151 SPECIAL ISSUE Laura Mychal eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral cultural substratum due to to your experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Latin America inform the way you relate yourself to art making in general? Thank you for speaking with me. I’m so happy to explain my work to you and your readers. To answer your question: I worked at Mills College with some incredible professors like Hung Liu and Anna ValentinaMurch who inspired me beyond words as they revealed the infinite world of art to me. I learned the power of simplicity, the idea that less is more, especially the trying to convey a message. And I realized that art had the power to convey important messages. I fell head over heels and knew that making art was what I wanted to do in a serious way. I’m passionate in effecting positive change and once I realized that could use my creative voice to do so, I was hooked. I started to search for my voice while at Mills. I was always interested in human connection to nature and I explored that through my sculptures and paintings. I then went abroad to work in the Peace Corps where I gained a more authentic experience of human connection to earth while living and working alongside a community in the rural Andes mountain region of Peru. I was working to teach concepts related to environmental health such as recycling and clean agricultural practices, all the while making art by myself and with my community. I started making sculptures out of the materials around me and painting portraits of locals on the cardboard that I was collecting. My passion for nature became a desire to protect it and the conversation about climate change became stronger in my mind. I started to use found materials in an intentional way after that. I became more concerned with how my art could relate to communities and make a difference in the world. It’s important for my art to be relatable to the masses and remain connected to a purpose larger than myself. My experience working so closely with my community in Peru, teaching and making art, propelled me into the MA program at the University of Arizona where I focused my energies on community art education. I’m concerned with how everyone understands art, because I think that in order for it to have the largest impact it needs to be palatable by the art world and everyone else - so it’s a fine balance. It’s important for me to have my foot in both arenas. Your practice is marked out with a captivating multidisciplinary feature, revealing that you are a versatile artist capable of crossing from a medium to another, including Painting, Drawing and Sculpture. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://lauramychal.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work: in the meanwhile, would you tell us what does draw you to such approach? What are the properties you are searching for in the materials that you include in your materials? And in particular, when do you recognize that one of the mediums has exhausted it expressive potential to self? I incorporate recycled materials and found materials that I can gather from around me. They symbolically represent me and my life as well as my connection to my environment. I’m interested in exploring the reality of our consumeristic society today and my ability to be sustainable in it. The found materials allow me to speak to environmental issues associated with waste and the pitfalls of our
SPECIAL ISSUE 152 consumeristic culture. I paint on, draw on, or include as texture in my paintings. I’ve also sculpted with it - a rested basket, scrap wood, etc. While I was in Peru I used the found materials I had available such as plastic bags, cardboard, glass and other recyclables that I could use within my work. I was doing this while learning, teaching and talking about environmental issues like climate change so my conceptual connection to them was becoming clearer and clearer. Lately, I've been incorporating scrap paper, plastic bags, old cloth and cardboard into my paintings. I try to incorporate them into the landscapes of abstract line-work, color, and paint as best I can as a metaphorical way of developing my own understanding of how all the excess material and waste we produce is fitting into our natural world. It’s as if I am creating a prayer or hope for a sustainable reality in regards to the waste. I glue materials to the canvas and then add paint, then sometimes I sand the surfaces, sometimes I scrape, and sometimes I pull the added material off the canvas and add a different material back. It is a process of push and pull , addition and subtraction, and creating texture, until the work is completed. Do you think that there is a central idea that connects all of your work as an artist? I definitely think my work is ever searching for an understanding - of myself, and my emotional and physical relationship to the world around me. Sometimes the work is abstract and other times it will incorporate representational aspects. I approach the work differently at different times - while sometimes I think the work through a bit more before beginning while at other times I let my energy flow freely without thought. agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries
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155 SPECIAL ISSUE The work is never conceived fully at the beginning though. My exploration and searching happens while creating the work. For this special edition of Peripheral ARTeries we have selected Holding and Wing a couple of interesting works that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of this body of works is the way you provided the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of Holding and Wing would you shed a light about your usual process and setup? A lot of my pieces begin with an interest in the material. With these two I was interested in wood - with “Holding” it was sticks and with “Wing” it was scrap wood. In each instance I started with the interest in the material, which I gathered and then studied for its materiality. I explored ideas associate with the meaning of the material while creating preliminary sketches. My interests lay something simple and universal while at Mills, when I made these pieces. For “Holding” I was thinking about home, and building a home. I wanted to gather these disparate pieces and make something whole out of them - strong and cohesive. For “Wing” the scrap wood pieces I found started to emerge as a wing and so I went with that idea and then worked as if solving a puzzle, fitting the pieces into my basic sketch. The works evolved as I built. I noticed how one stick worked in relation to another, how one bundle sat with another and using wire I combined them as it seemed visually interesting to do. My process of making is not linear. I start with a rough idea, then begin to Laura Mychal eries Contemporary Art Peripheral agazine
SPECIAL ISSUE 158 gather the material, see how the material works in my hands and notice what begins to emerge. I build from there - sometimes retuning to my sketch, returning to the concept and thinking about it more. A lot of the creation lays in the process. For Wing I started to love how the heavy material was flying - but that wasn’t something I thought of initially. I think art is about discovery. Resourcefulness is an important concept of your work and as you have remarked in your artist's statement, you strive to utilize what you have: we have appreciated the way you explore expressive potential and agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries
159 SPECIAL ISSUE the feelings associated with found objects, as you did in the interesting Crust, as well as in Reconvene and Isla. Art critic and historian Michael Fried once stated that 'materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more.' What are the the properties that you search for in the materials that you combine? In particular, what does appeal you of found objects? I don’t agree with Michael Fried’s statement here. I fell in love with the idea that materials hold meaning and therefore could be vehicles for messages and concepts in art. My use of found materials is intentional. I’m interested in what is around me and I am interested in conveying messages of resourcefulness and sustainability, which I think the found materials can do. I like trying to make sense of what exists rather in my vicinity rather than seek out more material. I feel that I can be an artist anywhere and with anything and so that’s my aim. Using materials I simply have on hand helps me to make sense of the world and my place in it. I use what is found, this “waste” material and incorporate it into the landscape of my paintings. I want to show a cohesiveness - to display a holistic relationship to the products of my consumption and surroundings - figuring out my relation to my material and my environment. The materials that you select provide your artworks with such tactile feature: German visual artist Gerhard Richter once remarked that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable". How would you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the ideas you explore and the physical act of producing your artworks? There is always a subconscious undercurrent of the natural world that emerges in my work. That is inevitable. It’s interesting to think about how the concepts behind my work and the physical act of making the work connect. Sometimes I Laura Mychal eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral
SPECIAL ISSUE 160 have a more intentional directive and other times it is less so. A lot of the time the concept emerges alongside the physical act of making. I simply create and then go back and decipher my thinking through the paint. So in regards to Richter, in a way I am always searching and looking back and then figuring out what to push, move or add in order to make the work look like what I want to be seeing. agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries
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163 SPECIAL ISSUE Your experience as a Peace Corps volunteer addressed you to discover the creative potential of found materials. How much does everyday life's experience fuel your imagery and your creative process? In particular, do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience? My everyday experience is integral the Laura Mychal eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral
agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries SPECIAL ISSUE 164 work I produce. It’s as much my emotional states as my thinking around ideas that drives my application and the energy I put onto the canvas. Sometimes I am sifting through ideas about my relationship to my existence directly onto the surface. The push and pull with paint and material are guided by my desire to understand myself and my belonging to my surroundings. My artwork is where I return to make some sort of sense out of the chaos of life. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your pieces, that in Hope's Haze and Natal show that vivacious tones are not strictly indispensable to create tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones you decide to use in a piece and in particular, how do you develop a painting’s texture? The colors I use are completely intuitive. I begin with a color that I am feeling at the moment - whether it is a quiet and peaceful lavender or more of an energized bright yellow-green. This push pull relationship that I’ve been talking about a lot is also reflected in the color I use. I continue to use my senses and feelings in order to choose the color that will accentuate the first one laid down. This tends to depend on my mood that day - if I’m painting the next day or a week after the first application - the painting will completely change. We like the abstract feature that marks out your paintings, that seems to walk the viewers to the point of convergence between reality and abstraction. The power of visual arts in the contemporary age is enormous: at the same time, the role of the
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Laura Mychal eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral 167 SPECIAL ISSUE viewer’s disposition and attitude is equally important. Both our minds and our bodies need to actively participate in the experience of contemplating a piece of art: it demands your total attention and a particular kind of effort—it’s almost a commitment. What do you think about the role of the viewer? Are you particularly interested if you try to achieve to trigger the viewers' perception as starting point to urge them to elaborate personal interpretations? I’m interested in creating an intriguing canvas from far away and up close. I work with a macro-micro eye, pulling close to the work and stepping away from it as I create it. I want to make work that is interesting from both points of view. This is relates to my concern with texture. I am able to achieve detailed surfaces using found materials with paint over them, sewing the torn canvas, or sanding, scraping and rubbing the paint. I want viewers to appreciate the work from afar but then feel curious and drawn into the surface and find something intriguing there. Over the years your works have been exhibited in several occasions, including your recent show at The World Money Gallery, in Brooklyn: one of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? I have always been concerned with how my art could relate to people, not just art people but everyone. I want my work to speak intellectually and visually at the same time. Some works remain abstract while others carry representational aspects or even written word. I’m constantly playing around and letting myself be free to evolve in a way that feels best for my ability to express myself. Yet, I’m driven by the desire to create change or thought or some kind of effect on my viewers so that determines a lot of the choices I make. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Laura. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I’m always expanding and exploring in order to see how I can best portray my message and do so in the most visually interesting way. I like working with representation and have been interested in exploring more portraiture and realism related to climate change: i.e. people, animals, and places affected by the rising tides or the extreme droughts that the planet is experiencing. Recently I have been pushing myself with materials and what I can do with them, such as creating more heavily textured and sculptural works on canvas. Please Follow my process on my instagram @LauraMychal Thank you ! An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator peripheral.arteries@europe.com
SPECIAL ISSUE 66 Rejecting any conventional classification, artist Steve Wetzel’s work sits at the intersection of observational documentary and experimental film and video. In his body of works that we'll be discussing in the following pages he utilizes both traditional heritage and unconventional sensibility to trigger the viewers’ and readers’ perceptual parameters. The power of Wetzel’s noetic approach lies in his insightful exploration of the relationship between folktales and the everyday, that he condenses in strategic ways that challenge conventions and generate new practical and theoretical perspectives. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to his stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Steve and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. We would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making? I was trained as a painter, or I went to both undergraduate and graduate school to be a contemporary studio-based painter. Early in my graduate studies at the University of Chicago (with the mentorship of Bob Peters and Laura Letinsky: thank you Bob and Laura) I came to the realization that I just couldn’t do the sorts of things I wanted to do through painting, or painting couldn’t accommodate the places my brain was going. Now this could certainly have been a limitation of my own imagination. Not sure. At any rate I started dabbling with installation, book making, and most importantly video performance. It was the extraordinary novelty of time that really got me, this totally new experience with time as a form and medium that fundamentally changed my work. With video I just felt like I could make anything I wanted. My thinking materialized with video. My thinking materialized through time. If art was a way of sharing one’s thinking then video was a great way for me to try to achieve this. Of course these days I am thinking a lot about painting. This is a Steve Wetzel Lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA Peripheral ARTeries meets Art is the one human discipline where form, non-sense, pleasure, and criticality mutually and freely converge. My role as artist is to expand, play with, and otherwise experiment upon these. I achieve this by pursuing a practice that is multiple in its approach. A recent development in my practice and research is folklore. I have spent much time documenting folk, and now I am investigating the richness of folktales as they relate to the everyday. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator peripheral.arteries@europe.com agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries
[PAUSE], book, 2014, print, 88 pages, cover illustration by Jessica Seamans
69 SPECIAL ISSUE Steve Wetzel eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral good example of Michael Taussig’s NS (nervous system) at work—maybe. And if I understand what you mean by cultural substratum, then I would say that my work is of course informed by and fundamentally inextricable from my cultural make up. I come from working class Midwestern stock and in some ways, over and above the seduction of time, my shift to video and in particular the recording of actual human beings going about their lives is probably linked to some deep sense of the practical. Even as a painter I was much more interested in representational images though I had (and continue to have) respect for the pursuits of abstraction. But there was no comparing something like the abstract works of Philip Guston and his later, cartoony works, though “cartoony” hardly does those paintings a service. His abstract paintings, however great they are as paintings, and they are great!, just don’t measure up to Guston’s later works for me. I mean, I have always been attracted to the universalist ideals of early makers of abstraction. I really have. Especially in my earlier, more idealistic years. And I teach abstraction, or I convey the necessity of putting aside the literal and the indicative and urge my students to embrace—or at least try on—the abstract and the subjunctive. I might add that my formative years as a youth were spent in a pretty standard suburb, not a lot going on culturally, not a lot going on generally speaking. At the time I had no idea that this place was boring because I had a pretty active life running amok in a neighborhood self-initiating games, self-refereeing games, wandering into longstanding pools of runoff water (we called it a pond) to collect god knows what, catching skinks on a soon-to-be-developed plot of land. Looking back this is a pretty privileged chunk of time: the late ’70s and early ’80s in a white working class suburb where I just didn’t fear anything and was, for the most part, totally oblivious to the world around me. Though this time did not equip me with a critical inner life (something I developed much later while in graduate school), it did set me up to create my own fun. The results of your artistic inquiry convey such coherent sense of unity that rejects any conventional classification. We would suggest to our readers that they visit http://stevewetzel.org in order to get a synoptic view of your work. While walking our readers through your process, can you tell them something about the evolution of your style? I try to tell myself over and over that I do what I want when I want. Despite this not being true it has helped me remain loose in my practice, helped me keep an open mind about what sorts of projects I should pursue and thus led me to some subjects that I might not otherwise have entertained. This is not the most socially responsible way to go about making art because I’m not asking myself, “What do others need from me, or how might my work help others, or in what way does my work mesh with current social and political goings on?” but rather, “What do I want to do?” My approach is not the right approach, it’s just an approach that has kept me engaged, kept me making work regardless of what limitations or constraints I might be experiencing. It has just simply sustained my wanting to make stuff, my wanting to contribute what little I can to the world of art and culture. I don’t feel fulfilled unless I am satisfying this call to do or make something that feels like an artistic gesture. Sometimes this is me putting on a costume and reading poetry at a local bar, sometimes it’s writing a little essay, sometimes it’s making a short video. I might set my sights higher and produce something with grander ambitions, but that’s just not how I have made work in the past. So I guess my style is simply a reverberation of what I choose to do and how I choose to do it. I don’t really know. My style regarding video has been experimentalobservational documentary, something I call anthromentary; others call it sense ethnography I think. My first work of this sort was in 2003 and it
SPECIAL ISSUE 70 offered a close look inside a men’s locker room, a place where semi-professional ice hockey players prepare for their job. It’s about a kind of male intimacy, male flesh, and masculinity. Another early work in this vein is about a little girl’s birthday party, which is a kind of rite of passage, or it’s one small symbolic marker of the self transforming over time, a transformation that is acknowledged and celebrated by others. This last video has played almost nowhere as I was a little sheepish about sending out into the world because it features my niece. Both videos are over 50 minutes, a format, the long format, which I have subsequently abandoned—at least for now. For this special edition of Peripheral ARTeries we have selected Aquarius the Waterman, an extremely interesting video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once impressed us of your exploration of the intersection of geography and human culture is the way you have provided the results of your inquiry with such autonomous aesthetics. When walking our readers through the genesis of Aquarius the Waterman would tell us what did address you to experimental documentary? I believe you’re asking about how I came to experimental documentary, or how and why did I decide to make experimental documentary videos. I think the answer in some way relates to question number one above in that I found myself needing to make work that was grounded in the actual, work that—while of course making all sorts of references and gestures toward the theoretical and the abstract—was essentially born from the lived world of others and had presence, meaning, and worth regardless of my own being. This was a way to extend out into the world of bodies and material and put aside, at least a little bit, my own psychology, my own personality, my own biography. The decisions I make when cobbling these works together are thrilling because the raw material comes from the not-me. And at its very best the ideal finished edit, something I don’t even think I can achieve because I still don’t know if I fully understand it and the very technology involved may preclude it, but at the work’s very best I hope to have helped conjure what Martin Buber calls the thou. The work, at its most ideal and at its very best, would be a thou for an audience. Building on agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries Aquarius the Waterman, 2017, 10 minutes, single-channel video
71 SPECIAL ISSUE this, because I am making this all up right now, the finished work is a perverse manifestation of me for an audience. So my documentary work is an attempt at extending out into the world during the gathering of documents so as to put the “I” aside a bit and converse with the “notme,” then the edit gets folded back into the “I,” the me, and finally unfolds over time in a theater for an audience as a potential thou for said audience. I think that all hangs together quite nicely. But back to the question. Over and above what I have already mentioned, I took some formative classes as a graduate student on metaphor Steve Wetzel eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral
SPECIAL ISSUE 72 theory in anthropology; comparative, crosscultural poetics; and ethnographic research methods. This coursework really opened up a bunch of stuff for me. Suddenly the entire world, each and every human action, gesture, sentence, whatever, was kind of thrilling; the human in all of its mundanity rose to the level of the profound. I became extremely interested in how we make our worlds, small and large—mainly small, at the level of the event or, in the case of Aquarius, at the level of a series of sentences that build a legend that explains the founding of a medieval mine in a small rural mountain village in Austria. agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries Aquarius the Waterman, 2017, 10 minutes, single-channel video
73 SPECIAL ISSUE Sound plays a crucial role in Aquarius the Waterman, providing it with such uncanny atmosphere, capable of walking the viewers to a multilayered sensorial experience. According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you see the relationship between sound and moving images? That’s a good question. Or, I am happy to hear that you recognize the sound as being important to the work because it really is, and not just as a way of making the video cohere. Often times sound is just treated as this extraordinary varnish on a work, a means to hide edits, or a way to simply lead from one improbable place to another. I think of sound as being the most important element in my work, and I do all of my own recording, mixing, and mastering. Now, I am not a professional sound engineer but I have spent a lot of time working with sound, thinking about it, and teaching it. And in many ways I am still a novice. I know enough to make my work the way it needs to be made, and enough to teach my sound course that leads with the urgency of deep listening and the development of empathy through such listening. I’m trying to help shape young artists (though many of them do not see themselves as such), and the first and perhaps only lesson is to learn how to pay attention, and of course what is integral to that is listening. And, yeah, we’re not very good at it as we tend to ignore the aural in favor of the visual. The way I see the relationship between sound and image is that it is in fact a relationship, and like most relationships the elements involved, sound and image, shape one another, impress upon one another, inform one another, are ecstatically entangled, and are wholly dependent upon one another. We can pretend that one or the other can exist in a vacuum, a sort of floating, untethered thing in and of itself. And perhaps it’s good on occasion to pretend such things, but it’s also good and necessary to pretend the opposite—that no such free, non-relational thing exists and that all is bound together in a relationship that extends infinitely through and around time-space. I Steve Wetzel eries Contemporary Art Peripheral agazine
From the Archives of an Inventor, 2009, 20 minutes, single-channel video
SPECIAL ISSUE 74 prefer this image. That’s how I understand sound and image and I guess that’s how I understand life. Yes, a sound can assert itself, declare its singularity, and we can recognize the assertion, even find pleasure in it. But in the end that singularity only has presence because of the multitude of other presences with which it is unequivocally bound. I mean, nothing new I guess. I would only add that I tell my students in my sound class that if they’re not truly engaging with sound in their work then they’re really not participating in the fullness and potential of the work. It would be like making apple pie and then choosing to leave the apples on the cutting board. I like crust. I love pastry crust. But my god you need the apples too. Aquarius the Waterman also addresses us to reassess our relationship to the material world: British multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch once stated "that works of arts often continue to evolve after they have been realised, simply by the fact that they are conceived with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur". Do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? I’d like to separate the last question into two parts. On the one hand we have a statement about the possibility of art as an experience that has baked into it the possibility of continual evolution or renewal. And on the other hand we have a question about the role of the artist in a contemporary, media-rich, global society. The one hand (art as an experience of continual evolution): This pertains to all that we experience, not just art. And it’s not so much about the object as it is the relationship between object and beholder. It seems a much more interesting way to live in the world to imagine that all relationships need not be what they are and need not move into the future unchanged. Even if this isn’t the case, it should be, especially concerning art. The notion that great art is timeless or that great art stands the test of time doesn’t mean anything to me. I understand the impulse to want to validate human work in such a way, or the need to separate the wheat from the chaff, but this should be left to each and every new generation while still honoring the choices of previous agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries Of the Iron Range, 2014, 20 minutes, single-channel video
75 SPECIAL ISSUE generations. At any rate I like Bulloch’s statement (a statement that is fundamental to understanding much contemporary art, or maybe the bulk of western art since the ‘60s?) and I would apply it much more broadly to include all relations, not just art and audience. Occupying this position as a human being would go a long way in, generally speaking, reducing violence. I just made a huge leap, but I mean it. The other hand (has the role of the artist in a contemporary, media-rich, global society changed): Yes and no. I guess this depends what one imagines the role of the artist is in Steve Wetzel eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral
SPECIAL ISSUE 76 society. If one imagines the artist’s role as a shaman, then it’s the same game with different tools. So too if the artist is imagined as a social watchdog—same game with different tools. Or what if the artist is a mouthpiece for a generation or a conduit for the non-human (god, truth, form) . . . same game new tools I guess. Perhaps the shift is for those artists who see their work as primarily an act of conventional communication. “My art communicates X to a viewer.” In that case it’s still the same game but perhaps the tools are more in line with, or they might better serve, the objective(?). Regarding changing agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries The First Shot is Silent: Kaszube’s Park, 2010, 14 minutes, single-channel video
77 SPECIAL ISSUE sensibilities, my sense is that this has always been a part of the give and take between artist and audience, or artist and public. An artist’s culture changes and she either speaks to those changes or she doesn’t. One needn’t, but if one doesn’t then the risk of making work that is simply unintelligible to its audience, or unrelated-able, is certainly likely. There’s also nothing wrong with going into one’s own little wormhole and making work according to either an outdated mode, form, or set of ideas, or making work based on a private, totally idiosyncratic set of symbols or images or language. It all depends on what one is trying to achieve. I wonder if I am way off base and what you’re asking is not so much about changing technologies but about the way in which an artist can so much more easily engage with an international audience, therefore the artist is a global entity as opposed to a regional or national one? And what are the ramifications regarding universalist ideals? Not sure. A recent development in your practice and research is folklore and a particular aspect of your current interests is focused on the relationship between folktales and the everyday: how do you consider the relationship between the real and the imagined? Do think that there's a point of convergence between these apparently opposite notions? In particular, how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? Yes I have to think that there is a convergence between the real and the imagined. Let’s use “the real” broadly as opposed to the narrower psychoanalytic construction of the term. In this way the real is that which I can’t wish away. My mom dying, for instance; she isn’t, but if she were I couldn’t wish that away, but I could wish or imagine that she be healthy. This is probably a crude distinction but it’s as good a place as any to start making some distinctions—if only to later find these very same distinctions melting away. So if the real can’t be wished away and the imagined can, then they hold sway over different terrain, or each can be accessed or is experienced differently. But of course the two intersect and are dependent on each other in the same way that sense and non-sense are, in the same way that any binary pair is: you can’t have one without the other and in mindful combination they set the Steve Wetzel eries Contemporary Art Peripheral agazine
Kid Beat Box: Twenty-two Tapes, Edit Nine, 2011, 9 minutes, single-channel video
SPECIAL ISSUE 78 stage for all sorts play, some good and some bad. The good sort of combinatory play is one where the terms remain active and reverberant and our contending with them makes us broader and more open to the world, makes us more generous, empathic, and loving. The bad sort of combinatory play leaves us stuck in a seemingly rigid binary between two opposing poles, each truer than the other, each without elasticity and potential, each its own singularity (we can hardly call this play). So while it’s important to recognize the distinctive features or attributes of the real and the imagined, it’s equally important, necessary actually, to live in their relationship. My mom is dying (she isn’t) and I imagine she isn’t (she is). In any case my thinking on my mom’s mortality makes me want to call her on the phone and tell her that I love her. Now returning to the question of the real and the imagined, you asked about how the everyday informs my creative work. The everyday is the bedrock of my work. The everyday is not spectacle. My work can be boring, and that’s great. At times I traffic in boredom, sometimes tedium. I like to think that the very best my work can do for others is to offer a place of sustained thought. In order to create this space there has to be room for an audience to think, there has to be room for an audience to extend into the screen not in the manner of character identification but in the manner of thought. This place offers itself to an audience as being from and of the everyday, or the real. The context of the work (in a theater, or perhaps its designation as art) speaks to the imagined. Found footage plays a crucial role in your practice and we have appreciated how you developed the idea of From the Archives of an Inventor: what does appeal you of found footage and of the chance to extract unexpected meanings from an image? In particular, would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? I have dabbled with found footage, mainly in the two works cited here (Aquarius and Archives). For the most part I record my own material, but for the sake of this interview I can talk a bit about found footage, or appropriated material though, again, this is not my primary approach and so I am likely to come off as a bit ignorant. In any event, I agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries Music Club, 30 minutes, 2015, single-channel video
79 SPECIAL ISSUE love the freedom that appropriation offers. When I’m working with my own cameragenerated material I have to do certain things like wait a year to edit the footage in order to create the freedom I feel when working with appropriated documents. There’s a part of me that wants to totally give up using a camera. There are enough images already! But, you know, I do get great pleasure out of framing up a scene; it’s the closest thing to painting for me. In a way found footage (I’m using found footage and appropriation interchangeably) feels like cheating. But to talk about cheating is to assume that there is one way to go about the Steve Wetzel eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral
agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries SPECIAL ISSUE 80 work of stringing together images and sound. There isn’t. But I say that it feels like cheating because it’s so easy. I have no attachment to the material and therefore I feel like I have absolute freedom to do as I please. And my palette is relatively unlimited when working with appropriated material. It’s almost too much fun. I was raised Catholic so negotiating fun and pleasure is a lifelong affair. Another positive aspect of working with appropriated material is in what you mention in your question above, the creation of unexpected meanings. Because the raw material is from a place not my own and the Music Club, 30 minutes, 2015, single-channel video
81 SPECIAL ISSUE general structure of the work seems so much more open (as opposed to trying to work within the conventions of observational cinema), my sense, at least for me, is that the unexpected can materialize much more frequently. The danger is that the unexpected, because of the fruitful conditions mentioned above, can quickly become diluted with too much use or too much presence. Jesse McLean, with whom I teach at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and who is a notable appropriation video artist, has stressed that borrowed footage/audio arrives with context and content that can't be easily disregarded and should instead be embraced by the artist incorporating this material into their piece. A crucial question for her with appropriation is, why show this now? What does this mean now? I like Jesse’s take. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you’re living under": what could be in your opinion the role of Art in the contemporary age? I think Orozco sets the conditions for this response, which is that there is no one contemporary age but rather various cultures and geographies in which an artist does their work. This way of conceiving the role of the artist is different than the more conservative, universalist conception of the artist. They’re both valuable or they both have something meaningful to offer, but I tend to favor Orozco’s characterization if only because it seems more perverse. Further, I like to think of the radical potential of the artist, or rather the radical potential of art—a human discipline like no other in terms of its openness, play, and social and psychological transformative possibilities. The novel. The film. The performance. The sketch. The song. The lyric. The poem. The gesture. The character. The space. The scale. The stroke. Personally speaking, I’d be nothing without art. It hasn’t saved my life so much as made my life. You are a versatile artist and you have also published two small volumes of essays: when introducing our readers to these works, could you tell us when do you recognize that the expressive potential of a material has Steve Wetzel eries Contemporary Art Peripheral agazine
Men’s Hockey, 53 minutes, 2003, single-channel video
SPECIAL ISSUE 82 exhausted its expressive potential to self? I am not sure I understand the question. I think you’re asking me if I can recognize when an idea simply isn’t right for a particular material or form. Or maybe you’re asking what happens when one realizes that one has exhausted the possibilities of one form, strategy, medium or material?, like how I was speaking about painting in the first question? Maybe I should just assert something that’s in the same ballpark as the question instead of analyzing it (the question). I try my best to always fully consider the agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries Untitled, 1998, oil on canvas, 4’ X 5’
Steve Wetzel eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral 83 SPECIAL ISSUE strengths of the strategy, form, and material with all of my works, but of course I make all sorts of compromises. I teach in a film and video department so I have to make time-based work. That’s just how it is. So I make sure to make room for other pursuits: a little music and living performance, some installation here and there, and writing. My writings offer me a space to grapple with other sorts of subject matter where I can test modes of representation that are somewhat more personal. I just simply find that I’m better able to do this in writing than with, say, a camera and microphone. If I had my druthers I’d be a writer, to be honest. We’ll see. It’s pretty presumptuous to say that. I should just give it a try and see where I end up, probably failing like most everyone else who has the gumption to say, “I shoulda been a writer.” I have an idea for my first story. It’s about a chronically masturbating medieval hermit who holds the Truth. One of the hallmarks of your work is its ability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language you use in a particular context? Do I consider the issue of audience reception a crucial component of my decision-making process? Yes, absolutely. And I’m glad to hear that you recognized the following in my work: “. . . its ability [the video] to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship.” For sure. Yes. If nothing else, this. I think of the work as being in direct relation with and to an audience, and it makes demands and requires the audience to be present-minded and actively engaged in order for the work to be fully realized. Like so much art-based video, there is a great reliance on the audience doing work! It does not simply deliver pleasure—though it may also do this, just not exclusively. I am constantly thinking about, while I’m editing, the way in which the video is pushing and pulling, proceeding and receding, extending and recoiling. Really. All work needs a fundamental tension (this is something my masturbating hermit mumbles about, a lot), and in my work it’s what I just tried to describe, something between the work’s meeting an audience and an audience being compelled to carry forward and meet it. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Steve. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Unthinkably, I just bought a house. Milwaukee, if you have a full-time job that pays above poverty wages, is a fairly affordable place to live. So me and my partner went all in and bought an old house that looks to be a lifelong craft project. I just learned the ins and outs of a remarkable machine called a boiler. How long have humans lived with such a machine? Not that long!, relatively speaking. And it’s incredibly simple and complex. It’s got a relay switch, and a reducer, and intakes and outtakes. You can empty the expansion tank (I think that’s what it’s called) by attaching a cut garden hose and threading it into your basement drain wherein air funnels back up through the hose to change the overall water pressure in the system, which is necessary, infusing this tank with air, because too much water pressure risks a burst pipe. Who wants that when you live in the Midwest? No one. So I had a one-hour master class on our boiler with Bill Webb, an individual who has been working on these heating machines for three or four decades. In sixty minutes he completely eased my restless brain. If only I could do this for my students. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator peripheral.arteries@europe.com
Shai Jossef
SPECIAL ISSUE 194 Hello Sylviane and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid background and after having earned your B.A. in Art Education Studies from Concordia University you nurtured your education with a M.F.A. in Art Education and Studio Art from McGill University: how do these experiences influence the way you currently conceive your works? In particular, how did formal training help you to develop your unique style? My formal art education and Studio Art sessions were instrumental in shaping my vision as an artist. The classroom setting was an efficient and effective way to experiment with a diversity of techniques, which one must absolutely master in order to become proficient in creating meaningful and original artworks. Aside from learning essential art techniques, my formal art education provided me with the incredible opportunity to work with other gifted artists and experience firsthand the progression of their artistic creativity and unique styles. I also did spend time studying the evolution of art throughout history, which not only broadened my understanding of how various art styles progressed over time, but also provided Sylviane De Roquebrune Lives and works in Naples, Florida USA Peripheral ARTeries meets As a multimedia artist, I have been drawn to a wide range of art practices. Not entirely satisfied with any one explicitly, I enjoy the exploration of each separately and the interdisciplinary approach of cross-referencing, fusing, and the reinterpreting the established genres to find my own voice. Change is a constant in my work. Each different body of work delineates the evolution of ideas over the course of years of my practice. My new work is inspired by women with extravagant hair or hairpieces and sometimes masks. Masked images emerge from an eclectic collection of mystical and visual images. We wear many masks at different times for different reasons as we interact with the world. Processes and materials are the vocabulary, and the method of working in a series provides the syntax for my art. I cannot anticipate the direction the work might take but it is through the process of making things, be they drawings, paintings that I can begin to understand what the subconscious may already have known. Intuition is my guide. I follow it blindly and trust that it will get me where I never knew I wanted to go. My over-arching goal in life as an artist is to define a style of my own and strive for a truth. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator peripheral.arteries@europe.com agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries
187 SPECIAL ISSUE Sylviane De Roquebrune eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral me with new insights for my own work. While my formal art education was the initial impetus, it was not my only source of inspiration. I did experiment a lot on my own with various techniques, styles and mixed media. It took me years of daily work, ever-ending experiential research and many, many challenging trials and errors before I was able to develop a style that I would consider to be my unique voice. I am far from being fully satisfied yet, however. Indeed, it is an ongoing development and growth. The hard part is to develop a mature and distinctive style that is uniquely yours within which you can grow. Your works convey such coherent sense of unity that rejects any conventional classification. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit https://www.sylvianederoquebruneart. com in order to get a synoptic view of your work: in the meanwhile, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up? Thank you for suggesting to your readers to visit my website. I follow a variety of processes when I do my artwork. Let me explain two of them. Initially I start on a small-scale version of my composition. This helps me to develop an idea and create a strong composition. I then proceed in rendering the small-scale drawing onto a large surface using various multi-media materials. Once I start working on the large scale, everything goes. Often the result is drastically different from the original small-scale version. Once I am committed to the large scale I am focused on my personal interpretation of what the original composition conveyed to me. I look for inner meanings, nuances and secret messages. Sometimes I skip entirely the small-scale version and work directly on a blank canvas or paper and let my feelings, mood and inspiration flow freely. I allow the energy of the moment and spontaneity to be my guiding light. It is no longer an intellectual exercise, but rather a spiritual journey: a means of expressing what treasures are hidden in my subconscious. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of Peripheral ARTeries and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article has at once captured our attention for the way your inquiry into the theme of women with extravagant hair and masks provides the visual results of your artistic inquiry with autonomous aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of the Women Series we would ask you if you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value. Being a woman has definitely influenced my body of works when I developed the “Women Series”. We live in a world that places an inordinate emphasis and obsessive importance on external physicality and appearance. I find that the influence of the media, in movies,
SPECIAL ISSUE 198 magazines, and television, is generally pervasive and detrimental to women. Fashion magazines in particular have a powerful effect on how women perceive themselves set unrealistic expectations for what the woman's body shape, size and appearance should be. Little is said or done about the "woman's soul, spirit and inner beauty". My "Women Series" deals with the notion that there is more to agazine Special Edition Contemporary Art Peripheral eries
199 SPECIAL ISSUE Sylviane De Roquebrune eries agazine Contemporary Art Peripheral