“ONGOING DISTANT ROARS DOWN THROUGH FOREST ON FOOTPATH,

CLOSED CABIN, EDELWEISS IN LOG PLANTER, COLD SHADE”

The following conversation took place in playful and casual bursts over email between Brooklyn and Stockholm, mostly from August 18, 2015 through August 20, 2015.

EMMALEA RUSSO: Your work makes me think about the importance of place. Where are you now? What’s it like there?

HELEN MIRRA: I’m in Sweden, though only for 10 days. The August light is friendly — clear and soft, and in Tyresta National Park, lake-swimming is bright, cool, and blueberries and mushrooms are rampant.

Much of your work is process-based and comes out of walking and/or being outside — a “paced printmaking” as you’ve called it. How did this shift to the outside happen?

For seemingly a long while I had been making work about the idea of the outside, without spending much time there. A series of opportunities shifted me out, maybe starting with a year I had a residency in Berlin, with a studio in the forest on the edge of the city It crystallized during another residency year in Basel, when I was given an office rather than a studio to work in — a problem I resolved by deciding to spend the time mostly walking in the mountains, collecting rocks. That being a total pleasure; I knew I wanted to stay outside, and found a strategy for how to do that. There were a few years when the works were all a kind of printmaking. Then it drifted into other forms.

How has the work changed — how are the objects different — making work about the idea of the outside versus being actually outside while making/collecting?

Only at first it was collecting — or, better, borrowing, as I returned most of the rocks to the mountains a few years after I had taken them. When walking became central, in its moving-center kind of way, I became less attached to the so-called work, and these days it feels more like it makes itself, and I assist.

I read an interview where you described yourself as a “careful amateur.” I think of this term often and I like the vastness of it, especially in a time so concerned with specialization and expertise. How does being a careful amateur fit your work and life? What are the benefits and drawbacks?

That’s funny: I think now I’d more say a brazen amateur, trying to be less cautious. “Not-knowing is most intimate.” So much more is available when one is not focused-on, not buttoned-up. So-called mistakes are constant, and no cause for distress; the aim is simply for one’s mistakes to be harmless. Once one is really mostly practicing being a beginner, everything is easier — frustrations still come up but are briefer in duration and easier to set aside, or to flip into curiosity, and approach.

How is a walk in the city different from a walk in the country? Do you have a preference?

It has taken me a while to embrace walking in the city, and it was practicing half-smiling, as described by Thich Nhat Hanh, that has allowed me to. Cities have the disadvantage of concrete and cars, and the advantage of discernible responses to practicing half-smiling. Forests are still the easiest for me: the changing surfaces underfoot, the moving light, the multitude of sounds high and low, near and far, the palpable diversity of species, the distinctions between a wet and a dry forest, in smell and color and the feeling of the air. Mountains are the most eccentric, and object-related.

Where and how do you prefer to spend your time?

I mostly try to drop preferences about where I am, and just be where I am. Still, I do feel most in my element when walking, especially in unmanaged green space, without any need to get anywhere particular, and while standing weaving, alternating balancing on one foot and the other. There are substantial pleasures of being somewhere I altogether or mostly can’t understand the language. This is an obvious kind of not-knowing, when there is nothing to do but pay attention to small gestures and expressions. I’m content in a hammock, particularly the one in our backyard next to where we buried our longtime cat-friend, Maclow.

You have a book called Edge Habitat Materials (2014). I think of walking as an edge practice. How do you think of edges? Who are the artists/people/thinkers who engage edge-space in ways that inform your work, or feel compelling?

I think of the edge being where one thing turns into another, turns inside out, upside down, where synesthesia happens — what happens in translation or communication, looking for and not finding the exactly right word. Of course a classic edge is the one between the familiar and unfamiliar. I think the edge habitat is the territory of André Cadere and Ad Reinhardt, both keystone artists for me. Percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. Translation work of Basho by Kazuaki Tanahashi and of Chinese Buddhist writings by Bill Porter (The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, 2014), Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Forgetting is a great edge.

You have a solo exhibition that opened August 20th in Stockholm. Could you talk a little about the work in the show and the process of making it?

I’ve been weaving on a large triangle loom, with the hypotenuse set at 180, 215, or 240 cm. Each weaving has wool from two black sheep — changing from one to the other halfway through. Three blacks appear: two from the individual sheep, one of their admixture. These three blacks are barely differentiated one from another but for a delimiting colored strand, dyed from foraged mushrooms, drawn through each work. Each inexact triangle is doubled over a cedar support, or folded into an even smaller floor sculpture.

In the fall, I saw your show in New York at Peter Freeman and found myself getting very close to those woven triangles, noticing the different strands of color. Those invited very close looking. I feel this way about much of your work. For example the Quarry works (2007) — small sculptures made with folded pieces of clothing, each with a rock perched on top. I find that these and the triangles ask for a certain kind of hovering and closeness — certainly evoking Dogen’s “not-knowing is most intimate.” Can you say more about the connection between not-knowing and your practice? Zen teachings and your practice?

Hovering is a good word — the aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity — which is one of the ways I think of not-knowing. Like the outdoors and walking going from the theoretical to the actual, it has been the same for me with so-called secular Buddhist philosophy — while I was intellectually engaged with it when I was younger, now I’d say I’m an adherent.

The “aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity” is lovely. It makes me wonder about the ways you’re encountering the outside — the “unmanaged green space” — and how that might relate to the ways in which viewers encounter your work in a gallery.

It’s like walking all day in rain and then coming inside and changing into dry clothes, or sleeping and awake, or vice versa. A gallery is a temporary minimalist habitat, and sort of like an animal shelter. I’m largely in agreement with Rémy Zaugg’s charge for ideal exhibition spaces (his 1986 lecture was recently translated and published: The Art Museum of My Dreams, or, A Place for the Work and the Human Being) and it is a reminder of why, how, they can be worthwhile. Maybe an examined life is best led outdoors, constantly reminded of its interdependence, and the exhibition space is a useful temporary fiction of autonomy for artworks, for another kind of attending to.

What’s next?

Referential weaving experiments, for a pair of shows in Berlin in January with Allyson Strafella. In one space we will show works of ours from 15 to 20 years ago, that we think of as connecting from there to where we are now. In the other, we will show new works, which we consider as reiterations or paraphrases, replies or responses, to each other’s particular existing works (which might or might not be included in the early-work show). Allyson is making typewriter drawings, and I’m making tapestry weavings. We both have very particular limitations, in color for instance, because of the materials we are using (typewriter ink, carbon paper/un-dyed and plant- or mushroom-dyed yarns), and size by the respective widths of typewriter platens and loom warps.

The post “Not-knowing is most intimate”: Helen Mirra in Conversation with Emmalea Russo appeared first on artcritical.

ERIC SUTPHIN: What’s the story with the banners?

BARBARA MADSEN: The banners are something I’ve been making for a long time. I made quite a few post-9/11 in Jersey City, Newark and in Washington DC. So when Arezoo asked me to do a show, I knew immediately that I wanted to put big images in the windows. But I also knew that I wanted to have an interaction with the city, so the banners had to be translucent. People use this room. I spent a lot of time sitting in here, observing people and how they use the space. If the natural light flooding in was blocked it would ruin the experience, and I did a lot of research looking for a material that is translucent, that can breath, change and let the light in.

They’re mysterious. We see them as large-scale photographic images and they might be mistaken for advertisements. Can you talk about their function as images within the city space?

MADSEN: They begin with something that’s very tiny, which I isolate and blow up. In that process they become iconographic and monumental. The objects I photograph are made from a vivid plastic, so you feel that they are advertisements for some kind of a product. When you look at the forms, there is a familiarity but the scale destabilizes your relationship to what the objects might be.

MOHSENI: They lack the text that is generally associated with ads. The banners also have a theatricality. When you see them at night from outside they are backlit and appear to glow.

And this location on Fifth Avenue is important. Fifth Avenue has a history as a sort of marketplace with big window displays showing off products. But while the objects on the banners appear familiar, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at. And that is what differentiates these banners from advertisements: an ad’s job is to be clear and sell you something, but Barb’s work tells us to look and to keep looking. Another function of the banners is that they invite us to look at the sculptures in the windows. Can you talk about the sculptures?

MADSEN: The sculptures are site specific and were made to respond directly to the library’s architecture. I wanted you to be able to see through them form both inside of the library and from the street. I didn’t want them to be closed forms; I wanted them to break down the relationship between image and object. I was thinking a lot about Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (1923 – 48). Each piece is modular so that when the installation is eventually taken down, each unit can function independently.

You mentioned that some of this imagery is taken from the video game Minecraft. This, coupled with the modularity, like Legos or building blocks, makes me think that play is an important aspect of your work.

MADSEN: I am interested in play and I have too much fun with this stuff! One sculpture has a periscope built into it, poking fun at the surveillance camera mounted directly above it. And inside that sculpture is a light, which flashes and twitches to imply that there’s a video playing inside. There’s no video, but it’s like a game of “Who’s watching whom?” There are a lot of visual puns in this piece. I invited the street artist Neanderthalogical to tag one of the pieces, which you can see from outside. I used photographs that I shot throughout the city so that when you’re looking at the sculpture, you’re also looking at the city, through the city through the sculpture.

MOHSENI: Is this the first time you’ve made freestanding sculptural work?

MADSEN: I’ve been using platforms or plinths as supports for my objects. The assemblages covered in photographic images are a first for me. I’ve been thinking about them conceptually, especially in relation to Schwitters, for quite a long time. With the Library installation, I finally had the right venue to make them happen.

MOHSENI: I see Barb’s work connected to a lineage of artists that includes Frank Stella and Nancy Graves. Both of those artists were investigating the disruption of three-dimensional space while also using intense color. The title of the show, “Plastic Age,” is important here. After World War II, plastic became essential in American industry.

But there’s also humor in the title, you’re playing off the historic “Ages” from the Stone to the Bronze and now into the Plastic Age. In two millennia we’ll be known as that weird civilization that left behind mountains of plastic.

MADSEN: When I was upstairs browsing the Pictures Collection I looked through the “Plastics” folder and I found these Monsanto ads from the 1950s showing the joys and possibilities of plastic. In the ‘50s, nobody thought twice about Monsanto. So there’s a conundrum with the love affair they created with plastic: it’s the container of our dreams but also the destruction of our dreams.

You’ve decided to use the vitrines and glass cabinets, tell me about what’s in those spaces.

MADSEN: The vitrines are dedicated to my collaboration with the Venezuelan poet Ely Rosa Zamora. I make images and she then responds with poetry. This particular book is called “The Unspecific Object” kind of making fun of Donald Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects.” Judd was against illusionary space, so I wanted to take back that illusionary space. I put out an open call on Tumblr to have people submit images of objects and upload them to the site. I then had two jurors: Arezoo and Jared Ash (a Special Collections librarian at the Metropolitan Museum), to whom I gave no set criteria, and together they chose 14 images. I asked the winners to send me the actual objects, which I photographed in black and white within architectural spaces I built. Then I printed the images as photogravures.

You’ve talked about your collaboration with Zamora and your interest in language; are there other literary references that shape the exhibition?

MADSEN: In terms of literature and its relationship to space I think about Flatland (1884), Edwin Abbott’s seminal novel about Albert Square, a two-dimensional figure who exists in a three-dimensional world. Square is persecuted and imprisoned for his belief in a third-dimension. The book talks about possibilities that we don’t understand and our limited aptitudes.

Can you talk about the photographs that are hung in the Pictures Collection?

MADSEN: The photographs conflate types of space — interior and exterior, for example — so what happens is a simultaneous implosion/explosion. I think of it as queering space and taking it as your own, transforming it into a place where “fits” and “misfits” can coexist. They’re psychological spaces that suggest possibility but also admit failure.

It’s funny, going back to the ways in which each of your pieces have this dialogue with each other… I’m standing in the Pictures Collection among aisle after aisle of picture files. So there’s a very direct tie to the function of this part of library and to what your work is doing. The sculptures in the window announce or anticipate what happens within the walls of the Pictures Collection. Did you take photos of the library while you were coming up with the idea for the installation?

MADSEN: I did take photos, but then I spent a lot of time going through the image folders in the Collection. This grid piece shows a selection of images that I think of as portraits, in which I try to make visible something that’s usually invisible.

In your case the idea of a portrait implies a relation to the objects you choose to photograph. You humanize or anthropomorphize the objects. You’ve talked about carrying your collection of objects around for over two decades moving with them, as part of a family unit. So it makes a lot of sense that you would document them as portraits.

MADSEN: It’s also a documentation of excess and hyper-consumption.

But I don’t feel you’re making a value judgment against accumulation or consumption.

MADSEN: Absolutely. I strongly believe that angry diatribe is a failed strategy. You can’t reach people by screaming at them. If you can engage people through looking closely, then you might have a chance at a conversation. But I did want to see just how far I could push the portraits without them becoming too baroque. There’s a Neo-Pop-Baroque aspect to them, they’re so excessive.

We’ll there’s a photogravure of a tiara downstairs!

[laughing]

MADSEN: That’s the queen in all of us.

The post Barbara Madsen and Arezoo Moseni in Conversation with Eric Sutphin appeared first on artcritical.