January 12, 2018 At Work Transgression and the Prohibition: An Interview with Moyra Davey By Sarah Cowan Still from Les Goddesses, 2011. Courtesy the artist. “A work, once finished, is ‘like a tombstone,’ ” Moyra Davey writes in her latest book, Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest. Always aware of the inevitable end, she has constructed a practice conscious of its own past and reliant on radical self-doubt. Her photographs, films, and essays cross-reference and depend on one another as she makes a subject of her own process and its intentions, fears, and failures. Davey has published twelve artfully designed books that lovers of her work covet for their rarity. This most recent book gathers two essays, “Les Goddesses” (2011) and “Hemlock Forest” (2016), along with photographs and stills from their respective film iterations, in which she is recites her text aloud for the camera, opening it up to the serendipity of mistakes. Davey emerged in the eighties, in an art world allergic to the confessional work she was making. Over time, she experienced a “gradual seeping in of a kind of biographical reticence,” until, as she writes, “my subjects constituted little more than the dust on my bookshelves or the view under the bed.” In the Les Goddesses film, she appears not photographing dust but wiping it from her own portfolios in order to reconsider the brassy, sexy photographs she made of her punk teenage sisters in the eighties. She pins the prints to the walls of her apartment where they function as visual footnotes in a monologue dealing with family and disappointment. Davey often portrays herself in her New York City apartment, within reach of any bookmarked volume in the crosshatched piles on her shelves. Her writing is weighted by reverence for other artists, writers, and filmmakers, whose quotes crowd her paragraphs. “Perhaps I still ‘write’ like a photographer,” she once wrote. “I go out into the world of other people’s writing and take snapshots.” Davey tends to invite her audience in at what feels like the most inopportune moment, when she is surrounded by notes, her rooms in a state of honest disarray, a mess of chairs and dishes piled in the sink. That’s why, as I sat down in her living room for our interview, I felt an uncanny familiarity—everything: the bookcases, the couch, the kitchen, was as I had seen it before—down to her cannonball-like pitbull, Rose, who lay on her back, watching us talk upside down. INTERVIEWER How did these two pieces come together into this book? They were made years apart—Les Goddesses in 2011 and Hemlock Forest in 2016. DAVEY After I made Les Goddesses, I spoke about it as a kind of love letter to my family. I tell the story of my sisters and myself when we were debauched teenagers. I draw parallels between my mother and my siblings, and Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters and their “bad behavior” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They got pregnant before marriage, they ran off to France, they lived as free spirits. Bringing the two stories together began with these fabricated coincidences of dates, for instance. My parents getting married exactly two hundred years after Wollstonecraft’s parents, having the same number of children, and coincidences of given names like Claire and Jane. By linking my family stories to the Romantics, I grant them a different kind of valence. Then, two or three years after making Les Goddesses, there was a tragedy. My sister Jane’s youngest daughter, Hannah, overdosed, and I started to rethink the way I had portrayed my siblings and all the drugs and drinking. I began to wonder what would it mean to revisit the story of Les Goddesses, in light of this fatal overdose, and not to show us as cute, fearless punks from the early eighties, but as we are now, visibly scarred women in our fifties and early sixties? What does our reckless behavior mean now, in light of what happened to Hannah? Read More
January 8, 2018 At Work Tom Sachs and David Searcy: Japanese Tea, Rockets, and Switchblades By David Searcy “Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony” Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (which closed yesterday) was a vast and complex exhibition of ideas within ideas about ideas, wherein the protocols of the Japanese tea ceremony and those of NASA’s space program are revealed to express opposed yet deeply similar understandings and even longings. There is a “me upon my pony on my boat” sort of yearning throughout this profound yet willfully childlike theater of imitation. Lucia Simek, an artist and the communications manager for the museum, and a friend of both Sachs and the writer David Searcy, arranged for the two to get together in the spirit of their weirdly similar interests—rockets, Mars, Japanese tea bowls, and switchblade knives. Read More
December 19, 2017 At Work An Interview with Kerri Pierce By Joel Pinckney The Faroe Islands. Jóanes Nielsen’s novel, The Brahmadells, is one of the first books to be translated into English from Faroese, the native language of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago of eighteen islands situated in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway. Its capital, Tórshavn, which figures prominently in the novel, has around twenty thousand inhabitants, making it one of the smallest capitals in the world—and the Islands’ native language, Faroese, only has around sixty thousand native speakers. Nielsen’s novel was translated by Kerri Pierce and published last month by Open Letter. This roving tale of the history of those small and remote islands tells a story both intimate, tracing the complex familial legacy of the Brahmadells and other families over several generations, and general, weaving historical documents and characters into its narrative thread. It is a captivating and enlightening immersion into a place most readers will find unfamiliar. Kerri Pierce and I spoke by phone earlier this month. Pierce’s translation marks the eighth language from which she has translated, though talking with her, one would never know. She was humble and unassuming, and she spoke of her voracious appetite for translating new languages as one might speak of learning to cook a new dish, or adding half a mile to one’s jogging routine. We discussed how she stumbled into translating, and the value of translated literature. Read More
December 11, 2017 At Work States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta By Sarah Gerard Anne Garréta was the first person born after the founding of Oulipo to be admitted to the experimental literary group. The conceit of her memoir, Not One Day (2002), is consistent with that association: At the book’s opening, she vows to write five hours a day, every day for a month, each time recollecting one woman whom she’s desired or who has desired her. She will place the entries in alphabetical order. The result, she says, will be a “stammering alphabet of desire,” one that will locate, spell out, and delineate desire in her life. But in the end, the book doesn’t follow its own rules; it is as elusive as desire itself, unable to be pinned down, slippery as the object of its second-person point of view. Rather than comprising, impossibly, an elucidation of the nature of desire, the memoir instead enacts it, becoming an experience of seduction and pursuit. Garréta has published six books in France, and two—Sphinx (1986) and Not One Day—have been translated into English (in 2015 and 2017, respectively, both by Emma Ramadan). Both upend expectations for love and literature, insofar as we can expect to be anything but transported. In Sphinx, Garréta offers a love story without revealing either of the lovers’ genders. The book is a dark, pulsing romance, tortured and thrilling. I spoke with Garréta recently about Sphinx and Not One Day. I was, at the time, falling in love and in the grip of desire. “Everything becomes salient,” Garréta told me, when I shared this with her. We talked about the relationship of desire to writing, the various states and attitudes of the physical body, and the reawakening of curiosity. INTERVIEWER How do you view the relationship between desire and writing? In your life, are those two things intertwined? GARRÉTA I’d say yes because they’re both quite complicated to figure out and they are both liable to fall into cliché, into patterns that are customary and basically uninteresting. So the difficulty, both in desire and in writing, is to create forms that are not necessarily given or granted. It takes effort. I would say that it’s not a writing of desire, or that there’s a direct connection—there’s an analogy. Read More
November 17, 2017 At Work Narcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer By Robert Storr Yvonne Rainer, still from Privilege, 1990, 16mm, 103 minutes. © Yvonne Rainer. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of Chicago. The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a collection of more than sixty interviews by Robert Storr with contemporary artists. Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker who has been recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of the past fifty years. She emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of the Judson Dance Theater movement, an avant-garde performance style that blended elements of dance and visual art, and later turned to experimental film. This previously unpublished conversation was conducted on April 9, 2009, at the College of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, at Boston University. INTERVIEWER Let me begin by saying that it is a special pleasure to enter into this conversation. Yvonne and I have known each other over quite a long time. We first met in the early 1980s—in effect, part of the protracted aftermath of the 1970s—which was a very different time from now. What we’ve gone through lately, and are about to go through with the onset of recession resembles the 1970s more so than the boom times of the 1980s and nineties: an art world where the terms of making art takes place against a very unsettled and uncertain background. Considering that we are about to speak in front of a predominantly student audience, I would like to begin by saying that I’ve been struck by the way that for the past twenty years or so, people have talked a great deal about careers as if there was some kind of scripted narrative or a scripted scenario for how one begins in one place and ends up in another ideal place. But it seems to me that art has always been much more about working, than about careers and about the specific work that one chooses. Since then you have done many things. Perhaps our conversation might start with the fact of just this variety of paths forward: how you have chosen to work in this way and chosen to work in that way and how have patterns developed rather than how those were patterns foretold or planned. Read More
November 10, 2017 At Work Daring as a Woman: An Interview with Lorna Simpson By Heidi Zuckerman The following is excerpted from Conversations with Artists, a collection of conversations by Heidi Zuckerman with thirty-four contemporary artists. INTERVIEWER Your work is extensive and takes many different forms. How do you respond when people ask you what you do? SIMPSON It gives me pause when people ask me what I do, because there are so many different avenues that my work has gone down. Photography being one avenue, film and video another, more recently—over the past five years—drawing, using inks, and collage. Although I’m trained in different areas, I gravitate more toward the photographic arts. I’ve always left it open as to how I work in different mediums and try not to put too many boundaries on what I do. It’s more about experimenting or the process of making that matters. INTERVIEWER Do you consider your works to be narrative based? SIMPSON Many, yes. My earlier works from the eighties and midnineties are very narrative based. But even more recently, the work has an undercurrent of the narrative of the archive, of found photographs, implied narratives, and fictions. Read More