Hito Steyerl: Pt II
II.
The Kiss (2012), detail, mixed-media installation: three-channel video projection; 3D print on plinth; eight light boxes; single-channel video, etc. Installation view, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2013: "Public Diary," at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Photo Kenichiro Ooshima.
ART iT: One reason that it's so stimulating to read your essays is your use of language play, like tracing the word "freelancers" back to its origins as the kind of yojimbo sword for hire, or the idea of the "poor image" being connected to systems of oppression and exploitation. You're using words in a way that allows multiple meanings to aggregate, and this wordplay also carries into your works as well.
HS: That's the condition of the non-native speaker. If the word is anyhow strange to you, then you take it and turn it around, and see what it looks like from the other side, and then usually you discover another dimension to it. I never take it for granted. If Chinese characters are multidimensional, why not other words?
I did a small work called Strike (2010) which is precisely about this kind of wordplay, and Abstract (2012), which plays with the idea of what abstraction is, as well as Red Alert (2007) - also about abstraction and the monochrome, as well as the relations between fear and security and the color scale.
ART iT: Language also seems to provide a route for images and concepts to become things. For example, in the piece here, The Kiss (2012), you are credited with "Realization and Objectification."
HS: It is "objectifiction," not objectification. That's what the work is about. You try to be as objective as possible using technologies which are supposed to be really objective or truthful, and provide real facts, but the object you produce is a complete fiction. This is inherent in the technology. You have to fictionalize so much in the process because the data you have is just a set of data, and the outcome is a complete interpretation. You have to connect the dots basically. Any object produced with this technology is always an objectifiction as much as an objectification.
The Kiss (2012), installation view, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2013: "Public Diary," at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Photo Kenichiro Ooshima.
ART iT: The Kiss is based on legal testimony regarding a massacre that took place in Bosnia, with a minor character in the testimony - a mysterious "black man" - becoming a kind of void-like presence in the installation. Yet the work itself is very dramatic, and sensual even, with the so-called 3D animations reconstructing the incident presented across three projections, all set to the musical theme from Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.
HS: This is one aspect of why people say this technology is so truthful. Usually this kind of reconstruction would be used in a courtroom, and the advantage is that you can see it from every angle. You do all these "fly throughs." This is the legal aesthetic. These fly throughs are supposed to enhance authenticity because, as opposed to the two dimensionality of the photograph, you can fly around. In a way the fly throughs are part of the promise of authenticity.
But what happens if you really do it is that you fly around and you see there is nothing in the back. There's a hole, an empty shell. This is what I wanted to expose. If you really follow through, then you see that parts of this objectivity, parts of the facts, parts of the data are missing, and it is these missing parts which are the documentary core of the technology, because the only thing this technology really manages to capture is the missing data.
In the original Rashomon there were these long tracking shots through the forest with the camera - they must have put at least 50 meters of tracks through the forest. I was reminded of the stark black-and-white of the Rashomon by the black-and-white point clouds of 3D scan technology.
ART iT: Does this work also develop from what you've written about documentality and the politics of what can be documented?
HS: Yes. We might be in doubt, more or less, about the "content" of the things represented. Who knows how accurate they are? On the other hand, one can be quite sure about the material circumstances of any image, its carrier: the film stock, the media container, compression. This presents a series of facts. These are certain.
For the content, this is hardly ever the case.
ART iT: You've done other works that are archaeological in nature, such as Adorno's Grey (2012), or the project Amidst Us (2009), for which you removed part of the façade of one of the "bridgehead buildings" in Linz to create a pattern reflecting the trajectories of labor, exploitation and expulsion that fed into their construction under the Nazi regime, presented alongside a video installation further expanding upon that history.
HS: The project in Linz is my favorite, just because it was so unlikely. It took about a year. I didn't believe it would really happen, and then it happened. Then after the façade was restored, the conservator told us that it is impossible to restore it 100 percent. Everyday, when the afternoon sun falls on the façade, you can still see the outline. I like it because this really speaks to everything I tried to say with this installation. This is about the erasure of history and covering it behind a façade. Then you expose it, and what happens next is somebody just covers it up again. This is how the artwork should be completed. This is its natural completion. Social forces are taking over and adding a different layer of meaning, or in this case, plaster.
ART iT: Of course the project in Linz was commissioned as part of the European Capital of Culture 2009. Often projects that attempt an archaeology of European identity or history seem to be produced in the context of celebrating Europe. I wonder if this does not compromise them somewhat.
HS: It's an interesting paradox. I think most institutions would prefer not having to deal with these problematic aspects in history. On the other hand, and this applies especially in the case of Linz, many people, especially those in the neighboring countries, would be very disturbed if this wasn't addressed at all, because Linz really was supposed to be the cultural capital of the Nazi empire. There were museums built there where all the artworks looted from all over Europe were supposed to be put on display. So you cannot have a European Capital of Culture in Linz without at least addressing this aspect of the history.
But of course in the whole dynamic of this paradox, you can also have the reverse effect, that this kind of work becomes a decoration for city marketing spectacle. That happens too. It's like two sides of the same coin.
Top: Amidst Us (2009), site-specific intervention into the Bridgehead Buildings, Linz. © Andreas Kepplinger. Bottom: Red Alert (2007), installation view, triptych of three video loops shown on 30-inch cinema computer screen. Courtesy Hito Steyerl.
ART iT: Speaking of erasure, in Lovely Andrea there is a sequence where you appropriate footage from the vintage Spider-Man cartoon. In one scene, we see an event at the "Metropolitan Museum" where a new painting is unveiled, and in the frame of the painting you insert your own bondage photograph. Then, in a second scene, the "painting" suddenly disappears, leaving an empty frame. Generally, artists seek to produce "the image" as the endpoint of their work, but in erasing your image, you prompt viewers to question what the image actually is, or what it is we are looking for in the image. In this sense, rather than leaving us with the strong image of the bondage photograph, you provide us with the poor image that circulates on the Web. If "the image" is rooted in Western tradition, the poor image seems to expand horizontally across multiple contexts.
HS: It's something I didn't notice until you said it. The act of taking away the image from the frame is first of all an erasure. This is important because with all the images circulating online, you cannot erase them anymore. You have no possibility of ever taking anything back, so erasure becomes a possibility that you want to claim. But it's not only erasure, because the next thing that happens in the frame is that something else comes up, which is the reverse bondage image of my assistant Ageha, and she replaces or displaces the previous image. So it's both about erasure and displacement.
In the whole sequence of films, November deals with my friend Andrea, while in the sequel her picture circulating around the world is replaced by the picture of Ageha, whose name sounds somewhat similar, but basically has nothing to do with Andrea. These images are contagious. They infect each other and touch each other and somehow there is a dynamic that relates one to the other, like images we give to someone who then gives it to someone else. So in this whole series of films these images keep circulating and changing and yet retaining something of the original impulse.
ART iT: What do you think about the support compared to the image? What is the support for the poor image?
HS: Yes, this is interesting. In traditional mediums everything stays with its support. The painting stays with the canvas. The statue stays with the stone. The photograph is more mobile and reproducible on several carriers.
My view is that the poor image can take on any possible support. I'm working on a text right now that deals with the idea, which I also have played with in other texts, of the image as a thing. The image can become a thing - materialize - but in the case of the poor image it can also be many other things. This is about the process of images walking through the screen into the world. Images literally walk across the computer or TV screen or projection screen and find themselves in the world.
The idea is that this happens more and more, that somehow images are implemented in the world, they are realized and materialized, but there is always some kind of glitch. If you walk through the screen, something happens and you can never go back to the way you used to be. There is an irreversible transformation that takes place. The first person to do this might have been Silvio Berlusconi. He was a TV magnate who owned the most important private television channels in Italy before he became prime minister. So, from being something like a TV image, he walked into reality, but on the way, because he had to go through the screen, he broke his nose, and had to have it fixed.
All the plastic surgery we're seeing right now - reconstruction, botox, whatever - it's all an effect of all these images which come through the screen into reality and then bump their noses and have to have them fixed. But this is only in the case of people. Many other things also go through screens and materialize in reality. A lot of contemporary architecture is really some sort of topological screen matter that was somehow ejaculated into reality and stays frozen there. A lot of our environments are shaped from realities which used to be confined to screens and now have emerged and constitute the world we live in.
The interesting consequence of this is that now, images form a large part of any real environment. They came from the screen and they immigrated into reality and we are now surrounded by them, which means that all the techniques we used to think applied only to things behind the screen, like editing, Photoshop, post-production, film theory - basically anything that relates to images - applies to reality now.
Top: Adornos's Grey (2012), detail, single-channel HD-video projection, 14 min 20 sec, four angled screens, wall plot, photographs. Bottom: Installation view, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, 2012. Both: Courtesy Hito Steyerl.
ART iT: But there is also something traumatic about the moment of representation. In Adorno's Grey, you film a team of conservators digging into the wall of the lecture hall at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, where Adorno taught. They are searching for the layer of gray paint that Adorno is said to have had installed there in order to focus the concentration of the students. But part of the backstory of the work is the incident when three female students bared their breasts to Adorno in protest - an incident which was apparently quite shattering for Adorno.
HS: Several of the points I mentioned are important for that work. For example, the idea of the image as an object, as something which materializes in the form of screens and other things throughout the installation. I wanted to reverse my usual historiographical approach and dig for something in the future.
In the film, we pretend to excavate something, but very quickly it becomes clear there is nothing to be found, and if we want to find something, if we want to have a result, we have to make it up, we have to imagine it. The only thing we ever find is a poor image, a moving poor image of a protest, of someone literally turning Adorno's book into a protective object, into a weapon. This image is neither from the past nor from the future but from the present, and it's really a poor image.
Of course the trigger for this whole investigation is this so-called "breast attack" which happened in 1969, but nobody wanted to talk about it. So in a way it wasn't possible to solve it in the past. It also had to be solved by the present in trying to again reconcile some of Adorno's ideas with contemporary social movements. This is something which I think is more and more important for my work. You cannot fix the past. You can go and look at it, but you have to fix it in the present by imagining the future.
Pt I
Hito Steyerl: Documenting Void
The Kiss (2012), detail, mixed-media installation: three-channel video projection; 3D print on plinth; eight light boxes; single-channel video, etc. Installation view, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2013: "Public Diary," at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Photo Kenichiro Ooshima.
ART iT: One reason that it's so stimulating to read your essays is your use of language play, like tracing the word "freelancers" back to its origins as the kind of yojimbo sword for hire, or the idea of the "poor image" being connected to systems of oppression and exploitation. You're using words in a way that allows multiple meanings to aggregate, and this wordplay also carries into your works as well.
HS: That's the condition of the non-native speaker. If the word is anyhow strange to you, then you take it and turn it around, and see what it looks like from the other side, and then usually you discover another dimension to it. I never take it for granted. If Chinese characters are multidimensional, why not other words?
I did a small work called Strike (2010) which is precisely about this kind of wordplay, and Abstract (2012), which plays with the idea of what abstraction is, as well as Red Alert (2007) - also about abstraction and the monochrome, as well as the relations between fear and security and the color scale.
ART iT: Language also seems to provide a route for images and concepts to become things. For example, in the piece here, The Kiss (2012), you are credited with "Realization and Objectification."
HS: It is "objectifiction," not objectification. That's what the work is about. You try to be as objective as possible using technologies which are supposed to be really objective or truthful, and provide real facts, but the object you produce is a complete fiction. This is inherent in the technology. You have to fictionalize so much in the process because the data you have is just a set of data, and the outcome is a complete interpretation. You have to connect the dots basically. Any object produced with this technology is always an objectifiction as much as an objectification.
The Kiss (2012), installation view, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2013: "Public Diary," at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Photo Kenichiro Ooshima.
ART iT: The Kiss is based on legal testimony regarding a massacre that took place in Bosnia, with a minor character in the testimony - a mysterious "black man" - becoming a kind of void-like presence in the installation. Yet the work itself is very dramatic, and sensual even, with the so-called 3D animations reconstructing the incident presented across three projections, all set to the musical theme from Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.
HS: This is one aspect of why people say this technology is so truthful. Usually this kind of reconstruction would be used in a courtroom, and the advantage is that you can see it from every angle. You do all these "fly throughs." This is the legal aesthetic. These fly throughs are supposed to enhance authenticity because, as opposed to the two dimensionality of the photograph, you can fly around. In a way the fly throughs are part of the promise of authenticity.
But what happens if you really do it is that you fly around and you see there is nothing in the back. There's a hole, an empty shell. This is what I wanted to expose. If you really follow through, then you see that parts of this objectivity, parts of the facts, parts of the data are missing, and it is these missing parts which are the documentary core of the technology, because the only thing this technology really manages to capture is the missing data.
In the original Rashomon there were these long tracking shots through the forest with the camera - they must have put at least 50 meters of tracks through the forest. I was reminded of the stark black-and-white of the Rashomon by the black-and-white point clouds of 3D scan technology.
ART iT: Does this work also develop from what you've written about documentality and the politics of what can be documented?
HS: Yes. We might be in doubt, more or less, about the "content" of the things represented. Who knows how accurate they are? On the other hand, one can be quite sure about the material circumstances of any image, its carrier: the film stock, the media container, compression. This presents a series of facts. These are certain.
For the content, this is hardly ever the case.
ART iT: You've done other works that are archaeological in nature, such as Adorno's Grey (2012), or the project Amidst Us (2009), for which you removed part of the façade of one of the "bridgehead buildings" in Linz to create a pattern reflecting the trajectories of labor, exploitation and expulsion that fed into their construction under the Nazi regime, presented alongside a video installation further expanding upon that history.
HS: The project in Linz is my favorite, just because it was so unlikely. It took about a year. I didn't believe it would really happen, and then it happened. Then after the façade was restored, the conservator told us that it is impossible to restore it 100 percent. Everyday, when the afternoon sun falls on the façade, you can still see the outline. I like it because this really speaks to everything I tried to say with this installation. This is about the erasure of history and covering it behind a façade. Then you expose it, and what happens next is somebody just covers it up again. This is how the artwork should be completed. This is its natural completion. Social forces are taking over and adding a different layer of meaning, or in this case, plaster.
ART iT: Of course the project in Linz was commissioned as part of the European Capital of Culture 2009. Often projects that attempt an archaeology of European identity or history seem to be produced in the context of celebrating Europe. I wonder if this does not compromise them somewhat.
HS: It's an interesting paradox. I think most institutions would prefer not having to deal with these problematic aspects in history. On the other hand, and this applies especially in the case of Linz, many people, especially those in the neighboring countries, would be very disturbed if this wasn't addressed at all, because Linz really was supposed to be the cultural capital of the Nazi empire. There were museums built there where all the artworks looted from all over Europe were supposed to be put on display. So you cannot have a European Capital of Culture in Linz without at least addressing this aspect of the history.
But of course in the whole dynamic of this paradox, you can also have the reverse effect, that this kind of work becomes a decoration for city marketing spectacle. That happens too. It's like two sides of the same coin.
Top: Amidst Us (2009), site-specific intervention into the Bridgehead Buildings, Linz. © Andreas Kepplinger. Bottom: Red Alert (2007), installation view, triptych of three video loops shown on 30-inch cinema computer screen. Courtesy Hito Steyerl.
ART iT: Speaking of erasure, in Lovely Andrea there is a sequence where you appropriate footage from the vintage Spider-Man cartoon. In one scene, we see an event at the "Metropolitan Museum" where a new painting is unveiled, and in the frame of the painting you insert your own bondage photograph. Then, in a second scene, the "painting" suddenly disappears, leaving an empty frame. Generally, artists seek to produce "the image" as the endpoint of their work, but in erasing your image, you prompt viewers to question what the image actually is, or what it is we are looking for in the image. In this sense, rather than leaving us with the strong image of the bondage photograph, you provide us with the poor image that circulates on the Web. If "the image" is rooted in Western tradition, the poor image seems to expand horizontally across multiple contexts.
HS: It's something I didn't notice until you said it. The act of taking away the image from the frame is first of all an erasure. This is important because with all the images circulating online, you cannot erase them anymore. You have no possibility of ever taking anything back, so erasure becomes a possibility that you want to claim. But it's not only erasure, because the next thing that happens in the frame is that something else comes up, which is the reverse bondage image of my assistant Ageha, and she replaces or displaces the previous image. So it's both about erasure and displacement.
In the whole sequence of films, November deals with my friend Andrea, while in the sequel her picture circulating around the world is replaced by the picture of Ageha, whose name sounds somewhat similar, but basically has nothing to do with Andrea. These images are contagious. They infect each other and touch each other and somehow there is a dynamic that relates one to the other, like images we give to someone who then gives it to someone else. So in this whole series of films these images keep circulating and changing and yet retaining something of the original impulse.
ART iT: What do you think about the support compared to the image? What is the support for the poor image?
HS: Yes, this is interesting. In traditional mediums everything stays with its support. The painting stays with the canvas. The statue stays with the stone. The photograph is more mobile and reproducible on several carriers.
My view is that the poor image can take on any possible support. I'm working on a text right now that deals with the idea, which I also have played with in other texts, of the image as a thing. The image can become a thing - materialize - but in the case of the poor image it can also be many other things. This is about the process of images walking through the screen into the world. Images literally walk across the computer or TV screen or projection screen and find themselves in the world.
The idea is that this happens more and more, that somehow images are implemented in the world, they are realized and materialized, but there is always some kind of glitch. If you walk through the screen, something happens and you can never go back to the way you used to be. There is an irreversible transformation that takes place. The first person to do this might have been Silvio Berlusconi. He was a TV magnate who owned the most important private television channels in Italy before he became prime minister. So, from being something like a TV image, he walked into reality, but on the way, because he had to go through the screen, he broke his nose, and had to have it fixed.
All the plastic surgery we're seeing right now - reconstruction, botox, whatever - it's all an effect of all these images which come through the screen into reality and then bump their noses and have to have them fixed. But this is only in the case of people. Many other things also go through screens and materialize in reality. A lot of contemporary architecture is really some sort of topological screen matter that was somehow ejaculated into reality and stays frozen there. A lot of our environments are shaped from realities which used to be confined to screens and now have emerged and constitute the world we live in.
The interesting consequence of this is that now, images form a large part of any real environment. They came from the screen and they immigrated into reality and we are now surrounded by them, which means that all the techniques we used to think applied only to things behind the screen, like editing, Photoshop, post-production, film theory - basically anything that relates to images - applies to reality now.
Top: Adornos's Grey (2012), detail, single-channel HD-video projection, 14 min 20 sec, four angled screens, wall plot, photographs. Bottom: Installation view, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, 2012. Both: Courtesy Hito Steyerl.
ART iT: But there is also something traumatic about the moment of representation. In Adorno's Grey, you film a team of conservators digging into the wall of the lecture hall at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, where Adorno taught. They are searching for the layer of gray paint that Adorno is said to have had installed there in order to focus the concentration of the students. But part of the backstory of the work is the incident when three female students bared their breasts to Adorno in protest - an incident which was apparently quite shattering for Adorno.
HS: Several of the points I mentioned are important for that work. For example, the idea of the image as an object, as something which materializes in the form of screens and other things throughout the installation. I wanted to reverse my usual historiographical approach and dig for something in the future.
In the film, we pretend to excavate something, but very quickly it becomes clear there is nothing to be found, and if we want to find something, if we want to have a result, we have to make it up, we have to imagine it. The only thing we ever find is a poor image, a moving poor image of a protest, of someone literally turning Adorno's book into a protective object, into a weapon. This image is neither from the past nor from the future but from the present, and it's really a poor image.
Of course the trigger for this whole investigation is this so-called "breast attack" which happened in 1969, but nobody wanted to talk about it. So in a way it wasn't possible to solve it in the past. It also had to be solved by the present in trying to again reconcile some of Adorno's ideas with contemporary social movements. This is something which I think is more and more important for my work. You cannot fix the past. You can go and look at it, but you have to fix it in the present by imagining the future.
Pt I
Hito Steyerl: Documenting Void
Arin Rungjang
THE GOLDEN TEARDROP
By Gridthiya Gaweewong
Golden Teardrop (2013, detail, site-specific sculptural installation with wooden construction incorporating wood from Ayutthaya house, iron beams from decommissioned post-World War II factory and 6,000 cast brass pieces, wooden construction: 5 x 5 m; brass sphere: 3 m diameter. Photo Kornkrit Jianpinidnan. All images: Courtesy Arin Rungjang and the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Thailand.
Thailand’s Office of Contemporary Art, Ministry of Culture, has selected two artists to represent Thailand in the national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Wasinburee Supanichvoraparch and Arin Rungjang. Along with Penwadee Manont and Worathep Akkabootara, the young curators of the Thai Pavilion, they are focusing on the theme of food to promote Thailand's soft power as a kitchen to the world.
In his project, Arin Rungjang smartly interweaves the edible history of sugar, a commodity that changed the world. As the politics of taste raised its status, sugar became even more significant when the first sugar mills to produce and distribute sugar to the European courts were introduced in Venice. This prompted the first migration of laborers, along with natural resources from the new world, to feed old world luxury lifestyles.
Arin draws an invisible connection with this natural material to people in Asia, Europe, South America, Africa and even the Asia-Pacific. His approach is unusual among Thai contemporary artists, who tend to be mostly focused on working with local materials and Buddhist motifs. Capable of working at transnational level, Arin is on a par with peers like Pratchaya Phinthong, and his seniors Rirkrit Tiravanija, Montien Boonma and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His new piece also offers a glimpse of how, by making reference to history, memory and small narratives, this generation of artists is able to transcend the boundaries of nation/state and cultural identity while deconstructing the mono-cultural attitude of Thai-ness invented by the state in the postwar period.
Arin is concerned with history and memory in relation to existing realities because he is aware that many parts of history have yet to be connected, associated, or even recorded. In Golden Teardrop, Arin's works are based on an amalgamation of grand narratives and small narratives, rethinking history by using sugar and a famous Thai sweet, golden teardrop, as a point of departure. Thais assume that golden teardrop is a traditional desert introduced during the Ayutthaya period (17th century). In fact, this famous dessert was introduced to the Thai court by Maria Guyomar de Pinha, a woman of Japanese, Portuguese and Bengali decent, and wife of Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek court counselor to King Narai (1633-88), of the Ayutthaya dynasty, who embraced early attempts at globalization in the name of colonization. For the Venice Biennale's Thai Pavilion, Arin re-fabricates this story, narrating it through different media to give viewers a better understanding of the role of Ayutthaya, the former capital of Siam, and how it was affected and influenced by colonization.*
On behalf of ART iT, Gridthiya Gaweewong met with Arin prior to the Biennale to discuss this project.
Interview:
Golden Teardrop (2013), installation view.
GG: How are your preparations coming with your project for the Thai Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale? What kind of issues are you working with and how will you present them?
AR: I am working on a video project called Golden Teardrop, which will be presented along with a sculptural installation. The sculpture is a big piece measuring about five-by-five meters , with almost 8,000 brass golden teardrops. The teardrops will be threaded with copper wire so that the shape of the sculpture resembles a chandelier. The structure consists of beams from a 200-year-old wooden house from Ayutthaya. The iron structure came from an old factory, built after World War II with cement and iron beams for the roof.
GG: Is the use of these recycled or found materials intended to create a dialogue with the site of production and the history of the golden teardrop?
AR: Yes, there's a discourse and dialectic between the materials. The brass chandelier is three meters in diameter. Standing up, you would reach only the midway point of the work, and people can walk around it.
GG: What else will people see?
AR: When visitors enter the pavilion, they will pass the reception counter and find Wasinburee's work in one room. My sculpture will be in the back of the other room. Visitors will see the "golden teardrop" chandelier made from brass, and then there will be a panel and door, with the video on the left side.
In its first part, the video introduces the personal memories of a Japanese woman, Hisako, the wife of a friend, who ended up in Thailand and opened a bakery shop here. She is originally from Hiroshima, and studied in the US. Her grandfather has rheumatism from walking across Hiroshima searching for his sister immediately after the atomic bombing, and her grandmother was scarred by the blast. Her great-grandfather was a tea ceremony master and her great-grandmother was an ikebana master.
The second, main part of the video starts with Henry the Navigator, the 15th-century prince and explorer who introduced sugar cane to Portugal, where nuns at the convent of Jesus in Aveiro used it to make the confection ovos moles. This confection is what became golden teardrop when it was brought to Thailand in the 17th century.
While Hisako has no relationship to the history we are talking about, fragments of history start to emerge, connecting with each other. I don't try to associate them, but simply want to put them on the table. When visitors see the works, they will make their own associations between themselves and the work. When I'm asked about the message I want to convey through my sculpture, I say the piece is open ended. It's a fragment, but the audience will use their own judgment, finding pieces of fragments to associate with their own experiences.
Another small part is photography, which is part of the video work, showing, for example, scenes of the workers making the golden teardrop shapes for my sculpture. The photos were installed on a wall, and then we zoomed in on them.
GG: You also include a photograph of a Portuguese village in Ayutthaya, from the 15th century, right?
AR: This was actually during the reign of King Phetracha (1688-1703), who followed King Narai. The Siamese wiped out the Portuguese and French on the suspicion that they were plotting to help Constantine Phaulkon seize the kingdom of Ayutthaya. The other image is a letter by Phaulkon's wife, Maria Guyomar de Pinha, to King Louis XV, demanding that he repay his debts. There's also an image of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Golden Teardrop (2013), video installation, HD color, 16:9 format, 27 min 24 sec, installation view, installation view.
GG: What happened between Ayutthaya and the French?
AR: In the nationalist revolution of 1688, through which he assumed power, Phetracha expelled all the French in Ayutthaya, leading to a break in diplomatic relations with France. Phaulkon was beheaded and his wife Maria condemned to slavery in Phetracha's kitchens until the king's death in 1703. Nevertheless, Maria, together with her daughter-in-law Louisa Passagna, continued to sue the French East India Company to recoup the money lent by her husband Phaulkon. She was vindicated in 1717 through a decree from the Council of State in France, which provided her with a maintenance allowance. Previously, Maria had also helped to draft the letter from King Naria to Louis XIV that the ambassador Phraya Kosa Pan carried with him to France in 1686.
The video also touches upon Marco Polo and Venice, because there was evidence that the Venetians took inspiration from the Persian innovation of making sugar to start sugarcane mills in Venice, and it was this technology that Henry the Navigator brought to Portugal. I also mention King Afonso of Portugal. He's the uncle of Princess Joana, who later became Santa Joana Princesa and established the Convent of Jesus Aveiro, where they made habits. One of the processes was to use egg whites to starch the habits. Then, with the left over egg yolks, they made desserts.
GG: When was this?
AR: In 1502. King Manuel of Portugal supplied 140 kilos of sugar per year to the convent. These images will be part of the installation, I also have an image of the uncle of Prince Henry the Navigator, as he is known in Thai history. I also focus on Phaulkon, the Greek merchant and adventurer who was born in Venetian-ruled territory.
GG: You say that you try not to establish associations between fragments or narratives, but it seems that you are creating a link between Venice and Thailand based on different characters and players from history and the present, with sugar as the foundation of that link.
AR: When I was doing my residency in New York, I also worked with this theme, but focused on slavery and the history of Ayutthaya and Puerto Rico. I made a video dealing with golden teardrops, bomba dance and sugar. Puerto Rico is where many sugar factories were founded, and many slaves worked there. By then, sugar was getting cheaper and sweets were being marketed around the world and were becoming a trend. The slaves came from all across Africa and couldn't really communicate, all they could do was dance. That is how the bomba dance started.
GG: This kind of connection is almost unthinkable. People don't see how they relate to each other, yet it's part of the rise of colonization. It was the age of discovery, and while many Thais think that we were not part of this colonization, we were involved from the beginning. We were never isolated from this trajectory. Everything is connected.
AR: Yes, I'm aware of this, and I do not try to rewrite the history. I'm not a historian. It's not about using fragments of history to create new narratives for negotiating with power, but about working with personal memories. It's the personal memories of Joana, Manuel, Maria Guyomar de Pinha, Phaulkon, I just put all of them together.
GG: As someone interested in small narratives, I find this point striking. The approach you take is subservient to the grand narratives - the official versions of the stories - but you mix in small narratives of normal people, like the Japanese woman who came to Bangkok, and workers in the factory. It's almost like tracing history, exploring time and space by using sugar - sweet as golden teardrops - and memory as the main players.
AR: But there were some characters I didn't initially intend to address, like the 17th-century Christian converts in Japan. They were accidentally related to Guyomar’s grandmother, who was stuffed in a sack and exiled to Vietnam for her beliefs during the persecution of Christians in Japan. The 26 missionaries and converts who were executed by crucifixion in Nagasaki are known as the Martyrs of Japan.
Still from the video Golden Teardrop (2013).
GG: You are working in Thailand, and don't have so many chances to interact with Western audiences. While I was in the US, they always got mixed up between Thailand and Taiwan, so artists like Montien and Rirkrit started to work on cultural identity issues. Now that people know more about us, it's time to do something more complicated. What you present here is visual, telling stories that create sensory experiences, rather than telling history like a historian.
AR: I am not trying to educate people, but as an artist, I use visual art and space to approach viewers in the form of sculpture, installation or video works. At the press conference, I explained that I am not a conceptual artist. Our country doesn't have the knowledge to create that kind of anti-thesis.
GG: So the dialectical tradition doesn't exist here?
AR: Art doesn't require dialogue or dialectic, because we do not have that tradition. In fact, we have about 10 style sets. If you want to work conceptually, you need to swing back to that area on the other side again.
GG: So you want to get away from the tradition of conceptual practice? Actually, you are a post conceptual artist because now "you can do anything you want." Are you concerned about what you will achieve over there, that it will not work because you don't know whether the audience will understand it or because you think that you are not going to tell the stories? But there is a narrative there.
AR: I think it's because when I did my presentation in New York, they told me that I was trying to become a global artist, not a Thai artist.
The work is very open. Viewers can use the structure as a frame. If the Portuguese see the work they will be able to relate to it, if the Greeks come they will find points to relate to, and so will the Japanese. However, this is not dedicated only to the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Japanese or the Thai people. The audience will make their own judgments.
GG: Is the project also about the nation-state or race? I look at nationalism in terms of ethnographic or different audiences. You've tried to deconstruct yourself and your identity, and the idea that Thai artists have to only work for the Thai people. I like the way you try to justify Thailand after colonial times. You say that no matter the nationality, viewers will understand. Some themes are universal, like food, which is very basic, but in terms of its history, some people might not realize those relationships, and what they take from it may be fragmented and difficult to understand.
AR: This project will show another image of the power of the institutions that establish a history or nation-state. It's a different type of image from the one we normally see; we don't think of it, but we should be thinking of it more. Today we are increasingly faced with uncertainty about the state of our existence, as more and more different facts are revealed.
Still from the video Golden Teardrop (2013).
GG: For how long have you been researching and developing Golden Teardrop, and how did you go about it?
AR: I think the research is an ongoing process. It started when I was standing on a balcony of the Dusit Thani Hotel building in Bangkok. This is about being in the same place as my mother and looking back at changing history. The initial idea came from an attack on my father that happened in 1977, when I was three. The attack happened in Germany and was due to a misunderstanding. I tried to interrogate ideology, history and ideas. I read and searched through history to look for answers to the cause of the attack on my father, but couldn't find the answer; there was no cause.
My father, who died not long after he returned to Thailand, told my mother that the Germans thought he was Filipino and that they hated the Filipinos, because during World War II, the Philippines had been used as a base of operations for the Americans.
GG: Did this incident make you feel uncomfortable or have problems with nationalism and racism?
AR: It made me think that something must be wrong with the idea of mass ideology, nation and government. It's part of why I feel no pride in being a Thai artist who is used as a tool by the nation-state.
GG: But you are in the Thai Pavilion!
AR: Yes, but I do not represent Thainess; it's more about the international context. I would say I represent the issue of not having power to control the individual, power to speak of the grand narrative. This has not come into being from only one person or one place.
GG: Are they going to see that? You are negotiating with institutions, telling them what are you doing, but what you are saying makes it subversive.
AR: They asked me how they would know if the information was accurate. I told them that I am not talking about the accuracy of the information, but am simply saying that we have more than 20 theories about how Constantine Phaulkon died. Greek history has yet another Phaulkon story. He is very important in Greek history and famous in a romantic way - the cabin boy who became the Minister of Home Affairs.
GG: The reason he is well known is because he came to work in Thailand right?
AR: Yes! And they really hate us in Greece. They hated Siam because we killed their people without reason.
GG: You've made three pieces in the last several years. What about your work for the Biennale of Sydney 2012 ?
AR: For Sydney, I visited Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, then Australia.
GG: So there is a post-colonial undertone?
AR: Deep down, I'm not working with issues of post-colonialism. I think of the history during colonial times, which is very explicit, and find my work seems to be going too much in the same direction.
GG: You are more like a third person who looks at the story rather than directly facing the situation.
AR: You asked me what my concern is? Well, I am concerned when some people say: "You are a Thai artist, why do you do this?"
Golden Teardrop (2013), installation view.
GG: That's because they look at you in the traditional way. Your approach is to relate things to others. It's like sharing your historical experiences with the world, which I think is much more sophisticated.
AR: I try to get rid of the hatred, because when I was young, I was full of hate. This hatred has disappeared and what I have found now is only humanity and unknown causes. Everything is mixed together.
There is one scene in the video where the person making golden teardrop shapes turns to me and speaks in the Isaan dialect about Manchester United. There is undirected conversation; there is this drive and there is the reason why we get out of bed.
As I mentioned, the story is of a Japanese lady making golden teardrops interwoven with the story of Marco Polo. It is visually beautiful; the production team was very good. Both stories will be overlaid like memories.
Return to Index
Arin Rungjang: Golden Teardrop
By Gridthiya Gaweewong
Golden Teardrop (2013, detail, site-specific sculptural installation with wooden construction incorporating wood from Ayutthaya house, iron beams from decommissioned post-World War II factory and 6,000 cast brass pieces, wooden construction: 5 x 5 m; brass sphere: 3 m diameter. Photo Kornkrit Jianpinidnan. All images: Courtesy Arin Rungjang and the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Thailand.
Thailand’s Office of Contemporary Art, Ministry of Culture, has selected two artists to represent Thailand in the national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Wasinburee Supanichvoraparch and Arin Rungjang. Along with Penwadee Manont and Worathep Akkabootara, the young curators of the Thai Pavilion, they are focusing on the theme of food to promote Thailand's soft power as a kitchen to the world.
In his project, Arin Rungjang smartly interweaves the edible history of sugar, a commodity that changed the world. As the politics of taste raised its status, sugar became even more significant when the first sugar mills to produce and distribute sugar to the European courts were introduced in Venice. This prompted the first migration of laborers, along with natural resources from the new world, to feed old world luxury lifestyles.
Arin draws an invisible connection with this natural material to people in Asia, Europe, South America, Africa and even the Asia-Pacific. His approach is unusual among Thai contemporary artists, who tend to be mostly focused on working with local materials and Buddhist motifs. Capable of working at transnational level, Arin is on a par with peers like Pratchaya Phinthong, and his seniors Rirkrit Tiravanija, Montien Boonma and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His new piece also offers a glimpse of how, by making reference to history, memory and small narratives, this generation of artists is able to transcend the boundaries of nation/state and cultural identity while deconstructing the mono-cultural attitude of Thai-ness invented by the state in the postwar period.
Arin is concerned with history and memory in relation to existing realities because he is aware that many parts of history have yet to be connected, associated, or even recorded. In Golden Teardrop, Arin's works are based on an amalgamation of grand narratives and small narratives, rethinking history by using sugar and a famous Thai sweet, golden teardrop, as a point of departure. Thais assume that golden teardrop is a traditional desert introduced during the Ayutthaya period (17th century). In fact, this famous dessert was introduced to the Thai court by Maria Guyomar de Pinha, a woman of Japanese, Portuguese and Bengali decent, and wife of Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek court counselor to King Narai (1633-88), of the Ayutthaya dynasty, who embraced early attempts at globalization in the name of colonization. For the Venice Biennale's Thai Pavilion, Arin re-fabricates this story, narrating it through different media to give viewers a better understanding of the role of Ayutthaya, the former capital of Siam, and how it was affected and influenced by colonization.*
On behalf of ART iT, Gridthiya Gaweewong met with Arin prior to the Biennale to discuss this project.
Interview:
Golden Teardrop (2013), installation view.
GG: How are your preparations coming with your project for the Thai Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale? What kind of issues are you working with and how will you present them?
AR: I am working on a video project called Golden Teardrop, which will be presented along with a sculptural installation. The sculpture is a big piece measuring about five-by-five meters , with almost 8,000 brass golden teardrops. The teardrops will be threaded with copper wire so that the shape of the sculpture resembles a chandelier. The structure consists of beams from a 200-year-old wooden house from Ayutthaya. The iron structure came from an old factory, built after World War II with cement and iron beams for the roof.
GG: Is the use of these recycled or found materials intended to create a dialogue with the site of production and the history of the golden teardrop?
AR: Yes, there's a discourse and dialectic between the materials. The brass chandelier is three meters in diameter. Standing up, you would reach only the midway point of the work, and people can walk around it.
GG: What else will people see?
AR: When visitors enter the pavilion, they will pass the reception counter and find Wasinburee's work in one room. My sculpture will be in the back of the other room. Visitors will see the "golden teardrop" chandelier made from brass, and then there will be a panel and door, with the video on the left side.
In its first part, the video introduces the personal memories of a Japanese woman, Hisako, the wife of a friend, who ended up in Thailand and opened a bakery shop here. She is originally from Hiroshima, and studied in the US. Her grandfather has rheumatism from walking across Hiroshima searching for his sister immediately after the atomic bombing, and her grandmother was scarred by the blast. Her great-grandfather was a tea ceremony master and her great-grandmother was an ikebana master.
The second, main part of the video starts with Henry the Navigator, the 15th-century prince and explorer who introduced sugar cane to Portugal, where nuns at the convent of Jesus in Aveiro used it to make the confection ovos moles. This confection is what became golden teardrop when it was brought to Thailand in the 17th century.
While Hisako has no relationship to the history we are talking about, fragments of history start to emerge, connecting with each other. I don't try to associate them, but simply want to put them on the table. When visitors see the works, they will make their own associations between themselves and the work. When I'm asked about the message I want to convey through my sculpture, I say the piece is open ended. It's a fragment, but the audience will use their own judgment, finding pieces of fragments to associate with their own experiences.
Another small part is photography, which is part of the video work, showing, for example, scenes of the workers making the golden teardrop shapes for my sculpture. The photos were installed on a wall, and then we zoomed in on them.
GG: You also include a photograph of a Portuguese village in Ayutthaya, from the 15th century, right?
AR: This was actually during the reign of King Phetracha (1688-1703), who followed King Narai. The Siamese wiped out the Portuguese and French on the suspicion that they were plotting to help Constantine Phaulkon seize the kingdom of Ayutthaya. The other image is a letter by Phaulkon's wife, Maria Guyomar de Pinha, to King Louis XV, demanding that he repay his debts. There's also an image of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Golden Teardrop (2013), video installation, HD color, 16:9 format, 27 min 24 sec, installation view, installation view.
GG: What happened between Ayutthaya and the French?
AR: In the nationalist revolution of 1688, through which he assumed power, Phetracha expelled all the French in Ayutthaya, leading to a break in diplomatic relations with France. Phaulkon was beheaded and his wife Maria condemned to slavery in Phetracha's kitchens until the king's death in 1703. Nevertheless, Maria, together with her daughter-in-law Louisa Passagna, continued to sue the French East India Company to recoup the money lent by her husband Phaulkon. She was vindicated in 1717 through a decree from the Council of State in France, which provided her with a maintenance allowance. Previously, Maria had also helped to draft the letter from King Naria to Louis XIV that the ambassador Phraya Kosa Pan carried with him to France in 1686.
The video also touches upon Marco Polo and Venice, because there was evidence that the Venetians took inspiration from the Persian innovation of making sugar to start sugarcane mills in Venice, and it was this technology that Henry the Navigator brought to Portugal. I also mention King Afonso of Portugal. He's the uncle of Princess Joana, who later became Santa Joana Princesa and established the Convent of Jesus Aveiro, where they made habits. One of the processes was to use egg whites to starch the habits. Then, with the left over egg yolks, they made desserts.
GG: When was this?
AR: In 1502. King Manuel of Portugal supplied 140 kilos of sugar per year to the convent. These images will be part of the installation, I also have an image of the uncle of Prince Henry the Navigator, as he is known in Thai history. I also focus on Phaulkon, the Greek merchant and adventurer who was born in Venetian-ruled territory.
GG: You say that you try not to establish associations between fragments or narratives, but it seems that you are creating a link between Venice and Thailand based on different characters and players from history and the present, with sugar as the foundation of that link.
AR: When I was doing my residency in New York, I also worked with this theme, but focused on slavery and the history of Ayutthaya and Puerto Rico. I made a video dealing with golden teardrops, bomba dance and sugar. Puerto Rico is where many sugar factories were founded, and many slaves worked there. By then, sugar was getting cheaper and sweets were being marketed around the world and were becoming a trend. The slaves came from all across Africa and couldn't really communicate, all they could do was dance. That is how the bomba dance started.
GG: This kind of connection is almost unthinkable. People don't see how they relate to each other, yet it's part of the rise of colonization. It was the age of discovery, and while many Thais think that we were not part of this colonization, we were involved from the beginning. We were never isolated from this trajectory. Everything is connected.
AR: Yes, I'm aware of this, and I do not try to rewrite the history. I'm not a historian. It's not about using fragments of history to create new narratives for negotiating with power, but about working with personal memories. It's the personal memories of Joana, Manuel, Maria Guyomar de Pinha, Phaulkon, I just put all of them together.
GG: As someone interested in small narratives, I find this point striking. The approach you take is subservient to the grand narratives - the official versions of the stories - but you mix in small narratives of normal people, like the Japanese woman who came to Bangkok, and workers in the factory. It's almost like tracing history, exploring time and space by using sugar - sweet as golden teardrops - and memory as the main players.
AR: But there were some characters I didn't initially intend to address, like the 17th-century Christian converts in Japan. They were accidentally related to Guyomar’s grandmother, who was stuffed in a sack and exiled to Vietnam for her beliefs during the persecution of Christians in Japan. The 26 missionaries and converts who were executed by crucifixion in Nagasaki are known as the Martyrs of Japan.
Still from the video Golden Teardrop (2013).
GG: You are working in Thailand, and don't have so many chances to interact with Western audiences. While I was in the US, they always got mixed up between Thailand and Taiwan, so artists like Montien and Rirkrit started to work on cultural identity issues. Now that people know more about us, it's time to do something more complicated. What you present here is visual, telling stories that create sensory experiences, rather than telling history like a historian.
AR: I am not trying to educate people, but as an artist, I use visual art and space to approach viewers in the form of sculpture, installation or video works. At the press conference, I explained that I am not a conceptual artist. Our country doesn't have the knowledge to create that kind of anti-thesis.
GG: So the dialectical tradition doesn't exist here?
AR: Art doesn't require dialogue or dialectic, because we do not have that tradition. In fact, we have about 10 style sets. If you want to work conceptually, you need to swing back to that area on the other side again.
GG: So you want to get away from the tradition of conceptual practice? Actually, you are a post conceptual artist because now "you can do anything you want." Are you concerned about what you will achieve over there, that it will not work because you don't know whether the audience will understand it or because you think that you are not going to tell the stories? But there is a narrative there.
AR: I think it's because when I did my presentation in New York, they told me that I was trying to become a global artist, not a Thai artist.
The work is very open. Viewers can use the structure as a frame. If the Portuguese see the work they will be able to relate to it, if the Greeks come they will find points to relate to, and so will the Japanese. However, this is not dedicated only to the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Japanese or the Thai people. The audience will make their own judgments.
GG: Is the project also about the nation-state or race? I look at nationalism in terms of ethnographic or different audiences. You've tried to deconstruct yourself and your identity, and the idea that Thai artists have to only work for the Thai people. I like the way you try to justify Thailand after colonial times. You say that no matter the nationality, viewers will understand. Some themes are universal, like food, which is very basic, but in terms of its history, some people might not realize those relationships, and what they take from it may be fragmented and difficult to understand.
AR: This project will show another image of the power of the institutions that establish a history or nation-state. It's a different type of image from the one we normally see; we don't think of it, but we should be thinking of it more. Today we are increasingly faced with uncertainty about the state of our existence, as more and more different facts are revealed.
Still from the video Golden Teardrop (2013).
GG: For how long have you been researching and developing Golden Teardrop, and how did you go about it?
AR: I think the research is an ongoing process. It started when I was standing on a balcony of the Dusit Thani Hotel building in Bangkok. This is about being in the same place as my mother and looking back at changing history. The initial idea came from an attack on my father that happened in 1977, when I was three. The attack happened in Germany and was due to a misunderstanding. I tried to interrogate ideology, history and ideas. I read and searched through history to look for answers to the cause of the attack on my father, but couldn't find the answer; there was no cause.
My father, who died not long after he returned to Thailand, told my mother that the Germans thought he was Filipino and that they hated the Filipinos, because during World War II, the Philippines had been used as a base of operations for the Americans.
GG: Did this incident make you feel uncomfortable or have problems with nationalism and racism?
AR: It made me think that something must be wrong with the idea of mass ideology, nation and government. It's part of why I feel no pride in being a Thai artist who is used as a tool by the nation-state.
GG: But you are in the Thai Pavilion!
AR: Yes, but I do not represent Thainess; it's more about the international context. I would say I represent the issue of not having power to control the individual, power to speak of the grand narrative. This has not come into being from only one person or one place.
GG: Are they going to see that? You are negotiating with institutions, telling them what are you doing, but what you are saying makes it subversive.
AR: They asked me how they would know if the information was accurate. I told them that I am not talking about the accuracy of the information, but am simply saying that we have more than 20 theories about how Constantine Phaulkon died. Greek history has yet another Phaulkon story. He is very important in Greek history and famous in a romantic way - the cabin boy who became the Minister of Home Affairs.
GG: The reason he is well known is because he came to work in Thailand right?
AR: Yes! And they really hate us in Greece. They hated Siam because we killed their people without reason.
GG: You've made three pieces in the last several years. What about your work for the Biennale of Sydney 2012 ?
AR: For Sydney, I visited Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, then Australia.
GG: So there is a post-colonial undertone?
AR: Deep down, I'm not working with issues of post-colonialism. I think of the history during colonial times, which is very explicit, and find my work seems to be going too much in the same direction.
GG: You are more like a third person who looks at the story rather than directly facing the situation.
AR: You asked me what my concern is? Well, I am concerned when some people say: "You are a Thai artist, why do you do this?"
Golden Teardrop (2013), installation view.
GG: That's because they look at you in the traditional way. Your approach is to relate things to others. It's like sharing your historical experiences with the world, which I think is much more sophisticated.
AR: I try to get rid of the hatred, because when I was young, I was full of hate. This hatred has disappeared and what I have found now is only humanity and unknown causes. Everything is mixed together.
There is one scene in the video where the person making golden teardrop shapes turns to me and speaks in the Isaan dialect about Manchester United. There is undirected conversation; there is this drive and there is the reason why we get out of bed.
As I mentioned, the story is of a Japanese lady making golden teardrops interwoven with the story of Marco Polo. It is visually beautiful; the production team was very good. Both stories will be overlaid like memories.
Return to Index
Arin Rungjang: Golden Teardrop
Hito Steyerl: Pt I
DOCUMENTING VOID
By Andrew Maerkle and Akira Rachi
Adornos's Grey (2012), detail, single-channel HD-video projection, 14 min 20 sec, four angled screens, wall plot, photographs. All images: Courtesy Hito Steyerl.
ART iT: You have a background in filmmaking, philosophy and criticism, and now your work and ideas are circulating more and more in a contemporary art context. What is your conception of art as a space for participation, and how do you approach it in your own practice?
HS: I'd like to approach this from a personal angle, because I'm trained as a filmmaker, but I found like many other people in other professions that opportunities and options in this field were closing down because of the restructuring of the economy of media and various other reasons. After a while it became clear that many of those people who couldn't work in the way they wanted in their own professions somehow all ended up working in the art field, because this turned out to be one of the few areas of, say, creative labor that encouraged experimentation and the imagination running wild to a certain extent. I met dancers and architects and other filmmakers and people from all sorts of other professions - writers, philosophers, poets - who somehow ended up convening within the sphere of contemporary art.
For me, this is not the only feature of what contemporary art is today; of course there are many other aspects including the art market and whole economies which run in parallel to or are fueled by contemporary art. But one of the most interesting aspects, I think, is that it manages to bring together so many people working in different fields, and also across wide geographical distances.
ART iT: Yet in your writings you also take an ambivalent or critical stance on art as well.
HS: In the art field we can study the contradictions of globalization. On the one hand art has an extremely enabling and liberating ability: it brings together people and events and objects which previously didn't communicate. On the other hand, it also operates on the premise of global capitalism by unifying markets, creating currencies - also jargons - and art works which are able to universally travel on the back of money, unpaid labour and wholesale exploitation. This unifies global art markets, and is what creates them in the first place. This also globalizes conditions of artistic occupation to a certain extent, rendering the conditions of freelancers and interns more prevalent all over. The different artworlds we have now, in opposition to, for example, 30 years ago, are wildly multi-polar, no longer centered in New York or wherever. There are many centers to it now, which makes it much more interesting but also much more complicated to navigate – also in terms of the conditions of occupation. It's much more transparent how contemporary art relies implicitly or explicitly upon unpaid, under-qualified, often migrant labor, as in the case of contemporary art development and construction projects.
Top: November (2004), DVD, approx 25 min. Bottom: Installation view.
ART iT: Within your own practice has more engagement in the art field changed your approach?
HS: Of course. It's absolutely changed my whole practice, my whole approach. I doubt that anyone can stay the same in this kind of dynamic. It changes everyone. Very simply, in terms of practice, I'm trained for a practice which is shown in a cinema, with one screen and fixed benches and a projector, where people enter and then leave after 90 minutes once the film is done. The setting is very clear, whereas in the art field the setting is more flexible and tricky and multiple. This necessarily changes the kinds of works you make, because you want to speak to the audience. You cannot pretend that this is a cinema audience anymore. Similarly the whole conditions of production have changed into an informal, fast paced, affective mess.
ART iT: Films like November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007) have a distinctly textual quality to them. You're drawing footage from multiple sources and overlaying your own reflections onto these sources. Is this a natural way to build upon your background in philosophy? For example, in November there's a telescoping of a historical moment with national and international dynamics and a very personal story of yourself and your friend, with each aspect feeding into the other.
HS: Both November and Lovely Andrea issue from the tradition of the "essay film," which starts maybe in the late 1950s, becomes quite strong in the 1970s and then gradually phases out until recently undergoing a revival. The two films are very strongly based on that tradition, whereas in other works there are more elements in play which would not be possible in a cinema setting - installation components and all of that.
To be honest I don't know what philosophy is. Whenever I encounter it in an academic form, it feels very rigid and conservative. Regardless of its ideas, its form is hopelessly stuck in the 19th century. A formal reflection on how most academic philosophy is written, staged and performed would yield devastating results. It's usually terribly authoritarian and excessively boring. Non-standard ways of thinking are changing this, and the essay traditionally belongs to them.
ART iT: One thought that struck me from November is the idea of a post-international world. Going back to the early 20th century, when Modern art was being disseminated it was very much in the spirit of the international, and of course now it's much more ambivalent. Even if it was rooted in a tradition of European philosophy, the international had a surprisingly open aspect to it as well. For example, the artist Tomoyoshi Murayama arrived in Berlin in January 1922 and two months later he was included in the Grosse futuristisch Ausstellung, which is somewhat hard to imagine happening even in the current globalized art scene.
HS: I think we are not living in a completely post-international world. I think the contemporary art world is a globalizing process. Of course, it's based on a quite different premise than the Modernist internationalism, which also had a sort of ethics to it, with a clear setting and a clear goal, which now does not exist. There's a vague jargon of communication and network and mobility and clear financial motives, but its international dimension doesn't go too much beyond that.
But other than that I still think that it's fairly open - much more so than other worlds, let's say. I'm always surprised at the diversity of the people that I encounter, and it reminds me, really - to give a historical precedent - of equally ambivalent processes which took place in the 19th century, described by Hannah Arendt as the movements of "the mob." There was no land, and the mob had to move out into the world, so they joined armies, invaded countries and ended up as vagrants moving around the world in what were often awful situations of domination, imperialism and exploitation. This mob directly collaborated with national elites in furthering imperialism and colonialism. Today I tend to think I am part of a similar mob being swept around the globe - whether I like it or not and whether I want to or not - within a game which is now much more complicated because many people are trying to invade, dazzle, out-spectacle and colonize each other.
Both: Lovely Andrea (2007), DVD, approx 30 min.
ART iT: One of the themes that you address in your writing that deeply resonates with the current situation is the idea of the intern and the strikeworker, figures who reflect questions about how people in the art world relate to their own labor and how the art world appropriates individual labor. How did this theme develop?
HS: The title of my book of essays, The Wretched of the Screen, is a pun on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which has a very strong section on the lumpenproletariat, who are not organized, who are just poor and trying to survive no matter what. Fanon tries to understand this situation – how he manages is a different debate. But I think that the situation of not belonging to a class, being the refuse of all classes so to speak, as Arendt aptly described the mob, also speaks to the condition of the people who are not even laborers in the current art economy. I don't even know what to call them. Something like voluntary serfs, maybe? We are not even talking about indentured labor, etc, in other parts of the global economy.
Of course young people are drafted into this debt economy first: they need to get deep into debt to get a degree, invest into themselves, but also into other people's institutions, in order to maybe see rewards later. This is very similar to the whole ideology of investment we saw during the recent bubble years. You buy into a fund, because at a certain point in time you're promised a return, but you don't get it. The funds collapsed. It's a Ponzi scheme. The hope that motivates everyone is to one day get noticed and then join the ranks of those who are paid for their labor.
This is basically how large parts of the art economy work and this tall new building in London, The Shard, beautifully captures the idea that the symbol of this kind of economy is precisely a pyramid: because it's a pyramid game. But you'll never make it to the condo on top. Instead, you are lucky to not be stuck in the elevator when the whole thing comes crashing down.
ART iT: In that sense your writing about labor connects to your writing about images and representation, or documentality. There's an unstated existential connection that labor shares with the idea of the image itself.
HS: The image exists in a similar hierarchy, and also the mobility of the image and its possibility to move or not is held back by copyright, monopoly, all sorts of copy inhibitions, so that only some images are able to travel freely, and also only under certain conditions.
So you have a very similar hierarchy in the realm of images. Rich ones inhabiting the top of the shard, and poor ones which are barely visible and do the labor of advertizing Viagra or gratuitously compressing former masterpieces of cinema alike. And most images are completely invisible today, just as a huge part of labor is completely invisible and unpaid today. They're completely under the radar of representation. There are so many images which first of all almost nobody sees, even if someone makes them and uploads them to YouTube, but also there are completely automated images like webcams - nobody ever sees the images they produce, even though they're being streamed somewhere. It's like spam. Spam is made by a bot and then gets caught by a spam filter, without any participation of humans.
There's this huge dark matter of imagery which no one ever sees, and there's this huge dark matter of labor which no one ever acknowledges. Of course people exploit it, take advantage of it, but it's not being recognized. On the level of representation it doesn't matter.
ART iT: How does this apply to the collective image of art itself? Many people join the art world understanding that initially they won't be paid for their labor or that it will be difficult to survive, but perhaps we could say they are chasing the image of art.
HS: I think this is hugely changing nowadays. I think probably in the 19th century or even until quite recently people were chasing the ideal of the genius who has a hard time painting somewhere, nobody buys the paintings and so on. But I think now the prototype of artist, at least from what I see with my students, has shifted into some potentially successful entrepreneur-style figure, someone who is able to have almost a sort of empire, a plan, and sustain it by huge amounts of intern labor and all of that. But this is interesting because it has art historical precedents in the studios of the masters. Titian, Rembrandt, you name it - they were all working with the same system, like outsourcing the backgrounds to the intern. This is how it's being done more and more today.
ART iT: The genius is a distortion of history.
HS: Yes, it's so tied into the idea of the 19th-century Western subject - the bourgeois middle-class individual - and this is the route of excellence for this particular subject. If that idea is unsettled, then the idea of the genius will also be.
Strike (2010), HDV, 28 sec.
ART iT: So what position should a strikeworker take?
HS: Well, strike, I guess.
But all the traditional tools of both labor activism and art activism have to be rethought under contemporary conditions. If you go on strike, nobody will notice, so the strike has to take on another dimension.
On the other hand, there are so many things that still can be done. Also, many people simply stop caring. They do not want to join this world anymore. They withdraw, building their own institutions, their own frames of reference and circuits of distribution.
So if you find a sword, strike. If you find two swords, strike. If you manage to handle three, congratulations!
Coming soon:
Part II
Hito Steyerl: Documenting Void
By Andrew Maerkle and Akira Rachi
Adornos's Grey (2012), detail, single-channel HD-video projection, 14 min 20 sec, four angled screens, wall plot, photographs. All images: Courtesy Hito Steyerl.
ART iT: You have a background in filmmaking, philosophy and criticism, and now your work and ideas are circulating more and more in a contemporary art context. What is your conception of art as a space for participation, and how do you approach it in your own practice?
HS: I'd like to approach this from a personal angle, because I'm trained as a filmmaker, but I found like many other people in other professions that opportunities and options in this field were closing down because of the restructuring of the economy of media and various other reasons. After a while it became clear that many of those people who couldn't work in the way they wanted in their own professions somehow all ended up working in the art field, because this turned out to be one of the few areas of, say, creative labor that encouraged experimentation and the imagination running wild to a certain extent. I met dancers and architects and other filmmakers and people from all sorts of other professions - writers, philosophers, poets - who somehow ended up convening within the sphere of contemporary art.
For me, this is not the only feature of what contemporary art is today; of course there are many other aspects including the art market and whole economies which run in parallel to or are fueled by contemporary art. But one of the most interesting aspects, I think, is that it manages to bring together so many people working in different fields, and also across wide geographical distances.
ART iT: Yet in your writings you also take an ambivalent or critical stance on art as well.
HS: In the art field we can study the contradictions of globalization. On the one hand art has an extremely enabling and liberating ability: it brings together people and events and objects which previously didn't communicate. On the other hand, it also operates on the premise of global capitalism by unifying markets, creating currencies - also jargons - and art works which are able to universally travel on the back of money, unpaid labour and wholesale exploitation. This unifies global art markets, and is what creates them in the first place. This also globalizes conditions of artistic occupation to a certain extent, rendering the conditions of freelancers and interns more prevalent all over. The different artworlds we have now, in opposition to, for example, 30 years ago, are wildly multi-polar, no longer centered in New York or wherever. There are many centers to it now, which makes it much more interesting but also much more complicated to navigate – also in terms of the conditions of occupation. It's much more transparent how contemporary art relies implicitly or explicitly upon unpaid, under-qualified, often migrant labor, as in the case of contemporary art development and construction projects.
Top: November (2004), DVD, approx 25 min. Bottom: Installation view.
ART iT: Within your own practice has more engagement in the art field changed your approach?
HS: Of course. It's absolutely changed my whole practice, my whole approach. I doubt that anyone can stay the same in this kind of dynamic. It changes everyone. Very simply, in terms of practice, I'm trained for a practice which is shown in a cinema, with one screen and fixed benches and a projector, where people enter and then leave after 90 minutes once the film is done. The setting is very clear, whereas in the art field the setting is more flexible and tricky and multiple. This necessarily changes the kinds of works you make, because you want to speak to the audience. You cannot pretend that this is a cinema audience anymore. Similarly the whole conditions of production have changed into an informal, fast paced, affective mess.
ART iT: Films like November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007) have a distinctly textual quality to them. You're drawing footage from multiple sources and overlaying your own reflections onto these sources. Is this a natural way to build upon your background in philosophy? For example, in November there's a telescoping of a historical moment with national and international dynamics and a very personal story of yourself and your friend, with each aspect feeding into the other.
HS: Both November and Lovely Andrea issue from the tradition of the "essay film," which starts maybe in the late 1950s, becomes quite strong in the 1970s and then gradually phases out until recently undergoing a revival. The two films are very strongly based on that tradition, whereas in other works there are more elements in play which would not be possible in a cinema setting - installation components and all of that.
To be honest I don't know what philosophy is. Whenever I encounter it in an academic form, it feels very rigid and conservative. Regardless of its ideas, its form is hopelessly stuck in the 19th century. A formal reflection on how most academic philosophy is written, staged and performed would yield devastating results. It's usually terribly authoritarian and excessively boring. Non-standard ways of thinking are changing this, and the essay traditionally belongs to them.
ART iT: One thought that struck me from November is the idea of a post-international world. Going back to the early 20th century, when Modern art was being disseminated it was very much in the spirit of the international, and of course now it's much more ambivalent. Even if it was rooted in a tradition of European philosophy, the international had a surprisingly open aspect to it as well. For example, the artist Tomoyoshi Murayama arrived in Berlin in January 1922 and two months later he was included in the Grosse futuristisch Ausstellung, which is somewhat hard to imagine happening even in the current globalized art scene.
HS: I think we are not living in a completely post-international world. I think the contemporary art world is a globalizing process. Of course, it's based on a quite different premise than the Modernist internationalism, which also had a sort of ethics to it, with a clear setting and a clear goal, which now does not exist. There's a vague jargon of communication and network and mobility and clear financial motives, but its international dimension doesn't go too much beyond that.
But other than that I still think that it's fairly open - much more so than other worlds, let's say. I'm always surprised at the diversity of the people that I encounter, and it reminds me, really - to give a historical precedent - of equally ambivalent processes which took place in the 19th century, described by Hannah Arendt as the movements of "the mob." There was no land, and the mob had to move out into the world, so they joined armies, invaded countries and ended up as vagrants moving around the world in what were often awful situations of domination, imperialism and exploitation. This mob directly collaborated with national elites in furthering imperialism and colonialism. Today I tend to think I am part of a similar mob being swept around the globe - whether I like it or not and whether I want to or not - within a game which is now much more complicated because many people are trying to invade, dazzle, out-spectacle and colonize each other.
Both: Lovely Andrea (2007), DVD, approx 30 min.
ART iT: One of the themes that you address in your writing that deeply resonates with the current situation is the idea of the intern and the strikeworker, figures who reflect questions about how people in the art world relate to their own labor and how the art world appropriates individual labor. How did this theme develop?
HS: The title of my book of essays, The Wretched of the Screen, is a pun on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which has a very strong section on the lumpenproletariat, who are not organized, who are just poor and trying to survive no matter what. Fanon tries to understand this situation – how he manages is a different debate. But I think that the situation of not belonging to a class, being the refuse of all classes so to speak, as Arendt aptly described the mob, also speaks to the condition of the people who are not even laborers in the current art economy. I don't even know what to call them. Something like voluntary serfs, maybe? We are not even talking about indentured labor, etc, in other parts of the global economy.
Of course young people are drafted into this debt economy first: they need to get deep into debt to get a degree, invest into themselves, but also into other people's institutions, in order to maybe see rewards later. This is very similar to the whole ideology of investment we saw during the recent bubble years. You buy into a fund, because at a certain point in time you're promised a return, but you don't get it. The funds collapsed. It's a Ponzi scheme. The hope that motivates everyone is to one day get noticed and then join the ranks of those who are paid for their labor.
This is basically how large parts of the art economy work and this tall new building in London, The Shard, beautifully captures the idea that the symbol of this kind of economy is precisely a pyramid: because it's a pyramid game. But you'll never make it to the condo on top. Instead, you are lucky to not be stuck in the elevator when the whole thing comes crashing down.
ART iT: In that sense your writing about labor connects to your writing about images and representation, or documentality. There's an unstated existential connection that labor shares with the idea of the image itself.
HS: The image exists in a similar hierarchy, and also the mobility of the image and its possibility to move or not is held back by copyright, monopoly, all sorts of copy inhibitions, so that only some images are able to travel freely, and also only under certain conditions.
So you have a very similar hierarchy in the realm of images. Rich ones inhabiting the top of the shard, and poor ones which are barely visible and do the labor of advertizing Viagra or gratuitously compressing former masterpieces of cinema alike. And most images are completely invisible today, just as a huge part of labor is completely invisible and unpaid today. They're completely under the radar of representation. There are so many images which first of all almost nobody sees, even if someone makes them and uploads them to YouTube, but also there are completely automated images like webcams - nobody ever sees the images they produce, even though they're being streamed somewhere. It's like spam. Spam is made by a bot and then gets caught by a spam filter, without any participation of humans.
There's this huge dark matter of imagery which no one ever sees, and there's this huge dark matter of labor which no one ever acknowledges. Of course people exploit it, take advantage of it, but it's not being recognized. On the level of representation it doesn't matter.
ART iT: How does this apply to the collective image of art itself? Many people join the art world understanding that initially they won't be paid for their labor or that it will be difficult to survive, but perhaps we could say they are chasing the image of art.
HS: I think this is hugely changing nowadays. I think probably in the 19th century or even until quite recently people were chasing the ideal of the genius who has a hard time painting somewhere, nobody buys the paintings and so on. But I think now the prototype of artist, at least from what I see with my students, has shifted into some potentially successful entrepreneur-style figure, someone who is able to have almost a sort of empire, a plan, and sustain it by huge amounts of intern labor and all of that. But this is interesting because it has art historical precedents in the studios of the masters. Titian, Rembrandt, you name it - they were all working with the same system, like outsourcing the backgrounds to the intern. This is how it's being done more and more today.
ART iT: The genius is a distortion of history.
HS: Yes, it's so tied into the idea of the 19th-century Western subject - the bourgeois middle-class individual - and this is the route of excellence for this particular subject. If that idea is unsettled, then the idea of the genius will also be.
Strike (2010), HDV, 28 sec.
ART iT: So what position should a strikeworker take?
HS: Well, strike, I guess.
But all the traditional tools of both labor activism and art activism have to be rethought under contemporary conditions. If you go on strike, nobody will notice, so the strike has to take on another dimension.
On the other hand, there are so many things that still can be done. Also, many people simply stop caring. They do not want to join this world anymore. They withdraw, building their own institutions, their own frames of reference and circuits of distribution.
So if you find a sword, strike. If you find two swords, strike. If you manage to handle three, congratulations!
Coming soon:
Part II
Hito Steyerl: Documenting Void
55th Venice Biennale: Index
THE 55TH VENICE BIENNALE: THE ENCYCLOPEDIC PALACE
Koki Tanaka - "abstract speaking - sharing uncertainty and collective acts," installation view, the Japan Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. Photo Keizo Kioku, courtesy the Japan Foundation.
Features
Hito Steyerl: Documenting Void
Arin Rungjang: Golden Teardop
Simryn Gill: Here Art Grows on Trees (Coming Soon)
Snapshots
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale Part 2
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale Part 3
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale Part 4
National Pavilions - Giardini
National Pavilions - Giardini Part 2
National Pavilions
National Pavilions - Arsenale
The Encyclopedic Palace - Giardini
The Encyclopedic Palace - Giardini Part 2
When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013
When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013 Part 2
Related Content - International Exhibition
Massimiliano Gioni (Artistic Director)
Things Worth Remembering 2010 (Dec 27, 2010)
The 8th Gwangju Biennale: 10,000 Lives (Sep 9, 2010)
Peter Fischli & David Weiss
The Techne of Schadenfreude (Nov 20, 2010)
Shinro Ohtake
An Indexical Survey of Tokyo in the Age of Cinema (Aug 1, 2010)
Danh Vo
A Five-Part Dossier on How Things Live (Mar 1, 2011)
Related Content - National Representations
France - Anri Sala
In and Out of Articulation (Nov 7, 2011)
Georgia - Thea Djordjadze
The Secret Border in Human Closeness (Jun 9, 2012)
Germany - Dayanita Singh
The Always Exceptional Condition of Images (Feb 1, 2012)
Japan - Koki Tanaka
The Center Cannot Hold (Oct 24, 2012)
Korea - Kimsooja
Points of Convergence (Jun 20, 2011)
Spain - Lara Almarcegui
Things Worth Remembering 2012 (Dec 26, 2012)
The 55th Venice Biennale: The Encyclopedic Palace
Koki Tanaka - "abstract speaking - sharing uncertainty and collective acts," installation view, the Japan Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. Photo Keizo Kioku, courtesy the Japan Foundation.
Features
Hito Steyerl: Documenting Void
Arin Rungjang: Golden Teardop
Simryn Gill: Here Art Grows on Trees (Coming Soon)
Snapshots
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale Part 2
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale Part 3
The Encyclopedic Palace - Arsenale Part 4
National Pavilions - Giardini
National Pavilions - Giardini Part 2
National Pavilions
National Pavilions - Arsenale
The Encyclopedic Palace - Giardini
The Encyclopedic Palace - Giardini Part 2
When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013
When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013 Part 2
Related Content - International Exhibition
Massimiliano Gioni (Artistic Director)
Things Worth Remembering 2010 (Dec 27, 2010)
The 8th Gwangju Biennale: 10,000 Lives (Sep 9, 2010)
Peter Fischli & David Weiss
The Techne of Schadenfreude (Nov 20, 2010)
Shinro Ohtake
An Indexical Survey of Tokyo in the Age of Cinema (Aug 1, 2010)
Danh Vo
A Five-Part Dossier on How Things Live (Mar 1, 2011)
Related Content - National Representations
France - Anri Sala
In and Out of Articulation (Nov 7, 2011)
Georgia - Thea Djordjadze
The Secret Border in Human Closeness (Jun 9, 2012)
Germany - Dayanita Singh
The Always Exceptional Condition of Images (Feb 1, 2012)
Japan - Koki Tanaka
The Center Cannot Hold (Oct 24, 2012)
Korea - Kimsooja
Points of Convergence (Jun 20, 2011)
Spain - Lara Almarcegui
Things Worth Remembering 2012 (Dec 26, 2012)
The 55th Venice Biennale: The Encyclopedic Palace
Joan Jonas: Pt V
V.
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2005. Photo Paula Court. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: You mentioned how when you first came to Japan you were impressed with how different the sounds were here. In your own works the use of sound is so important.
JJ: Well, my use of sound was directly influenced by the trip to Japan. I did the Jones Beach Piece right after we got back, and that's directly influenced by the clapping of wood blocks in Noh and Kabuki. In this case the clapping measured the distance between the audience and the performers.
I'm very interested in music and always have been my entire life. Sound is the parallel track that I develop in my work. I produce and edit all my own soundtracks with the help of technical assistants and the composers that I work with. I began using very minimal sounds and then gradually I developed more complex sounds and then began to work with composers. The first mirror performances were silent, except for a poem by David Antin that had been recorded and was played back, but it was just one moment.
In Variations on a Scene (1990), with the composer Alvin Curran, I revisited a lot of ideas from the early outdoor pieces. In that performance I made sounds while Curran played electronic music. For a number of pieces I have asked composers to make structures out of percussive objects, so that they can work with them live during the performance.
ART iT: For Variations on a Scene, was the sensitivity to sound something that shaped the performance across the mise-en-scène?
JJ: There's always a relationship to sound. Often, it influences the performers' movements. Sound is always an important element for structuring the works. Sometimes I start out with a soundtrack and then work backwards from there, as with Upside Down and Backwards (1980). This is another work involving fairy tales that I made after The Juniper Tree. Sound is material just as an image can be.
ART iT: At the beginning we talked about literary references, like Aby Warburg and HD's "Helen in Egypt," and you also made the piece Sweeney Astray (1992) based on Seamus Heaney's translation of the medieval Irish epic of the same name. In such works, how does text structure the rest of the piece?
JJ: With Sweeney Astray and Lines in the Sand, I read the poems over and over again and chose the parts I liked the best for making a script. But the script only consisted of the text. I then had to develop all the parts in relation to the text. The text is the first layer.
I approach each work in a slightly different way. There's often a device; for Sweeney Astray I constructed a glass table, six feet off the ground for the actor to stand and perform on. It represented the tree for the King who is turned into a bird. Later, I worked on this piece with a theater group in Amsterdam, but before that I developed it with an East-German actor at Kunst-Werke in Berlin. It was just when this space was starting with Klaus Biesenbach, who gave me a wonderful space on the courtyard there for a month or so. I had a table made of wood with glass, and it was lucky we didn't have a terrible accident because it was rather fragile. Later the frame was built with steel, but that was where I worked out the part with the glass. So in all the works I go back and forth between the structure of the visual devices and the text. It's an interaction.
ART iT: Obviously, when you sit down and read a poem or a novel you're immersed in the text, but all kinds of associations or even distractions come to mind as you read. Would you say your works are also a way to bring that sense of intersection through reading to life?
JJ: I don't think of it that way, but yes, that's what happens, basically. That's what Reading Dante is about. That was a scary piece to do because of how important Dante is to the Italians, and I was really nervous about presenting it in Italy. But I wanted it to be about that process of reading and free association. It was directly involved with what you were just describing. Of course, I'd worked that way from the very beginning without really calling it that or thinking of it exactly in that way.
Top: Lines in the Sand, installation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2003-04. Photo David Allison. Bottom: Reanimation, installation view, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2013.
ART iT: Returning to the idea of structure, I think it was with your retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that you had to consciously look at the old performances and turn them into installations. I assume that this was a very conscious switch in your practice.
JJ: After the Stedelijk show I simply began to think about my work in that way. It was a big shift in focus from just performances to this idea of having the works exist without me performing live. I found it very interesting to start working with that slightly different problem of space. Now it's something I continuously think about. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things began as a performance, but Lines in the Sand began as an installation and became a performance, which allowed the installation to develop further.
ART iT: Currently, many younger artists work with dramatic installations that can also be spaces for performances, or performances that generate installations. How has it been for you to see this develop?
JJ: Very interesting. I'm interested in other people's work and go to see exhibitions, but I don't have time to see that much. I have to stay focused. However, I do see as many of the big international group shows as possible. It’s important for me to be aware of what younger people are thinking about. And I follow the work of the young artists I have known in various art academies. This is a pleasure.
ART iT: You were trained as a sculptor. Do you think of what you do as a sculptural, additive process?
JJ: Yes, in a way I do. Since I started out as a sculptor, right at that point and up until now, I bring ideas of sculpture and space and objects into the performances and installations. So ultimately I do think about it, especially in relation to my props. For example, for Reanimation I made an object with threads of crystals suspended over a video projection. This interests me now.
I | II | III | IV
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2005. Photo Paula Court. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: You mentioned how when you first came to Japan you were impressed with how different the sounds were here. In your own works the use of sound is so important.
JJ: Well, my use of sound was directly influenced by the trip to Japan. I did the Jones Beach Piece right after we got back, and that's directly influenced by the clapping of wood blocks in Noh and Kabuki. In this case the clapping measured the distance between the audience and the performers.
I'm very interested in music and always have been my entire life. Sound is the parallel track that I develop in my work. I produce and edit all my own soundtracks with the help of technical assistants and the composers that I work with. I began using very minimal sounds and then gradually I developed more complex sounds and then began to work with composers. The first mirror performances were silent, except for a poem by David Antin that had been recorded and was played back, but it was just one moment.
In Variations on a Scene (1990), with the composer Alvin Curran, I revisited a lot of ideas from the early outdoor pieces. In that performance I made sounds while Curran played electronic music. For a number of pieces I have asked composers to make structures out of percussive objects, so that they can work with them live during the performance.
ART iT: For Variations on a Scene, was the sensitivity to sound something that shaped the performance across the mise-en-scène?
JJ: There's always a relationship to sound. Often, it influences the performers' movements. Sound is always an important element for structuring the works. Sometimes I start out with a soundtrack and then work backwards from there, as with Upside Down and Backwards (1980). This is another work involving fairy tales that I made after The Juniper Tree. Sound is material just as an image can be.
ART iT: At the beginning we talked about literary references, like Aby Warburg and HD's "Helen in Egypt," and you also made the piece Sweeney Astray (1992) based on Seamus Heaney's translation of the medieval Irish epic of the same name. In such works, how does text structure the rest of the piece?
JJ: With Sweeney Astray and Lines in the Sand, I read the poems over and over again and chose the parts I liked the best for making a script. But the script only consisted of the text. I then had to develop all the parts in relation to the text. The text is the first layer.
I approach each work in a slightly different way. There's often a device; for Sweeney Astray I constructed a glass table, six feet off the ground for the actor to stand and perform on. It represented the tree for the King who is turned into a bird. Later, I worked on this piece with a theater group in Amsterdam, but before that I developed it with an East-German actor at Kunst-Werke in Berlin. It was just when this space was starting with Klaus Biesenbach, who gave me a wonderful space on the courtyard there for a month or so. I had a table made of wood with glass, and it was lucky we didn't have a terrible accident because it was rather fragile. Later the frame was built with steel, but that was where I worked out the part with the glass. So in all the works I go back and forth between the structure of the visual devices and the text. It's an interaction.
ART iT: Obviously, when you sit down and read a poem or a novel you're immersed in the text, but all kinds of associations or even distractions come to mind as you read. Would you say your works are also a way to bring that sense of intersection through reading to life?
JJ: I don't think of it that way, but yes, that's what happens, basically. That's what Reading Dante is about. That was a scary piece to do because of how important Dante is to the Italians, and I was really nervous about presenting it in Italy. But I wanted it to be about that process of reading and free association. It was directly involved with what you were just describing. Of course, I'd worked that way from the very beginning without really calling it that or thinking of it exactly in that way.
Top: Lines in the Sand, installation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2003-04. Photo David Allison. Bottom: Reanimation, installation view, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2013.
ART iT: Returning to the idea of structure, I think it was with your retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that you had to consciously look at the old performances and turn them into installations. I assume that this was a very conscious switch in your practice.
JJ: After the Stedelijk show I simply began to think about my work in that way. It was a big shift in focus from just performances to this idea of having the works exist without me performing live. I found it very interesting to start working with that slightly different problem of space. Now it's something I continuously think about. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things began as a performance, but Lines in the Sand began as an installation and became a performance, which allowed the installation to develop further.
ART iT: Currently, many younger artists work with dramatic installations that can also be spaces for performances, or performances that generate installations. How has it been for you to see this develop?
JJ: Very interesting. I'm interested in other people's work and go to see exhibitions, but I don't have time to see that much. I have to stay focused. However, I do see as many of the big international group shows as possible. It’s important for me to be aware of what younger people are thinking about. And I follow the work of the young artists I have known in various art academies. This is a pleasure.
ART iT: You were trained as a sculptor. Do you think of what you do as a sculptural, additive process?
JJ: Yes, in a way I do. Since I started out as a sculptor, right at that point and up until now, I bring ideas of sculpture and space and objects into the performances and installations. So ultimately I do think about it, especially in relation to my props. For example, for Reanimation I made an object with threads of crystals suspended over a video projection. This interests me now.
I | II | III | IV
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
Joan Jonas: Pt IV
IV.
Reanimation, installation view, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2013. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: Two works which interest me and might even in some way be connected to the current piece, Reanimation, are Jones Beach Piece (1970) and Delay, Delay (1972), for which you expanded the performance or event across an entire landscape, and played with sound delay as well as drawing into the landscape. Do you ever revisit these ideas in your recent pieces?
JJ: I have revisited the idea of working with landscape and distance, but not directly. I include the action or concept of drawing in all my work. I find reasons to draw in relation to the space and content of the work. For Reanimation, I didn't think of drawing in the snow before I went to Norway to record footage for the work. It's just that all of a sudden I thought, I have to draw in the snow. That's how it happened.
But I do look at my old work and think, how can I bring those ideas back? I have what I consider a vocabulary that migrates.
ART iT: With Delay, Delay in Rome, you used the motion of the Tiber as a device for movement in the performance itself. That's radical. We look at rivers all the time in the urban landscape and are not really conscious that they're moving and that our actions are intrinsically connected to that movement.
JJ: Yes, I work with what is at hand; it was an experiment. I put the rope in the river with the board on it, and I thought these six men could drag it out, but they couldn't do it for the whole performance. So that became a constant throughout the performance, them trying to drag that board out.
ART iT: What would have happened if they had been able to get the board out?
JJ: Nothing. It would have just happened. I didn't have any plan, but I liked the image of the board on the rope in the water throughout the performance.
ART iT: In your recent pieces going between performance and video do you also maintain space for that kind of contingency or accident?
JJ: I work in the same way that I have always worked. I begin each piece with a collection of materials and ideas. I allow accidents. I think first you have the structure and the subject matter, and then you program your brain to be involved in that process. In that way ideas come to you. For instance, when I was working on Mirage (1976/2005), I was walking and saw a game of hopscotch in the street - this is a common sight, but in that situation at that moment, I thought, that's perfect, and I incorporated it into the work. I allow that to happen.
ART iT: The interesting thing about Noh theatre is that the performers don't really rehearse together. They're all highly trained, but as an ensemble they might only meet once before the actual performance.
JJ: That's amazing, I didn't know that. I do rehearse. For me it doesn't work to fully improvise in live performances. I have it totally planned out, so that 99 percent of the time the only thing that varies is that I might take a little longer to get across the stage or move this before that - very minor differences - but everything is choreographed. It has a lot to do with my idea of movement, that I move in a certain way, cross the room in a certain way, pick up something - I try to do it the same way every time, because it has to do with timing, economy of movement, and a sense that the continuum of movement can be a kind of dance.
ART iT: In the 1960s you did workshops with Trisha Brown and other choreographers. Can you explain more about what these workshops entailed?
JJ: In moving toward performance I had little prior experience, so during this transition from sculpture and more traditional visual arts I attended workshops with dancers. Trisha Brown's workshop provided a situation in which one could experiment and present with the other participants. We were not working on Trisha's pieces at all. It was a very open situation of improvisation. She never commented on our work, but we discussed it among ourselves. In workshops with Yvonne Rainer, we would sometimes perform simple actions like running in her presentations. I tried to learn Trio A, which was interesting, but I never performed it. I never performed with any of those people, except Deborah Hay, once at the Whitney.
Top: Lines in the Sand, performance, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photo Werner Maschmann. Bottom: Mirage, film still, 1976. Photo Babette Mangolte.
ART iT: Simply in having bought the Portapak there, your trip to Japan in 1970 was a big turning point for your career. It's also an interesting moment in Japanese history because there was the Osaka Expo and the Tokyo Biennale, and my sense is that this was a point when there was great confidence in the Japanese art scene that a real dialogue was happening with other parts of the world, and it was also the moment when the group of artists who came to be known as Mono-ha were first being recognized. Did you have much interaction with Japanese artists or curators at that time?
JJ: I knew about the Portapak before I went, but I bought it there, and then, because I really wanted to get away from the aesthetic of minimalism and develop my own language, seeing the Noh drama, which is a kind of dance-visual theatre, was very encouraging and inspiring.
But I didn't meet many Japanese artists, and only learned about Mono-ha recently. I was with Richard Serra, and after the Tokyo Biennale opened we went to Kyoto and Nara and stayed there.
ART iT: So the encounter with Noh was really the big thing.
JJ: Yes. Also, just being in Japan. The minute I arrived I remember the sounds were different. All cities were emptier and quieter than they are now, but Tokyo in particular. I remember hearing the sounds and thinking it was so different. Everything was so different. And I'd never been to Asia, of course, so the whole thing was completely fascinating. But I was aware that the contact American artists had with Japanese artists in the 1960s had a strong impact on what was going on in New York.
I | II | III | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
Reanimation, installation view, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2013. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: Two works which interest me and might even in some way be connected to the current piece, Reanimation, are Jones Beach Piece (1970) and Delay, Delay (1972), for which you expanded the performance or event across an entire landscape, and played with sound delay as well as drawing into the landscape. Do you ever revisit these ideas in your recent pieces?
JJ: I have revisited the idea of working with landscape and distance, but not directly. I include the action or concept of drawing in all my work. I find reasons to draw in relation to the space and content of the work. For Reanimation, I didn't think of drawing in the snow before I went to Norway to record footage for the work. It's just that all of a sudden I thought, I have to draw in the snow. That's how it happened.
But I do look at my old work and think, how can I bring those ideas back? I have what I consider a vocabulary that migrates.
ART iT: With Delay, Delay in Rome, you used the motion of the Tiber as a device for movement in the performance itself. That's radical. We look at rivers all the time in the urban landscape and are not really conscious that they're moving and that our actions are intrinsically connected to that movement.
JJ: Yes, I work with what is at hand; it was an experiment. I put the rope in the river with the board on it, and I thought these six men could drag it out, but they couldn't do it for the whole performance. So that became a constant throughout the performance, them trying to drag that board out.
ART iT: What would have happened if they had been able to get the board out?
JJ: Nothing. It would have just happened. I didn't have any plan, but I liked the image of the board on the rope in the water throughout the performance.
ART iT: In your recent pieces going between performance and video do you also maintain space for that kind of contingency or accident?
JJ: I work in the same way that I have always worked. I begin each piece with a collection of materials and ideas. I allow accidents. I think first you have the structure and the subject matter, and then you program your brain to be involved in that process. In that way ideas come to you. For instance, when I was working on Mirage (1976/2005), I was walking and saw a game of hopscotch in the street - this is a common sight, but in that situation at that moment, I thought, that's perfect, and I incorporated it into the work. I allow that to happen.
ART iT: The interesting thing about Noh theatre is that the performers don't really rehearse together. They're all highly trained, but as an ensemble they might only meet once before the actual performance.
JJ: That's amazing, I didn't know that. I do rehearse. For me it doesn't work to fully improvise in live performances. I have it totally planned out, so that 99 percent of the time the only thing that varies is that I might take a little longer to get across the stage or move this before that - very minor differences - but everything is choreographed. It has a lot to do with my idea of movement, that I move in a certain way, cross the room in a certain way, pick up something - I try to do it the same way every time, because it has to do with timing, economy of movement, and a sense that the continuum of movement can be a kind of dance.
ART iT: In the 1960s you did workshops with Trisha Brown and other choreographers. Can you explain more about what these workshops entailed?
JJ: In moving toward performance I had little prior experience, so during this transition from sculpture and more traditional visual arts I attended workshops with dancers. Trisha Brown's workshop provided a situation in which one could experiment and present with the other participants. We were not working on Trisha's pieces at all. It was a very open situation of improvisation. She never commented on our work, but we discussed it among ourselves. In workshops with Yvonne Rainer, we would sometimes perform simple actions like running in her presentations. I tried to learn Trio A, which was interesting, but I never performed it. I never performed with any of those people, except Deborah Hay, once at the Whitney.
Top: Lines in the Sand, performance, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photo Werner Maschmann. Bottom: Mirage, film still, 1976. Photo Babette Mangolte.
ART iT: Simply in having bought the Portapak there, your trip to Japan in 1970 was a big turning point for your career. It's also an interesting moment in Japanese history because there was the Osaka Expo and the Tokyo Biennale, and my sense is that this was a point when there was great confidence in the Japanese art scene that a real dialogue was happening with other parts of the world, and it was also the moment when the group of artists who came to be known as Mono-ha were first being recognized. Did you have much interaction with Japanese artists or curators at that time?
JJ: I knew about the Portapak before I went, but I bought it there, and then, because I really wanted to get away from the aesthetic of minimalism and develop my own language, seeing the Noh drama, which is a kind of dance-visual theatre, was very encouraging and inspiring.
But I didn't meet many Japanese artists, and only learned about Mono-ha recently. I was with Richard Serra, and after the Tokyo Biennale opened we went to Kyoto and Nara and stayed there.
ART iT: So the encounter with Noh was really the big thing.
JJ: Yes. Also, just being in Japan. The minute I arrived I remember the sounds were different. All cities were emptier and quieter than they are now, but Tokyo in particular. I remember hearing the sounds and thinking it was so different. Everything was so different. And I'd never been to Asia, of course, so the whole thing was completely fascinating. But I was aware that the contact American artists had with Japanese artists in the 1960s had a strong impact on what was going on in New York.
I | II | III | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
Joan Jonas: Pt III
III
Volcano Saga, photograph, Iceland, 1985. Photo Joan Jonas. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: You mention how in dealing with structure and form and the medium of video, your early performances allowed the audience to see several different realities at once. For me, that's one aspect that connects the older works to the later narrative projects.
JJ: Definitely. I'm more or less working in the same way, it's just that I'm older. In the 1970s I started working with fairytales and found that in representing these stories, there was a similar abstraction to the previous work in which there were hidden myths. Later, I became interested in these big, epic pieces, and I spent a good part of the 1980s exploring how to work with a narrative. My work has been an exploration of how to tell a story through the layering of image and text.
ART iT: You hit upon a unique way to do this, by pulling apart the story into fragmented parts linked together by a bit of text as an intertitle or a voiceover that orients the viewer in a general direction.
JJ: I really chose to work in a more poetic way and not in a Hollywood or filmic way. I'm still interested in the idea of making a narrative film, with a story told in a detailed way, but so far in my kind of work, I limit how much text I use to tell the story because the work is visual. In The Juniper Tree (1976), I used almost the entire story, but later on I started to edit stories and text and experiment with how I could rearrange them.
ART iT: Was Volcano Saga (1985) an important leap in that sense?
JJ: Yes it was. But this is one of two pieces that I consider problematic, Double Lunar Dogs (1984) and Volcano Saga. People liked Volcano Saga, but in both of these pieces there is perhaps too much fragmentation. I was experimenting with how to integrate my performances with sections shot in the studio. These were works made for television. I think they're interesting because they were made in the 1980s, when artists suddenly had access to TV studios. We got big grants, so we could do things that we couldn't do before. You had to work after-hours at night with an editor, but you could really experiment with special effects, so it was very different from the 1970s. I was exploring that situation.
Volcano Saga has different levels. It includes elements of the performance and footage of Iceland and combines these in the studio with actors. These two pieces are the first time I worked with professional actors. This could be the strength of these two works.
Top: Volcano Saga, installation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2003-04. Photo Ari Hiroshige. Bottom: Volcano Saga, performance, The Performing Garage, New York, 1985/87. Photo Gabor Szitanyi.
ART iT: Yet from the viewer's side, there's a very stimulating sensation of all these different media and sources intersecting in the site of the installation. When you're working on a piece and putting it together, do you imagine a space where all these things cohere?
JJ: Sometimes artists are very critical of their own work. I'm always critical. I think it's the way that you move on to the next piece. When I'm working on a piece I'm inside the piece and figuring out how to make it work from the inside as well as looking at it from the outside, taking the position of the audience.
Now, because of digital technology you can do everything at home. In the 1970s I had to have it all planned out so that it could be edited in a studio in one or several nights. Now I spend weeks editing my work, considering the computer space. I find editing to be one of the more interesting parts of the process. Space has been one of the most important elements I’ve considered in my work from the very beginning. I always work with a specific space in mind. Either the physical space of a stage set I design or a site that I’ve chosen like the inspiring indoor space of Dia:Beacon or the equally inspiring outdoor space of Jones Beach. Parallel to these physical spaces, there is the space of the monitor and the space of the camera, what the camera sees.
ART iT: My impression is that, at the same time, the works spill over into each other, as in the progression from The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things to Reading Dante (2008) and Reanimation (2010-12). For example, the image of the woman, Melancholia, sitting with the dog, makes recurring appearances.
JJ: There is some overlap, yes. I'm interested in some ideas and I extend them because I feel I didn't fully explore them, or I'd like to continue exploring them. The woman with the dog appears in The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things and in Reanimation, although not in Reading Dante.
I made this image of Melancholia for The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things because for many generations of art historians, it is a major focal point. This is certainly true for Warburg. Obviously there are many levels of interpretation; I am interested in how an image or a concept is altered by placing it in various contexts: in this case, my different works. Another reason for my inclusion of Melancholia, was to show a certain sadness in relation to the natural world. My work often includes quotes from earlier work. My recent piece Reanimation is titled after a chapter in the Halldór Laxness book, Under the Glacier. There's a piece I made in 1973 with people swimming in a pool that hardly ever gets shown. I integrated it into this piece because as soon as one considers the glacier, the concept of melting ice also has to be considered. I was interested in going back into my work to find that watery world. I liked the way it worked in the context of this glacial melting. I'm interested in how you can alter the meaning of something by using it in a different way. This is also reanimation.
I | II | IV | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
Volcano Saga, photograph, Iceland, 1985. Photo Joan Jonas. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: You mention how in dealing with structure and form and the medium of video, your early performances allowed the audience to see several different realities at once. For me, that's one aspect that connects the older works to the later narrative projects.
JJ: Definitely. I'm more or less working in the same way, it's just that I'm older. In the 1970s I started working with fairytales and found that in representing these stories, there was a similar abstraction to the previous work in which there were hidden myths. Later, I became interested in these big, epic pieces, and I spent a good part of the 1980s exploring how to work with a narrative. My work has been an exploration of how to tell a story through the layering of image and text.
ART iT: You hit upon a unique way to do this, by pulling apart the story into fragmented parts linked together by a bit of text as an intertitle or a voiceover that orients the viewer in a general direction.
JJ: I really chose to work in a more poetic way and not in a Hollywood or filmic way. I'm still interested in the idea of making a narrative film, with a story told in a detailed way, but so far in my kind of work, I limit how much text I use to tell the story because the work is visual. In The Juniper Tree (1976), I used almost the entire story, but later on I started to edit stories and text and experiment with how I could rearrange them.
ART iT: Was Volcano Saga (1985) an important leap in that sense?
JJ: Yes it was. But this is one of two pieces that I consider problematic, Double Lunar Dogs (1984) and Volcano Saga. People liked Volcano Saga, but in both of these pieces there is perhaps too much fragmentation. I was experimenting with how to integrate my performances with sections shot in the studio. These were works made for television. I think they're interesting because they were made in the 1980s, when artists suddenly had access to TV studios. We got big grants, so we could do things that we couldn't do before. You had to work after-hours at night with an editor, but you could really experiment with special effects, so it was very different from the 1970s. I was exploring that situation.
Volcano Saga has different levels. It includes elements of the performance and footage of Iceland and combines these in the studio with actors. These two pieces are the first time I worked with professional actors. This could be the strength of these two works.
Top: Volcano Saga, installation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2003-04. Photo Ari Hiroshige. Bottom: Volcano Saga, performance, The Performing Garage, New York, 1985/87. Photo Gabor Szitanyi.
ART iT: Yet from the viewer's side, there's a very stimulating sensation of all these different media and sources intersecting in the site of the installation. When you're working on a piece and putting it together, do you imagine a space where all these things cohere?
JJ: Sometimes artists are very critical of their own work. I'm always critical. I think it's the way that you move on to the next piece. When I'm working on a piece I'm inside the piece and figuring out how to make it work from the inside as well as looking at it from the outside, taking the position of the audience.
Now, because of digital technology you can do everything at home. In the 1970s I had to have it all planned out so that it could be edited in a studio in one or several nights. Now I spend weeks editing my work, considering the computer space. I find editing to be one of the more interesting parts of the process. Space has been one of the most important elements I’ve considered in my work from the very beginning. I always work with a specific space in mind. Either the physical space of a stage set I design or a site that I’ve chosen like the inspiring indoor space of Dia:Beacon or the equally inspiring outdoor space of Jones Beach. Parallel to these physical spaces, there is the space of the monitor and the space of the camera, what the camera sees.
ART iT: My impression is that, at the same time, the works spill over into each other, as in the progression from The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things to Reading Dante (2008) and Reanimation (2010-12). For example, the image of the woman, Melancholia, sitting with the dog, makes recurring appearances.
JJ: There is some overlap, yes. I'm interested in some ideas and I extend them because I feel I didn't fully explore them, or I'd like to continue exploring them. The woman with the dog appears in The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things and in Reanimation, although not in Reading Dante.
I made this image of Melancholia for The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things because for many generations of art historians, it is a major focal point. This is certainly true for Warburg. Obviously there are many levels of interpretation; I am interested in how an image or a concept is altered by placing it in various contexts: in this case, my different works. Another reason for my inclusion of Melancholia, was to show a certain sadness in relation to the natural world. My work often includes quotes from earlier work. My recent piece Reanimation is titled after a chapter in the Halldór Laxness book, Under the Glacier. There's a piece I made in 1973 with people swimming in a pool that hardly ever gets shown. I integrated it into this piece because as soon as one considers the glacier, the concept of melting ice also has to be considered. I was interested in going back into my work to find that watery world. I liked the way it worked in the context of this glacial melting. I'm interested in how you can alter the meaning of something by using it in a different way. This is also reanimation.
I | II | IV | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
Nalini Malani: Pt II
II.
Hamletmachine (2000), four-channel video play, three wall projections and one floor projection on a bed of salt, surrounded with mirror reflecting material, sound, 20 minutes. All images: Courtesy Nalini Malani.
ART iT: Clearly national identity, national myth and utopian nationalism, which are all related but different, have variously figured in your works. For example, you have the piece Unity in Diversity (2003), which connects late 19th-century Indian nationalism to ethnic violence in contemporary India. Where utopian nationalism was inspired in part by a spirit of internationalism, now in the age of globalism it's a very interesting moment to revisit that point in this whole discourse.
NM: Yes, I think it's breaking down, which is a good thing. Nationalism had its moment in the bourgeois revolutions that took place in the Western world and in India as well. When India gained its republic in 1947, it was a bourgeois revolution, not a working class revolution.
As touched upon in Unity in Diversity, there was the utopian idea that emerged in India in the 19th century, and which the middle class fought for, that all different religions and cults would live together in harmony. But now we've gone beyond that into globalism and the hegemony of the multinational or transnational entrepreneurship. Most of the cars on the road in India are either Korean or Japanese. It's that level that interests me because that's what we're living in.
In central India there is a Maoist revolution taking place. This is a region inhabited mainly by tribal indigenous people, where the land is extremely fertile and forested, and provides the tribes their livelihood, but now multinationals want to dig there for bauxite to make aluminum, like the company Vedanta Resources. But once they start digging, the land becomes barren. There are also areas in south India where a Japanese company is digging for granite. Once you dig, there's nothing left.
This is where the multinationals are coming in, excavating and taking away for profit. It's not brought back to the people who live there or are ousted from there. People don't know that there's actually a revolution happening, with the tribes coming together to fight the authorities coming in with the companies. And the government of India is hand-in-glove with the companies, because we are going towards liberal capitalism, like in the United States.
On that level, on the micro level, we have to address these problems. I'm an artist and I can only make art, but even doing that, if in some sense a few people understand, then it starts to grow. Every democracy needs work. It is not a given. You have to reach it. There are times when things might veer the other way around, but you have to try to prop it back again. It happens all across the world before you arrive at a steady situation. So parochial ideas need to be challenged. With my audience in India I want to break away from the parochial voice and push it to be more expanded and open.
ART iT: You also frequently draw from literary sources, as in Remembering Toba Tek Singh. Is that part of creating a more expanded voice?
NM: Yes. The author of the original story, "Toba Tek Singh," is Saadat Hasan Manto, an Indian-Pakistani writer known in both countries. He wrote only short stories to do with the business of Partition, and for example my family are victims of Partition - I was born in Karachi. "Toba Tek Singh" is set in a lunatic asylum in Lahore. When the people in the asylum are told that those who are not Muslim, including Christians and Sikhs, will be moved to India, while those who are Muslim will be moved to Pakistan, everyone is in turmoil. There's a Muslim man who climbs a tree and says, I don't want to go anywhere, I want to stay in this tree, because I don't know anything about this Pakistan, I think it's a razorblade factory! Manto makes the whole business of cutting the nation in two ridiculous. When nuclear testing took place in 1998, I decided to evoke that story, and its satire.
These are people who are brilliant writers, and I feel I can partake of that. I also use Heiner Mueller, whose work I admire greatly because he's able to use the classical language of myth as well as graffiti of the street. Medea (1994) was one work based on Mueller's plays, and Hamletmachine another. I have also used Christa Wolf's Cassandra, and reference the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who has been working with the tribal communities who are being dispossessed. The "make her" sound in the In Search of Vanished Blood installation comes from her work.
Top: Unity in Diversity (2003), single-channel video play, in Indian Art Deco room with crimson walls with a projection in golden frame, two lamps and framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru, sound, 7 min. Bottom: Detail.
ART iT: You mention the idea of splitting the nation in two, and have made the work Splitting the Other, and then of course there's "splitting the atom" of nuclear fission. Is this something you intentionally link together?
NM: Splitting the Other has to do with psychological terminology used in theories of projective identification in the works of the post-Freudian analyst Melanie Klein. From her observation of infants, Klein came to the conclusion that a kind of strange, irrational hatred or aggression occurs when you project a part of yourself which is itself aggressive onto another and see it there, not in yourself, and then begin to attack the other. In 2002 in the state of Gujarat in northwestern India, there was an extremely violent attack by fundamental Hindus against minority Muslims. The kind of violation and aggression that occurred was so horrific: men raped pregnant women and then cut the fetuses out. Those images have never left me.
The work was made after that, so in it you see the fetus outside the womb with the umbilical cord, but I join up the brains because when you give birth to a child you also give birth to a brain, to civilization. When a man killed this woman and the fetus, he was actually killing civilization.
That's why I call it Splitting the Other, because there was a majority community who believed a minority community would somehow come back and attack them. You're talking about a ratio of 83 percent to 17 percent. The 17 percent Muslims are going to come back and kill all these Hindus? Isn't this crazy? It's this little community that was made into a demon by the fundamentalists. And of course it also happened with the Jews in Germany. So it's a mental phenomenon that needs to be examined.
In Search of Vanished Blood (2012).
ART iT: In this way you're working with allegory, but it's an interpenetrated allegory that pulls from different stories, or you work with painting, but it's an interpenetrated painting that pulls from multiple sources. It seems you work with parts more than with a whole or unified vision.
NM: I don't like to complete circuits. I think it's good to leave them open, like questions. I don't have the answers anyway. I have some ideas but I don't have all the answers. That's why it's all about communication. That's why in In Search of Vanished Blood I use footage of the person signing American hand language, which is a very efficient system of spelling, unlike in India and Europe where they must use both hands. "Democracy" is being spelled out, and then after that there is the Morse code, which is of course an old way of communicating.
But the voice you hear is a female hysterical voice, because that's the next thing we need to work on, the hysterical voice. Why is it that the hysterical voice is not listened to? What is the hysterical voice saying? It has been denigrated as an illness. Is it really an illness, and not a cry? That's my next project, hysteria.
ART iT: As shown in the video, the hand gestures of the sign language also mimic the iconography of different religious representations, like the mudras of Hinduism and Buddhism or even Christian depictions of Jesus with his hands held up in a gesture of blessing. When something is disconnected from its context, there are all these different ways it can absorb another meaning.
NM: That's also interesting. As much as I can talk about the work, I'd like others to talk about it too, because then we can make a triangular relationship, which is actually how an artwork is completed: the viewer, the artwork and me.
Pt I
Nalini Malani: Multiple Body, Multiple Voices
Hamletmachine (2000), four-channel video play, three wall projections and one floor projection on a bed of salt, surrounded with mirror reflecting material, sound, 20 minutes. All images: Courtesy Nalini Malani.
ART iT: Clearly national identity, national myth and utopian nationalism, which are all related but different, have variously figured in your works. For example, you have the piece Unity in Diversity (2003), which connects late 19th-century Indian nationalism to ethnic violence in contemporary India. Where utopian nationalism was inspired in part by a spirit of internationalism, now in the age of globalism it's a very interesting moment to revisit that point in this whole discourse.
NM: Yes, I think it's breaking down, which is a good thing. Nationalism had its moment in the bourgeois revolutions that took place in the Western world and in India as well. When India gained its republic in 1947, it was a bourgeois revolution, not a working class revolution.
As touched upon in Unity in Diversity, there was the utopian idea that emerged in India in the 19th century, and which the middle class fought for, that all different religions and cults would live together in harmony. But now we've gone beyond that into globalism and the hegemony of the multinational or transnational entrepreneurship. Most of the cars on the road in India are either Korean or Japanese. It's that level that interests me because that's what we're living in.
In central India there is a Maoist revolution taking place. This is a region inhabited mainly by tribal indigenous people, where the land is extremely fertile and forested, and provides the tribes their livelihood, but now multinationals want to dig there for bauxite to make aluminum, like the company Vedanta Resources. But once they start digging, the land becomes barren. There are also areas in south India where a Japanese company is digging for granite. Once you dig, there's nothing left.
This is where the multinationals are coming in, excavating and taking away for profit. It's not brought back to the people who live there or are ousted from there. People don't know that there's actually a revolution happening, with the tribes coming together to fight the authorities coming in with the companies. And the government of India is hand-in-glove with the companies, because we are going towards liberal capitalism, like in the United States.
On that level, on the micro level, we have to address these problems. I'm an artist and I can only make art, but even doing that, if in some sense a few people understand, then it starts to grow. Every democracy needs work. It is not a given. You have to reach it. There are times when things might veer the other way around, but you have to try to prop it back again. It happens all across the world before you arrive at a steady situation. So parochial ideas need to be challenged. With my audience in India I want to break away from the parochial voice and push it to be more expanded and open.
ART iT: You also frequently draw from literary sources, as in Remembering Toba Tek Singh. Is that part of creating a more expanded voice?
NM: Yes. The author of the original story, "Toba Tek Singh," is Saadat Hasan Manto, an Indian-Pakistani writer known in both countries. He wrote only short stories to do with the business of Partition, and for example my family are victims of Partition - I was born in Karachi. "Toba Tek Singh" is set in a lunatic asylum in Lahore. When the people in the asylum are told that those who are not Muslim, including Christians and Sikhs, will be moved to India, while those who are Muslim will be moved to Pakistan, everyone is in turmoil. There's a Muslim man who climbs a tree and says, I don't want to go anywhere, I want to stay in this tree, because I don't know anything about this Pakistan, I think it's a razorblade factory! Manto makes the whole business of cutting the nation in two ridiculous. When nuclear testing took place in 1998, I decided to evoke that story, and its satire.
These are people who are brilliant writers, and I feel I can partake of that. I also use Heiner Mueller, whose work I admire greatly because he's able to use the classical language of myth as well as graffiti of the street. Medea (1994) was one work based on Mueller's plays, and Hamletmachine another. I have also used Christa Wolf's Cassandra, and reference the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who has been working with the tribal communities who are being dispossessed. The "make her" sound in the In Search of Vanished Blood installation comes from her work.
Top: Unity in Diversity (2003), single-channel video play, in Indian Art Deco room with crimson walls with a projection in golden frame, two lamps and framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru, sound, 7 min. Bottom: Detail.
ART iT: You mention the idea of splitting the nation in two, and have made the work Splitting the Other, and then of course there's "splitting the atom" of nuclear fission. Is this something you intentionally link together?
NM: Splitting the Other has to do with psychological terminology used in theories of projective identification in the works of the post-Freudian analyst Melanie Klein. From her observation of infants, Klein came to the conclusion that a kind of strange, irrational hatred or aggression occurs when you project a part of yourself which is itself aggressive onto another and see it there, not in yourself, and then begin to attack the other. In 2002 in the state of Gujarat in northwestern India, there was an extremely violent attack by fundamental Hindus against minority Muslims. The kind of violation and aggression that occurred was so horrific: men raped pregnant women and then cut the fetuses out. Those images have never left me.
The work was made after that, so in it you see the fetus outside the womb with the umbilical cord, but I join up the brains because when you give birth to a child you also give birth to a brain, to civilization. When a man killed this woman and the fetus, he was actually killing civilization.
That's why I call it Splitting the Other, because there was a majority community who believed a minority community would somehow come back and attack them. You're talking about a ratio of 83 percent to 17 percent. The 17 percent Muslims are going to come back and kill all these Hindus? Isn't this crazy? It's this little community that was made into a demon by the fundamentalists. And of course it also happened with the Jews in Germany. So it's a mental phenomenon that needs to be examined.
In Search of Vanished Blood (2012).
ART iT: In this way you're working with allegory, but it's an interpenetrated allegory that pulls from different stories, or you work with painting, but it's an interpenetrated painting that pulls from multiple sources. It seems you work with parts more than with a whole or unified vision.
NM: I don't like to complete circuits. I think it's good to leave them open, like questions. I don't have the answers anyway. I have some ideas but I don't have all the answers. That's why it's all about communication. That's why in In Search of Vanished Blood I use footage of the person signing American hand language, which is a very efficient system of spelling, unlike in India and Europe where they must use both hands. "Democracy" is being spelled out, and then after that there is the Morse code, which is of course an old way of communicating.
But the voice you hear is a female hysterical voice, because that's the next thing we need to work on, the hysterical voice. Why is it that the hysterical voice is not listened to? What is the hysterical voice saying? It has been denigrated as an illness. Is it really an illness, and not a cry? That's my next project, hysteria.
ART iT: As shown in the video, the hand gestures of the sign language also mimic the iconography of different religious representations, like the mudras of Hinduism and Buddhism or even Christian depictions of Jesus with his hands held up in a gesture of blessing. When something is disconnected from its context, there are all these different ways it can absorb another meaning.
NM: That's also interesting. As much as I can talk about the work, I'd like others to talk about it too, because then we can make a triangular relationship, which is actually how an artwork is completed: the viewer, the artwork and me.
Pt I
Nalini Malani: Multiple Body, Multiple Voices
Joan Jonas: Pt II
II.
ART iT: We were just discussing your relation to the feminist movement. You have previously described Organic Honey as an alter-ego who is erotic and sexy. My initial interpretation is that this is a re-appropriation of the commodified image of woman that circulates in the male-oriented mainstream media, but was that really the case?
JJ: I can see how you would say that. I don't have any control over how you see my work, so it's fine that you say that. But it wasn't my intention exactly. It was more a process of discovery through working with video while considering theatricality. It had a great deal to do with the technology of video, sitting in front of the video, which was like a mirror, and altering my appearance and therefore my persona. I was more involved with the idea of exploring the persona of something that was not me, but was me, through making disguises and costumes. Of course, I was also taking control of the construction of an image.
My other idea of Organic Honey was that I was exploring the idea of female identity and the question of what is female. At the time people were exploring the idea of male and female in different languages and questioning what that means. My question was, is there such a thing as female imagery, and does it have to come from a so-called woman? At the same time, I was looking at the films and performances of Jack Smith, whose imagery is very "feminine.” I was interested in actually constructing a so-called “female” identity. So there were all those questions, and then at the end of the period I went on to explore other issues, although I continued to consider in my work the roles that women play in our culture.
ART iT: Would you say Organic Honey actually developed from an intuitive process of experimentation?
JJ: Yes, I started with nothing. Or, I started with video. To work with the medium of video alone was radical. You can't imagine what it was like then, to sit in front of a TV and see yourself, and be able to make your own films in your own home, and to edit and do all kinds of theatrical things and record it and make a film. I called it film because I was also looking at film and very influenced by underground film. It wasn't based on theory, but it was based on ideas from literature, in particular, poetic structure. It was also based on the idea of montage as expressed by early filmmakers, as well as ideas of the relation of sound and image.
ART iT: Do you have the sense it could have been anything?
JJ: No, it was definitely directed. I began to work with my own figure, my self, objects and references I had collected; also, from the idea of feminism, I was working with myself as a woman - who am I? What am I? What does this mean? So that was the starting point. And then I had just been to Japan, where I actually bought my Portapak, and so I was very influenced by the Noh drama. You don't see it necessarily, but it was there as another influence.
Top: Mirror Piece II, performance, Emanu-el YMHA, New York, 1970. Photo Peter Moore, courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo. Bottom: Joan Jonas 'Mirror Check' 1970 from Kaldor Public Art Projects on Vimeo.
ART iT: Of course you did the mirror performances, and used the video as a mirror, and people writing about your work tend to associate these projects with narcissism, but in Shinto shrines mirrors are put in the shrine to represent the gods, which suggests almost the obverse of narcissism: a mirror you can't identify with. Was there any similar element of dissociation from your own image that you experienced in the mirror pieces?
JJ: I think so, because I saw the image as a separate thing, yes. But I was also responding to a kind of anti-narcissistic tendency in the minimalist performers of the time, who were rebelling against dancers like Martha Graham. I wanted to question that idea of narcissism. I didn't know about the Shinto mirror, although I do have a photograph of a mirror in a shrine, reflecting my face, from that trip. I'm pretty sure I still have it.
Another thing I find interesting, which didn't initially register, is the idea of the mirror room in Noh theatre, where the performers enter their characters before going on stage. So I know there are a lot of mirror references in Japan. But I was already working with mirrors before I came to Japan, so really it came out of that, and then moving to video as a mirror.
ART iT: Previously you've used the word "erotic" to describe a number of your pieces. How did you understand the erotic in the context of doing these performances?
JJ: I don't think I consciously set out to make an erotic piece. I think my work seemed to have the flavor of eroticism because of the imagery I worked with and the feeling about it and of the time, when it wasn't a subject for other people. However, I was interested in developing my own language. Carolee Schneemann's work is rather erotic, I would say, but I didn't know about it at the time because she was living in London. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) is certainly erotic in a gentle way. I was interested in playing that up, actually, in going to certain limits of representation. I was really interested in the richness of imagery, the possibilities of color, texture and fabric, and a certain languid feeling.
ART iT: Formally, too, did the erotic show you a series of movements or a way of relating to objects and space?
JJ: No. I don't think it's necessarily erotic, but the only thing I can say is that I really enjoyed this reggae song that I used in Organic Honey. The words are, "You look / so radiant / standing there tonight." It's just a very beautiful reggae song, and I really enjoyed coming out with my headdress and my mask and my costume and dancing. I don't know if you would call it erotic or not. It's a little bit of an overreaction. It's a natural thing: a woman who's dancing to music - maybe it's erotic. I didn't plan on being erotic, it was just, I'm going to enjoy behaving and moving and looking this way.
ART iT: At the same time you were breaking up the field of the performance.
JJ: Yes, there were several things going on at the same time. It was about dealing with structure, and form, and the medium of video, the way the audience saw several different realities at the same time. There were all those things going on at the same time. I built up my pieces slowly with all that in mind.
I | III | IV | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
ART iT: We were just discussing your relation to the feminist movement. You have previously described Organic Honey as an alter-ego who is erotic and sexy. My initial interpretation is that this is a re-appropriation of the commodified image of woman that circulates in the male-oriented mainstream media, but was that really the case?
JJ: I can see how you would say that. I don't have any control over how you see my work, so it's fine that you say that. But it wasn't my intention exactly. It was more a process of discovery through working with video while considering theatricality. It had a great deal to do with the technology of video, sitting in front of the video, which was like a mirror, and altering my appearance and therefore my persona. I was more involved with the idea of exploring the persona of something that was not me, but was me, through making disguises and costumes. Of course, I was also taking control of the construction of an image.
My other idea of Organic Honey was that I was exploring the idea of female identity and the question of what is female. At the time people were exploring the idea of male and female in different languages and questioning what that means. My question was, is there such a thing as female imagery, and does it have to come from a so-called woman? At the same time, I was looking at the films and performances of Jack Smith, whose imagery is very "feminine.” I was interested in actually constructing a so-called “female” identity. So there were all those questions, and then at the end of the period I went on to explore other issues, although I continued to consider in my work the roles that women play in our culture.
ART iT: Would you say Organic Honey actually developed from an intuitive process of experimentation?
JJ: Yes, I started with nothing. Or, I started with video. To work with the medium of video alone was radical. You can't imagine what it was like then, to sit in front of a TV and see yourself, and be able to make your own films in your own home, and to edit and do all kinds of theatrical things and record it and make a film. I called it film because I was also looking at film and very influenced by underground film. It wasn't based on theory, but it was based on ideas from literature, in particular, poetic structure. It was also based on the idea of montage as expressed by early filmmakers, as well as ideas of the relation of sound and image.
ART iT: Do you have the sense it could have been anything?
JJ: No, it was definitely directed. I began to work with my own figure, my self, objects and references I had collected; also, from the idea of feminism, I was working with myself as a woman - who am I? What am I? What does this mean? So that was the starting point. And then I had just been to Japan, where I actually bought my Portapak, and so I was very influenced by the Noh drama. You don't see it necessarily, but it was there as another influence.
Top: Mirror Piece II, performance, Emanu-el YMHA, New York, 1970. Photo Peter Moore, courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo. Bottom: Joan Jonas 'Mirror Check' 1970 from Kaldor Public Art Projects on Vimeo.
ART iT: Of course you did the mirror performances, and used the video as a mirror, and people writing about your work tend to associate these projects with narcissism, but in Shinto shrines mirrors are put in the shrine to represent the gods, which suggests almost the obverse of narcissism: a mirror you can't identify with. Was there any similar element of dissociation from your own image that you experienced in the mirror pieces?
JJ: I think so, because I saw the image as a separate thing, yes. But I was also responding to a kind of anti-narcissistic tendency in the minimalist performers of the time, who were rebelling against dancers like Martha Graham. I wanted to question that idea of narcissism. I didn't know about the Shinto mirror, although I do have a photograph of a mirror in a shrine, reflecting my face, from that trip. I'm pretty sure I still have it.
Another thing I find interesting, which didn't initially register, is the idea of the mirror room in Noh theatre, where the performers enter their characters before going on stage. So I know there are a lot of mirror references in Japan. But I was already working with mirrors before I came to Japan, so really it came out of that, and then moving to video as a mirror.
ART iT: Previously you've used the word "erotic" to describe a number of your pieces. How did you understand the erotic in the context of doing these performances?
JJ: I don't think I consciously set out to make an erotic piece. I think my work seemed to have the flavor of eroticism because of the imagery I worked with and the feeling about it and of the time, when it wasn't a subject for other people. However, I was interested in developing my own language. Carolee Schneemann's work is rather erotic, I would say, but I didn't know about it at the time because she was living in London. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) is certainly erotic in a gentle way. I was interested in playing that up, actually, in going to certain limits of representation. I was really interested in the richness of imagery, the possibilities of color, texture and fabric, and a certain languid feeling.
ART iT: Formally, too, did the erotic show you a series of movements or a way of relating to objects and space?
JJ: No. I don't think it's necessarily erotic, but the only thing I can say is that I really enjoyed this reggae song that I used in Organic Honey. The words are, "You look / so radiant / standing there tonight." It's just a very beautiful reggae song, and I really enjoyed coming out with my headdress and my mask and my costume and dancing. I don't know if you would call it erotic or not. It's a little bit of an overreaction. It's a natural thing: a woman who's dancing to music - maybe it's erotic. I didn't plan on being erotic, it was just, I'm going to enjoy behaving and moving and looking this way.
ART iT: At the same time you were breaking up the field of the performance.
JJ: Yes, there were several things going on at the same time. It was about dealing with structure, and form, and the medium of video, the way the audience saw several different realities at the same time. There were all those things going on at the same time. I built up my pieces slowly with all that in mind.
I | III | IV | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
Joan Jonas: Pt I
REFLECTIONS FROM THE MIRROR ROOM
By Andrew Maerkle
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2005. Photo Paula Court. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: From your early performance pieces in the 1960s to the recent multimedia installations, one continuity seems to be that your works all have very dispersed elements, while also communicating some kind of narrative experience. For example, when you presented The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004-05) at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008, I wasn't aware of it when I was inside the piece, but somehow I walked away with an understanding of Aby Warburg's trip to the American Southwest in 1895 and melancholia. How do you approach the idea of the message in the work? Are you trying to find different ways to communicate something like a message, or deconstructing the idea of the message?
JJ: I don't really think of it in terms of a message. I think of it more as a kind of translation of the information into a visual representation - in this case, the text by Aby Warburg. I wasn't interested in illustrating it in his terms, using his images. I was interested in translating it into my imagery, based on what the text inspired in my life.
I felt a very personal relationship to Warburg's text because in the late 1960s I visited the American Southwest and saw the Hopi Snake Dance, so I was very moved when I found his own writing on the ritual. That's how the whole thing started. I had a direct relationship to his essay about his experience in the Southwest, and so I could refer to this indirectly through Warburg.
So I'm not thinking about message, but I am paying close attention to the text. I edit and use quotes from his text, and I hope that if one listens to his words, one will understand his ideas through my interpretation. This is my translation in image and sound, which may be difficult, but I ask the audience to stay with it and allow themselves to enter into the piece. There's something about Aby Warburg's method I feel very close to because of his way of referring to other cultures and the way he assembled and rearranged art historical images on large boards. I identify with his way of thinking about art history cross-culturally.
ART iT: In that sense the work collapses several moments across time or history into one, from Warburg's initial visit to the Southwest to his nervous breakdown and the present that we inhabit. But the work also has a very delicate connection to these different moments.
JJ: I'm sure it does. The text by Warburg was written while he was in a psychiatric institution about 30 years after his visit to the Southwest. It describes his impressions and was addressed to the doctors in the hospital to demonstrate that he had recovered from his nervous breakdown, in the same way Jose Blondet, who plays the part of Aby Warburg in my piece, addresses the audience in the performance.
But I don't have any way of experiencing what you experience, because I am so much a part of the process. I can only hope that the audience understands it. I thought of the basement space at Dia:Beacon as a kind of sanitarium. For the installation, which I developed after the performance, I included a highly edited version of the performance that was playing in one space adjacent to another with the other five projections playing simultaneously. The soundtrack for the entire installation consisted of Warburg’s words spoken by Blondet with music by Jason Moran and various sound effects. Each scene of the performance had a highly edited video backdrop, a parallel narrative to the action. I extracted certain of these backdrop sequences that I felt were the most emblematic of what Warburg was thinking and of my experience of his work and my own experience with the Hopi Snake Dance. It also relates to my interest in animals and the spirit of nature and ritual that predates my interest in Aby Warburg.
Both: Lines in the Sand, performance, documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photo Werner Maschmann.
ART iT: Yet in works like Lines in the Sand (2002), you have drawn more direct parallels between historical and literary references and the current political context - in this case, the specific situation in the US following the invasion of Iraq.
JJ: Yes. Lines in the Sand happened to be very directly related to what was going on as I was editing parts of HD's poem, "Helen in Troy," upon which the work was based. I didn't choose it for that reason, I chose it for other reasons. But 9/11 happened as I was working on the piece, and as I read the poem it became more and more clear that it related to the way America is, or was, at the time.
ART iT: Going back to the older pieces, how did the social climate affect you when you started doing things like Organic Honey in the early 1970s, or when you started bringing the performances out into the landscape and choreographing the landscape? For example, your first film, Wind, was made in 1968.
ART iT: I think there was a certain atmosphere around 1968, not just because of what happened, but it was the situation. The art world was very different in the 1960s and '70s, smaller and not so involved with the commercial aspect of the market and galleries. There was more of an idea of experimentation and exploring new ideas and new territory. It was very open, and the world was small enough that you sort of knew everybody and other artists participated in your work, so there was more interaction going on. Of course, I'm speaking from my generation's point of view. Maybe younger artists have a similar situation now, it's just that I'm of an older generation.
The other part of the 1960s and '70s was that the Vietnam War was going on, and there were many artists protesting and doing politically oriented art. My work was not directly involved with that kind of politics, but it was directly affected by the feminist movement, which was politically important for everybody, and it was something that everybody talked about and was involved in. All of my work from maybe 1970 on referred to the feminist movement, but indirectly. I wasn't interested in making political art, but from the very beginning I've always been interested in how my work relates to the present situation. It felt then that one was on the edge of something. I don't want to make something that exists only in the past. It has to exist in relation to the present.
II | III | IV | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
By Andrew Maerkle
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2005. Photo Paula Court. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.
ART iT: From your early performance pieces in the 1960s to the recent multimedia installations, one continuity seems to be that your works all have very dispersed elements, while also communicating some kind of narrative experience. For example, when you presented The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004-05) at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008, I wasn't aware of it when I was inside the piece, but somehow I walked away with an understanding of Aby Warburg's trip to the American Southwest in 1895 and melancholia. How do you approach the idea of the message in the work? Are you trying to find different ways to communicate something like a message, or deconstructing the idea of the message?
JJ: I don't really think of it in terms of a message. I think of it more as a kind of translation of the information into a visual representation - in this case, the text by Aby Warburg. I wasn't interested in illustrating it in his terms, using his images. I was interested in translating it into my imagery, based on what the text inspired in my life.
I felt a very personal relationship to Warburg's text because in the late 1960s I visited the American Southwest and saw the Hopi Snake Dance, so I was very moved when I found his own writing on the ritual. That's how the whole thing started. I had a direct relationship to his essay about his experience in the Southwest, and so I could refer to this indirectly through Warburg.
So I'm not thinking about message, but I am paying close attention to the text. I edit and use quotes from his text, and I hope that if one listens to his words, one will understand his ideas through my interpretation. This is my translation in image and sound, which may be difficult, but I ask the audience to stay with it and allow themselves to enter into the piece. There's something about Aby Warburg's method I feel very close to because of his way of referring to other cultures and the way he assembled and rearranged art historical images on large boards. I identify with his way of thinking about art history cross-culturally.
ART iT: In that sense the work collapses several moments across time or history into one, from Warburg's initial visit to the Southwest to his nervous breakdown and the present that we inhabit. But the work also has a very delicate connection to these different moments.
JJ: I'm sure it does. The text by Warburg was written while he was in a psychiatric institution about 30 years after his visit to the Southwest. It describes his impressions and was addressed to the doctors in the hospital to demonstrate that he had recovered from his nervous breakdown, in the same way Jose Blondet, who plays the part of Aby Warburg in my piece, addresses the audience in the performance.
But I don't have any way of experiencing what you experience, because I am so much a part of the process. I can only hope that the audience understands it. I thought of the basement space at Dia:Beacon as a kind of sanitarium. For the installation, which I developed after the performance, I included a highly edited version of the performance that was playing in one space adjacent to another with the other five projections playing simultaneously. The soundtrack for the entire installation consisted of Warburg’s words spoken by Blondet with music by Jason Moran and various sound effects. Each scene of the performance had a highly edited video backdrop, a parallel narrative to the action. I extracted certain of these backdrop sequences that I felt were the most emblematic of what Warburg was thinking and of my experience of his work and my own experience with the Hopi Snake Dance. It also relates to my interest in animals and the spirit of nature and ritual that predates my interest in Aby Warburg.
Both: Lines in the Sand, performance, documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photo Werner Maschmann.
ART iT: Yet in works like Lines in the Sand (2002), you have drawn more direct parallels between historical and literary references and the current political context - in this case, the specific situation in the US following the invasion of Iraq.
JJ: Yes. Lines in the Sand happened to be very directly related to what was going on as I was editing parts of HD's poem, "Helen in Troy," upon which the work was based. I didn't choose it for that reason, I chose it for other reasons. But 9/11 happened as I was working on the piece, and as I read the poem it became more and more clear that it related to the way America is, or was, at the time.
ART iT: Going back to the older pieces, how did the social climate affect you when you started doing things like Organic Honey in the early 1970s, or when you started bringing the performances out into the landscape and choreographing the landscape? For example, your first film, Wind, was made in 1968.
ART iT: I think there was a certain atmosphere around 1968, not just because of what happened, but it was the situation. The art world was very different in the 1960s and '70s, smaller and not so involved with the commercial aspect of the market and galleries. There was more of an idea of experimentation and exploring new ideas and new territory. It was very open, and the world was small enough that you sort of knew everybody and other artists participated in your work, so there was more interaction going on. Of course, I'm speaking from my generation's point of view. Maybe younger artists have a similar situation now, it's just that I'm of an older generation.
The other part of the 1960s and '70s was that the Vietnam War was going on, and there were many artists protesting and doing politically oriented art. My work was not directly involved with that kind of politics, but it was directly affected by the feminist movement, which was politically important for everybody, and it was something that everybody talked about and was involved in. All of my work from maybe 1970 on referred to the feminist movement, but indirectly. I wasn't interested in making political art, but from the very beginning I've always been interested in how my work relates to the present situation. It felt then that one was on the edge of something. I don't want to make something that exists only in the past. It has to exist in relation to the present.
II | III | IV | V
Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room
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