grown in abundance, as the fabrication of their parts has become a multi-million dollar a year industry. On a regular visit to Junk Shop 3D I saw 100 or so trophies sitting together on a high shelf. I was immediately attracted to their sparkle, form, and all that they have come to represent. I left them behind wondering how I would use them. On the car ride home I decided to find a way to bring all the golden statues on the tops of trophies to the same level, with the smallest of trophies rising high as the tallest. The next day I returned to buy the trophies and over the course of the next year and a half collected, planned, and assembled Second to None.

BB: We can guess you might have trolled eBay and local thrift stores, but did you have any unexpected encounters on this trophy hunt via Craigslist or some other source? I’m picturing some middle-aged ex-motocross dude who is finally parting with his old trophies he has kept displayed in his garage. Maybe this is part of the power of the work – thinking of accomplished childhood dreams turned into passé objects occupying valuable space. What do you think about this?

RR: I look at the collection of trophies as the crystalline materialization of practice, passion, and dedication. A trophy is both a bi-product and a means to an end. They are the treasure at the end of a voyage and a symbol of the love for the journey. Once I bought the bulk of trophies from Junk Shop 3D it became easier to procure them. The collection had its own gravity and soon without me trying friends and family were giving me their old trophies.

"The Queen's Reign"

BB: Furthermore, did you play sports growing up and receive any trophies in your childhood? I’m wondering if nostalgia is involved personally for you in the creation of this work. The final work seems like a clean slate. The personalization is gone and now we are all after the one “big fish.” It also made me think of collectors “trophy hunting” through the galleries.

RR: When I was a kid I really wanted to win trophies and although I didn’t play many sports. When I saw all the trophies on the shelf at Junk Shop 3D the same part of my psyche that was attracted to trophies as a child was activated as an adult. I consider the sculpture a celebration of the trophies themselves, their design, their form, and the logic and language of the world of trophies. The sculpture becomes an armature onto which we can project countless stories of triumph and accomplishment.

BB: Let’s stay with Second to None and dissect your process once more. Did you go through several ideas of how to use the trophies before settling on the winner? If so, can you share to unrealized ideas?

RR: The basic idea for Second to None was a constant, to bring all of the tops of the trophies to the same level. I realized early on I did not want Second to None to include anything outside the material and formal language of the trophies. That meant no plexi-glass, no fishing line, no glue, etc. Instead I used existing means of trophy production, ordering parts from trophy suppliers, to assemble Second to None.

BB: Let’s discuss The Queen’s Reign. What came first – knowing how you wanted to use the earrings or finding the umbrella stand?

RR: On my way home from the studio I spotted the umbrella stand used in The Queens Reign being sold as part of a sidewalk sale, so I pulled over and bought it. Once I got the umbrella stand back to the studio I envisioned it covered with earrings shaped like water drops. I liked to strangeness of the combination of objects and the simplicity of its making, collecting earrings, drilling holes in the umbrella stand and hanging the earrings through the holes.

Courtesy of the Artist

Ryan Wallace is a painter and mixed media artist who lives and works in Brooklyn.  His body of work spans a range of influences, re-purposing a variety of art historical and popular references into a fluid vocabulary of rough, playful abstraction. His paintings vary in size and medium but are united by their alternating notions of fragmentation and unity and by a moody, often diffuse tone. His compositions reflect the payload of modernism viewed through the dust covered lens of a gritty, sun bleached kaleidoscope. His interest in the way information is presented, transmitted and stored results in a sensibility that is equal parts science, mysticism and high fives. I had a chance to stop by the artists Greenpoint studio recently to talk with the artist.

HH: You went to school at RISD, your background is in illustration, have you always been a painter?

RW: I don’t have a deft touch. I have to work things into submission to gather my bearings. I tend to make a mess and then clean it up. There is room for this approach in painting. Painting has always felt most natural to me. I’ve been making sculptures and other three dimensional experiments lately but those even feel rooted in my approach to two-dimensional picture making. I stumble into these efforts as a result of not being able to articulate a tone or idea on a flat surface.

HH: You frequently work in the space between painting, collage and printmaking. Perhaps you can speak to this. How do different mediums fit into your practice?

RW: They all inform one and other. I’m always interested in finding new ways to use materials that are endemic to their specific properties. Certain types of work I can only resolve on paper, others on canvas or panel. The limitations of each lead to breakthroughs in others. In this sense the formal quality of materials is a very important part of my practice. I think I have a consistent sensibility and the outcomes are guided by the materials themselves. It keeps making things interesting. I couldn’t sit down and make ten paintings one at a time one after the other. While an oil painting is drying I may work on a mold for a sculpture or a piece on paper. It keeps the experience of being in the studio feeling fresh. I am free to work on what feels appropriate at the time. I think it also keeps a thread between the variety of media within a body of work.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: You are constantly working on several bodies of work, each embodies a separate formal element of your practice. Your make collages, what you termed “proper oil paintings,” spare minimal “tablet” paintings, as well as evocative unique prints, how do you imagine each as part of the whole?

RW: I see it all as one body of work composed in parts revealed at various times.  I have mentioned before Brian Eno’s idea of a song as a selection lifted from a larger soundscape. I see my work functioning like this as well. That each piece is a selection of a larger atmosphere or timeline. Sometimes these parts are ripped from this environment and sometimes taken as an elegant slice or section. Certain paintings seem to be disintegrating or building themselves in front of you. Lately I have been looking at the Timeline pieces functioning like an Atlas and the other works as specificities within this larger collection. Atlas is also the name of particle detector at CERN that I have done research on. I like when monikers fall into place like that and this is often how I come to title works. In regards to my last show. I started the (((Ω.))) paintings in the summer of 2009. I developed them to a certain point then I photographed them and put them away for a year or so. Then, I bitmapped and tweaked the pictures in Photoshop and made lithography plates from those images. These plates became the basis for the works in the large square grid in the show. As I began those works on paper, I switched from newsprint to a finer, whiter drawing paper and Mylar to catch the run off from the plates in the printmaking process. Those pieces of paper and Mylar make up the cut pieces in Mist (Timeline) 3 and other works with the collage elements. Then I looked at everything and went back to finish the paintings that I had first started. From there I felt that the gestures in the work could be played with in a different way and maintain a similar tone and the Tablet paintings are the result of that exploration. So there is a physical and material relationship between the work as well as a conceptual link.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: Your collage pieces especially are defined by their use of form, there are clearly references to painterly tradition and modernism, but you draw equally from science. Where do you gather these influences?

RW: I read a lot of books and magazines, I attend seminars from time to time. Youtube and the web are valuable resources for research.

Right now I’m watching this:

http://www.wimp.com/bighistory/

I focus less on specificity and more on the gesture of these types of ideas. I am especially interested in the human condition, how we operate, perceive and interpret the world around us.   I see a parallel between our own personal fears and desires and the way that the public views developments and trends in the sciences. The fuzziness of reality and imagination.

I recently read an article in Discover about how teams at the University of Rochester and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  were having success with a series of quantum experiments showing that measurements performed in the future can influence the present. They call this Reverse Causality. Destiny is another more familiar word. They were studying this by observing particles under a laser run through several mirrored reflections, over a prolonged period of time, much longer than is typical in these types of experiments. I saw this as a very similar approach to making a painting. You sit and observe and wait for things to happen in front of your stare and you go back, revisit marks and areas and make necessary adjustments. My work isn’t about the science of Reverse Causality. I will tap into an idea like this in terms of its approach to observation and time and philosophical nature and use that as a starting point for my work. Science has given me a lot of starting points in recent years.

What I find fascinating or worth further research isn’t important to the work beyond getting me to begin it.  I am just trying to make pictures that contribute to the dialogue of painting. I see each piece as “a painting” not a painting about this or that.

HH: When did you start using collage, how do you approach this process?

RW: I have always made collages. As far as how I apply it now it began by wanting edges harder than I could make with paint. I was cutting out images and shapes from paper to get this type of edge and collaging those pieces into narrative, architectural paintings. As the work began to abstract more and more I still had these piles of cut paper and mylar laying around. Some pieces were of recognizable things and some were just scraps with color and texture that I had built up.  I shared a studio at the time with the artist Joseph Hart. He uses cut paper and collage as a primary method in his work. He moves the pieces around on the page and makes malleable compositions that he plays with until they are glued down. I found this technique to be a fast way to find surprising results that I employed in my own work. Having this detritus around I was able to experiment with familiar material during this period of transition.

HH: Your paintings reference both the celestial and the grid, is there a logical intersection for the magical and the rational?

RW: When I present a piece like (((Ω.))) Cycle,

http://www.ryanmwallace.com/Guerrero8.html

those are the precise kinds of concerns that I am hoping to incite within the viewer. I try and keep any opinion out of the work but use materials and visual cues to guide its reception.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: Your works seem to champion a level of instability; there is a sense of both momentum and collapse. There is something dystopic, though your paintings are composed of light there is darkness, where do you fit in this contradiction?

RW: The notion of serenity subverted is a common theme. This brings us back to the blur and fuzziness of perception that I am interested in. With those paintings, I am aware that they reference Ross Bleckner’s light paintings at the same time as aboriginal dot paintings. The big bang and the big crunch. This white light is our symbol of creation and of death.  I like the ambiguity of all of this.  I think it breathes mystery into works that at first glance feel so direct. I find that it helps the viewer come to the work on their own terms.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: The introduction to your recent catalogue quotes Pierre Chardin. Can you elaborate on the significance of “the omega”?

RW: The Omega Point is a term that he coined in his book The Phenomenon of Man. Chardin’s theoretical “Omega Point” describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. While I find these types of theories beautiful I am wary of lofty singular ideas and predictions: the end of the world, a raison d’etre for evolution, one supernatural being, universe, politic, etc. The nature of this singular event is subverted by painting more than one.Here is total consciousness….wait, maybe it’s this one.

I used this idea as the starting point for works in a recent solo show at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco. A critic wrote this about this installation:

http://www.ryanmwallace.com/Guerrero1.html

“This visual reverie is interrupted in the installation by the sheer  repetition of nearly identical canvases in tight proximity to each other. The frequency seemingly degrades the potency of each piece, shifting the interpretation of the sequence of paintings to the act of repetition itself. Robbed of this perceptual intimacy, the series as a whole shifts to a veneer of pop decadence, as if the canvases were nightclub promotions.”

He really understood what I am doing, though I’m not sure that he realized it. I found this very complimentary, I think it was meant to be critical.

HH: We’ve talked about your influences, from sci-fi to physics. Who are some of the contemporary artists you’re looking at today? Is there anyone who you feel pushes you?

RW: I find the artists closest to me to be the biggest inspiration.

Last week the best shows that I saw were by Mark Grotjahn, Picasso, Sol Lewitt and Katy Moran.

Tara Donovan’s show of pin paintings at Pace was exceptional as was the recent Rudolf Stingel show at Gagosian.

HH: Your starting a gallery in East Hampton, tell us a little bit about it.

RW: It is called Halsey Mckay Gallery and we are now open. The name is a combination of our grand mothers maiden names. Mckay is also my middle name. I opened it with my good friend Hilary Schaffner. She is an artist and in recent years has focused more on curatorial endeavors. She has a strong background in photography so between the two of us we have a pretty thorough appreciation of a broad spectrum of work. We are working with several artists but for the main exhibition area of the gallery we are focusing on one and two person shows. You can see images of our first show by Patrick Brennan here:

http://www.halseymckay.com/patrick-brennan-there-is-an-ocean/patrick-brennan%E2%80%93there-is-an-ocean

We are really excited to bring artists that we are close with and whose work we believe in to the Hamptons where there is a great understanding, history and support for visual art. It all happened very quickly and I feel very fortunate to have such amazing artists to give opportunities to and a great space to show the work in. The artists that we have in our schedule are truly emerging. They are all showing in New York and abroad and have exciting careers but may not have appeared in a biennial or major museum show yet.  We are hoping to be able to exhibit these artists work in a setting that doesn’t have all of the pressure of a big New York show but still is exposed to serious patrons, artists and those who appreciate great work. The community in East Hampton can provide this.

HH: What are your plans? Upcoming shows?

RW: It’s a busy summer that I am really excited about.

I will be in Grasping for Relics at Zieher Smith organized by Patrick Brennan.

Summer Whites at Rachel Uffner curated by Eddie Martinez and Sam Moyer.

I’m releasing a book that I made with Oakland publisher Land and Sea at my friend Annabelle’s shop on June 17th. This is a joint release along with beautiful books made by Dave Kennedy Cutler and Ruby Sky Stiler.

I will be in a show at Blackburn 20/20 as part of a fellowship that I did at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

I am curating a show at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton called Domestic Goods. May 28-June 28. This is a large group show of some of my favorite people and artists.

At Halsey Mckay we are putting on five exhibitions from the end of May through September:

Patrick Breannan May 20-June 7

Joseph Hart & Ruby Sky Stiler June 10-July 4

Chris Duncan July 8-July 31

A Group show curated by Rachel Uffner August 5- September 6

Glen Baldridge & Bryan Graf September 6-October 3

E3-HS9, 2011

Tree Drawings, Nightwalks, Insect Flight Paths, Restorative Device, For the Baron, Postal Works, and his latest Recorded Delivery.  Those are the work titles of UK based artist Tim Knowles. You can pick up on the artist’s sensibility simply from those titles – simplified to bare bones – no more, no less. When I first experienced one of Knowles’ Nightwalks photographs at Bitforms Gallery, I was indeed speechless. One could easily muse at Knowles’ Nightwalks images and be inspired to write. Understanding the process behind this creation though, shows us a slightly different story. The artist uses all the natural elements as his materials, which forms a spontaneous and performative act. No, this has nothing to do with performance art, more like behavioral studies. Looking at Knowles’ body of work all together leaves me at this comfortable space that is somewhat ambiguous yet extremely familiar. Who would have the guts (or time) to wire-tap the inside of a package with audio/visual recording devices and send it off on a 902 mile journey?  I wouldn’t. It must’ve also required a period of trial-and-error before the package is ready to set off. The result, “an artwork which captures the topsy-turvy world of a parcel in the post.”  Recorded Delivery, created with permission from the Royal Mail, is currently on view at the Bitforms Gallery, NYC, until the 27th of May.

E3 3TT 18:21:41[E3-HS9

HW: I am fascinated by your Post Box project. It seems to be a progression from your previous Postal Works.  What is the inspiration that led to this entire series of work?

TK: I had been making drawings produced automatically by systems beyond my control, such as a series made by a pen suspended below a buoyant helium balloon which traced out the wind’s movements on paper. I was exploring different possibilities and began to think about ways in which the act out delivering an artwork might produce the work.  The postal drawing works and the vehicle drawings were conceived at the same time – the postal works particularly as a low cost and simple way of making a work for exhibitions further afield.  For my exhibition Music of Chance I drove down to Milan, Italy producing a drawing onto a roll of slowly moving paper in the back of the car. As I traveled the drawing recorded forces at work within the car as it drove along motorways, up and down mountain passes and around city streets.  Departing with a blank roll of paper a drawing is created over the duration of the journey, which maps the roads and traffic conditions with very distinct sections.

TK: Similarly, with the postal drawings, I seal a blank piece of paper into the parcel and neither myself nor the recipient (gallery / collector) knows how the piece will work out until it is opened when it arrives.  And with Post Box E3-HS9 when I downloaded the 20,000 images taken over its 902 mile journey there is a real sense of excitement to see what has been captured.I had been working with long exposure photography and experimenting with time lapse so Spy Box the first camera parcel was a logical progression.

HW: Do you plan to further develop it?

TK: Yes, and the crate work presented in the Bitforms 6th floor project space was a first step in that direction, but I don’t really want to give further developments away at this stage.

Recorded Delivery (Installation view), 2011

HW: A large part of your work seems to be based on the natural phenomenon of chance vs. control. Can you tell us a bit about working in this method?

TK: Akin to scientific experimentation, a situation is engineered and the work carried out – rules, limitations and boundaries may be set and to some extent affect the outcome of the work but with the exception of ending the experiment, I relinquish control. The work frequently utilizes tailor made mechanisms in its production, be they custom made parcels, weathervane helmets.

Roman Signer describes his practice as using actions (such as an explosion, a fall, etc.)  to sculpt  - cause and effect – he presents the results of actions. Similarly, my work presents the results of processes and experiments.  The situations I construct though carefully and genuinely adherent to the process are not scientifically rigourous and a multitude of external factors come into play.

My more recent works such as the Windwalks made in London are less predictable and allow for greater number of possibilities and outcomes, and a greater potential of the unknown for me the participant.  I set off guided solely by the wind venturing into unknown territory, the constantly changing wind is channelled, diverted and redirected or blocked and reversed by buildings, eddies shift, passing vehicles create air currents, etc.  The drawing produced as a part of the final work accurately maps my random meandering, which collides with the city’s structure and obstacles.

The Post Box work takes an image every 12 seconds. These images capture random moments, at times the parcel moves through the postal system, at others sitting still observing the system working around it. With works such as the tree drawings the outcomes are relatively predictable – clear connections, characteristics and patterns often existing between trees of the same species, though all the drawings differ.

Though notions around determinism, free will, chance, randomness and prediction are a significant aspect of the work, it is certainly not solely about these concepts.   The work does not assert a particular fixed position with regard to the concept of determinism,  certainly not a hard determinism incompatible with free will.  I’m currently developing works which explore the idea of the butterfly effect, and the way in which events are connected in an infinite global network of causes and effects, the world in constant flux.

Crate work #1, London - New York City, 2011

HW: Your Tree Drawings are delightful and hint at a playfulness that most of us as adults have forgotten. What influenced you to make this project?

TK: I think a sense of playfulness is very important and often goes hand in hand with a desire to explore, sadly can be looked down upon by some as connected to childishness. According to Stephen Nachmanovitch, play is the root and foundation of creativity in the arts and sciences also as in daily life. Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Play may also serve as a pretext, allowing people to explore reactions of others by engaging in playful interaction. Flirting is an example of such behavior.

Tree Drawing - Hawthorn on Easel #1, 2005

HW: What is your system of research, from concept to realizing an idea? Do you put aside project ideas and revisit them in the future?

TK: Ideas are refined and resolved over time until they are realised or not, as the case may be – in many cases there is a level of logistics, organisation, the production of mechanisms, before the project can be executed and/or realised. There are a number of different but connected strands running through my work be, it the mail art works, the Nightwalk photographs or the Windwalk series. There are connections between the strands – long exposure photography was used in my Insect flight paths, Full moon reflection photographs and in the night walks – which connects with the Windwalks and Restorative Device #1 and Suit which spills a trail of seeds as I walk through a barren landscape, creating a living trail. The notion of drawing a line, a pathway recorded is central to all of the work.

HW: What was the experience like producing the Nightwalk photographs?

TK: The Nightwalks are performed over a new moon so there is no moonlight. A large format camera is set up on a tripod looking out into the landscape, the shutter is opened and then I walk away from the camera into the dark night landscape carrying a number of very powerful flood light torches.  As I move through the darkness the lights illuminate the landscape revealing my path. Whilst one can see the ground within the bubble of light immediately around you – as I walk, my position in the landscape and orientation to the camera are steadily confused and I just try to follow the ridge I’m walking, a path or a compass bearing.

TK: For different works I have walked for between 45 minutes and an hour & a half, subject to the landscape and the camera’s view point.  When I reach the point that I want the walk to be finished or I’ve moved out of the camera’s view I turn off the lights and turn to the direction where I think the camera is, carefully retracing my steps in the dark until I can see a light signalling that the camera shutter has been closed by an assistant, I acknowledge with a signal back and then make my way back to the camera with a head torch. Each of the long exposure photographs takes 2 to 3 hours by the time I’ve returned to the camera and 2 or 3 walks are made each night.

Nightwalk - Valley of the Rocks #1

HW: Have you thought about other ways of capturing the light other than using photography, ie. shooting with video?

TK: I have looked at other ways of capturing light including video but photography also has the quality of being able to compress time into a single image often revealing things that weren’t apparent to the eye – the pattern of the full moon’s reflection on undulating water or an hours walk captured in one of the Nightwalk photographs.

HW: Your work addresses some environmental concerns (eg. the Seed Suit and Wind Walks), yet romanticized in its own right.  How do you feel about the environment that you’re living in now?

TK: Much of my work, particularly the Tree Drawings, Windwalks explore and investigate the natural world, drawing attention to it but without taking a political position. The new works made for the Horticultural Society introduce the notion of a restorative environmental gesture – I find the idea of restorative environmental design fascinating and something that will be required more and more if we are to preserve the world around us.

The world is changing fast, and in many ways that are deeply worrying – I feel that we need to pause, consider what kind of world we want to live in and change a lot of the values we currently hold.

HW: What are you reading these days?

TK: A little time back I read Our Ancestors – a collection of 3 great stories by Italo Calvino one being Baron in the trees from where the title for the Horticultural Society Exhibition originates.I’ve just started reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde.

HW: Any upcoming projects to share?

TK: I will be presenting a collaboration with Brazilian Artist Carlos Eduardo Costa (Cadu) at Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo in June – the project explores weather both on a local and global scale. There are others upcoming projects but they are staying under wraps at the moment!

(Images courtesy Bitforms Gallery)

"Folding In On Itself" (2011, Type Records)

Ezekiel Honig is a NY based music producer, sound artist and founder of two respected labels – Anticipate and Microcosm – well known in the circles of music connoisseurs and art enthusiasts. Many people, including myself, have fully embraced his solo work with the beautiful and enigmatic “Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band” (Anticipate, 2008). Aside from having released six studio albums and an equal amount of singles/EPs and splits/collaborations since 2003, Honig has also been producing sound for picture as well as being a constructive audio thinker.

Ezekiel has generously shared his latest release with me on a rainy Thursday afternoon of April. From the first seconds of this recording I immediately sensed that I am entering a very private territory.  It brought me to a place that was warm, organic, and, strangely enough, familiar. The sounds coming from Honig’s latest album blended exceptionally well with the moody cityscape outside my window as if they were the reflecting voices of the neighboring buildings or the sighs and the pulses of the passers-by. “Folding In On Itself” carries Honig’s signature sound but its textural palette tells a more personal story that ties the artist to the city he inhabits and the city respectively becomes the skin and bone of Honig’s aural canvas. A minor difference worth noting compared to his earlier offerings is that Folding In On Itself is released under the Type imprint, home to artists like Xela, Helios, Goldmund, Deaf Center, Mokira and Rene Hell among others.

Folding In On Itself Record Release Party is on May 12 at Littlefield. The bill also includes a DJ set by John Xela (founder of Type) as well as a set by Borne. More info about the event can be found here.

MP: Does “Folding In On Itself” summarize your personal soundprint within the collective memory of this city and its past?

Ezekiel Honig: Well, it’s a tiny sliver of that, an example of moving through cities.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling it a summary, but more a version of it.  Similarly, although New York City dominates the album, there are moments from Torun, Poland, and Milan, Italy as well.  In a way, any city serves the purpose and the symbolism, even though the heart of it and the majority of the outdoor sounds do originate in New York.  I recorded all the original sounds so it’s all remapping experience, wherever I was when the recordings happened.

MP: How long did it take you to make this album?

EH: Roughly two years.  That time is of course not full time, eight hours a day and not regimented in any way.  There were weeks where I didn’t get anything done and weeks that were extremely productive.

MP: A recurring pattern in your work which, I think, is responsible for the uniqueness of your sound, is its muted, slow paced meditative flow. Do you spend a lot of time with your materials until they get their final shape and sound?

EH: Making music is as much about meditation for me as anything else.  Each track gets finished slowly, editing and piecing things together until they feel correct.  Because the music comes out of the process itself, and is not incredibly preconceived, it needs to happen over a period of time, revealing itself to me though trial and observation, making sense as I delve further into it.

MP: How much space do you leave to intuition when you produce a track?

EH: Intuition is a big part of it.  That being said, let me be clear that the intuition is based on a range of experiences and sounds and built over time, a cumulative idea rather than a make it up as you go, free-for-all.  Intuition might be another way of saying internal logic, the system that a track or a series of tracks sets up for themselves, moving from one piece to another in a way that makes sense within the confines of the world it is existing in, the sounds it is using and the place I want it to go.

MP: What is your approach when it comes to field-recordings? Do you hunt the sounds that you have in your mind or do sounds reveal themselves to you after the recording process?

EH: Definitely the latter.  I never look for something specific when I record outside, though of course the sounds that happen are limited by where I go.  Besides choosing a location I’m more interested in finding things that just happen, searching for the sounds that occur within the recording and have potential for a track.  I often find a sound that leads to a track being built around it and I never could have planned that.

I’m more excited by the happenstance of what occurs at any given moment, the accidental nature of the process of recording a situation that you can’t control, and then the paradox is that you do in fact control the final output, manipulating that material to do what you want it to do.  It’s almost like digging for samples, but within a few spare moments of actual occurrence rather than records that exist.

MP: Do you have a favorite location in NY that you regard highly inspirational and sonically interesting?

EH: There are certain spaces that have a particularly interesting resonance to them (subways, museums, etc), but honestly, any second on any city street has a wealth of potential.  If you’re listening carefully, it is all interesting, but certain nuances need to be coaxed out.  Because it’s more about editing and processing any two minutes of recording can at least potentially yield something essential.  It makes you listen to the world more carefully, which changes one’s perspective, on life as much as music.

"People, Places & Things" (2004, Microcosm)

MP: I get the feeling that in this release the use of recorded environments/spaces contains at times a denser network of metadata and personal memory stamps. How does that relate to your concept of the loop as a tool?

EH: There are certain moments which feel like they can work as a loop, while others need to play out on their own a bit.  I don’t know how to explain this accurately because it is based on instinct (leading back to your previous question).  This instinct (or intuition) is based on all past experience and sound work, so it is incremental in a sense, and part of being myself.  Just as a loop is a tool to be used in the construction of a piece, any sound is a tool in the same vein.  That is, however, a simplification of something more emotionally complicated.

The fact that I recorded the sounds of these spaces inherently carries with it a memory association, but it also gets manipulated from a source of all memories.  It’s difficult to separate the event itself from all other events.  Sound is so powerful for memory.  While a photograph is missing what was out of frame, and one fills that in with what they think was there, sound is just as it is, if it hasn’t been manipulated of course.  It retains all things which were within earshot (microphone-shot, more specifically).  Listening to a recording of a space I am instantly transported there and begin remembering details about the moment, even if it was from years ago.  While I may remember some things incorrectly, the sound is what it is.  I may have forgotten that this car drove by, but I hear it very distinctly, so I know that it happened.

Editing those moments into something new, utilizing shards of them for a new purpose, is a layered process because depending on the processing and the arrangement it can either color the rest of the track with those memories or it can get lost in the new thing which it is now a part of.  It completely depends on the way it is used, how it is mixed, and how strong the associations are.  In many ways working with these materials can be flashback oriented, movements through personal stories, and sometimes they’re just sounds with potential, a tool to be harnessed like any other towards the desired goal.

"Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band" (2008, Anticipate)

MP: Recently I read a very interesting article about the state of music industry. The author made the remark that an artist who has developed a unique aural vocabulary can stand out and defy the challenges of the democratized and yet cluttered music community. Do you think that being “unique” is enough and if so how would you define this term?

EH: This is a question I think and talk about often.  There are so many interwoven layers to it, of art, business, social culture, technology. Unique as an idea is of course defined differently for everyone, based on their taste.  What is unique for one is boring for another.  It all depends on context, on cultural associations, so it’s an extremely “eye of the beholder” type of construct.  There is also the need for something to be unique and ‘good’, another word with a multitude of definitions.  My point is simply that uniqueness helps you stand out, but the work needs to also connect to something familiar enough that people will respond to it.  It’s an interesting balance.

To comment on the article you read more directly, being unique is necessary to stand out in the crowded marketplace, but it is far from being enough to make a difference, or to stand out to the extent that people will support the work (i.e. support the artist, support the label).  There is so much out there, that while some things rise to the top because they touch a specific emotional or cultural chord with audiences, much of the success of something still relies on how loud the shouting is (promotion, marketing) or the label that it is released on.  A small number of labels have an established enough brand for it to affect how a release does in the marketplace.  An overwhelming majority does not.

Similarly, the crowding of people’s time and mental space creates a situation where all of us miss out on material that we might love, but will never find out about, or have time for if we did.  Aggregation is consistently being given more attention because it can use filters for people, but the filters still leave something to be desired.

The thing which is both interesting and scary, exciting and challenging, about the current musical landscape (and all media for that matter) is the fragmentation that we are in the midst of.  While there used to be a set route of producing, releasing and promoting a work, there are now pretty much no rules and lots of options, both tested and still to be thought of.  It’s amazing, and also can be confusing.  It calls into question some basic tenets of distribution and finding an audience.  One can dream up a new approach and make it work, and there is no need to really follow the same path that has been used for the last bunch of decades.  This then calls into question the whole concept of course, and reminds us that what we take for granted as the manner in which music is released and received is an extremely new thing in history, and we are merely at the beginning of the next phase, and we don’t know how it will turn out and what the effects will be.  Because so many of the boundaries have been removed, there is less authority of taste in a sense, which is amazing, not just because it creates a situation which makes it easier for more creative ideas to break through, but because it requires the average listener to curate their own taste more concretely, to shape one’s listening habits rather than turning on the radio and accepting whatever the pop charts are.  I realize many people still do that, but a lower percentage than it was twenty years ago.

MP: How did your release with Type occur?

EH: I’ve known John Twells, the owner of Type, for a few years, through music industry circles.  He asked me about doing a record for the label after hearing my Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band album, which I released on my Anticipate label in 2008.  Thankfully the resulting record met his criteria for a release on his label.  It’s pretty amazing to be working through Type, with a label and a person that I respect creatively and organizationally, that I trust with my work.  Self-promotion has always been a necessary evil for me, rather than something which comes naturally, so having another company take care of that end of a release is pretty rad.

MP: Do you have any other creative activities currently going on apart from your latest release?

EH: I took a bit of time after finishing the album to clear my head creatively, but am back in full swing now, working on a couple collaborative audiovisual projects which are in a different direction, am in the early stages of a collaboration with Mark Templeton, and beginning to work on music for a couple of short films and possibly a documentary later in the year.

Artist Links:

http://www.ezekielhonig.com/

http://www.anticipaterecordings.com/

http://www.microcosm-music.com/

"Don't Tread on Me" Three Channel Video installation. Performance still, Momenta Art, 2011 (Photo: Alesia Exum)

Chelsea Knight is a New York based video artist. She recently completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Italy. She is a current resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program.  Her video installations tackle the dynamics of political and social control. Her narratives blend fiction and reality in a singular fluid motion. Her subjects have included professional dancers, military instructors, prison inmates and the artist’s own parents. She encourages her characters to improvise, creating a tension between the personal and the scripted.  The artist’s videos examine the ways in which both governmental and domestic forces control our emotional, political and social reality. It is Chelsea’s great strength to lay bear the wires by which humans manipulate and entrap one another. I recently had a chance to stop by her studio in lower Manhattan to chat about her work, recent projects and future plans.

"I Am Not a Man, Not Now" Single Channel Video, 14 Minutes, 2011

Howard Hurst: Your recent piece “The End of All Resistance” features two U.S. army interrogators as they role-play official “emotional interrogation techniques” taken directly from the Army Field Manual.  You then had two female actors and your parents improvise upon a re-enact the script. Where did the impetus for this project come from?

Chelsea Knight: I was reading a book about non-violent interrogation by Matthew Alexander (How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq, Free Press, 2008), and I found it really interesting to think about removing the physical extreme of torture from an interrogation, being left with a series of nonviolent, institutionalized emotional manipulations. I feel like the American population is so galvanized for or against the use of physical interrogation techniques but aren’t having many mainstream conversations about the nature of verbal interrogation, do we need it, what should it include, what does it mean, etc. The army manual on which I based my project (US Army Field Manual 22-2-3, 2006, available free online) has a specific list of “emotional techniques” that seems to borrow from popular culture —one technique encourages the use of good cop / bad cop, and is named “Mutt and Jeff” after the cartoon characters. I was interested in making a work that backed away from torture and focused more on the way emotional manipulation in these techniques borrows both from the language of intimate relationships and the media.

HH:  In “End of All Resistance”, as well as other projects, there seem to be a focus on relationships of power.

CK: I feel relationships of power are at the core of every social interaction, they affect the way we use and interpret language, and in like manner, language affects the way we understand and use power. I’ve always been drawn to writing and art that reveals roles of authority or control in extremes: work that either lays itself bare and exposes its intention, or hides itself, its violence, its power and its truth in language. In “The End of All Resistance” the power relationships are laid out in the manual very clearly, almost embarrassingly so. I was fascinated by this as an openly published thing, almost as if a secret was being revealed. What wasn’t being addressed in the manual was the accepted fact that this is how interrogations should be carried out, this was the way bodies should be regarded, played with, manipulated. It was treated as self-evident. I began thinking about the ways we learn social codes from watching others, and how our intimate lives mirror these unspoken rules and the play element of power.  I wanted to make work about that.

"Acting Out" Single Channel Video Installation, 19 minutes, 2010

HH:  Your videos seem to be quite complex, and labor intensive, is there a finished product in mind from the beginning? How much of the process is intuitive?

CK: I set up a specific framework for each piece, and then within that framework there is a fair amount of improvisation. The participants I work with are usually people authentic to a given field: interrogators, or diplomats, Tea Partiers, etc., so they drive a fair amount of the content within each piece, and we always discuss how much of a piece will be true vs. fictional, intimate vs. alienated, etc.  So yes, the process is intuitive to a degree, including the editing, but is also mapped out in a pretty specific way beforehand.

HH:  You are a graduate of the Whitney Studio Program. The director Ron Clark is known for his very specific theoretical focus. How was that experience?

CK: I enjoyed the ISP, we read an interesting range of theories: feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, economic, etc. The main thread for me was the formation of the subject, and the ability or inability of that subject to resist larger frameworks of power, both on an intimate or self-reflexive level, and in relation to larger ideological frameworks. I think the program affected my work in lots of ways; I’m still processing it.

HH:  You recently screened an installation of your project Don’t Tread On Me at Momenta Art. The video takes members of the Tea Party as its subject. What drew you to this project?

CK: After my year at the ISP, which was very politically left-focused, I felt I wanted to experiment with political persuasions different from my own, and see what bridging (if any) might be possible. So I collaborated on the piece with members of the Tea Party, libertarians, and Ayn Rand enthusiasts who are right-leaning, to see what conversations might arise. An important part of the final performance and video was some physical choreography by the participants based in some ways on their ideology. Though we weren’t able to find many common points of view, the image of their bodies moving through space creates a vulnerable counterpart (the body) to the firm and fixed authority of the political views being spoken.

HH:  What seems to unite your various projects is an interest in peeling back layers of perception, fictional and otherwise.  This involves a mix of scripted performance, improvisation, and actual interview. I imagine each piece as an evolving performance, where the juiciest bits happen in the margins, off script.  I am thinking especially of “Acting Out”, where you filmed prisoners inside the County Jail in Skowhegan, Maine  performing scenes from Ubu Roi. How does this process work? When you embark on a project, when you choose a script, what are you hoping to find?

CK: Each project is a collaboration in some sense, though I ultimately edit or co-edit the pieces and have control over how they are seen, but in many ways the meaning is arrived at collectively. In “Acting Out,” a collaboration with artist Austin Shull, we chose the location, the script, the actors and even a director, but the overall project was driven by the convergence of all of those elements. The piece re-enacts a nineteenth century political parody play, with some absurdist twists, within the confines of a jail. We were struck most of all by how prejudiced our ideas about confinement were, what it meant to be “in jail” and to perpetuate stereotypes about what a prisoner does and who he or she is. Recognizing this, we chose the title based on Freudian term “Acting Out” which denotes an inability to work through something, the tendency to perpetuate it by acting it out over and over again. The piece therefore isn’t documentary but isn’t strictly fiction either, it’s a depiction of how people respond to an environment beyond their experience but firmly fixed in their imagination.

"The End of All Resistance" Single Channel Video, 29 Minutes, 2010

HH:  How do you fit into this process? How has making videos like “The End of All Resistance” effected  you? Are the results expected or anticipated?

CK: I’m always surprised by the results of my projects. The End of All Resistance turned out much the way I originally envisioned it—that piece was more based on transcription and careful planning than some of my other work. And yet I was not anticipating the intricacies of my father and stepmothers’ interpretations of the process of interrogation, nor the fact that the actresses would choose to interpret the interrogative transcripts as though they were on a cop show, or the kindness and professionalism of the army interrogators themselves. Each relationship I filmed and participated in both contracted and expanded as we went through the process together.

I was surprised, perhaps naively, most of all, by the outcome of the Tea Party project, “Don’t Tread on Me.” I expected to find points of convergence and softening between myself and the participants. Instead I found I got along well with the people involved, but felt myself completely shut down by their views, and polarized more to the left by what I was reading, hearing and understanding. Reading right wing essays left me feeling enervated and depressed, I expected to be more resilient.

HH:  You also have done several projects of photography. How do you view your prints in relation to the videos?

CK: In my work with the Tea Party, I used photographs as ancillary to the videos, connected but also stand-alone. The images in that project depict stereotypes about freedom in the US, and include an image of two wall-street executives wearing Greek masks. The videos don’t have any direct reference to the photographs, but there is a kind of slippage between them. In other cases I make photos without any accompaniment, but they always relate heavily to themes embedded in my other video and performance work. In a recent project dedicated entirely to photography, “The Historical Contemporary,” I appropriated old filmstrip images from 1970s educational filmstrips on European, Asian and African cultures.  Some images show women being instructed by men in various industrial and commercial environments. Others show women instructing their daughters in domestic spaces. I was interested in the way women were portrayed as workers in these images, but always childlike, under the watchful eye of a man, and in turn they are allowed to instruct their daughters—actual children—but only in matters of the home. That series was shown on its own at a recent group show at Harvard University, but will be shown again alongside a current project I am working on about women and labor.

HH:  What are you working on currently? You just finished filming a project at the Met?

CK: I just finished a collaboration with artist Elise Rasmussen, where we explore Antigone in its references to the roles of women in ancient Greece. We read the play as both a proto-feminist play and a misogynistic one, where the protagonist engages in acts of brave civil disobedience, but is also 
used as an example of a stereotypical feminine tendency to feel rather than think. Elise and I try to draw attention to the way language is used against women in the play, its loss and gain of intention through time, and its relevance today. We were lucky to be able to film part of the project at the Met museum. I’m also working on a collaboration with writer Melissa Seley, a colleague of mine at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, with a performance and video to be shown at the LMCC open Studios on May 13-15.

In the bath (Mother and sister) 2009

Clarisse d’Arcimoles is a 25-year-old French artist living in London. Her work can be found at Saatchi Gallery until April 30th as part of NEWSPEAK: BRITISH ART NOW and in Tel-Aviv at the Alfred Gallery until April 31st. A solo show in London just closed at Degree Art Gallery and she had a busy 2010. BOOM! That’s Miss d’Arcimoles blowing up – and rightfully so. Her powerful images and projects bring to mind a dozen other positive adjectives. The power in her work partially lies in the multiple jumping off points for the viewer. You’re viscerally thrown off guard with emotion, intimacy, humanity, and history. Artcards Review digitally jumped the pond to talk with Clarisse.

Brent Birnbaum: Let’s start with the Market Estate Project. A year ago a council estate with 571 flats was bulldozed in Holloway, North London. Up until its final days, 31 families still called the Market Estate their home. Some residents had for over 40 years. This complex built in the 1960’s represented a utopian vision of modern urban planning. Were you familiar with the building prior to discovering it was going to be leveled?

Clarisse d’Arcimoles: We were seventy-five artists who had been granted the possibility to work on site, to transform flats left behind, corridors, staircases, building facades and change the estate into a creative playground, knowing all along that market estate would be demolished. Surprisingly, I was the only one who really built a personal relationship with a resident. It is probably due to the fact that Jimmy Watts was one of the few who didn’t want to move out and leave all his souvenirs behind.

BB: At what point did it hit you there was an art project to be had here?

CD: The first time I came I could only see the gloomy and desolate sides of it. It was hard to believe that there were still people living there. I started taking photographs and I was really intrigued by the building itself at first and eventually more so by the abandoned flats. I also started researching the history of the estate but it is only the day I entered for the first time in Jimmy’s flat that I realized there was an art project to be done. In the end, Jimmy by sharing his stories was the only one who really made me understand how alive and lovely this council estate used to be. This was something I wanted to share with the audience from the really beginning.

BB: Jimmy Watts was one of the first residents to move into the Market Estate, which occurred in 1967. How did you approach him? Was he receptive to your artistic ideas from the beginning?

CD: I met Jimmy on January the 15th. He was standing next to the lift and was carrying a shopping trolley. He was mumbling because the lift was broken so I asked him if he needed help. He introduced himself saying that at 87 years old, he was the oldest resident of the estate and had been there the longest. Five days later he invited me for a tea in his flat. I noticed the pictures on the walls, which were already gone and the traces of them still visible. Jimmy spent forty-three years in this estate, as he told me later, and was forced to move, leaving his memories behind. I stayed with him all afternoon listening about his souvenirs; each tiny object was a reminder of passed times. Jimmy was aware from the start that I was doing an art project about him however at that stage the only important thing was for him to have someone to talk to and tell how much he used to love this place.

BB: How did the other residents react to you focusing on Jimmy?

CD: I never really met or spoke to the other residents and I was very lucky to have met Jimmy who had so much to tell. He had seen the estate from its birth to its demolition. To knock on his door and enter his flat was like time travel for me. By the end of the project, I realized I had not even spoken to any of the other 74 artists working on site on other projects for almost two months.

BB: Mr. Watts opened up his life to you. I imagine there were some intense moments. Imaging this through your simple yet profound presentation of the project is highly charged. Were there any times either one of you were overwhelmed with emotion?

CD: Jimmy’s whole life in the estate was packed inside sealed boxes. It all eventually came back to life the day he opened one of those boxes to share his super 8 home movies with me. I discovered wonderful moments of Jimmy’s life. One of them his son, as a boy, is dressed as a magician, performing simple tricks by making the most of the camera. In reality, the boy pauses the film and removes a cup from the table, making it look as though it has disappeared. The images on the screen of a happy, thriving estate, a hive of activity in an exciting modern setting, reflect some of the utopianism of the estate’s first residents. The discovery of those fragments of life hidden in those boxes for three or four decades from what Jimmy calls “the good old days” was magic. I could see the places and the faces being brought back to life, he said “I shall treasure these images forever”. We both laughed and felt at that moment so vulnerable and fragile. A week later I received a call from Jimmy asking me to accompany him to visit the new flat he was forced to move into. He was going there for the first time. We discovered that his new flat was facing the old clock tower, which was a landmark of the Market Estate. He whispered to me that every time he will look at it, he will remember. That day we both felt a little lighter.

BB: How did Jimmy Watts feel being the subject of an art project as things began to develop and he could see what you were creating?

CD: Each time we met, Jimmy would surprise me by sharing so many memories and records of his family life. He also showed me some old newspaper, which traces the history of the estate but also explains its rise and fall. It is only the day he moved out of his flat and gave me the keys that it really felt to both of us that he was the subject of an art project. I spent one week working alone in his empty flat, my feelings were fluctuating between nostalgia, having spent all these days with Jimmy in those rooms and excitement at the idea of offering him a beautiful homage on the day of the event.

BB: It has been a year since you did this project. Are you still in touch with Jimmy?

CD: Absolutely! Jimmy sees me as the daughter he never had. While for me he has somehow replaced my Scottish grandfather to whom I was very close. Next time I see him, I will definitely print this interview and show it to him. He is so happy and proud. It is my way of saying thank you to him.

BB: Your collaborative installation, The Rise and Fall, faithfully and meticulously re-created Mr. Watt’s kitchen within the white box of a gallery. Did Jimmy Watts attend the exhibition? If so, how did he react?

CD: Unfortunately he wasn’t able to, although I did my best to convince him to come. In a way we are all similar. It is so hard to leave a place because we are scared of forgetting, and once we leave we don’t want to go back out of fear of remembering.

BB: You have also exposed some intimate moments within your family. Let’s discuss your artistic process with the Un-possible retour project – which has received a lot of well-deserved attention. In this series, you recreated decades old photos of family members. The original photo is shown alongside the new photo. Seeing the aging of a person, as the background more or less is the same is staggering. There is some fully accessible art mojo here. How did this project dawn on you? Furthermore, did you always have this collection of family photos, or is it something you pieced together at your parents house back in France?

CD: The initial inspiration for wanting to do this project came from a photograph of my brother and I when we were very young, having a bath together in a small pink bucket. I produced Un-possible retour as my graduate project. I had three months to produce the work and it is only when I went back to my parents’ house and looked carefully through my family albums that I realized how difficult and ambitious this project was.

BB: Specifically dissecting one work from the series, In the bath (Mother and sister), some small bottles appear on the bathtub edge beside your mother’s head. Why did you decide these should be in the new photo, as nothing was in that spot in the original photo?

CD: The problem when you shoot a picture in a bath in the evening and the five members of your family already had a shower, there is no more hot water! In the rush we simply forgot. I could have removed them afterwards on Photoshop but I like to leave room for doubt.

BB: We see the inevitable aging of housing complexes and people in your projects. Your attraction and even possible fascination with time is evident. I read you see time as a collaborator. This brilliant notion is something people push against their whole life, yet you seem very accepting and embrace time. Has this been an interest of yours since you were a child or has this progressed as your interest in Photography has?

CD: I started questioning myself a lot to understand why my relation with time is so intimate at the age of 25. I suppose that I am too young to use it as something hostile or fatal so I use it as collaborator. I find it fascinating to experiment with the ability of photography to play with the time and manipulate it.

BB: I recently saw one of the best works of art in New York I have seen in years. Did you see Christian Marclay’s work The Clock when it was at White Cube in London? If so, give us your thoughts as it is all about time.

CD: For the one who lives in London and missed it when it was projected at the White cube, you’ve got a second chance to see it at the Hayward Gallery at the British art exhibition!! It is an outstanding idea, totally captivating and amazingly well thought out. In this artwork you could either forget about time while you are constantly told what time is or you could end up feeling that you’re wasting your time just by watching the passage of time. It reminds me the work of Candice Breitz, which also manipulates film and music, remixing familiar footage into epic narratives.

BB: Onto my standard ending questions. Are there other artists whose work your excited about or other people you would cite as influences?

CD: I am totally addicted to Sophie Calle’s work. I admire her madness and the simplicity in her presentation. It seems that for her being an artist is an excuse to explore her boundaries and do things she wouldn’t normally do. I also love her unique way to tell us stories.

BB: The projects we discussed seem conceptually and physically time consuming to construct. Are you brainstorming any other big projects or have a mental queue of work in your head you care to share?

CD: Brainstorming! That is exactly where I am at the moment! This new project began the day I decided to look through old photographs of strangers. I found a lot in second hand and antique shops, and discovered entire lives documented. One that particularly struck me was a 1940’s photo album that showed a young man from birth to the last day he was seen by his family, the day he left to fight in World War II. So far it is the story of an unknown soldier.

BB: Finally, what are you working on right this second (besides this interview)?

CD: I spent my day gardening, and while I was gardening I was thinking.

Studio

Artist Website:
clarisse-darcimoles.com