My name is Jasmin Tsou and you’re listening to JTT. In today’s episode, I interview Sam McKinniss. Sam was born in 1985 in Northfield, Minnesota, but spent most of his life growing up in Connecticut before moving to New York City in 2011. Sam is a painter who depicts dramatized versions of popular figures from within his own lifetime. Through his paintings, you can trace a timeline of American culture: from the 1984 cover of Prince's Purple Rain to Nancy Reagan’s official portrait during the late 80’s AIDS epidemic, to Aaliyah 90’s Tommy Hilfiger commercial, to Lindsay Lohan drunk driving in her Porsche with a cigarette in her hand in 2007, to Mason Ramsey yodeling in a Walmart in 2018. The images Sam paints might be recognizable to Americans born in the mid 1980’s who are in any way invested in popular imagery – or used actors, politicians, singers, or the news media to understand their own desires. Sam’s version of these photographs are saturated with color, bravura brushwork, and often imbued with the almost religious sense of iconography. Today we talk about what the significance of these images are to Sam and how he thinks about them in relation to each other. Thanks for listening. 

JT: Alright, I'm here with Sam McKinniss. Hi, Sam!

SM: Hi, Jasmin!

JT: Thank you for joining me today.

SM: My pleasure.

JT: I want to start with your show, Costume Drama, that was on view at the Ovitz Collection. In this show, you did a masterful painting of the Titanic sinking. It was a still from the James Cameron’s 1997 film, Titanic, and you describe the film as a romantic disaster epic as well as a costume drama. What is a costume drama?

SM: Well, first of all I think– thank you, I'm glad that you think that was a masterful painting. I tend to agree, it did become a centerpiece for that show which was called “costume drama” and a costume drama would be what you could also call a period piece – or you know a film or a play or some piece of drama – where the characters and the setting takes place in the distant past. So the costumes inform the story telling, they become a significant part of the storytelling. I was wanting to make a show that reflected that specific moment in the world's history, which we could just call the pandemic era, and I thought of using costume drama as maybe a shortcut to getting to the historical significance of the era we were living in at that time. Exactly 2020 into 2021.

JT: Yeah, I mean you actually talk about Covid a lot in that press release. And it feels like you know a lot of people think about your work– or your work does take a lot of content from the 90’s or the early 2000’s, but really there's so much about the contemporary moment that we are in in your work. This moment of looking back into it, and I feel like you really talk about that in your press release. So what was it like thinking about the content in that show sort of standing in the moment that you were in?

SM: The pandemic, when it first arrived, I would describe the way everything felt at that moment was everything was heightened. Everything felt too much, too stressful, too anxious, too nervous… There was a threat to the general health and well-being of the world's entire population that we did not understand. In the United States, we had a federal government who was not ready or not equipped to deal with it, and there were just so many questions – existential questions – about how to keep ourselves and our communities safe and healthy. And was there any way to get through? We didn't know. All of it was just too stressful. For most people, the easiest thing to do – or the thing that was most recommended for us to do – was to try to self isolate and limit contact with our communities as an effort, as a safeguard, against spreading this disease that we had no vaccine for and had very little understanding of. And of course self isolation does a real number on one's mental health. So you could avoid the Covid, but at the same time your mental health was maybe going south. I think I had that experience. But we could talk for an entire week or month about what exactly is meant by Covid-19 – like what are all the details and all the contours of that as a context – but briefly, I think you could say just extreme anxiety, extreme stress, fear, and fear of what we did not know about or understand– or did not know what we were dealing with exactly. 

So before that time, I think my work as an artist involved itself with pictorial content that is sourced or borrowed or appropriated from the middle past – you know, some prior moment but that I could sort of remember from my own lifetime. But when I was younger, or much younger, or maybe last year, or the year before, or maybe five years, ten years ago, 15 years ago. And while making Costume Drama, I wanted to describe a mental state that was very unsure, very insecure, very packed with nervous energy and just a lot of stress. Relying on one genre of storytelling, by which I mean costume drama as a genre, if I could rely on that it would limit what I could draw from. If I could only draw from this one sort of way of telling stories or making pictures, then that would act as a kind of organizing principle. But also, just the genre itself allows itself to heighten states of dramatic storytelling. It heightens the romance, or the drama, or the rush – versus someone wearing contemporary dress. Contemporary casual dress, it's not as exciting perhaps…

JT: Can you describe some of the other paintings in the show? The other content you had in the show?

SM: Well, the Titanic was perfect because it felt like a perfect image of what it felt like to live in a big city in the United States, where this group of people are packed in close together and they are all on this sinking ship. It's all going down. It just felt very apt as a metaphor for what we were collectively living through and feeling. And all the confusion that comes along with being on a sinking ship. And then also in that show was a painting of Mozart laughing and he's at a party wearing a costume – he's dressed as a unicorn I think – from the movie Amadeus, which is another costume drama. And then there was a picture of Desdemona having sex with Othello from the film version of Othello starring Laurence Fishburne. And there was another picture of, oh dear, Batman (laughs) in an embrace with Nicole Kidman – which was not exactly a costume drama, although Batman is itself very much about the costume. And there was another painting of Kate Winslet's character from Titanic, Rose, and she's doing that famous nude scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack, is drawing her naked. And–

JT: And there's also a cop car on fire in this show. And is this, perhaps, the most contemporary painting you've ever done? Meaning the content in itself was fairly recent, right, it was of that year I believe…

SM: Yes, at that time that probably was the stand out for being completely contemporaneous to the year I made it. But this year I made  a painting of Will Smith crying, which happened earlier this year, and then I showed it the same year that that had happened. But the cop car felt completely analogous to a sinking ship. So here we have the vehicles on fire in Brooklyn – in, you know, one of our neighborhoods – and it's really similar to an ocean liner that's struck by an iceberg which is going to sink in the Atlantic ocean. I mean these both have to do with wrecked vehicles, you know. But they mean completely different things, the pictures of them mean completely different things. But there was an analogy worth making there which could bring the early 20th century, when we have ocean liners sinking in the north Atlantic, right up to yesterday when we have cop cars being lit on fire by angry protestors in our own city. And both brought drama, but with one I felt like I could sympathize with the politics of protest in the form of a protest in the form of a picture. And the other one, I felt like I could use a Hollywood movie based on an actual historical event. And when bringing them together, you get a sense for how dramatic the times were during 2020 – during the context of Covid-19.

JT: Uh-huh. Also the cop car– the canvas is small. I don't know off the top of my head, but maybe it's a nine by twelve inch painting. And the Titanic is a large, landscape sized painting and really just exquisite in terms of the– I mean they both are, but for different reasons. There’s a sort of delicate nature to the cop car, and I was wondering how you went about deciding what size– actually I'm kind of curious how you go about deciding what size any of your paintings should be?

SM: It’s intuitive but it’s based on trying to decide what would feel the best, what would feel the most appropriate, what would feel the most effective, in terms of the encounter of a gallery visitor walking into a gallery. Walking into the exhibition arena and being confronted with one of my paintings– a large canvas kind of dominates or envelops the viewer in a different way than a small picture invites and requires a viewer to come closer and really investigate its detail on a smaller scale. Also, smaller canvases are much easier to collect, which is a business decision but it's also an emotional reaction of feeling like you can approach an object and feeling like you can imagine yourself holding it. You can imagine yourself owning it, you can imagine the possession of that object much easier than you can imagine the possession of a large billboard size canvas. It’s harder for you to wrap your head around that because you can't wrap your arms around it – do you follow? So it's a difference physically. But I also thought– I was imagining it being very sweet and kind of funny, but also sympathetic, to share, reshare, e essentially reblog, a picture of that cop car being lit on fire – which did in fact get reblogged millions of times because it was a viral sensation on the internet. But I was trying to imagine resharing that image as an almost tenderly rendered experience from our backyard. Almost to say– I don't know what I was saying, but I was trying to extend my political sympathies towards the person who lit that car on fire and had to go to jail probably forever, and say, “I too agree that there are too many cops and I think we can afford to light some of those vehicles on fire.” And the image of it alone is thrilling. At the time, it was so thrilling and unexpected and it was sensational and also now we are realizing it is hard to live up to and hard to duplicate. We haven't so far had a summer that was as intense on the streets here in Brooklyn as what we experienced in New York in the summer of 2020. And I'm kind of shocked at that, that we got to live through a summer of social protesting that was that intense and has not yet been replicated.

JT: Moving on to the solo show that you made for us at JTT in May of 2022 titled Mischief, can you tell us a little bit about the work in this show and why you chose this title for this body of work?

SM: Yes, well I think I imagined– JTT the gallery had taken a new lease in Tribeca and you were all renovating this brand new gallery exhibition space. That felt like a really fun and exciting opportunity to reenter normal business hours – or comparatively normal business hours, normal business experience now that people have been vaccinated and re-vaccinated and re-vaccinated – and so just looking at the space, you had shared with me, “there's was an opportunity, a place in the calendar for you to make a smaller exhibition” in what you were calling the back room, which was really just the smaller of two large-ish significant exhibition spaces, downtown. So what I had imaged was, “well that's great, I'll make a small show.” I imagined it as a quartet of images – just a tight assembly of interlocking pictorial components that could all lean or rest on one another north, south, east, west. And each picture in that quartet could derive energy from the painting next to it, and the painting across the room from it, and the painting on its other side. That then became a quintet, the five paintings to show. The show before that was Costume Drama, and that ballooned into some like 15, 16, 17, 18 paintings. I don't remember, but it was a lot. And then I thought, let’s just keep it very tight and try to make these relationships between artworks hidden but palpable. And once I got to five pictures– well the first one I started was probably the little painting called Junior, which was the painting of a little boy with red hair dressed up in a devil costume from the movie, what is it called… 

JT: Problem Child?

SM: Problem Child! The character is Junior from Problem Child, and I imagined that as kind of like a stand-in for young me – child me. And then thinking about the show being a quartet or a quintet, then I started thinking about a nuclear family. So then I tried to source the father, then the mother, and then give it a landscape within which to exist. And the other picture ended up being a piece of pornography, to try to imagine a household where the child is gay, the parents are difficult, there’s this porn element and you’re also– all of this is happening in Hell as a landscape. The landscape is Hell, the mother is Nancy Reagan, the father is at a baseball game getting hit in the face with a baseball bat, the child is the Devil, and they are living in Hell. Oh! And the porn is there just floating around in the space, adding a bit of the internet and sexual tension to all of this, all of these proceedings.

JT: I think Junior is one of my favorite paintings of yours. Partially because I do think of it so much as a self portrait, and I do see so much– just thinking of you painting it, the child is so mischievous, I mean the title of the show is so appropriate for that painting. He looks like he's getting so much pleasure out of whatever sort of  – probably seeming as a child, potentially harmless – behavior he’s enacting. But there's this just sort of pleasure in his rebellion. But also, yeah, so young... And kind of tender.

SM: I never– I don't think I’ve seen that movie since I was, myself, a child. Because it ran on cable all the time – and I talked to Michael Ovitz about that and he said, “yeah, that's usually a bad sign.” If the movie does badly at the box office, it goes straight to cable and you can see it everyday or every weekend on cable, and that means they are trying to get some of their money back. And so the movie was not a great success, apparently. However, I think for people of our generation, a lot of us have this memory in common of just turning the TV on and Problem Child is playing somewhere on some cable network. But I don't remember the plot, or what happens, or anything that Junior is doing in the movie. I remember there's maybe a lot of sight gags, physical humor, a lot of like… pranks that look painful, you know, or something like this. I don't know, I remember I liked the movie a lot when I was younger – but it doesn't really matter, just the kid’s smirk and his pale complexion and his reddish hair, it reminded me of myself. But also, that's a hard image. A little kid dressed up as Satan, that is secretly very hard. And while at the same time just being– it’s stupid. It's kids stuff. It's really stupid. But if you try to imagine a kid being a devil (laughs), it goes kind of hard. And then if you throw into that this Czech porn star with a huge hard rocking cock across the room, you're getting into territory that is even more uncomfortable or hard. And then Nancy Reagan, she's residing over all of this with a “just say no” attitude. It doesn't make any sense, none of these people really get along. However all of these conflicts make them reliant on each other– it's kinda like codependency (laughs).

JT: Well, I think they went together perfectly and–

SM: Me too, codependency works!

JT: (laughs) but I mean, and how tender for a child to see themselves as the Devil. I think that's sort of the complicated thing that's deep at work within the painting. And the porn star acted a bit to me– as you're describing this as a sort of family unit, the porn kinda felt like a window out, but also a way through which this child sees itself as evil. And this Nancy Reagan also a window through which the child could imagine itself as evil. So they all inform each other so deeply.

SM: Mh-hm. Also, what I will say is I think for a lot of people our age who had access to computers, the internet was the window to find your way out, a window to something that was not Nancy Reagan's American– or you know, not the kind of conservative family values household in which many of us were raised that then started to feel like a trap. So what was the internet for when we were younger? It was for finding porn. And what did that do? It made us feel cool (laughs). Nancy Reagan did not make many of us feel cool. And I was too young to really be paying attention to her, all I can say is that that style of adulthood persisted way past its expiration date. And another funny thing about the Mischief show was she's wearing almost the exact same outfit as Junior is. They are wearing the same color red, she has a pussy bow blouse and the little devil costume comes with a red bowtie – so they are almost dressed exactly the same. They do look related. And that was a lot of fun to make, to bring out that genealogy. 

JT: What does Nancy mean to you? I mean, I understand her in the context as this sort of mother in this but–

SM: I was using her as a private metaphor for exploring private memories from my own personal life. But what she means to me as a part of, I don't know, is Reaganism the word? What she means to me from that part of my life is a failure to take AIDS seriously, and AIDS was a thing that decimated a community before I was even born. And by the time I was born, and then had to grow up and become an adolescent and then an adult, the failure to deal with AIDS before and right after I was born meant that I still had to deal with it by the time I became sexual. And so the Reagans to me represent– I don't know much about anything that they did, all I know is that for a gay person, sex also has to come with AIDS because we’re still dealing with it. We are still cleaning it up. It's a lot easier now than it was of course, thank God – but that's not because Ronald and Nancy Reagan dealt with it. So also that should be familiar to us because the Trump administration refused to deal with Covid as quickly as they could have, and it was up to other professionals inside the government to pick up the slack. It’s really embarrassing that basic issues of human health and happiness make these types of people uncomfortable (laughs) okay… I’m sorry you are uncomfortable, but the hospitals are maxed out because nobody can fucking breathe. I'm sorry you are uncomfortable…

JT: There's something really powerful about the Nancy Reagan portrait. Not to focus on it too much, but it was the work in the show that I think that stopped a lot of people in their tracks. And there is something about painting her so exquisitely. Looking at that painting I think– yeah there was just a lot of power in it and I think, I mean what a horrible human being, Nancy Reagan, and I don't know what it means to sort of spend time looking at her.

SM: I don't like it, I didn't like making that painting. And I made a second one that we are going to show together in Miami at the art fair and I really didn't like making that one either. 

JT: Yeah. What about the second Nancy Reagan is different from the first?

SM: Well, she's– it’s a larger pose, so the painting that we included in Mischief was just essentially a headshot portrait, just head and shoulders. And what we’ll show together in Miami, it's basically waist up right and she's posing I think on one of the balconies outside of the White House. I believe that's where she is. And it's kind of a coy, playful, very gestural pose that she's doing. It seems a little bit informed or infused with her background in Hollywood – there's a little bit of glamour, a little bit coquettish, but of course very buttoned-up and dressed in state power and what you might call “power red.” She’s in a power red skirt suit, or I don't know what you would call it, probably it's like a Chanel suit but more Republican than that!

JT: (laughs) So just last month you opened a show at Almine Rech in Paris titled Misery, can you tell us a little bit about the work in this show?

SM: Yes, this was my first solo exhibition in Paris and, briefly, I wanted to show– I wanted to do a show that was mostly consisting of portraits of actors receiving Academy Awards, but then to complicate that theme or maybe create a sub theme or sub plot, that these actors would be side by side with paintings of cows in the landscape. So farm animals and actors. And I also wanted to cover the floor of the gallery with a red carpet. So that ended up being the way it was, more or less – actors and cows.

JT: It's funny because when you were telling me that you wanted to make this work, I could not see what these two things had in common at all. But then I went up to your studio and saw the work before it shipped, and it was quite remarkable how well these two things go together. It didn't hit me until seeing the cows in person, but they have this very maternal vibe to them (laughs) and they– I mean I think in one of them, there is actually a calf. So there is actually a sort of mother calf relationship. And seeing the cows next to these adults crying, it felt like this whole show was one large Pietà. 

SM: Yeah, that's not bad. And it's not– it is funny, it is a little bit of a joke. But the joke itself isn't a very good joke. It’s just something that was useful to me to complicate my own track record, my own exhibition history, my own way of designing shows and choosing subject material. I think if I were to send a show out that was only, you know, pop culture related references and images appropriated from the world of Hollywood or entertainment, I myself would get very bored and also risk boring my audience. Because as much as these pop culture phenomena– the pop culture phenomenon they all have their own constituent publics and fandoms, but also me as an artist who shows in public, I'm also developing my own public, my own audience. And when I make the work I'm by myself. Basically entertaining myself, by myself, through my own artistic activity. So I needed a hard pivot away from just purely Hollywood stuff, and I have been working for the past year in an old barn in Connecticut next to my house there. And you know, I didn't want to make this show, I didn't want to do it. I was tired, I was a little bit– I had been working a lot. I did two shows in 2021. I had just finished Mischief for you in New York. I was not really too amped to make a show for Paris, even though it was a great opportunity and it's lovely to be in Paris and it’s excellent to show artwork there. As soon as I looked outside and decided, you know, I'm just going to do whatever I want, all I want to do right now is look at the cows who are my neighbors. I said, “I'm just going to paint cows and see how I feel after that.” I made one small little study of a cow and I said, “I know exactly how to make this show.” I know exactly what this show is, I'm doing– well okay to back up, in 2021 when I was doing press for my show Country Western, which was at Almine Rech in London, an interviewer at a magazine asked me kind of a glib closing question. She said, “so, what's next for you?” And as a joke, I told her I want to make a show about celebrities winning Academy Awards and the show is going to be called Misery. And that was just off the cuff because I thought that was a funny thing to throw at this interviewer – something to print that might be funny or interesting, okay? But then, the more I thought about it, I thought, “well that might be cool!” (laughs)

JT: What is funny about Misery with the actors and the Academy Awards?

SM: If you watch it, it's a boring production on TV where these people– it's a lot of pageantry, a lot of build up. It's supposingly very meaningful to watch this or be a part of it, you know, but it's boring television to watch the– the Academy Awards stinks, it's not great. And every year the Academy Awards gets nominated for an Emmy Award, because it's just another piece of televised entertainment. We are acting like it’s a historically relevant event commemorating another year in the life of American cinema, but it’s just boring TV like everything else is.

JT: I always thought that the association between misery and these actors winning Academy Awards was sort of like the reality of the misery of success – like it's never actually quite satisfying.

SM: Of course, yes, there is a moral that you can derive from this – and I've been aware of that. That’s built in as well. Closer to home, I think the funny part, the joke part, is about how miserable it is to watch the Oscars on TV. You also get– there's cracks in the veneer of some of these people who are on television trying to pretend like this is a fun thing or a meaningful thing that they are participating in. When they might just be miserable and they’d rather be at home, or at a nice restaurant, or…

JT: Any other place. (laughs) 

SM: You know? They'd rather not be in LA, I don't know… But then, also the other part of the joke – and this has more to do with the way I was thinking about it, it’s less about the crafting of a joke – I started to ponder the similarities between the word “livestock,” and my reliance on stock photography and stock imagery in order to derive materials for paintings, to find something interesting to paint. I’m very reliant on stock imagery that I can find on Google Image Search. So livestock, stock photography, they’re not so– they must have something in common. And then I was also thinking in terms of misery being a large part of the human condition. Most of human life has been miserable and filled with pain and cruelty and unfairness and suffering. And I was trying– there's another thing where cattle or cows you can describe as “beasts of burden.” That's a cliche. That's a phrase that we’ve heard before, and it just means an animal upon which we work them very hard. Their life is characterized by – or typified by – the burdens they carry. And there's something about parading actors and actresses across a stage and freighting them with the emotional stuff – and the enormous capacity for our imagination all gets freighted onto these people who enact our fantasies and our dreams and our dramas on the screen for us to consume – the same way that livestock feed our bodies physically, nutritionally. The same way that actors playing out stories across the screen on stage feed the lion share of our own imaginative capabilities. They take on all of that responsibility. It seems like an enormous burden, sometimes. If we can take it there. If we – especially when, like I do, when you are trying to unpack or play around with or toy with the possibility that the entertainment industry has … that's where all of our imagination goes. A lot of it! Just goes to an industry based in Hollywood, California. And what do we do when we get home and we are tired of thinking about our misery and our problems? We turn on TV, or we go to the movies, or we take to the internet to imagine a different reality. Or imagine something more colorful, or more interesting, more exciting, more lovely, more younger, sexier – it's kind of mind boggling to me that Hollywood gets to take mostly the responsibility for the ways in which we imagine life. It's a really troubling system to try to live with and cooperate with, and try to find ways to work around or within it or bring it down to your own needs and purposes for how you would seek to design and live your own life.

JT: It's interesting for you to use that word imagination because I always think of your work as so emotive and about sort of processing feelings, or using imagery to access feelings.

SM: Well, the original essential question, how I got into this way of working was, “I don't know how much of my own desire I’m responsible for versus how much of it was designed by the entertainment industry that projected all of these images inside of me since the day I was born.” I don’t know how to get out of that paradigm. And that’s what becomes emotional for me – like I'm tearing up right now just trying to work out the difference between how much of my life was lived versus how much of it was a reaction to something I saw on a screen. Or how much of my desire was innate to me and how much of it was programmed for some profit making enterprise.

JT: Which makes total sense why you made a painting of porn.

SM: (laughs) Yeah, right, right. Because everything is porn. Everything is already porn. Everything is either porn, advertising, or propaganda. 

JT: So, I want to move on to a sculpture that you are making. Is this the first sculpture that you have made?

SM: Not quite, I played around with it in undergrad - but certainly not seriously and–

JT: Can you describe what the sculpture is?

SM: In Miami, I’m going to show a bronze– it's basically a lawn ornament, it’s a lawn sculpture that I found at an antique dealer in Connecticut, and it's a little faun, like the woodland Greek mythological figure. That kind of thing that plays around with Dionysus the god of wine, it’s the kind of thing you might find in an 18th century or 19th century European or American nouveau riche pleasure garden lets say, okay. And he's playing a pan pipe and he has pointed ears and he's nude and he doesn't have feet, he has hooves. Right, so his legs are in the shape of donkeys’ legs. And he's like a prepubescent– a child figure. And it's the kind of thing you might prop up in a little woodland area or a grotto or somewhere where you might meander around the estate and bump into it. I found this thing and bought it and set it up in my yard in Connecticut. And the more I looked at it, the more I wondered if everyone might like to have this. And so I sent it to a fabricator in Kingston, New York who pours bronze – and made a cast. They poured bronze, and then we had it powder coated green to match– it’s a shade of green that I used in my dining room. It's just this really vibrant, verdant… it's just a little bit sharper than kelly green. Like what you can imagine as Irish American green. It's just a touch darker than that. In Paris, for Misery, I was playing a lot with a green and red contrasting color scheme. If you could think about these dairy cattle grazing on an expansive beautiful green lawn and juxtapose that against a red carpet. Likewise in Miami, I wanted to bring that on to Miami and think about, here's Nancy in Republican power red on the balcony at the White House, and here's a little pleasure garden thing in very verdant, 18th century green. So that's the story of that. 

JT: Are there any parallels between the faun and Junior at all?

SM: Oh yeah, exactly. The reason I found– the reason that I saw the fawn and became attracted to it and wanted to own it and to bring it to my house, was because I was painting Junior there and Junior’s devil costume looks just like a faun or a child in a costume – the same way the faun is a costume for like …  it's just a statue, but you could dress a kid up in a faun outfit, you know? So there was a relationship there. The fawn sculpture plus the Nancy painting, it's more of an extension of Mischief to Miami – is where we are going with that…

JT: Well thank you, Sam…

SM: (laughs)

JT: (laughs)

SM: Of course, thank you, Jasmin!

JT: Is there anything else you want to add?

SM: I don't think so.

JT: I don't think so either. I think that's a really nice way to tie it up with just Faun and Junior.

SM: Beautiful, well see you in Miami! It's a wrap.

My name is Jasmin Tsou and you're listening to JTT. In today's episode, I interviewed Dena Yago. Dena was born in 1988 in New York. Her work incorporates text cut into metal, images cut into pressed wool, and paintings that use the visual language of situationist cartoons rendered in pastel color pallets and framed in aluminum. The images that Dena creates, and the texts that she writes, reflect on cultural capitalism – specifically, how culture is utilized by other non-culture based industries. In a larger sense, Dena focuses on the economy that has emerged through network technologies. She asks questions that have been around since the beginning of capitalism, such as what labor is visible and why? But she's also thinking a lot about emerging behaviors and trends – and a very contemporary form of labor that trades in affect, emotion, and creative production. Thanks for listening. 

JT: I'm here with Dena Yago. Hi, Dena.

DY: Hello.

JT: Thank you so much for coming to my house (laughs).

DY: It's a pleasure.

JT: I'm gonna just get right into it.

DY: Yeah!

JT: Okay, cool. You recently had a show in Paris with High Art that opened just last summer. It's titled Industry City, which is also the name of the neighborhood your studio is in. Why did you choose this title?

DY: So, I moved into my studio, which is in the Sunset Park neighborhood next to Industry City, about three years ago – before the pandemic. Industry City is this development that is in what was an old manufacturing hub. So it's a series of buildings on the waterfront where– I think it was founded in the late 19th century. Originally, it was doing import export of hard goods like bananas, chocolate, and cotton –so pretty standard colonial affair. And it was called Bush Terminal at the time, but in 2010 under Bloomberg, it went under this revitalization and remarketing effort and became a cultural hub in this very horizontal way. In the way that places like Chelsea Market – or in LA, Grand Central Market – these other industrialized spaces which had been decommissioned in the 20th century, were finding a new life for this sort of lifestyle commerce. But also a hub for different forms of production that went from like– you know, the buildings were initially housing these hard goods and then, through the process of 100 plus years, ended up becoming a space that originally housed artists studios, who then ended up getting priced out, and now are these maker spaces. A lot of craft oriented lifestyle production.

JT: I'm not sure if you know the answer to this, but I know that Bloomberg had found a way to utilize a lot of that waterfront property in conjunction with real estate development in other areas, so tying in money that–

DY: The ferry…

JT: Yeah, exactly.

DY: His establishing of the ferry system, this was kind of done at the same time as Brooklyn Bridge Park and other areas, but the reason I titled the show Industry City was sort of the linguistic twist of, “what is a cities’ industry?” What is the sort of thing that drives commerce within a certain territorial bounds? But also the fact that in a five block radius around Industry City – or part of Industry City – is also a jail. MDC in Brooklyn. Also, Amazon had moved in and it was a distribution center for their flex point, so last mile delivery services were happening out of there. And then in the jail was where Ghislaine Maxwell was being held as well, so it felt like this sort of synthesis of so many threads that were happening in contemporary culture.

JT: Well, I wanted to start with that question because I feel like actually there's so many ways that your work, and just who you are as a thinker, deals with this particular form of corporate or horizontal growth, essentially. So to get into what I mean by that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the work you were doing actually all the way back when you just graduated from Columbia in 2010. And you were at that point, in some way, working as a consultant for corporations. Am I correct in that?

DY: Right out of school – well actually while I was still in undergrad – we formed K-Hole. But we didn't actually start consulting or working as K-Hole until a few years after that. It sort of started as a conceptual collective writing project, but at the time I was working as a rollout technician at a corporate law firm right next to the World Trade Center. 

JT: Can you explain what that is?

DY: It was just a large corporate law firm that wanted to hire artists and actors and people in creative fields to translate between their hardware department and their lawyers to help explain what was happening with the technology in an accessible cool– quote unquote “cool tech people” that could relate kinda–

JT: What made you prepared for that job?

DY: Absolutely nothing… (laughs) I kinda fancied myself– I was trying to teach myself web design, so somewhat tech literate, but it was just kind of circumstantial.

JT: And so you’re doing this work, and then you start to form K-Hole?

DY: Yeah, so around the time I was working at this law firm, but a lot of my peers ended up out of art school working in marketing agencies and advertising roles. I feel like when I was in undergrad, the path that many people thought they were going to go on was into publishing, but that sort of collapsed or transformed into the digital media landscape that we see now. And the kind of sieve that caught all of these people out of art school were just the machinations of branding. Which wasn't something– it felt like a shift that was happening at this time. Like, “why does everybody have these roles?” Roles that I didn't even know existed and just seemed really bizarre, like a strategist or a trend forecaster. And we were sort of passing around these pdfs amongst friends that just seemed like the most Brita-filtered-down versions of Deleuze or continental philosophy spat out as branding decks. And it really felt like this form that could be detourned, kind of subverted, and could be reused as a platform through which to mount some cultural criticism. So I and four other friends banded together and formed K-Hole. We were like, “ok we are going to start releasing these documents” as kind of a critique of what felt at the time like an emergent lifestyle branding approach, I guess.

JT: Can you define what a trend forecaster is?

DY: Yeah, I think that the way that other people may have encountered this role is through William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, where there is a protagonist named Cayce Pollard – she’s kind of a strategist/trend forecaster – where her role is to just from a very sort of subjective diaphanous position, to say– pick out something from the ether and say, “oh this one thing that's occurring is indicative of the shape of things to come.” Trend forecasting itself exists within many different categories. So you can have a fashion trend forecaster, you can have materials, colors, foods, or you can have something that's more macro. Macro trends look across all categories and basically synthesize leading indicators that are happening in culture and say, “oh this is ….” and they name it. They basically name things that they spot occurring.

JT: So just to take one step back, K-Hole is a collective that was formed in 2010. It no longer exists, but you can actually still access the materials that you gathered at that time in the different basically– you did a different, what would you call it, a report? Every year or so?

DY: Yeah, we ended up releasing these pdf reports for free. We all came from arts and design backgrounds and wanted this project to be something that was accessible to art worlds and to the world of advertising and marketing and branding and whatnot. To kind of put forth our ideas of what was happening in the world and just make that information accessible and free.

JT: What was the significance or importance of it being free?

DY: So the first report, just to kind of harden it up a bit, was called “Fragmoretation.” And it was a trend that we saw coming out of the recession where it wasn't, you know, “cool” for lack of a better word, for brands to be seen as these power, top-down monoliths that controlled all of the resources. So what certain organizations were doing – either symbolically through ad campaigns or in their own corporate structuring – was creating a sort of theater of mom and pop, these kinds of sub brands. So Madewell was a good example of this. Madewell is associated with this same company that owns J. Crew. You walk into a Madewell at the time, in 2010, and they had all of these fake brands on the shelves. They would be called “Delancey” or “Broome and Baxter,” things like this that really evoked the Brooklyn American heritage nostalgia. And they would present Madewell as a purveyor and curator of local goods and also bringing in small brands and things like that, when really it’s… shocker… it’s J. Crew all along. It's not really that enlightening of a thing to say in 2022, but at the time it really felt like, “okay all of these, Timberland or Jeep, they are all these longtail sub-brands” – real or fake. So that was one of them. Another one we looked at– we called the report “Prolasticity” and it was basically about fragmentation over time. And then we released one called “Youth Mode” where we identified the trend Normcore, and that's kind of what jettisoned us into not as much inhabiting this role of trend forecaster, but just like doing the thing. And was when we started working as consultants for brands.

JT: As you are talking I'm just imagining that a Madewell Court Street Grocers combo would be a perfect combination of stores (laughs).

DY: Saying this 12 years later, it's really funny because this was before the collaboration mania and before, I mean, hypebeast behavior. I'm trying to keep myself from calling things “cultures” that don't necessarily feel like they are. But yeah, it feels like it's been a long long ride. 

JT: And just one last thing to help understand trend forecasting, how does time play a part? When you are a trend forecaster there's this understanding that it's something that is currently happening, but will happen more so in the future based on things that are happening in this exact moment?

DY: Yeah, I mean a lot of times people will ask for a 15 year forecast, and I've always been very skeptical of that because the practice itself is using– I mean, ok, to get into it, a lot of trend forecasting agencies will use social listening or use google analytics or google search indicators to be like, “ok all these people are interested in this thing therefore it’s going to blow up and that's a trend.” But the minute that people are googling something, that's already a lagging indicator. Something is already happening and fomenting at a different register. So I've always tried to position trend forecasting as you are looking at things that are already existing. There’s not really projection going on, it's just an extremely contemporary practice. It's like very much looking at what is happening in the moment and not necessarily trying to be prescriptive, but just maybe creating a framework of language around something that doesn't necessarily have that yet. But the other way I've thought about it, which really bleeds into the visual work, is this framework that Raymond Williams established about residual, dominant, and emerging trends. And residual trends are existing behaviors that have maybe been dominant– it is what it means, things that are definitely still a thread in culture, but aren't necessarily leading change or the more dominant power structures. Dominant trends are the ones creating and shaping our reality. And emerging trends are more of these subterranean threads that will soon cycle up, in a way. And all of these things can exist contemporaneously. 

JT: Alright, so to go back to your art practice, in 2011 you had your first art show at Tomorrow gallery and you're just starting K-Hole at the same time. So simultaneously to that work, you are doing your art practice. And this show is titled ESPRIT and it consists of high resolution scans of objects such as almonds, labelless bottles of liquid that look like they might be green tea – I think it's titled “green tea” – a bottle of perfume, fish oil pills, rocks, and there's more... Looking back now, how do you think that very first show was informed by the consultant work you were doing at the time, or just in general, the theory that you were thinking about at the time?

DY: I think that the thing that we all know as lifestyle branding, and the way it exists on Instagram and social media, was just taking shape then. Instagram was started in 2010, so I feel like at that time, all of the sudden you were seeing people create – which had always been the case – but people were creating these self portraits expressing their identity through consumptive habits. And what was really different, that sounds like, “okay duh. That is capitalism,” but in 2011, all of the sudden there was this networked technology that traded– that, you know, privileged the aesthetic. It was a photographic medium where people were taking still lives, people were sharing desk scapes, people were taking photos of their fruit bowls in the early morning. And it really became this aesthetic practice, that as an artist, was really interesting to me. A lot of different artists have approached portraiture through objects, but there was a clear kind of taste and class signification that was happening there as well. And so I started using a scanner because it was the tool that I had ready at hand, and in my early 20s was extremely affordable to work with, and was just starting to document and create these extremely high definition archives of the objects that were that for me, in a way. Which once you meditate on them and look at them and each material has its own history, you're like, “ok” why is it that the watch, perfume, green tea, supplement nexus is now what we now know as the Goop-ification of a certain class and taste bracket – that is now aspirational in many ways. I was trying to pull apart these individual signifiers and objects.

JT: Moving on to 2014, you did a show with Eli Ping and Frances Perkins called Distaff. Can you explain the work that you made in that show and how that work followed the work you were making prior?

DY: Yeah, so to kind of talk through the artworks in that show, I worked with a friend, Denitsa Popova, who’s Bulgarian and she was starting to create this brand, I guess, where she was importing wool blankets from the town where she was from in Bulgaria and really foregrounding the kind of heritage craft aspect of it – like they were washed in the local river, they were sourced from local mountains, things like that… And then on the flip side, at the time I was sharing a studio with a fashion label, Eckhaus Latta, which was also kind of foregrounding the craft and material aspects of, you know, rust dyed denim and things like that. And I was thinking about how, on the one hand, there was this very tactile, material, old practice of shearing sheep and making wool, and then how that translated through these dematerialized and yet still very gendered endeavors – you know, hand dying, brand making, things like that. And then I worked with a dyer named Cara Marie Piazza in Brooklyn to take these wool blankets and then dye them, and was sort of just thinking about gendered and material histories and a different– yeah, womens’ work in different forms. So what ended up being presented were these wool blankets that Cara and I dyed using different rust material from bridles and saddles and different kinds of horse hardware, because the terms of the show– the show was titled Distaff, and the term distaff refers to a matrilineal line in horse breeding as well as being a tool in weaving. And I was also kind of thinking about things in terms of the artist’s’ subjectivity as well and what is lineage and pedigree and grooming – and you know any of these terms that have become a way to talk about a lot of things – through single sculptures that then were installed in the space kind of draping and tethering to the walls and the ceiling and the floor.

JT: So just to do a little recap, in 2010 you got hired as a consultant. You are still in undergrad and you start this collective that starts to deal with some of the things you are finding out in the world as a working individual in New York City who is also a creative individual – and sort of mixing together these different things you are learning, both in the theory you are learning or knew recently from Columbia, or just from being an artist and being curious to the world, to some of the ways corporations were understanding the individuals they were selling to. But then something really happens in this shift in the 2014 show, to me, where it feels like you really start to think about labor – I don't want to say for the first time, but in a really deep and significant way that feels like this other piece that kind of starts to come into your way of thinking more than just thinking about the consumer. Is that true?

DY: Yeah, I think so because I think that being in your early twenties and, you know, starting to work – in the recession still at that point – I think you feel a level of agency, you feel like you have a level of agency that you might not have. I don't know, I think there's a level of confidence of like, “I'm the one setting the terms.” When really it's so far from that. And I'd say that a few years in, you sort of start to see the ways in which artistic labor, creative labor, is both highly valued as an image within the form of capitalism that we live in, but completely devalued in terms of practice. So artists are being featured in ad campaigns… things like that. But you know that the actual material conditions of, not just artists, but any kind of creative– especially in New York City which really fashions itself the whole “made in New York,” its really foregrounding that culture happens here and yet the conditions under which culture is being produced are pretty dismal. 

JT: And also gender starts to become something you are thinking more about as well.

DY: Yeah, I mean I think it was sort of self reflective of trying to understand– going in between being like, “I am myself, I’m an individual,” but also I am not blind to the fact that I'm one of many indefinitely symptomatic– as much as I am an individual, I’m also a product of my time and place and conditions.

JT: Moving on to 2016, you had an exhibition with High Art called Escrow. Where did that title come from for you, wanting to title the show that. 

DY: I think this was– so with Distaff and with ESPRIT, I really start with titles as shaping the sort of cloud of associations and looking at word play and the ways in which words can mean very different things within different contexts. And escrow – the title of the show was In Escrow – the kind of main work in the show, and this was the first piece I made in this way, was a mural of Alice in Wonderland. This Alice-in-Wonderland-scape of her trimming weed bent over a mushroom where her body– you know the scene in Alice in Wonderland where she goes into the house and then eats the cookie and becomes large and the house kinda becomes her body in a way. It’s very literally thinking about the way in which female bodies, queer bodies as well, just are having to reflect upon themselves as image and as property that other entities will sort of project and take their own rights to. So escrow as a term within real estate, or just in general in finance, is taking money and putting it into a neutral third account that is visible by the other party to demonstrate that you have the funds. 

JT: In 2017, you made a show with Bodega in New York, which is now called Derosia, and that show was titled The Lusting Breed. In it were tableaus made of pressed wool dyed with natural materials and cut with pressurized water. Can you explain a little bit about this process and how you cut into the wool?

DY: Yeah, this show really closely related to the Distaff show as well. When I started working with wool, I was really heavily influenced by this book called Textile Sculpture, and it was fully just showing other works with women and fibers – which is a whole category into itself – and I was sort of thinking about the gendered and material history around wool specifically. Also I really was interested in using, in this show, industrialized felt – pressed wool is just felt material – because it has this, its used in industrial applications, its used in noise silencing, its used in machines, but it's also definitely a prime material for etsy makers as well. And I have been interested in this swinging between the two. What does mass-craft look like? The whole maker movement itself has sort of failed in a lot of ways because of this, because it's really demonstrating a level of individual craft but then mass producing the object offsite. Anyways, those works were made just very pragmatically, industrial produced wool that I was hand dying with natural materials and then water jet cutting. I was interested in water jet cutting specifically because it’s this weaponization of a soft material, and also creating an image through negation, through subtraction. The image itself was made through cuts and slits, so having this fontana-esque approach of kind of violent intervention, but done with a more “feminine” soft–

JT: How does water cut exactly? Does it just literally go fast enough that it cuts through the wool?

DY: Oh yeah… it can cut through anything, stone, marble...

JT: And because it's water, it doesn't leave any kind of burn mark on the wool itself?

DY: Exactly. You can’t laser cut it because it singes the fabric. 

JT: What were the images that you made on these pieces of wool?

DY: I started with these two Courbet paintings, The Grain Sifters and The Sleeping Spinner, which were from his larger project which was taking a social realism – I guess that's not the art historical term for it – elevating the everyday, elevating depictions of labor that were not otherwise shown in different Bozart exhibitions. And these two images particularly were of interest to me because they– one of them is an image of rest at work. And at that time, I think Linda Nochlin had written a bit about this piece, how at that time there were all of these depictions of women, in the period just at the crux of industrialization, sleeping on the job. And how that was really demonized by society and sleep was seen as the antithesis to a productive member. And I think that what we know now is that sleep and rest is a primary form of care that is not really made available to most people, full stop. But in domestic work and different forms of invisible precarious work, rest is really a thing that is not available.

JT: You say in the press release, “like these women, some of you may be leveraging your ability to engage in this work at a time that fetishizes such modes of production, particularly affective labor which is often made invisible, and artisanal craft which is often made hyper visible.”

DY: Yeah the other piece, the show I think had six works, two of which were the Courbet and then the other ones were depicting forms of contemporary affective labor. So there was an influencer, a stylist, an assistant… and I also was noticing at the time that there weren't really depictions of the work that we were doing because so much of that work happens in digital space as well. So I wanted to create images, because one of the first points of social cohesion or understanding that other people are experiencing the same thing is having some sort of shared representation.

JT: In 2020, you had another show with Bodega titled Dry Season. Can you explain the work you made for this show?

DY: So, I've been working with text in almost all of my visual works. I will often start with titles, or there will be an exploratory poetic writing phase where I emerge different themes that are important to me in the work. In Dry Season, which was in September of 2020– so I was making the show primarily in the first six months of covid and I wanted to explore ways that the text could be more closely linked to the visual work, which I feel like I've worked through in different forms. At that point, I basically wrote a five voiced play that was delivered through pre-programmed Big Mouth Billy Bass animatronic fish that were mounted on these wood panels. Each character in that inhabited a different generational perspective or a different subjectivity, and they were monologues that intersected at different points, but it was really about the sort of echo chambers that existed within each one of their narratives. So there was one that represented the millennial, one that represented the aging boomer, one that represented a queer therapist, one that represented a poet. So yeah, there were these different roles– a gen x poet, sorry. The age and generation that they came from was also critical.

JT: One thing I also want to follow up what you just said with is that this idea of invisible labor is so relevant right now because of just the way that you can live in a city like New York and not even see any of the people that participate in producing the product that you are acquiring – just through delivery services and things as simple as that. But there is so much of an invisibility of the labor of those around us.

DY: Yeah, I mean the types of work that I am engaging in are extremely white collar, dematerialized knowledge work that trade in affective mediums like branding and communications and things like that, but obvious the largest class of invisible labor is Black and brown people that don't have access to the machinations of the branding or the strategy or the campaign or any of that. A lot of the trickle down operations or ways of depicting their work is not up to them, and that is a form of violence. So I think that in New York City we are more aware and in New York City you do see the ways that Amazon flex points or last mile delivery services kind of impact the cityscape. We've talked about this before, you go into a Whole Foods, it’s primarily people– pickers, people that are shopping for Prime Now. Or, if you are in a bike lane, chances are that you are riding behind somebody with a trailer full of black and yellow tubs filled with goods to bring to peoples’ door steps. I think that where it really becomes invisible in a lot of ways is through just the rest of America, not major urban centers. 

JT: So to explain what Dena just referred to, we recently moved locations – we the gallery JTT, and when looking through different locations we got outbid twice by what they were referring to themselves as, “grocery concept stores.” So New York has been filled more and more with stores that are not grocery stores that people can walk into and buy things, but they are stores that are delivery only. 

DY: Ghost bodegas.

JT: Yeah exactly, instead of a bodega. And so that's just something that– I guess I sort of feel though that a lot of people haven't seen those stores as easily. They are the kind of thing that I notice because I have been in bidding wars with them, but some people that live in the city don't even notice they are here because they are sort of covered up with paper or an advertisement and they might just think that the store is not occupied. 

DY: Yeah there is, I mean this is a very good segway to getting back to Industry City, but to bring up something in the middle of this, there is a writer and management consultant named Venkatesh Rao who wrote an article an essay about Hamiltonian cathedrals versus Jeffersonian bazaars, and the ways in which representations of the hyper local market are used to obfuscate the massive logistics and warehouse and data infrastructures behind them. And the example that he points to is Whole Foods / Amazon. So if you go into a Whole Foods, you know, they'll tell you where things are sourced. There is this kind of, I don't know what you would call it, pastoral drag that's happening around the store in different ways. And what actually is happening behind that is you know a massive – it’s Amazon. It's owned by Amazon. So there's warehouses, there are seasonal workers, and that just stands in really stark contrast to the more kind of agricultural worker that one might be made to think of more directly through instore displays at Whole Foods.

JT: Moving back to your show, Industry City, with High Art, you sort of started a different visual language – in the past year or so – that consists of panels with metal framing and a lot of text and they are painted, actually. Can you describe some of the work you made for the High Art show? 

DY: Yeah, so if I was trying to trace some sort of progression, I'd say that since the ESPRIT show, I've been trying to figure out the relationship between written language and visual form – and how they can relate to one another in a way that's not just illustrative or captioning, but kind of creating a different visual form to work with. So I've made concrete poetry, sculptures out of metal, I incorporated language in Dry Season through the play with the Billy Bass, and then I kind of had a moment during covid to really take a minute and think about what forms really have worked historically with text and image and kind of had a light bulb moment of being like, “oh yeah, comics right.. That’s the one.” I started kind of looking back to Situationist comic books, which were more interventions into existing forms. And in my practice I've used a lot of culturally known images – Disney characters, brand mascots, Billy Bass, things like that and taken a kind of fan fiction approach where I've used those cultural signifiers that people have their personal relationships with as a way to do a bait and switch and have them speak this more critical content. So I started thinking, “okay, well, I can do this in a way that feels natural to me” and started creating images that have a bit of a collage aesthetic to them – which has just kind of been an organic way of how im assembling images in photoshop and illustrator, and then using those as a way to tell these different stories. So for Industry City – and I had previously made a series of dressing screens for this Art Basel presentation in 2021 – I basically was making large scale comic images, comic illustrations.

JT: And you have made for us some new work for Art Basel Miami. Could you explain some of that work?

DY: Yeah, so it’s kind of building off of the work that was in Industry City. For each body of work that I've been making, I have a set of primary forms. For that show it was the lantern fly and nest eggs – those were kind of the two very significantly rich objects that I wanted to work with. And there was a piece in the High Art show which was called Out the Door – it was basically a nest full of eggs that had “phone,” “wallet,” “keys,” things that you can't really leave the house without that kind of buttress you to the world. And I wanted to extend that because I felt there were so many things that didn't fit into that one work of what's in your go-bag – from when you are going to an opening, or you’re going to work, or you're just going out in the world. So the series that I made for Basel is an extension of these eggs, which are sort of like the things that one uses to arm themselves with.

JT: It feels like within your work, sort of knowing what you know and having the perspective that you have on trend forecasting – just to focus on that specifically, but it's so much more than just that – what do you feel like are your biggest concerns for society?

DY: Wow.

JT: Yeah…

DY: I mean, I think that when I say things like “branding” or “lifestyle economy,” these things are so large and there are so many threads within that. And there is one that just particularly irks me whenever I come into contact with them. And one of them that has existed at a particularly high volume over the last ten years is this brightsiding toxic positivity and sense of optimism which just immediately triggers me to be like, “what is that masking?” It's a very kind of silencing approach, it's just the silencing of critique or negativity. You see this right now– there's a Pinterest campaign around the city which is like, “do your do” or, “do you, just do it.” Yes, that is Nike I guess as well, but the way that Pinterest is approaching it particularly makes me want to claw my eyeballs out. Which is just this very A for effort, all you've got to do is shift your mindset and come to the table with a good attitude and things are going to work out for you – which just silences critique. That just sequesters any sort of productive form of negativity out of the conversation, in a way. And I lived in LA for a while, where this is particularly prevalent, but I was made aware of the term “brightsiding,” which is basically a form of gaslighting by means of positivity (laughs) death by positivity (laughs). Yeah, so I feel like that's something that comes in and out of the work in a lot of ways. Another theme that I think keeps sort of cycling through a lot of the work is rebooting, and the kind of ever growing zone of narrative universes. I’ve made a few works now which are about these characters that are trapped in some cycle where they are constantly being employed in some version of content that truly only functions as a trailer for the next thing. And it is in a way this leapfrogging of, “everything is supposed to segway attention into the next” and it's just this exponentially growing hype cycle that doesn't seem like it can sustain itself. And what this looks like is anything from the Marvel extended universe to the way that brands operate as just this long tail of, “there will always be a new drop” – it's very kind of anticipatory and takes us out of any kind of immanence or present moment. So those are sort of pet themes that find their way back into the work.

JT: Yeah, and something that we've spoken a bit about that I feel resonates a lot with me is this idea that there is a predetermined path for the consumer to walk down in some aspect and that there's this sense that your agency is kind of taken away from you as a consumer.

DY: I think that… hmm… people don't really like to see themselves as consumers. Maybe it's more about being a subject under capitalism, which is an equally broad term, but I think that the way in which people are, not forced to, but the way that people maybe in different ways feel like they need to operate in being a hybrid subject that is flexible and available at any moment– you know these sort of cursed blessings as I’d call them, these things that were promised to us as emancipatory which ultimately have only furthered our individual precarity and atomized us in a way that doesn't really encourage us to see ourselves as part of a cultural class, an economic class. The atomization that sort of works against class identity and solidarity is definitely a problem. So I don't know that it's– I’m not even going to touch into the realm of agency or free will, I think it's more about recognizing one's conditions as symptomatic, and recognizing others that might be experiencing similar things.

JT: Well, thank you, Dena.

DY: Thank you.

My name is Jasmin Tsou and you’re listening to JTT. Today’s interview is with Anna-Sophie Berger. Anna-Sophie was born in 1989 in Vienna, Austria. In 2013, she received an MFA in the fashion department of the University of Fine Arts there. In a previous interview I talk with Anna-Sophie about her solo show at the Kunstverein in Bonn and her use of language in that exhibition. In today’s interview we talk about her solo show at JTT, which opened on May 13th and recently ended on June 18th. We focus on some of her interests in fashion which have been weaving in and out of her work since she started making art. We also discuss her use of found objects as symbols in her work and how possible it is for symbols to be fully legible. In both interviews you will find Anna’s pleasure in the forensics of found objects, which is not necessarily to think about how an object is made, but more to think about what events might have occurred to the object recently. How is an object used and who consumes it? How did a dress come to be covered in mud, for example. And how does one find meaning not only in an object but in how it’s used? Thanks so much for listening. 

JT: I’m here today with Anna-Sophie Berger – Hi Anna. 

ASB: Hi

JT: How are you?

ASB: Good.

JT: Thank you for joining me today. I want to begin talking about your show with talking about your interest in historical painting. What I think is really interesting is you approach sculpture in a sort of symbolic way, perhaps, in the way that historical painting is, so I'd like to just talk in a larger sense about how you got to that point. Previously with Emanuel Layr, you made a sculpture that was a one-to-one, in a way, replica of The Conjurer painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Can you talk a little bit about that?

ASB: Sure, that one is interesting because it does a few things that I’m interested in. First of all it's a fantastic painting, which I guess with Bosch a lot of people share this immanent reaction to his paintings because they are very, very strange, very odd. I mean as an art historian you could probably tie them in with Bruegel, but they are essentially full of symbolism that is not always decipherable, often indebted to folk logic, but essentially they are both nonsensical, unreadable but also at times slapstick-y. So that particular painting struck me as interesting—which I should mention, some scholars will attribute to his workshop and not to himself. It's called The Conjurer, so at the center of the image you have a table with, I think you call this “hat game,” no “game of cups”… I forget… Actually, do you know? What's this game called, you know the one with three cups, a coin…

JT: I never thought of what we call it but I just know it.

ASB: It's a basic trickster game which is actually outlawed in many states, countries around the world because it's literally premised on the idea of tricking the onlooker into thinking they have agency to find the coin. But then if the conjurer, the one who's playing the game, is dexterous enough, they can always win. So basically, you're made to believe you can find the coin but you can't. So typically it would be a very, how to say, it has to be a very transportable game because it's usually someone who's running away from the police, in any given country, with three cups and a coin, playing on the street. So you have that in the Bosch painting, but then more than just the conjurer and the person being duped, who in good Bosch fashion is like standing there mouth agape with a frog jumping out of his mouth, which is our first allegory, although, and that's interesting with Bosch, it's not always a clear allegory, it's not like, I don't know, we all understand that purity is probably personified or– 

Let's make this more simple. What I'm trying to say is the frog crawling out of the mouth of the person who is being tricked is both a very clear symbol but also kind of weird. And that's what he does, it's ambiguous. And then right behind the person being tricked is another person –  and I'm not going to bore you with the historical details – who is cutting loose the bag of money from the person being tricked because he's so transfixed on the conjurer that he doesn't notice it. 

So we have three people involved in a scheme, which is seemingly pretty clear: a trickster, a person being tricked, but then there's a third person actually stealing the money. So I got hooked on that very basic scenario of like, who is really the worst? Whose fault is what? In classic moralism, you would say, “Oh, the person who lets themself be tricked, it's their own fault” right? Which would lead us directly into contemporary capitalism, like prowess and ability, right? I just love that. So I copied it. I wouldn't say one-on-one, but I'm also not quite sure what one-on-one means. I left a lot of space for slapstick, because transferring a 2D painting into sculpture is already kind of a little ridiculous. And then the way I copied it is, if you look at it very closely, not faithful. Like the frog in my case becomes a panda bear from a Japanese gashapon machine with an excessive jawline. So I left freedom and it's not, let's say, like an OCD copy.    

JT: No, by no means.

ASB: So not to say it's not one-on-one, but I think it's crucial to understand that I left that open so that someone could also see, well, someone should be able to, with the help of the title, perhaps see the likeness, but also see that I'm aware of the well– the transferal is real, there is no need, right? 

JT: Well, your sculptural reproduction is almost sort of tabletop itself. So it's replicated in more concept than in image.

ASB: And I mean, the tabletop in the Bosch painting is interesting, because it's a vexing image. So if you turn the Bosch 90 degrees, the table with the cups and the coins standing there in front of the conjurer becomes sort of a stylized face with a very odd nose. And in my sculpture, I was doing the same thing. So if you look at it from a certain angle, you will have the illusion of a kind of comic-y face. Which I'll leave it to you to insert that into the whole dramaturgy, really, of three agents tricking each other and then the table itself being a sort of weird face composed of the very instruments of the fraud. And that's actually nice, because that leads us straight into sculpture, the instruments of fraud being used for different configurations, but hopefully pointing back at allegory. 

JT: Also, something that I think your work does a lot – which is represented in these three figures – is the participation, the willing participation, as you said earlier, in capitalism, but in some cases in your work through fashion. So the sort of awareness in which– almost the desire to be tricked.

ASB: I think that's absolutely an interesting and valid point to bring up with fashion. I want to have a brief look at my notes, because I think something here befits this quite well. I'm reading this beautiful book called Courtly Love Undressed by Jane Burns, which I found in my research at the Morgan library, actually, researching into The Romance of The Rose. And this book looks at Medieval fashion, but I would argue really from the vantage point of someone who's very understanding of fashion as a – how do I put this – as a semantic field. Although that's already misleading because semantic is what is the problem of language and it's not necessarily the problem of fashion, because there's a specific handling-based truth to fashion. Also when you link it back to capitalism, there's an immersed-ness or an imminence in wearing and using fashion that is not, let's just say, categorically, unlike art or art objects, but that is quite a bit different still. I think I'm quite interested in that, which doesn't mean that all of my sculpture is interested in that, but when I think about fashion and use of fashion and garments, I think that plays an important role for me. Let me see… 

JT: Were you going to quote the book? Did you quote the book?

ASB: I did quote the book but I'm also looking for, “the basic duality of clothing” which she starts off with and then sort of debunks. So you can say there’s this either state sponsored or religious sponsored duality between biological body naked to then be gendered, sexed, or classed. Now we're talking about the medieval times with Jane Burns, but you can extend that to later on with Simmel who talks about, if I'm not entirely wrong, 19th century society class distinction through garments in which garments always are both used as distinction and to create likeness and community. But then Jane Burns – and that's why she's interesting and very 

much in the tradition of sort of other great fashion theorists like Elizabeth Wilson, who wrote Adorned in Dreams – she makes the point that this basic duality between like either naked and biological and then clothing sort of being put on top of it as a fake outside or like a constructed social body that is not the naked body, she would make – and I'm not being unfair on her account here to say that – should would make the point that there's really no such thing as these two dualities. She has better language for this, but clothing becomes the body too. And that's why it’s also an interesting ground to look in and add agency, essentially. In her case, she's looking at courtly love, so it's not necessarily just female dress in the Middle Ages, but of course, if we talk about agency it begs the question of female agency in dress. Which usually, popularly, if we think of common mistakes in fashion, Simone de Beauvoir would be the one to say, “Well, makeup subjugates women.” I mean, I'm exaggerating but basically the idea there would be that fashion is something imposed on the female body and thereby enslaves or suppresses it, whereas Jane Burns in the tradition of many other more recent scholars of fashion – and feminism, really, which is where she's coming from – would argue that there is no such thing as the naked biological, female body. There's like a whole trajectory of this sartorial, I think she calls it the sartorial body, which is then not just the naked woman getting dressed to be even more womanly, and even more wife, but essentially, there's a whole horizontal line of different body configuration, different playing out of garments, to use them to also confuse certain tropes. And I don't even want to say the most progressive–  this is the mistake I think that traditional criticism makes, they confuse this reading of fashion as a sort of progressive reading. Of course, you're not going to put on a dress and then you’re liberated from your suppressive environment. But I think it's about the theory of understanding and the grace, the almost, in language very hard to describe, ability of garments. 

JT: So to kind of return to this Bosch painting of the conjurer, there are these three figures that in some way personify some of the things you're very interested in. The sort of moral of what brings this trickster here to a place to need to make money in this particular way? 

ASB: Exactly.

JT: The person that is being tricked, how much agency do they have in being tricked, in participating and giving their money away? And this even third figured doing the trick beyond the trick that is sort of turning the consumer on its own head in a way. 

ASB: Right, plus a crowd of onlookers who might have their own idea about what they are seeing there. And their judgments really. 

JT: So it makes sense that sort of historical painting would have – that you would be interested in it for its symbolic potency in this sense, and this is sort of a starting point in some of your sculpture practice.

ASB: Definitely. I mean, I don't want to go all too deep in how my relationship to sculpture changed or whatever, but I definitely think it's significant at a certain moment in time that I take recourse to a painting that already in itself has so many symbolic meanings that are still not completely legible. And that there's something about the sort of play with legibility, making available of a symbol, but then also, quite decidedly refusing to read it to the end for the spectator. Which is interesting, because you could argue, one could make a show without symbols that is still ambiguous, right? You could opt for forms rather than symbols – such as frogs, maidens, unicorns, fences, fountains, to name a few of the things that are part of the current show – but I think I'm interested in allowing it but then maybe not delivering on it. Or maybe I do– It's hard to say… 

JT: So to talk more about the show that’s up right now, titled Sin, this show is inspired in part by the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters. Is that correct?

ASB: That is correct. Although, I would say time wise, that came a little later. But it became quite important as again, it's good that we started with the Bosch because it's almost like a visual importance. Later on I got also interested in the allegorical aspect and interpretation of specifically the Cloisters’ unicorn set of six tapestries. But in the beginning, initially, I was just as with the Bosch. I was interested in the spatial configuration of one of these tapestries, which is like a fence, very basic symbolic elements in the tradition of, let's say, medieval scholastic knowledge, which is at a certain point– one can read a fountain as an audience, within the capacity of what is religiously and sort of spiritually sanctioned at the moment in time. So yeah, I took that, specifically that one of the six tapestries, the one with the unicorn fenced in, slightly wounded, but pretty much happy with a collar around its neck, tied to a tree.

JT: So when you became interested in these tapestries, you did a bit of research on them. Maybe you can give a bit of a background on what these tapestries are? How they came to be there… 

ASB: There’s this fantastic book, which actually now I can’t quote, which is unfortunate, by one of the Met curators who deals only with the tapestries and it's fantastic. I can only suggest to read it. So essentially, there are different avenues to approach this. The objects themselves are highly interesting because they got lost. They were probably commissioned in the late French Middle Ages by a wealthy family, although that's also unclear because, for the longest time, they were supposed to be a set of six but thematically, they are now in current research not held to be a set because there's literally three pictorial and allegorical traditions present in the six tapestries. But essentially, they were, let's just assume, a rich aristocratic family commissioned them in some way, and then they get lost. And then there's like years and years of upheaval, there’s the revolution, and ultimately, parts of them end up in potato basements to cover harvest. And somehow then, I now forgot how exactly they made it into the MET collection, but they ended up there. They are being restored. Two of them are at least missing half if not more of them. So they're fragmental. And so that's already quite a fascinating history of the object of tapestry as a used piece of cloth that is then, you know, that is extremely wealthily produced by the top workshops of the time and then sort of lost and used in a basement. So that is a whole podcast to talk about. 

But then there's the allegorical aspect of the hunt for the unicorn and how research is trying to retrace these traditions and to make it brief, which I'm not, there's three pictorial traditions. One is, you could say, the secular one which pretends to courtly love. Courtly love in the medieval times, which would be the hunt for the unicorn as lover, which means –  I'm trying to get this right and not wrong – the lover is the unicorn. And the unicorn is seeking out its Beloved. And ultimately, the lover gets caught in a benevolent state of marriage, which would be the image I’ve described before: the fenced in unicorn, definitely not dead, not suffering, kind of joyful, now safely enshrined in a closed off space, which could be seen as a symbolism for marriage or love or safety, whatever. And that will be the only secular reading. Then there’s two more. One is the mystic hunt for the unicorn. Hunt is always part of it, and hunt is already also an allegory. Depictions of “the hunt” were very dominant in the Middle Ages. So the unicorn basically replaces the stag in the stag hunt and becomes a kind of more flamboyant protagonist. So in the mystic hunt for the unicorn, the unicorn can be seen as Jesus Christ seeking out – well not really seeking out – Jesus Christ not yet being born into the world. So it's basically God giving his son into Mary, like Mary conceiving Jesus. So that would be the mystic hunt for the unicorn, and in these tapestries you would maybe also find an angel like Gabrielle who is announcing to Mary. Already these two are quite interesting because if you have at the same time the unicorn as a lover, even if you leave out the carnal of sex, but the secular subject matter of love as the Lover seeking out a maiden, and you pair that with Jesus seeking out Mary to become embodied in the world as the son of God, that’s already great. Clearly it would be blasphemous to assume that throughout this time people would be allowed to see it this way, but the breadth of the allegory is breath-taking (laughs). And then the third would be the passion of Christ, which is the most dramatic one, where the unicorn is hunted down just as Jesus Christ is put to the cross. In the Met Cloisters set, this would be one where in the final instance the unicorn is hanging from a horse carrying it dead to a castle and the unicorn is bound by what resembles Jesus’ thorn crown, in the passion of Jesus. So these are three, and I mean you can be interested in that or not, I’m not proposing that the interesting part is necessarily the Medieval relationship to Christianity. I’m more interested in, like you already said before, the symbolic quality and allegorical strength. 

Now I will go back to my notes because Medieval texts, and especially biblical text, usually followed – and here we are talking Christianity so not before that – as soon as Christian writing exists, there is a tradition of how to read scripture, and in German we call this vier sinne des textes. I researched this the other night and it's very specific here, not so specific in Austria where Catholicism and Christianity are so present, but it's called the Four Senses of Scripture. This is in the Christian tradition. And I think you will like this, although it's very specific. So first, let's say you have a text and so there's the literal meaning of the text: what is said. In that tradition, this  would be the past, right? Jesus went and made water into wine. So the literal meaning is: Jesus made water into wine. That's the past. And then typological or allegorical would be: what does this mean for us? So he made water into wine, that means that we are saved. That will be time passed with present, right? And then there's a moral sense which pretends uniquely to the present. So, “because he did this, and because it means to us that he took away our sins, we should do A, B, C.” I don't know, repent, say what you will. And then there's also the anagogical, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, but it's a very foreign word which pertains to the future and is catrological. So basically, the end of the world, the Last Judgment. That will be future looking. Those are the four senses of Scripture that any Medieval scholar  – or I mean, ordinary people, that's again a debate about who could even read – basically anyone reading biblical, or medieval, or Christian texts at a time went in with that notion. And that's quite–  that's amazing and impressive and interesting to me. And I'm not, again, I'm not saying that's not the case with text today, but I like looking at that, and then looking at artworks that deal with symbolic framework. 

JT: And you researched a bit the origin of the unicorn? 

ASB: Yeah I mean that's funny. As far as I can tell, and I’m nowhere near a specialist because I am a lazy researcher, I shouldn't be.. As far as I understand, the original word which must at that point have been either Greek or aramaic Hebrew, was a translation mistake. So the unicorn – I mean I'm saying the English word and it must have been a different word – but this sort of creature that has a one horn is thought to have been a translation error in the Bible somewhere between the Bible changing languages. So suddenly you have a creature being described as “mono horn,” unicorn. And from there on it kicks off a whole tradition of – there's the tradition of the Physiologus: the first book compiled in the middle ages, basically a compendium of natural phenomena, like plants, and mostly animals. So basically, they start to draw animals that they really see around, and they give them names. And they say, again, what I just said to you, in the different senses, they say what it is literally, but then they also say, “Okay, this is a lion, a lion screams, a lion can kill you,” but then it also says, “the lion is the protector of..” right?

JT: I think it's maybe less important to hold you to a unicorn scholar a bit more than I'm interested in, that you as an artist found this one truth about the origin of the unicorn and that you were fixed on it, as somebody who is very interested in language. And so you have this sensitivity and awareness to the way in which images are read, but also the quickness with which things can be misread through a translation error, or the sort of irony of the way things translate, which I think you've dealt with a lot in your previous work. Maybe not so much in this specific show as much as earlier work, but it's definitely in your practice.

ASB: It's true that I think about this a lot. I think about symbols as populism, and popular signs, like pop signs. I think about them as an entry point for everyone. But then, of course, I'm less interested in making symbols readable to everyone and then teach a very concrete lesson in that sense, I'm not very Four Senses of the Scripture. I’m not very interested in coming out with a concrete, either moral or intellectual, reading. I'm mostly interested in proposing something quite complicated and open at the same time, but not - how to put this - proposing it in an excessively stylized, withdrawn sense. Hence, some of my work looks quite pop by comparison to more classical conceptual practices. 

JT: So, to move to the show that we have up now, called Sin, you have these unicorn tapestries in the back of your mind and you’re now making sculpture. So can you describe one of the sculptures in the show titled Lady Wealth?

ASB: Yeah. That’s the starting point for the show. I know there's a lot of Medieval referencing going on, but the Lady Wealth was culled from yet another Medieval poem, The Romance of the Rose, which, this I can make really quick, is a moralistic ethical poem about how courtly love should happen, in the form of a dream, in which a protagonist wanders through the world and encounters allegories for vices and virtues all while searching his love, the rose. Which is, in the book, really a rose, the flower. But everyone then knew, it is a flower but it’s also his beloved of any – so that's also the interesting part – could be a woman, could be a concept, could be love. In this book one of the encounters, encountered personages or figures, is Lady Wealth or Wealth just simply. And it's nice, when you go to the database for this, there's like 300 copies of that book out there. I don’t know what to compare it to nowadays, it was like an extremely popular life guide, highly contested and criticized for its misogyny, but then also really important to understand certain ideas about how they saw concepts of love at that moment in time. So if you look online, or if you research this in libraries, it's very nice because you can usually type in the characters. You can go like “wealth” and then you'll be spit out with illuminations and illustrations of Lady Wealth throughout the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, so it’s really beautiful. 

I got stuck with Lady Wealth because I was writing an essay called Waist of Money that was looking, is looking –  it's to be published soon – at the female body and the waist, but with a certain focus on the homonymous waste as in throwing something away. And via that avenue, I stumbled upon Lady Wealth as a sort of ambiguous, again, allegorical character, embedded in Medieval tradition as a sort of ambiguous figure, right? So let's picture Lady Wealth. Because I was telling this to a friend, it's not Everest, it's not lady Everest, where it's quite clear that it's a vice, right? Lady Everest is thrifty and doesn't want to give out. Lady Wealth, a bit more complicated. It's not Lady Generous either, so we're kind of midway between like, “what is wealth throughout the centuries?” Is it the wealth of nations? Is it a positive thing? Somebody could be wealthy in good attributes or wealthy in a monetary kind of sense. So Lady Wealth in both The Romance of the Rose, and generally speaking the Middle Ages, is ambiguous because having the means – what they call in the Middle Ages, the largesse to give to others profusely and abundantly is good and is expected and is a sign of having the power to do so. But at the same time even then, already, there's a both religious and general moral suspicion that who has so much to give freely, has a certain position of power that is dangerous and can also maybe bring with it, immediately, impoverishment on the flip side. So I was just very taken with that idea and I think I was really – I really wanted to create that figure. I’m not even going to say– I think a rendition thereof of this Lady Wealth with incorporating aspects of textile sumptuary laws that pertain specifically, and again in a very reduced and popular sense, to skirt lengths. There's a whole, you could probably just basically look at hem lines when looking at historical clothing laws– 

JT: Can you describe what a sumptuary law is, specifically? 

ASB: Sumptuary law are clothing ordinances – but it doesn't have to be limited to clothing, it could be anything that anyone consumes in any society. So a sumptuary law tries to regulate consumption for citizens or constituents. I think, again, I mostly settled my investigation with the Middle Ages and then later on in the monarchic tradition of European courts. I would venture that it exists earlier, but it's the idea and the attempt to regulate consumptions of citizens, usually state sponsored, usually somewhere in between the desire to keep class lines firm so that – and this leads us back to the suspicion and anguish about fashion – the peasant will not go out and buy a fur coat and become a prince because that would be frightful to the strict class lines. And then later as class becomes, I mean it's still important but it's kind of slowly crept on and outweighed by capitalism, the more that starts to happen, the more global trade starts to happen, the focus shifts from the peasant not becoming the prince – because that's anyways not possible anymore as industrialization creeps in – but it becomes more about who should spend money on which products and what would that do to the empire or the national state later on. So essentially, you have a sumptuary law in Great Britain prohibiting buying silk from India because they want to protect the native market. So that's the quite interesting span of what sumptuary laws can do.

And so, working symbolically, I picked up on the hemline as a quite beautiful idea, and sort of proverbial and of course, exaggerated idea of representing this. There’s also the hemline index of, I think it's in the 30s, where this theoretician comes up with the idea that if the economy is booming, if people are rich, that skirt length would get shorter. Basically mini skirts representing economic boom and then conservative styles and long hemlines representing a bad economic recession—which I mean, is nowhere near a phenomenological truth, but it's visually and aesthetically very pleasant to think through that and to harvest that.

JT: So can you describe the sculpture, Lady Wealth, to us?

ASB: Sure, it's like a medieval cotehardie dress, which is significant in as much as I researched—I felt like researching—medieval patterns. Because I hadn't drawn patterns myself, probably since my graduation. I have all my patterns that I made then and I go back to them, which makes me a lazy pattern maker. But I wanted to make a new one so I was looking at Medieval costume history and picked out the cotehardie which is a long dress usually for women with, in this case, a set in sleeve, which at that point has already been discovered. Before, usually most of the garments were cut or torn within the framework of weave and weft, so like following the fibers of a fabric, and then gradually as pattern making progresses the set in sleeve provides a close to the body kind of cutting, which is revolutionary and enables very tight sleeves, very tight upper parts of the dresses. And that's true basically for male and female wear of the time. So the cotehardie has that and consists of tight bodies, tight buttoned sleeves with a prolonged line—well the sleeve is as long as the middle of the hand, I don't know how to say this more elegantly. It's slightly longer than ending where the hand starts. So it opens up like a tulip a little bit after the … what's this part of the hand?

JT: The wrist? 

ASB: Yeah, so at the wrist it opens up a bit like a tulip and then ends basically where the thumb starts. So it's quite an elongated sleeve, and then a wide skirt.

JT: And you made this dress yourself?

ASB: I will say to be completely fair, I made the pattern, I made the first toile, as they say, and then I work with a seamstress who will help me make it perfect because sewing velvet, which this is made from, cotton velvet, is a fucking pain in the ass. So I could do it. I'd like to fancy myself being able to do it. But there's, I think, good reason to have her do it. She's incredible.

JT: And what else is inside the sculpture?

ASB: It is worn by a mannequin that I sourced here in the city.

JT: And the mannequin itself is pretty unique.

ASB: The mannequin is pretty odd. I'm really glad I found it on Craigslist, because, I mean, mannequins are always a problem because they are direct bodily representations. I knew it was going to be a white woman because everything else seemed like just not befitting the—I mean there was just no question in my mind that we're talking about Lady Wealth as generative of European, Western investigation. So it is a mannequin that was made, artisanally modeled, from the head of a model. And there's photos of that which are very odd. So it is this short haired 80s looking woman frankly looking pretty miserable, like her head is sort of slightly, kind of like a turtle pushed forward and doesn't look very healthy nor very wealthy or powerful, which is a nice contrast for the sculpture. 

And then there are three frogs, or shapes that seem to be looking like frogs by her feet, sometimes covered by the hemline of the skirt, by the trail of the skirt, sometimes not. And they are green. 

JT: And where do these frogs come from? 

ASB: Yeah, I adapted these from a playground. Well, I copied two playground frogs from a tiny park at the crossing of Eldridge and Hester, which is pretty much the center of my life in New York in the past 10 years. Whenever I stay or live for a longer time, that's where I tend to live. Not at that crossing precisely, but the crossing would be a crossing of daily use. And I've been researching New York's playground sculptures for a long time. Less the historic WPA ones, like the ones from the 30s, and more really like the standardized industrial ones. Like I read a nice article about the whole Department of Parks and Recreation being very frustrated with this one Head of Parks who was totally into animals and would put all their money into buying as many animals for every park and everyone was like, “Can we not? This is really not.. why? Why does it need another elephant right here?” So yeah, I liked those standardized sculptures, and I had my mind on them for a long time.

JT: Do they feel gratuitous to you to be in the park?

ASB: Gratuitous? They're broken, so... They are supposed to be sprinklers, which I think is a thing that is nice in the summer, because it's so hot, but they're broken. So they're kind of like, it's hard to say….

JT: They are sort of underneath the dress, the dress is flowing over them in parts, and it reminds me a little bit of your interest in The Tin Drum, which you've done in some of your earlier work where in the beginning, a character finds himself, you know, hiding essentially under the dress and there's also, it's also a different motif throughout the book.

ASB: Well, The Tin Drum is nice for that. Again, I'm really trying hard not to paint or draw a too dominant image that sort of makes Lady Wealth more one thing and less another, but I think Lady Wealth, having these copies, slightly poshed up copies of playground sculptures, should give an interesting idea. 

And then the one The Tin Drum image you're referring to, which also led to another sculpture I made, also a skirt sculpture, we could say sculptures dealing with the skirt as well – here we go again – as either a fashion garment as something that pertains to the female or any body, in this case it's happens to be female, it pertains to movement, it pertains to who is wearing the skirt meeting what feature of the skirt. And in The Tin Drum scene it's interesting because it's this woman on a potato field using the skirt to hold potatoes that she's digging out of the earth and then in a later moment of that scene, she saves a criminal who's running away from police by hiding him underneath what is in the actual book text, underneath her seven skirts, which is another beautiful thing to investigate. We've talked about hemlines, but if we're talking about the Middle Ages, we could talk about layers, which is both, again, philosophically and epistemologically interesting. 

So yes she saves him and then we learn that really, it's, it's all told very slapstick-y, because in The Tin Drum, Oscar is a child – the main authorial self is a child. So it's like, all very funny until we learn oops, while she saved the criminal under her skirt, she was impregnated. So suddenly, we're in the realm of, what is it, an accidental rape? It's all told in such a way that it's quite hard to understand if it's something that happened incidentally. And again, it's nice since we're talking allegory, it's very hard to know if it's really—since a child is telling the story—we don't know that it happened like this. It might have happened at home in actual domestic violence, it might have… you know, it's an allegory for women in the war. 

JT: It's been a minute since I've read it, but I believe that Oscar is even describing how the dresses are like Russian dolls, like they kind of rotate, one goes in the outside at one point–

ASB: Yes, exactly. 

JT: So there's kind of these different identities that you can assume through the skirt. 

ASB: And more crudely, well not crudely, let's say more formally, it's this container over female sex, which I always found interesting. Because if you grow up in the 21st century as a girl, it's very hard to think about not wearing a pair of undies underneath a skirt, like some of us do. And sometimes, you know, when you want to discover sex, it can be like a hot thing to not wear a slip underneath a skirt. But usually, the way we're socialized, that's a very rare thing to do. Definitely I can hardly conceive of a mother who would be like, “that's fine.” (laughs) So it's a funny thing to think about these times when underwear in women was still sometimes rare. And really, only the skirts fell down around the sex. And then if you lifted them, or so we are sometimes in cheap representation of these times, or pornography for that matter, made to think if they're lifted, there is immediately like “whoosh.” So there's all of that, too, that I'm pretty fascinated by. Like this place covered by the skirt, which is not the head. It's down there, but it's its own place. I don't know, I like that. It's not even, you know, only within the framework of potential rape, but also within the framework of sex, lust, womb, carried space, etc…

JT: I think as an interesting counter piece to Lady Wealth in the show called The Virgin, could you describe that? 

ASB: The Virgin and The Unicorn, which I think is nice because it makes the dualism between the two ladies, or the two representations of females, in the show a bit more tricky introducing that third, yet again, that third figure actor. I can say that it's a white identical twin parent dress to the other dress. The difference is the hemline is not as long, fabric is white, the mannequin is strangely more poised, although more childlike looking, has less concrete features than the other one—more like window mannequin alien face you could say—but the hand is, one arm is positioned in the side. How do you say it's holding the hip in a pose kind of way. But the white fabric, white velvet, shows distinct traces of mud. Not everywhere and not in an applied fashion but what looks like a splatter or splash or staining of some sort—and it's actual mud. If you get close you can see the particles of clay. 

I want to go somewhere with this. Instead of excessively comparing Lady Wealth to The Virgin and The Unicorn, I want to talk about the title, The Virgin and The Unicorn because we've talked about the unicorn but we haven't talked about this idea of a virgin being needed to catch the unicorn. That's also another one of these ambiguous and untraceable medieval traditions that were somehow along the line of the weird coming into existence of a monohorned being. Somewhere it became clear that to catch it—because it clearly didn't exist so nobody saw it—you probably need something really wicked. And there comes the Virgin, right, so to catch a unicorn, you need a maiden, a virgin. Again, immediately we have the tradition of religious reading, which would be Mary is needed for Jesus, right, because she's pure, but without the religious one, you can also just explore it as the virgin as a very contested and important figure in any primordial or later patriarchal, organized society. So you need a virgin to catch a unicorn. 

And as I already was working on that piece—which has ties in with a lot of other things I'm interested in, mud, namely, as a locus of my interest—I found this Samuel Delaney story, and it was really like that. I am reading a lot by him and in this book, collected short story book called Aye and Gomorrah—I don't know how you pronounce “aye”, I think “I” and Gomorrah, I suppose—one of the stories in that book that kind of falls out a little bit from the rest, because the rest is predominantly in the tradition of his sci fi interest, there's one story which is, again, an allegorical rendering of an observation of the very cloisters tapestries, and it's titled, Tapestry. It starts with an Auden poem that is so beautiful, (laughs) and stupid. I'm gonna read it to you. So, Samuel uses Auden's poem, he really likes Auden a lot. 

“They noticed that virginity was needed to trap the unicorn in every case, but note that of those virgins who succeeded, a high percentage had an ugly face.” 

I'm not going to interpret a poem right here, but that's the beginning of Samuel’s essay. And then, what this essay does and why—I mean, I'm obviously quite taken with anything Samuel Delany writes – but kind of in line with my interest in complicated symbols, let's say, he does an incredible job rendering these dead objects in a museum, alive. So he envisions, he makes up his own story of an encounter between a virgin, the Virgin, and a unicorn, the Unicorn. And in his rendition, it's really this encounter of like, quite a strange maiden who's not really sure why she's here. I mean, she was sent by someone, right, because she is needed to catch a unicorn. She's both naive, but also like the prime deceiver because she knows she's catching something. She's well aware. She's not a victim in this, she knows she's out there to catch a creature, but she's also a bit afraid because nobody has seen the creature. And the creature appears and the creature is a dirty, mud bellied, unwashed, unkempt, rancid unicorn that needs like– And she sees that immediately, she's like, “eww that sucks.” But she's out there to catch it, there's probably a price for that, father will be happy.. Or I don't know.. And then he goes on to describe this incident as a really incredibly nuanced encounter of forces, which again, if you want to of course you can read it as ultimately the unicorn raping her or like treading on her trail, her bleeding, screaming, but then it's also she thinks about retreating back to the castle but decides otherwise because she wants to make that deal. She wants to catch the beast and the beast is also confused because it has never seen a virgin like that. So it's, yeah, I'm desperately trying to describe a fantastic story by Delaney, but for me really there was such a beautiful moment to read that text with all the mud, the violence, the vulgarity, the beauty of rendering this pristine court idea of the pure unicorn and the pure virgin through that different lens.

JT: What about legibility and something not being legible is important for you? Or the sort of complexity of a symbol being able to be read in many directions.

ASB: It's an interesting question. I was talking to a friend the other day, who was maybe trying to tease out in me, “What are your enemies?” Right? Who are you fighting when you opt for not complete legibility, or, I wouldn't ever call it relativism because I think I'm not a relativist in my life. So I don't feel like my sculptures are. But I think I'm both interested in being truthful to what an object can do and investigating to which degree my desire to speak and say is stronger than what the sculpture could ever do. So I'm trying to bridge these two desires, right, like me being very eloquent and loving to talk, loving to criticize art, but finding a way how a sculpture can exist coming off that, but then being itself. I mean, it sounds horrendously esoteric, but really, that's one of the– And the other thing, I guess there's some aspirational party making artists probably forcing complexity on the viewer. 

This is Jasmin Tsou and you’re listening to JTT. In today’s episode, I interview James Yaya Hough. James was born in Pittsburgh in 1974. At the age of 17, he was incarcerated and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The United States is of course the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed before turning 18. Today we talk a little about how James developed his practice as a young artist while he was incarcerated – first at a juvenile detention center and then later at Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania. In 2012, 20 years after his initial incarceration, two cases were brought before the Supreme Court arguing that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles violated the 8th amendment. Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative argued in these cases that children are constitutionally different from adults in their levels of culpability – and won with a 5 to 4 decision. James followed these cases closely, but despite this ruling, he was not immediately given parole. It isn't as though the carceral state willingly frees individuals, even if the Supreme Court states that they, in fact, have to. James fought for seven years after Stevenson’s victory to be released, and in 2019, he finally was. I’m giving this information on James’s case so that you understand how bureaucracy is an efficient tool used by the carceral state to keep individuals imprisoned for as long as possible. And carceral bureaucracy is something that James focuses on a great deal within his practice. In today’s interview, we talk about a body of drawings that are on view at JTT from May 1st through June 11th. James made these drawings while he was incarcerated, and mostly in secret. In secret not because art isn’t allowed to be made in prison – it is – but in secret because James’s drawings depicted the devastating conditions of the carceral system, a criticism that the guards and the institution do not allow to be expressed, and certainly not shared, amongst fellow prisoners. I came across James’s work in a show curated by Nicole Fleetwood titled, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, on view at PS1 from September 2020 to April 2021. The show presented over 40 artists, a majority of whom were either formerly incarcerated or currently incarcerated. I owe a great deal of my understanding of James’s work to Nicole and her award winning book under the same title of the show. Copies of Nicole’s book are available for sale at the gallery, and you can learn more about James’s work at jttnyc.com. Thank you for listening. 

JT: I am here with James Hough. James, thank you so much for joining me today.

JH: You’re very welcome.

JT: We are here in Pittsburgh right now.

JH: Absolutely.

JT: Can I ask where and when you were born?

JH: I was born August 22nd, 1974, in the city of Pittsburgh.

JT: What was it like growing up here in Pittsburgh?

JH: Very interesting. You know, I grew up in this community, the Hill District, and this community had a lot of challenges – and still does – but for me, it was a mix of vibrant culture, street life, and I saw a lot. I would experience a lot in early life that later in life, things I would re-experience but have a stronger context for, personally. So, it's kind of a tough neighborhood, you’ve got to have thick skin, you’ve got to grow up fast. But at the same time, you learn a lot. You learn a lot – there’s an education that takes place that will carry one through life if taken.

JT: When you were younger did you make a lot of art?

JH: The bulk of my childhood was spent creating art, and I wouldn't say it was like proper art in the sense of contemporary art, but it was definitely experimental childhood stuff. But it kept me engaged, it kept me visually engaged.

JT: What kind of stuff would you make? Would you make drawings or–

JH: Oh! Absolutely drawings. And then I got blessed with a watercolor set and so I started to dabble with paint brushes. And, you know, it's funny – and I'm speaking for myself but I think I can just speak to the ubiquitous artist experience – as you grow and you’re learning, you know, it's almost like an experimentation, growing and learning and trying things. You’re copying things and you’re representing things but then you get some new material, new stuff to work with, so it's like the process begins all over again. It's like all over again – times two.  

JT: What kind of stuff were you drawing?

JH: Ah you know, all my favorite cartoons, comic books, all my pop culture stuff. I was enlisted to draw everything for all my friends. So you know, everybody who wanted some drawing… And you know, it's funny, when you’re a child – and I think this translates as well into the adult world – there’s an element of drawing and creating art that is magical. There’s a magicalness to it to see you be able to do something that someone saw on TV or someone saw produced in popular culture. There’s a sense of power – empowerment I'll say – but also a sense of magic to it. You know, just having that ability to see people light up when you’re able to do that is also amazing to me.

JT: Did you make art all throughout your teenage years as well?

JH: Oh yeah… And then I had a little break. And when I say break I mean, I guess this is true too in the life of an artist and it happens in different ways, but as life happens, right, there’s sometimes this process where– or this distraction, life becomes a distraction away from your ability, your gift, your talent, skill… To me, that was represented by the pull of different negative forces around. And so, it was kind of a break, but it wasn’t. You know, my attachment to drawing sort of was ceded into the background of my life and other things sort of came to the forefront, unfortunately. 

JT: You were incarcerated when you were 17–

JH: Yes.

JT: I’m just curious, how long after you were incarcerated did you get back into art?

JH: I mean, almost immediately. My initial incarceration was as a juvenile. When I was incarcerated in the juvenile system – they have detention centers – and what happened was, what do people do in moments, or in times, or periods of their life when everything else is stripped from them and they’re literally in a chasm of the darkest part of their life? Well, what resilient people do is they reach out and grab onto the things that are really the essence of themselves. With some people its spirituality, with some people its other people – right, family and friends. For me, it was art. For me, art was me reaching back to the center and essence of myself and sort of reclaiming that. And that’s when that process sort of reignited. Art came back into the forefront of my life, partially as a survival mechanism, psychologically, but also as a way to reclaim one’s self. A way for one to re-engage with one’s self and reclaim one’s self from whatever forces – particularly those forces that had taken hold of my life. 

JT: So, what did you start making first?

JH: What I started doing was, I started to polish up – you know it was weird, I started to polish up my skill set. I initially felt like – and this was really conscious too – I felt like I had not just deferred my dreams of being an artist, but what I had done was I had almost destroyed them. In my imaginary mind, I had this track of life that I should have been on. You know, I should have gone to an art school, I should have gone and got trained, classically, or in a certain specific profession of art: graphic illustration, digital illustration, etc.. And since I didn’t do that, but I knew that existed, I had this almost imaginary track that I needed to reconnect with. You know, for me it was, I said to myself, “I need to really hone my ability to draw again.” To the highest level possible for myself, to reach the highest levels possible I can. That takes you on a path of realism and representing things as they are. But that's sort of the intention that I was thinking, “I need to really draw the things around me, I need to be able to represent life around me.” I would do portraits of the other juvenile prisoners, portraits of the staff, do studies of the dormitory, and all those things. 

JT: Since this was kind of a self educational process, how were you learning? Were you looking at books for how to draw or was it through the experience of just continually drawing everyday?

JH: Both, but an emphasis on the latter. I’ve always been the type of person who loves reading, who loves learning. Whenever, you know, I get my hands on art books, art history books, instructional books, I would devour them. You know, cover to cover, no steps skipped. And I would literally – even stuff that I knew I could do with little difficulty – I would still engage with the material. But the latter part, the emphasis on just a rigorous, everyday, voluminous drawing, that was the core of my personal practice and sort of re-engagement with art. You know, I felt like, also an immersion, self immersion into myself artistically – that was the core of it. 

JT: Were there other people you were incarcerated with that were also artists that you learned from? 

JH: Initially, no. But what was really cool was that I always ran into people, and was incarcerated with people, in every phase of my incarceration who drew, people who used to draw, people who used to paint, people who had different levels of engagement with art, their family members were artists… There was always a social aspect to, you know, my practice. Art always started a conversation, and usually a very positive conversation. It was always a relationship builder. In many cases, I wasn’t fortunate to find someone who was skilled enough and possessed a great sense of artistic ability and great knowledge of art that could really teach me, but what I was able to do was find levels of engagement that were really powerful with other people. Sometimes the staff I would run into, honestly I found myself teaching them (laughs) trying to give them levels– or you know people would show me their drawings and say, “What do you think I could do with this art? Is this good?” and I would say, “This is perfect! I like it.” So you know I–

JT: So the staff was showing you drawings–

JH: Yeah, I found myself there. Because later on, you know if I fast forward a little bit, I was able to get into a community of incarcerated artists and then I was able to see other people who did things exceptionally well that I liked.

JT: When you say later on, how much later on was that?

JH: Ooh, ah man. Just got to jump in the time machine and fast forward a little bit. I would say I was fortunate to be around other artists who were really great painters but they would all possess various – and I don’t want to say flaws – technical deficiencies where when compared, I didn’t. So it wasn’t a situation where I was blessed to learn from them, but I was blessed to engage with their talent and engage with them. So I guess you could say a vibe or energy was created where we could work together positively, you know.

JT: So what you are talking about is actually, you kind of had an audience first before you had peers to make art alongside. Which is funny because sometimes it feels like that's the opposite of what most artists’ careers have, right? They kind of have to find their peers in order to find an audience sometimes. Of course, social media changes that but having an audience, for an artist, is one of the most important parts of the practice I feel, personally, and it seemed like you had an audience, is that right? Kind of early on people were following what you were making and–

JH: I mean yeah, because the art, because there was no way to– there has never been a way for me to separate art from who I am, you know, as a person. People who know me from going to school with me as a child, the first thing that comes to their mind is, “Ah man he was a dynamic artist, man, he’s always been an artist.” So there’s no distinction between the artistic self of me and the self self, the personal self. There’s never been, inside my family life, inside my communal life, there’s never been a distinction. My headstone will read, “Artist” (laughs). 

JT: Could you explain some of the content of what you were interested in most when you were first drawing? Maybe let's just say in your early twenties or your mid twenties?

JH: Heavy on the political and the social, you know representing political and social themes. A little light on the, you know, graffiti and cartoon characters and stuff like that – because that’s always been a part of things I’ve loved to draw and represent. Because, on the one hand, I always wanted to do different types of graphic novels and comic books and I ended up – while incarcerated – creating two. So that part of me has always been alive and well as an artist as well as having a distinct and definite relationship with political content, social content, political imagery, political cartooning. You know, I’ve always been drawn to, when I first saw Thomas Nast cartoons from the eighteen hundreds, I was blown away. The distinct style of drawing combined with the messages were very appealing to me.

JT: When you say politics, what kind of specific politics are you talking about?

JH: Definitely revolutionary politics from the Black power era. Which would be categorized as the late sixties – early sixties all the way to the seventies and some of the early eighties. That stems from just growing up in a community I grew up in. There’s always been a strong political undertone to all the art that’s been created. And overtone as well, that's been created around me. The speech that’s been part of my life, you know, has always had a political overtone to it. So to me, it was almost natural that those things would be represented in artwork, particularly when I became, the more conscious I became. You know, especially at the time of my life, too, experiencing the carceral system and all that that entails. And also the music of that era influences me as well, you know, I remember as a child – and this is very relative, but – I would look at album covers from the seventies of various groups, George Parliament, funkadelic and different poetry album covers and stuff – and even the photography was just done so message oriented and so powerfully crafted, its like visual imprints on your subconscious overtime. I think my subconscious has been overloaded with images from that era, sort of belay it out beautifully, drawn out and found its way out through my hands in artwork.

JT: Currently on view at PS1 is a show called Marking Time by Nicole Fleetwood, and you have a suite of drawings that are installed there and they’re really gorgeous, super beautiful. And I know they were made over the course of a number of years. What years were those drawings made over?

JH: Those drawings were, don’t quote me on this cause again approximately between 2009 and 2010 to 2015, 2016. Even though those drawings still continue to be a part of my life, they’re ongoing, the core of them were created during that stretch of time.

JT: Could you, just for our listeners, describe those drawings a little bit?

JH: Oh, absolutely. So those drawings are, you know, line drawings that are on paper that is institutional paper. It is triplicate copy paper from institutional forms. And the choice to use that paper is very intentional – it grounds the work in the experience, and in the location, and in the scene it was created. It sets a tone for the drawings themselves. Particularly as an artist, aesthetically, I love the colors of the paper and I love the texture of the paper. And that it’s not art paper presented the concern to me that it's not archival, it's not very durable in the sense of, you know, you have to be delicate working upon it. But at the same time, just the energy that it possessed, because of where it came from and what I was intending to do with it visually just made it a no-brainer to execute the works on. The drawings themselves are, as I said, line drawings that are depictions of what I intend to capture at that moment of the life of someone witnessing the carceral system, but not from the visually literal point of view. From an intensely psychological point of view. And just to go a little deeper, as I evolve as an artist and as I was evolving at that time, I saw so much work and I had also created so much work that was representative of the carceral experience. But the symbols used lacked the power to really convey emotionally, psychologically, viscerally, what was really going on. Right, so, I knew that in order for me to continue doing this work – because I knew it was meaningful and powerful to represent visually – it's very important that it's an experience necessary to be represented in art, at a very high level, but it wouldn't be able to be done with the same symbols. It wouldn't be able to be done with the visual symbols of handcuffs and bars and prison walls and, you know, because those things have become, in some cases they become trite, they become misinterpreted, they become dual and triple symbols and beyond for many other things, right? Their usage has been exhausted in a lot of ways, visually. At least, especially to say what I was trying to say. And so I knew there would need to be a deeper dive into different symbols and different objects that would do the work of really connecting with people on a deeper level about what the carceral experience is about. 

JT: Do you feel like you pulled from your language of graphic novels in order to create that symbology? Or where would you say that symbology that you’ve invented came from?

JH: Ohh.. Yeah that’s a great question. I mean, so that symbology that is within those drawings is from a multiplicity of places, definitely the style lends itself to a certain graphic novel style, a strong line drawing style. And the use of space, the use or interplay with figures and line lends itself to – and the scale – lends itself to, you know, graphic novels drawn on a page and a certain level of proficiency as an illustrator. But the symbols themselves I pulled from places like Native American mythology, European mythology, American mythology, and American culture. Deep looks into symbols and objects that sort of make up how we see things at a really base level. They come from a variety of places, some a little more deeper and ancient than others, but it wasn’t necessarily one source I think. That’s also one of the keys to this visual language that we have, particularly within these drawings, is that there isn’t one sort of key, necessarily. It's sort of a hodge podge, you know, a pulling together or a mixing of different symbols which can work coherently together to convey these powerful ideas. 

JT: I want to go back to the paper for one second because I believe you had access to art paper if you wanted it? So it was a choice to draw on the paper that you drew on, correct?

JH: Yes, yes. And this is another thing, you know, not only would I make that choice, I would intentionally encourage other artists in the carceral experience to make that choice. While I was working I would always –  I became aware of, you know, through studying and through practice, the use of found object, the use of trash, detritus, you know I would constantly encourage other artists because there’s this, with novice artists there’s this belief that the materials that can be purchased are superior to what you may find in the world or in a location. And nothing could be further from the truth. I think, not discounting the durability of materials that are not professionally produced, just as symbols and as powerful objects, you know, there’s no purchasing a door that was taken off of a building, you know, there’s no purchasing a found door. You might have to negotiate for it or you may have to steal it! (laughs) God forbid, but there’s no purchasing that door.

JT: What about the provenance of an object, is that something that you’re interested in?

JH: Yeah, yeah.. I mean– 

JT: Maybe this is a two part question, just to be specific, because you mentioned this paper is institutional paper, but maybe you could explain exactly what you mean by that. What was this paper specifically used for? What is triplicate paper used for?

JH: Yeah, so triplicate paper is used for institutional forms cause the carceral system is a giant bureaucracy built with many people who do various parts of one job, they would need the same form reproduced to go to various people. So, you would fill out one form, but that form would then be attached either by you or by the person that receives it initially and it would be sent to one office, another office, and another office – which always seemed crazy to me. And I tried to represent that also within the drawings, this series as whole, because there’s this labyrinth like, or nonsensical steps that only go to a certain level, there are funnels and tubes and mysterious dark holes or walls or inside spaces that don’t appear to be walls. You know, there’s this interplay between people that represents power in most cases in this series. But that whole bureaucracy, capturing that surveillance between spaces and people, you know where people stand on certain series of steps and not always like– to me, it's unavoidable within that carceral space. To represent it – to try to represent it – with rationality would be irrational in-and-of itself, so it requires a certain level of visual irrationality. Like, why would there just be a series of steps that don’t go anywhere, right? That someone could just stand on and walk up or walk back down, that's representative of this whole thing of triplicate paper. And, mind you, the carceral space– society and the world had well moved into the digital age, and there's still this obsession with triplicate paper (laughs) so….

JT: Previously, you’ve described these works to me as looking at the economies within the carceral state, and you specifically referred to this economy as an economy of desire – which I thought was very interesting. And even just hearing that description you gave, its certain types of economies, right? Of gratuitousness and excessiveness. What is the economy of desire in the carceral state to you?

JH: Well, to me, you know the economy of desire is when you have, one, a society that is pretty hedonistic in many aspects, and then you have this microcosm which is a carceral state which is also based on the rules of the larger society, so it also possesses large amounts of hedonism, but you also have all these other desires at play. You know, you have the desire for power, the desire for freedom, the desire for food, you have the desire for other necessities of life, you know, and then other pleasures of life, which many of which are intentionally deprived through what is forms of punishment, and others are, to use like greek mythology, others are used like tantalists. They are held above one’s head as a form of punishment, to keep that desire at a high level, but never fulfilled. In prison, there’s the desire for sex. I mean, you know, rampant amongst the staff, amongst the prisoners, there’s this whole desire for pleasurable relations, right? And that is used as a form of control, punishment, and also tantalization. All that creates an economy. All that creates a series of exchanges, right, between individuals and between groups as well. And how it plays out, you know, in the drawings you see there’s this mixture of raw sexuality and power. And those are, you know, the two strongest hedge funds in that economy. Those are the federal reserve and government money printing agency of that economy. They sort of control it.

JT: There’s also a lot of conveyor belt-like imagery in your drawings. Repetition, some of the figures, there’s multiple of them. And there’s sort of, what does that symbolize for you? 

JH: Multiplicity of figures represents the mass incarceration aspect. There's a strong narrative based series I could have built around a character or a series of characters and they would embody what I want to convey visually. In a carceral state, which I'm picturing what you have is a massive amount of individually recognizable people, but at the scale that the carceral state exists, a mass of anonymous people. What better to do that with than this faceless sort of stitched up mannequin like an individual, right? Who seems lifeless, but is filled with life, right? Is filled with some type of energy based on how it's drawn and the body movement, etc..

JT: Desire even, right?

JH: Yes! Filled with desire. But still externally anonymous, externally sort of hammered down into one of infinite numbers. Things like conveyor belts and the other objects really represent the mechanical workings of a system. And almost the, I don’t want to say unbreaking nature, but the sort of mechanical parts that just keep rolling. You know, it represents that industrial thing that this country at one point was an industrial power and it had those conveyor belts and sort of devices that would lift and tilt things and whatnot. And I think the carceral state, inside of America, represents the last vestiges of that. Physically it does, but also psychologically it does. It's a throwback environment to an earlier America. A not too distant, but an earlier America that was more industrially and mechanically, visually built.

JT: It’s funny that you mention that because you gave me this book to borrow, Life Without Parole, by Victor Hassine and in an interview at the end, he interviews an old head who gives a description of what prison was like in the sixties and seventies and it was – the description was much more bare bones and I think that the way that Victor kind of retells the interview, you kind of realize how sophisticated prison has become in terms of the economy, because of, you know, there’s a lot more food that's offered now, there's a lot more things that are offered in commissary. But there's also, within that, all these different economies that can break out for the barter and trade of all of those things. So, it's interesting to think of it as a vestige but it's also this thing that is becoming more sophisticated, too, over time, is that true or?

JH: No, that’s absolutely true. So, let's use a metaphor like a caveman with a cellphone, right? The mentality still, what I portray in that series, that's the mentality, that's the driving motivating nature of that experience, but as society evolves technologically then some of those technological innovations for financial profit, primarily, enter into the prison system, enter into the carceral system. But, at the base of it – because absolutely there are definite technical advantages as far as the use of phones and the use of different phone companies and what not and different access to different foods – but the caveman aspect is, these things still become modes of survival at the basic level. Unfortunately, people end up being hurt and damaged in their relationships with other people and these things.

JT: Just to bring it back to your drawings, were you ever private about this particular series of work? Or, was there a certain series you felt more comfortable sharing with people and certain series you weren’t comfortable with sharing? 

JH: Absolutely, absolutely. So, with this series, I kept it private for the most part because what I worried about was what I experienced with political art in prison – which was a certain level of oppression, a certain level of investigation. And I didn’t want that with this series because this series was actually, on the surface, a little more mysterious, but at the same time I knew if I had this series on my wall, inside on the cell wall, prison guards who would look at it, or officials who would look at it, they came and searched my cell, and they would see it, they would know exactly what it was because they are in a relationship with a symbol language that is the– I kept it intentionally hidden, you know, inside of a footlocker or trunk and I would smash it together and keep it organized, but at the same time, you know, there was definitely that secretive aspect to it. Most of these drawings were worked on at night, when the prison would quiet down a lot. Not only for that reason, I would be able to work steadily, but I had a nice block of time to work consistently. I was in a cell by myself so it gave me the freedom to not really have to engage with anybody, I could maintain my focus as I worked for long periods of time. I did show this series to two other prisoners and it got mixed reviews. It got mixed reviews (laughs). One, both artists friends of mine, Russell Craig– showed Russell Craig the series, he was blown away. I showed it to another artist friend Nicolas DeMateo and he was confused. He was like, “What the hell??” And I think, you know, the reason why is because – and we talked about it – he is a pretty sophisticated artist but I think the sexual content, because it unfortunately in prison much of the work doesnt have much of a sexual aspect to it. There’s this internal repression that takes place. Me, I vehemently, creatively fought against that in my own work and what I would encourage others. Art represents freedom of expression and creativity. You cannot engage with art if you have all these pre-set conditions and rules, right? You need to be in a space mentally and creatively where you are free. So if you need to draw whatever you need to draw, you need to draw it. Or paint it. There is this strong internal repression. And then that's coupled with a strong external repression. Market forces, right, how can you, you can’t sell it so, you know, if you can’t sell it then what value does it really have? But also, there’s this thing where externally there's going to be a reaction and internally you sort of protect yourself from that reaction as an artist or if you sing, dance, whatever, and that whole interplay does not work well for someone trying to create or tell the truth. That ends bad. 

JT: I want to ask a little bit about your involvement with murals. Can you talk a little bit about the project you were involved in here in Pennsylvania?

JH: So, if you’re referring to the Mural Arts Restorative Justice Program, behind the walls of SCI Graterford in, now, Phoenix, yes, again I will kind of chronologically ground it now. Because this is actually important to me. So, in I want to say 2002–

JT: What year were you incarcerated, just to give–

JH: Oh 1992, so I want to say 2002, I had the blessing and the privilege to meet Jane Golden from Philadelphia’s Mural Arts program. That meeting occurred because there was an arts therapist within the prison, who, what he did, his name was Will Ursprung, was sort of an anchor. He tried to continuously keep artists engaged with each other who, you know, fledgling groupings and programs, right? You know, he did a really great job because there was no official art program per say – there was no institutional art program – but he would organize little showings and exhibits and, you know, that sort of created this, it set the stage for the artist to bond and connect with one another, over a large prison. A prison of two to three and now four thousand people. So, he set that stage for that. One of the things he was exceptionally good at was occasionally inviting people to the prison that had some relationship with art at different levels – individual artists but also people who did stuff. Jane Golden did stuff. She ran a program in Philadelphia as the executive director of the Mural Arts program. She came up and did a presentation about murals. To me, I had never thought of doing murals, alright. You know, her presentation sparked myself and several other individuals that were there – some really nice artists – and it sparked us to want to try it. Some guys had had experience doing graffiti on a larger scale, but never really murals. And we just had a great time talking and engaging, but it was brief, right. And so she left. And so we sort of used our magical powers to, you know, be like, “Yo, you need to come back. We need to talk again, there were some things we missed, what about this, what about that…”

JT: (laughing) you were networking!

JH: Yes. We were like, “We need a second meeting.” And fortunately, we got it. And in that second engagement, what happened was we said, “Well, we would like to try a mural. We’d like to try more… Maybe we could do a mural inside the institution?” Cause I don’t think we could even conceptualize doing one outside. But, we were like, “Maybe we can do a mural inside the institution under your direction or somebody that you could direct us– somebody you could direct to direct us.” And she was like, “Aw that's an amazing idea, let’s make it happen.” Right, so we end up doing a mural inside the prison auditorium, which is the meeting place for everything. It's like the crossroads of the prison. You know, we end up doing that and–

JT: What was the mural of?

JH: Oh! Great question. The mural was a chessboard, right. 

JT: Who gets to design it, too? How does that process go?

JH: We– well so we collectively designed it. We sat down and each got images and then we figured out a way to integrate those images into a coherent picture.

JT: How many people are we talking?

JH: We’re talking between… we’re talking about… twelve people.

JT: That’s quite a bit of collaboration.

JH: Twelve to fifteen people. Very interesting collaboration as well because, again, the symbols that were chosen – the chessboard and the pieces – this is what led me, not what led me but this was what continued to fuel my reach for more powerful and deeper symbology, visually. Because I just knew, these things don't– there was a pillar with a clock on the top of it that was broken. It was these trite– not to be pejorative, not to be harsh, but, you know, eh….. I still have my conflicts with this thing.

JT: (laughing) It’s hard to collaborate.

JH: Yeah. I still have my conflicts with this thing. But the beauty wasn’t necessarily in the mural, right, the beauty was in the engagement of us working together and learning something new, learning new material, you know we worked on a material called Polytab.

JT: Could you explain this to me– I know you’ve explained it before, but it's interesting.. Polytab… 

JH: Oh, sure. Polytab is manufactured by a company in Los Angeles, don’t have the name of it right now but, Polytab is basically a fiber based paper. So, it's like the two best combinations between a paper and a fiber. It works as a canvas in that sense, where you can cut pieces of it and prime it, right? So you can cut a piece of it– at that point we were using column-like, rectangular cuts. Probably like nine feet, two feet across, right? But, as we worked on other projects we began to use a standard size of five by five, so five feet by five feet squares. Polytab is a really lightweight material, but when you apply it to a surface like wallpaper, it has the ability to be seamless in its application. You can do great line quality artwork on it, you know, with acrylic paint. And it just has– it just seamlessly molds to the wall. 

JT: So it allowed you to basically make– do paintings, do the sections of it wherever you could, in your cell or wherever, and then come together and apply them to the wall, which would later be how you would make murals outside and have them be able to be applied in Philadelphia and around Pennsylvania. 

JH: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, we completed that first auditorium mural, what sort of happened after that was– Jane, we all had explicit conversations about this, it was like, “Well, you guys, you have a lot of talent, definitely have a lot of time on your hands, you already have your own individual work going on. What about us formulating a group? And having that group produce murals?” Right? The guys fell in love with the idea because there was also a strong impulse to want to pay for one, in a sense, to give to society, to the institution, to try to do some reparative work, you know, externally. And I think in that process, it's like a noble motivation, and in that process I think what also happened was there was reparative work being done inside of individuals as well. One of the phrases I like to always say is I grew in my own understanding of what was happening and that process, I always said, “The real artwork is being done on the inside.” The real artwork is being done on the inside of the individuals who are doing the artwork. You know, with the construction of that group and with funding, we were able to make, I want to say, I know I participated in close to a little bit over fifty, less than sixty but over fifty, murals. And, you know, worked with some great artists, mural artist, staff artists, under leadership I learned a lot about mural making and just about art in general–

JT: I didn’t realize how much you were a part of the beginning of this!

JH: Oh yeah.

JT: With Mural Arts, that’s really impressive, I knew you were part of it, but...

JH: Oh yeah.

JT: Can you explain a little bit about the process of what the actual mural would end up becoming. Like the process of that being approved and who would design those images.

JH: Ah man, so, great question. What would typically happen is we would work with a lead artist who would direct the project. It was like a movie almost, so we’d have the lead artist and that lead artist would come to us with the project.

JT: And they would be from the outside?

JH: Yes, they would be from the outside. So that lead artist would present the project, or the theme. So here’s the theme… right. And we would all, you know, have a conversation. You have a group conversation amongst each other and the lead artist and we talk about what is justice, where do we think it goes, how could it be portrayed, what does it mean.. And in that process we take notes, we draw, we come up with things, we shoot ideas at each other. And that lead artist would be sort of the one to pool all of that, to collate everything together and start pulling everything together.

JT: So, would you have direct interactions with them? Would they come in and visit with you guys and talk to you directly?

JH: Oh yeah, it was extremely liberal. I mean, one of the– so, it was a total contrast to my personal practice as far as doing political work and doing socially relevant work and work that challenged the correctional system and visually– it was a total contrast. I mean, I had paintings confiscated at prison art exhibits, like literally taken off the easel like, “You can’t show this here.”

JT: What’s a prison art exhibit like?

JH: A prison art exhibit is crazy (laughs).

JT: (laughs) Okay let’s back up here a second. Who organizes it, where is it?

JH: Okay so, the ones at Graterford would be in the institution auditorium, which is like a cavernous space, all these rows and rows and rows of theater style chairs, old hard plastic theater style chairs, but at the base was a stage and there was a, I wanna say a floor, right? So, there was a floor and on that floor area before you get to the stage area, which was elevated – and all this stuff is from the forties – so imagine old 1940s style, if you look up at the ceiling, to hold the roof up there are these big steel trusses, right? So this is like, with big rivets in them and stuff, so.

JT: I think Graterford was built in the thirties, right?

JH: Yes, exactly. So this is like, you know, really old. But so, the floor was this dark green stone. If you fell on it you might, you know, it was over. But, on that floor would be the exhibition space. So, it was wall-less. Open air, and there were, fortunately we were able to get easels at some point. Like little wooden cheap easels. And for guys that had paintings, they could display their paintings on those easels. For guys who didn’t have paintings, it would be tables where they could lay their drawings on the tables or have their drawings propped up on little smaller picture frame type stands and stuff like that.

JT: Did anybody show their work?

JH: Yes, and it was, that was what was so cool. You had, you know, one of the forgotten sort of elements of incarceral art is craft making, which I never did, but always was giddy about, right. Because you had guys that would take popsicle sticks, you know, from summertime fundraisers and take all those popsicle sticks and make ships out of them. And I would give myself up right now. People that would make the little ship in the bottle and stuff, stuff like that just would blow me away. It's amazing! They would be like, “I wish I could do what you do! The way you can draw.” And I’d be like, “Nah, I wish I could do that!” You know what I mean? People who could sew very well and make quilts. They would take old prison clothing and take old christmas stockings, they used to give out Christmas stocking bags for the holidays. A Christian charitable group used to do that. And, you know, the stockings they were cheap material and fabric but the guys would take all those stockings and make quilts out of them. You know, the filler that they would get from the prison industrial shop and make these quilts. Because they would make mattresses as well. And these guys were making quilts and you have some guys making teddy bears and stuff. So there was this whole craft industry or creative grouping within the prison itself. Guys would make their own chess boards and stuff out of cardboard, so that always intrigued me and that always really excited me. But those guys would be prominent at the prison art exhibits. Whenever we would have them, those guys would be prominent and really putting, really showing out, I mean–

JT: How long would the exhibit be on for? A couple hours or?

JH: Oh, it would be on, I want to say for a full day. Because you have the, the prison days are weird because it's a constant back and forth inside of the same environment. Because you have to be in an environment, then you leave that environment to go back to get counted or to eat or… and then you come back to that environment. So – when you add it all up – that show would be up from that morning, it would be set up all the way and it would stay up through the evening and then for the next day, because people would come back and pick their work up and collect their work and whatnot. And then there was also the ability to sell work, so, there was also this industry created where prisoners could sell artwork to the staff and to each other etcetera… You know, it was just a really good space and environment for artists inside that space to create relationships and to really get to know each other and, you know, to be able to exercise their gifts and talents, creatively. 

JT: Just to do a nod to Nicole Fleetwood, because she talks a lot about how prevalent art is in prisons, and she mentions that in fact it's so prevalent that every prison pretty much has to have a handbook or an agreement for how they handle art within that particular prison, so at Graterford, what were the rules? Were you allowed to sell it, because some prisons even allow selling to outside of the prison itself, was that allowed or was it only allowed to be sold within the prison?

JH: It could be, that's a great question, and yes it could be sold outside the prison, but no matter if it was sold inside or outside, the institution got 10%.

JT: Right.

JH: They got 10% off the top. 

JT: Well, I take 50% so I don’t know whose… (laughs)

JH: Yeah, but you’re legitimate though! We aren’t talking about no mafia stuff. This is some maffia stuff. And then a person has a choice to do business with you. There literally was no choice. It's like, “If you’re going to do this and you want to sell it officially, then you’ve got to give us 10%”

JT: Right, right…

JH: And that’s 10% with our foot your ass (laughs) so.. But, nevertheless, those experiences – let me, not preface but let me kind of reset a little. When I use language like “great,” it kind of can be misleading because it can take away from the really dungeon-like atmosphere that exists psychologically in prison and carceral spaces. But when I say “great,” I mean on an internal and personally fulfilling level that can also be translated to a collective of individuals. Or groups. And I think that's definitely what I'm referring to. And I used to always say this too, and I still do, to me, art and creativity was providing a sort of shady spot in hell. Right? It was like a shady spot, a place in hell where you could get a little breeze and a drop of water would hit your forehead. So in the midst of some really trying circumstances in a lot of different respects, there was like an oasis that would provide a semblance of hope, a semblance of what's possible. Really propel you to the next moment where you can get closer to your eventual goals. If im not using my art to– I could have made cards, could have done portraits, and I did, but I could have exclusively done those things and made a couple bucks here and a couple bucks there–

JT: So you’re basically saying you could have made art to participate within the economy, the prison economy, but that was not what you were interested in.

JH: Yes, yes. No, because if it didn’t have a personal meaning that was powerful, if I wasn’t using it to express a truth that was larger and that would, no matter what the outcome for me personally, but that could be a body of work and a grouping of work that would live on and somebody could recognize it and say, “Man, this is the real shit right here. This really gives the truth about this experience” that was also a hope and that drove me. Like I always said, once a body of work is seen, either its going to be vehemently rejected or critically appreciated for the truth that it tells. But it will not be anonymous, it will not be unacknowledged, so that’s a hope in that. And it propels one. 

JT: You had a life sentence at this point. And so you– but you had so much hope in terms of this work and knowing that it was going to go out into the world. From what I’ve heard of the way Russell described some of those years, you kind of had this strong belief that this work was going to go out into the world, and it has. 

JH: I mean part of it is rationality, right? I look at– any cursory reading of art history will reveal there are movements, there are periods, there’s a constant search for new material, new content, new artists. You have your greats, you have your established powers that be, artistically, but there’s always a search for new voices, emerging artists. So, you know, I knew that there’s constantly a space being developed for a new voice, right, a new image, a new– so that possibility remained open, however tight, that possibility remained open. At some point I also believed that someone would be interested in documenting, critiquing, critically analyzing, work that’s from this experience. If they, when they did that, I would want to be part of that and the way I would want to be part of that would be in the most aesthetically vibrant and creative way possible. So that would mean creating work that would stand out inside, but at the same time, outside of that experience, to a degree. You know what I mean? You could be able to be recognized. And just personally, it's a rationality with that too, you know. There’s sort of a calculation that goes into that as well, personally. And this is outside of art, this is into my legal situation, which is the whole other art in and of itself. Initially upon my incarceration, an older prisoner gave me some sound advice. He said, “You should be aware of the United States Supreme Court. Throughout the legal history of America, they have constantly changed law. They’ve constantly reevaluated law. You know, if you are aware of decisions that they make, they could possibly make a decision that could impact your personal life.” And so, as I went on legally to do my own stuff and develop my own case with very little success– but I always knew that there was a chance that the United States Supreme Court would take a look at certain issues surrounding my incarceration. You know, that truism held up. It's historically sound. There’s a phrase they use called “evolving standards of decency” and that we live in a society that is constantly evolving and moving towards a vision of equality under law, and fairness, and justice. Inside of that, there’s a whole bunch of legal technicality. Knowing that at the base gave me a certain level of legal hope that there would be a review at some point of my circumstance. Not individually, but as part of a class of individuals. And so, you know, that provided me with some legal hope. But again that alone wasn’t sustaining. Art was more sustaining in that sense. Spiritually, emotionally, psychologically…

JT: In terms of hope.

JH: In terms of hope and also – I can’t leave this out because this is the most important ingredient – also, personal changes I was making as a human being as I was doing the things I was doing. That can’t be understated, you know. There’s like a karmic relationship between each individual and their own existence. The fact that doing good in bad times counts double, right? There’s a bonus, I guess. It really must have meant something for him to give that five dollars. It was fifty percent of his total wealth. And I think that's what I was striving to do as a person. I was striving to give as much of myself as I could without disintegrating, because I knew that I was investing in my own future, but also in the future of other people. And sort of in a collective hope that I was investing in as well. And that helps not only stimulate personal change, but that helps drive it. You know, that helps drive it. Doing the mural work, I mean, it was tiresome. It wasn’t easy, you know. Navigating a lot of situations in prison in order to maintain an artistic practice – half your artistic practice is trying to figure out how to stay alive to do artistic practice. So… Which is not easy…But if done correctly, it really does motivate one to be a better person and motivates one to really be a solid person as a human being and prepare one for the ability to be a person again. Inside or outside of a carceral system, you know. And that is fulfilling. 

JT: This brings me back to, we kind of trailed out of the mural conversation, just to kind of bring it back to that, one more thought on that is that I know from previous conversations with you, some of the men had a complication relationship to the mural project because they felt like their labor was being used to make another artist’s design, essentially. Because these artists from the outside would come in, they would talk to you, there would be a design conversation back and forth. Essentially, your labor is put into this mural. You are very optimistic and very hope driven, but you seem to have a more optimistic experience with the mural project. Can you talk a little bit about why you felt comfortable with that project or what about it?

JH: I mean, because at the base level I was appreciative. No one– the greatest gift someone can give another person besides life is opportunity. No one owes you an opportunity, right. You are born into this world and circumstances can be extremely unfair, so for someone to bring forth an opportunity when they don't have to, creates a baseline level of just – for me – gratitude. What happened with some of my fellow artists, not to disparage them, they got big headed (laughs). Which is what happens in all successful endeavors. Not to bring too much levity to it, but there is levity. They got big headed. You know what I mean? They got some…I’m just speaking by myself so I'm going to be very favorable, but I like to consider myself a decent person. So if someone buys me a popsicle, I want to buy them one too, right. You know, one for the one they bought me and then another one just out of pure gratitude that they even thought about me. Everybody ain’t reached that level yet. Everybody hasn’t evolved to that standard yet. And yes, they will use, they will bring about real economic disparity and use that as the statistic, they will use that as the evidence, but what's underneath that is really, “I want more.” Do you know what I mean? I want more. And so, we would have these internal conversations. These internal conversations would play out and I used to tell the guys, “Alright so, what happens if they pay you.” Let me dial back a little bit. Some guys I used to tell this to, “If they paid you what you were worth, you would still be making the same amount of money, right?” 

JT: Right, because you got paid to make the murals?

JH: Yes, we got paid fifty something cent per hour. And that was the institutional wage, right. Because the institution has set a cap on how much a person can make an hour. And the cap, we were making above that. So the institution wage was for forty two cents, we got fifty something. But if you’re painting, if you start out painting for money then you always, unless you make millions, you’re always going to have a problem. Even when you make millions, you’ve gotta pay for your art. But it's like, you know, my thing was, we aren’t painting for money, and we’re also not painting purely for the love of painting. Some of us are trying to paint away what we’ve done, some of us are trying to paint a new future. You know, we are painting for something bigger. I used to have these conversations with the guys. Some guys would be like, “Well, you are kinda idealistic.” They wouldn't say it that way, they would say it in a different way, you know never too disrespectful. But, you know, some guys were just stuck on this whole thing of, “I want to be treated like everybody else.” And I'm like “Well, that ain't even how the economy works.” If we want to get into some raw economics of it, that ain't how the economy is going to work anyway. Really you want more, and I understand that but there are vehicles to create more. One of the vehicles we had in that situation was, we were able to exclusively sell work at Mural Arts events. So, guys had whole other streams of income coming in. And certain guys were able to amass significant amounts of paper in that process by selling their work. But the whole thing about being compensated in extractive labor and all these things – which are very important to me as an artists, you know what I mean, and as a person in the carceral system – in that situation we were in, when you pull that apart and investigate that, its not purely, “Well this is some extractive, you know, slave painting camp.” You know what I mean? “You’re going to paint these murals or suffer.” No, it was a skilled labor job. It was an ability, an opportunity to participate in a community works program for, primarily, guys serving life sentences who really the world and society forgot about. And really didn’t have a vested interest in remembering. You know what I mean? Because the last time they had seen some of us, it wasn’t a nice situation. So to have an opportunity to get a second chance to use your gift… I mean… that sticks with me. I consider Jane Golden a friend because here’s a person who took a chance, because she deals with city government in Philadelphia. At the time – its progressively gotten a little better – but at the time, government can be center right or center left depending on how the political spectrum sways, but one thing center right and center left got in common, they don’t care how good a convict can paint. They don't want convicts doing that. And we were able to take that opportunity and build such a beautiful reputation and relationship with the community inside the prison and outside the prison. And that’s priceless. To use that cliche, that's priceless. We were able to rehabilitate our images to some degree. That's priceless. Damn the coins, you know what I mean? Cause I can figure out a way to make money, but it takes a special series of events and relationships to figure out a way for me to repair my social standing in life and in the world. I can never take back what I’ve done, that’s etched in the universal stone. But what I can do is – with help from others – be part of opportunities that help show different and better of who I am as a person. And that’s what we were giving. And I think when I used to hear guys complain about money it was almost like, “You’re worried about a couple pennies or a couple dollars when your existence as a human being is on the line. And you’re getting a chance to repay something deeper to yourself and to the community and to the world.” And that's how we initially started too, so I used to remind them of that. We didn’t start out, this didn’t start out as a money making venture. This started out as, “We want to give back.” But now that you get a little education about the business, you – I’m being colloquial – you get big headed. You get some success, start getting in the newspapers: “We got this group of guys up at the prison and they are doing great work.” You start getting acolaids from prison staff, guys get big headed. And I’ve seen it happen in different social groups in prison and different charitable stuff I was a part of. And it happens in life, so it’s not something unique to the carceral space – but as human beings I think there’s a positive greed, there’s a positive aspect to wanting more, but there’s also a negative aspect and I’ve seen that negative aspect and I’ve always tried to push back against it. And just to pair it to Russell Craig, one of the things that, and I’ve told him this, I’ve said, “Man the one deciding factor in me to work with you is one thing that had nothing to do with art, nothing to do with talent, what it had to do with was your character. When I saw your true character – it didn’t take me long – when I saw your true character expressed, I saw that you didn't have larceny in your heart. You weren’t out to take advantage of others, myself, you weren't that type of person.” And I said, “That’s what has been the strongest motivator in me to share whatever I have.” You know what I mean? And there’s something to be said for that.

JT: Thank you so much, James, for joining me today, I really enjoyed it.

JH: It's been my pleasure.

My name is Jasmin Tsou and you’re listening to JTT. In today’s episode I interview Charles Harlan. Charles was born in 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia and currently lives and works in Wilmington, North Carolina. Charles’ practice consists of combining architectural materials – such as I-beams, bricks, concrete conduit, stone, and corrugated metals – into relatively minimal configurations. In a larger sense, Charles is interested in creating an experience of transcendence with materials that traditionally hold a more utilitarian function in society. Today, I asked Charles about his most recent show at JTT titled, Celtic Cross, which is based off the celtic cross spread used in tarot card reading. We talk about the leap Charles makes from construction materials to the tarot, as well as the common ground that viewing art and reading the tarot share. Thanks for listening.

JT: Today I’m here with Charles Harlan. Hi, Charles. Thanks so much for joining me.

CH: You’re welcome.

JT: Where are you right now?

CH: I’m at my home in Wilmington, North Carolina.

JT: Before we start, I want to talk a little bit about your show today that’s currently on view at JTT titled, Celtic Cross – which is on view until April 24th. But before we start talking about that, I want to describe, for our listeners, a solo show that you had at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2018 titled, The Language of The Birds. In this show, you had a large work – actually all of the works in this show were titled, Bird Bath – but there was one particular piece, titled Bird Bath, that was a large fiberglass baptistry. It was baby blue and it was the type of baptistry that gets in-set into the ground at the altar of churches in the South. And the way it's designed is there are stairs that descend down into a pool of water and then a person who is being baptized walks down those stairs, plunges underneath the water, and then there’s a set of stairs where the person who’s being baptized can exit the pool of water. You took this baptistry and, you know, set it on top of the ground – on top of concrete ground – so you are sort of showing what would normally be an architecture that is under the ground. And you had it standing upright on the set of stairs so it was sort of off-kilter, weighed down by a stone bird bath, a stone actual bird bath from a yard. Can you, for our listeners, just tell us the significance of that baptistry piece?

CH: Well, it was the kind of baptistry that was in the church that I grew up going to and I was baptized in a baptistry like that when I was, I don’t know, twelve or something. And, basically each piece in that show had– was built around this structural form of a baptisimal font. So the sort of vessel for water and then behind it, a reredos – which in a church is what you would see behind the priest. Usually they are decorative and quite beautiful. Anyway, that was kind of the structure for each piece and in this case it was the bird bath standing in for the baptisimal font and the reredos behind it, the sort of background, was the baptistry. So it had that biographical connection to my past, but what I liked about that piece and the bird bath itself was– I just find it kind of funny that baptisimal fonts look like bird baths, first of all. But using the weight of that stone in the narrative of the baptistry, you know, someone – the sinner – descends into the water and meets the priests or the preacher who cleanses them and then they ascend back up the other side. That's sort of a nice neat little narrative. So I like the idea of this object that’s used for birds, for nature, the weight of it, holding down – or basically shifting – that narrative. A very neat, clear, linear narrative of descent, cleansing, and ascent. I thought that was a nice reconfiguring of that narrative.

JT: So to describe the other works in that show, for example, again all of them are titled, Bird Bath, and there’s another work that has bales of pine straw stacked in a corner like structure and inserted into the bales of pine is an aquarium. A fish aquarium. I’m imagining that this–

CH: Right, so that was sort of the reredos. The backdrop structure for that piece. And in front of that was a bird bath I had constructed out of fence wire, a roll of fence wire, and a wheelbarrow. That was meant to be the bird bath. 

JT: Right, so that was kind of a two part piece. It has two structures to it. And then there was also another work that had an actual bird bath standing on a wooden plinth with gloss bricks – again, in a corner-like structure. So there were a lot of these corners, sort of architectural structures in the show.

CH: Right, and the steps, there were steps in each piece to mimic the steps of the baptistry.

JT: Exactly. I wanted that show to be in our viewers’ minds a little bit when you’re describing for us the works in the Celtic Cross show, which is up right now at the gallery. Would you mind describing for our listeners the layout of this show and the works in it?

CH: The show is sort of based on a celtic cross tarot spread, which is the standard first spread you learn when you are learning about the tarot. For this show – I did a tarot reading for the show – I made a scale model of the gallery. And funnily enough, the gallery, architecturally, is sort of in the shape of a celtic cross reading in that to one side you have the smaller square room and then on the other side you have a longer rectangular room. So, you sort of have the two elements of the celtic cross reading, which is the cross and the staff, on the other side. So I did the reading, and each card in the reading was meant to represent a sculpture in the show, or I guess more accurately, each sculpture in the show was meant to represent a card in the reading.

JT: So I know that the deck that you used for this reading was known as the “Rider-Waite” deck. Can you explain why you chose that deck as a starting point for this show?

CH: There were several reasons, I mean for one I really like the artwork of that deck. This incredible artist Pamela Colman Smith did the prints for each card and they’re incredible. So it's a very beautiful deck. You know, I’ve always had an interest in – a longstanding interest in – Western occultism. And I had all these A. E. Waite books on my shelf, of various different topics, because he is sort of a prolific writer on topics of Western occultism. So, when I decided I wanted to use the tarot as a source reference for the show, I looked on my shelf and thought, “Oh, I already have all these books by the creator of the Rider-Waite deck.” So, it seemed like a good fit and I really like A. E. Waite and the milieu that these cards emerged from, because they were used as ceremonial cards for the Golden Dawn secret society that he was a big part of with–

JT: Can you explain the golden dawn?

CH: Yeah, it was a goofy secret society around the turn of the century. Aleister Crowley famously was a member. Pamela Colman Smith, who did the art for the cards, was also a member. Your typical initiatory secret society where people got together sort of in the tradition of the masons or something like that – and you rose up in the ranks. I think it was founded by MacGregor Mathers who was kind of the student of– MacGregor Mathers also had an interest in tarot cards. So, it was just a funny secret society and I've always been interested in it. And also the Rider-Waite deck is sort of the first deck that people start with when they are learning the tarot, which I was just starting to learn the tarot when I decided to use it as a source material for the show. The reason for that is because artist Pamela Coleman Smith illustrated– I’m not sure if it's the first deck, but it's one of the first decks where each card including the pip card, the minor cards, the suit cards, were illustrated with sort of symbolic references. So, when people are learning the tarot it's a popular deck because visually each card gives a reminder of what the significance is, visually. Whereas older decks, the Marseille deck for example, the number cards are not illustrated, they just have, say, the five of pentacles the card is literally five pentacles. It's probably the most popular deck and I just find it really beautiful and I like the people who created it – so it just was the natural fit for the show. 

JT: Right, now you and I have known each other for a very long time and I’ve always known – perhaps since our early twenties – you’ve been interested in the occult and have been reading a lot about it, but only recently have been really invested in the tarot. And I'm just curious, what brought you to the tarot specifically? And why you chose that to incorporate into your work.

CH: Well, like you said, since all through college and growing up I've always had an interest in the occult and reading about all these weirdos from back in the day and their obscure writings. So I was always vaguely aware that the tarot – I had a friend who gave me a tarot reading, I don't know, a decade ago –  always vaguely aware. I had looked at the cards. It's like something that's always in the background of our culture. Everybody is vaguely aware of it to some extent. Specifically, I hadn’t really read much into it until I decided I wanted to use it for, to sort of generate, this show. And the reason I decided that is because what I did know about the cards is that each card has a symbolic significance and the way that you read those cards is by laying them out in different formations. The cards draw meaning and significance by their relationships to each other and their position. So not only does each card have a significance, but the order and the position of each card in context with the other cards creates even further significance. I was always vaguely aware that that was the structure of the tarot, and I was drawn to that because the way I make my work, the way I've always made sculpture is sort of each raw material – and I often work with raw materials or construction materials or whatever – each material in my mind is sort of invested with a significance or symbolic meaning that I've kind of confusingly created in my own bespoke symbology as an artist. That's what we do. The way I would create sculptures would be to take those materials, stack them, arrange them, and sort of the same way with the tarot, the stacking, the arrangement, the position of these symbolic raw materials on top of each other, around each other, was what sort of created this significance of the sculpture – what turned it from raw material into art. And so it seemed really natural, it's the way I already thought about my sculpture and it seemed like a natural thing to read into. Then covid happened and I was stuck inside for a year and so I started reading about the tarot. I mean, I think if you want to be a casual reader, it's easy to pick it up and kind of go with it. But I wanted to read into each card so that I was confident before I approached making an art show about it. It was nice to have all of that time during covid to read – just do the research for the show. 

JT: So, I want to talk about a couple of the sculptures in the show, but before I do, I think that the celtic cross has this really beautiful progression. So there are ten cards in the reading and each card has a progression. So it starts for example with “this covers” and it goes on to “this crosses” and those two cards are put on top of one another. And then the third card is “this crowns” and it goes on to “this is beneath,” “this is behind,” “this is before,” “this is within,” “this is around,” “hopes and fears” and then finally, “what will come.” So each of these placements in the celtic cross has, of course, a tarot card associated with it. But it also has, for your show, a sculpture. So the sculpture is not only one-to-one with a tarot card, but it's also one-to-one in its placement in the reading. So I wanted to start first with the one that you titled, Below, which would be essentially in the fourth position of the celtic cross. And this one is a really beautiful piece, can you remind me of the card that this one stands for?

CH: The card in the position of “below” was strength. 

JT: And can you describe that card to our listeners? What strength is…

CH: Strength is a card that features an almost angelic looking woman in a white gown and she has the lemniscate, the infinity symbol over her head, which is meant to represent her strength, her mastery. And she has her hands on the mouth of a lion. Some people say she’s closing the mouth of the lion, some people say she's holding the mouth of the lion open. But, in any case, she is sort of the master of the lion. It is meant to represent a control over animal instincts through this development or esoteric knowledge above her head represented by this infinity symbol. 

JT: Right, and in the actual sculpture you recreated the infinity symbol with chicken wire, basically steel, into –

CH: Yeah, it's hardware cloth.

JT: And then each of those loops is filled with a type of stone. One is more blue and one is more red. And they are standing on a brass shape, and that shape is in the shape of the symbol for Leo?

CH: Yeah, so the pedestal that each piece is on – or that the stone is on – is sort of meant to represent the lion in this piece. And it's sort of an abstracted form for the symbol of Leo, the sign Leo.

JT: So in this podcast we are talking about this piece and we are revealing to our listeners that that is the strength card, but we don't actually talk about that in the press release. We don't do a one-to-one for every sculpture and card that it represents – and I feel like that was a really important choice for you. I feel like you wanted to make sure that the sculptures, people could approach them as sculptures. Do you agree with me on that?

CH: Yeah, well and also I just think it's sort of cheesy or silly to go through piece by piece and be like, “This sculpture means this, this sculpture means this…” I don't necessarily think that's interesting at all. For me, it was sort of the inspiration, the impetus to create the sculpture – and any artist needs some inspiration. Specifically what each card means, or, sorry, what each sculpture means, what card it is, is less interesting to me – more the idea that the relationship of the reading, so the arrangement of the cards, of the sculptures, and the meaning of each sculpture in the context of the other sculptures in the room sort of echoing that same relationship with a tarot reading. 

JT: Another sculpture I want to talk about was the one titled, Cover/Cross. So this would be two tarot cards that are stacked on top of each other in the center of the celtic cross. And what were the two cards that this sculpture represents?

CH: So, those were the–  the cover card was the two of cups and the cross card was the seven of wands. 

JT: So for this sculpture you actually incorporated marble countertops, which is what you’ve done in earlier works. Usually you’ve taken marble countertops from, sort of like domestic countertops and then put them onto the wall, so inverted their orientation or altered their orientation. And now you’ve, for the first time, brought the countertop back into its proper orientation. It's parallel with the ground. And descending down are these two circular cylinders, essentially. And one is white and one is black. Is there an important symbolism in those for you?

CH: Well, so the card itself – the two of cups – is a man and a woman holding two cups and cheersing each other in celebration. You know, we kind of talked about this with Marie when we were talking through the show, sort of putting the show together. I don't necessarily want it to be like, “The black cylinder is the masculine figure, the white cylinder is the feminine figure.” But there is this, in the symbolism with the tarot, there is this idea of balance and opposing forces. I guess what the two of cups represents, what the card represents, are these two opposing forces but a nice balance between the two. So that's why we have the white basin and the black basin. They are balancing on top of them the counter top in perfect harmony. 

JT: And then where the faucet would normally go stands seven different types of tools. Lawn tools, essentially, that have long dowels. All types of tools that have dowels–

CH: Right, they are like garden tools.

JT: And they stand in for the wands of the seven of wands.

CH: Right yeah so where you would install the faucet in the sink, the vanity top, you would have three holes usually. In this case, on one side you have three holes and on the other you have four. And inserted through those holes are seven garden tools with wooden handles, and then they are supported at the bottom with the backsplash for the vanity top, which I drilled matching holes. 

JT: So the marble countertop and tools, in an abstract sense, have been things that have been reoccurring in your work quite a lot. I know that you and I have spoken about tools being really important in the sense that they are these clever devices that a previous human invented to help make our later labor easier. And they are kind of an interesting way to communicate with the past, an invention of sorts. What do the tools in this sculpture represent to you?

CH: I like what you said about tools being a way to communicate with the past because I like to think about the person who was standing there thinking, “Well I have this shovel, which was invented a few years ago, but it's not really perfect for what I'm trying to do which is scrape the dirt into a certain pile. I need something more like a hoe.” So I think it’s funny to think about the specific problem that led someone to be like, “Okay, well this isn't working, I’ve got to invent something else.” I think that's funny.

JT: (laughs) And these are like super ancient, ancient concepts – shoveling and digging.

CH: Well yeah I mean it's gardening, that was sort of our first big mistake. You know, we stopped grazing around the fields and living the hunter gatherer lifestyle and we figured we could make more food by growing it. And that was sort of the first big mistake. 

JT: Why do you call it a mistake?

CH: Well everything has gone downhill from then. I think it would be pretty nice to be a hunter gatherer just frolicking through the fields. It's all been downhill from that first decision to start growing food – I think.

JT: What about the marble countertop has been significant in your work? What do you feel like it's symbolic for?

CH: I mean, I don't know that it's specifically what a marble countertop is symbolic for. I don't know that it's specifically a symbolic for anything. For me, obviously marble is an art historical material. You think of the ancient Grecian sculpture, ancient architecture that was using marble – particularly like the carrera marble seems like an art historical material – and I think it’s funny that it’s this material we find in our home, in our bathroom or remodeled kitchen and just as a material, you know, it’s stone, it's going to last forever. And what I’ve always found interesting about it is thinking about how we make our homes now compared to how they have been made in the past. You think about these McMansions or whatever, these thrown together homes that are kind of pumped out across the country. But there in your bathroom is this stone slab that, after thousands of years from now, after the carpet in your bedroom has rotted, you will still be able to find the countertop under the strata. 

JT: There is this sense of endurance that you are interested in in a material and I feel like you talk about that a lot. And this endurance that lasts longer than the life of a human.

CH: For me, I guess it's more like being interested in time. And as somebody who makes objects – artworks – the effects time will have on a sculpture. So we were talking earlier about the strength piece, Below. The pedestal for that piece is made of copper. Above it, we have the two cylinders of stone. On the one side is a red stone that sort of matches the copper, and on the other side is a blue greenish blue aqua colored stone. And what I wanted to do with that piece is, you know, copper over time it tarnishes. So what I wanted the piece, I wanted the pedestal to start out the color of the first stone, the red stone, but then over time as it tarnishes and turns blue, then it would match the second stone, the aqua stone. So I guess that's more the interest in time. Like a time element to the sculpture. 

JT: I want to describe to you more pieces in the show. One that's titled, Before, and this one is a kind of clever stack piece for you because for some of our listeners who know Charles’ work, you know that he often stacks materials in these very simple forms – and this one is essentially a stack piece. It's a meteorite stacked on top of a mirror stacked on top of a black barrel. And the mirror is broken. So, it kind of gives this illusion that the meteorite fell out onto this mirror and shattered it. What’s the significance of this piece for you?

CH: Well that piece is in the “before” position and the card that came up was the knight of– or i'm sorry not the knight, the page of cups. And when you are doing a reading, the face cards – what we would think of as sort of the king, queen, and jack in a standard deck of playing cards – the tarot has those. They are kind of the hardest cards to read because they don't have a ton of significance but they often are said to represent people in the life of the person who’s being read for. So I was thinking about who this card could be for in the before position. What's interesting about this card is that the page is holding a cup and it's filled with water. From the water is a fish, emerging out from the water, causing the water to ripple. So I got to thinking of it almost as Narcissus looking down into the water, into the perfect reflection. Into the water below, the Caravaggio painting. But the idea of that water, that mirror, being shattered or broken up by something from outside. So I think that's what the card signifies is something from the subconscious, or something from outside, disturbing the placid water.  So thinking about it that way, I thought the piece should maybe be a self portrait. In that position, the person that the card represents is me, Narcissus, looking into the water. What's more alien, what’s more of a disturbance to the placid water than a meteorite? We got to looking for a meteorite, and yeah that's what I was thinking about for that piece.

JT: So the broken mirror is essentially a disruption of this placid water?

CH: Yeah it's sort of the water being disturbed or the reflection being broken up by an outside force, the meteorite.

JT: Do you think of that disturbance as a break between the subconscious and the consciousness?

CH: Well, I think traditionally that's how you would like– about the card, yeah, water, the cups, sort of represent emotion or subconsciousness, the water being what's below. Fish emerging from below would be something from your subconscious or from outside breaking into the consciousness, so then being on the surface. 

JT: And so, you’re kind of – no pun intended – but mirroring that with the idea of your own ego being shattered in some sense? And by talking about Narcissus?

CH: Maybe… to me it's more, I guess I was thinking more about inspiration. A shock of inspiration.

JT: Hm.. There's another work in the show that also deals a lot with the subconscious and that's the piece titled, Around, and its actually three components that are each very similar. They each have a concrete base, also another mirror laid on top of that concrete base, and then a crab trap laid on top of that mirror. And so there are three of them – two large ones and then one small one. And these represent the judgment card, if I'm correct. Can you describe a little bit about why you chose these objects for that card.

CH: Right so, the judgment card, there's an angel, an arc angel above blowing a trumpet. And below are three figures that have emerged, again, from the water. Sort of like the page of cups. Emerge from below, above to the water, and they are floating in their caskets. And they have risen from the dead. And the idea I guess is that they are to be judged. For the piece I had these three crab traps that had belonged to my dad and I've eaten many blue crabs from these traps over my lifetime. And I just thought they were really beautiful objects, the way the wires, the sort of visual effects of the wire as it’s layered on top of itself as you walk around it – it sort of creates a nice visual pattern. But also what a good stand in for that idea of something being drawn up from the depths for judgment than a crab trap? Which you leave down at the bottom of the ocean and when you want to have some crabs you go back out to pull it up and see what you have. See what you can draw up from the depths, so it just seemed like a good fit for that piece.

JT: This is a bit of a non sequitur, but I do want to say that a lot of times I get text messages from friends that send me pictures of objects they see on the side of the road that remind them of your work.

CH: Right.

JT: You create transcendence in your work in the gallery, but you also create transcendence when people are out in the world and they come across objects that are oriented in a way that reminds them of your work. And it's almost like one can stumble upon a material in the middle of industrial Brooklyn and have a slightly more alone and maybe less mediated experience than a gallery, kind of almost just having a moment where that material is speaking to them. And I think that your work inspired those opportunities and the way that you were describing the crab traps reminded me of a feeling I would have when I come upon a material. And now crab traps won’t be the same for me anymore, seeing them in Maryland. 

CH: (laughs) Well, I get those text messages from friends all the time too. And that's something I’ve always been interested in with sculpture, is having an artistic experience with something that's not quote un quote art. And bringing that experience into a gallery setting. And then, as above so below, you can take that same experience and take the gallery high art experience and take it out into the field and sort of strike that balance.

JT: Are you interested now that you have done so much research on the tarot, in pursuing a practice as a tarot reader?

CH: Well I don't know, I don't know how good I am at it, but I have done a few readings. I've done one for you–

JT: You’ve done more than one for me (laughs).

CH: I’ve done a couple for you, and I’m open to doing tarot readings for people but I don’t know how good I am at it. I think I’m a better sculptor, let's put it that way… 

JT: Well, what do you want to make after… Now that you’ve made this body of work, what do you see next?

CH: I really had a lot of fun making this show and, you know, working with these cards has been really generative. So, for example, I have a show up right now with Darren Flook in London at his project space, Free House, and it's a fountain piece. But that piece was sort of based on the ace of cups card. And so, you know, I want to keep working on this thing because it's been a lot of fun and I feel like it– the works in the show that we did together were, I felt really pleased with them. So I’m going to keep working on this thing.

JT: I just have one last question. It's something we talked a lot about with the press release and something you and I have spoken about in this body of work is not so much over emphasizing the tarot, even though we did that quite a bit today, but actually the process of interpretation itself. What about interpretation, interpreting the tarot, interpreting a sculpture when you see it in a gallery, is important to you?

CH: Well as someone who works a lot with found objects, sort of the quote un quote ready made, that's kind of the key, right? It is the artistic act, is interpretation, both as an artist and as a viewer. The artist creates something and puts it out in the world and then it's up to everyone else to interpret it, so it's a nice relationship that push and pull and give and take, you know? Like with the tarot it's all about that. 

My name is Jasmin Tsou and you’re listening to JTT. This is the first in a two part interview with Diane Simpson. This first interview focuses on Diane’s life from when she was born in Joliet, Illinois in 1935, up until her Chicago solo show at the Cultural Center in 2010. The second interview will start where we leave off today, and in that interview we will talk about how she began working with her current art dealers, Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, Herald Street in London, and JTT in New York. We will also discuss how her career received overdue recognition with solo shows at the ICA Boston, at the Nottingham Contemporary, at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, and her inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

Before we get into that later part of Diane's career, let's begin with today’s interview. Today we focus on Diane’s formative years as a student and her early career as a sculpture artist in Chicago. In order to give context to Diane’s career in the 70s and 80s, we refer a couple of times to the Chicago Imagists. Many of you might be familiar with the Imagists, which were a group of painters that came out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and exhibited in the late 60s and into the early 70s. Their work is figurative, sexual, grostesque, political, and surreal. The artists that we refer to today that are amongst this movement are Jim Nutt, Ray Yoshida, Roger Brown, and Christina Ramberg. This movement has received a large amount of recognition in the past few years – particularly from audiences in New York who have come to retroactively appreciate Chicago's anti-Pop sentiments as a counter to the work made in New York and LA at the same time. And this is partially why we refer to them so much today. The Imagists have become a prominent cultural landmark of art made in America at that time, and it would be difficult to talk about Diane’s career in Chicago without untangling her relationship to them. Diane studied with the same professors that the Imagists studied with. In some cases, the Imagists themselves were her professors – and at one point she was even represented by Phyllis Kind who was the dealer of the champion of the Imagists in both Chicago and New York. 

But Diane is not an Imagist: she makes sculpture where the Imagists made mostly paintings, she uses muted tones where the Imagists used vibrant colors. While Diane’s work references the figure and form and outline, it doesn’t depict the body itself or have the sexual – or bodily – aspects that the Imagists’ work featured. I hope this interview and its personal account of Diane’s early career helps to expand the understanding of art made in Chicago in the 70s and 80s. I also hope this interview gives a look into Diane's career as she navigates working with different dealers – at times having to walk away from relationships when they are no longer supportive, and at other times going for long stretches without working with a dealer at all. As an art dealer myself, I'm sensitive to some of the myths that I think the art world can perpetuate, and one is that the artist needs a dealer in order to be validated as an artist. But Diane's practice shows otherwise. Her commitment to her work over the past five decades is unwavering and truly inspiring. I hope you enjoy this interview and thanks for listening.

JT: Hi, Diane!

DS: Hi, Jasmin!

JT: Thank you so much for joining me today.

DS: Oh.. You’re welcome!

JT: Today I'm actually going to invite Ben Chaffee to interview you as well. Ben is actually also here with us.

BC: Hi Jasmin, hi Diane.

DS: Hi, Ben!

JT: Ben and I worked together with Diane when Ben was the director of Corbett vs. Dempsey, which is Diane's primary gallery in Chicago. And we worked together for many years. Currently, Ben is the curator at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and earlier this year Ben curated a show of Diane’s early cardboard sculptures titled Cardboard-Plus, 1977 – 1980. And we are going to ask Diane a bit about this early work and how she started her career, so thank you both again for joining.

BC: Thank you for having me.

JT: Alright, Diane. So we are going to start by asking you when and where you were born?

DS: Okay, well I was born Diane Klafter in Joliet, Illinois in 1935. You realize this is the first time I've had the chance to state publicly the name I was given when I was born, so... Thanks for that!

JT: (laughs) Thank you.

DS: (laughs) Because I changed my name when I got married, and you know in those days – this was like 1956 – number one, I didn’t think of myself as a professional artist and when I did think about– and also it wasn’t kind of done then unless you were really out professionally at the time when you got married. And it was just too long a name to write on my slide holder, you know? So I decided just to drop the Klafter, so I appreciate the fact that I can now get that out. 

JT: So would you have done it differently if you could do it over again?

DS: Pardon?

JT: Would you have kept your maiden name if you could do it over again?

DS: Yeah, I would, I would.

JT: Can you tell us a little bit about Joliet, Illinois and what it was like growing up there?

DS: Well, Joliet is a town about 60 miles south of Chicago and actually it was a really nice place to grow up. There was one big high school for the whole town, although there were two Catholic high schools also. But the high school I went to, it was really a melting pot because the population in Joliet was really a mixture ethnically and racially – although the neighborhoods were fairly separated. And I knew many of the local bus– families that were running the local businesses in town and it was easy as a kid to actually take a bus and go downtown to the library. Or I was taking music lessons, and so you know I'm glad I grew up there.

BC: Diane, was there anyone in your family who was an artist? Either professionally or had a hobby of making art on their own?

DS: Well, I did have an uncle – my fathers brother – he studied architecture when he came to this country from Europe, but he never really practiced architecture. But he then went into jewelry designing and I think, I'm not sure, I think he worked for Harry Winston in New York for a while. When he died, I inherited these amazing drawings of his jewelry. I mean this big box came to me because the family figured I would appreciate it. And I had so many, I framed many many of them and I distributed them to the rest of the family. But I kept most of my favorites.

JT: Do you have them hung up in your house right now?

DS: Yes, yes, you've probably seen them, Jasmin (laughs). They are in my hallway, the front hall. And in my bathroom, too.

BC: I think I recall seeing them in the downstairs bathroom.

DS: Yeah you remember, okay good!

BC: And when you were growing up, did you go to museums with your family or on your own? Or, did you see much art when you were younger?

DS: Not when I was really young, no, I really didn't. I mean we didn't go into Chicago to museums, it was only later when I was in high school. At that point I went to Saturday classes at the Art Institute. But I actually didn't have time on those Saturdays to really go into the museum proper. So no, I didn't really have that experience as a young person.

JT: Diane, it sounds like you studied art before you saw a lot of art, is that true?

DS: Right. 

JT: You were going to classes already, how did you know–

DS: Actually, you know my– I did enjoy art classes even in high school but I think my first experience where I really got interested in art maybe as a profession was when I was in high school I took the train from Joliet into Chicago and I took Saturday classes –  it was called junior school – and these were life drawing classes with this really amazing teacher Mr. Jacobsen. The students in that class were exceptional. Irving Petlin was in the class and there was a girl, Leah Sears, who I actually became really good friends with. We saw each other outside of classes as well – she would come and visit me in Joliet. And her family was in my mind, it was just so romantic to know her family because her father played in the Chicago symphony – in the orchestra – and her sister was in the New York City Ballet and they had a place in the Indiana dunes. I took the train there and went out to spend some time with them in the summer and Leah and I would do a lot of drawing and sketching outside and we would exchange our work and there was just something from that experience– it really, I think it was, you know, so romantic to know this family and to know these students in this class. I think that was when I really started to know that I wanted to continue on with art.

BC: When did you decide that you wanted to go to art school and then when you decided you wanted to go to art school how did you choose the School of the Art Institute of Chicago?

DS: Well, I would have chosen the School of the Art Institute, but what happened, my father passed away when I was a sophomore in high school very suddenly. And my mother, there she was a 40 some year old, early 40s, raising three kids on her own. I think she didn't want me to go to the Art Institute – I think she realized she didn't want me living in the city on my own and she probably thought, and she was right, that the Art Institute had some pretty weirdo kids there. It was okay for her that I wanted to study art, but I went to the University of Illinois for the first two years in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. It was okay to transfer because then I had met Ken – but that's another story. Do you want me to tell you that too?

JT: Of course. But first I want to know, this young woman that you were making art with in high school, did she also go to art school? What was her name again?

DS: Leah, Leah Sears.

JT: Did she also go to college for art?

DS: Yeah, yeah she was– so after, you know, I didn't go on directly to the Art Institute, but she did. And so I never really had a chance to be in school with her later because when I transferred, she was already– actually let’s see, she just wasn't there I don't remember exactly but she wasn't part of my school experience when I went to the Art Institute to the undergrad program.

JT: But she was somebody who had a father who was in the symphony and their family understood the significance of a school like the Art Institute, so she was able to go freshman year, which is interesting…

DS: Right, right…

JT: You studied painting in school, is that correct?

DS: Well, I studied painting at Illinois, University of Illinois, and also for my undergrad I studied painting – and it was primarily figure painting. At Illinois, I think I had a really good understanding of the body. They emphasized the skeletal structure. We had to buy a book that was really a medical book, practically showing the bone structure. But then I transferred and I went to SAIC for my undergrad, and I continued painting. 

JT: What kind of art were you making in high school prior to going into college?

DS: Oh wow I don’t even remember. I know that I was always the one who was given the job of designing programs for, you know, all the concerts and musicals and everything that went on there. That was my job. And I did some pretty realistic kinds of drawings and paintings at that time I believe.

BC: Was your family interested in your artwork as a student?

DS: Well, my mother was very encouraging, especially my mother because she was the one that enrolled me in those classes in high school at the Art Institute. Throughout my life then, she was behind me, really proud of me when I started to exhibit.

JT: So Diane, what other artists were you studying alongside in school?

DS: I really have a foggy memory of classmates both at Illinois and in my undergrad at SAIC. My life, I didn't have a very– my social life wasn’t based around school either because I was already dating Ken, and then got married. I'm sure there were people that I got to know but I can't really think of them right now… 

JT: Maybe this is a good time to stop and ask about Ken, cause this feels like a very important moment in your life.

DS: Well, what do you want to know about him? (laughs)

JT: So, Ken is Diane's adoring husband who I know very well, and he has been so supportive of her career. And Diane, I want to know, when you first met Ken, where in your college years that was.

DS: Well, we met between my freshman and sophomore year at University of Illinois. We met at a wedding we both attended in that summer between my first and second year, and he was a good friend of the groom and I was a good friend of the bride. Ken was an usher, actually, at the wedding and I remember saying to my friend who was sitting next to me, “I've got dibs on him.”

JT: (laughs) This is a classic romcom, Diane! I love it!

DS: So I waited until the very last dance of the evening. I was wanting to meet him but he didn't ask me to dance until the very last dance. And that was the beginning of a relationship that has gone on now for what, 70 or 60 years…

JT: Beautiful… So you guys started a family, I know, while you were still in undergrad. Is that correct?

DS: Yes. 

JT: When did you guys get married? Or how quickly were you…

DS: Well, we got married between my– when I went back to school at SAIC, sort of in my third year of school. We got married during that year, the end of that year I believe, in 1956. I continued with school but I got pregnant soon after we got married – so I went to school until my 7th month of pregnancy. Consequently, they were on the quarter system and I didn’t get to finish that very last quarter in order to get my BFA. 

JT: Right, so you had done three years, three quarters of school, and stopped your education at that point.

DS: At that point, right.

JT: And how long was it before you finished that last quarter? 

DS: Ahh, like ten years. Because there was a deadline. If you didn’t go back and complete it, you would lose all credit. So I sort of had a deadline built in there. And we wanted to have more than one child so I decided since I was already diapering, I might as well get through with the diaper stage and have my other two kids. I wanted three kids, so I did have these three children and when the youngest one was six, that was when I decided– I had to go back at that point or I would have lost all credit. And when she was six and she started first grade, I was able to go back. And it took me like three years to finish that one quarter because I loved going back and would just take one class at a time and I just dragged it out.

JT: And were you making art over that ten year period?

DS: Yes, yes, I was mostly painting at that point. A lot of paintings of Julie, my oldest. When I had time when she was still an infant, I did a lot of paintings of her. Then I went back and, in order to sort of get my feet wet, I enrolled in– then I decided to go on for my MFA. I went to enroll in sort of student-at-large classes in order to kind of get acclimated again. At that point, I enrolled in Ray Yoshida’s class and one of Barbara Rossi's classes.

BC: That’s a good segway because we were sort of wondering, how did you decide to continue on for an MFA at SAIC and  – you know these days an MFA is often thought of as preparation for teaching – I’m wondering if you were thinking about teaching at the time you were starting the MFA program?

DS: Well as an undergrad, I was thinking of a career in teaching. And actually I did take some teaching, education classes and I got my teaching certificate at that time, but during the interval between the undergrad and grad I joined a women’s co-op gallery and that made me start thinking about going on to get an MFA. I started to kind of think of myself as really becoming a professional exhibiting artist at that point, and also getting an MFA would have allowed me to teach at a college level.

BC: We kind of skipped over this earlier, but I still have it as a question: who were some of your undergrad teachers who were most impressionable on you? Or had the greatest influence on you?

DS: Well in undergrad I had– I did mostly figure painting. It was with Paul Weigert, he came from Germany and he had studied at the Bauhaus. Paul Weigert, I think, had a good sense of color himself and I think that was what sort of translated to me and kind of– I think he influenced me that way. But as far as the style of painting I was doing, I had all these Paul Weigert look alike paintings. Now, everybody in the class started painting that way, and we were sort of doing a quasi, semi Abstract Expressionist type style of painting at that time.

JT: And how about some of the professors you had in graduate school? I know that you mentioned Ray Yoshida. For people that are from Chicago, you know Ray Yoshida is an iconic artist, but maybe you could explain why he was a significant person to study underneath?

DS: Well I actually– when I went back to graduate school I had two main, my two main advisors were Ray Yoshida and Barbara Rossi, but I also talked to Whitney Halstead for a lesser period of time.

JT: So just to explain to our listeners, Ray Yoshida and Barbara Rossi are of course artists, but Whitney Halstead was an important historian and, I believe, not an artist himself. 

DS: Also, I took just about every art history class that Whitney Halstead taught, and that was really really important to me. When my advisors would leave after meeting with me, I would immediately jot down their thoughts in a notebook and recently I found the notebook and it's incredible because the notes about Ray and Barbara’s thoughts were so relevant to me actually right now even. So, you know, I think they were really important in terms of developing my interests in some of the source materials that are so important to me as well. 

JT: Well, I want to take a moment and talk a little bit about Whitney Halsted because from my understanding about him – I know that you are talking about Ray Yoshida and Barbara Rossi – but from what I understood about Whitney Halstead – was he was this historian who really integrated self-taught material into the curriculum more than maybe other historians would naturally. And a lot of the artists who came out of Chicago ended up being inspired by just a different part of history than maybe some of the artists that came out of New York. To go to what you were just saying, it doesn't surprise me that you thought a lot about your source material – it seemed like something that a lot of artists in Chicago thought about very carefully at that time. Would you agree with that? 

DS: Yes, yes. You know, I think in that sense I really relate to the Imagists because we all had Whitney for our art history classes and both Whitney and Ray Yoshida were so influential in looking at source material that just – not other artwork – speaks to us. And Whitney taught classes you know in Oceanic art, African, Japanese – I took every class he had and I think that all of those things have been continual source interests for me.

BC: And when you entered grad school, Diane, you were still focusing on painting. Is that right?

DS: When I entered grad school, no actually there were like 5 years between undergrad and grad and I had started making prints, collograph prints. I actually bought a press. So when I entered grad school, for my portfolio – first of all I had taken these classes with Ray and Barbara before I applied to grad school I was doing prints and drawings at that time with them – those are the things that I used. And then when I decided – because I wanted to continue working with Barbara and Ray, I thought  – I went into the painting department. But I never did a painting the whole time I was there. Was that your question? (laughs)

BC: Yeah that was totally my question. So here's the big question then, because nowadays you are not known for two dimensional work, how did you get from painting, printmaking, drawing into sculpture?

DS: Well, that happened toward the very end of my graduate period. I was doing these very dimensional drawings and I was encouraged to start building these–

BC: My last question was about the big shift in your work and how, I mean we've talked about this some, but I am wondering for everyone listening, they know you as primarily a sculptor. So I was wondering if you would tell a little bit the story of how you moved from two dimensional work – you just described a shift from painting to printmaking and drawing, but then how did you get from printmaking and drawing into sculpture?

DS: So I was making these very dimensional drawings and they just sort of really wanted to pop off the page. And it was Ted Hawkins who suggested why don't I actually build these drawings and really put them into space. So, at first I resisted and I said well, “What's wrong with illusion?” but then finally I decided to try doing what he suggested. And I started out with this using cardboard – like a triple thick cardboard called triwall. And from then on, the works, at first they were wall pieces that were dimensional that came away from the wall and then eventually they were free standing pieces. So I did these towards the very end of graduate school and they were the works that I had for my graduate show – for my thesis show –- and then I just continued.

BC: For everyone who hasn't seen them, I wonder if you could– how would you describe them today? How would you say they look in terms of content? What's their visual presence for you? 

DS: So I was using this triple layered corrugated board – it was cheap and it was lightweight. And that was good because I was working from home and I had to schlep them down to school every couple of weeks. I would make individual sections, usually one piece would have four sections and they had open slots and the pieces would interlock and be slotted together. And cutting the cardboard was clean, because my studio at that time was in my dining room. And the first sculpture tool I used was a jigsaw – I used a knife edge blade to cut the cardboard – and because the jigsaw could angle 45 degrees or any degrees one direction or the other, this was important since I wanted the these 3D versions of the drawings to replicate exactly the spatial system that I had divided in the drawings. So in the sculpture version just like in the drawing, there would be two parallel planes going back into space at about a 45 degree angle and then there would be two other interlocked sections facing the frontal plane. So the idea was that I wanted to duplicate exactly in space the version of the object that I was drawing. And then for the surface treatment, I would rub crayon over the surface and that would bring out the pattern of the interior cardboard fluting. 

JT: So just so I know, the very first sculptures you made, were those a part of the cardboard that we now know as the cardboard series or were there some that you made leading into that series?

DS: There were some, in other words, I was making collagraph prints and collographs prints are made by making a plate that would have a backing and then materials glued onto it. And then it would be what made intaglio, like an etching, and printed. So from the printing stage, I started to enlarge my plates so they actually were too large to fit onto the press and they became wall sculptures and they would have some dimensional sections that would actually angle out – again they were angling out at this 45 degree angle, so there was this group of work before the pieces really came into space that were sort of going toward that direction. Is that what you meant? Something in between… 

JT: Yeah, I'm just impressed that basically your very first series more or less– I mean the cardboard series was such an early part of your sculpture practice. Because they are very impressive pieces… 

DS: Thank you! (laughs) 

BC: Your show at Wesleyan earlier this year, Cardboard-Plus, 1977 – 1980, was the first time that some of these early sculptures of yours have been shown together since 1980. And I wonder, how was it to revisit these early works and especially because some of them you hadn’t seen installed in such a long period of time. 

DS: First of all, it was so great to work with you, Ben, again. And then the gallery itself, Zilkha, is so incredible. The walls are, what are they? 20 feet high?

BC: Yeah, 24 feet.

DS: And the materials in the gallery consist of stone walls – these beautiful gray stone walls. And so when I entered the gallery it took my breath away, really. It was so beautiful the way the brown cardboard appeared in relation to these stone walls and the whole space of the gallery, and there's natural light coming from one direction from a whole wall of windows. So I mean I walked in and I couldn't believe it, it was so gorgeous. And then I hadn't seen this work installed, like you say, for all those years and they looked pretty fresh! I mean they had been packed in these cardboard containers that were falling apart and then they had to be repacked in order to be shipped, but I had not really unpacked any of them beforehand to see their condition. And they all looked pretty new! That kind of surprised me too. And made me very happy. And the installers for the show were incredible because they only had these little bits of paper – little scraps of barely readable scribbled notes on how to put them together. Because all the pieces came in flat individual sections and they had to assemble them all, so the whole experience was just so, so, so exciting for me.

BC: It was for me too. And it's such an honor to work with you again. I agree with the feeling about the works in the space. Not only was there something interesting just tonally – the fact that the limestone and concrete in the gallery was a similar value to the cardboard, so there was this kind of similar presence across the space – but also there was something interesting happening that I maybe haven't seen so much with your work, and that is a relationship between monumentality and anti-monument. Because cardboard is such an ephemeral material, yet these pieces are so large so there's an interesting tension there in the work that was maybe emphasized by the gallery space. 

DS: I love that idea that they suggest monuments but they're this ordinary material (laughs).

JT: I think to take that even further, the way that you cut them, you have these very sharp angles that you’re sort of confronted with and I think that seeing those sharp angles in this delicate material, in this cardboard, there's even a further push of this feeling of ephemerality to them. And just being impressed that this sharp angle has sustained itself over such a long period of time (laughs), the sort of archivist in me, the first thing that I think about when I look at those is how sharp they are. 

DS: Well, there are a few little bends here and there, you just can't look at them that closely. 

JT: And Ben, there's something that happened in that show that I think is very special: when a curator and artist come together and they have a personal relationship like you both do. I happen to know that Ben and his family come and visit Diane’s family when they do their yearly fall raking and chili feast, and I'm only a little bit jealous of the fact that you have joined their family and done that (laughs).

DS: I'll invite you next time!

JT: I need to drive to Chicago to do the yearly fall rake. But I think when you have that kind of personal relationship there are some things you can experiment with, and one of them was that you made these very personal wall labels for a lot of the work where you gave a history of Diane’s career in a way that felt just a bit more personal than sometimes wall labels tend to be. How did you decide that, Ben? How did you make that decision to include some of that material?

BC: Good question. You know there was– in the process of installing the exhibition, Ken, I'll bring Ken back into this, both Ken and Diane shared so many recollections about those early works, about devising the works, about where the cardboard came from, about some of the history of things that were going on at that time. And I just felt like I was learning so much, you know, and witnessing all of these recollections. And I remember getting distracted from the installation because I decided I should start taking notes. So I kept getting out my notebook to write down these facts and then decided that, actually, maybe that was something I needed to be doing more actively during the installation. So I started actually really just typing them up and writing them up. And it seemed in the context at Wesleyan, it's not just the fact that we have this brutalist, architecturally specific gallery space, but we are also a university gallery. So I wanted to also open up the work to an audience that would not have maybe seen anything else that Diane Simpson had made before and assuming that a majority of the audience may– this might be the first encounter with Diane's work. And thinking about entering into an exhibition space of work that's all 40 years old that feels present, but how do we make that history accessible to an audience for the first time. So it was a way of making it more personal and also bringing some of the history elements in.

DS: And Ben, I did remember seeing people reading those labels. They actually read them! (laughs)

JT: Can you, for those that didn't get a chance to see the show, summarize maybe one of the labels or a story that was told? Sorry to put you on the spot, but… 

BC: No, sure, sure. Well one of the stories– and you can interject here, Diane, I remember one of the stories was how you came across that particular kind of cardboard. I remember I had the labels in front of me and I was the pandemic and uprisings and everything away from writing those texts, but I remember you telling the story of walking past a neighborhood arts center or a kids, a child’s center… 

DS: It was a children's museum but it was in a store front that was in Wilmette and they had a chair, a cute little childrens sized chair, made out of this cardboard. And I really liked it and walked in and asked them about the material. They had stored a bunch of it and they actually gave me or sold me a couple sheets and they told me where I could get it from, this Riley and Gear company in Chicago at the time. So that's how it started, and then I would go to Riley and Gear and I would drive him nuts because I would make sure that they weren’t warped and I would make them take several out of a pile before I would choose one (laughs). But anyway, that's how it all started and how I discovered the material.

JT: Just to give our listeners a taste of how Diane gathers materials, she has a bathroom in her house that is covered in the most beautiful wallpaper. And it's not only on the sides of the walls, it's also on the ceiling of the bathroom. And whenever Diane gives a tour of the house, she very proudly shows the wall paper off to her visitors. And Diane, how did you acquire this wallpaper?

DS: Oh, well first of all I'm not a wallpaper person generally. I would never think of wallpapering anything, but the bathroom– it seems like that was the thing to do. My neighbor was doing a colossal job of doing her whole house in wallpaper and then she would get these huge samples and discard the samples she wasn't gonna use. I garbage picked her samples, so I still have a bunch of them – I use them as wrapping paper for gifts. But anyway, this one particular wallpaper, I would never ever have chosen if I had looked through wallpaper samples, but it seemed really perfect for the bathroom because the bathroom is original to this house – which is like the 1920s – and it just has this feeling… Oh and it has some tile that reminds me of a Turkish bath. And this wallpaper reminded me of a Turkish bath type wallpaper. So that's how it happened. And we don't take showers in that room. It's got this bathtub with feet and the original fixtures, the original sink. So because of that, I think there hasn't been a lot of steam from a shower so it's held up and it's still in pristine condition. 

JT: When did you first install it? 

DS: When we first moved into the house.

JT: Oh, yeah, it's in great condition. Okay so going back to the cardboard series, or into your work at that time, I believe Karen Lennox, who was the director of Phyllis Kind gallery at the time, saw your sculptures at Artemisia gallery? So how did you– did you show at Artemisia right after grad school or during grad school?

DS: It was right after grad school. You know, I joined Artemisia because I had been at another gallery called ARC in between, before I went back to grad school. But then I dropped out because I didn't feel like I could spend the time contributing to the gallery – it was a co-op – and so I dropped the gallery when I went back to grad school. And when I finished grad school and I was making these huge sculptures, Artemisia gallery, another women’s co-op had moved to a very large space. So I didn't go back to ARC gallery, but I joined Artemisia. So that's where– I don't know if Karen actually got over to see the work there or whether she went right across the street from Phyllis Kind gallery. The original MCA museum was right there and at the same time that I was showing at Artemisia, I was in a 6 person group show at the MCA and I had three cardboard pieces there. And so to this day I still don't know if Karen actually went over to Artemisia or just went across the street. 

JT: So then Karen introduced the work to Phyllis, and then Phyllis offered you a show in her New York gallery after that, is that correct?

DS: Yeah, right.

JT: And was that your first commercial gallery show?

DS: Yes it was, yeah.

JT: How did it feel to show with Phyllis Kind – who was, I'm assuming, already at that time a huge name in– a huge gallery to be a part of. 

DS: Well, first of all I couldn't believe it. I had met with her when Karen suggested I come in and talk to her about the work. And I went in there and took a notebook of black and white glossy photos and I took two maquettes – two little single ply cardboard pieces – and Phyllis actually bought those two pieces right then and there during that meeting. I think she paid 150 for them.

JT: Oh man… 

DS: I was so thrilled.

JT: Wow.

DS: And during that meeting she just immediately offered me this show in New York! So I mean it was kind of incredible. I couldn't believe it, I floated out of the gallery after that and–

JT: Had you seen a lot of shows at Phyllis Kind? You knew who she was, she was obviously such a–

DS: Right, especially when I went back to grad school, that was my gallery go-to place. I really liked the work she showed and, you know, at that point it was like in the late 70s and some of the Imagists that really spoke to me – some of the people whose work really spoke to me – was Christina Ramberg. And Barbara Rossi was doing painting at that time. You know, it wasn't really so close to what people think of as Imagist art in the sense of the early Imagists work, it was much more contained. Anyway, those were the people that I really especially loved. Miyoko Ito is also an artist who Phyllis showed whose paintings I really, really loved and went to see. Roger Brown’s work and just, you know, I liked all of them really. It's hard to give one definition for the Imagists’ work because, like I said, the individual artists differ so much in style and most people when they think of Imagists, they probably think of their early work from the late 60s that did have certain similarities in that it was pretty raw in both subject matter and style. But then the artists that I responded to mostly were people like Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg and Barbara Rossi – and especially the painting she was doing in the 80s. They were just more refined and quiet. But you know we– I didn't especially go to comics for my inspiration as some of the Imagists did, but we also shared a certain appreciation for outsider artists like Joseph Yoakum. And we all had Ray Yoshida for a teacher and Whitney Halstead, who for his art history classes, influenced us to especially appreciate vernacular source materials. 

JT: For those that don't know, Joseph Yoakum was this amazing artist who is part Cherokee and I believe his father was a trail guide for people who were laying railroads out in the west, western part of the United States, and then Joseph Yoakum himself became someone who was a bit of a guide for people who ran circuses I believe? And then he later, in his 70s, started to draw and would draw a lot of the landscapes of western and southern United States. I think he also was a soldier at some point… Anyways, so he did a lot of different types of landscape work all from memory. 

DS: Wow! You know more about him than I ever– that's great. 

JT: But he is very influential to a lot of the Imagists and I think on your work too, right Diane?

DS: Um probably! I mean one– I love love love love his work and so, I think his color too is really wonderful.

BC: I think maybe one thing, it's important to draw a little bit of a distinction because it’s interesting, Diane, about how you fit into this history. How this gap between your undergraduate studies and your graduate– your MFA studies at the School of the Art Institute is kind of exactly when Chicago Imagism took root in the downtown scene, or really out of the Hyde Park Art Center. Which was the opposite side of the city from where you lived and also kind of a time when you were focused on other things. You know, for those of you not so familiar with the art historical movement, it started with the original show– Chicago imagism started with Hairy Who and the first show was 1966 I believe at the Hyde Park Art Center, which was this community based art center run by an artist, Don Baum. Hyde Park is a neighborhood of Chicago, but it's on the southern side of the city about seven miles south of downtown, seven miles from the School Yard Institute, which is where all the artists were from – or was kind of a nexus out of which it was born. But can you talk a little bit, Diane, about how– I mean, you made reference to some of the basic sources of inspiration for ways of describing Imagism that there's a relationship to comics and that kind of reductive style; there's a perversion of the figure; there’s a presence of the figure; and certainly a relationship to surrealism as well, which is maybe something that kind of separated Imagism from other Pop art movements in LA or New York. And you talked a little bit about artists you are particularly interested in, which, it's interesting you mention Roger Brown, Barbara Rossi’s paintings from the 80s and Mikoyo Ito, because I think of all of those painters as dealing with architecture and space a little bit more in their painting – and rendering objects and geometries. Miyoko Ito a little bit more Color Field, but still a lot about those shapes, geometric shapes. And I hadn't thought about those relationships to your work. But can you talk a little bit about your relationship with some of the Imagist artists or about this gap time between your undergraduate and your graduate studies?

DS: Yeah, so you mentioned the Hyde Park Art Center show that– the first shows the Imagists had. During that time I did not ever see those shows. I was raising a family, completely isolated from the art scene. So it was only really later that, as I mentioned, the artists that really meant more to me – I related more to their work – that was later when I went back to school and I was going in to Phyllis Kind. So there seems to be sort of this gap, this real split in the early Imagist work that was shown in the Hyde Park Art Center shows and the later work that these artists did. I mean someone like Jim Nutt, his early work is… Well, I didn't relate to that as much as his later work, especially his portraits. I mean I really relate to those and maybe it's because there's none of that rauceos stuff going on. He's concentrating on a very refined version of a portrait, of  a drawing. He's also angling his faces in a sort of skewed way that I think related to the way I skew work. And I love his sense of pattern, the kind of patterns he uses on these women's clothing in his portraits. So I mean there's this thing, it's like with Jim Nut, there's two Jim Nutts in my mind. And it's that later work that I think I appreciate more.

BC: Yeah I just think it's really interesting, it's easy from the outside to look in at Chicago and think of it reduced to one movement at that time. Just Chicago Imagism. What's interesting to me about your connection or lack of connection with that work is that you’re actually a little bit older than most of those artists, you were in school before they were, and then not around the scene when they were, and when they were defining the scene. When you talk about then reconnecting in with Phyllis Kind gallery in 1980 or 79, at that point many of those artists had had great careers and works in museum collections, so they have already skipped ahead– not ahead but like moved further in their career than you had at that point. So there’s this interesting way you are sort of out of alignment. Even though you were in the same space and traversing some of the same pedagogical spaces. Same university, same gallery spaces and cultural spaces, but there's a slight separation. Which I think is, you know, that's notable and in some ways going to define some of your things that you are grappling with in different ways. 

JT: What I think is also interesting is that the Imagist movement was, of course, very much based in painting and Diane became very interested in sculpture. And that difference also feels super significant. I know, Diane, that you are friends with Richard Rezac, were there other sculptors in Chicago that you resonated with, or you shared work with, or you grew with?

DS: Hmmm not really, I mean the thing, the artists that– Well, when I was in grad school we had visiting artists and there were some women that came. These women artists of the 70s excited me. Oh Jackie Winsor’s work and ohh trying to think of their names now. Those were the artists that– Eva Hesse, Ree Morton, Mona Hatoum, those are the artists that I think interested me primarily because they were working with materials that were non art materials and, I think, Ree Morton actually came to school and was a visiting artist. That was a tragic moment where she got hit by a car and actually was killed at that point. But anyways, in terms of sculpture it was really more the women artists that were doing work in the 70s that spoke to me.

JT: I know this story that you are going to have to remind me, Diane, where you found out that you and Christina Ramberg had both been using the same book as a source for your work. Can you tell us about that?

DS: Sure, anyway, I got to know Christina around the time I joined the Kind gallery, but we were never really close friends. But when Ken and I were planning a trip to Japan, she came over and told us about her recent trip to Japan and gave us information on places to go that I would have never known about – places that weren't on the usual tourist map. In terms of Christina's paintings and drawings and how they resonate with me so strongly, I think in her paintings it's her forms that are so strong and how she chooses a particular section of the body. And how she would place it on the canvas, and also I think it's her colors. These muted colors and her finish is just so exquisite, so complete the way she paints. So I think it's just everything about her paintings that I love. And I love her drawings too. What was your question, was it about her or ? I don't remember…

JT: (laughs) Well Christina Ramberg is one of my favorite artists of all time, she’s just amazing. I think very loved by a lot of artists, and I remember throughout me loving you, I've always been so fascinated with how much you knew her and been just a bit of a fan girl in general of her work. And of course a huge fan of yours. And I feel like you've told me over time that you knew each other, you were friends, but you weren't super close. But there were these moments where you both were looking at the same source material.

DS: Ohh! About looking at the same material, yeah.

JT: So I just have this romantic idea of how you guys both were on this parallel trajectory in your careers.

DS: So, yeah, you know I'm so sorry that I didn't really have a chance to talk to her about so many of the things we were both looking at at the same time. For instance, I think what you are talking about, I had a catalog for a show of Christina’s drawings that Judith Kirshner curated a show in around 2000, and so in this catalog– The catalog was all of Christina's drawings but also it included notes on her thoughts and her lists of subjects that interested her and things like that. And then on one page she had written the title of a book, several page numbers from that book, and she was probably, I can picture her researching this book at Ryerson library at the Art Institute, and the book was from a ten volume set of color prints, they were published originally around the 1880s in Germany, and they were individual sheets of absolutely gorgeous illustrations of clothing and furniture and household items and architectural elements. Each volume would have a particular– would concentrate on a particular period ranging from the 12th through the 18th century. And so, as I was looking at these notes I realized that this particular book, these books, this whole ten volume set I actually own! I found it in a used book store many years ago and those images really have nourished me for years now – the visual sources in those books. And actually even the page numbers that she listed, they happen to coincide with some of my favorite images. So, it just blew my mind, I couldn't believe it. Also on that page there was a drawing of a Japanese headdress, and underneath she had written kon mori. Well this was a headdress, but I never really knew the name of it, but the form of the headdress is one of my absolute favorite, favorite forms. And so, you know, here she was looking at the same kind of forms. So it was some, we really were on the same wavelength.

JT: Yeah, it definitely seems like that. Even though I don’t, you know, looking at your work is obviously very different and how you took that source and how it inspired you is so different, but I'm very interested in how you guys had such parallel thought processes.

BC: Diane, we just kind of diverged after talking about your introduction to Phyllis and your first show in a commercial gallery, and I know you had a second show with Phyllis in her Chicago space in 1983 I believe – which was the Samurai sculptures – could you talk a little bit about your history after that show? Sort of bring us from 1983 up to more present day in the sense of, you know, what galleries did you work with? Your history with galleries in that period is something that's a little hazy for me personally, but how did you stop working with Phyllis is interesting and then who did you work with in between Phyllis and Corbett v Dempsey in 2010 ish?

DS: Okay, well, I didn't tell you about my show at Phyllis’s in her gallery, did I? 

JT: Please tell us, we want to hear.

DS: Well, okay so this was exciting, I was– I show my whole group of Samurai sculptures. This was the first work I had done in wood – in medite fiber board – so, you know, and having a show in Chicago then was exciting since all my friends were there. But during the opening, I noticed Phyllis wasn't anywhere around and I got a call from her – she was calling me from New York – to tell me that she could not be at the opening. And I almost died! I mean I was so dissapointed. I never– I went to a lot of her shows and she was always at the opening, you know? So that really, really disappointed me and I kind of, from that, was getting some hints that I wasn't on top of her list of favorite artists. So, what happened after that show, a couple years went by and I had been making a lot of work, and asked her if any other show was going to happen, and she suggested– Oh no I had a show at the State of Illinois building, the Thompson Center, and I had several pieces in this show and I dragged Phyllis over there to see it. Picked her up, took her there, and she at the time had said, “Okay, maybe I will give you a two person show.” And she mentioned who she was going to give me, possibly, the show with – and nothing happened. And I still to this day don't know why, because maybe the person that she had in mind didn't want a show with me or she just gave up the idea, but whatever nothing was happening and then I was feeling pretty, I guess confident about myself at the time, and so I left the gallery. From then on I joined a number of galleries, I sort of jinxed all of them because they all closed right after my show! I shouldn't tell you this, Jasmin. 

JT: I know, because the first time I did a studio visit with Diane and after, basically, Diane wrote me this email after I started the gallery, we’ll get into this later, but I flew to Chicago immediately to ask Diane to do a show and we had a studio visit and at the end of it you said, “Just so you know, whenever I do a show with somebody, the gallery closes. Are you ready to close?” Basically (laughs) and I was like, “Let's do it!” (laughs) That's a way to go down, do a Diane Simpson show and close – I think that's totally fine.

DS: (laughs) I'm surprised it didn't scare you off! I mean really….

JT: I was only a couple months in, what was I– I didn't have anything to lose, you know? (laughs)

DS: So anyway, I joined like three different galleries. One of them was a really good gallery - Dart gallery. But like I said, it closed after my show. And it was not anything to do with me, it was having to do with the gallerist at the time was not doing well physically, I think. But I never was in on any of these stories, so it kind of shocked me. But then at that point, I was preparing for a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. A thirty year retrospective. And so I had really done a lot of work at these different three galleries and nothing was selling, as so... But I had all the work you know. It was at that point in 2010 when I had, you know, the show was installed and at that point I decided to approach Jan Corbett and Jim Dempsey at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery and I took them actually, gave them a tour before the show started, before my retrospective started, and they also came and visited my studio at that point, and they invited me to join the gallery. So there was a happy ending to that kind of disappointing period. And then I joined JTT! And that’s, I have some questions about that actually. 

JT: (laughs) Well we have to set some records straight, I believe, because I spoke incorrectly about a year ago on Talk Art podcast, Russel Tovey and Robert Diament, and on this podcast they ask me how I came to know your work. And accurately I said that in 2010 or so, maybe nine, I was the director of Kimmerich gallery in Tribeca and Matthew Higgs was curating a show there and he shared– he just very casually dropped your catalog on my desk and I immediately became obsessed with your work and tried to get Dennis to show it. So that part was true, that's how I came to know your work. And then once I stopped working with Dennis and I opened up JTT, Diane sent me a very flirty email telling me that she wanted me to be reminded of her work. And I couldn't believe somebody that was as incredible as you ever would want to show at JTT. And that's when I went for a studio visit, I asked her to work with me. But I inaccurately explained how Matthew Higgs came to know your work. I said that B. Wurtz was curating a show at White Columns and that B. Wurtz came across your work in the White Columns registry – this is what I said on the podcast – and Diane Simpson was listening to this podcast from her home in Wilmette and is very upset with me (laughs).

DS: No, I wasn't! 

JT: (laughs) For inaccurately portraying it, so… Diane, time to set the record straight.

DS: Okay, great. You were almost right, you were part right. But I never was part of the registry at White Columns. So, what happened is that – the way I understand it – B. Wurtz sort of accidentally came across the image of one of my sculptures as he was researching Richard Rezac’s work, because Richard– I had asked Richard to write something about my work for a brochure for a show I was having, and evidently one of my sculptures popped up when B. Wurtz was looking at his website. And so that particular– Then he invited me into the show and used that particular piece. It was just a big pure coincidence in how he happened to come upon it, yeah. After that show, I would usually stop into White Columns to chat. So Matthew suggested when I brought him a catalog, a catalog that had been made for this Cultural Center retrospective show, and so Matthew suggested that I send a catalog to Kimmerich and to Andrew Kreps gallery. I actually had a really nice meeting with Andrew Kreps, they were really nice to me, he spent a long time talking but then nothing ever developed. And Jasmin, I'm trying to remember, it was a while before we connected I think? Right?

JT: I think maybe too. I think maybe a year, maybe two years. Because I took a year off, yeah, after having–

DS: I  remember you were in an art fair and I think I approached you there.

JT: No, I think you sent a– did you really come to me? I think you sent me an email…

DS: I was pretty gutsy!

JT: Yeah… I think you sent me an email, because I remember being very surprised and immediately buying a ticket to Chicago.

DS: Huh, okay.

JT: We will have to search our emails and find that out. But maybe you did approach me at the Chicago Expo – is that possible?

DS: Could be, yeah. I seem to picture it in my head, yeah.

JT: (laughs) Wow Diane, love it. You were into it.

DS: I just had a nerve those days (laughs).

JT: But it worked out.

BC: Diane, now that you have galleries in both New York and Chicago – and actually at this point, London, as well – and the beginning of your career was split between these two cities through Phyllis Kind. I wonder, do you experience a difference as an artist between having work or showing work in both of those cities? What's your experience of the relationship between New York and Chicago – if you have one?

DS: Well, you know, back in the day, before there was internet and art fairs, I think there was a really big difference in showing in Chicago or New York. You know, Chicago has some decent publications – like The New Art Examiner – and they had some good reviewers, but the reviews were probably never read by anybody except people that got the Chicago papers. So I think the exposure, you know, was limited. But I think it's changed now because of the internet and the art fairs. But, you know, there's really nothing quite like a good review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times, right? I think there's just much more exposure still in New York, having a show in New York, but I don’t think that Chicago artists are thought of so much as you know “local” Chicago artists any more. Many of them are known throughout the world and there's just a more equal playing field, so… 

BC: And that totally makes sense. I had a question for you that's maybe a little bit more getting back into your studio practice, and that is from knowing you and working with you over the years, I know that you don't use– you don't have any assistants who help make your work. And though it can take you a long time, you figure out how to do it and construct everything on your own. Is there a reason why you feel that's important to you? I know these days so many artists have things fabricated, you know drop some plans or work with a fabricator, have things made for them – or portions of things. I think it's very particular to you and your process that you don’t. I wonder if there's a reason why that's important and could you talk a little bit more about that aspect of your practice?

DS:  Well, I think it's because my process is such a trial and error kind of process, learning sort of on the job with each piece. And also I don’t think I’m organized enough to know when I could really use an assistant. There are certain periods where I would love– I'm doing some very repetitive boring work and I would love to have somebody help me, but I can’t always know when that would be. I guess I'm just not that good of a planner, so I couldn't predict in advance. You know, I have, at one point there was an artist from Columbia College in Chicago, who– this was way back, she was given honor to, a senior was chosen and that the honor was to work with another artist. And they would set it all up and I was sent in to work with this particular student and she came and actually all we did was talk. And we never– I never really did any work with her while she was there. So, you know it's– I think I'd be kind of self conscious with somebody near me as I'm trying to, in a very clumsy way, figure something out. I mean here I am, I'm supposed to know what I'm doing, but I don't. You know? I just like working on my own. And it probably has some drawbacks but… And I couldn't possibly think of fabricating something because I like the feeling in my work of the hand being there and using materials that are associated with the hand, like putting crayon over a wood piece or drawing on the piece. And so I think it's just not my style of working to fabricate something. At all. It would not work.

JT: So what are you working on right now, Diane?

DS: Ohhh Ohhhh, well there was a piece that was– a show I was just in and a piece was damaged there and the collector preferred to have the piece remade rather than, you know, collect insurance on it. Which I'm glad about because it happened to be one of my favorite pieces. I said, “fine I'm going to make it over.” So for the last six weeks I've been working on that. And actually today is kind of a celebration because I’m ready to actually put it together. All the components–

JT: That's exciting!

DS: Yeah, so that's what I’ve been working on. It’s not, I mean it’s been nerve wracking because I’ve been working with this very high gloss paint that is impossible to put on without mistakes and I don't know how I did it so perfectly the first time, but this time it took me forever. I was getting dust in the paint and I kept buying new cans of paint and– I won't go into it but anyway, it finally looks good. As soon as we get through talking, I'm going to run out to my studio in the garage and actually put it together for the first time in a long time! So that’s what I’m working on. And I also have been working on new pieces, and they are a combination of wall pieces and freestanding. And they are much more architectural in nature and in terms of my sources, than having to do with clothing so much as I had been concentrating on for so long. These are things that– I always work from photographs, my inspiration comes from usually photographs that I’ve taken. These are photographs that I've taken in various times and trips and whatever – of, primarily, window treatments on buildings – have interested me, the type of window, and... Anyways… so the work is really removed and has moved away from clothing source material so much.

JT: Right, and I think you are also working on new sculptures for a show that you might be having at JTT in the fall of 2021? That was a bit of a baiting question (laughs).

DS: Yes, yes, yes (laughs) so I have motivation!

JT: You’re supposed to say, “I’m working on my next solo show at JTT art gallery.”

DS: I have motivation ! (laughs) Yeah… 

JT: So Diane, do you ever lose sleep thinking about art? 

DS: Oh my god, all the time. I really do. I, you know, on how I'm gonna make this piece work, how it's going to hold together, I mean I do sometimes I lose sleep thinking about it or I have dreams about it all the time. I don't know, is that unusual?

BC: Not at all–

DS: For an artist to get so hung up?

JT: No, I don't think so.

DS: Yeah.

JT: Diane, do you have any advice for any artists that are starting their career out?

DS: Oh wow, that's really a difficult one. It really depends so much on each person's situation – especially how financially secure they are because I know how difficult it is to have an art practice and support oneself in their art when they are just starting out. I think I would just say to have really strong convictions in the art that they are making, and listen to themself.  Just to know what's important to them in terms of what they want to express, not what is going on around them that might be in vogue, but just what is really important to them. And just, you know, marry a doctor (laughs).

JT: Good advice, that's very good advice. Ben, do you have any last questions for Diane?

BC: No, I don’t at all. I mean if I, I really enjoyed this conversation, and though I knew a lot about your work and history, Diane, I feel like I learned a lot hearing from you today. So, thank you. 

DS: Thank you!

JT: Thank you, Diane. Thank you, David!

DS: David is with his mask on (laughs).

JT: And thank you Ken for all of your support.

DS: He’s sitting with his mask on on the other side of the room (laughs).

JT: And thank you so much, Diane. 

DS: Ohh thank you Jasmin and Ben – good friends and wonderful, wonderful people. I'm so glad to know you. 

JT: We are glad to know you too.

BC: Likewise. 

JT: Alright guys, I think it's a wrap. 

BS: Sweet. 

JT: How do we feel about it?

DS: (nervous vocalizing) I don't know!

All: (laughs)

My name is Jasmin Tsou and you’re listening to JTT. Today’s interview is with Anna-Sophie Berger. Anna was born in 1989 in Vienna, Austria. She has lived in Paris, London, Tokyo, Munich, New York, and Vienna – where she grew up and where she currently lives and works. Living in those countries has allowed her the opportunity to study multiple languages. She can speak German, French, and English fluently; Italian and Serbian conversationally; and while she claims she can’t speak Japanese, I witnessed from afar her studying the language everyday while she lived in Tokyo for a few months. I bring this up not so much to compliment Anna – while as her adoring art dealer it's hard for me not to do – but more to point to the volume of time of Anna’s daily life that has been, and continues to be, consumed with learning languages. Everyday she is engrossed in a dictionary, constantly getting to the bottom of the meaning of a word or searching for the best word to describe a feeling or expression. She is very careful when translating her titles – which sometimes feature idioms that need to be culturally translated, as much as linguistically. This approach to language expands into objects very fluidly for Anna – who makes photography, installation, video, performance, sculpture... She thinks about materials as if they’re words, which is to say that materials are something one can shuffle through until you find the most appropriate one for the intention of an artwork. Anna is also keenly aware of the various apparatuses in place around objects. She is concerned with the object's production, its distribution, and how the object is ultimately consumed. Her work deals with how nationality, class, and the public or the private realms of government denote the significance of an object. Today’s interview is a little longer than our other podcasts, as Anna walks us through a major solo show at the Kunstverein in Bonn. For images of the show, please visit JTTNYC.com. 

And one technical note – I recorded this interview in a somewhat experimental fashion because I'm an art dealer and not a sound technician. Without getting into details as to how this occurred, sometimes when you hear me it sounds like I’m on the phone, and sometimes it sounds like Anna’s on the phone – because we are on the phone with each other. We edited it in a way that we hope isn’t too distracting. Okay, thanks for listening. 

JT: Anna-Sophie, we are here today to talk about your Bonner Kunstverein show that opened up on September 4th, and it was curated by Susanne Mierzwiak. I am so upset that I wasn’t able to see this show in person! You very generously have walked us through the show a bit digitally, but I feel like it's one of the most important shows you’ve done yet – by far – and I thought, before we get into that show, I wanted to introduce our listeners to your practice a bit. So while I represent you – and have for a couple of years now – I have to say that defining your practice has always been something that is mutable and changing, and I think a part of that is because when you come upon one of your works, it's not always easy to say, “This is an Anna-Sophie Berger artwork” because you use so many different types of materials. And I think that's actually something that crystallizes a bit in the Bonner show. I thought maybe you could just start by talking a little bit about the work that you were making when we first met – which was right when you had just finished your degree at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. You got your MFA in fashion, and early on I really understood your work through this lens of fashion, but it was very clear within the course of the first year of us working together that it was not just fashion that you were interested in. So I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about what your work was like in those early years?

ASB: I think when we met – we met in and around my final thesis project – a year before, and then a year later when we did the show which was sort of the gallery adaptation of that work, which was a fashion collection so there were many outfits devised, designed, drawn, and constructed by myself. And then in parts, also produced by myself. I had some help but it was very much a huge project which was, critically, not thought of or produced for a gallery context. And in this sense, I don’t think it's like you met me and underestimated or overestimated my relationship to fashion, it's really more that I was at a threshold of learning, understanding, what my fashion education vis-a-vis my own subjective relationship to fine arts was. So at the point where I showed the work at JTT, I think many complications were already present – but maybe submerged – so it enabled us to do a show which was critically very well received and I was happy, but then I would say now that at least the next three years I spent thinking about, to spell it out, “what does it mean that i have fashion objects – which I thought about conceptually from this perspective of presenting them on bodies or through the auxiliary structure of photography during a fashion show or on a mannequin – and now I am invited or entering a space which is largely a white cube?” And how to negotiate these two conflicts. That was totally not resolved when I did that work. It was also curious for me to get this reception of the work, and then at that point I wasn't– I think it's fair to say that I was familiar with more classical notions of philosophy as I learnt, or studied them, in additional classes to my fashion education, but I was not attuned to critical fine art discourse. By which I mean what artists discuss in terms of what school is dominant or what is being done in museums and galleries.

JT: I was just going to say that I love the idea of JTT being a white cube gallery in 2014, which was really quite a small space (laughs).

ASB: But, yeah, I mean maybe for you it didn't feel that way because it was a very young gallery showing young artists, but I am aware that people would finish their fine art degree while I finished a fashion degree to enter with a different discourse. That's not even a qualitative statement as it is that you need that [fine art degree] to know, it is very much learning a new language. So what I would say now in 2020 is that I could use a critical work of fashion or of “fashion art” – if you were to use that word – but that in the way it looked, and being presented as fine art, had posed curious problems to me. Like for example the modernism of the forms, primary colors, and the extreme reduction to basic stylistic elements, all of which lead certain people to be invested in it, and I wouldn't even know what that meant because suddenly I was dealing with a fine art discourse where arguably other things are pushing in. So that was, this is basically where we meet, in this conundrum of understanding what I want to do and it could have easily led to something else, you know? Like abandoning the white cube immediately again and gravitating back to making garments and selling them or giving them away for free or what have you…  

JT: Just to give our listeners a little bit of background, JTT started in 2012 and we actually met in 2013. Were you conscious of what it was like to be bringing a practice that was developed in Europe to America? And so we met in 2013, your first solo show was 2014 so it was still really early on in the development of JTT as well and what we cared about.

ASB: I think at the time– well definitely not at my first show. I mean that's pretty much like, in retrospect, I had planned to do a show in New York City without– like if someone invited me to do a show now, let's say, in a foreign place, this would catapult me in a much bigger dilemma than back then. I just pretty much took what I had and showed it. And I wasn't really aware of anything in particular. But as I stayed longer in New York and developed friendships, I did notice a big difference between pretty much everything from education to sociocultural background, which first you think is not a big thing because it's pretty much the West and we watch the same movies – which is by the way also not true, pop cultural references were totally lost on me. I remember dinners where I felt very un-knowledgeable. Not in a– I understood that I couldn't have known these things, but there was definitely something I understood it was just not where I grew up and I have to adapt, not in the sense of giving up where I come from, but in order to have certain conversations about humor or, yeah, to relate. That's one thing. And the other thing is that, as I just mentioned, when I met you and when we started to work together and I started to actually have conversations with artists about art, that all happened in New York rather than happening in Vienna – where I was in art school and had certain conversations, but was still performing a fashion practice. In a fashion course, it doesn't matter if I thought I was doing art at the time – who knows what art is? – but we all know that there’s a language that is attached to our discourse, which means where do we show that art. And to ignore that would be nonsensical. So I started doing that in New York rather than in Vienna, learned there from all the incredibly well trained - that sounds bad - but people who are extremely well read and eager to learn, which is how I perceived New Yorkers in the beginning. It's only later where you grow more cynical and you go, “well that's because they have to survive in capitalism.” But first of all it was just challenging and beautiful and I learned there and then eventually returned to Vienna, not physically because I lived there, but then critically evaluating fine art in Vienna or Austria or in Europe.

JT: I want to move forward to 2018 – one of my favorite pieces where you had a show at S.M.A.K. as a part of the ARS VIVA prize and in that show you included a piece of documentation related to your parents’ business. Would you be able to explain that document to our listeners?

ASB: In effect, it’s two works. Unlike what they look like, they are actually not readymades. So, what we see are two vintage pieces of paper – we can only tell that from the typography being somewhat dated. Both of them have letterheads referring to a company with an address, called Berla, which happens to be – and I disclose this in the description and in the press text – the company, or I should say factory, run by my family throughout three generations. The production site factory for plastic and metal goods, namely accessories and fashion jewelry. This sort of heritage or the relics, the few relics, I have of that time – which is not like far back I mean until I was I think 15, this factory existed. It existed as a location that I went to after school to have lunch, to see my mom, and to eventually rummage through the archive of. And so, grew up with. This place of production from zero to product, which is interesting because that's rare now, except if your dad happens to be a carpenter and you really still grow up with a notion of making a thing from scratch. So that definitely lingers in my memory and I chose to show these two pieces of paper because when I found them – Ii think my grandmother had left them after the factory had long closed – I was myself surprised about this even older story which I did not grow up with, because I think those sheets, which are in effect order sheets where you have lines in which you can write down the number of items and item number of what you want to order, spoke of a time when I was not born of the same company existing. And things had changed, the address had changed, the telephone number that is listed on it has three digits which is not in existence anymore. So in a way, it had a curious passing of time inscribed while still being a nostalgic or personal object to me.

JT: There are three components to that piece that I feel like come up a lot in your work. There's a sort of poetics of daily banal life, there's this personal biographical story, and then there's also this unraveling of the systems that our world lives in. And that piece encapsulated all three of those aspects. I can see that now, sort of looking back two years later, but at the time I remember just thinking in a much more simplistic way that that work was about distribution.i I think at that time that was how I was understanding your practice – which is the way that images are distributed throughout the world and internet, how clothing is distributed, how ideas are distributed and translated… So, did you think a lot about distribution at that time?

ASB: With that show, I did in an almost formalist sense. I can't make this really really short but there was a, let's say, sister exhibition to this one where I had shown a piece which was essentially composed of two football goals, iron football goals, shackled together. And the basic idea aside from everything else that it can refer to and that I'm interested in, it was about frustration of potential or sort of like the destruction of an open field. In a very basic sense, if you take a squared field and you put two goals, with that very simple intervention you both create that field for play, which is delineated, but you also create this potential for play which is all the space inbetween. And then sort of shackling them together is this, in a very formal basic sense, compressing space or destroying that potential. And coming from that work – which I for reasons specific to that work, returned after being used in the exhibition space to function again as football goals – coming from there and preparing for the show, I devised this much more let's say interior design piece. Or, it's not an interior design piece but I devised a piece consisting of four sofas that are shaped like corners. Could it be more banal? I mean those sofas exist. Again I was interested in what it meant to place them far apart or close together, eventually in this iteration of the work, more commenting on the aesthetic of the delineation of space. 

JT: With those particular pieces, I also feel there's like a sense of power play going on with it where you – even if it's just in a teasing kind of way – where you are sort of asserting yourself on this space, however small or large it is. 

ASB: Right.

JT: Do you ever feel that way with these pieces?

ASB: I mean I think that's really everything you do in a white space – for me. I mean not what you do, what I do is sort of–

JT: Dominatrix? You are dominatrix-ing the space (laughs).

ASB: Maybe it's like grappling for agency? To use something that is less magnanimous. You know, trying to define yourself vis-a-vis the circumstances – be they invisible, institutional, hierarchical or just very basically, “this is a shit ass space, how do I come to terms with that?” Or this is a weird country, strange city, etcetera… So I think that's true for everything I do, or where I start. But thinking about distribution, that's I think why you’re not wrong and why me thinking about those sheets delineating – or those sheets used for ordering goods in a factory that is now not in existence because its product is outdated and industry in Western Europe in a certain moment in the 2000s – that is definitely about distribution. Where can something be placed, how is it going to be received, where does it need to go? And more metaphorically, I think that's what my making art is about for sure. Like, “what should be where?” and this maybe is also part of an answer to why people perceive my work – and that's also true I mean I make it like that – but why people would say, “oh I saw your last show, there and there, I didn't even recognize it as your work.” Or I think it was Olga who once said to me, “every time I see your work it's like completely different stuff” (laughs). She said it without a value judgment. I can't tell if that's good or bad but I thought it was adequate because I don't think that a lot of things can go many places at the same time without thinking about that shift of distribution. 

JT: Well, I think what's so interesting about the show in Bonn is it's probably the first show that one could walk into and say “ah, this is an Anna-Sophie Berger show.”

ASB: Yeah.. well I don't know, maybe...

JT: I think so. But before we move on to that show, I want to talk about one last series that is titled, The Choicest Relic. And this is maybe an interesting counter to something like the, what I call “soccer” goals and the couch pieces, because they are very delicate. They are large pieces of white paper that have a coat that has been soaked in water thrown on top of the pieces of paper and then dried. So what is left is a paper that has the remnants of the water drying. And it's wrinkled in areas and crumpled in areas and flat in other areas. Can you tell us about the title of those pieces and why you chose to title them that?

ASB: This is actually a riddle. So, the story is that I remember finding the title “choicest relic” as a word – and this is why I think I remember, but memory is tricky – I remember having to google “choicest” or choice as the adjectiveal use. So not choice as in the noun, I choose, but choice as in the best solution of a choice, the choice piece of meat. I remember googling that after reading it in a Beckett text. At the time I was reading quite a bit – and was also working previously, like at that time on a show that we did at JTT, a group show, which also had reference to this text by Beckett called First Love – and was absolutely sure I took it from there. So the meaning to me was in a Beckettian sense, something akin to one dead body of a long gone civilization humorlessly being placed – like not ethical but, “is one bone I find from the old Roman empire better than another?” and how would I justify that. So it’s a little hard to understand but it’s very, to me, it was very Beckett. Very, very Beckett. Like this relic, and how do you say one relic is better than another? Is it older? Is it nicer? Does it taste better? And I really like that. And I chose it for the title of this piece that you described. But it turns out recently the piece was shown in a show that a collector here in Vienna organized. She owns the piece, or one of the series, and she had a writer write blurbs about the work. And this writer did not consult me, it's not her fault, I mean she had all the info she needed. She tied “choicest relic” to Thoreau and the Walden text, which I have read and I was like, “how dare she?” or “why didn't she do her research?” But sure enough, it is a concept he explicitly uses. That sentence, “choisest relic,” in that connection and he uses it to describe language as opposed to objects, or the material world, as the best of relics. I could go on and on but… So that I also like because in a way it's a watermark of something that is gone. So it's basically nothing, it's paper. If we didn't know about the process, it really is water that has evaporated and that is of course related to indexicality. Like the trace that something leaves that has once touched – which is interesting to pair with language. But so, I don't know anymore. Today I started to look through texts and look through my notes and try to find that concrete link to the Beckett text, and I can't find it! I really don't think I was thinking of Thoreau at the moment but it is, it's a riddle.

JT: It's funny –

ASB: Like when you type it into google, “Beckett choicest relic,” the only thing that pops up is Anna-Sophie Berger (laughs).

JT: (laughs) You know what's so funny, Anna, when you started this by saying this was a riddle I really thought you were going to say it was a riddle between you, the artist, and the viewer, but it's really just a riddle between you and yourself (laughs).

ASB: No its true, very solipsistic, just me wondering by myself if I made a critical error or I mean, I don't know (laughs).

JT: Alright, so let's get into your show at Bonn. There's a really powerful installation that I feel like the show centers around – I’m not sure if you feel like the show has a center – but this installation called Taking Stock, it's not the first piece you see, it's actually a piece you get into once you've gone through two different installations. But I really would love to hear your description of that installation, which comprises of 32 objects I believe?

ASB: I think so... roughly… I actually don't know. Not a good stock taker (laughs). I don't know which work predates which other work in the show. Ultimately, I never really, it doesn't really influence my choices. It comes together like in circles. But this was definitely one that I started to think about early on in the process. I think the idea I had had for a while. It’s not completely foreign to me to think about lists of words or lists of words in English as correspondences to my speaking German and having English as a second language. But also, the more I understand about my own practice, I would say it's based in language – which is an interesting pairing that maybe many sculptures deal with and others would totally refuse because they would say that they work with the object materially. But I very often find myself noting down a sentence like ‘choicest relic’ or thinking about the gesture and having a language or symbolic understanding of that word and having no idea what the sculpture could be – or whatever, it could be a wall work. And then only later do I find a way to make a gesture, quote un quote. So for this piece, though, I wanted it to be very stupid or like almost dull. Creating a stupid system which I could fill up with sculptural investigations without falling pray to a taxonomic approach, which would be sort of like when the system is what we perceive first of the work. I would say taxonomic would be to say, “here are 30 objects all used by women in Western Germany” and even if they would look heterogeneous to you, you would perceive the structure, as soon as you know it, as the dominant because you understand how they are aligned and how they relate to one another. And I wanted to do that, a similar thing, I wanted to create a structure but then not to fulfill it. So how did I do that? I don't know if that fails but I wanted it to be an assembly of individually constructed sculptures that follow certain sculptural logic, as in one is, I don't know, a burned piece of wood, a chair, and one is a totally dented car door made from metal and lacquer. But I didn't want all of these means of production to be similar. I didn't want to only have readymades. I didn't want to make them all from scratch as original sculptures. I wanted them to preserve a sort of complexity where you are not quite sure if it's found, if it's constructed, and then to arrange them in ways that additionally complicate that relationship. So not, you know, put each of them on a pedestal so that you can again, taxonomically, perceive it, but more like one of the pieces is a thread which is bound around the wood piece, so two pieces enter a relationship even if it's a precarious relationship.

JT: So just to take a step back, can you explain the relationship between this work and language?

ASB: I drew up a list of verbs or participle perfect like burnt or burn, it doesn't really matter, and the only limit to that list was that the words should denote transformative or violent processes. So as to burn, to chop, to break, to mold, to wither, ultimately to change, to disappear – although change was not specific enough to yield any sculptural output. And then from that list I researched and narrowed it down to words that would yield interesting sculptures which then were completely freely devised. I mean maybe there would come up the idea that wood would be nice to burn. I would take a minute to define that it should be a rocking chair that my grandmother owned, which is in a way more violent than just putting a burned log of wood on the floor. Which could have happened as well, I just wanted it to be in both parts pathetic and mundane I guess. So from there I started to set to work and had a year of time, which allowed for a lot of freedom to just go through life and find something but also decide to make something – as, for example, with the plaster cast of Benjamin’s face, which is entirely an original sculpture not at all a ready made. And through the process I started to think of them installationally, like leaning the car door against the sofa, placing the basket next to the table… But that is almost then scenographic – that happened through the course of making the work.

JT: So, beside this installation is a video piece called Duel, which is also the name of the show. I watched this video close to after you finished it, and it was– I loved it, it was very powerful. The video is about 50 minutes and it includes footage that you've taken with a camera of your life, a video camera, and music sort of layered on in a way that feels to me a bit like you are using it as a soundtrack. I flow in and out of nostalgia for the footage that you recorded and also some voice overs that you give telling stories or narratives of different moments in culture that kind of parallel, or have metaphorical relationship with, the footage we are looking at. So I watched this video for the first time right after you made it, and I found it so powerful to hear your own voice in relation to the materials or the imagery that you were working with – partially because I just find you so eloquent in the way that you tie language in with the imagery. I watched it again in the middle fo covid and I just started crying watching this video because it was like suddenly there was this time warp and we were back in Forlini’s and having drinks with all of your friends. I think it was a going away party? Was it your going away party after leaving New York?

ASB: Or birthday?

JT: Oh, birthday!

ASb: Going away! No, no it was going away, you're right. Basically that was already 2020, like January 2020.

JT: Because how long – you lived in New York for a period of time, how long was that?

ASB: Well on and off. Since I received the lease, six years. But I really stayed for let's say maybe two years – until the onset of covid. Two years I stayed there without having a home. 

JT: Yeah, so watching that video it was like I was remembering you being in New York and I was remembering– or just seeing artists that are your friends like Lena Henke and your friend Teak, and it was another kind of interesting moment where I was realizing I was having a sentimental moment, but I was also having a sentimental moment about really banal life experience of just going to Forlini’s and having drinks. And I felt looking at this video in the middle of covid like I was seeing exactly all the things that you are interested in – which are the values of sort of everyday life. Looking at that video now, how do you feel like it relates to your larger practice?

ASB: It's so hard to talk about it… Not that I don't know what to say about it, but more like the technique of editing footage of collecting footage then rearranging it and devising a second layer – which is in this case lets say I have video footage and then I decide to add textual meaning recorded by myself, which is not related to the footage necessarily… Just to give you an example, let's say I had footage of New York City that meant something to me but really is just  a street crossing on Essex street and Delancey, and then to add to this in my recorded voice a bit I had written about a Nestroy play – which is an Austrian playwright. This sort of process which does not happen– or to me, I hadn't planned that. It's not like I'm a director who can sit down and say, “I’m going to record New York City street views and my friends to then layer it with text.” So that whole process was wild and large parts of the time I didn't know where I was going, I mean you can't just make a movie about street scenes in New York and then put other people's music on top. I mean you could, it's still going to have an impression but… So that whole process of coming to terms with what should be brought together and additionally enter the film was wild and I didn’t see the end of it until I really started – and that was great. In this sense, it fulfills a role that my sculpture cannot fill. It fulfills a sort of– it serves as a repository for a clusterfuck of everything I find interesting without having to justify why that has to be in a piece, you know, like going to a theater, thinking about Mozart and then filming the street lights. And then it’s a cross pollination – like you find yourself recording sirens and red lights and then you start to think about red lights in the city. So that's also nice because it's almost investigative, like you do it and then you can start to ask questions. So that's great. Other things, as this specific nostalgia and patheticness of certain scenes, I had to– I always love them like the scene where I use that Oneohtrix Point Never track, which I use because of the film, Good Times, by the Safdie brothers, which is beautiful but it was pathetic. It has been used before by Arthur Jafa, but definitely dominates the sentiment as you watch that scene of young people in a bar, which has since closed for good, with the red light illuminating their faces. And I still don't know how that functions. You can’t decode it. I wonder how it is for someone in Berlin coming to Bonn thinking about that sort of nostalgia or what that moment means. And it has already aged in a sense because we are experiencing covid so these moments are now not in existence and lord knows when we will all be together. But I don't know how– yeah, these are things that I have not yet completely figured out. Would I do that again? Or would I use different music? 

JT: What was powerful about it was that when you are experiencing daily life, if you make art about daily life the objects or banality sort of sustain themselves. But when daily life changes so dramatically, looking back on something that was once banal becomes so incredibly powerful because it's a bit like looking into a self that you no longer are – and I guess that's kinda what nostalgia is. But yeah, I had this moment where I realized, I might never be drinking with Dena Yago in Forlini’s ever again. And something about that made me cry (laughs).

ASB: You will definitely not do it because the bar is gone.

JT: Yeah…

ASB: But it's interesting cause in a way, obviously we didn’t deal with the problematics of the world having changed while we were preparing a show too much. I brushed it aside, and I think I’m glad I did, but of course I think we had to ask the question, “what’s gonna change?” We were supposed to open in May – we couldn't open. We were opening after the summer, which is roughly half a year into the pandemic or more, and of course I was thinking like, “what will that do to the video?” etcetera… But two things I think are true for New York especially and for the world: one is that covid fleshed out– like I think I disagree with people who describe it as a condition that brings out new things about us or the world, I don't think so. I think it brings us in touch with very intimate fears, most of all those of us who are most fragile. And it sort of exacerbates everything that's going wrong in societies. So that's like crudely speaking what I perceive. So in a sense, what was already precarious or critical in that video now is exacerbated to a dimension that it cannot even speak of. Like it can't even speak of all the people who are suffering, dying, losing their work, their job, their homes. So this is one thing, and the other thing is New York, where I was just reading, I dont know if you ever read Samuel Delaney’s Time Square Red Time Square Blue where he’s doing such a good job not to fall into nostalgia while he talks about the changing structure of the sex cinemas of Time Square. And it is true that with New York, almost everything that you record, in time – that is specific – is almost immediately already gone in a weird sense. Like we don't know the same thing for vienna. Vienna has this curious narcotic effect when people return they go like, “oh thank god its still there.” Like nothing ever changes, and maybe I'm jinxing it now. But New York has this where you watch films that are five years old, ten years old, you add to it pre and post 9/11 and how people relate to this. There is this very powerful dominance of change in time I think.

JT: There's actually something else about that video in particular that I found very American. I’m not sure if you agree with me on this, but in the beginning of the video there are 30 or more examples of sirens going through the city. You have police cars, ambulances, fire trucks – but you don't only record the actual sirens, you record the way the light refracts against the walls, the buildings, and sometimes even the interiors of restaurants. It’s really beautiful. I’m actually going to play the voice over of that part of the video for our listeners:

The semantics of emergency. The pious cross themselves to protect the victim and cast off the evil eye of the vicious fate. The symbol of organized religion syncretization of the inchoate but true fears of folklore. Sirens, they are called. Dangerous creatures half bird half woman who lure nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rock coast of the island. Refracting from walls, illuminating faces, the pervasiveness of law enforces pierces through every fiber of civic life.

Was there something about living in New York that made you feel more aware of law enforcement than other cities you’ve lived in?

ASB: Yeah for sure, although to exaggerate my– like I was definitely not, how to phrase this, I was definitely visually aware of this sort of what I call “piercing through civic fiber.” And I found that already living there, almost perverse in its beauty. I step out of the door and the whole straightness of the street, because it's a grid, right, is penetrated by a light on the other side or like two blocks away from an ambulance car. I mean it could be all three of them, which slightly changes the reading, right? Because one of them is trying to save lives and another one is arguably arresting, and thereby maybe destroying, a life – depending on how you want to view it. And that's definitely a different thing as compared to Vienna. What I was grappling with, or what I was trying to say is that– it's not like I was in contact with law enforcement because I'm a white body living in Manhattan and that's just also something to say. It's not like I felt pressured by law enforcement because I'm not – that's the structure of this, of police presence in the areas that I walk in and my socio-economic setting. So I couldn't claim that. Coming back to Vienna, I wondered if that is because im more alerted to it or because I follow the discourse or because I'm more critical or radicalized in my criticism, I do think since we've returned we've noticed – and I mean there's real number to back that up because we had a very conservative and right wing coalition government which was only turned over a year ago if I'm right – that government really stocked up on police presence. And that has not changed even though the city is technically run– Vienna is run by socialist mayor. A social democrat, not socialist. Police are everywhere. We don't hear about police brutality as we do in the U.S. and I think it's safe to say it's very different, but I am very acutely aware of there being too much police, of it being pervasive, of me being on the street and within the course of ten minutes seeing three cop cars that are there to signal the presence of the police. And that bothers me massively. So there's, I think, it wouldn't be conducive to the conversation to say it is as in the U.S. – because it's not – but I feel very upset about it being so dominant here too. 

JT: I'm going to switch gears briefly and ask you a very broad question: do you identify as a structuralist?

ASB: (laughs) well….. I’m going to pull up my notes! I mean this is a very large question depending on how you want to start. I would say I am not. Mostly because as an artist I don't have a standing manifesto and I don't have specific rules for my points of interest. So to mirror a concept that derives from a specific science in the humanities, namely philosophy, and then bordering on other system theory and otherwise, I wouldn't feel good about it and I wouldn't feel that I was adequate because the translation is always poor. So even if my whole subject matter was to make art about philosophy, I think it wouldn't– I couldn't make art that is about structuralist philosophy. But hey, that's also my personal thing. The other thing is that to think about structuralism, like we were talking before – to be concise about it – I also from time to time have to look up these things in order to not just reference empty shells, but there’s aspects about structuralist thought that I agree with or that resonate with me. For example, the very basic thing to postpone meaning in a single thing or fact, which is related to the fact that structuralism does not regard the single parts as important but looks at the whole or the structure in every given situation. And if we popularize this or if we perceive this as something that has shaped a thought – obviously not just of philosophy but of course shapes art theory, shapes culture – that is something I, of course, agree with. I am not interested in a stable, essential, erratic object which then you see and you are hit by that specialness and you immediately understand it and then you are activated and changed. No, I don't believe that just as much as I don't believe in that in society at large. I think, yes, we have certain objects in the world, certain thoughts in the world, we ourselves as subjects we move in the world and the way we are understood, and the way that our actions are understood, adn the way our sentences are read, are contingent on the systems that we are intertwined in. These could be basic systems of kinship like, “you like me and I like you,” “you know me and I know you.” Or it could be systems of power like, “I fear you and you fear me.” So in that sense, yes, I like that and I can relate to that. With my own practice, if someone were to call it structuralist just simply to describe that I make an object which has many meanings, which draws from many places, and can be read in many ways, I would still then maybe say that is not all I care for because as I come from fashion and I work myself around the theory of objects or the material theory of objects, I am also drawn to the– I mean there's a very complicated word to describe something simple which is called praxeology. And this basically describes the handling of objects, and this could happen non semantic. It's very hard to talk about it because the minute I describe to you that I handle a chair and I am violent, we are already dealing with language. But there is, let's say, such a thing as the residue of something non semantic that attaches to objects which I'm drawn to. It's not an esoteric thing, it's just that I think it's more powerful than we know. And I think it also influences our relationship to objects more than we know.

JT: Maybe a good example of that is in Taking Stock, where you have these objects – these 32 sum objects – and each of them represents a word, and that word is violence or destruction, but you don't make that list available to the people who are coming to see the show. And it's because you have a trust that there is an experience that the viewer is going to have with those objects, even if semantics plays in without semantics mediating the experience. 

ASB: Right. And the hope or the goal would be to create to a certain degree, an openness that allows for a reading that is both maybe brutal but also creates a new point of entry. Because we all know – I mean this is again thinking about what Delaney talks about when he talks about society and place – where people can meet and how important it is to have spaces that are permeated by delinquency or shadyness or perversity or desire or sex. There is no such thing as just “wrong” or “right” or broken or functional. At least I don't really believe in this. So, I’m not proposing this is the start of a new world of broken objects, but I am also very much trying to not propose this is the result of us being destructive and now that's sad and then I wag my moral finger and hope that we reconstruct. That would be a very conservative reading of that piece that I try, would have tried, I mean that would not be my reading of it. Or my attempt. 

JT: When you enter the Bonn show, the first piece that you see is a piece called Tower 1 and there's a second piece also called Tower 2 in the second room. Would you mind describing those works for us?

ASB: So… Tower 1 and Tower 2 both constructed similarly, or the same way, from units of plywood boxes – shapes covered prior to being assembled with various fabrics. And I’ve used that way of constructing, of building, before and it draws from do-it-yourself logic of city vendors. Not as stated in the Frieze article just from Asian vendors – that I think was a critical mistake in that piece. Yes, when you walk in New York City and you walk by a flower shop you can find those preliminary or like quickly put together structures that are used by vendors to permeate public space to create a structure that is both cheap, serves its utility, and that is perhaps also not so pristine that people would steal it . And drawing from that, I devised this idea of using those cardboard cubes and then I covered them in fabric. The fabric usually for me has specific sociological connotations which I use in reference to which work I'm making. So while before I had used only polar fleece, which is a fabric which induces sort of a feeling of childishness or naivete – it's kind of soft looking and slightly hairy and in a way you could say it dumbs the look of wood. If you have a wooden cube, the primary association is hardness. If you cover it, it looks more like a toy, it looks softer, or it reminds you of a cat scratching pole. And I used that before and for Bonn I started to mix in with the polar fleece tweed fabrics. Which again, in the most basic of chains of association, I would say is a fabric for suits. We could add maybe a suit for a man but it could also be a suit for a woman. It is definitely an area of a field of professional people who wear the fabric both because they can afford it but also because they should afford it to signal a certain earnestness in their profession. I don't know, a lawyer, an advocate, a doctor perhap – not in the hospital. So these fabrics you could say are very different. One signals to the life of adults who earn money. One is maybe slightly infantilized. And when I say this to you, it is not because I have a clear ambition of what the outcome of that pairing should be. I think that's impossible and I'm not interested in it. I can’t tell you if the tower should speak to us about the adults dominating the children or the children taking over the adults. Or you know, like politics going down the drain or discursivity being lost. I don't know that. But I use them to create a sort of tension, pretty much. And then in the final object, which as the name refers to is a tower – and it’s a pair of two towers who look colorful and strange – I wanted to have this sort of envisioned scene of maybe the duel which gives the title to the show. So, one of the two towers is built exactly like a tetris structure. Like very even and very controlled and it reaches almost 5 meters in height and looks like a high step. You could walk on it and end up on the tip. And the other one is more disorderly or  it's hard to say if it's in the process of becoming as stable and as ordered as the other one or if it's just refused to be as stable as the other one. So it's sort of semi-constructed and less upreaching than a sort of wall or brick wall. And both of them are on wheels which alludes a little bit, again, to the idea of movement from A to B, but in this case maybe also the movement to reach each other or to reach to the wall of that very big and very tall exhibition space. And that's it essentially. They differ in the way they are assembled, the basic units are the same. 

JT: And just the last thing I wanted you to talk about is the cut out piece which is a diamond shaped hole in the wall that points a lot to kind of the shape and size of the diamond cuts put into borders around construction sites, especially in New York. And inside are two red light bulbs titled, Hirn (Brain). Can you talk a little bit about those works?

ASB: Well the construction site diamonds, I've been obsessed with for a long time. But with a lot of these sort of works around phenomena of the real world that are also neutral but that are not neutral– but let's say we view them critically. Let's say we view building in the city of New York critically because we usually have reason to distrust it serving the city. Of course they have a specific meaning, and I was unsure for quite a while of how I would want to use them or if I would want to use them at all for risk of making a facile statement about real estate or making a pretty work about something that is not pretty. And ultimately for Bonn, I solved it by deciding I was not going to replicate it entirely – because the diamonds at the construction sites are usually closed off by additional plexi glass in the same shape. I did not do that for the show in Bonn because I thought it's less valuable to me that it be exactly the same as in New York City and I was rather interested in the idea of what it stands for. Like the idea of penetration, transparency, opening something up. I mean visually it's very, very beautiful. Like any structure that is imposed and then performed many many times. If I were to tell you, “draw a diamond on each wall in New York City,” that would yield the most beautiful formal result. But really, it's interesting because for practical labor code and construction code reading, it has to be done. And it’s used – or not used, I don't know how often it's used in ill effect – to allow transparency at the workplace. Which is such a funny thing because the minute the building ends or the building process is done, that transparency seizes. And logically that makes a whole lot of sense because the labor then is done. But this is the moment where usually the building goes up, which many have spoken about much more eloquently and criticized what that means for a city. In a city where public space is scarce, in a city where cheap housing is scarce, etcetera… So I was just interested in that sort of penetration or this performed transparency which then afterwards ends. And I brought it into the exhibition space. In the end, for the piece it's not so much to speak solely about New York City’s construction code, but also just performing or reperforming the effect of spatial penetration with a hole. And in the case of the show, we have one hole that pierces or cuts through the outer wall of the cube, which is permanently in– it’s built in the exhibition hall. And the other one is inside. And this is a little harder to know when you can't visit the show. So what I did was I built an additional drywall to make the inner cubed gallery space smaller – which sounds like a trick or, “why is that important?” But it means that there's a frustrated non-space now that is not in use. Which people who are familiar with the exhibition space there, know. So they are basically missing half of the inner exhibition space and they are perhaps looking for it or can't find it. And in that wall which separates the inner space, there is another cut out which enables you to really look inside into that dead space and see behind the drywall. So we have these two cut outs that serve a slightly different– or allow a slightly different perspective into the exhibition architecture.

JT: And that ties a lot, in a way, back into the soccer goal works or the couch pieces where you are cutting off space and allowing people to peer into, essentially, a head sized peep hole into another room. And just to clarify cause earlier you were saying how beautiful it would be to draw diamonds on all the walls in New York – so in a way you are talking about what it would be like to cut actual holes into all the walls in New York to divide up public and personal space, which is something that you talk a lot about in your larger practice, this idea of public space. Who is the public and what is private space and who is that shared with?

ASB: Right. In that now smaller exhibition space, I installed two red light bulbs, each of them being a work in and of itself. It’s called, the german title means brain, “hirn.” It’s as much, again, a poetic understanding of the idea of red light as it is a sociological understanding of the idea of red light. So, I titled it “brain” because it sort of signals towards the informational center of the body, which we all don't really– we are not really sure what's really going on there but we know it's sort of where everything is guided from or decided from. So you could arguably say that the red room is the control center, spatially, of the rest of the show. But you could also read that red light again with a lens towards society: red light district, spaces where red light is used, I mean from the photographic developing room to spaces in clubs. In Vienna, we often have red light outside of brothels, which are not criminalzied here, prostitution is legal. And again, leading full circle to the video where red light signals towards law enforcement but also emergency vehicles. 

JT: So Anna, where do you see your practice going from here and what are some things you are thinking about?

ASB: Steadily further. Yeah I don't really use steps prior to making them I dont think. I’m looking at a lot of objects I’ve collected that are printed – like tissues and business cards. I’m thinking about doing a show just about that. 

JT: Commercial printing?

ASB: Yeah, just like all found objects but the opposite of the Bonn show because none of them are sculptural. All of them are flat and on paper or cardboard. Thinking about our show, which I have no solution for really because it's such a complicated moment in the U.S. Trying to find ways to not do the same thing over. Oh! That is not true actually. I’m writing– I’m trying to write two texts and I've been violently procrastinating them. One is about defining more clearly and more structurally why I'm upset about certain artworks or shows. The idea of why I am doing that is because I found myself ranting about certain things and then I wanted to know, “Can I put this in words that are theoretically salient?” Not that I want to have objective truth but, you know, sometimes you go like “oh this is so fucked up that he made these works.” And then you go like “well.. Am I being moralist or is it ugly or is he an asshole?” So I’m trying to write that text and I’m trying to write a catalog essay for the Swiss Institute show from last year

JT: That sounds like a good practice to try and articulate the things that frustrate you. I have long wanted to write towards all the small ways I get frustrated as a dealer that would just result in a book of power plays (laughs). 

ASB: A best seller ! Jasmin Tsou…

JT: The bitch who went off (laughs).

ASB: And on! 

JT: (laughs) Well Anna, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me. 

This interview contains strong language, as well as descriptions of violence and torture. Listener discretion is advised.

My name is Jasmin Tsou and I own an art gallery in the lower east side of New York called JTT. You’re listening to the first in a series of interviews with the artists that I represent. This first interview is between myself and Doreen Garner. Doreen was born in Philadelphia in 1986 and currently lives and works in New York. She is a sculpture artist and her practice at large deals with the history of medical experimentation on Black women in America. In today’s interview we refer to a doctor by the name of James Marion Sims, who began his career as a plantation doctor in the 1830s. In the 1840s, before gynecology existed and women's health was largely misunderstood by Western medicine, a condition called vesicovaginal fistula was affecting many women at childbirth – often leading to the death of the mother or the death of the child. Under the guise of better understanding this condition, Sims began sadistic experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women. At any given time, Sims had up to sixteen enslaved women in his so-called clinic – and on each of them he performed multiple vaginal surgeries. He never administered anesthesia during these procedures, claiming that Black women have a higher tolerance of pain and didn’t require it. Sims wrote very detailed notes on the violence of his surgeries, giving gratuitous descriptions of the pain or pleasure the women experienced at his hands. Because he was later celebrated for his work in the field, these journals are still read by medical students to this day. An article published last year by the New York Times, written by Linda Villarosa, states that reading these articles affects medical students’ understanding of Black pain. A 2013 study examining racial disparities in pain management found that Black and Hispanic people received inadequate pain management compared with white counterparts. And a 2016 survey of 222 white medical students and residents published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that half of them endorse at least one myth about psychological differences between Black and white people, including that Black peoples’ nerve endings are less sensitive than white peoples’. This background is important for understanding Doreen’s larger practice and the interview you are about to listen to. For more images of Doreen’s work, please visit JTTNYC.com.

JT: Doreen…

DG: (laughs)

JT: Thank you for coming over today.

DG: Sure.

JT: I’ve asked you to come here today to talk about some new work you just made for Art Basel’s 2020 OVR (online viewing rooms). And I thought we could start by just telling some of our listeners a little bit about your larger practice. So, in the context of Basel, in 2018 you and I went to Switzerland together and did a statement booth and that project featured some of James Marion Sims’ journals. Would you mind talking a little bit about that project?

DG: A lot of my work is very three dimensional and fleshy and mixes a lot of different materials, but I think that people can easily dismiss those objects as not being factual. So one thing I wanted to do was to include his journal entries as actual proof – or things that he said out of his own mouth, written himself – and look at the way he talks about his practice and the ways that he has regarded the Black female body. 

JT: So, your work, in a larger sense, deals with the history of medical experimentation on Black bodies – specifically women. Can you talk a little bit about who Sims is?

DG: Yeah, J. Marion Sims is a white man who became very famous for progress that he’s made in the gynecological field. But, he ended up becoming famous by torturing Black people – in abundance, Black women – during slavery. So a lot of these women were unconsenting. One thing that I wanted to add about the journal entries is that I wanted to incorporate some parts about myself. So at the time, looking through his journal entries, there was a lot of information lost and there was a lot of fluff that he put in basically praising himself. I ended up censoring what I wanted people to see at the fair, but with my own menstrual blood and urine. So I wanted to cut out all the useless text and just really focus on the ways that he described the bodies and, I guess, the conditions that they were in. He talked about bloody gauze and mucus and the stench – that these are all a product of his own practice. So, if he’s trying to stitch people up and then kind of leaving them on a bed, of course fecal matter and blood is going to create a stench, but the way he was talking about them as if they weren’t human beings was outrageous. 

JT: How did you find these journal entries?

DG: I found the journal entries when I was doing research in 2015 at the New York Academy of Medicine library that's across the street from where his statue used to be. I hit up the librarian and told her that these were some subjects that I wanted to focus on, so she pulled out a series of different books. So, she pulled out his journal and also some books with diagrams. At the time she had told me that she was trying to find Medical Apartheid but they didn’t have that at the moment. So then that's when I went out to find the book on my own. 

JT: What was it like reading those journals for the first time, when you were coming across some of the ways he was describing the surgeries…

DG: Right, I actually didn’t see the part where he was talking about the surgeries at first. But I do remember a section that I read where he was talking about a woman that came in that was hysterical and saying that her uterus was flipped, inverted, and that he had to put it back into place. So he basically, like, finger fucked this lady as a medical practice? Quote un-quote. And afterwards he was describing her sigh of relief and then also described how she was queefing – in a disgusted way. 

JT: And for the wall works that you made for Basel, you were mentioning you used your menstrual blood to kind of box out certain text but highlight other text. So, this is what you are describing, right? You are highlighting some of the ways he was sort of enjoying some of the torture he had done.

DG: Yeah for sure, I think to be a physician at that time, you definitely had to be evil. There was no other way (laughs). There was so much blood! 

JT: What was it like to use your own blood in that particular piece?

DG: I felt like I was attaching myself to the work. A lot of times, I’m describing histories that have happened to Black people in the past, but I’ve never been tied to that history physically on paper or in a physical object that is presented to an audience. And so I felt like that was a good opportunity for me to physically attach myself to the work. 

JT: The centerpiece of that presentation was a large wall work that had a metal frame, sort of red-orange fluorescent lights, and in the center were silicone torsos that you had cast from Black women and sort of pieced together in different parts. You could see hands, breasts, sections of the torso. And these torsos were also adorned with beads. For you is there an element – obviously you are pointing to a really horrific violence – but is there an element of.. what does the adornment of your work do for you? Is there an element of devotion to these women? 

DG: I think as far as the adornment is concerned, it is a way to draw in viewers that do not have the stomach for that type of history or visual language alone. So, by swapping in different materials that they are used to placing value on – or at least used to admiring, whether you see it on clothes, or as jewelry, or in a storefront – they are able to use that language to process the history. It's like, if that wasn't available for them, they would just walk past. I really appreciate the idea that if a crystal catches a spotlight as they are walking by, that draws them into the work and as they are looking at the pieces and they’re wondering what it's about and then they start to venture into the writing of the work and then realize how horrific all of it is. I like that the material can also draw people in rather than just what it physically looks like.

JT: I think what’s interesting about that project is he also mentions a couple of the women’s names in the journal, but he usually omits them. And you refer, in the first solo show that you did with us, to Betsy – which was one of the women that he performed surgeries and tortured – and there’s a piece in the show titled, Betsey’s Flag. Could you maybe describe that piece? 

DG: Yeah, so Betsey’s Flag is a mostly silicone sculpture that takes clippings from a body cast and stitches them together to create an American flag, or a dated American flag – which is, The Betsy Ross Flag. Which we know, Betsy Ross did not make (laughs). But I thought it would make an interesting play on words. The spelling is really specific to Betsey, the woman that he operated on, not Betsy Ross’ name spelling. And then the circle of stars just notes to that style of the flag but also to the sixteen cots that he purchased so that he could, you know, have a constant supply of Black women’s bodies to cut apart. 

JT: Right, right. I thought it was touching that you called it Betsey’s Flag though, outside of the relationship to the American flag, but also just that it's not Sims’ flag. It felt like it was a bit of a way to reclaim this experience – in some way – for Betsey. 

DG: Yeah, I mean the thing too is that because the flag is stitched together and all the clippings are coming from the same body, it represents also how many surgeries these women had to endure over and over again without anesthesia.

JT: Moving to the work that you made for the Basel 2020 OVR, for this project you made wooden panels, and on these you have sort of sculptural vanitas that are displayed on top of that. Can you talk a little bit about some of the objects that are in these vanitas?

DG: Some of the objects include, I don’t know, things you would typically see in a vanitas still life. So, skulls, dried flowers or plants, there’s also food, quote un-quote. I’ve sort of swapped in different things, so if you look at some of the original paintings there will be a piece of meat. And so instead of a piece of meat, I swapped that in for flesh. You know, there’s a teacup and saucer that’s filled with blood. Now that also doubles as a scrying mirror.

JT: Can you describe what a scrying mirror is?

DG: Yeah, a scrying mirror is an obsidian mirror – a black mirror – that people can stare into and have kind of a portal into the spiritual realm. So I wanted to place a scrying mirror into the pieces so that there is an element of connection to the spiritual realm where your ancestors – or the idea that the viewer could stand there and spend more time with the piece in hopes to get a message.

JT: One thing that I’ve been talking about with you, with relationship to the vanitas, is that this reflection on death feels really relevant right now with everything that’s going on with covid. And one thing that you told me that I felt was really touching was that people right now are dying alone. And not only are they dying alone, but people can’t even come together to have a funeral for the people that they are losing. And we know that these are disproportionately Black and Brown communities. So, I felt like what is kind of interesting is you take this object from a certain moment in history in the Dutch golden age, where people are just afraid of death, but there are all these other layers to what death feels like right now, at least. And of course it's easy to retroactively look on that period. But it's like, you are looking at death and dying alone. I kind of am interested in, you are thinking about a lot of different types of histories but how much of these pieces are really thinking about contemporary medicine and how much is thinking about more historical medicine. 

DG: I don’t know, I feel like they are pretty connected, so it's hard to even say historical practice of medicine and contemporary because of course the tools are updated and there’s sterilization now, but I think that the use of really specific bodies is still the same. When I’m reading through Medical Apartheid, there are sections where they are talking about the medical college in Georgia, and –

JT: Medical Apartheid is a book by Harriet Washington that goes through the history of medical experimentation in America. 

DG: Right, there’s sections where they’re describing the scene. So, for instance with the medical college in Georgia, they used to dig up Black bodies from specifically Black graveyards and cemeteries and bring them back into the school and dissect them –  when dissection was still considered legal. They would have body parts in barrels and in jars with whisky and almost amongst medical debris like pill bottles, food trash, cups, it was just all mixed together and that sounds really horrific in general, but I also really try to think about what that will look like visually. Not in a way that it just looks like a bunch of trash piled up, but how do objects that are in close proximity to each other inform each other and inform this history. And how can I take this really horrible arrangement and place it into a language that artists and art viewers can understand. 

JT: So in one of the vanitas sculptures, you have a couple of vials that are filled with whisky, and this is referring to this exact historical moment.

DG: Yeah, exactly.

JT: And you had another piece at Socrates where you had vials hanging from trees that were filled with whisky. And what was inside of those glasses again?

DG: Those are also body parts resembling Black people.

JT: So in that way, the still lives are referring to very specific historical moments, but also you are still thinking about this moment that we are in, now. 

DG: Yeah, exactly. And then also, you know, I’m always thinking about trauma and ways that I can implant my work into people’s psyches forever (laughs) because whisky is such a strong, has such a strong scent, the idea that people will be in the gallery and, you know, have this overwhelming smell of whisky while reading some of this information, I feel like every time that they smell it, then they will think about that. And that is a way to ensure that these lives will not be forgotten or this story will not be forgotten.

JT: There’s also a lot of, just from a formal level, once you start to incorporate resin and liquid and water into the actual sculpture, it almost invites a type of reflection into the piece where it's literally suspension of the materials. 

The pieces have very strong titles. Would you like to read the titles?

DG: Sure. 

JT: Here I got them.

DG: Thank you (laughs). So the first piece that has more of the meat, or tools and objects that would push more towards things to be eaten or cut apart, that piece is called “One Could Say That Few Living Things Have Experienced Vivisection The Way That Black Subjects Have Without Also Being Cooked and Eaten,” Scribed a Sultan. So that piece was really inspired by an essay that my friend ____ wrote on me. He included so many things I had never thought about, but that line in particular really stood out for me and inspired me to create an entirely different work. So I’m really grateful to him for that. 

The second piece is the one with all the apothecary jars and bodily material, like bodily waste material, called, Please God I Hope When I Die it Will Be in The Summertime. And that really just notes to Black peoples’ total awareness that even after they died, these white people were still seeking after their bodies to cut up. And, you know, especially in the South in the summertime, bodies decay pretty fast given the heat. And so, it's this idea that, “hopefully if I die in the summer time then they won't be able to chop me apart.” 

The last piece is the piece with a skull and the teeth are pulled out, and a lot of wheat. That piece is called, As The Gauze In My Mouth is Filled With Blood and My Limp Body Hit The Concrete I Remembered Joice Heth. And that is a personal quote from me. The other quote was from an anonymous woman, an anonymous Black woman from Virginia. This quote is from me and it's about, you know, maybe two years ago – no not two years ago maybe like three or four years ago – I had to get a root canal at NYU Dental. I had to get a root canal, I was waiting there all day, they finally put me in the chair and then the student dentist, he asked me if I was willing to participate in a trial. And I was like, “Well, what does that mean?” and he said, “It's basically like a test to see if your stress affects the way you are able to process anesthesia.” And so I was like, “What?” and he's like, “Yeah so, the idea is if you're stressed out or if you have anxiety, that your body is not going to take it.” And I'm like, “Well, I am stressed. I'm at a dentist” right? I'm a Black woman being asked to consent to a process where you’re trying to tell me that my body is not processing it? How do I know you’re not just not giving me anesthesia? So that happened, and then he told me that I couldn't get the root canal in the end, and that I had to get my tooth pulled out. So, I wait another few hours and I get down to the emergency area and there’s like two student dentists trying to pull out my tooth and–

JT: Student dentists?

DG: Yeah, I mean like listen, I was still teaching at the time, I was so fucking broke there was no way I could go to the normal ass dentist, right? So, they are trying to pull out the very back molar in my mouth and they are just, man… It was some kids, they were some kids, they had these big ass horse pliers and they were just doing all this shit. And then this Black woman comes in and she’s like “What are y’all doing?” And I guess she was the overseeing dentist and she put gauze in my mouth and was like, “What if that tooth, when you pull it out, drops and it goes down her throat?” So that wasn’t even in place… And I remembered asking for the tooth afterwards and they were telling me I couldn’t have it. And I’m like, “What do you mean I can’t have a piece of my own body?” You know, in the end one of the dentists, he kinda wrapped it up in gauze and gave me a head nod to pick it up as I was walking out, but… So I left the dentist, and at the time I was still with Jamal and we were catching the train back to Bushwick and I was on the train and all of the sudden I started getting really flush and I was like, “I have to get off the train” and he’s like, “Are you sure? You can't just wait one more stop?” and I’m like, “No,” and so as soon as I walked off the train I taste all this blood but then I just went limp and fucking hit the ground.

JT: Oh man…

DG: Yeah, so then all these people were trying to pick me up, this lady gave me her bottle of water and I sat down and I just started bawling, crying. And I just felt really drained but the idea that my experience – I don’t know it just, it really reminded me of some of the things that I’ve read.

JT: Right, right, right. And it's also tied so much to the lack of available health care in America that you are put into a situation where you're working with student doctors.

DG: Right, and it's also the idea that, “Ok, I am a young Black woman with a masters degree, I’m living in New York, and I'm still not exempt from a dentist not giving me anesthesia on purpose.”

JT: Its fucked up, Doreen.

DG: Yeah…

JT: Can you tell us who Joice Heth is?

DG: Joice Heth is a Black woman who was enslaved. She was purchased by P.T. Barnum and he was, you know, doing his circus at the time. And he had many Black people on display. So, he ended up saying and presenting her as this mammy of George Washington. And, I mean, she definitely was not his mammy. But he wanted to use that as a scheme to get people to pay money to see her. And so, this Black woman, he said that she was 161 years old, she was severely malnourished by his own hands.

JT: To make her look older?

DG: Yeah, to make her look older. I believe she had cataracts and also was paralyzed in both legs and in one of her arms. In addition to that, would get her black out drunk on whisky and pulled all of her teeth out to make her look older and more believable as being 161 years old.

JT: And I believe she wasn't even actually that old? 

DG: No, she was 80 years old.

JT: Oh, she was 80.

DG: Yeah, so then a lot of people were like, “No, she’s not George Washington’s mammy. That’s impossible.” And he's like, “No, she is. And to prove it we are going to do a public autopsy.” And so, as soon as she died, they transformed a saloon in New York into an operation theater and they sold tickets for 50 cents for, you know, citizens of the city to come see. I think they said 15 hundred people showed up and her autopsy was an invasive, bloody circus. So they just –

JT: And it makes no sense either, how could an autopsy prove any type of.. Anything..

DG: Yeah, and so as soon as they were like, “No, based on her cardiac arteries she was probably 80 years old,” he was like, “No no no that wasn’t her, that was another woman. She's actually still alive in this other place..” But you know it was just– it's ridiculous. They cut apart this old lady? And this was in New York.

JT: Right, because there's this myth in America that the South was more racist than the North.

DG: It's like, they all learned up here! And then went back down there. Do you know what I mean? Those fucked up physicians have studied in Philadelphia.

JT: Which is where you are from.

DG: Yeah, yeah.

JT: And in that particular piece you also have wheat. What does the wheat refer to?

DG: Just how whisky is …

JT: Right, yeah, right. So, for these pieces, again, do you feel like there is any opportunity for healing, I guess, in this work at all? Reflecting on some of this trauma. Or do you feel like that’s not really –

DG: Hmmm I don’t think the focus is on healing but more so as education and the sharing of information. So, you know one thing that’s really cool now with social media is that I can watch some peoples’ reactions. You know, things that people choose to post, I can hear the viewer’s experience. This one girl, she had posted about it and she talked about the title, Please God I Hope When I Die it Will Be in The Summertime, and she just really broke it down. And it was amazing to hear that coming out of someone else's mouth.

JT: What did she say?

DG: She was just saying how it was so impactful because that meant that Black people were really hoping to not be mutilated after they were dead. And that was also a fear beyond just being enslaved and post slavery, beyond all of that another fear was being diced up.

JT: Well Harriet Washington says in her book at one point that being enslaved was one type of torture and pain, but the idea of being taken in the afterlife was really what actually formed some uprsings.

DG: Yeah, postmortem racism…

JT: Well, thank you Doreen.

DG: (laughs) Yeah.

(both laughing)

JT: I appreciate it, is there anything else you want to–

DG: Yeah, I just want to encourage all of the Black listeners right now, especially Black women to really do what you want. If there are things that you want to say, just say it. I feel like with this recent announcement of the lack of indictment for any of the officers that murdered Brianna Taylor, its just really a slap in the face. It's like, “Ok no matter what I do, even if I'm home asleep, I’m not safe” and I think that you can be really fearful or that can make you really fearless. Like,” I have nothing to lose” and I feel like that's how I feel right now. So I just want to give people all the courage to do the things they really want to do. Tell off the people you need to tell off (laughs). Literally just live like you have nothing to lose and people are going to be really afraid of that. And that’s powerful.