S.T.H. 2008—we are now taking submissions for issue No. 67.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Towards a Metalanguage of E V I L
By Cady Noland (published in BALCON No. 4, 1989.)
Part 1
There is a meta-game available for use in the United Sates. The rules of the game, or even that there is a game at all, are hidden to some. The uninitiated are called naive or provincial, liars or suckers. To those unabused by an awareness of back door maneuvering, a whole world of deceit remains opaque. Those in the dark are still ripe for exploitation.
The game is a synthesis of tactics, played out in the social arena, in which advantage can be gained in an oblique way. Demonstrations of the game are now available on TV shows like DYNASTY and DALLAS. Cathesis is afforded minorities through Joan Collins or Diahann Carroll in DYNASTY, although with ceremonial structures clearly locking them outside the true hypno-whirlpool of the game. John Forsythe exists for the whole audience as a fossil bearing the contrivancs of the game. Gone is the ritualized cautionary debacle featured during the finale in earlier fictive explorations of the game, such as in the 1966 film, THE OSCAR.
Tabloids already use many of the game's tactics by foreshortening and cropping celebrities, blowing them up, and, in the case of NATIONAL ENQUIRER television commercials, reducing them to photo-objects and then animating these objects. These papers regularly publish little bits of the rules gleaned from popular psychology books about how to manipulate people. These books have their genesis in the old warhorse, HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, by Dale Carnegie, whose on primogenitor is THE PRINCE by Machiavelli. According to Ethel Spector Person, the psychopath shares the societal sanctioned characteristics of the entrepreneurial male. Their maneuvers are differentiated mostly by decibel, the acts of the psychopath being the "louder".
The game is a machine composed of interconnecte mechanistic devices. These devices facilitate bad faith interaction... A con or snow job is the site at which X preys upon the hopes, fears, and anxieties of Y for ulterior motives and/or personal gain. The machinations which vehiculate this manipulation can have wide effect—ranging from the aftermath of minor mischief to serial or mass deaths. These machinations exists a priori of X or Y as an indifferent set of tools and could conceivably be picked up by anyone and used against anyone else. As befits the extreme artificiality of these devices, there is no group who is naturally a victim of this abuse. These are mechanistic devices and have nothing to do with nature. There are those who feel that their kind or type is immune to being worked over by X. Some of the most shocking moments in real life and in fiction occur when they are disabused of this synthetic notion. The mayor theme in film noir is that there is never a respite, in this world, from the game and the exploitations. The quintessential narrative through-line in film noir is where a cynical guy, Y, who is wise, gets taken one more time.
The game is a hero system where the organism tries to blow itself up at the expense of a real or imagined antagonist. The clinical psychopath embodies a gross internalization of the game at its most spartan, unpolluted by an internalized other with whom to negotiate.
The purpose of the enlargement or aggrandizement of the organism is to stave off anxiety about finity and death. This expansion, virtual or literal, may entail stockpiling of real supplies or the gathering of narcissistinc supplies implying a triumph over one smallness and the inevitability of one's own insignificant decay, as Ernest Becker argues in his books, THE DENIAL OF DEATH and THE STRUCTURE OF EVIL.
Although the psychopath displays a chilling fondness for the game, and would always prefer to operate via the game, he stops short of involving himself in the honorific courting of death except by proxy. It is in this way that his internalization of the game diverges from its rules. He is simply not involved in fair play of any sort. Those who would follow the official hero game to the letter, like Ernest Hemingway, will often make sure to have an action death, in order to purchase a symbolic piece of immortality in the process. The psychopath being the machine that it is, cannot imagine that it will cease to function, but in keeping with its obsession with control, it will shortcircuit itself at the last moment if it is unquestionably about to be "offed". This machine itself does not consider this a matter of heroics; it is done as a last petty gesture.
Part 1
There is a meta-game available for use in the United Sates. The rules of the game, or even that there is a game at all, are hidden to some. The uninitiated are called naive or provincial, liars or suckers. To those unabused by an awareness of back door maneuvering, a whole world of deceit remains opaque. Those in the dark are still ripe for exploitation.
The game is a synthesis of tactics, played out in the social arena, in which advantage can be gained in an oblique way. Demonstrations of the game are now available on TV shows like DYNASTY and DALLAS. Cathesis is afforded minorities through Joan Collins or Diahann Carroll in DYNASTY, although with ceremonial structures clearly locking them outside the true hypno-whirlpool of the game. John Forsythe exists for the whole audience as a fossil bearing the contrivancs of the game. Gone is the ritualized cautionary debacle featured during the finale in earlier fictive explorations of the game, such as in the 1966 film, THE OSCAR.
Tabloids already use many of the game's tactics by foreshortening and cropping celebrities, blowing them up, and, in the case of NATIONAL ENQUIRER television commercials, reducing them to photo-objects and then animating these objects. These papers regularly publish little bits of the rules gleaned from popular psychology books about how to manipulate people. These books have their genesis in the old warhorse, HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, by Dale Carnegie, whose on primogenitor is THE PRINCE by Machiavelli. According to Ethel Spector Person, the psychopath shares the societal sanctioned characteristics of the entrepreneurial male. Their maneuvers are differentiated mostly by decibel, the acts of the psychopath being the "louder".
The game is a machine composed of interconnecte mechanistic devices. These devices facilitate bad faith interaction... A con or snow job is the site at which X preys upon the hopes, fears, and anxieties of Y for ulterior motives and/or personal gain. The machinations which vehiculate this manipulation can have wide effect—ranging from the aftermath of minor mischief to serial or mass deaths. These machinations exists a priori of X or Y as an indifferent set of tools and could conceivably be picked up by anyone and used against anyone else. As befits the extreme artificiality of these devices, there is no group who is naturally a victim of this abuse. These are mechanistic devices and have nothing to do with nature. There are those who feel that their kind or type is immune to being worked over by X. Some of the most shocking moments in real life and in fiction occur when they are disabused of this synthetic notion. The mayor theme in film noir is that there is never a respite, in this world, from the game and the exploitations. The quintessential narrative through-line in film noir is where a cynical guy, Y, who is wise, gets taken one more time.
The game is a hero system where the organism tries to blow itself up at the expense of a real or imagined antagonist. The clinical psychopath embodies a gross internalization of the game at its most spartan, unpolluted by an internalized other with whom to negotiate.
The purpose of the enlargement or aggrandizement of the organism is to stave off anxiety about finity and death. This expansion, virtual or literal, may entail stockpiling of real supplies or the gathering of narcissistinc supplies implying a triumph over one smallness and the inevitability of one's own insignificant decay, as Ernest Becker argues in his books, THE DENIAL OF DEATH and THE STRUCTURE OF EVIL.
Although the psychopath displays a chilling fondness for the game, and would always prefer to operate via the game, he stops short of involving himself in the honorific courting of death except by proxy. It is in this way that his internalization of the game diverges from its rules. He is simply not involved in fair play of any sort. Those who would follow the official hero game to the letter, like Ernest Hemingway, will often make sure to have an action death, in order to purchase a symbolic piece of immortality in the process. The psychopath being the machine that it is, cannot imagine that it will cease to function, but in keeping with its obsession with control, it will shortcircuit itself at the last moment if it is unquestionably about to be "offed". This machine itself does not consider this a matter of heroics; it is done as a last petty gesture.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
GETTING ANGRIER!
The Bullet is starting a book klub—Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse was our first in the series—this week's read...
"You can't reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.
Revolution."
"You can't reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.
Revolution."
Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Art of Necrophilia
Steven Parrino (1958-2005) was part of the downtown NYC art scene during the eighties and nineties—a time when painting was declared 'dead'—so, he decided to practice in some necrophilia. One of my favorite artists, Parrino's life was cut short on New Years Eve, 2005 when he lost control of his motorcycle on his way home from a party.
Gagosian uptown (980 Madison—accross from The Whitney), has an awesome show up currently which has been extended until this Wed... I highly recommend it—Parrino was a very important artist of his generation who's influence is felt today.
Spin Out Vortex 2, 2000
Gagosian uptown (980 Madison—accross from The Whitney), has an awesome show up currently which has been extended until this Wed... I highly recommend it—Parrino was a very important artist of his generation who's influence is felt today.
Spin Out Vortex 2, 2000
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Halloween Polaroids
Simply applying Cortney's make-up:
Cortney as Bai Ling:
David as a Japanese teenage Ganguro girl:
Golomon as a cross between Whoopi Goldberg and Marilyn Manson:
Simply as Anna Nicole Smith in clown make-up:
Scotty as Howard K. Stern with Anna Nicole and baby Danny Lynn:
Fatima as very rich oil Saudi & Marie as a bounty hunter:
Khalid as Bobby Trendy with Anna:
DJ Michael Magnan as Goth Jock:
Cameron as Cameron:
Johnny Mischief as Johnny Mischief:
Lady Dang as Loco Nut:
My video tape of Anna (worth a lot of money!) will be released soon...
Cortney as Bai Ling:
David as a Japanese teenage Ganguro girl:
Golomon as a cross between Whoopi Goldberg and Marilyn Manson:
Simply as Anna Nicole Smith in clown make-up:
Scotty as Howard K. Stern with Anna Nicole and baby Danny Lynn:
Fatima as very rich oil Saudi & Marie as a bounty hunter:
Khalid as Bobby Trendy with Anna:
DJ Michael Magnan as Goth Jock:
Cameron as Cameron:
Johnny Mischief as Johnny Mischief:
Lady Dang as Loco Nut:
My video tape of Anna (worth a lot of money!) will be released soon...
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Project P-Town Teasers
Project P-Town, The Movie—Official Movie Site: Teaser Trailers—Coming soon to a dive Theatre near you...
Teaser 2:
Red Balloon Teaser:
Teaser 2:
Red Balloon Teaser:
Monday, October 22, 2007
PIRATE
PIRATE by the artist Annika Larsson. The video was filmed 1st of May 2006 in Stockholm Sweden during a manifestation by the swedish anti-copyright movements (Piratbyrån and Piratpartiet). Filmed and edited by Annika Larsson. Sound by Tobias Bernstrup and Annika Larsson.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Rachel Howe: Inside-Out
Interviewed by Juliet Jacobson
I showed up on Rachel Howe's doorstep on Sept 6th at 2 pm. It was a nasty muggy day. The kind of New York day that smells bad. She opened the door and here's what we each looked like, starting at the bottom: ballet flats, black cotton dresses, skinny white arms, long brown hair, bangs, sweaty. The vague look alike and big drawings are not all we have in common. We both could have been seen in 6 hole Doc Martins in 1997, loving then like now the Cure and Siouxsie—staples of girl rebellion, more sad than angry. Last week, we emailed each other at exactly the same moment, confirming my suspicion that we are indeed members of the psychic friends network.
The following document is a record of our studio visit, gmail chat, and questions emailed back and forth.
__________________________________________________________
JJ: Hi Rachel! I think I should pick out appropriate music for our chat. What do you think, Christian Death or Bauhaus?
RH: Bauhaus!! Definitely.
JJ: Do you listen to music to match your drawings? Are the trappings of goth culture close to your heart because of your biography or for other reasons?
RH: Yes, I do sometimes, but more like noise music like Burzum or the Thrones, for concentration. I like the whole goth thing because it's a real acknowledgement of difficult aspects of life, like conflicting aspects of outside/inside, melancholy & aggression, death & life... and it's all worn outside to really send a message. I was not really goth when I was younger, but I identified on the inside with a lot of that stuff.
JJ: Do you associate these ideas with adolescence or think of the imagery used in your drawings as juvenilia?
RH: I don't want to pin it down to that only, but it's definitely a real source. It's not about teenagers being cool or attractive, but since so many emotions & ideas are being formed in adolescence, we are really forming who we are in adolescence, I think its a powerful association to use these cultural things that are most common in adolescence... When you are experiencing things for the first time, they are really intense, and so you look for things outside of yourself to make meaning of it; that is the aspect of it that I'd like to use the most, that yes, there are more goth teenagers than adults, but in using those visual cues, its like a quick tool to talk about things like inexpressible emotions or aggressive impulses, which can then be applied to adult ideas as well.
JJ: Adolescence is universally marked as a period of change. Sometimes it's associated with sexual development but mostly with the search for a social identity. The adolescent is sort of a symbol for the end of innocence—a figure in which right and wrong, good and evil become confused while the innocent egocentric child starts to place her or himself socially. Do these themes surrounding adolescence have a resonance in your work? Change, ethical confusion, or struggling with social norms…
RH: Yes, definitely, especially using image & figuration to talk about adolescence. I’ve written about adolescence and those changes you mention a lot, like in relation to school shooters and how they are directing their fates based on their confusion about how to work in the social structures that have been set up, which are sort of inimical to the natural ways that people develop. But, exploring this visually is a different problem, since appearance and image is an important aspect to developing an identity. I’ve thought about how since you don’t see yourself, as an image, or how you interact with the world, you can’t see yourself living; how you develop how you think of yourself visually is so much based on looking out at other people and things, not back at yourself. And in adolescence this is really accentuated, in a school setting full of all your peers. You almost disappear, because you never see yourself in action, and you can’t really step back and see how you fit into the world. A lot of my drawings have obscured or unfinished faces, because I think that blindness about yourself and your own image is really significant in how one’s identity is formed. I remember the first time that I saw a video of myself (a candid video, so my gestures and everything were natural), in junior high I think, and I was so shocked at how different the video image of me was from the image I had in my mind about myself.
JJ: Something about the drawings—maybe their scale and sensitivity—suggests self-portraiture. Can you talk about the role of identity in your work?
RH: Well, in a way, they sort of have to be self-portraiture... that's not the intention, but I'm investigating things in the drawings because I feel an attachment to them or because I'm thinking about them. I guess they have to be somewhat about me! But the idea of identity is important to me. I've always felt and been interested in the disjunction between perception & reality, especially as it relates to forming identity. If you're defining your reality through your emotions, it in some way negates the physicality of the world, and yourself even. And so it has to be put back together, or created whole again, from its fractured state. One way to do that (I'm talking both in life & in my drawings) is to use cultural cues that are already infused with meaning, from the outside. So the defining of one's identity becomes this process of breaking & repairing. I'm looking for a parallel process while making the drawings.
JJ: I’ve been doing some research—Goth spans decades. I always thought it this was just my sloppy relationship to it, but it really takes many forms: New Romantic, Deathrock, Industrial, and so on. Personally I love the term mallgoth. Most of the band logos and lyrics you use are from the 70s. The classic period. Is it fair to assess this as nostalgic?
RH: Oh, the Goth terms... baby bat, kindergoth, spooky kid! (I think these are all derogative terms for beginners or posers) I do like the classic period the best; I am drawn to the basic & truest version of things. I think its not so much nostalgia as that it's what was current during my childhood, its what I experienced first. It's just what my idea of goth is, that has the most intense associations for me. When you're young I think that you relate emotions to music much more readily than as an adult. When I was in high school I would drive around at night listening to the Cure or the Smiths and just totally wallow in my depressive feelings, just create this totally depressive atmosphere to mirror my feelings, to the point where I can barely stand to listen to some Cure songs today! ("A Forest", if you must know!) You don't really do that as an adult.
JJ: Mostly you've talked about really strong feelings but your drawings also have an emptied out quality. It's in the kid's expressions, the logos, and the text you include, phrases like, "nothing to lose" talk about absence. Formally also, you tend toward economy and let the vacuousness of the blank page dominate. What is this emptiness about?
RH: Well, one of the strongest feelings I've felt, as a depressed teen, was this extreme boredom & emptiness of meaning in everything. So the absence or lack can hold a lot of intensity in it. Mourning, or despair, has a lot of emotion held within loss or absence. But it also relates to the incommunicable quality of some emotions, or how rage turns to sadness through repression... the emptiness in the drawings could be sort of a visual equivalent of inexpressible angst. Or un-understandable emotions, or confusion about what exactly one is actually feeling or thinking; even in the newer drawings with the full textile background, there is still information missing, there is a lack of a recognizable setting or a context, as if it were blank.
JJ: Something about the figures posture suggests victimization. They lie at the bottom of the page under thick black logos and their hands gesture toward the last vestiges of their bodies disintegrating into blank space. Their eyes are down cast or they stare blankly past you. Do you ever think of them this way? If they are victims who or what is the victimizer?
RH: They could be victims of themselves. I am really interested in how girls express rage at the world inward, as opposed to boys expressing it outward. It's like taking a huge burden onto & inside yourself. I do think that the fracturing of identity that I talked about earlier is a really violent thing that happens to girls, (I'm not saying it doesn't to boys as well, but I think it can be more extreme in girls' cases). So when I'm thinking about that, I want to show this violent fracturing, or fragmenting, in a physical way.
JJ: Are they all girls? While totally twee, the busts in your drawings are pretty androgynous. How do you think of them?
RH: Yeah, I moved from drawing boys who were really identifiable as part of a goth subculture, or a school shooter subculture, to drawing more androgynous figures, who are probably girls. I don't want to make art about sexism, but there is a really specific way that girls get lost, or lose themselves, that is really sad and that I want to explore.
JJ: When you were drawing boys they would always be holding weapons but now the figures and weapons get their own drawings. With weapons isolated like this they still imply physical violence though it's ambiguous as to whether it's associated with an aggressive subject or a victim. In some of your drawings the subject's face actually dissolves to reveal a skull beneath. Some of the drawings have doubles or mirrors. Can you talk about your work as a confusion of inside and outside? What does the doppelganger mean?
RH: Yeah, that also goes back to the goth idea, I sort of think of goths as being both aggressive and defensive, or using an aggressive image as a defense mechanism. Or death metal, or whatever other subcultures who use the idea of death as both a shield and a sword. The drawn weapon is powerless but at the same time has power in its meaning. The thing's meaning is more meaningful than the thing. (The image is stronger than the thing). The ideas of doubles or mirrors I really like, because it holds this contradictory idea of thing & meaning.
JJ: A lot of what I'm hearing you say is that your drawings represent a feeling of the material being as irresolute and a spiritual or emotional life as much more "real." Your emotions are experienced as undeniable but your physical manifestation in the world is called into question. These drawings describe a physicality that is projected from the spirit. Ciphers associated with goth culture become a way to mark an image or projected identity in the world. While the feelings are pretty deep the visual cues are pretty surface. They are icons from pop culture—their meaning is mutable and mobile. Can you talk about this contradiction a little?
RH: I do sometimes feel like I can’t really show what I’m trying to make art about, for the reasons that you are asking about, because its about these invisible & intangible emotional perceptions. I guess making a totally black drawing would get close but also be pretty boring and derivative by this point. So, part of the process is finding imagery that can suggest these things, while not really replicating them. These icons and logos and props can only really act as indicators because I haven’t found how to show exactly what I mean. I’m really inspired by spirit photography from the 19th century, which to me seems an attempt at showing the unseeable, and what they came up with are things like ectoplasm, which is formless matter, and basically doing what I do, taking imagery from the media of the time and inserting it into the picture, where it impersonates a ghost.
JJ: Goth has associations with horror and the supernatural largely it owes these to the Gothic novel. This is were the monsters come from too, ghosties and Dracula and stuff. As they filter through German Expressionist film and American Horror they become campier and more self-conscious. I usually think about monsters in terms of liminal zones, like vampires neither dead nor alive, or werewolves literally being shape shifters. Which aspects of monsters resonate for you? Why do you choose to use them in your work?
RH: Definitely, monsters are representative of a sort of “dusk” or threshold space for me, a liminal zone as you say, where things change or contradictions exist simultaneously. I like vampires and ghosts for their qualities of being dead/undead, having qualities of both life and death. Ghosts are literally what you talk about earlier, purely spiritual and totally immaterial. But I’m also interested in what culture has done to them, turned them into symbols and removed them even further from actual death. I am actually really interested in real ghosts, or leftover energy & how its thought of in occultism, but more related to visual matters would be how ghosts are thought of and depicted historically in media, Halloween, visual imagery, etc. The vampire persona also is like death cartooned, or death with all the death removed. The Dracula myth is all about the fear of death, but there is really only this chain of un-deaths, or death in statis, forever in the process of dying. It’s interesting how property and land ownership is a central plot aspect in the book Dracula, which is sort of an alternate way of gaining immortality, although not physical. The monster myths seem to me a way of talking about certain difficult or hard to express conditions or feelings. When I read Frankenstein I felt that it dealt pretty directly with ideas of understanding yourself & facing suicidal desires, through the device of the monster; there is sort of a parallel between the monster & the creator as they try to fit into their worlds & fail.
JJ: You write about death languidly in an almost matter of fact manner. Your interest in death doesn't come across as a fascination with an unknowable threshold either ecstatic or material, nor does it work like a momento mori. Can you talk a little about your unaffected treatment of death?
RH: It may lead back to the intensity in emptiness thing, that without any sentimentality there is a clearer picture of death. But, it may be more that it’s not really about death itself, but the associations around it. It’s more of a stand-in, a signifier for some sort of negative atmosphere. In talking about death, I can allude to feelings of loneliness, fear, hopelessness… It’s sort of a device. I started writing these scenes of death when Sue de Beer & Ian Cooper sent me an interactive project they were working on a few years ago and part of it was that you write a description of your own death as you would imagine it, and I wrote about a car crash, and I liked how I could explore situations and emotions using a death as a plot anchor. So the death is really like a setting or background for the real stuff.
JJ: Can you talk a little about your process?
RH: I work slooowly. I’m a little more productive now, since I can finally use my hand again after breaking my arm pretty badly in May; I wasn’t able to draw all summer, so I’m so excited now that I can again. But I still do take a lot of time to think about things, and look at images online or in magazines, and let connections come to me, and it sort of has to all be right or it doesn’t work and I trash it. I hardly ever start drawing just to see what comes out, but I also don’t use projectors or map too much out beforehand. It’s a pretty equal mix of intuition & concrete planning. When I use text, I trace the letters and do a low-tech transfer method with tracing paper and pencil graphite. The rest is all free-hand, so my hand has to be in the mood; some days I just can’t draw! I also take photographs or write, if my ideas aren’t working with drawing.
JJ: You have any upcoming shows?
RH: I have a two-person show upcoming in December at Bespoke Gallery, with a close friend of mine. A sisters-in-darkness show.
I showed up on Rachel Howe's doorstep on Sept 6th at 2 pm. It was a nasty muggy day. The kind of New York day that smells bad. She opened the door and here's what we each looked like, starting at the bottom: ballet flats, black cotton dresses, skinny white arms, long brown hair, bangs, sweaty. The vague look alike and big drawings are not all we have in common. We both could have been seen in 6 hole Doc Martins in 1997, loving then like now the Cure and Siouxsie—staples of girl rebellion, more sad than angry. Last week, we emailed each other at exactly the same moment, confirming my suspicion that we are indeed members of the psychic friends network.
The following document is a record of our studio visit, gmail chat, and questions emailed back and forth.
__________________________________________________________
JJ: Hi Rachel! I think I should pick out appropriate music for our chat. What do you think, Christian Death or Bauhaus?
RH: Bauhaus!! Definitely.
JJ: Do you listen to music to match your drawings? Are the trappings of goth culture close to your heart because of your biography or for other reasons?
RH: Yes, I do sometimes, but more like noise music like Burzum or the Thrones, for concentration. I like the whole goth thing because it's a real acknowledgement of difficult aspects of life, like conflicting aspects of outside/inside, melancholy & aggression, death & life... and it's all worn outside to really send a message. I was not really goth when I was younger, but I identified on the inside with a lot of that stuff.
JJ: Do you associate these ideas with adolescence or think of the imagery used in your drawings as juvenilia?
RH: I don't want to pin it down to that only, but it's definitely a real source. It's not about teenagers being cool or attractive, but since so many emotions & ideas are being formed in adolescence, we are really forming who we are in adolescence, I think its a powerful association to use these cultural things that are most common in adolescence... When you are experiencing things for the first time, they are really intense, and so you look for things outside of yourself to make meaning of it; that is the aspect of it that I'd like to use the most, that yes, there are more goth teenagers than adults, but in using those visual cues, its like a quick tool to talk about things like inexpressible emotions or aggressive impulses, which can then be applied to adult ideas as well.
JJ: Adolescence is universally marked as a period of change. Sometimes it's associated with sexual development but mostly with the search for a social identity. The adolescent is sort of a symbol for the end of innocence—a figure in which right and wrong, good and evil become confused while the innocent egocentric child starts to place her or himself socially. Do these themes surrounding adolescence have a resonance in your work? Change, ethical confusion, or struggling with social norms…
RH: Yes, definitely, especially using image & figuration to talk about adolescence. I’ve written about adolescence and those changes you mention a lot, like in relation to school shooters and how they are directing their fates based on their confusion about how to work in the social structures that have been set up, which are sort of inimical to the natural ways that people develop. But, exploring this visually is a different problem, since appearance and image is an important aspect to developing an identity. I’ve thought about how since you don’t see yourself, as an image, or how you interact with the world, you can’t see yourself living; how you develop how you think of yourself visually is so much based on looking out at other people and things, not back at yourself. And in adolescence this is really accentuated, in a school setting full of all your peers. You almost disappear, because you never see yourself in action, and you can’t really step back and see how you fit into the world. A lot of my drawings have obscured or unfinished faces, because I think that blindness about yourself and your own image is really significant in how one’s identity is formed. I remember the first time that I saw a video of myself (a candid video, so my gestures and everything were natural), in junior high I think, and I was so shocked at how different the video image of me was from the image I had in my mind about myself.
JJ: Something about the drawings—maybe their scale and sensitivity—suggests self-portraiture. Can you talk about the role of identity in your work?
RH: Well, in a way, they sort of have to be self-portraiture... that's not the intention, but I'm investigating things in the drawings because I feel an attachment to them or because I'm thinking about them. I guess they have to be somewhat about me! But the idea of identity is important to me. I've always felt and been interested in the disjunction between perception & reality, especially as it relates to forming identity. If you're defining your reality through your emotions, it in some way negates the physicality of the world, and yourself even. And so it has to be put back together, or created whole again, from its fractured state. One way to do that (I'm talking both in life & in my drawings) is to use cultural cues that are already infused with meaning, from the outside. So the defining of one's identity becomes this process of breaking & repairing. I'm looking for a parallel process while making the drawings.
JJ: I’ve been doing some research—Goth spans decades. I always thought it this was just my sloppy relationship to it, but it really takes many forms: New Romantic, Deathrock, Industrial, and so on. Personally I love the term mallgoth. Most of the band logos and lyrics you use are from the 70s. The classic period. Is it fair to assess this as nostalgic?
RH: Oh, the Goth terms... baby bat, kindergoth, spooky kid! (I think these are all derogative terms for beginners or posers) I do like the classic period the best; I am drawn to the basic & truest version of things. I think its not so much nostalgia as that it's what was current during my childhood, its what I experienced first. It's just what my idea of goth is, that has the most intense associations for me. When you're young I think that you relate emotions to music much more readily than as an adult. When I was in high school I would drive around at night listening to the Cure or the Smiths and just totally wallow in my depressive feelings, just create this totally depressive atmosphere to mirror my feelings, to the point where I can barely stand to listen to some Cure songs today! ("A Forest", if you must know!) You don't really do that as an adult.
JJ: Mostly you've talked about really strong feelings but your drawings also have an emptied out quality. It's in the kid's expressions, the logos, and the text you include, phrases like, "nothing to lose" talk about absence. Formally also, you tend toward economy and let the vacuousness of the blank page dominate. What is this emptiness about?
RH: Well, one of the strongest feelings I've felt, as a depressed teen, was this extreme boredom & emptiness of meaning in everything. So the absence or lack can hold a lot of intensity in it. Mourning, or despair, has a lot of emotion held within loss or absence. But it also relates to the incommunicable quality of some emotions, or how rage turns to sadness through repression... the emptiness in the drawings could be sort of a visual equivalent of inexpressible angst. Or un-understandable emotions, or confusion about what exactly one is actually feeling or thinking; even in the newer drawings with the full textile background, there is still information missing, there is a lack of a recognizable setting or a context, as if it were blank.
JJ: Something about the figures posture suggests victimization. They lie at the bottom of the page under thick black logos and their hands gesture toward the last vestiges of their bodies disintegrating into blank space. Their eyes are down cast or they stare blankly past you. Do you ever think of them this way? If they are victims who or what is the victimizer?
RH: They could be victims of themselves. I am really interested in how girls express rage at the world inward, as opposed to boys expressing it outward. It's like taking a huge burden onto & inside yourself. I do think that the fracturing of identity that I talked about earlier is a really violent thing that happens to girls, (I'm not saying it doesn't to boys as well, but I think it can be more extreme in girls' cases). So when I'm thinking about that, I want to show this violent fracturing, or fragmenting, in a physical way.
JJ: Are they all girls? While totally twee, the busts in your drawings are pretty androgynous. How do you think of them?
RH: Yeah, I moved from drawing boys who were really identifiable as part of a goth subculture, or a school shooter subculture, to drawing more androgynous figures, who are probably girls. I don't want to make art about sexism, but there is a really specific way that girls get lost, or lose themselves, that is really sad and that I want to explore.
JJ: When you were drawing boys they would always be holding weapons but now the figures and weapons get their own drawings. With weapons isolated like this they still imply physical violence though it's ambiguous as to whether it's associated with an aggressive subject or a victim. In some of your drawings the subject's face actually dissolves to reveal a skull beneath. Some of the drawings have doubles or mirrors. Can you talk about your work as a confusion of inside and outside? What does the doppelganger mean?
RH: Yeah, that also goes back to the goth idea, I sort of think of goths as being both aggressive and defensive, or using an aggressive image as a defense mechanism. Or death metal, or whatever other subcultures who use the idea of death as both a shield and a sword. The drawn weapon is powerless but at the same time has power in its meaning. The thing's meaning is more meaningful than the thing. (The image is stronger than the thing). The ideas of doubles or mirrors I really like, because it holds this contradictory idea of thing & meaning.
JJ: A lot of what I'm hearing you say is that your drawings represent a feeling of the material being as irresolute and a spiritual or emotional life as much more "real." Your emotions are experienced as undeniable but your physical manifestation in the world is called into question. These drawings describe a physicality that is projected from the spirit. Ciphers associated with goth culture become a way to mark an image or projected identity in the world. While the feelings are pretty deep the visual cues are pretty surface. They are icons from pop culture—their meaning is mutable and mobile. Can you talk about this contradiction a little?
RH: I do sometimes feel like I can’t really show what I’m trying to make art about, for the reasons that you are asking about, because its about these invisible & intangible emotional perceptions. I guess making a totally black drawing would get close but also be pretty boring and derivative by this point. So, part of the process is finding imagery that can suggest these things, while not really replicating them. These icons and logos and props can only really act as indicators because I haven’t found how to show exactly what I mean. I’m really inspired by spirit photography from the 19th century, which to me seems an attempt at showing the unseeable, and what they came up with are things like ectoplasm, which is formless matter, and basically doing what I do, taking imagery from the media of the time and inserting it into the picture, where it impersonates a ghost.
JJ: Goth has associations with horror and the supernatural largely it owes these to the Gothic novel. This is were the monsters come from too, ghosties and Dracula and stuff. As they filter through German Expressionist film and American Horror they become campier and more self-conscious. I usually think about monsters in terms of liminal zones, like vampires neither dead nor alive, or werewolves literally being shape shifters. Which aspects of monsters resonate for you? Why do you choose to use them in your work?
RH: Definitely, monsters are representative of a sort of “dusk” or threshold space for me, a liminal zone as you say, where things change or contradictions exist simultaneously. I like vampires and ghosts for their qualities of being dead/undead, having qualities of both life and death. Ghosts are literally what you talk about earlier, purely spiritual and totally immaterial. But I’m also interested in what culture has done to them, turned them into symbols and removed them even further from actual death. I am actually really interested in real ghosts, or leftover energy & how its thought of in occultism, but more related to visual matters would be how ghosts are thought of and depicted historically in media, Halloween, visual imagery, etc. The vampire persona also is like death cartooned, or death with all the death removed. The Dracula myth is all about the fear of death, but there is really only this chain of un-deaths, or death in statis, forever in the process of dying. It’s interesting how property and land ownership is a central plot aspect in the book Dracula, which is sort of an alternate way of gaining immortality, although not physical. The monster myths seem to me a way of talking about certain difficult or hard to express conditions or feelings. When I read Frankenstein I felt that it dealt pretty directly with ideas of understanding yourself & facing suicidal desires, through the device of the monster; there is sort of a parallel between the monster & the creator as they try to fit into their worlds & fail.
JJ: You write about death languidly in an almost matter of fact manner. Your interest in death doesn't come across as a fascination with an unknowable threshold either ecstatic or material, nor does it work like a momento mori. Can you talk a little about your unaffected treatment of death?
RH: It may lead back to the intensity in emptiness thing, that without any sentimentality there is a clearer picture of death. But, it may be more that it’s not really about death itself, but the associations around it. It’s more of a stand-in, a signifier for some sort of negative atmosphere. In talking about death, I can allude to feelings of loneliness, fear, hopelessness… It’s sort of a device. I started writing these scenes of death when Sue de Beer & Ian Cooper sent me an interactive project they were working on a few years ago and part of it was that you write a description of your own death as you would imagine it, and I wrote about a car crash, and I liked how I could explore situations and emotions using a death as a plot anchor. So the death is really like a setting or background for the real stuff.
JJ: Can you talk a little about your process?
RH: I work slooowly. I’m a little more productive now, since I can finally use my hand again after breaking my arm pretty badly in May; I wasn’t able to draw all summer, so I’m so excited now that I can again. But I still do take a lot of time to think about things, and look at images online or in magazines, and let connections come to me, and it sort of has to all be right or it doesn’t work and I trash it. I hardly ever start drawing just to see what comes out, but I also don’t use projectors or map too much out beforehand. It’s a pretty equal mix of intuition & concrete planning. When I use text, I trace the letters and do a low-tech transfer method with tracing paper and pencil graphite. The rest is all free-hand, so my hand has to be in the mood; some days I just can’t draw! I also take photographs or write, if my ideas aren’t working with drawing.
JJ: You have any upcoming shows?
RH: I have a two-person show upcoming in December at Bespoke Gallery, with a close friend of mine. A sisters-in-darkness show.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Finally, I am done with the Steppenwolf!
Learn to laugh in the face of reality...
a toast to:
THE IMMORTALS
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life's fevered surge,
Wealth's excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death meals on the gallow's verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers' hands, usurers' hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in foetid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure's way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you ever more residing
In the ether's star translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time's dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
a toast to:
THE IMMORTALS
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life's fevered surge,
Wealth's excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death meals on the gallow's verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers' hands, usurers' hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in foetid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure's way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you ever more residing
In the ether's star translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time's dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Too Much, Too Little, Too Late.
John Connelly Presents is proud to announce Scott Hug’s solo exhibition Too Much, Too Little, Too Late. Hug has been a prominent figure of the New York art scene for nearly a decade as an artist, curator, graphic designer, and publisher of the innovative and highly acclaimed magazine K48. Following his noteworthy solo exhibition at Locust Projects in Miami in December 2006, Hug will unveil a new body of paintings, sculpture, video and text-based work that continues his incursions on media, pop culture and politics. Using imagery appropriated from popular journalism such as Time magazine and the The New York Post, Hug dissects our national obsession with celebrity “news” to suggest that there is a covert hypocritical morality to the nation’s media which seeks to distract us from more pressing social and political concerns.
Included in the exhibition are ten brightly hued silk-screened headshots of various celebrities mined from the Post’s Page Six gossip columns. Images of media obsessions such as Lindsay Lohan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Janet Jackson are coupled with self-help inspired captions such as “Get Well Soon”, “Day of Rest” and “Exact Demands”. In a related series – Hug’s largest works to date – a metaphoric black hole has been created at the center of each canvas through the artist’s process of layering front page images of media “disasters”, such as Anna Nicole Smith and Hurricane Charley, until the content literally implodes. These works together with Hug’s new video “Spin Control” – a never-ending spiraling color wheel familiar to Macintosh users as a symbol of processing data - suggests an impending and ambiguous collapse or apocalypse.
Also in the exhibition is a free-standing self-portrait of the artist as his Simpsons avatar. The promotional push for the recent feature length version of the long running animated sit-com The Simpsons included an opportunity for anyone to submit a photo of yourself that would be used to create an archetypal Simpson character in your likeness. The resulting life-size cardboard cutout of Hug clearly communicates the way we are seduced and manipulated by consumer culture by borrowing a quote from recently struggling newscaster Katie Couric that reads: “I have days when I’m like, My God, what did I do?”
Coinciding with the opening of the exhibition will be the launch of the new publication TOO MUCH TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: POLARIODS 2002-2007 by Scott Hug.
Special Thanks to: KINGDOM, Phiiliip, WiCKEDPHOBiCX, and Kyss Keshkha.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Get A Load of This...
cum here tomorrow night... just say you're on Scotty Potty's list. (there will be another party at The Cock next Wed/Slurp night).
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Juliet Jacobson: Narcissus, Spirits in the Material World
Next in our series of round-robin interiews, I introduced Jan Wandrag to my awesome friend, Juliet Jacobson. The title of this post is borrowed from one of Juliet's beautiful large format pencil drawings. I first met Juliet last winter in her graduate studio at NYU—I was immeditatly drawn to the sensuality of her work. I invited her to create a special piece for issue #6 (make sure to check it out if you haven't seen it yet!). It's fun playing match-maker—Jan & Juliet hit it off and I'm excited to have them both on TheBullet. – hugs
Jan Wandrag: Hi Juliet,
Juliet Jacobson: Hi Jan—How are you?
Jan: I'm good, you? So you're at work?
Juliet: Yes. I 'm working on the Jimmy de Sana Estate. Laurie Simmons is the estate's trustee and I've been working out of one of her studios for the past six months or so.
Jan: Sounds great. How did you get that job? Seems perfect for you as far as day jobs go.
Juliet: Last fall my friend Adam Putnam curated a show called "Blow Both of Us" and included a number of JDS images in the show. When he mentioned to me that Laurie might be looking for someone to help her organize the estate I got really excited.
I wrote Laurie about my enthusiasm for the work. She responded to my interest in the JDS stuff as an artist. I feel really really lucky to get to work with this material.
Jan: The images of JDS you sent me are great. But better yet is how well they relate to your own work ... do you find working with it inspiring?
By the way, feel free to cut the chat short if Laurie storms in demanding a Mocha Frappuccino ;-)
Juliet: Laurie's actually been the most wonderful boss. I've really enjoyed working for her. And, yes, I find the material really inspiring and interesting.
Because the source material I work with is termed gay and because so many people have voiced concerns about what it means for me, being a woman, to use these images I thought engaging with a gay photographer's work on a really deep level would be a good idea.
And some people have been concerned about the way I've used images that symbolize death along side images of gay sex—because it reminds them of the AIDS crisis or a negative valuation of gay love/sex. JDS died of AIDS in 1991 and, you know, made really sexually explicit work for most of his career. So, in the beginning I wanted the job because I wanted to try to be responsible to the imagery I'm working with.
Jan: I was going to ask you about the implied violence and morbid themes. Some of the images can almost be read as a warning against gay sex. I have a real fear of snakes, so in my mind they do become these menacing phalluses. But then you pair it with such beautifully drawn boys and roses and it becomes more complex. I'm interested to hear more about your relationship to sex ...
Juliet: Before I made sexy pictures of boys I was making sexy pictures of girls in much the same visual vernacular. The source images for these pictures were mostly 60s and 70s soft porn magazines like Penthouse. Making these drawings and paintings I thought a lot about how the women oscillated between subject and object. For me they were really unstable and fascinating images. The women's bodies in these old magazines were treated much like bodies (both men's and women's) are today in advertising. Initially when I substituted boys for girls I just wanted boys' bodies that were treated the same way: vulnerable, available, on display, but also with a little distance and romance.
So when I started making these pictures they were really about a kind of mediatized sexuality and not about eroticism that you might experience interpersonally. To answer your question, these pictures were conceived as a response to a culturally pervasive sea of images where sex is ubiquitous—though I would say the modes of sexuality deployed are few. When I started using boys, my relationship to the images changed dramatically. Boys can be my imaginary love objects in a way that girls aren't. The idea of idealized romantic love got all tied up with sex and this is where all the really heavy symbolic imagery came in.
Jan: Do you have a boyfriend currently? What does he think of your interest in these boys? Does he look like one of 'em? People always expect you to be with someone that looks like your pictures I've found.
Juliet: I love this question... Yes, I have a boyfriend. He's really into my interest in boys and has been really supportive of the work. He's super smart and we have enough cross over in terms of our interests that we've been able to read books together—which I love! We read Judith Butler together and he introduced me to William Haver. I've convinced him he absolutely must read this Michael Taussig book next.
He does not look like my drawings. He told me he would never ever be in one when we started dating.
Does your boyfriend look like your pictures?
Jan: No, my boyfriend doesn't really have a stereotypical boy look like a soldier or skater. Maybe a little of both, come to think of it. When I'm shooting I'm looking for a specific type of guy, not always the same. He is cute though and that's important in my pictures too.
Maybe your boyfriend doesn't want to be in your drawings because he doesn't want to be nude in an artwork ... or is it that he doesn't want to be perceived as being gay?
Juliet: He's a total Victorian and would never be naked in public.
He doesn't exactly have a tough guy image. I would hazard a guess that he's been mistaken for gay once or twice.
Jan: He's an anthropologist?
Juliet: No, an artist.
Jan: Oh, sorry. You think it's better to be with a fellow artist? I thought an anthropologist would be a good match for you. You're kind of doing some art anthropology with the JDS stuff.
Juliet: Actually, my best friend is an anthropologist! Her investigations are a lot more rigorous than mine though.
Most of my thinking about JDS, contrary to what I expected when starting to work with the material, has been about the way he treats bodies in images. I haven't thought so much about situating these in a political or social history outside the contemporary moment. I've ended up really admiring his treatment of the body where it's first a beautiful object and ethnicity or gender is a later concern.
Jan: I think it is interesting that your source images are probably all shot by gay guys in the seventies. You're acting as a medium in a way resurrecting these images of boys that had a much more short-lived purpose in mind. I wonder how you think using a live model or photographs you commissioned would change your relationship to the work? Direct interaction with a body as object ...
Juliet: I think a lot about using models. The longer I work with this material the more specific my ideas about what I want—I get.
On the other hand I feel like it would mean something really different. My ideas about what art is and should be really come from looking at Pictures Generation artists. Something about engaging with material that is at large in a cultural arena seems important—though I just use it as a cipher to focus on ideas about identity and personal experience. I think there is something important for me in translating this distant photo from the past that you can hold in your hand into a life size image. I think the time spent tracing over every little bit of a life size body makes these drawings really personal for me. It's a really satisfying way to fulfill the desire for possession this kind of image creates.
Jan: I can imagine you sitting in your studio for hours working on one body part. It looks like you're always very focused on the boy's dicks. Sometimes you would leave a face unresolved but I never see any unresolved penises ... why?
Juliet: That question actually made me laugh out loud. You are right; the penises are usually the most labored over part of my drawings.
I think this kind of treatment of penises owes much to religious iconography where the erect penis symbolizes male fertility and creative powers.
Usually when the penis is symbolic like this it's called the phallus—a highly contested term in Psychoanalysis and Feminist redresses there of. Usually in these systems the possession of the phallus—a symbolic representation of male generative powers is comparable with divinity. Some people think the woman is it, some people think the man has it and the woman wants it. It's basically always deployed in a heteronormative framework, which requires a privileged and a secondary term.
I think this system sucks, but I think boys and their penises are great. My hope is that lavishing attention on the boys' penises gives a positive valuation to a symbol of masculine creativity, as an organ grounded in pleasure in the imagination, and as a symbol of agency in the Other. Representation of the penis like this draws on a history that goes back to the Greeks, with figures like Priapus.
Jan: So you're saying some people might say this is you're way of possessing a phallus. Quite an intimate bond you have with your images. How do you feel about exhibiting and selling them, letting them go—some castration anxiety?
Juliet: I haven't sold any of the really big ones yet—and those are what I get really attached to. I'm just starting to show and am really excited about it. There's a show that opens September 20th at Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery and I'm working on a show for November in London. It's a two-person show at gallery called Ritter/Zamet.
Marlene McCarty is the other artist. She's a long time idol of mine. I'm a big fan of the work and also have always been inspired by her integrity as an artist. I'm a little intimidated by the pairing but really excited too.
Jan: Sounds really great. Congratulations, that's amazing to be in a two-person show with your idol.
I look forward to seeing some of the installation shots from that...
Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed our chat. Anything happening with the JDS images?
Juliet: Thank you! And actually, yes, I think I just found the original transparency for a 1979 piece called Dishwasher.
Jan: Will there be a JDS show?
Juliet: Right now a portion of the estate is being donated to the Fales Collection. I'm moving the last 6 boxes in tomorrow. I hope there will be a show. It would be great to see this work in a presentation space.
Jan: Definitely. Keep me posted.
Juliet: Awesome Jan. Thanks so much. It's been really fun to talk to you.
(Photographs included here by Jimmy de Sana, courtesy the Jimmy de Sana Trust. Images from 101 Nudes (1972), Eggs and Sofa from Submission (1977 - 1978). The final image is from transparency and was used for collage in the unpublished folio Salvation.)
Jan Wandrag: Hi Juliet,
Juliet Jacobson: Hi Jan—How are you?
Jan: I'm good, you? So you're at work?
Juliet: Yes. I 'm working on the Jimmy de Sana Estate. Laurie Simmons is the estate's trustee and I've been working out of one of her studios for the past six months or so.
Jan: Sounds great. How did you get that job? Seems perfect for you as far as day jobs go.
Juliet: Last fall my friend Adam Putnam curated a show called "Blow Both of Us" and included a number of JDS images in the show. When he mentioned to me that Laurie might be looking for someone to help her organize the estate I got really excited.
I wrote Laurie about my enthusiasm for the work. She responded to my interest in the JDS stuff as an artist. I feel really really lucky to get to work with this material.
Jan: The images of JDS you sent me are great. But better yet is how well they relate to your own work ... do you find working with it inspiring?
By the way, feel free to cut the chat short if Laurie storms in demanding a Mocha Frappuccino ;-)
Juliet: Laurie's actually been the most wonderful boss. I've really enjoyed working for her. And, yes, I find the material really inspiring and interesting.
Because the source material I work with is termed gay and because so many people have voiced concerns about what it means for me, being a woman, to use these images I thought engaging with a gay photographer's work on a really deep level would be a good idea.
And some people have been concerned about the way I've used images that symbolize death along side images of gay sex—because it reminds them of the AIDS crisis or a negative valuation of gay love/sex. JDS died of AIDS in 1991 and, you know, made really sexually explicit work for most of his career. So, in the beginning I wanted the job because I wanted to try to be responsible to the imagery I'm working with.
Jan: I was going to ask you about the implied violence and morbid themes. Some of the images can almost be read as a warning against gay sex. I have a real fear of snakes, so in my mind they do become these menacing phalluses. But then you pair it with such beautifully drawn boys and roses and it becomes more complex. I'm interested to hear more about your relationship to sex ...
Juliet: Before I made sexy pictures of boys I was making sexy pictures of girls in much the same visual vernacular. The source images for these pictures were mostly 60s and 70s soft porn magazines like Penthouse. Making these drawings and paintings I thought a lot about how the women oscillated between subject and object. For me they were really unstable and fascinating images. The women's bodies in these old magazines were treated much like bodies (both men's and women's) are today in advertising. Initially when I substituted boys for girls I just wanted boys' bodies that were treated the same way: vulnerable, available, on display, but also with a little distance and romance.
So when I started making these pictures they were really about a kind of mediatized sexuality and not about eroticism that you might experience interpersonally. To answer your question, these pictures were conceived as a response to a culturally pervasive sea of images where sex is ubiquitous—though I would say the modes of sexuality deployed are few. When I started using boys, my relationship to the images changed dramatically. Boys can be my imaginary love objects in a way that girls aren't. The idea of idealized romantic love got all tied up with sex and this is where all the really heavy symbolic imagery came in.
Jan: Do you have a boyfriend currently? What does he think of your interest in these boys? Does he look like one of 'em? People always expect you to be with someone that looks like your pictures I've found.
Juliet: I love this question... Yes, I have a boyfriend. He's really into my interest in boys and has been really supportive of the work. He's super smart and we have enough cross over in terms of our interests that we've been able to read books together—which I love! We read Judith Butler together and he introduced me to William Haver. I've convinced him he absolutely must read this Michael Taussig book next.
He does not look like my drawings. He told me he would never ever be in one when we started dating.
Does your boyfriend look like your pictures?
Jan: No, my boyfriend doesn't really have a stereotypical boy look like a soldier or skater. Maybe a little of both, come to think of it. When I'm shooting I'm looking for a specific type of guy, not always the same. He is cute though and that's important in my pictures too.
Maybe your boyfriend doesn't want to be in your drawings because he doesn't want to be nude in an artwork ... or is it that he doesn't want to be perceived as being gay?
Juliet: He's a total Victorian and would never be naked in public.
He doesn't exactly have a tough guy image. I would hazard a guess that he's been mistaken for gay once or twice.
Jan: He's an anthropologist?
Juliet: No, an artist.
Jan: Oh, sorry. You think it's better to be with a fellow artist? I thought an anthropologist would be a good match for you. You're kind of doing some art anthropology with the JDS stuff.
Juliet: Actually, my best friend is an anthropologist! Her investigations are a lot more rigorous than mine though.
Most of my thinking about JDS, contrary to what I expected when starting to work with the material, has been about the way he treats bodies in images. I haven't thought so much about situating these in a political or social history outside the contemporary moment. I've ended up really admiring his treatment of the body where it's first a beautiful object and ethnicity or gender is a later concern.
Jan: I think it is interesting that your source images are probably all shot by gay guys in the seventies. You're acting as a medium in a way resurrecting these images of boys that had a much more short-lived purpose in mind. I wonder how you think using a live model or photographs you commissioned would change your relationship to the work? Direct interaction with a body as object ...
Juliet: I think a lot about using models. The longer I work with this material the more specific my ideas about what I want—I get.
On the other hand I feel like it would mean something really different. My ideas about what art is and should be really come from looking at Pictures Generation artists. Something about engaging with material that is at large in a cultural arena seems important—though I just use it as a cipher to focus on ideas about identity and personal experience. I think there is something important for me in translating this distant photo from the past that you can hold in your hand into a life size image. I think the time spent tracing over every little bit of a life size body makes these drawings really personal for me. It's a really satisfying way to fulfill the desire for possession this kind of image creates.
Jan: I can imagine you sitting in your studio for hours working on one body part. It looks like you're always very focused on the boy's dicks. Sometimes you would leave a face unresolved but I never see any unresolved penises ... why?
Juliet: That question actually made me laugh out loud. You are right; the penises are usually the most labored over part of my drawings.
I think this kind of treatment of penises owes much to religious iconography where the erect penis symbolizes male fertility and creative powers.
Usually when the penis is symbolic like this it's called the phallus—a highly contested term in Psychoanalysis and Feminist redresses there of. Usually in these systems the possession of the phallus—a symbolic representation of male generative powers is comparable with divinity. Some people think the woman is it, some people think the man has it and the woman wants it. It's basically always deployed in a heteronormative framework, which requires a privileged and a secondary term.
I think this system sucks, but I think boys and their penises are great. My hope is that lavishing attention on the boys' penises gives a positive valuation to a symbol of masculine creativity, as an organ grounded in pleasure in the imagination, and as a symbol of agency in the Other. Representation of the penis like this draws on a history that goes back to the Greeks, with figures like Priapus.
Jan: So you're saying some people might say this is you're way of possessing a phallus. Quite an intimate bond you have with your images. How do you feel about exhibiting and selling them, letting them go—some castration anxiety?
Juliet: I haven't sold any of the really big ones yet—and those are what I get really attached to. I'm just starting to show and am really excited about it. There's a show that opens September 20th at Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery and I'm working on a show for November in London. It's a two-person show at gallery called Ritter/Zamet.
Marlene McCarty is the other artist. She's a long time idol of mine. I'm a big fan of the work and also have always been inspired by her integrity as an artist. I'm a little intimidated by the pairing but really excited too.
Jan: Sounds really great. Congratulations, that's amazing to be in a two-person show with your idol.
I look forward to seeing some of the installation shots from that...
Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed our chat. Anything happening with the JDS images?
Juliet: Thank you! And actually, yes, I think I just found the original transparency for a 1979 piece called Dishwasher.
Jan: Will there be a JDS show?
Juliet: Right now a portion of the estate is being donated to the Fales Collection. I'm moving the last 6 boxes in tomorrow. I hope there will be a show. It would be great to see this work in a presentation space.
Jan: Definitely. Keep me posted.
Juliet: Awesome Jan. Thanks so much. It's been really fun to talk to you.
(Photographs included here by Jimmy de Sana, courtesy the Jimmy de Sana Trust. Images from 101 Nudes (1972), Eggs and Sofa from Submission (1977 - 1978). The final image is from transparency and was used for collage in the unpublished folio Salvation.)
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Happy Fingers
Last night Jimmi & I went to Socrates Sculpture Park and saw this free Dr. Seuss movie from 1953, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T... it's soo rad and gay—there's only one woman in the entire movie (the kid's Mom)! My favorite line: 'You should totally believe what kids say, even their lies.'
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