Artist Lawrence Chua interviewed Julie Mehretu for BOMB Issue 91, Spring 1995. “At the heart of Julie Mehretu’s paintings is a question about the ways in which we construct and live in the world,” he wrote five years ago. “I think of Mehretu’s paintings as going a long way toward articulating the disjunction of life as it’s lived today: as we circulate across reality and its mediations, constantly trying to reconcile daily experience with the peculiar light emanating from the end of the world as we know it.”

We can’t think of a better statement with which to end this portion of our “BOMB in the Building” series. Enjoy!

Julie Mehretu, "Congress," 2003. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 71 × 102”.

Lawrence Chua: To what extent are the paintings a critique? We’ve been talking a lot about current political events. . . .

Julie Mehretu: I don’t look at the paintings necessarily as critique. In fact, I’m not so interested in being critical. What I’m interested in, in painting at least, is our current situation, whether it be political, historical or social, and how it informs me and my context and my past. I am trying to locate myself and my perspective within and between all of it. I know I keep on going back to that, but it’s like, here’s a war and here’s the way that we’re treating the war, and how we’re experiencing the war. I was looking at some great Martha Rosler pieces recently, the Bringing the War Home photocollages which she began in the ‘70s. They are her images of advertisements invading the interiors of new homes, new homes designed for living in new worlds, but through the windows you can see soldiers fighting the Vietnam War. There are these interesting juxtapositions of what’s happening and what we experience. Of course there’s much more inherent critique in those pieces.

LC: That sounds metaphoric in a way that your paintings are not, which is what gives your work its power. We live in a moment that is obsessed with the Real. There’s this disjunction between physical daily life and the kind of extremely mediated reality we glimpse on reality TV or Fox News. Maybe it’s that disjunction that is being lived out in your paintings.

JM: When you’re writing, is it important to you to make that bridge between a situation that is happening right now and the eternal process of working and creativity?

LC: I begin with a structure and I try to have as clear an idea as possible about the structure and the way characters are going to move through that structure and the events that are going to propel them. The structure becomes set in a context, whether it’s the nineteenth century of Vanity Fair or the twentieth-century Gulf War. That context will influence language, rituals, actions, but I try to maintain the structure I set out to build. Colm Tóibín taught these writing workshops where he had the students begin by reading three Greek tragedies. His basic premise was that you could trace all Western narratives to these three tragedies, Electra, Antigone, and Medea. The truth of those relationships, those responses, are a part of our consciousness. So maybe a good writer is writing the same stories over and again. The context may make it a bit more relevant to the moment, but it’s not as if a mother killing her child isn’t incredibly relevant to current political events.

JM: The structure, the architecture, the information and the visual signage that goes into my work changes in the context of what’s going on in the world and impacting me. Then there’s this other subconscious kind of drawing, this other activity that takes place, that is interacting with everything that is changing, and it’s the relationship between the two that really pushes me. And why abstraction? There are so many other ways to make paintings about these conditions that I’m drawn to. But there’s something that’s hard to speak about that abstraction gives me access to.

LC: More and more I shy away from actually describing the physical characteristics of the characters. They almost become abstract figures that operate in a narrative. With the last extended piece of writing that I did, for instance, I was interested in how to completely absent race. I was interested in what kind of person the police were actually looking for on the occasions that they’ve stopped me. You know, what did that guy who robbed the grocery store that you mistook me for look like, exactly? Did we share some common historical reality? How do you begin to talk about the characters without using police language, or this mediated language that is ultimately unreliable, to identify them? For me abstraction is liberating. I read Chester Himes’s prison novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, and it is never really clear whether the characters are white or black even though he claimed they were white. He plays this funny game with them, their racial markers, their identities. That was one of the challenges for me in writing the last manuscript. How do you create these characters whose gestures are real and similar to the gestures that you live with in daily life without the burden of this mediated racial identity, while at the same time acknowledging the importance of race in shaping your reality? And now, I don’t want to do traditional area studies for my Ph.D. because what I’m interested in doesn’t just happen in Southeast Asia, it happens in Europe and it happens in the United States.

JM: Yeah. Even though I collect and work with images in the studio they don’t enter the work directly. Instead I’m trying to create my own language. It’s the reason I use the language of European abstraction in my work. I am interested in those ideas because I grew up looking at that type of work, but also not taking any of it at face value. It is as big a part of me as Chinese calligraphy or Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts. The more I understand any kind of work the more I see myself conceptually borrowing from it. Going to the Met and seeing particular paintings over and over inevitably becomes a part of my language. Abstraction in that way allows for all those various places to find expression.

LC: I wonder if that’s because language doesn’t come to us naturally because of each of our specific historical contexts. English or European abstraction is just not second nature to either of us. We meditate intuitively or self-consciously on whether this is the right word or the right gesture to use in this situation.

JM: I want to shy away from talking about your situation, my situation, as being more privy to a certain kind of understanding—

LC: I totally agree with you, but why are we more conscious of these uses of language? You were talking before about collecting images . . .

JM: Newspaper images.

LC: Right, and saying that to use them wouldn’t be as liberating as abstraction. Yet someone like Matthew Barney refers to some of the things we have been talking about. He also has a historical trajectory that he draws on where he’s not comfortable accepting a word or gesture at face value, and the discourse produced around his work isn’t reducing it to being about a potato famine.

JM: It’s the same reason that being from Addis Ababa and having lived in say Harare, Dakar, Providence, Kalamazoo, Houston, is not the point of departure for my work. There’s that desire to exoticize, but I don’t know if exoticize is the right word.

LC: That response is a kind of exoticization, but it’s a very sophisticated one. It’s certainly not as crass as it was in the 1980s, but it’s still a mediated version of our experiences: a kind of police report, or APB on our lives.

JM: I think the work is about trying to make sense of what is happening outside of that mediated reality. There are more and more of these complicated situations and I think we all exist in them, or at least I know I do, where I come from two different realities and I’m trying to locate myself. That was the point of departure in all the work, trying to make sense of the version of history and reality that my whole family in Ethiopia is living in, and another one that exists here with my parents and my grandmother and yet another one that I experience.

LC: Yes, but it’s that third part of the equation that is so crucial because it throws everything off kilter.

JM: Totally . . . (laughter)

LC: Like, there’s Ethiopia and there’s Michigan, but what about the Australian outback in your trajectory? Or, we understand why you were in southern Thailand when the tsunami hit or in New York City on 9/11, but tell us again why you were in Beirut?

JM: Right. (laughter) I think it’s that I’m seeking how to nurture that process of working in the studio while allowing other things to happen. Because the most interesting realizations happen there and that’s why I just want to work on only drawings right now: to allow for that kind of freedom and let those new kinds of languages and new marks arise to articulate a different picture of what’s happening in the world that, even though we’ve talked about it so much, I still feel really confused by.

Read the complete interview here.

Harrell Fletcher, "The Report," 2003. Xeroxed publication. All images courtesy the artist, Christine Burgin Gallery, New York, and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco.

Allan McCollum: I enjoy that the meaning of your work doesn’t reside in any one piece. In fact, looking at any one piece you might pass over it; they’re often so simple and easy to describe. But looking at project after project (the number seems to go into the hundreds), and then your Learning to Love You More website with a couple of thousand more projects, a certain set of values comes through. You’re not trying to produce singular masterpieces, and almost all your work is about people other than yourself. A lot of the things that we expect an artist to do, you do backward. It constantly takes me by surprise.

Harrell Fletcher: It’s about having a set of natural proclivities. I see the structure of how an artist is supposed to operate, but some of those things don’t feel comfortable to me. In graduate school, I started realizing that I did not have to follow the normal course.

AM: How did you perceive the “normal course” while you were in school?

HF: It’s so concentrated in graduate school; you see all of these people going into their studios, spending hours and hours making objects or paintings. And it’s supposed to be about isolating themselves. Maybe they have a wall of inspirational clippings from magazines, but that’s the extent of their interaction with the world.AM: Where did you go to school?

HF: I went to Humboldt State University for three years, the San Francisco Art Institute for one year, and then the California College of Arts and Crafts. I was coming from a photography background, and that led to going out in the world and finding things to document. But even then I was frustrated by the system in which art was shown. I wanted to make booklets of photographs and hand them out on the street rather than try to find a gallery to show them.

AM: I never would have guessed that your impulse to do these projects came from photography.

HF: I’d become interested in new forms of documentary and I just started making books. They were almost like making an exhibition—I could hand one to someone and they’d get the entire idea.

AM: In the same way a photographer can put together a book of photographs.

HF: Except I was making one-of-a-kind works. I made about 30 of them. Then I started making Xerox books, and that led to the various publications I make now, newspapers, small books, etc.

AM: What happened to those early books?

HF: I still have them. They’ve never been shown. This relates to your first comment about seeing my work best as an overall set. In graduate school I was doing an independent study with Larry Sultan and whenever he would ask to see work, I’d give him these books that I had made years before. At one point, he was like, “Why aren’t you showing me any new work?” And I said, “I’m trying to make you into my ideal viewer. I want you to be prepared before I show you anything new so that you know exactly where I’m coming from.” It was as if I were trying to show him 30 exhibitions I’d done, all contained within these books.

AM: So much of your work seems to have been done for what might be called a fairly narrow audience. Like your piece Some People from Around Here, those big eight-foot signs along the highway in the small town of Fairfield, California, blown-up painted plywood cut-out portraits of local people. Clearly, the chosen audience was the local townspeople.

HF: About a million people a week commute past Fairfield to the Bay Area. That was the audience. Also the local people who were represented on the billboards, and their friends and neighbors. The local people had this thrill of suddenly seeing a person they know, or maybe a person they see every day, being treated the way they’re used to celebrities being treated. The excitement for those local people was knowing that I wasn’t just making it in their backyard for their friends to see, but for all those people who don’t know them. That’s the difference between a normal citizen and a celebrity: people who don’t know them personally can still recognize a celebrity’s face.

AM: You’ve got images of the project on the Internet. That’s where I saw it, in New York City, 3,000 miles away. I’m a part of the “art world.” So, now you’ve got an art world audience looking at the works, as well. All artists have to think about their audience, but it’s especially complicated with you when you work with local people in these small communities.

HF: At the time the piece was done, I didn’t know that would happen. I was trying to make work that would function without special art knowledge so that people could access it in a direct way, which might also be incredibly complex based on their own personal history and associations. At the same time, as an artist I have knowledge of the history of art, and that goes into the work too. There are multiple readings, but sometimes having too deep a reading takes you away from the actual experience.

AM: What do you mean, the actual experience?

HF: That first encounter with something.

AM: The first encounter of “us” in the art world, or simply the first encounter?

HF: For anyone. David Hammond says that the art world audience is the worst one, partly because they’re overeducated and partly because they’re too conservative. They have expectations and immediate cynicism or they try to dig into it too deeply right away.

AM: But people who don’t study contemporary art are just as likely to have an impoverished way of looking, a knee-jerk ‘Oh, that’s just elitist,’ or ‘My kid could do that.’

HF: Especially if the work that you’re presenting to them seems like something they could have made themselves. I’ve tried to make projects less about my own personal aesthetic, which might appear to be a my-kid-could-do-that approach because that’s an aesthetic that I like. But I give the work a certain level of technical proficiency so people feel that it’s validated. The portraits on the highway are not hyperrealistic, but they’re not sloppy either; people can’t automatically say, ‘I could do that.’

AM: I see, because they couldn’t do that. (laughter)

Read the full-length BOMB interview here.

In this short excerpt from the longer video, author and theorist Giuliana Bruno and the artist discuss his video installations at Hiroshima and elsewhere. You can watch the full 15-minute BOMBLive! video here.

Barbara Kruger, 1981, photo montage.

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, we stepped back into our archive looking for a piece by John Baldessari only to find this portfolio of his work from 1986. But since we promised you an interview, we stepped back further in time to find this conversation that correlated to Baldessari’s work instead. In this interview from BOMB Issue 3, Summer 1983 (26 years ago!), Richard Prince and Art21 artist Barbara Kruger ask each other the same question that result with some varied responses. Read the full interview here.

Richard Prince: What about all these recorded conversations we hear about these days?

Barbara Kruger: Presidents, interview, things like that?

RP: Yes.

BK: Well, in most cases recording seems to offer both the curiosity of replication and the resoluteness of evidence.

RP: Does this have anything to do with the pictures we’re looking at?

BK: Yes. I think in some ways their definitions are interchangeable.

RP: Fiction feels good and recanting causes stress. Like lying, in the physiological sense, the telling of a true story is an unnatural act. Do you think fiction has anything to do with replication?

BK: Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.

RP: Some people think that things that sell the most are the best. How do you feel about being seduced by popular culture? Or are you?

BK: Being socialized within similar constructs of myth and desire, it is not surprising that most people are comforted by popular depictions. Sometimes these images emerge as “semblances of beauty;” as confluences of desirous points. They seem to locate themselves in a kind of free zone, offering dispensations from the mundane particularities of everyday life; tickets to a sort of unrelenting terrain of gorgeousness and glamour expenditure. It you and I think that we are not susceptible to these images and stereotypes than we are sadly deluded. But to have some understanding of the machinations of power in culture and to still joyously entertain these emblems as kitschy divinities is even more ridiculous. And for women it’s an extreme form of masochism.

RP: The fact that we use things that have possibly been observed or unconsciously collected by people other than ourselves…things that have previously been available to anyone who cared to use them—that kind of thing, given these conditions, do you think your work is produced or reproduced?

BK: Well, given your criteria it would seem that all work can be called reproductions to some degree since it incorporates certain styles or codes which preceded it. I think the difference lies in the acknowledgment of previous production within the work. This acknowledgment can function as a device which removes the “original” image from naturalness, perhaps suggesting either an implicit or explicit commentary. In my work I am interested in an alternation between implicit and explicit, between ingratiation and criticality. I also think about assumption, disbelief and authority, but there are no “correct” readings. Only reproductions and possibilities.

RP: A while ago we talked about “cool”. I remember saying something to the effect that “cool” was a prehistoric style. A little like being a dinosaur.

BK: If you think about words like primary and secondary, you could say that cool is mired in the secondary address. It is self-conscious without the presence of cameras and tape recorders. It has internalized their promises and threats. It is totally subsumed by style. Often, its repertoire is composed of gesture. It is celibate, but in an emergency it can fake pleasure pretty well. Its language is not of words but a kind of physical short handing; a verbal withholding. It wants you to think it’s detached. Do you think a lot about style?

RP: I’m misinformed about style. I always thought it had to do with being able to wear the same kind of a jacket for ten years. I don’t know. What I wonder is…is it possible to have style and be unreasonable at the same time?

BK: I think unreasonableness can mean any number of possible locations nearer or further away from the idea of reason. Because many of these positions are already coded, their shock value is tempered by style. A lot of times the idea of transgression really turns on a romantic conception of otherness; of a rebellion already tolerated. You know, the charming rogue, the picaresque cuteness of the bull in the china shop and in the art world, badness invades the atelier. Driving limos through heavy neighborhoods to look at the graffiti. Unstylish unreasonableness may be limited to the categories of the insane and the unpleasant (the poor, the unbeautiful, the unempowered). The non-romanticism of these kinds of otherness makes them unsightly and “vulgar” considerations for the polite company of international bohemia.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004, color digital video, 32-minute loop. Images courtesy of the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Anthony Downey: The act of not taking sides would seem to be part of an ethical, rather than political, approach if we’re looking at Un Ballo in Maschera as a historical metaphor for political redemption. Is the film a direct comment on the present day in this sense?

Yinka Shonibare: I give the audience two options. You see the king go into the ball, indulge himself in the excess and get murdered. But I give him the option to get up again. It’s up to the audience to decide which version prevails. Do they want him to stay murdered, or do they want him to be saved? The audience is seeing both possibilities. In real life, of course, there is no rewind, or replay; an event happens and that’s it.

AD: So you’re asking the audience to be complicit, if not in the assassination, then in the redemption.

YS: It depends on the person. Viewers have to make up their mind whether this person had the right to assassinate that leader or not. You need a leader, but what sort of leader? The film gives you the opportunity to engage with the various tensions. In the dance and the theatricality as well as the breathtaking visuals, you’re part of that excess and you indulge in it, but then it’s not that simple because there’s a dark side to this beauty. It’s not just a lavish banquet; there’s always this “terrible beauty.”

AD: “All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.” It’s a particularly apposite quote from W. B. Yeats, bearing in mind that it comes from a poem that expresses his own disillusionment with revolution.

YS: Yes, so there’s always this thing that isn’t what you imagined it to be at first.

AD: There’s also an absence of dialogue in your film. That was obviously intentional in the presentation of visual rather than aural excess. Is this what Barthes calls jouissance, the literal pleasure in the image itself?

YS: It’s really about the presence of the actors. I wanted to avoid linear narrative, and dialogue sometimes makes that difficult unless I were to use dialogue in a very sophisticated manner. I didn’t want to distract from the presence of the actors. I left in things that would be taken out in “normal” film, like the effort of their dancing, or their breathing, or the sound of their clothes. Everything’s exaggerated so that you can just focus on the people, on the movement, on the visuals. That also gave the action a slightly disturbing quality, which I liked.

AD: I quite like the idea of redemption as an ethical or relative, rather than political, gesture.

YS: I don’t force that notion onto the audience. You have the opportunity to rethink these things, but you don’t necessarily have to. There are people who believe that the war in Iraq is absolutely right, as there are people who believe that it is absolutely wrong. There are two sides, and I think that’s what an artist has to recognize: positions are always relative.

AD: And not taking a side is in fact taking a side, insofar as it opens a third space, beyond that easy agreement or disagreement.

YS: Even racism is about relativity, do you see what I mean? I guess as an artist that relativity is what I want to highlight and play with. According to Brecht, the audience completes the work of art, and that is a notion I very much subscribe to.

AD: Also the Brechtian idea that you have to draw attention to the artifice of the theater in order to involve yourself politically in what is happening. I know you’re a big film buff. I want to talk about the importance of film for you. I mean particular filmmakers, particular films. I know you’ve cited Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as a film that interests you.

YS: Actually, for Un Ballo in Maschera I looked to that film again, because it shows how ridiculous excess can be, and how when you push it further, it becomes extremely primitive: the primitive side of humanity. I also like the pace of the film, the darkness of it, and its form. There are also some Godard films in which he focuses on form. You can do that with art; you can reference your form quite easily in a way that people understand. But with the saturation of Hollywood cinema there has also been a return to the idea of referencing the form of the film itself, which the great modernist filmmakers, particularly the French, were doing. This was something I felt I wanted to do: make an art film that refers to itself.

AD: Two things come to mind: the long shot in Godard’s Weekend that tracks along a road of burning cars, and the circular narrative of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.

YS: Yes, Resnais used the device of repetition in that film. That’s a very good one to reference, because of the sheer excess of that film: they’re all in this amazing hotel. It’s certainly one of my favorite films. French New Wave cinema is probably my favorite period of film. You can watch them over and over again and see something new every time.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

Betsy Sussler: When did you decide to be an actress in your photographs? Do you consider it acting?
Cindy Sherman: I never thought I was acting. When I became involved with close-ups I needed more information in the expression. I couldn’t depend on background or atmosphere. I wanted the story to come from the face. Somehow the acting just happened.

Betsy Sussler: Now when you’re doing it, what are you thinking?

Cindy Sherman: I think of becoming a different person. I look into a mirror next to the camera…it’s trance-like. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens. It seems to work out, it sounds like meditation. But something happens that makes it more fun for me because I have no control over it. Something else takes over.

Betsy Sussler: How do you decide on the character, or does it matter?

Cindy Sherman: Well, the characters sometimes appear while I set up the lighting. I may go through several different lighting situations until I feel some kind of mood or response to it.

Betsy Sussler: The mood of the light?

Cindy Sherman: And sometimes it’s just experimental. I may look at what I’ve been doing and realize I haven’t used a harsh yellow light so I’ll try that. Then sometimes, arbitrarily pick out a wig I haven’t used in a while.

Betsy Sussler: So you choose colors and that suggests atmosphere and then you choose costumes. Is that arbitrary too? I mean you just go around and collect things and make them?

Cindy Sherman: Sort of. Lately it’s been these fashions that I was commissioned to use.

Betsy Sussler: Those are very interesting photographs. Like the ones you did for Dianne B. where you’ve got your legs up and it looks like you’re masturbating and you’re laughing hysterically. That’s my absolute favorite, the one in red.

Cindy Sherman: Well, a lot of that came out of a response to the clothes. I felt forced to use these clothes. I didn’t have a choice.

Betsy Sussler: Were you embarrassed by them? Exposed or…

Cindy Sherman: The clothing, you mean? No, it was just that some of them were so weird. Some of Dianne B.’s stuff was really bizarre; Issey Miyake straw coats with poles that stuck up from the shoulders. The Comme Des Garcons stuff was like expensive bag-lady clothing…I was real interested in what the clothing was bringing out of me and some of it was a retaliation against fashion, as well as humor. But to see in magazines what they do with those kinds of clothes—they have this beautiful, skinny model in some tattered-up dress that costs a thousand dollars. I’m not doing anything else for fashion right now, so I’ll just use whatever is in my closet.

Betsy Sussler: Those everyday clothes were very psychological, but you got back into the props and the costumes after that in a more extravagant way, which gave you more freedom, more range with the acting.

Cindy Sherman: Yeah.

Betsy Sussler: I don’t know what you call it if you don’t call it acting.

Cindy Sherman: I suppose it is. I’ve never had any exposure to traditional acting so it just never occurred to me. Since the day-to-day costumes I’ve really only done fashion and that’s part of the problem right now. I haven’t really worked just for myself in the last two years.

Betsy Sussler: It’s interesting that you have a mirror set up so you can see yourself. You do pick and choose. It’s not technical considerations that inform your editing. Besides, letting yourself go and becoming, do you have some idea of what you want to become?

Cindy Sherman: I recognize it when I see something I don’t recognize. I’ll do test pictures, maybe a whole roll of film that all looks familiar. Like the same character from another picture or too much like me. When I see what I want, my intuition takes over—both in the “acting” and in the editing. Seeing that other person that’s up there, that’s what I want. It’s like magic.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

Paul McCarthy, "The Saloon" (1995-96), mixed media, 139×191 x 110”. Installation view showing Dance Hall Girl and Cowboy (Gunfighter). All photos courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.

Benjamin Weissman: The pulsing id. That’s what I think about when I think about your videos. Partly achieved through minimal dialogue. A generalized wound is articulated, or dug up: anxiety, sexual tension, humiliation, bodily fluids, consciousness. You get a lot of mileage out of wards via a spare, fragmented mumblelogue that’s more like chanting than dialogue, drilling wards into the ground rather than at other characters, and there’s something repetitious about this method, within a single work, then from piece to piece, year to year. Can Paul’s Anxiety Channel accommodate a fuller script, or would that throw your characters into the acting deep end and deflate the luscious fucked-up universe you invent?

Paul McCarthy: In high school I did a drawing of a man’s face looking out of the picture plane straight at the viewer. Behind him in the landscape I drew a square hole in the ground. I have always been interested in digging. I remember finding a rock in a vacant lot when I was five years old. I tried to break the rock. I pounded it with another rock. At one point I stopped pounding it and picked up the rock to carry it home. After a short distance, a head appeared from the rock. I think I was dressed in white. All the houses around me were white. It was a very bright day.

I’ve talked to myself in performances since the ‘60s. But this auto audio babble got louder in the ‘70s. At times I would talk from the moment it started until the moment it ended. A muttering faceted language serving a number of purposes, directed at me and for myself. It’s a multitude, a kind of runabout. A mother, father, brother, sister this and that. In Santa Chocolate Shop there were five performers including myself. In Saloon there were five performers. There was a script, but during the performance the scripts are improvised, repeated, and become language appropriation trying to be mediated into the other.

BW: When you say language serving a number of purposes—what purposes?

PM: A purpose, B purpose, C purpose and so on.

BW: Back in the day a ton of interesting artists were doing performances. Now that energy seems to be directed toward video and film. Artists acting up for the camera. Where has performance gone? Why aren’t people working with the live, high-risk moment? Why do the majority of artists insist on being mediated? Why the distance and safety, why behave on a big installation screen, or a monitor on the floor or a pedestal? I know it’s hard on a performer (physically draining) but that used to be the appeal, the rush, which is why all actors want to perform in plays, the venue of the real. It’s odd to see a whole form almost disappear. There used to be performance magazines and regular venues at museums and galleries for performance. Not too long ago theater and performance were blurring; it was a fertile time.

PM: When I perform for the camera there are others standing on the sidelines in the void. It’s very Hollywood to stand and watch a movie being made. I am planning a performance in a theater in Berlin this year at Christmastime. I don’t know yet whether it will be on the stage or not. I think I would like to use the entire theater as a performance room, the theater as a set. Maybe I will extend the stage out into the audience, reduce the seating. I am interested in blurring our positions. I’ve always been interested in the audience being a prop.

BW: Do you find it strange that people have such strong reactions to fecal matter, blood and mucus? The slightest thing that pops out of us is a total horror. Aren’t these standard human materials? Why the shock of what’s inside us?

PM: Maybe it is a conditioned response: we’re taught to be disgusted by our fluids. Maybe it’s related to a fear of death. Body fluids are base material. Disneyland is so clean; hygiene is the religion of fascism. The body sack, the sack you don’t enter, it’s taboo to enter the sack. Fear of sex and the loss of control; visceral goo, waddle, waddle.

BW: How cool that you’re a grandfather now. How does that affect your understanding of the world?

PM: I spend more time on or near the floor. I seem to be happy down there.

BW: Walt Disney the man, the freak with the harsh, right-wing politics, and Walt Disney the creator of all those remarkable characters and the cheerfully perverse world of Disneyland. Share your Disney thoughts?

PM: Disney has something to do with the future. It’s a virtual space, not unlike the Acropolis. The Disney characters, the environment, the aesthetic are so refined, the relationships so perfect. It’s the invention of a world. A Shangri-La that is directly connected to a political agenda, a type of prison that you are seduced into visiting.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

James Casebere, "Monticello #3," 2001, digital chromogenic print, 48×60”. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NY.

Roberto Juarez: I have my ideas of why you used black-and-white photographs in your earlier work, but tell me—why did you use black and white instead of color?

James Casebere: Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.

Roberto Juarez: What were the images, in the Penn Station installation?

James Casebere: Most of it was a synthesis between two bodies of work, a combination of domestic space in the foreground with romantic, faraway places in the background. I tried, in part, to simulate the experience of sitting on a train, looking out the window. But the foreground might also be a dining room, or a kitchen, or a café.

Roberto Juarez: How did you create that? Was it a layering of pictures through exposure, or was it from a model that you built?

James Casebere: I built a model. Half the time, there’d be a frame dividing the foreground from the background. The backgrounds were images of the American West, corrals, and also one image of a sinking canoe, and one which was simply an outdoor train platform. There was a mission facade in another image. I was trying to create a sense of wistful reverie.

Roberto Juarez: The West is a very romantic idea in the American psyche. I’ve gotten invitations to submit proposals for light boxes in train stations. It’s become such a fad, or an easy art form for public projects to take on, because it’s not that expensive. But you were early.

James Casebere: I used a light box for a show I did at Franklin Furnace in 1981. It sat in the window, facing the street. I was never interested in the context of a fine art photo gallery. I was really interested in the usefulness of art—in a Constructivist sense, or as in the Bauhaus or de Stijl. What all these movements shared—and they overlapped, of course—was the belief that art should not be broken up into separate disciplines. An artist might make paintings, design buildings, do graphics, photographs and sculpture. It was very multimedia. They also shared the belief that an artist had a purpose, a usefulness within the context of the larger society.

I was looking at how art worked within the larger social world and wanted to place my work where most people see other photographs. So I wanted to put my images into the advertising context, the way conceptual artists like Dan Graham were using pages in a magazine as their art. The magazine is one kind of public space, street signs are another. I wanted to design things that relate to people’s everyday experience. People like Dennis Adams and Jeff Wall began using light boxes at about the same time as myself. Adams actually designed the public spaces, the bus shelters, to show them in. There were Holzer’s broadsides, and Barbara Kruger’s billboards. It was the same impulse. We were all thinking about mass media. One of the first images I shot in New York was of a courtroom which I made into a poster, and put up anonymously around Lower Manhattan. There was that anonymous poster phenomenon going on in the Lower East Side at that time.

Roberto Juarez: You make models that sit somewhere between architecture and sculpture. I mean, I’m sitting here with you in your studio, and we’re surrounded by all these structures that you’ve made; do you call them models?

James Casebere: Yeah.

Roberto Juarez: They’re objects in space, three-dimensional objects that became, through being photographed, illusions or more than simply what they are physically. Maybe that’s how you’ve translated the space. Do you see Aycock’s and Graham’s influence in your structures?

James Casebere: Conceptually, I was following a similar trail. I got more interested in architecture after getting out of undergraduate school. But I looked at the activity I was engaged in as related to installation or performance, because the set or the model I used was temporary, and the image of the set was what most viewers experienced. And that was true for performance artists and installation artists at the time. I simply continued to work the model—that became more and more a part of the pursuit.

Roberto Juarez: Continue that thought, please. The model exists to make this illusion or image but the images that you’re making now are getting to be quite gorgeous things in themselves, objects. That is something that has changed.

James Casebere: You know, part of my program early on was that the seams had to show. That you would suspend disbelief when looking at the object or the image, but the way it was made still had to be clear to the viewer. My models were always clearly models. This is a Constructivist idea; you don’t hide the construction. It’s a Godardian idea, too. This is a value that he held as a filmmaker: you allow the viewer to step back and have a certain critical distance from the experience. You’re not swept away emotionally by the heat of the moment the way you are with a filmmaker like Spielberg.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

Tom Sachs, "Hermès Valuemeal," 1998, hot glue, ink and paper, 18×12 x 12". Courtesy of Tom Sachs Studio.

John Kessler: Your work is very populist, and I wonder if that’s the main reason you haven’t been given the critical attention you deserve.

Tom Sachs: I find it disappointing. I read October and Arts and Artforum in college, and I always thought that when I moved to New York, I would be engaged in conversations like that. But there was never a movement toward the real. People didn’t go all the way. It’s too threatening to the art world system to have art that works, because part of what makes it so strong is that it is insular. You need to be a little provincial to keep your things tight. That’s partially why I’m not as interested in art as I am in media and technology.

JK: There are so many ideas in your work, like failed utopianism, functionalism and design, high and low culture, surveillance and globalization, that I would imagine critics could really bite into. That is, if they don’t want to talk about hot glue and duct tape.

TS: Well, it’s like Barnett Newman said, it’s what ornithology is to the birds.

JK: You’re talking about criticism?

TS: There is a lot of art that has its pants down, so to speak, and gets the critical attention. I think the popularity of my work doesn’t leave a void for critics to fill. It’s a very complete world; it’s anti-elitist. There might as well be a sign on it saying, ‘This doesn’t need anyone to explain it.’

JK: How did Nutsy’s change when it went from the studio to the Bohen Foundation?

TS: I don’t think it’s as interesting. It’s the difference between being at home and being a guest in somebody’s house. The original plan was to make it a home for us to move into, but that wasn’t realistic. A gallery is not a studio, and a public space has different constraints.

JK: I became aware of the interactivity of your installation when I went to one of the Tuesday night races. The drivers are smoking bongs and there’s a DJ spinning records and you’re all in your Tyvek jumpsuits running through the installation with your remote controls.

TS: The performances give the installation more life. All the functional aspects of these things, like the boom box and the repair station, are evolving as we get better. Sculpture for me has always been about developing a language. The actual making is a big part of that language. That’s what building it, operating it, and constantly developing it is-developing a language.

JK: Despite the fact that you have a studio full of assistants, the work doesn’t feel fabricated: your hand is all over it.

TS: Well, it’s all real.

JK: What does that mean?

TS: It’s not made up to look like something other than what it is. All of that stuff is built by me and my crew, and we have a very specific ethic: make the effort to show your work rather than hide it. We have all these great people who start out as studio assistants but wind up making really personal contributions. We maximize everyone’s natural skills.

JK: Your studio reminds me of an architect’s.

TS: The manner in which we do things is always based on a triangle of good, cheap, and fast—you choose two out of three. I always say make it good and show how you made it. Don’t hide the screw, show it. Always show the glue mark. Let the tape show the dirt that it picked up while being handled. There are other rules too. Writing is always in Sharpie, and if something needs to be written and I’m not there, there’s a chart of my handwriting so it matches. When it comes to making the logos, sometimes it’s just a question of using a projector and tracing the letters. Duct tape is generally done in cross-hatch pattern, and if it’s laid horizontally it must go on in a shingle-like pattern so that dust doesn’t accumulate on the ridges. Mending plates should always show the price tag from OK Hardware, which indicates that the thing was built in Soho.

JK: There was so much in the show, so many pieces, so much material and so much process, that it was easy to miss a lot. People were walking around with a kind of glazed look.

TS: Maybe I should be more manipulative. I often think about Robert Gober, who hides all the details of how he makes things. That restraint is what’s so exciting about his work. But I could never do anything like that. All I can do is what I do.

JK: I know you know Richard Wentworth. I see the influence of those English artists—Woodrow, Wentworth. Richard Deacon, especially in this show. You must have seen their work while you were living in London.

TS: Yeah. That generation, for sure. Bill Woodrow is a big one, Tony Cragg, there are even a couple of younger artists that are right out of that, who I think are just as good. Like Rachel Whiteread and Stephen Pippin. What I like about all those English artists is that they’re process-oriented. I always used to say that what I do is process-oriented conceptual art. The concept is really about the making. That part of it is really un-chic right now. People don’t obsess over that aspect of Rachel Whiteread’s work, do they? It’s more about its monumentality.

JK: Most people are out of touch with how things are made.

TS: People always say to me, Where did you get this stuff? And I’m like, I made everything. There’s nothing I like more than talking shop.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

"Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon" (detail) ("Symbolic Representation of New Babylon"), 1969, collage on paper, 55×60”. Photo: Victor E. Nieuwenhuys.

Linda Boersma: When I saw the New Babylon paintings again at Documenta, and when I looked at the photographs that were once taken of the models, then the interiors of New Babylon immediately made me think of the labyrinthine spaces that are now designed by computers and that you can enter virtually. In an interview that Rem Koolhaas conducted with you, you said you were building an enormous model that was intended to give a filmed impression of New Babylon. Has that ever taken place?

Constant: No, not really. There were some films made, by my son and by some other filmmakers. But a real film, such as I had in mind then, where I could show the aim of New Babylon with explanations, that never happened. That’s why I returned to painting: “illustrations” of New Babylon. What do you see when you walk through it? To show that, I had to return to painting. Plans for filming New Babylon always ended as a filmed interview with me. But I wanted someone to actually crawl inside those models with a camera. Because that’s what it’s about. What do you see when, once inside, you look around? The models are worked out in great detail. The whole project is now in the Municipal Museum in The Hague, and a filmmaker could quietly spend weeks or even months working there. I’m still waiting for someone to be able to do that. But of course, it can be done at any time, even after I’m dead, as the models are all available. I wouldn’t sell any of it, as I feel New Babylon should stay together. It was a project that I worked on for a decade and a half. This whole studio was one great workshop. It was full of models, and I had several assistants working with me. Making the models was very labor intensive, and without assistants I could never have managed it. I sold my paintings from the CoBrA period and used the proceeds to finance the New Babylon project. Later, because I had studied architecture, I lived partly on commissions for rebuilding playgrounds and the like.

Linda Boersma: You studied architecture?

Constant: Yes. For the New Babylon plan I naturally needed some architectural knowledge. Aldo van Eyck [a well-known Dutch architect and a friend of Constant’s] showed me a few tips. “I’ll give you my old course books, you can read those,” he said. And that’s what I did.

Linda Boersma: Did you ever get the urge to build a model that you yourself could walk into or to create an actual building or construction?

Constant: No. I’ve never felt a need to do that. New Babylon is an idea. I’ve always called it an illustration. An illustration to my story about another form of urban construction. I made some models for this, here, in this space, but also limited by the space.

Linda Boersma: You were and you still are a painter—you always emphasize this. But how did your interest in architecture come about?

Constant: That happened in Frankfurt at the beginning of the 1950s. I was alone with my son, who was seven at the time. It must have been 1951. Frankfurt was bombed flat during the war. I had been in Essen, Bochum. . . . The Ruhr was not nearly as bad. Frankfurt was indescribable. I’d borrowed a studio from a painter who was himself in Paris. I was working there for an exhibition in the Zimmergalerie Franck, and every morning I took my son to school. The walk to the school was across an enormous bombsite. A great heap of rubble, with here and there some places that had been flattened so you could walk over them like paths. There were some outer walls of houses still standing. A doorway, and some stretches of wall. It was a surreal landscape, and it inspired me enormously. If you walk through a town that lies in ruins, then the first thing you naturally think of is building. And then, as you rebuild such a town, you wonder whether life there will be just the same, or what will be different. Then you think about the influence of the surroundings.

Linda Boersma: New Babylon began in 1958, or was it 1956?

Constant: It began in 1956 with texts and drawings. One of the first projects, which formed the basis of New Babylon, came about in 1956 and was inspired by a gypsy camp in Alba, Italy, where I was living then. Guy Debord, who had founded the International Lettrists in 1952, came to visit me there. He lived in Paris, but his mother lived in Nice, and that isn’t so far from the Italian border. The Lettrists had a mimeographed leaflet called Potlach, and they always sent me a copy. That leaflet interested me. I could sympathize with their criticism of architecture, so I started to write for the magazine I.S. or International Situationist, which was also founded by Debord, sometime later, in 1956 or 1957. It was in this magazine that the first model of New Babylon was shown, in 1958. Situationism was about the creation of situations: le création des situations. We discussed other ways of living, and from there the discussion soon turned to living environments. And then it progressed to urban architecture. But I had already been studying the relationship between urban architecture and living environments. I had also published on the subject, and so I was asked to cooperate on the magazine, the International Situationist.

Linda Boersma: And you still continued to paint. At the beginning of the 1950s you made poignant paintings like Terre Brûlée (1951), which is an assimilation of the war and of such sights as you saw in Frankfurt. But also, and practically at the same time, you made abstract works like Composition with 58 Cubes (1953) and Composition with Orange Triangle (1953). I think these are fascinating compositions, but I find that they differ strongly from your other work.

Constant: Composition with Orange Triangle was first a collage, then a painting. I colored the paper by hand, with watercolors. I made quite a few of these collages over a period of two or three years. And then I turned to spatial objects. After that I didn’t paint anything for a long time, or hardly anything. Adieu la P . . . (Farewell to P . . .) from 1962 would have been the last painting. I did paint now and again. Ode à l’Odéon was my first painting after New Babylon. In 1968 there was the student uprising in Paris, where the Odéon theater was occupied. I was in Paris then, by chance on the Rue de l’Odéon. I saw it all from close by. New Babylon was a very extensive project that took up all my time until 1969. At that time, the whole studio was chock full of models. In 1969 I decided I was finished with New Babylon because I felt I had nothing to add to it. The Municipal Museum in The Hague bought most of the project over the following years. I needed space to paint.

Linda Boersma: And you still paint.

Constant: Every day. I’m here from 12:30 to 7:30.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine.