"Troupe" photo by John W. Sisson, Jr.

Many of these discussions about hybridity seem to center on the borders of identity: those places we feel something might end so that another substance, or self can begin. Language is essential in the communication of those boundaries; it enables a consensual agreement. The very act of naming, for instance, differentiates one body from another. I am curious about how language is embodied and how an artist invested in movement-as communication might explore that position. I thought I could interview performance artist, Justin Cabrillos. He is particularly focused on how the body and language relate: what seemed like an additional progression from my last discussion with Vanessa Place. Drawing on elements of dance, performance art, poetry, and sound art, explores an inefficient use of breath, the valleys of nonsense and physical exertion. Cabrillos was an IN>TIME Incubation Series artist-in-residence at the Chicago Cultural Center, and a 2011 LinkUP Artist at Links Hall. He recently collaborated with Every House Has a Door in a performance for artCENA in Rio De Janeiro. He is the recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum.

Caroline Picard: I’m interested in how you integrate language and the body: there is something about this process that makes a lot of sense to me, in so far as both the body and language are mechanistic. In your performances, you seem to embody the two at once, calling attention to the ways in which the body gives life/animates language. At the same time, I feel like you also illustrate a kind of twitch or glitch in both, as they merge  — is there some way that you could talk about this?

"Faces, Varieties, Postures" photo by John W. Sisson, Jr.

"Faces, Varieties, Postures" photo by John W. Sisson, Jr.

CP:  What is the function of breath in your work?

"Troupe." photo by John W. Sisson, Jr.

This post is part of an ongoing series about art and beer. 

Over the weekend, I met artist and brewer Christopher Tourre at his house as he and Lance Curran, his partner in Arcade Brewery, brewed a five and a half gallon batch of beer they call Oatmilk Stout. Tourre brews on his kitchen stove in big gleaming steel pots. At the same time that he showed me a page of obscure calculations made in composition notebook, the mash assembled by those same calculations steeped in a rough plastic cooler of the kind you normally bring iced and bottled beer to the beach in. A hardware store spigot juts out its front for easy drainage. Chris tells me that some home brewers get extremely scientific in their process, invoking hyper accurate measurements and fine-tuned equipment to get as close as possible to target flavor components like International Bitterness Units (IBUs). But even a highly trained human tongue can only pick out a range of a few IBUs. Add in layers of complexity like sweet flavors from the beer’s malt or extracts added to it and the exact measurement becomes even harder to guess at without equipment.

Taking the mash's temperature

For Tourre and Curran, this kind of ambiguity is an asset to be celebrated both in their beer and in the engagements they’re looking to build around it. The imperfect process and intuitive understanding a brewer have are just two things that make brewing an artful craft. While Arcade is certainly intended to function as a business, lessons that come from participatory art and event-making are also primary concerns. Last year, in a month-long residency at Spoke, Tourre invited the public to both sample his own beer and to share in the creation of original brews. He connected with foragers and garderners around Chicago to make small batches of beer and soda using ingredients they found or grew. He also gave free home-brewing workshops. At the end of the month, he hosted a tasting of all the different beverages crafted with his co-creators present to share the stories behind each drink.

Although the Public Brewery at Spoke was firmly planted in the realm of art, it also helped Tourre and Curran’s business prospects. The residency got them in touch with New Chicago Beer Company, opening soon at The Plant—an indoor vertical farm in the Back of the Yards. Arcade will be renting New Chicago’s equipment between cycles to brew their first commercial batches. But public events are not intended to shrewdly forward a brand and network. Tourre and Curran think of interfacing with the public as more than market research. As they shift from an art project to a business, they’re aware of certain values they want to hold onto. “Sometimes it’s easier as an artist to create a convivial spirit and atmosphere.” Tourre says, “How do you stay sincere when it becomes a business? How do you take something that I would do as an art project and convert that over to a money making endeavor? How do you keep the same spirit, legitimacy, and authenticity? That’s part of the challenge for us.”

Because the beer isn’t in the bottle yet, sincerity and collaboration with the public are mostly guiding principles at the moment. But Arcade does have a few plans for keeping audiences substantially involved in what they do. Public Brew sessions will work much like the residency at Spoke did: people can attend causal brewing sessions where Tourre answers questions and explains every step of the process. While Arcade will have certain beers available year-round, their seasonals will be decided by a process of public consensus. People will be able to submit, discuss, and vote on recipes to create seasonal brews they’ll share credit on.

Arcade is also developing some novel ideas for the design of the bottles too. They’re working with the writer Jason Aaron and the comic artist Tony Moore to create a six-pack design where each bottle will have on it a frame of an original comic that relates to the beer it holds. The central theme for Arcade seems to be that everything around the beer is as important as the beer itself. As Curran said during our brewing session: you don’t just taste the beer, you experience it. That experience manifests in the crafting of beverage and builds out to include the vessel it comes in, the type of things people do when they’re drinking it, and the understanding people have of what it is they’re consuming.

Work in progress (2009-present) interactive audiolfactory installation investigating creolized scents in Chicago.

Caroline Picard: This series started for me because I kept hearing the word hybridity — in multiple conversations about different art works or practices, hybridity started to sound like a buzzword. While on the one hand, I know what the word means of course, it also feels like a term that carries a certain amount of baggage. I was hoping to try and identify what that baggage was and, even, pin down (if possible) what hybridity means. Perhaps part of its intent is to remain fluid and unpinnable — as a kind of strategy resistant to traditional power structures — at least that seems to be an element that motivates your own work. Can you talk a little bit about more why hybridity is important to you? [As an aside, I'd add that this interview took place several months ago, at the inception of the Occupy Movement)

Gwenn-Aël Lynn: Hybrid is a word originating from the biological sciences. It indicates the cross breeding of different species or plants, often through human manipulation. However I am using it in the manner that Homi Bhabha defined in the 1990s. So, in my case, it is really a cultural term. I'm actually pushing this definition a little further, because what I'm really after is creolization, a term used, in particular, by Edouard Glissant, a Creole speaking Martinican poet, who, sadly, passed away recently. Where Hybridity is the offspring of two entities (in other words it hinges on a binary system), creolization allows for multplicity, a mixture where the different parts remain autonomous, a place of endless permutation. It speaks of a process, of something in constant flux, instead of just two parts synthesized into one. I'm actually looking for an appropriate translation of the French word métissage, and I think it is really interesting that there is no literal equivalent in English. There are many expressions like “mixed-race,” “bi-racial,” etc. but they all result from colonial racial ideologies, and I simply don't believe that these terms are relevant to today's society. Not that we should stop acknowledging “race” in America, but rather if our language is still predicated on colonial racial terms, we'll never move forward. The mere concept of race is very confining. Meanwhile. the global world is mutating. Therefore I settled on creolisation as the closest meaning to métissage, an intercultural process (and cross breeding by the same token), that granted is a by-product of colonialism, but also gave birth to new languages: Creole(s); new religions: Vodoo, Candomble, Santeria; new ways of cooking: Caribean, Reunionese, Mauritian, Brazilian, Mexican, etc. And indeed these cultural phenomena, over a long history, often occurred under complex power structures (whether under the European Colonial expansion, or the various invasions that have shaped modern day India, or even the succession of empires around the Mediterranean basin.)

CP: How does this subject resonate with you?

GAL: I guess I should also specify that I am a hybrid, but not in a racial term, because I have a french mother and an American father (from California) and I grew up between two households, over two continents, speaking two languages. So, I've always had, at least, a dual understanding of the world. In fact, one of the key moments I became aware that I was not simply “French” or “American” occurred while visiting my former in-laws on Reunion Island (A French “Over-Seas department”(1) in the Indian Ocean) where a local journalist asked me if I considered myself a métis [mixed race] because of my dual origins. I hesitated for a little while before answering “yes.” This answer would not be acceptable in a racially structured society like the United States (because I’m actually not the result of miscegenation, however I am culturally mixed), but on this island, where race relations are differently problematic, it was a possible answer, precisely because the Reunionese revel in creolisation. So when confronted with the North American way of dealing with race, creolization gives me a place that I can navigate, and more importantly where I can meet and share with other people, who are not like me, but who also possess this sense of belonging to a multiplicity rather than a single group or community. This creolized place is not only racially or visually motivated; it is linguistic (for people who command more than just English) transgender, and last but not least, political.

CP: It sounds like your understanding of creolization opens up at that point to include other kinds of mixes — like you say, mixes of sexual orientation, or gender etc.

GAL: Yes, I am naturally attracted towards other hybrids, and discourses, and practices, that embody such identity(ies). And, one of the things that have always disturbed me about the United States is that race theory, discourse, and emancipation has become very inward looking; we have all these very different hyphenated Americans (African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the list is quasi infinite) but this hyphen does not provide any room for those who belong to more than just one ethnic community. And there are many historical reasons to account for these racial divides (like, for instance, the “One-drop rule”)(2), it is a bit like, indeed we are a melting pot, but the content of the pot never melted. However, we tend to forget that the civil rights movement, for example, even though it started in the segregated South by those very people whose liberties had been restricted for so long. The civil rights movement had only been possible, and became successful by uniting across racial divides as “people.” If you look at pictures from those days you see people from all walks of life — there is a majority of Black folks of course, but you also see Jews, Whites, and in parallel you have Cesar Chavez uniting farm workers in California, and the formation of the American Indian Movement. As a matter of fact my father recalls participating in a protest against a segregated Woolworths in Santa Monica, CA, in the late fifties. Angry racist Whites were throwing stones at the protesters. Yet it’s through efforts and sacrifices of this kind that change was enacted. And so, today, I feel that “We Americans,” unlike other cultures that have also felt the yoke of colonialism, like India, Brazil, or Mexico, we do not embrace our creolized nature. And we certainly don’t give space to those who refuse to identify as belonging to a single racial, or cultural, and gender category.

BlackXican Pozole. Performance detail 2011. Gwenn-Aël LYNN and Hermes Santana collaborated to make and serve a pozole dinner in a performative way, emphasizing its olfactory dimension. (see note 6 for details)

 CP: Do you feel like we should try to shed identity altogether?

GAL: Of course not. It is not about: “let’s all mingle and become so homogenous that there is no difference left.” Rather, it is about the possibility of having multiplicity within each of us, and to relate to each other while embracing our differences. I think, but I’m not sure, that this is one possible interpretation of what Antonio Negri calls the “multitude.” So it becomes a multitude of multiplicities, the ferment for new democracy. On a simpler level there is a gastronomic metaphor that, I find, illustrates multiplicity very well:

Our preference, for miscegenation as thought, will go to the soup, for it is respectful of its components leaving them intact in a sober and tolerant broth.3
[From the Dictionnaire du Métissage
by Francois Laplantine and Alexis Nouss,
Paris, Pauvert Editions 2001]

CP: Where does that leave us now? And why do you think people are so interested in hybridity?

GAL: You know, there are moments when, I feel we are where we are, in the middle of the Great Recession, with a Black president, who is actually a “hybrid,” but who campaigned as a “black” candidate (instead of a mixed-race candidate, because of the “One-drop rule” I was speaking of earlier) and decided to show his birth certificate to answer pressure from the Republicans, because it is in the interest of Capitalism to have us divided like this. Divide and Conquer is an old colonial strategy to gain the upper hand. So if the American people is divided along ethnic classes that makes more cheap labour for Capitalism, because we are not going to get together to fight back. It’s easier to blame the Mexican immigrant worker because he is supposedly taking our jobs, or vice-versa to blame the Black worker, or the Unemployed because, as a citizen, he has access to what’s left of the welfare system, medicaid, etc. It’s easier to blame each other for the situation we are in than to reach out, and try to organize each other across divides, to actually take control and decide for our own fate. It’s a lot easier to let a bunch of flunkies on Capitol Hill haggle over the debt ceiling for weeks on end, while it’s getting harder for all of us to put food on our plates. And this goes for artists too, we are workers, we are manual and intellectual workers, but we are divided along medium, schools, hell we are divided along race too! And many of us accept to work very hard practically for free. Some of us even put themselves in debt in the hope of finishing a project because we are at a point where there no longer is any viable support for making art. But who reaps the fruit of this hard labour? The art market. Has it ever invested into an ambitious artistic project? Does Sotheby’s give back to the community when it scores a big sale? Nope! It lets the local art council support as best as can the making of art, and comes afterward to harvest the product without even leaving a dime behind. And yet we all put up with this system, or rather we just witness its passing. There are some in the community who are trying to raise some awareness about this labor division within the art world.

CP: Do you have an example?

GAL: I am thinking of Temporary Services, for example, who released a newspaper last year. There is American for the Arts but they are really more of an Art in Education advocacy group in DC. How about a group who advocates for better “art making conditions,” for the possibility of being a full time artist, rather than an artist with three or four different odd jobs and no time for art making for example? Recently, as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, there has also been Occupy Museum and Occupy Art.In France, some artists are trying to self organize under various headings to fight for more support and better policies, but it is one high steep hill. So, anyways, these are some of the reasons why I make work that addresses questions related to hybridity.

"Kretek," 2006, photograph: Maartin Van Loosbroek (see note 7 for details)

CP: How has this stuff influenced your own practice?

GAL: In terms of art projects, well there is this interactive Audiolfactory (4) installation I started working on in 2009, and for which I was awarded a CAAP grant dy the DCA of Chicago, but it’s unfortunately still in progress (I say unfortunate because I had originally planned on wrapping it in one year!).

CP: Doesn’t your work incorporate smell?

GAL: I started by engaging in conversation with other hybrids about their understanding of creolization and I asked them to relate their experience to smells, in order to garner scents that could be described as “Hybrid” (again not in a chemical or biological sense, but rather as associated to a hybrid experience). In order to meet my interviewees I relied on ads placed on the CAR website, on Facebook, on fliers placed in key coffee houses, and on cultural centers such as the American Indian Center on Wilson avenue, the Center on Halsted, the Korean American Center, The Tibetan Cultural Center in Evanston, the Asian American Museum in Chinatown, the Japanese American Historical Society, as well as word to mouth communication. Methodologically I did not rely only on conversation (in other words on language) to determine what these smells could be, I also conducted a performative scent workshop to see if the “performative body” would suggest other scents, in which Sebastian Alvarez participated. This workshop actually led to other scents, but the unforeseen issue is that it has now grown into a performance workshop that I have been asked to conduct in several places (including Lithuania) with no particular connection to hybridity. Anyways, after all these smells were suggested, I then collaborated with two perfumers : Michel Roudnitska (based in the South of France), and Christophe Laudamiel (based in New York) to reproduce these scents. I am not disclosing what they are yet, because I want the experience to be fresh and unmediated when this installation opens to the public (no set dates yet), but some of them are really surprising and interesting.

CP: Does the piece focus solely on smell?

GAL: Sounds will be associated to each scent station, and for this section of the project I am collaborating with an experimental DJ: Christophe Gilmore aka FluiD, who is originally from Los Angeles, but is now based in Chicago, and is actually Creole. Some of the comments and observations that were made by the various hybrids I engaged with will also find their ways into these sound samples, but I have to work that out with them, making sure they agree with the edits, get their permission etc. But these abstracts will greatly complexify the definition of creolization I gave earlier.

CP: It sounds like your understanding of this terminology, and your investigation of that terminology, changes depending on who you work with.

GAL: One of the great things about working with people (rather than alone or “in the name of”) is that it really gives you a plurality of meanings, and forces definitions to be very fluid and transient, but it is also hard because you have to make sure nobody is left behind or frustrated by the process. All of the participants to the project get credited in the end, but that’s a few months away. Each sound/smell station will be in the form of rice paper maché sculptures (mostly because I need material that at the same time contains but let smells and sounds ooze through) in the shape of noses and ears, so as you can see the hybrid nature of this installation really resides in its scents and sounds and not so much in its visual aspect. And that’s a deliberate choice, because it is the eyesight that makes us see race (skin surface level). Whereas it is not so present (but not completely absent either) in our aural and olfactory phenomenology. As Stuart Hall once said: “race enters the visual field.” There is actually a number of texts on visual hegemony and how this differs when it comes down to olfaction, but that discussion would take many more pages. But in a few words I can say that I’m addressing the question of creolization through smells to open up a new territory, not to be charted visually, but to practice rhizomatic studies to sense how identities, formed out of multiplicity, can get together and generate new sensibilities, new relations and hopefully new knowledge in how we can form inter-related and diverse groups of human beings.

GAL: While working on the above mentioned project, my former roommate moved out, so I placed an ad on Craigslist to find a new one, and one of the respondents happened to be someone I had initially interviewed for the project. So he moved in, and we are getting along well. As the project has been taking so long to complete I have been hosting “hybrid dinners” at my house once a year to keep in touch with my fellow hybrids but also to let them know I am still working on the installation, and to continue our conversations. For one of these dinners, Hermes (that’s my roommate) decided to make a Black-Xican Pozole (as you may have guessed he is Black and Mexican, and a fantabulous professional chef). It’s a pozole made the Mexican way, but it also incorporates elements of soul food like collard greens, and ham hock. Shortly thereafter I was invited, by Alberto Aguilar and Jorge Lucero, to contribute to a show they were curating: Hecho en Casa, a program of events that verged on acts of domesticity. So Hermes and I decided to turn the dinner into a public performance.

Finally as a last example, I could mention a previous interactive odour and sound installation (2006) which, when I made it I did not think of in terms of hybridity, but looking back I think it would qualify, even though, at that time, I did not have the theoretical baggage, let alone the drive, to conceive of it as a hybrid project. It’s an installation that I made while being an artist in residence in the Netherlands, in Enschede, close to the German border, via the European Pepinieres for Young Artists network, Transartists and the media department of the AKI. I wanted to address the fact that in current European discourse, and in particular in the Netherlands, despite years of immigrant labor and influx from the former colonies, identity is still defined from the center, the White Dutch majority. For instance, the Dutch government passed a law, a few years ago, that forces new immigrants to be fluent in Dutch. Yet there are plenty of Dutch citizens who are from the former colonies, and speak other languages. From my perspective this definition is very problematic, so in order to come up with a postcolonial definition of the contemporary Netherlands I met and engaged with Dutch nationals who had some kind of affiliation with the former colonies. As expected I met many different kinds of people, some with very traumatic histories, because independence was not a peaceful process, others because when they came to the mainland they had to deal with blatant racism. Some of these questions and stories were integrated, along with music composed by Antony Maubert, into the sound part of this installation, and others (I had a lot of data) were indexed on an audio CD that was released with the opening of the show in Enschede. And as an answer to the push for monolinguism by the authorities, the soundtracks of this project total 8 languages (Afrikaan, Bahassa, Balinese, Dutch, English, Papiamento, Taki-Taki, and Zulu). Indeed, Dutch is not the only language spoken today in the Netherlands. So it is by no means exhaustive, but instead reflect the people I met, while in residence. This project was my initial collaboration with Michel Roudnistka for the smells. Looking back at that project, I tried to manifest ideas of creolization by using a non-dialectical structure. A sensory experience organized by associations in order to foster connections and expand ideas of communities, language, identities, etc.

floor plan of the interactive odour and sound installation at De Overslag, Eindhoven, 2007.

But regarding hybridity specifically in regard to this installation from 2006, I think my most interesting find was that when Indonesia was occupied by the Dutch there were Indos who used the following expressions to describe their ancestry: the Motherland was Indonesia, and Fatherland described the Netherlands, because often, Indos were the children of a Dutch male civil servant who had married an Indonesian woman. This example was narrated by Johan Ghysels (an Indo photographer from Enschede) on the soundtrack associated to the odor of Kretek (clove cigarettes). In his words “we were the in-between layer” of Dutch colonial society, between the white elite and the Indonesian natives, rejected by the latter because more privileged, and despised by the former for not being “completely” Dutch. As a matter of fact, many of the people I talked to, in the course of this project, described themselves as “in-between”. When independence struck, many of the Indos had to leave for fear of being exterminated by Indonesian Nationalists who identified them with the oppressors. So they sought refuge in the Netherlands where they had some relatives but once there, as Gill Bollegraf, another Indo photographer from Enschede, told me, they were confronted by really strange behavior. An incident happened to her mother (Gil was born in the Netherlands): one day at the market, after her arrival in the Netherlands in the sixties, a little White Dutch kid lifted her skirt to see if she had a tail, because he thought she was a monkey. So a few Indos went to California to start a new life but the majority of them, nevertheless, stayed in the Netherlands. Today they have organized themselves into different associations (http://www.nasi-idjo.nl/), they have their own music, food, etc. It is a striving culture, but always remains at their core, this sense of having been forcibly displaced.

____________________________________

(1) Read: former colony, whose inhabitants decided to remain within the French République when the colonial empire broke down in the 60′s and 70′s. It boasts one of the most creolized population in the world.
(2) Meaning any person with “one drop of black blood” was considered as black under the Racial Integrity Act, despite the fact that many were mixed-race people.
(3) This quote is my rough translation of the following text, and operates a distinction between two kinds of soups: the potage -which is a soup where all the ingredients have been grinded and blended and a soupe where all the ingredients are left as they are, floating in their broth: “Notre préférence, nonobstant nos penchants gastronomiques et leurs goûts respectifs, ira, pour une pensée du métissage, à la soupe. Car elle est respectueuse de ses composantes qu’elle laisse intactes dans un bouillon sobre et tolérant. Le potage, lui, broie, mélange, passe, bref il fusionne, visant à l’homogène.”
(4)Sound and smell

IMAGE NOTES
(5) Roots… (a speaking garden) 2010. Installation made while in residence at the Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes in St. Cloud, France. A sound enhanced winter garden. Foreigners, and nationals with experience abroad, recommended the plants constituting this installation. While in residence, I met with them and conducted interviews discussing the metaphor of roots, as pertaining to one’s origins. During the exhibition, abstracts from these interviews were triggered by the visitors, whose displacements were monitored by discrete c-mos cameras and a computer where these displacements were analyzed by two open source software: Processing and Pure Data. Pure Data patch built by Ben Carney.
(6) This dinner took place at Cobalt Studios, located in Pilsen, and was sonified with a “Pilsen” soundscape. It was part of a series of event: Hecho en Case/Home made curated by Alberto Aguilar and Jorge Lucero. A program of events that verged on acts of domesticity.
(7) interactive odour and sound installation (2006). Detail of kretek diffuser (clove and tobacco). Scents, sounds, electronics, infra-red motion detector, MIDI box (an open source interface), software, computer. This project was realized while in residence in Enschede, the Netherlands, via the European exchange program for young artists: “European pépinières [nursery] for young artists”. Collaborators: Paul Jansen Klomp (new media artist), Antony Maubert (composer), and Michel Roudnitska. (perfumer).
This installation has been shown in Enschede at Villa deBank in April 2006, in Eindhoven at De Overslag in March 2007, and at Casino Luxembourg, Forum for Contemporary Art, Luxembourg in September 2007.

GUEST POST BY HEIDI NORTON

As a photography student of the mid/late 90′s, Barbara Kasten was of great significance to me. I lost track of her during the first decade of the millennium, as the contemporaries of the Becher’s school (Gursky, Ruff, Struth) dominated the art market with their dry, representational Deadpan Photography. Now, as an educator 11 years later, I relish in Kasten’s renaissance. Abstraction is transcendental to me, but above all, I see Kasten as a pioneer of contemporary relevance.

Most people know her as photographer, but Barbara Kasten is an artist. Photography is a material to her, the camera’s use- very calculated and intentional. She treats it with equal significance to the rest of her materials–mesh, plexi, screen, mirror, glass, and light. Her influences are vast and span many decades: Irwin’s light and space movement of the late 60′s; Judd’s studies and use of modern industrial material; Post-Minimalism, and its tendencies toward performance; Process art; Site-Specific art; and Abstraction of the 40′s (Moholy Nagy), 90′s, and present. She is presently celebrating her first solo show in Chicago at Tony Wight gallery, Ineluctable, which runs through October 22^nd.

Barbara Kasten, Ineluctable at Tony Wight Gallery

Barbara and I sit down and talk art–mostly me picking her mind. But flattered I am, as she is inquisitive about my work as well. See below!

H: Material became important to you very early on in your career. You were trained as a sculpture and a fibers artist. As a fibers instructor, you used fiberglass screen as a teaching tool to model 3d forms. Talk about your transition from fiberglass as a 3-D sculpting tool to its appearance in your first Cyanotype, Untitled 13, 1974. When and how was the camera introduced?

My first photographic works were photograms. When I discovered the industrial screen as a way to create 3D weaving maquettes, I also tried creating a 2D illusionistic rendition in the form of a photogram. That was in 1974, and I still use the same material today in the Studio Constructs.  In the process of arranging the photograms. I liked the way that shadows were captured in negative shapes.  I was also making life size arrangements using packing boxes and other geometric forms I built for that purpose.  At that time, Polaroid was a new color photographic medium; so when I was offered some 8×10 Polaroid film, I learned how to use my first camera, an 8×10 view camera.

Barbara Kasten, Untitled 6, 1976, Cyanotype photogram

H: Speaking of the camera, let’s talk about the relationship between the image created, the materials (light, plexi, screen), and the exhibited object (the print or projection). When we spoke, you talked about the “several stages of development before the image is where it should be”. Please explain this. Can you talk about the integral relationship between the construction/sculpture and how it is mediated through the camera? A minimalist like Robert Morris might have said that there is a “dematerialization of the object via the process of it being photographed.” Do you see the camera and photographic print as more, less, or equal in relevance to the process and materials?

Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 125, 2011, Archival pigment print

B: Process has been the core of all of my work- whether it was the sculptural fiber pieces I did in Poland while on a Fulbright, the photograms in the early 70′s or the most recent Studio Constructs and video work.  The shadow- and the light that causes it- has been my conceptual grounding.  I am not interested in the object itself but how it serves as the means of recording light and shadow.  The photograph becomes the object when the light is merged with form and shadow on a 2d surface. It’s really the light that completes the action, whether it is in direct contact with light sensitive material or passing thru the lens of a camera.  The Studio Constructs go through many configurations before I arrive at the final image….The ‘sculpture’ stays set up in the studio giving me time to live with it and the images I make of it.  I can expose many pieces of film before I’m happy with it.  Why not digital…many reasons but the main one is that I like a slower process so I can think about the work as I make it.

B: How about you, Heidi? You currently have a show up at Northeastern University, Not to Touch the Earth (Reception this Friday, Oct. 21st,  from 6-9). In some of your work, the photograph seems to be a document of your process and in other work, the plants or objects are integral to the piece by their physical inclusion.  Talk about these different approaches and how you decide when to create a sculptural piece versus a ‘recording of the piece’ -if you see it that way.  If not, how do you think about the role of the plants?  Does the photograph play a different role in each of these approaches?  Tell me about the importance of the object in your work.

Heidi Norton, Installation view

H: All of this work began from the image Whitescape, 2010, where I painted all the objects, including the plants, white by hand. Several weeks later, I was at my studio and noticed that the Dieffenbachia plant I used had begun to grow out of the paint. The painted leaves died and fell off and new life began to sprout from the center. I was intrigued by this–a very pleasant surprise– as painting the plants had left me feeling guilty.  The material of the paint was killing, yet at the same time preserving and stimulating growth. I included that same Dieffenbachia plant in the piece Deconstructed Rebirth- my third still life construction made for the camera. In that piece you see the new sprout and the decayed white leaves hanging from the plant. Almost a year later in My Dieffenbachia Plant with Tarp (Protection), the same plant reappears as a whole new plant. Only through the use of the camera as a recording mechanism is one able to see the inclusion of this narrative. With the camera’s ability to freeze time we can see the plants in varying states through life to disparity to death. Evolution of a Plant is a more literal example of this idea.  I think of the “New Age Still Life” series as sculptural construction. Like yours, these have several stages of development before they become images or objects on the wall. Higherself and Mango are shot in a studio with a plexi-glass shelving unit that was created to compress the space further within the 2D plane.  In the sculptural objects- glass and wax pieces- the plants are pressed to glass or embedded in wax. These materials are also meant to preserve, freeze, and maybe illicit death. The pieces are meant to activate one another; whereas the photographs are fixed- frozen in one state, in the way that Barthes talk about the “Death of an Image”. He sees death implicit in each photograph. He is struck by how the photograph moves you back through time, how you always have the past with you- the photograph as a kind of resurrection. The sculptures will transition in front of your eyes over a span of time based on the nature of the plant. Plants in various states between life and death, wax melting, the color of the plants from green to brown- they are in constant flux.

Heidi Norton, Explore Every Aspect of the Finite, 2011

H: In the Alex Klein essay that accompanied the group show at Shane Campbell in 2010, “Terminus Ante Quem” she compares your process to that of process and earthworks artist, Robert Smithson. She writes, “he famously challenged what he saw as the misperception that art objects function as a kind of culmination or terminus as quem of artistic achievement.” Basically stating that the object supersedes the process, or the process is a building up to the object. People see your works, the final product, a very polished and refined photograph or projection, different than the “documentation” of the 70s. How has being grouped into a movement of photographers whose work is notable for its formal beauty and technical execution changed how the work is interpreted?

B: I happen to like beautiful objects, but beauty alone isn’t enough.  Some investigations of beauty can bring out the underpinnings of a structure or idea or process that doesn’t possess that same kind of beauty as the surface. However, I think that my process is important to the understanding of the work which ultimately becomes an object…. a beautiful object. The traditional photographic process is different than mine.  I carry on a continual dialogue with the subject, changing each step along the way, much like a painter might do. The process is intense and intimate and can include aspects of performance, documentation and sculpture.

H: You mentioned you are reading Donald Judd’s essay on the “specificity of objects” and the discussion of the “under developed rectangle”. Please explain it’s relevance to your work. We talked about using light on reflective surface to break or reconstruct space within your work and that reduction is the abstraction. Talk more about this.

B: I was in a show at Ballroom Marfa this year and visiting the Chinati Foundation re-sparked my interest in Judd.  Just to witness his immersion into the simple architecture of a small western town and how it became an extension of his vision and art. The barracks, containing row after row of polished, reflective boxes illuminated by the Texas sun, was an incredible experience of landscape and geometry merging through the medium of the sun.  Judd is straightforward and yet incredibly complex.  Its a position that I hope to develop more in my work and thinking.

H: Architecture within the constructed space and the architecture of the gallery seem integral to the work and installation. Please discuss the distinction between phenomenological space and imagined space, and how unambiguous, or understandable for that matter, the difference is between the two experiences.

B: An example of how I like to incorporate architecture is in the installation of ‘Ineluctable’.  The three 11×14 silver gelatin prints are positioned so as to include the corner when the viewer looks towards the work.  Upon close observation, one becomes aware that there is a corner in each of the pieces that reinforces and establishes the importance of the architectural element in situ.  The video ‘Corner’ also plays with the identity of generic structural architecture and light projection that alters its dimensionality.

Barbara Kasten, Installation view, photograms on right

B: What about the space and environments you create in the gallery’s space? Do you think of your work as environmental installations?  For instance the inclusion of architectural pedestals as in the piece, Michael 2011, shown in Jason Foumberg’s September 2011 Frieze review, or the collaborative piece with Karsten Lund, presenting shelves of books that were focused on plant life in “Not to See the Sun” exhibit at Ebersmoore last April?

H: I am interested in creating an atmosphere or environment in all of my spaces- the gallery, the studio, my apartment. When making work, I like to assume the personality of an avid plant collector, a botanist- my studio is a hybrid of herbarium and art studio.  I speak mantras to my plants. There is dirt, roots, wax, film and photographs everywhere. I am a creator and nurturer of things and sometimes these things have difficulty co-existing in the same space—precious archival pigment prints shot with 4×5 transparency film made on expensive baryta inkjet paper do not mingle well with dirt, wax and resin. But I like this mix- taking something precious like a photographic print or plant and submerging it into hot wax–pushing the integrity of the material outside of it’s natural limits.  Michael, the piece you mentioned, is maybe a good example of when these two polarities collide—to me, it’s both photographic and sculptural. When I created the display stands for the piece, I intended for them to not look like pedestals that reference high art. I wanted them to assume some anonymous person’s makeshift constructions. “After the Fires of a Little Sun”, the installation of books and mirror, are to reference a mantle and book collection.  Not necessarily my own collection (though all the books are/have been used for personal research and relate in some abstract way to my work), but maybe someone whose interests vary from botany, to color theory, to a 1970s back-to-the-land manual. The project grafts new imagery and typewritten text directly onto the pages of existing books. The artist and writer’s responses become merged with the research materials, producing an unconventional artist’s monograph/zine, fueled by the symbiotic combination of three elements: the original texts, the writer’s typewritten thoughts, and the artist’s wide-ranging visuals. The effect of leafing through this material (now collected in one volume) is a bit like stumbling upon some anonymous person’s avid research materials — perhaps a mad botanist with a flair for detours into the histories of art and counter-culture.

Heidi Norton, Installation at Northeastern Illinois University. Through October 28th

Ineluctable is on view until October 22nd at Tony Wight Gallery. 

Not to Touch the Earth is on view until October 28th at Northeastern Illinois. Opening Reception, October 2nd, 6-9pm.

Heidi Norton received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She lives and works in Chicago. Norton has presented solo exhibitions in Chicago and San Francisco. Group exhibitions include How Do I Look at Monique Meloche Gallery, The World as Text at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Snapshot at Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Knitting Factory in New York. Norton was published in My Green City (Gestalten) in 2011 and her spring show at Not to See the Sun, EbersMoore was reviewed in Frieze, September 2011. She currently is collaborating with writer Claudine Ise in a seasonal column for Bad At Sports called Mantras for Plants. Norton is represented by EBERSMOORE gallery in Chicago. She is faculty in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I came across an article by Martin Patrick, Restlessness and Reception: Transforming Art Criticism in the Age of the Blogosphere, that discusses at length the role of art criticism today and — unlike most pieces I read about the state of the world — ends on a seemingly hopeful note. It thought I  could post something about it here because I find I’m often thinking about the web-context and what it means as a medium. I don’t especially feel like I have a handle on how best to exercise its talents, but I like chewing on the idea periodically, no doubt in hope of some Eureka! moment. “The web becomes a tool for ‘housing’ certain materials, indeed a virtual archive, or in Andre Malraux’s famous phrase a ‘museum without walls’ but then it is more important to ask how can newer arrangements, actions, conversations be created on the basis of these contextual settings” (Patrick).

I’ve seen a dramatic shift in Chicago’s critical dialogue. When I first moved here about seven years ago all anyone could talk about was the death of the New Art Examiner. Its demise added salt to the already throbbing (and ever hysterical) wound of Chicago’s second city syndrome. The Midwestern art market was not even capable of supporting a magazine that represented its interests and the rest of the country was disinterested in the activities of its midriff. While I’m likely misremembering the past (again, I’d just come to Chicago and did not yet understand its nuances), it seemed like that pang of insecurity propelled a number of other projects forward, as they insisted on creating modes of dissemination and representation. When I came here NAE had been out of commission for two years and its lament was continuous for the following four. Now, there’s an amazing vitality located largely on-line with artslant, art21, BadatSports (though I suppose B@S would resist the art criticism label standing somewhere between Vice and Cabinate) and many others. The mechanics of this phenomena are reflected in Patrick’s piece, as he points to the once-professional potential of The Critic (even in so far as it possesses archetypal potential); now much of the critical dialogue is activated and sustained by amateurs. Even those who are paid rarely expect a living wage and at best peddle together a variety of wages. “The blog—apart from the vast amount underwritten directly by corporate sponsorship—is most often an amateur/volunteer’s virtual space involving a greater probability of being generated and launched quickly, randomly, even haphazardly, and with more chance of rapidly ensuing back-and-forth discussions, responses, dialogue than a traditionally formatted journal, magazine or newspaper can generally allow.” That’s not to say the article is all positive.

This model of free labor is quite attractive to corporations. Additionally there some very real suggestions that the bite has been taken out of critical remarks (for instance, Mad Men’s ironic appropriation of the past that nevertheless collapses into a complicit reprise of old hierarchies, or how response to the Yes Mens’ NYTimes prank neutered the fake newspaper’s very serious critique message.) These aspects are also endemic to an Internet age, where we can constantly rewrite history. Then of course there’s the Internet’s shady origin story: “The origins of the Internet itself derive from the American attempt to establish a communications system in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack under the aegis of the the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) a wing of the Department of Defense, or ARPAnet[work]” (Patrick). Additionally the web facilitates a kind of sloppiness. (At this time I would like to retroactively apologize for my typos. If you want to be my editor without pay, give me a holler). But beyond slights of hand, on-line appropriation is fast, constant and cheap — it’s so easy, for instance, that images, text and ideas are borrowed, spliced, reiterated, misrepresented and so on and so forth. While on the one hand the frontier-like openness of this space, a space not yet settled and defined, is exciting; it lacks a codified rigor. It is still experimental and malleable and capable of much more. The question then remains: How to exhaust its potential as a response vehicle for cultural production? How do we embrace its shortcomings with its strengths? And does it truly challenge canonical ideas of art historicism?

“The internet offers a seemingly open public space that is simultaneously private, solipsistic, restricted. Within this reconfigured environment the digital archive acts as a kind of indirect critical mechanism and virtual repertory house for essential material to be potentially drawn upon by interested parties. That is to say, the accessibility lent to previously arcane and unusual avant-gardist phenomena goes a long way towards setting a tone for the integration of the wildly eccentric and experimental practices that are too long overlooked rather than solely the widely accepted canonical material which is in turn overexposed and despite its merits altogether lifeless. Thus the existence of new sites such as Kenneth Goldsmiths’ www.ubu.com facilitates the permissive and promiscuous notion of having experimental strands of poetry, prose, music, film and visual culture inhabit a treasure hunt/database ready to scavenged and relived via the use of mp3 files, YouTube-style streaming video, text files and so on means that Hollis Frampton, Marcel Broodthaers, Luigi Russolo and many more are incrementally closer to becoming household names” (Patrick).