SHERMAN SAM: You were at the Whitney program in 1982/83.

CAROL SZYMANSKI: Yes, and before that I was at the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA in video and performance art.

What did you do at the Whitney?

I was making 3-channel video installations, where I would video people having natural conversations. They would talk about their lives, say at a cocktail party. Then I would go back and transcribe what they said, and then bring them back into the same situation with the transcription and ask them to act out what they had said previously. So that was when I think back on that, I think of it as a bit of a Reality TV show.

It sounds ahead of its time, like something people might do today.

Yeah, I think a lot about that. I kind of stopped making video because at the time we had to carry big porta-paks around and it was very cumbersome. You really needed two or three people and no matter how much you set up a situation to prevent things going wrong technically, something would always go wrong. It was quite a frustrating experience.

At that time I was also very much involved in semiotics, I guess many people were in the early ‘80s, and that drew me to thinking about language. The beginning of making sculpture was developing this font based on the phonetic alphabet. I began to make abstract drawings with the font. I thought of doing the phonetic alphabet, which brought me to the phoneme being the simplest expression or thought that has meaning. I thought, “that’s something I wanna break and I can break it in an abstract way and I’ll have something that’s more than what the phoneme is.” So I took these single letters and started drawing abstract shapes with them with that in mind. That brought me into sculpture in the sense that I really wanted to do something more with the shape. I guess on some level I was thinking in a three-dimensional way although I have no sense of perspective in the sense of a traditional sculpture training [laughs].

Its ok, we’re all artists! None of us have any sense of perspective.

So that sort of evolved over the course of many years—working with fabricators and so on. One thing that I find interesting, reflecting back on that period and stays with my work today, is that I think because I don’t approach making sculpture in a traditional sense. For example I never have a base or a way in which the object sits. In fact a lot of my work have variable qualities… like they can be arranged in different directions. [Points at an image of her horn sculptures] So when I started making the horns from the shapes, they were just made to be held or played, then you can just set them down in whatever way you want.

Don’t you think that this notion of “baselessness” corresponds with that idea that it’s all language or sound or expression. And therefore these things can change and be reorganised. So maybe a base would anchor it too much?

I always think of them as sound and verbal expression connected to sound.

So do you think of them as – all across the work– making sound physical or visual?

Yes, definitely… I think it’s an interesting way to phrase it. I do think about making them physical, but they are more sort of conceptual experiments. I’m more interested in examining an idea or making than the physical object/image. It’s the result of a thought process that’s more like a philosophical position. I don’t want to say a remnant.. but, like something left over.

Maybe a proposition?

I have a degree in philosophy, so I think a lot of my work comes out of that study.

When we’re talking about this period where you shift from video to sculpture after the Whitney program are we talking a 10-year period? A 5-year period?

Well, I always considered video as sculpture, as opposed to film. I think 4-5 years. But I think I’m always not completely satisfied with what I’ve done, and that’s what moves me into the next work. I think I was frustrated with the nature of the medium and the expense involved. But now I would like move back into it.

It seems to me like with this show, although you have many, many different types of objects or expressions, they all feed into this basic proposition of working with sound.

Yes, that’s right.

And what strikes me having known you for so many years now is that its not like you think “oh, I can do this, then do that”, its seems more of an organic process..

At the time I was working with language in an abstract sense, which ended with making this phonetic alphabet and making these horns and the idea was shaped breath and that sound of the horn was a function of the shape of the letter. And that moved it into this language music thing. But I felt that I was running away from meaning in the sense of direct verbal expression. My work is about language but I wasn’t dealing with the words. When I went to London to work at the bank, I was not getting to the studio much. The cockshut dummys, [an email project] which was a practice where I could make art while I worked at the bank. I started writing and did this email project. So the cockshut dummys gave me an opportunity to address that distance from language, and that was satisfying. I loved that! And when I came back to New York I really wanted to write and find a way to incorporate writing and make sculpture at the same time. I wanted to use both and have both represented in my work without it being conceptual art, in the sense of text on a wall. Although I have started playing around with that, too.

What started this newest body of work is the thought that it’s hard for people to read texts on the wall. I picked two letter words, and made two letter word poems and then took the shapes from these two letters. So they would be both readable on the wall and abstract. Then I started looking at two letter words, and that’s when I hit the Solfege or the Solfegio, that’s do re me fa so la ti. Those are two letter words and I never saw them as two-letter words! Then I realised, “well they also represent sounds on a musical scale.. Oh my god!” This became a project I had to do to round out the other side of the horns. It was like a gift. So I returned to working with the font and came up with – what I call – the icons of the Solfege. It was invented by Guido Solfeggio in the Middle Ages. I realized that there were many individuals through out history that worked with it and created adjacent meanings, or in Wittgenstein’s terminology, “family resemblances”. So I was really interested in creating meaning with that kind of adjacency, instead of that variation of a theme which is what we see very much of today and is very much a given way you look at art. [ 1832]

So as I began to create a system, and that’s very much how I work, I create a system and work within it. The first thought was that I wanted the icons to become ballons, inflatable sculptures. I wanted it to be the inverse of the horns. They were shaped breath when blown: your lips round and become a shape. In the horns, air went through a tube but in this case I wanted the air to be contained. And that’s why I thought of inflatable sculpture. I really like the idea of not having a rigid base. I wanted the objects to float around people and move, and be variable.

The funny thing about the balloons is that they remind me of the horns.

That’s right, they were the same shapes as the horns. The first horn I made was “D” “O”. Then I made sculpture out of that shape, out of Lucite, where I had a computer carve that shape.

Today you can just 3-D print that. [laughs] I bet back then it was really difficult to do.

That’s why I stopped doing them.

So you were a pioneer of digital printing before it was digital printing!

It was engineered and took a long time back then: they had to be carved out of a solid block of Lucite. So it makes sense that you saw the same shape.

Coming back to your system, tell me a bit these different notations.

The hands are from John Curwen who wanted to created gestures for sight reading. He also assigned meaning – what I call sense – to the hand gestures, but he only did it for the major scales, so in my situation I added the five minor notes. I saw all of these things as creating music or songs, and I saw them as songs of Solfege. What’s important here is that Isaac Newton created this notation system for the colour and it is very much associated with sound. The things I got very discouraged about with myself was that I was just appropriating every body else’s notation systems… so I said this is silly I have to have my own. That I got very excited about.. so I decided to look at the Curwen meaning for the senses and start there, and got very excited about the interjection because that’s the closest thing between sounds and words that have meaning and their emotions. They’re in the zone between meaning and sound, and I just took interjections and assigned them to the twelve notes, or in the Schoenberg case eleven notes.. Then it came so easily, it was perfect! Music is emotional. It really fits to have an interjection as a musical note to me, that I assigned the 12 interjections and that’s what makes it.

The index feels like a summation, the whole show makes sense with it.

I hate to say this, but this is a lot like the kind of stuff we did at the bank! The charts and the graphs seem to be in my system.

In a sense they’re your I-Ching?

I used to throw the I-Ching all the time! Fundamentally I believe that categories create how we look at the world. And in whatever particular country or society, whatever micro/macro situation you’re in, how things are categorized is the way people understand them. So that’s how I became intrigued by the thesaurus. There really hasn’t been one since Roget that we take seriously. I like reading the thesaurus. I think it’s something I’ve been doing since my 20s. Now the question you haven’t asked me is about nonsense.

Nonsense?

Most of my understanding of reality or operations of behavior and people is that one never really sees what one gets. So there’s always an underlying message going on that you’re never really picking up on. That’s what I took away from the bank! That was going on where I worked. For instance: if a decision had to be made. They brought everyone in, but it had already been made. They just wanted everybody to believe that they were involved in making the decision. So there’s always that element, and nothing really makes sense. In fact what you’re understanding and what’s in front of you does not always make sense. That’s why the Berlusconi quote [a quote attributed as Qaddafi’s last words to Berlusconi is screen printed to the wall] so perfectly reflects that. That’s why I set up this logical or seemingly logical system where in fact it’s nonsensical. I want that nonsense in the system.

The post Nonsense in the System: Carol Szymanski Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

September 15 to October 18, 2015
33A Orchard Street (between Canal and Hester streets)
New York, 646 944 6197

There were essentially two bodies of work festively commingled in Carol Szymanski’s solo show, “My Life is an Index” at Tanja Grunert this fall — each made under different circumstances. A portion of the work was squeezed out in free moments while performing a demanding day job. The rest of it was deliberately produced as part of the artist’s recently resumed full-time studio practice, which had been set aside about a decade ago. The show makes a case for why, even if you have to keep your day job, you should find a way to keep making work. Her book of wry daily accumulations, called Cockshut Dummy Desk Version (2004-2015), was the heart of the show. Note the word play in the book’s title: “Cockshut” and “Dummy” are synonyms, albeit obscure, chosen by the artist for the words in the name of London’s The Evening Standard tabloid, which she passed on the newsstands during her workday commute. Reminiscent of an old-school library reference tool, the 12-inch stack of two-hole-punched, letter-size pages were bound by a pair of upright metal loops. 11 years in the making, the self-published tome was presented on a small vintage table with a stool in the middle of the gallery. The book’s culturally diverse, encyclopedic content has been shown previously in different forms. To support her family, Szymanski put her studio practice on pause in the early 2000s to take the aforementioned day job as an investment banker, the demands of which only left time for composing one daily email — of images, text or both. The subjects of her messages were based on free-association responses to her day’s experiences paradoxically organized around the comprehensive epistemological classes found in Roget’s Thesaurus. Hillary Clinton-style, the emails have been saved, printed and bound.

Cockshut Dummy was reformatted in two ways in the exhibition: uploaded digitally on a wall-mounted iPad installed near the front door, and edited down to a single quote in 833, Cheerfulness; “Ciao Berlusconi, Libia sta benissimo, non c’e problema” (2015), which was silk-screened on the opposite wall. The phrases in the title of the work which comprised the selected quote broadcast — in large dark blue, hand painted letters — the cheery words of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to his pal, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi just before their respective falls from power. Szymanski selected the quote because it most perfectly represented the profoundly absurd and dangerous sphere she was privy to while working inside an established financial institution as world markets collapsed.

By presenting the book in these different ways the artist established a loose formal connection to the second, more recent body of work spilling around the space, reviving the artist’s multidisciplinary exploration of units of expression. Szymanski’s 12 tone interjection series (2015) graphs Arnold Schoenberg’s modern musical scale with involuntary vocalizations, two-letter musical alphabets, an encoding of color with different emotions, hand gestures, and composite letter forms. Framed in white, the silkscreen print presents 8 rows of text and pictograms stacked in 12 columns banded in the colors of the spectrum. In correlating these multi-sensory elements, some created by the artist and others credited to writers, scientists and musicians from the last five centuries, Szymanski offers us rudimentary tools for building new languages, presumably in order to think new thoughts. The work on paper functions as a Rosetta Stone-like key to her newest work; she has also translated its concepts into various physical forms, including here neon sculptures, shaped floating inflatables made of Mylar, abstract cibachrome photographs and flat, single-image paintings. Content from Szmanski’s two oeuvres was also intertwined in musical compositions by Betsy McClelland performed in the gallery by Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble during the run of the exhibition and in readings by Mary Ann Caws and Barry Schwabsky.

The artist’s consideration and practical application of the philosophy of knowledge is the fundamental connection between the pieces associated with the book and those related to the 12 tone series. How, as part of making our way in the world, do we make and use categories? Recent brain research shows that language, which is dependent on classification systems, is one of the drivers in the evolution of the structure of our brains; what and how we think ultimately affects what we are capable of conceiving. In a 2014 interview, Szymanski cited the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987), as one of her inspirations. Lakoff summarizes the potential for his new way of organizing our thoughts, “[We] will be considering … a shift from classical categories to prototype-based categories defined by cognitive models. It is a change that implies other changes: changes in the concepts of truth, knowledge, meaning, rationality—even grammar.” Cockshut Dummy alloys specific information Szymanski gleaned from her work in the material world with the artist’s philosophical concerns, while the 12 tone series reveals the artist’s response to related ideas made in a cloistered, open-ended context. Overall, the more recent, brightly colored work creates an upbeat, scavenger hunt aesthetic with Szymanski celebrating the freedom of her return to the studio.

As with the new research on the workings of the brain Szymanski’s more recent work overall feels bold and intriguing, but also somewhat preliminary; some of her objects suggest but don’t fully embody her ideas. Ironically, while engaging to ponder, the instructional 12- tone chart took some of the fun away from one’s own decoding of the images and materials in the show. I found myself musing about alternative installations of the exhibition where a reduced selection of work was included. The iPad, 12-tone chart, the neon and floating sculpture appear superfluous to the viewer’s explication of such engaging objects as the book on its table, the photographs, silk-screened wall text and a set of smaller paintings and photograph fragments exhibited in a cluster. Cockshut Dummy, created in a less-is-more environment feels more inherently resolved and tied to the tenor of our times; a weighty prize for the deserving winner of the show’s party game.

The post Day Jobs, Dictators and Musical Scales: Carol Szymanski at Tanja Grunert appeared first on artcritical.

April 26 to May 26, 2012
558 West 21st Street at 11th Avenue
New York City, 917-226-3851

On December 12, 2008 in her ongoing Emailed text piece, “Cockshut Dummy,” Carol Szymanski quoted one of her French banker colleagues as saying “in this climate don’t go pissing against the wind.” This man added, “That’s not an easy one for a girl to understand.” Szymanski admitted, “they had me on that one.” Then, she added, “I said, ‘Oh yea now I get it.’” That conversation gave her part of the title for this exhibition. A visual artist who deals with the literal meanings of language, Szymanski originally was concerned with the smallest units of linguistic meaning. Her charcoal drawings from 1996 contain variations on the word “stand.” And the three brass horns in Him (2001-12) form the shape of that word. More recently, she has expanded her concern to larger units of language, to texts. To understand and describe a way of life, you must understand how people compose their sentences. And because she is interested, specifically in how bankers present themselves, she became a political artist.

When Szymanski started exhibiting, in the late 1980s, Marxist-based art criticism was all the rage. The only legitimate goal of art, so we were told endlessly, was to critique the social order. But since the galleries and the artists who exhibit in them are a very peripheral part of that system, it was always superabundantly obvious that studying art galleries is not the best way to teach you how capitalism functions. To learn that, you need to enter the financial world, which is what Szymanski did. When she became an upscale banker in London, she wrote about that experience, sending to a few lucky friends a series of texts and images (mostly taken with the camera of her mobile phone), which was transmitted by e-mail every evening at the end of her working day. Walking in The City, London’s equivalent of Wall Street Szymanski noticed the Evening Standard form of advertisements, which had catchy and ironic phrases on them to get people to buy the newspaper. “I always enjoyed reading these placards . . . .They were an odd form of poetry for me.” Hence the origin of the name “Cockshut Dummy”: “for the word Evening, I chose cockshut which means evening twilight and dummy for the word Standard.”

Szymanski’s We Want We Said Wanted More (2010-2012), taken from “Cockshut Dummy,” includes many fragments of conversations from her banker-colleagues. (No image accompanies this text.) Like the words in Stephen Mallarmé’s prose poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”) or in Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974), with its juxtaposition of quotations from Hegel and Jean Genet, hers are not easy to decipher. Szymanski’s banker’s world is opaque to us art writers as, no doubt, our concerns are to them. If you want an account in plain English of what bankers are doing, then you should read The Nation. We Want We Said Wanted More is a work of art, which is to say that its relationship to the economic and political history it draws upon is elliptical, subtle and indirect. To fully comprehend Szymanski’s achievement, you need to read and view “Cockshut Dummy.” Soon that cumulative work of art will be completed and published, and so that will be possible. Meanwhile, this marvelously suggestive mini-retrospective, which speaks in deeply original terms to our present aesthetic and political concerns provides a good introduction to the ambitious oeuvre of a great mid-career artist, whose art deserves (and soon will surely receive) close sustained discussion.

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