IJ: Well, yeah. We all lie to ourselves, and others constantly without knowing.
BC: Yeah, all the time. So, I wanted to explore that or to use that framework to be like, “Hey, I have all these stories, I’ll embellish a few, I’ll fuck with them a little bit, I’ll tell some white lies.” The crux of the story will still be there, but then you land in this liminal space, if I may, between a fictional/non-fictional space through the text that works around the idea of honesty. For me, my own honesty is the material. Honesty is a rare commodity in art.

IJ: I think that society privileges honesty or pretends to. Often, the truth is the last thing that people want to hear.
BC: That’s absolutely true, and at the same time in my life and in my work, I’m very open. I think that being open is a mode of operating, but honesty is not a mode of operating. It’s more of a moral code. To be honest is to be trusted, right? I think that as an artist, my responsibility is to do the opposite. I think of Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Decay of Lying”. In it, Wilde essentially proposes that, “lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” Honesty in the late Capitalist world in which we live is like a commodity. So lying is an anti-commodity, art is an anti-commodity, until collectors and the market overtake it.

IJ: It’s interesting that you brought up Oscar Wilde since he was also an advocate of uselessness, and the idea of robbing something of its utility and giving value to that.
BC: Yes, he advocated for that. I chafe against the utilitarian value of art. The beauty of art is that it’s useless.

IJ: You mentioned that your family is from South Africa, how do you think that’s shaped and formed the way you perceive things as an artist?
BC: That’s a good question. I think, and you might be able to relate, being a first generation American, and having that dual citizenship, having that complex background—not overly complex, I’m just not a straightforward American. Particularly also being an only child has given me the sense that I’m always on the outside looking in. I think any immigrants that come to America, unless they assimilate, that outsider looking in is always part of us, and its certainly been passed down to me through my parents. That informs my work I suppose in terms of comedy, comedy is premised on observations and things that have happened to comedians and/or artists. These things happen to you and you search for the humor in it. So, I feel like if you’re constantly sensing yourself not as an outsider, but sort of the outside looking in, you potentially are observing constantly in a way that might be different, say from someone who are in and were assimilated before they were even born. I think that in order to tell the stories that I am telling I always have to stay on the outside of pretty much everything.

IJ: Your literary background comes through within the work too, obviously. Something that I was struck by is the minimalist way in which you approach the text and I was reminded of Raymond Carver’s short stories. There’s such a terse and pithy way in which you frame language. You’re trying to get at the essence and something more direct and concise.
BC: I feel that to achieve an economy of language is extremely difficult. When I think of Raymond Carver, I take that as a huge compliment, by the way, but when I think of Raymond Carver, or Hemmingway, or artists who achieve an economy of language, they work for that. I was trying to employ that actively, but for a different reason than Raymond Carver would, for example. When you read a book, there’s an act of intimacy that happens; like the trope of turning the page.

IJ: It’s a very private, personal experience.
BC: Mine isn’t. Mine is very public. What I’m trying to do also with the pacing of it, I’m not only asking the viewer to work, but I’m also asking the viewer to engage with the piece, and then to become intimate with it. It’s like my way of having sex with my viewers! How my work functions, is that it essentially asks you to imagine the visual for yourself. In Nietzsche, a leaf is not a leaf it’s just a metaphor for the thing itself. What’s interesting is if you employ that in a Raymond Carver setting or in my work, your notions of what a casual encounter may be, or an email is are very different from the next person. I am attempting to present an essence of something which is the content, but the way that that content takes place in the viewer’s brain is different from the leaf or the next leaf or the next leaf, because each individual is different in how they view the work.

Barnett Cohen, still from Radical Honesty, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

IJ: What you’re talking about made me think of Ed Ruscha’s City paintings; the way in which the word stands in for the actual thing itself.
BC: Yes, Absolutely.

IJ: In the video, you’ve included the more interesting aspects of your life; it’s not about banality.
BC: That is correct. I think that it comes full circle to the work that I’ll be working on next, which is my sex disco. Not all the stories have a sexual innuendo or are straightforwardly about sex, but another thing in which I see a lack of and in which I’m responding particularly to in the work of my peers is a rejection of sex. It’s sublimated in some work, but I prefer to use it and have it thrust, so to speak towards the viewer! That sounds very graphic, but yeah, I like the idea of being sexually graphic in the work but still not overdoing the work. Think of it as Playboy as opposed to Hustler.

IJ: I would have to agree that a lot of work avoids sex in general, which seems strange since so much of our life revolves around sex.
BC: I just realized that sex is one of the many materials with which I work and the joy of working with it is that it is malleable particularly when it comes to text-based work. There are infinite ways to attack it, to confront it, and to employ it. An anecdote comes to mind, Tom Waits was interviewed by the BBC about what inspires him to make a record and he responded that he goes to his local record store, searches for a record he would like to hear, comes up short, and then goes home and makes it himself. His work is a response to a lack and in some ways perhaps mine is as well.

IJ: The text in your video is structured the way in a joke is structured. The simplicity of it also helps because humor has to be very direct and straightforward. If it becomes too clunky it becomes too convoluted and confusing.
BC: When I started writing, I guess you would call it writing, these text pieces, I was thinking very much about comedians and how a joke functions. I think that as an artist it’s incumbent upon oneself to ask this question, which is, “what do you want to do to your viewer?” For me, the audience is considered to a point, and I think that the work stems out of my love of comedy, which started as a kid, and how word play and comedy operates. There’s a very famous Eddy Murphy joke, where he uses a very boring, overplayed story about a woman coming home to find her husband in bed with another woman. And she starts screaming at her husband, “You’re fucking this woman, you’re fucking this woman, you’re fucking this woman!” And they have this argument, and he says, “Yes, you want me to admit that I fucked her? Yes! Yes, I fucked her!” He overemphasizes the word “fuck,” and he says, “If you’re going to let a fuck come between us making love then there’s something wrong with you, woman!” I just think that the word play in comedy is for me, very exciting, and I think that my intention is not only to thrust myself upon my viewers, but also to make them laugh. Art that is humorous and isn’t ironic, sarcastic, or overly self-aware, is for me some of the most effective artwork.

IJ: Irony is almost an easy way out. I don’t believe in this blind devotion to the altar of seriousness and reverence in art, but irony is too easy. It’s become the norm, it’s too accepted. You’re almost expected to be ironic.
BC: Particularly in text pieces, a lot of work that I see has a lazy approach to text. For me if your material is text, you have to be exact and know what the hell you’re writing about.

IJ: Although you talk a lot about the humor in your art, is there an underlying serious or philosophical message that you want to get across to the viewer, through the use of humor?
BC: I think of comedy as being a more effective political tool. It’s like the court jester. So someone comes before the king and he says something and the king lops off his head. In King Lear, he had his jester around and the jester could speak truth to power in front of the king because supposedly he wasn’t taken as seriously as someone who might provoke the king to anger. Humor allows me to touch upon subjects of sexual relations and gender and the fluidity of sexuality in a way that is less didactic than it would be if I were not employing humor.

The post Irena Jurek talks Honesty and Sex with Barnett Cohen appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

2. The flat has three books: Kronos by said Boullet, a slick and glossy photo tour of the artist’s work circa 2012 (vegetables and beach scenes thrown in haphazardly), The Institute of Social Hypocrisy by Victor Boullet, a massive white tome with photos and text, and Time is the Assassin, which purports to be something like a novel, and which I have been tasked to review. I dismiss Kronos as being yet another artsy exercise in self-justification and note that despite the intriguing title, in Social Hypocrisy much of the text is written by others.

3. Time is The Assassin is the black sheep of the bunch. With more than a hint of anxiety I wonder if this V. Boullet can pull off the ritual exercise in self-justification. Being a literary type, I miss neither the reference to Rimbaud’s Illuminations (the line “Now is the time of the assassins” appears in Matinée d’Ivresse) nor the cheap cut-up of the cover of Henry Miller’s Time of the Assassins. Those two are from another world, prophetic texts, records of the author’s confrontation with himself. Mr. Boullet is setting high standards on which to impale himself.

4. On the largely black cover, Victor Boullet’s name appears in blazing white – in this first five minutes, I’ve already gotten the point that this gentleman likes to bruit his name about—the title is in gray letters and down near the bottom in barely perceptible type, “Ghostwritten by Kristian Skylstad”. Ahem. My sensors quiver wildly. Out come the scapels. I prepare to move in for the kill. Mr. Boullet has his very own ghostwriter to do the work for him.

5. Let me tell you something I didn’t know at the outset of this review, although it should have been obvious from the moment the box was open: this Boullet is a trickster. He is canny, and not without his humors — although he is careful to avoid the comedian’s fate. One example: he invited the curator Damien Airault to a week’s residence at the Institute of Social Hypocrisy’s gallery in the Marais and — held him hostage. Airault could neither leave the gallery space nor communicate with his captor — the artist — for a week. Food was ferried up the side of the building in a basket. A neat role reversal — a curator trapped inside a gallery — as well as a commentary on power relations in the always-ethical art world. “I want to make him a better person, a better curator,” the droll Boullet said by way of explanation.

And now you know more than I did when I took Time Is The Assassin with me into the metro, to ride around for a few hours and read the book twice.

6. The novel takes place in a dreary suburb on the outskirts of Oslo, in a dreary bar that is way closer to Hell than, “fucking, swinging Pennsylvania.” (The author’s words.) The opening pages are exceptionally dubious, a messy, post-modern wank-a-thon. For example? Everywhere:

“There was a time when art could alter society, but that chance was missed. This in front of me, these four imbeciles sitting with me, a hypocrite either way, cannot and will not be changed by art. And these four in an absurd way control society in their passivity and I don’t even know or care if I know or care if that’s OK or if it matters.”

Who is speaking, Victor Boullet or his ghostwriter Skylstad, and who cares? I’m barely to Trocadero and I’m tempted to spin the book out the window at an angle. With a bit of luck there will be a car passing the other way and the book will land on someone else’s lap. That’s part of Boullet’s plan, too.

7. It gets better: people are getting drunk and they make fools of themselves, humanity enters, a possible novel raises its head. There is a cast of characters: Boullet, endlessly pontificating, superior to the others; his brother the photographer, the butt of most of Boullet’s jibes; the occasionally glimpsed Skylstad himself; Tim the Jacuzzidude and Tina, the drunk, who sobers up long enough to deliver a fascinating excursus on what blind people may or may not see. A kind of anti-novel takes shape, in which drunks in the middle of nowhere debate life.

“Maybe I’m blessed with standing in a twilight zone here in the road of Saturn, in pure delight, almost touching delirium… It’s genuine frenzy this, standing here at the bar. I’m consumed with gladness. A taste of heaven. The moment of inspiration, brought to me by intoxication.”

I dodge the cops at Republique and take the No. 11 to Place des fetes.

8. Boullet’s idea is to be a fake, a hypocrite, an actor — while saying something real about the art scene and life. His paintings are bad, his sculptures derivative, and there he is, feeling his way, asking us, “But are we really alive?“ A pest, a nebbish, a loser, like your current NYC mayoral candidate, who, while claiming to be faithful to his wife, cannot keep his grubby fingers away from the naked pix. In Boullet’s case, Art is his wife. It must be everything he wanted when he was a kid, and now he finds the only way to be faithful to the original idea is to drag his bride through the mud.

But with humor. He imprisons curators and forces his empty work which looks good into exhibitions and raw space — and no one can tell the difference from the other stuff on display. When the Institute went bust and Joseph Tang opened a gallery, Boullet created an installation that loaded the space with dim sum noodles which slowly moldered away.

9. Whether it is Boullet’s intention or Skylstad’s, the novel is constantly searching for a way out of our society’s materialism and the trite, platonic otherness festering inside conceptualism. Gilles Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus is mentioned at length. Then Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, Anais Nin, and an angelic appearance by Marina Abramovic somewhere in the dark between two bars — surely one of the book’s high points — even if it’s clear that these Grand and Glorious Guardian Spirits won’t get Boullet out of his jam, which is: “What to do now?“ For that you need the supernatural, an extra-human agency. The book delivers it in the form of a talking bear that out-talks Boullet.

Miserable miracle, the book is awkward, excruciating and funny. (Its reflections on Norwegian and Scottish cultures alone will be enough to make the Tourist Boards grind their teeth.) In other words, a night of serious drinking. It is 87 pages long and the best Anti-Novel of the year so far. By anti-novel, I mean a piece of fiction that says what it wants and doesn’t give a damn about commercial rules of order.

10. Back home, the two other books from Antenne look considerably different now. They are both funnier and more pathetic and I can’t help but wish Boullet luck. He exists in a kind of agony of self-awareness, ceaselessly asking, Is that all there is? His generation, ten years on either side, have all gotten the point: one can create safe, “conceptual”  or post-Dada work and, on the European model, glide quite smoothly into the academico-gallerist-museum structure where your more or less meaningless work will pad out show after show. You will get residence after residence and live reasonably comfortably. Boullet meanwhile paces the beach like a Scottish Hamlet, has photos taken while he pushes driftwood around in various poses of Artist At Work, and worries the Whole Thing. He is a messy version of this generation’s Duchamp.

11. “Never think of minimizing the importance of challenging accepted truths, and you should go against the flow — you will go where no one else dares to go. You will enter the eternal uncertainty, and you will never come back — but even if you know it’s a road you have to take, and even if you know that road is closed, you should go there — in the dark. Alone. There you will find something real.” So saith the Bear in his broken English.

“We shall not forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day. Now is the time of the Assassins.” – Rimbaud, Illuminations.

By Iddhis Bing

victorboullet.com

The post Eleven Ways To Think About Boullet: A Review in Real Time appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

IJ: Like a sacred medium?
CC: Yes, it’s like a sacred medium or respected or feared in a way. That’s why I’ve always been inclined to keep paintings on the stretcher, and I haven’t been the type of artist who wants to do assemblage. I want to maintain that as a face, there’s this history or trajectory of painting and I want to use how I display paintings to speak about that. I want to use my paintings as weapons but they are also used sometimes to enact violence.

IJ: Can you talk more about painting being a metaphor for a battlefield?
CC: Painting is the best way that I know how to communicate. It’s essentially me throwing my ideas at you in a literal, slapstick way. People are always invested in seeing the painting upright and on the wall. They’re almost invested in this safe way of viewing.

IJ: It’s like a control group almost.
CC: Yeah, I want them to see a painting on a catapult or they see it away from the wall. Makes them think about it differently. That whole conversation of painting as object, painting beside itself, is a typical conversation around painting. I view painting as an object, and there’s just as much conversation coming out of its back, the stretchers, where the stretchers came from, the canvas that it’s on, and the signature on the back; there is as much information as on the front. The back speaks to this history and the front has the ideas. I view them both as speaking at the same time, so it’s necessary to show both. As far as painting as battlefield, I’ve never wanted to make it seem like I’m against painting. It’s not that I hate painting, I love painting.

IJ: I could see that, but I think there is a history of the idea that there is this romantic battle; painting a painting is a battle, especially found in the works of the Abstract Expressionists or Expressionists in general. There is a certain sense of humor found in that aspect of your work.
CC: Right. Sometimes you come into the studio and it’s the best studio day and you think that you made the best piece of art ever. Then the next day you think, “this is shit, I don’t know what this is but I’m never going to show it.” I want to show you that battle on the canvas. I think all artists have to deal with their medium as a battlefield, and that’s just the process of creation. It’s never a straight lined good thing, or if it is you’re doing it wrong! Or you have way too many assistants or you planned everything out too early.

IJ: I think that it’s also more of a newer attitude to show that aspect, to show more vulnerability in art. Older generations weren’t as prone to do that.
CC: It’s totally different from this idea of bad painting, where somebody consciously attempts to show a struggle that is not real.

IJ: It’s almost hyper ironic, bad painting. It’s self aware of being bad. By using the metaphor for painting as battlefield, you’re actually reintroducing the idea of effort or importance and significance.
CC: In all of those battles, which go down, the end result isn’t always the same. There are times when the painting survives and becomes the most important part of the installation, and it doesn’t get graffittied or covered up. Then there are times that it does, and the sculpture or installation has to win in order to redeem the whole project. Sometimes the paintings are heralded, and celebrated, they’re put on a pedestal literally and other times they are leaning over like they’re ready to commit suicide. I’m interested in showing all of that. It’s just more real. It is just really the process of working in the studio, and the studio is a battlefield, you know?

IJ: Sometimes you set paintings on fire, using fireworks. There is this performative element to you work. How important is your role as performer/painter to authorship? Where do you see yourself? Are you always present?
CC: I guess the question is am I the perpetrator or the savior? I’m definitely a performer in my work. I never want to be present completely in the physical way. In the Loyalist installation, where I had the canon fuse, it was never my intention to show the canon fuse being lit in the gallery. It’s theater that isn’t meant to be seen, it’s theater that’s happened in the past. It was supposed to be a past action; this canon fuse had already set off a canon that was shooting at the other painting, the Queen Victoria painting. I’m more interested in you seeing all of those layers of possible destruction, and the actual painting that was previously there, than I am watching the whole disaster go down. Either I would show up before the action or after the action, but I wouldn’t show the action itself. I think that takes a lot away from people seeing two-dimensional objects like paintings.

I’m trying to concentrate on this 2D/3D tension where you’re moving through different realities. You’re creating a reality through painting, and the sort of reality of seeing ready-made or constructed objects next to each other. Performance is just another can of worms that I’m not interested in opening.

With my installation at the Brooklyn Museum, there’s two pieces that have the potential to be launched, and there’s one piece that has been launched. I’ve debated in the past whether I’d show a painting being launched as a performance, that’s the obvious question that everyone asks. I would never show a painting being launched.

IJ: You have a recurring cast of characters in your paintings, you have this amphibian every person creature, the black santa, and the sexy bunny, among others. Could you talk more about the characters in your work?
CC: The Golem character, the every body, everything character, is actually from Jewish folklore. There are tales of this anthropomorphic being that gets created out of clay or sand or dirt and then becomes animated and then essentially kills its creator.

IJ: That’s almost like a twist on the Narcissus myth. Do you identify with any of the characters?
CC: If I were to identify with anybody, I would say it would be the Golem figures, but they identify with everything. Their purpose is to be chameleon like, I identify with that sort of way of living. You have to be a chameleon to be at a certain party, you have to be dressing like everyone else. Golems can be any color, and sometimes they have to change genders.

I’ve always had this narrative of a post-human world. Maybe they’re aliens that have come back that are trying to pick up the pieces of American civilization.

IJ: There’s definitely this idea of time in your work, you’ve recreated the DaVinci catapults for your installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Could you talk more about that? 
CC: It’s funny that we were just talking about the Golems taking over the future, but most of my work is about the present or the past. I have a personal fascination with history, but I’m also interested in war and politics. I really don’t want to talk about those things that specifically.

IJ: It almost seems that there is a sense of play and humor that references much more serious issues. That’s a way of allowing people to think about those things using satire.
CC: It could be considered satire, because the paintings seem light-hearted on the surface. Depending on how you look at them. If you’re just looking at the paintings, things could come out looking quite humorous and light-hearted, but if you look at everything at once you get a different interpretation. I’m not trying to necessarily make fun of war or politics, I’m just trying to give light to the fact that things you would think are very serious are humorous at the same time. When I make pieces like the Sarah Palin paintings or paintings of politicians in them or black Santa, or the Easter Bunny girl, they’re all equally fictional and absurd. The humor exists in recognizing that Sarah Palin is not much different from…

IJ: There’s this fallibility in the characters. Although none of them are really human, even Sarah Palin, they’re all deeply human on a level. By removing the human elements, you make them more human in the end.
CC: Totally. That’s the purpose that the Golems serve. It makes it easier for me to insert dialogue, whereas to put humans in the paintings, for me, would make them very weighed down. These Golems can be whatever I want them to be at any given time.

As far as the whole satire and war, it’s not that I’m trying to make war seem lighthearted, but I’m trying to get people to recognize that these things are not sacred. These things are a part of who we are. At the same time as I’m representing Queen Victoria, Britain, and America as a battle, it’s also connected to how we all have these times of great hatred for other people, fights, and jealousy. We all shoot the canon and launch paintings.

IJ: There’s a little heaven and hell in all of us.
CC: It’s not that there’s humor in that, it’s just that I’m trying to point out the humanity in war just as much as I’m trying to point out the humanity in laughter.

IJ: Do you have any upcoming events coming up?
CC: As far as upcoming events, I am curating a show, TIS BANK, at Torrance Shipman Gallery, in Sunset Park. It is an artist-run space I co-run. The show will feature work by Lisa Cobbe and Troy Michie. I will also be giving a talk at the Brooklyn Museum on August 29 with art writer and critic, Nick Faust.

The post Irena Jurek talks Painting and War with Caitlin Cherry appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Brian Getnick: Art for me is a way of joining thoughts that might not belong together in any other discourse. When you make art, you can actualize these thoughts into forms and create models where they are indisputably united. I like that stubborn insistence.

As far as my family is concerned, I’ll start with Halloween. We would start sewing costumes in early September. There’s a picture of me as an 8-year-old howling at the camera in a green tunic, swim goggles, witch nails and a felt rat sewn to my chest. Obviously, I was rat-man. I almost never wanted to be a recognizable character. When the holiday was over, I would make small figures with fabric and florist’s wire drawn from the world I had inhabited in costume, playing out stories around the house and in the woods. I never wanted the fantasy to end.

LO: What’s your working process?

BG: Play is my process. When I begin working on a performance, I make an object, mask or costume and start activating it by moving inside it or handing it off to a collaborator. For The Pest Horse, a performance I’m doing with Bryatt Bryant this August, I hand him the horse bodies and say, “Give me two performances.” It can be as simple a directive as that. He intuitively knows how to make something come alive and find out how it wants to behave. We record what he comes up with, we try it again, and eventually whittle it down.

LO: Where did you go to school and how did that effect your artistic development?

BG: I got my MFA in the Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The department’s philosophy of encouraging the intuitive and pleasurable process of experimenting with materials gave me the breathing room to grow. Five years after getting my MFA, I went back to making plays with figures and costumes. 

LO: What are the ideas in your work?

BG: Memory, control, freedom and the body. In the total sensorial experience of my performance work, I want these subjects to weave in and out of visibility and articulation. My first desire is to mesmerize the audience with how the sculptural bodies that I make come alive, later fall apart, and how they behave in general. What they interpret this interplay to mean is up to them. That is a type of research that I couldn’t get if I simply installed my costumes as static sculpture in a gallery. I could only theorize about what the audience’s response would be. When I first moved to LA, I performed exclusively in queer nightclubs. The audience would shout back, walk away, and participate unexpectedly. No one felt cowed into submission by the pressure to interpret. They came to the club for pleasure and I wanted to give it to them. If they walked away entertained I was happy. If they absorbed some of the nascent content later, that was even better.

LO: You are a performance artist who also creates sculptural objects. How is performance different from making objects conceptually for you as an artist?

BG: My sculptures often take the form of theaters nested inside other things: a hog’s head, a prison, or a decrepit airport, for instance. I think of the theater’s architecture as a body or an extension of the architect’s body, which implies that the audience is being digested by the play. My performances are the inverse; all the fantasy is attached to the body and surrounded by the audience.

LO: What is it like to be observed as a performing artist, and to also be observing the audience?

BG: It feels like a political moment to be the center of attention. I feel that pressure. What am I saying in this arena? What are my values? I think this is why I tend not to perform as myself but as other things and with other people. I’m not interested in presenting a singular representation of selfhood. I’m not interested in the audience reifying me in a cult-like way. I’m interested in showing the audience a system of reorganizing or exploding the self into multiple, independent beings. I also prefer to have the audience mobile and unseated if possible, so that they can choose to see what they want, or to leave.

LO: What kind of reactions and impressions have your performance works engendered from audience members?

BG: My friend told me once that she thought of my performances as “home-school kabuki theater,” and I like that. My work has a lot of absurdist elements, so laughter is one of the first responses I get in galleries. Artists come to galleries prepared to scrutinize forms and analyze their meaning. I get this too. It’s hard to shut off the politic and history-seeking part of my brain, but with performance, the opportunity is to experience art bodily. The analysis is important, but it can happen later, or at certain moments within the total experience.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?

BG: Art offers models of ways of being that are at best, deeply, internally researched. This is so important in the era of social media determined identities. I’m speaking here not of all art which, of course, can use social media as a material or a vehicle, but specifically of the fabrication of objects and of live performance. Solid things are derived at a slower rate and that gives you time to fantasize about an audience or ignore the possibility of an audience. I don’t think that can happen when you make things for the web.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?

BG: I would say: Consider measuring the energy expended on seeking prestige with the effects that it has on your body and your creative output.  Instead, find a community of people who will support you making your work and find places where you can experiment freely. I live in LA where the rent is low and the pay-off for experimentation and collaboration is very high. What I would suggest to the New York performance artist is to visit LA. I run a performance art journal and platform called Native Strategies with my partner Tanya Rubbak. If you’re a performance artist reading this and are thinking of visiting LA, look us up if you want an orientation. nativestrategiesla@gmail.com

LO: Who are you favorite artists and why? 

BG: There are so many. I love Asher Hartman who is more of an experimental theater director and works closely with an ensemble of perfomers who have worked together for over five years. Hartman tends to collide narratives and switch the identities of his characters in the script. The language he uses is often very dense and chaotic but because of the strength of his ensemble, the abstraction in his narrative(s) become grounded through the obvious humanness of the actor’s relationships. I just saw Glass Bang by Hartman, which is about violence, real estate, and ghosts. I also love Mike Kelly’s Day is Done project. He made this parallel universe of ghosts, vampires, virgins, pagan rituals, and bits and pieces from a pseudo biography all extrapolated from high school yearbook photos. It’s a template for someone like me who starts his process by making objects and then finds the performances inside them. I also have found precedent in his writing for the way I treat subject matter, how it comes in and out of focus in my work. In an Art21 interview he talks about beauty in relationship to a deliberate confusion between different contents: “I think what I make is beautiful … because terms and divisions between terms are confused, and divisions between categories start to slip. That produces what I think of as a sublime effect, or it produces humor. And both things interest me.”

LO: What are your upcoming projects?

BG: I’ve started color-coding my yearly output. What I’m presenting at Station Independent Projects this summer is the culmination of a year’s production of green performances and objects. I realized I was coloring work in 2012 when I was making Memories, a performance in which a big puppet’s limbs and head are controlled by dancers and musicians in blood red costumes.  I decided to research how color resonates for my work by starting this year by consciously choosing a color.

I think of intuition as faith in finding substance in darkness. For the next several years I’ll be coloring that void until I have the complete works of the rainbow.

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