Volume 2 Number 1 $5.00 Journal of ContemporaryArt INTERVIEWS: PART TWO Art & Language John Baldessari Artists Ashley Bickerton Speak Moira Dryer Giinther Forg Tishan Hsu Joel Otterson Gary Stephan Spring/Summer 1989“The art object can be used asa mutlti-vernacular, multi-phonetic device.” Ashley Bickerton Richard Phillips: Hostility towards the audi- ence is a key coordinate in modernism. Your work tends to direct its own traffic. How does the juncture of meaning and the social matrix set up in your work serve as a measure of hostility? Ashley Bickerton: 1 can’t bear work that condescends to its viewer. I find this a most banal kind of arrogance. It exemplifies a very unsavory aspect of the whole modemist enter- prise in its implications to imperial, techno- logical, new colonialist culture. T feel that an art object should be an open, vital forum, a podium from which the artist can speak freely about anything they damn well please, to follow lines of research and inquisition, develop curiosity and name de- sires, The art object can be used as a multi- vernacular, multi-phonetic device, through which to “talk” to the viewer and to show them, without condescending, what one has researched, thought about, lived: to offer up propositions, not to proselytize or to con- JCA. 119Hi Ashley Bickerton demn, but to work with the viewer. The rela- tionship to the viewer can be complex: you can sneer, you can cajole, you can joke with, you can educate—and all these contradictions can exist and create sensations and stimulate the viewer in many different ways at once. There doesn’t have to be a specific directive. RP: InRobertSmithson’ s ‘Incidents ofMirror Travel in the Yucatan,’ he said, “All those guidebooks are of no use. You must travel at random, like the first Mayans. You must risk getting lost in the thickets.” Comparatively, what function does the mapping-out of exotic locations serve in your work, in the sense of creating “fantasy-scapes?” AB: That brings up an analogy that I’ve been toying with, but haven’t really talked about. One can either create (and I know “create” has been an unpopular word in the last 10 years) under the explicit brilliant and exacting neon lighting of the laboratory, where everything is laid out in precision diagram, or one can let one’s thoughts operate in the ethereal half- light, where phantasms of desire move through the parameters of your vision. Some- where between these two possibilities might exist a desirable space for art: one has no backbone, the other no heart. ‘The idea of the guidebook is so specific. I know what Smithson is getting at. But we see the world somewhat differently now that every space has been marked, touched, charted and catalogued. There is no virgin frontier, at least in the broad sense. Frontiers exist in the specifics now, in the microscopic as opposed to the macroscopic. ‘We long for this space, and the sensory 80 Vol. 2.1 “Every space has been marked, touched, charted and catalogued. There is no virgin frontier.”Ashley Bickerton Ij overload that this discombobulation provides, but we can’t have it. It’s all been circum- scribed and prepackaged and inscribed in the form of kitsch. So the idea was to mate that primal need we have for kitsch packaging and the feelings themselves—somehow it’s about a sense of loss, But we can reinvent ourselves, in kitsch, like a dog can get excited about going out for a walk on a chain. RP: The surfer Derek Ho said, “How you surf there, getting your photos taken, building a reputation, is the most important thing on the circuit.” Your artwork seems to have a World Tour-readiness. Is there a parallel between your experiences in the New York art world and the pro surfing circuit? AB: The idea came out of what I had wit- nessed in the surfing industry, which had become my little laboratory for analyzing culture. I watched surfboards go from air- brushed mandalas and pure white surfboards to boards massively smeared with corporate sponsorship decals. The logos became a form of expression, about the relationship to corpo- rate culture. What I said in my press release formy show at International With Monument was: these essentially are the sporting goods for the race- track of art, or the circuit. Sporting equipment didn’t interest me because it’s so designed to be used. So I wanted to look at the entire art scene from a holistic point of view, objects as utilitarian things that operated within that circuit, and were applied to all the different usages of that. I just wanted to make them manifest, to make obvious all those refer- ences: lifted, shipped, stored, hung. Jca_ 81HH Ashley Bickerton I wanted to make perfectly clear that the point of aesthetic referencing at the moment that exists on the wall of the gallery is only one minute fraction of that object’s existence and total meaning. RP: Your work is often autobiographical: how did your earlier travels with your family and the special interests that guided them shape your experience and influence the work? In particular, your early travels, the business of living in a tent in Guyana. AB: 1 don’t think they could not influence. As you're continually mobile and ripped out of one context—cultural and geographic—and placed in another, it shapes the entire cogni- tive understanding of the world. I've lived in so many different countries that spoke every dynamic of the English language, all the dif- ferent creoles, and pidgins from a shanty- construct of English in West Africa, West Indian, Creole, Hawaiian Pidgin, American, and also British English. So the language itself became stretched and twisted through all its permutations and all its vernacular inflec- tions, yet it remained the same language. So this gave me a very particular view of the malleability of language and a deconstructive perspective, possibly. At that point one realizes, too, that the basis for all our understanding of the world is the linguistic model. Everything is understood through language, and so one cannot separate the discourse from the style of the discourse. And the relationship of language to culture is so specific and acute: the speaking of all those different tongues gave me a view into the plasticity of language. 82 Vol. 2.1 “The speaking of all those different tongues gave me a view into the plasticity of language.”Ashley Bickerton H RP: Did that feed in a direct way into your early phoneme pieces? AB: Those pieces were very simple. They were about: what is a formal painting? Whatis the relationship of form to content? By taking content and reducing it to its most preliterate guttural bellow, and making form its most archly self-conscious plastic con- struct, to drive a wedge between form and content, to play out the dynamic of so-called modemism in this twisted information-age way. RP: Specifically, how did your father’s re- search inform this work? AB: Chomsky used the model of infant lan- guage acquisition, In reaction to that, my father examined the model of pidgin English, which was an ad-hoc language that was formed when you got, say, three different language groups put together in the same context. My father developed this idea: seeing how these languages evolved, there were cer- tain axis mechanisms in language itself that were universal, He formulated this idea of the “bioprogram” that exists in the mind, which is essentially this reflexive structure upon which all words are hung, It doesn’t matter if they're Mandarin Chinese or Bantusi. It was an equa- tion between the constructed language and the innate cognitive mechanism that was dis- posed to deal with the possibility of language. This reductive model—without him being very influential on me—it was just the sense that it was all there in our family, and as an organic unit we moved temporally and geo- graphically. It was part of our whole existen- tial reality, And [just applied that to how I saw JCA 83a Ashley Bickerton modem art—how I had grown up. When I went to the Museum of Modem Art, that’s what I saw and that’s the way I interpreted it. Other people would have different interpreta- tions. RP: In the past you've provided statements containing themes, comparisons, dedications and introductions to the work. Can you ex- plain the function of extreme hyperbole and linguistic brouhaha that accompanied the work? Why comparisons to Michael Jackson and the dedication to Robin Leach? AB: The press releases were just all that I couldn’t fit into the work itself. Now I’ve worked towards the notion of: If you think it, say it—say it on the piece, find room for it. If you've gota crush on Jane or Bob, find a space on the piece to write it. Talk about anything you damn well please. If it enters your head, and you think it’s worth saying, then it has every right to exist artistically in one’s work: there should be a kind of processing of one’s life into a mechanical mode. RP: How did this relate to the text-oriented conceptualism that was going on at CalArts when you were a student there? AB: It became the opposite of the students there who would put up a white painted board and produce an accompanying text, and try to put the two together. All I saw was this mon- strous schism that existed between the two. I thought, why not just slap that text on the piece? Ifit’s there, the piece should be able to handle it. I felt that art could no longer exist as, a diagram, an illustration for some extemal and alien reckoning. 84 Vol. 2.1 “If you’ve got a crush on Jane or Bob, find a space on the piece to write it.”“I began to see certain greatly-heralded works of art becoming the banners for Western technological society.” Ashley Bi ‘kerton @ Ibelieve that somehow the neutralization of free thinking is always manifest in the work- ing out of the formal nuances. The re-ham- mering home of a stylistic look—that part is essentially dead in the water. For it to be alive it’s got to be an open mode of address. RP: If you look at Ryman’s context, in the sense that he is looking at the specific rela- tionship of the painted object to its wall struc- ture—there’s a limited scope to the specificity of always referring to the object in the gener- alized condition. AB: It has the same singular, mechanistic quality of the Stella model. It remains in that idealized, laboratory lighting. I became inter- ested in its relationship to a more expanded set of possibilities. I began to see certain greatly- heralded works of art as ultimately being the reflexive liberal and intellectual self-image held forth, becoming the banners for Westem technological society. The self-aggrandizing autonomy of these pieces is merely the flag of liberal purity held forth by what amounted to a much more insidious and dark machine, all the might of Westem technological imperial- ist society. RP: And these works continue to serve as ambassadors? Are they to be seen as the public relations element? AB: They were mute in a sense. Their very simplicity and abstraction became a smokescreen for the real workings of that machine. This in every way crippled the art object’s capability to speak. Modem techno- logical society was also offering up all these other things through its consumption, through JCA 85BE Ashley Bickerton its constant and voracious need to equilibriate itself within the world economy and environ- ment. It was creating other problems. Sud- denly you had 60,000 new chemical composi- tions being produced and put out in the world every day. The earth-objectitself was being ir- reversibly, and horribly negatively, altered by this machine that was being spoken sweetly and poetically of by these emblems that were modem paintings, This becomes a sinister conspiracy that hasn’t really been addressed. It seemed to be so wide open, so ripe, that it just invited me to walk in. This is the kind of terrain I just feel an artist can operate best in. RP: Whatinfluences the decisions being made in the new work, the new landscape pieces? Where did you look for the work? You men- tioned your interest in the underwater labora- tory, roll-bars on cars... AB: | keep thinking of the hardware—roll- bars of off-road trucks, canvas from tents, backpacks, rigging from mountaineering equipment and ships—as being precisely the materials by which culture can leave its con- text and enter into the natural space. These are the apparatus which we construct in order to Temove ourselves from the cultural matrix. I wanted to problematize the relationship of these objects as they exist in a cultural situ- ation that they’re predetermined for. The hardware that I’m choosing is the hardware by which we equilibriate our biological selves in an unfriendly natural macrocosm, and replace ourselves into the natural arc. I wanted to make art that was biodegradable. Now that we have the new foods that are health foods, I 86 Vol. 2.1Ashley Bickerton Hi want to make “health art.” The material I use will be benign, ice., toxic free. Realizing that the most toxic materials were the most exquisite, I began to ask myself: where were all the carcinogenic and waste products of the object going when I poured them down the sink, and all the sprays going into the air? Somehow this seemed to tie itself into that whole value equation of the art ob- ject. What began to develop was this scenario in relationship to culture and modemism as banners. I beganto develop a picture of things. The handles which carried the painting in the gallery context suddenly became the very handles by which it could be transported and dumped on the side of a cliff with so much jetsam. Suddenly I wanted to make art that was designed for those applications. Instead of taking painting and making it applicable, and changing its meaning by recontextual- izing it, I wanted to take art that seemed directed towards those applications, specifi- cally, but leave it in the gallery so that it screamed in its discomfort and begged you to consider a wider interpretation of how we might see an object ina gallery, in culture, and how culture really works. Ultimately, it’s all part and parcel with, and really governed by, the organic world. RP: It seems like the new work exists at that juncture precisely between where itis going in terms of landscape and how it will exist in the codified art world environment. What's the deal? AB: Our whole idea of landscape seems to be changed. The issue that kept offering itself up was that itno longer suffices to record land, to JCA 87ef Ashley Bickerton record the natural terrain, the biosphere, to record its image. These allegorical inscrip- tions seemed to be no longer an issue. The pri- mary source, terra firma itself, was losing its own inscription. ‘The issue of preservation of the land moved into an idea of centrality in the idea of landscape. And this was the shift that became crucial, that I had to work towards. Agriculture is one of the primary ways that we first rerouted the natural environment to serve the cultural apparatus. In the new work, using all sorts of raw grain stocks and food, there is a relationship between culture, cul- tural production, and the cultural artifact, the consumption of the cultural artifact, and the consumption of fuels for the biological being itself. I have this one piece I’m working on now called Minimalism’s Evil Orthodoxy: Monoculture’s Totalitarian Aesthetic. All that I'd seen good about Minimalism sud- denly revealed itself as being a celebration of what in effect was monoculture, which is in effect the form of agriculture which is total, for miles and miles, indistinguishable corn, which produces the absolute reliances on chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides. All the chemical producers are now buying up the seed companies, because they’ve now been able to patent seeds. And they're produc- ing seeds that produce no offspring. I began to see all the classic premises of things like Minimalism being absorbed in the most hei- nous aspects of culture. And so the more I thought about people standing in front of this gorgeous reductivist object, in all its seductive splendor, and contemplating and finding reas- surances and beauty, the more I saw its adver- sarial position to life itself. You begin to see 88 Vol. 2.1“The art object is there, the viewer is there, they just coincide.” ‘kerton Hi how this produces this idea of landscape that I'm beginning to work towards. In my disillu- sionment of being a portrayer of culture- Scape, and trying to approach the idea of landscape from the point of view of sculpture, seemed both incredibly obvious and not with- Out its own extreme challenge. Ashley Bie RP: What about the biodegradable? The cy- clical nature behind the work? The idea of the object being able to recycle itselfinterms ofits life as a work of art, being seen in the public situation. In other words, what relationship does the new work have to its ‘potential audi- ence? AB: It implicates its viewer in a matrix of First World consumption and global destruction, As the viewer stands in front of the work, one has to realize that the whole constructions of one’s aesthetic notion of the world we live in are implicated in that matrix of. ‘consumption. I want to tie our consuming indulging corpu- lence to global destruction, to implicate the viewer right there, right on the spot. I want to construct work explicitly to bypass the con- temporary viewer. The vieweris, ina sense, an uninvited guest to an experience that belongs toa completely alien set of values. Again, the process of inversion. So [had to confront them as possessing a set of values that didn’t belong to me, and somehow that would inform us. It gets back to the idea of our species not being central, that we’re just one set of organisms existing in the biosphere. That the intended audience is not necessarily the art public, or even our species. The art object is there, the viewer is there, they just coincide. One of our most offensive manifestations is JCA 89Hi Ashley Bickerton this need to hide certain things and to aggran- dize ourselves as a species, and this is mani- fested in so much of our cultural practice, our art. I would justlike to make certain things that might be disagreeable staringly obvious. It comes out ofa lot of thinking that might relate to holism, or ecological views, it’s an anti- anthropocentrism. Certainly in numbers we are not dominant by any means. RP: How important is the concept of forging ahead with the new? There seems to be a specific break from the idea of you holding fast to the idea of yourself as a painter to the new broader, more all-encompassing idea of the landscape. AB: That’s the specific problem, because while I completely mistrust the desire to reaf- firm the nurturing warmth of the known, Lalso have a great distrust of the blind and eager moving forward into what we consider to be the less-defined, which marks the health of our species, but also spins in its wake a rather diabolical trail. This sets up a sort of strange position. You have tokeep the mind alive—youhave to keep twisting it, ripping it apart like clay, demand- ing oft, taxing it. One has to continually push it to maintain its organic vitality. Now we enter a whole other time clock that is much more amorphous, much more arbi- trarily viscous, and the atoms ricochet in unprecedented configurations. December 22, 1988, New York. 90 Vol. 2.1 “Now we enter a whole other time clock that is much more amorphous.”Journal of Oyo ORM yee Ross Bleckner inst Datel Buren First Sarah Charlesworth Jack Goldstein Jeff Koons Stephen Lack Wolfgang Laib Will Mentor David Reed Spring 1988 “We are a strange accumulation of historical sentiment.” —Ross Bleckner, p-51,Vol.1, No.1 “T am sure today Baudrillard must not recognize his children.” —Daniel Buren, p.17, Vol.1, No.1 “I am trying to explore the hidden psychological dimension of culture.” —Sarah Charlesworth, p.66, Vol.1, No.1 “I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it.” —Jeff Koons, p.22, Vol.1, No.1 Volume 1, Number 1, Interviews—Spring, 1988. This first issue includes inter- views with Arakawa, Ross Bleckner, Daniel Buren, Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Jeff Koons, Stephen Lack, Wolfgang Laib, Will Mentor, David Reed. Available as a back issue for $10.00. Limited supply. “Not another journal on art? Wait. This is truly different. The complete 100 pages are devoted exclusively to interviews with contemporary artists....In the first number there are no illustrations, but the ten conversations offer a splendid, easy-to-read key to what art is about in the late 1980s....And itis all presented sans jargon and sans the tension of academic theory. The magazine is a must for any library involved with contemporary art.” —Bill Katz, LIBRARY JOURNAL, May 15, 1988“The process of painting ‘for me is a process of re- vealing. But when you start a painting, there’s always a part of you that wants to conceal, and let the painting be this mask. —Elizabeth Murray, p-32, Vol, No.2 “All behind me are the Sriends that died; ?m breathing this air that they can’t breathe... These days I see the edge of mortality; the edge of death and dying around everything like a warm halo of light Sometimes dim sometimes irradiated...” —David Wojnarowicz, p.84, Vol.1, No.2 Journal of ContemporaryArt Special Projects Richard Artschwager Judith Barry Mike Bidlo Jennifer Bolande Bary Bridgwood Robert Gober Joseph Kosuth Jonathan Lasker Elizabeth Murray Amulf Rainer William Wegman David Wojnarowicz Christopher Wool Fall/Winter 1988 Volume 1, Number 2, Special Projects—Fall/Winter, 1988. Original projects created for the issue by: Richard Artschwager, Mike Bidlo, Jennifer Bolande, Barry Bridgwood, Robert Gober, Joseph Kosuth, Jonathan Lasker, Elizabeth Murray, David Wojnarowicz, Christopher Wool. Available as a back issue for $10.00. Limited supply. “More than one observer of the current art scene has noted that discussion among artists—genuine conversation about artistic ideas and goals—has seemingly hit an all-time low. Noting this, the artists John Zinsser and Philip Pocock have taken matters into their own hands—by starting a magazine of their own that contains nothing but interviews with artists.” —Douglas C. McGill, The New York Times, January 22, 1988Journal of Contemporary Art 330 East 19th Street, Box CC New York, N.Y. 10003 (212) 982-6169