Sub-Rural # 60, Michelle Grabner Interview

PK: Michelle, I understand the design and presentation of your work through a reformed neo-Dada and Feminist frame. But it’s differently located in a consciously American and Inland context of class, industry, and hand-made labor with grit and a restless sense of humor. Is that a reasonable abridgement? Your democratization of form reinforces the idea that everyone instinctively aestheticizes, everyone designs, and within that there can be freedom and subversion.

MG: Those are very much the frameworks I find myself working within now. Earlier in my career, just after graduate school, the theoretical language of feminism and postmodernism was more explicit, even directive. I was deeply engaged with those academic structures and theories, and they shaped how I understood power and representation.

Over time, though, as I moved beyond that institutional context, those same concerns didn’t disappear—they became embedded in the everyday life. The power structures that I had once approached analytically began to reveal themselves through different conditions: in the economics of the middle class, in the rhythms and expectations of women’s labor, and in the material realities of domestic and industrial making.

What changed was less the framework itself and more its location. The work became a site where those forces operate quietly but persistently—less about illustrating theory and more about enacting it. Moreover, abstraction became more foregrounded.

I became more interested in how aesthetics emerge from that space—how repetition, pattern, material and labor carry meaning without needing to illustrate the self or the politics of those social conditions. I found room for a kind of subtle resistance: a way of working that acknowledges constraint. The middle position (middle America, the middle class, and the mainstream) is also a power position and a location of agency.

PK: How does your observance and modification of objects and materials relate to trends in archival art production and regional identity? How does it approach content linguistically, particularly with punning and un-naming?

MG: My relationship to objects and materials begins with giving attention to the mundane, an observance of what is already present, already in circulation, already used. I’m not so much interested in transforming things beyond recognition as I am in translating them. This unoriginal approach to artmaking can reframe context so histories and associations can surface or resurface. In that sense, the work aligns with certain tendencies in archival practices, but it resists the authority or fixity of the archive. I would say that I am less interested in preservation than in activation.

Regionallity plays a role in that. Living and working in the Midwest there’s a cherished proximity to industry, to domestic production, to systems of repetition and utility. These aren’t neutral conditions—they inform a visual language that is modest, pragmatic, and often overlooked. I’m drawn to that sensibility, to a kind of vernacular intelligence embedded in everyday forms.

Linguistically, I approach content in a similar way. Punning and re-articulating are strategies that open language up rather than close it down. A pun can introduces slippage while un-naming resists the impulse to fix meaning and to submit efficiently to the transactional, both in ideology and the cultural marketplace.

PK: Is inland culture a viable alternative to coastal culture?

MG: I’m not sure I think about Inland culture as an “alternative” so much as a condition. The often overlooked or undervalued in relation to coastal centers can be an opportunity for the imagination. I often think about the American School of Architecture at University of Oklahoma, particularly as it developed under Bruce Goff and Mendel Glickman. There was an emphasis on experimentation and a kind of independence from dominant architectural orthodoxies. Working at a distance from major cultural centers allows for distortions of prevailing styles and institutional expectations. Just as an aside, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Goff show was exceptional and I hope those who relished his imagination also grasped how place and distance contributed to Goff’s work.

So that model has always been instructive to me. It suggests that geographic and cultural distance can foster a kind of formal and conceptual freedom, where experimentation is less about responding to cultural hierarchies and more about responding to immediate conditions. It’s not a withdrawal from larger conversations, but a different entry point into them.

PK: How does your observance of un-aesthetic and folk objects critique a still-living Greenbergian thread about untrained artists, commerce, and kitsch?

MG: I don’t approach those objects as “un-aesthetic,” even though they’re often categorized that way within a Greenbergian framework. What interests me is how hierarchies between high and low, fine art and kitsch continue to shape how we assign value. In that sense, my engagement isn’t about rejecting those distinctions outright, but about quietly unsettling them.

When I adapt and translate everyday motifs, objects, and materials, I’m attentive to the intelligence embedded within them. These objects aren’t outside of aesthetic consideration, they simply operate within different systems of knowledge or are tied to utility, repetition, or tradition rather than an artistic authorial condition. But of course, those objects, materials and motifs are already entangled with commerce. I’m interested in how those forms of making complicate the narrative that kitsch is purely derivative or passive. So rather than positioning my work as pure critique in a declarative sense, I think of it as a re-situating which of course also carries a critical stance. To reroute authorship, taste, and what constitutes a meaningful aesthetic experience are tensions I hope to keep active.

PK: Does higher education de-emphasize or overemphasize place and mentorship?

MG: At best, higher education needs to do both at the same time. But today mentorship is overemphasized. Unfortunately art education is increasingly selling students the promise of privileged proximity to influence instead of the resources for self-directed development. When place and mentorship are treated as dynamic and contingent, they can be generative. When they become transactional, they limit inquiry, critique and risk. 

PK: Does Contemporaneity disenfranchise regional histories and labor?

MG: Contemporaneity can flatten distinctions if it’s understood as a universal present that privileges immediacy, circulation, and visibility. But I don’t think that disenfranchisement is inevitable. It depends on how artists choose to work within or against those conditions. Also because regional histories and labor are not static. For me, domestic or repetitive labor carries a temporality that runs adjacent to much of the speed of contemporary culture. 

PK: What contributions to Modern and Contemporary art emerge from rural and suburban provinces?

MG: That is a difficult question. Perhaps that is why I run alternative art spaces in rural Wisconsin (The Poor Farm) and for a time in Oak Park, IL, a suburb of Chicago (The Suburban) which now resides in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood. It is certainly true that rural and suburban contexts contribute a different relationship to time, labor, and material. And they offer alternative models of rigor and can foster a relationship to artmaking that need not be attached to novelty. But I can say that  I enjoy working in my rural studio because my understanding of persistence, attention, and physicality are altered. 

PK: To what extent do young artists relate to making socially intelligent work about where they live also acknowledges the complexities of Modernism critical to the discipline?

MG: I think many young artists are deeply invested not necessarily where they are, but how ‘where’ can help augment their narrative identity. Let’s call that their brand. So that means they stop short of engaging or even caring about the complexities and histories of those Modernisms that may be critical to their discipline. OK, that seems harsh and generalized but ‘place’ in today’s culture is a prop for storytelling and not a place to intellectually or ethically dwell. 

PK: How badly does AI risk blunting the resurgence of handmade objects, archival projects, or the significance of ruralism over the last couple of decades?

MG: I am confident that artists will work through, against, and alongside it as we always do when confronted with new tools. And for artists who value process over outcome, AI is not a threat. But it is a dire threat to our environment, its inhabitants, and to our natural resources. Don’t get me going on the data centers overtaking the Wisconsin landscape. Shameful.

Above images from the exhibition “Anosmia” Mickey Gallery, Chicago