EVERYTHING TRANSFORMS
Maya Kramer, “There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore,” 2010. Laundry detergent, black light, pump, vitrine. Courtesy the artist.
I first met Maya Kramer at a dinner party she was hosting at her home in one of the tree-lined compounds of the former French Concession in Shanghai. But it was only after we opened the second bottle of wine that I found out she was an artist.
After completing her MFA in sculpture at Hunter College, Maya worked in the curatorial department of the Guggenheim Museum for three years. She first visited China in 2009, to take up a six-month residency at the now-closed True Color Museum in Suzhou, a privately owned contemporary art and performance venue that had been set up by musical entrepreneur Chen Hanxing. Maya was the first foreign artist to be invited to China for the museum residency, and left her mark with a wishing well installation in a grove of paper trees that whispered random desires through hidden speakers.
The idea of establishing a solo practice in China presented a challenging way of both working and living, but two years on from the residency, she is now happily ensconced in the burgeoning art world of Shanghai. Her art practice is concerned with the environment, often consisting of sculptures made from everyday paper waste. She has since extended into collaborative projects, working with notions of value and exchange.
We spoke a few times in Shanghai about the many differences between America and China, the new types of work being explored in the vast number of galleries and museums opening across the country, and especially about the problems of not speaking the language (she does, while I barely scrape by). When I arrived back in New York recently, I interviewed Maya about her work and what she thinks of the now volatile relations in the art world between China and the USA.
Maya Kramer, “There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore,” 2010. Laundry detergent, black light, pump, vitrine. Courtesy the artist.
Maya Kramer, “There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore,” 2010. Laundry detergent, black light, pump, vitrine. Courtesy the artist.
Din Heagney: I’m intrigued by There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore, a vitrine with a tiger skull made from laundry detergent that dissolves over time as water slowly drips on it. The connections you’ve made between endangered animals, pollution, and museum aesthetics make it a very tight piece.
Maya Kramer: Upon completing this work, I was quite excited as it was one of those rare instances where the result matches with one’s original conception. For a while, I’ve been trying to come to grips with a rapidly deteriorating ecology and our place in the world. But in the end, I’ve started to see that everything dies and transforms; it’s inescapable and has nothing to do with us.
I wanted to point to this concern for the environment by fusing various symbols, an x-ray (a diagnostic tool used to examine an underlying problem), a tiger skull (an animal nearly extinct), and laundry detergent (an everyday pollutant), and then have all those concerns literally fall apart.
EMPATHY VIRUS
Carl Scrase, "Fractal 090812," bull-clips, 2009. Courtesy John Buckley Gallery.
“People kept telling me art can’t change the world; so I stopped calling what I do art,” says Carl Scrase, a young Australian artist who shot to local fame with his intricate fractal sculptures made from bits of stationery. Now he’s set out to prove the naysayers wrong by creating a global empathy virus at SymbioticA, one of the world’s leading bio-art labs. I emailed him to ask about some of his recent projects and what led him from labor-intensive studio work to developing collaborative social engineering projects.
Din Heagney: You hit everyone’s attention back in Australia with your meticulous and painstakingly detailed sculptures of amorphic stationery. Can you tell me some more about those early works?
Carl Scrase: I’ll tell a little story that may shed some light on those early works. When I was about fifteen, I did an aptitude test, you know, one of those tests that is meant to say what job you would be good at. Well anyway, it gave me two options: vending machine attendant or army. I think from that point forward, me and the man had a bit of a problem getting along. I set out on my path to become a creative being, vowing to overthrow a system that gives a young male two dead-end options in life.
Pens, rulers, bull-clips, and thumbtacks: they are the subtle manacles on the white-collar worker. Stationery (curious name) for me symbolizes a static way of thinking, a dogmatic belief in capitalism, profit, and endless growth. These are obsolete ideas, but people are stuck in outmoded belief systems that are going to be very detrimental to the human race in the short, medium, and long terms.
I know I sound a bit simplistic, reactionary, and militant, but I am not; I know it’s not a simple cause-and-effect relationship, I know nothing is black and white. It’s very hard for me talking about art in such a linear format as writing; there are always parallel, divergent, and contradicting motivations and meanings that end up imbuing each work I make. The stationery works are about a lot of things; they are about everything, are about an attempt to gain wisdom through play and perspective.
PUBLIC AMNESIA
History isn’t was. History is. No matter how much we wipe our feet at the front door, we track history through the house. Leaving its muddy footprints all over the carpet.
This quote is from Phillip Adams, one of Australia’s most respected broadcasters and a left-wing atheist humanist who happens to write for a national and mostly right-wing newspaper. He’s also on the advisory board of WikiLeaks, so it’s quite telling that this quote makes an appearance in Australian artist Lily Hibberd’s latest work, one that unravels some of the gruesome history of institutionalization.
Lily Hibberd has always been interested in ideas of love and time (and let’s be honest, who hasn’t?), but her overall practice is difficult to describe, only as it has evolved so much in recent years. As a painter, her early works show an interest in pictorial illusion of cinema, such as the Blinded by the Light series, large canvases of recreated film stills that glow in the dark with phosphorescence. I still remember when the lights were switched off for the opening night at a gallery in Melbourne some years ago and a shocked woman spilled her drink all over me then spent the rest of the night apologizing. But the same woman also introduced me to someone who would become a fantastic lover, so both the evening and the paintings have always stayed with me and I’ve followed Lily’s practice ever since. The lover, alas, moved into the vestiges of time.
Lily Hibberd, "Blinded by the Light," oil and phosphorescent paint on canvas, 91 x 153 cm, 2002.
Then there are other series, like Paint Tin Fantasias, where characters confront their own delusions in famous movie scenes, each recreated in oil and pigment, shimmering and swirling inside old paint tins. And again, later works including I Want To Break Free, which saw her paint urban scenes that went to extreme ends with subjects such as death-by-dishwasher and other domestic disaster scenarios.
Lily Hibberd, "Paint Tin Fantasias," pigment, oil paint, tins, 2004
Since then, Hibberd has moved onto more challenging historical and performance-installation projects, such as the large-scale work from 2008, Bordertown, a monolithic black sound wall featuring audio narratives from two women who lived in a divided community on two sides of a remote state border.
Lily Hibberd, "Bordertown" (installation view), wood, paint, speakers, computer, Artspace, Sydney, 2008.
When thinking about how Hibberd reached this point from painting to examining Australia’s dark penal and mental institution history – a search that took her to London and Paris and back to some remote albeit scenic places in Australia – it seems that much of her oeuvre shows people being confronted with the unknown, or what they consider to be the unknown, when in reality, it is something they have deliberately forgotten.
