X-TRA’s Artists and Rights is a conversation series exploring what art can do at the intersection of Los Angeles’s most urgent issues and artistic practice. Each session brings four artists together around a table.
Episode 4:
Episode 4: What Solidarity Feels Like: Unlearning, Finding Alignment, and Being Uncomfortable
with Cog•nate Collective, Vishal Jugdeo, Patrick Staff, and Elana Mann
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In today’s episode, the group picks up their conversation and works to define and reframe the idea of the artist.
This session was recorded back in February 2020. Before COVID-19 had a name, and before the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a global movement for racial justice. And yet, this conversation addresses the present in so many ways. They discuss what solidarity looks like and the complexities of collaboration. Assessing different levels of need across groups, and understanding the time and work to achieve transformation. They acknowledge that it very well might be necessary to be uncomfortable.
The stories they share span working with women vendors in a market in Tijuana, collaborating across continents with a trans person in India, partnering with non-artist tech startups, and maintaining and activating criticality towards art institutions while working within them. They talk more about the need to re-imagine art history and to look beyond art institutions to find guidance.
They also grapple with the need to un-do and un-learn what they were taught in school. And identify this is a key step in the decolonization of the mind, a concept introduced in the first episode by Todd Gray. One take away from this episode is that the future must be built on a foundation of solidarity, that careful collaboration and reciprocity require dialogue and risk. And, importantly, it will take time.
Learn about the Artists
Cog•nate Collective, Vishal Jugdeo, Patrick Staff, and Elana Mann
Keywords
dialogue, different forms, critical agency, aspiration, scales of change, art worlds, institutions, unlearning, transformation, decolonization, collaboration, solidarity, interdisciplinary, platforms
Reference Links
Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator supports creatives with their Artist in Residence program.
Mujeres Mixtecas, the textile cooperative that collaborated with Cog•nate Collective.
Learn more about John Baldessari’s practice in the interview between the artist and Moira Roth published by X-TRA in 2005.
** Scroll down for full transcript**
Elana Mann and Mario Ontiveros at Catasonic Studios.
(L-R) Artists Vishal Jugdeo and Patrick Staff listen to Cog•nate Collective (not pictured) at Catasonic Studios.
Cog•nate Collective (Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz) listen during the Artists and Rights conversation.
Acknowledgements
Executive Producers: Shana Lutker and Mario Ontiveros.
Recorded at Catasonic Studios in Echo Park by Mark Wheaton.
Production and editorial assistance from Sara Ellen Fowler and Theo Greenly.
This series was made possible by generous support from California Arts Council Art and Public Media Grant, the Michael Asher Foundation, and KCET’s Artbound.
Thanks to all who contributed to the development of this series, including Ellen Birrell, Andrea Bowers, Ian Chillag, Neha Choksi, Poppy Coles, Justin Cram, Gilda Davidian, Juan Devis, Sara Ellen Fowler, Harry Gamboa Jr., Theo Greenly, Kara Hart, Carren Jao, Anuradha Vikram, Brica Wilcox, Matty Wilder, and Lindsay Preston Zappas.
TRANSCRIPT
(Session Recorded 02/13/20)
Vishal Jugdeo: I mean, I was actually really interested in where we left off the conversation: talking about different types of collaboration and reciprocity. But then also this idea of setting up some kind of relational structure that you can return to. And just thinking about that in relationship to this larger question of urgency. And actually tying it into a previous conversation about slowness and interdisciplinarity and cross-knowledge sharing and production, and how those things kind of unfold. And because I was thinking about some of the work that I’ve been doing in India, which has, you know, been over like four years. And it is a place that I cannot get to, like, you know, by driving or something. And so it’s hard to sort of really kind of I mean, like learning new structures. And for me and my work life that type of collaboration is really actually new, and it’s really interesting to then learn. And also the people that I’m working with are not artistic or not necessarily connected to art, per se. And so just thinking about how that type of knowledge production can kind of actually happen in a way that is mutually beneficial or mutually generative. And I guess I don’t have any question or thought, but it just was something that I was sort of felt towards the end of the previous conversation–we kind of got to this place where I could just feel all of these ideas sort of coexisting between us here.
Patrick Staff: I mean, I would, I would be interested to ask you quite specifically about the work you’ve been making, because my understanding is that there’s a sort of main protagonist or a main person that you’ve been working with who, to my understanding, is trans? ([YES]) And I mean, I’m interested I suppose in a way, like whether your work acts as a vehicle for them to get somewhere, but maybe also what that relationship is between working in the US and India? And how that, like, the kind of nitty gritty of that, I’m actually really interested in…
VJ: Well it’s actually quite interesting because it came up when I was in December in India shooting, like I realized that I just in making the work I kind of hit a real like road bump because I realized that actually Vikram, who I’ve been working with, in a way, over the course of time, our desires in relationship to one another sort of shifted. Where I realized that actually, I was becoming more and more interested in Vikram’s political engagement, and, and because in all the while that we’ve been shooting together, there has been–as was mentioned earlier–the kind of rise of the sort of, like, of this kind of ethno nationalism, you know, within India. And that’s actually happened just sort of in the backdrop of this process of us working together. And because a lot of Vikram’s work actually has to do with political activism, but what came up in December is that I realized that actually Vikram is far more interested not in leaving that behind when we work together and actually more interested in exploring self representation, in exploring being represented, actually, and like seeing themselves like in image form.
PS: Represented to who do you think?
VJ: Well, that’s an interesting question. And that also came up a lot this time where I realized, because it turns out that in the last few visits it has been revealed that it’s more (the work) has been more about a relationship between Vikram and this other person. So there’s a sort of a second central protagonist. But what I realized was that because Vikram–actually, mobility internationally is prevented by the fact that they don’t have a passport. And it’s been very difficult to gain a passport and which partly has to do with being trans and like, and going through the kind of methods that it will take to get these kinds of government documents. What it’s produced is that there’s actually, like, they have a real sort of imagined idea of who a viewer is or who an audience is because the work is not actually circular. I mean, it hasn’t, because it’s very much in-progress that hasn’t circulated broadly anywhere, regardless, but, and I realized that we came up against that where it was sort of like: who is this imagined audience that you have? And I realized that Vikram was sort of constantly thinking of a particularly white outside audience. And then when I sort of also had to make the point that it was that the audience and those that I found have been interested in the work are actually not necessarily white. It’s actually very intersectional and very diverse who they’re in conversation with, but this kind of funny notion of a sort of an outside “I”/eye became really interesting to me and also like a total complication that I knew is there but I don’t think I had looked at such an extent. But I yeah, I don’t want to say too much more, because I know it might sound, it might be a bit esoteric to an audience that doesn’t know exactly what we’re talking about.
PS: Does that resonate?
Elana Mann: Yeah, I mean, it kind of resonates with me just in terms of as a project’s going with a collaborator or a partner, then the desires change or the desires, you realize them more. I just was collaborating with this feminist activist artist group that works on issues of gender in Japan and Korea, mostly, but Asia, broadly. And something that kept on coming up over time, like, you know, I sort of invited the: Hey, let’s work together. And they were really excited and we started working, but then this roadblock or issue with working with them was: for them, it’s so much about direct action. So it’s like, how is what we’re doing together going to be part of a campaign that we’re doing or how are we going to apply it to our work? And I was really interested in that too. But as an artist, it was like, well, I don’t know. And I can offer you this. And I still really want to work together. But you know, like this is also going to exist in a gallery at some point as well. And so that was just a space we had to negotiate. And they were like: oh, this thing’s happening right now and we have to make something for it immediately. And it was like, well, but we’re not done with our project. And so there were these urgencies that were happening. And these unpredictabilities of the political situation like: oh, there’s an election and we don’t know how that’s going to be resolved or what issues that we’re going to focus on or whatever. And it was like, well, as an artist, I can’t respond that quickly to that election in a few weeks or whatever. So that goes back to temporality but also to like, just collaboration and urgency, different urgencies, and so on.
Amy Sanchez Arteaga: Yeah, I also, I start to think about, like, different notions of like solidarity, too. And now, I think for us, we have a clear notion of what solidarity looks like and what it means to enact that. And then, like walking into each collaboration that we undertake with folks, you realize, like, oh, actually, we have to have a conversation about that again, because that means like, really different things for really different people. So yeah, like dialogue, is, I think, like really fundamental to determining what solidarity looks like in each collaboration, and then what representational strategies are applied.
EM: Could you just like maybe describe two different solidarities? I’m just curious. So curious, yeah, the different solidarities.
ASA: So I think about like, so for instance, a project that we did fairly early on in Tijuana was working with a group of women who have a collective called Mujeres Mixtecas, which is based in Tijuana. And they are women who are mostly from the state of Guerrero or who moved to the north to work largely in the manufacturing industries in the maquiladoras. Many of them, like, after working in the factories for several years started families and once they had children were fired from their jobs. And so they needed to find a way to supplement their income. And so they started a collective where they would make clothing, like school uniforms for children in the neighborhood, and also start to do embroidered blouses, so kind of like traditional Mexican embroidery. And they wanted to sell those blouses at the market, at the Mercardo de Artesanias de La Linea, which is like the artisan market of the borderline – is what that translates to. And so at the time, we had the space. And so the other complication is that there was like a moratorium on permits for vending. So when they would take their blouses to sell them for, you know, like 15 or $20, or whatever, which would be like a substantial profit that they could make to take home. A lot of times those products or their blouses would be confiscated by the authorities and they’re gonna eat that because they didn’t have permits to have a permit. It’s like, three or $400 a month, I mean, something like just in dollars also this is like not pesos. So these women, because of just like structural racism and sexism, were just completely shut out from vending in the space, right. And we got to know some of them and sort of befriended them. And so what we realized was any product that was finished from within the space of that market, because the space the physical infrastructure was permitted, that product was then permitted. So it’s like, if you finished it there, then it was, like, legal, it was sanctioned. And so what we did was we invited them to do a residency with us where they brought objects that were like, mostly finished. They do most of the embroidery like at home, in their collective, but then a few people at a time would sit in our space, and they would finish the embroidery. And then because it was finished there, it could be sold there. And so that’s a really direct form of solidarity where we’re like, yeah, you need to sell, you need a space to produce like, here we have one. But I think other times it’s been more like: could you just help us edit a video? And like, take some photos? Or I think working especially with, like immigrant rights campaigns in Orange County. It was more just like, yeah, yeah, like the people at the forefront of this need to be the families that are impacted, need to be folks who are fighting the deportation of their loved ones, which we understood. But so it’s not the space is less that question and it’s more like “all hands on deck,” what are the kind of spheres of reproduction and producing images and language that create platforms for folks? To just think about: what are different platforms and like scales of platform? And how do you like co-author those? I guess, is a question we ask.
Misael Diaz: But also this, I think it becomes a thing about learning to negotiate, what scale of change you’re invested in–as an artist–and whether that coincides with the person that you’re collaborating with, right? Because I think like, oftentimes, working, especially with activist organizations, the scale of change is immediate, right? It’s like direct action. And so now it’s the campaign, it’s this law, like, it’s a very specific target. Whereas I think especially working from the realm of art, and everything, like cultural, social, we’re thinking about, like, radical change in the sense of going to the root of the issue. And to go to the root of an issue to really like, dig something out, like, you know, white supremacy, that’s the scale of transformation and the time that that’s gonna take us is a lot different than the kind of immediate need that is at hand. So I think making that connection and straddling that is definitely a challenge. But I think that that’s a really interesting question for that we’ve been interested in trying to address and trying to develop things that could potentially try to do both, maybe. Maybe not always at the same scale or at the same level of intensity. But I think we’re conscious about that. The relationship between those two scales and yeah, like the different levels of need, and what it’s ultimately needed for change to take place.
PS: It’s funny, I’ve been working, I suppose, recently, in a very different set of conditions or with a very different set of stakes than necessarily ones we’ve been talking about so far. In that I’ve just kind of come out of working on an exhibition in the UK at this institution, which is, I suppose, within the British context, occupies a very large level of visibility [Serpentine Galleries, London] you know. It’s you know it’s a gallery that is publicly funded, it’s in the middle of like the biggest park in London so it’s visitor figures are insane because there’s just like dog walkers, families tourists, whatever, like coming through the door constantly all day. But they also deliberately, as a way to sort of survive as a publicly funded institution, do a lot of very like visible public… they have like big galas and you know, call a lot of like, celebrity staff and then they do shows with artists like Marina Abramovich, like, they go for these big like summer blockbusters every now and then. And so, I was invited to do a show, obviously is like one of their kind of offseason emerging artist moments, you know, which is fine, but it also like, you know, for me on the one hand represents a sort of paradigm shift of going to a level of visibility that has not previously been available or something. But also knowing that that invitation comes with a certain, on the one hand, desire to absorb a criticality within my practice, you know, to be the institution seen to be exhibiting these critical works, while at the same time for me having to enter into that situation and know that in reality, they’re going to try and wriggle out of me directly speaking to them as an institution, you know, what I mean? And as a British artist who lived in London, studied in London, like this institution also, to me always represented a certain place in the ecology of like British arts. And so I entered into it, knowing that I wanted to somehow find a way to be, like, critical of the relationship between that type of institution, a certain idea of a public, a certain position as it connects to like a broader British politics almost in this very, like, hometown or, like, home country kind of way. You know, and it was like, it’s just me making sculptures and videos and whatever. But kind of trying to find a way to retain a critical agency within a structure that really doesn’t allow for very much. And that actually a lot of those strategies ended up being about having to find ways to kind of go under the immediate or under the surface a little bit and kind of flip it from within, and it’s such a difficult, complicated position to be in. And it’s also I suppose like, working in that context, I think puts me in greater proximity to the 1%, or a greater connection to a certain echelon of the art world, when I feel that my personal politics are far more invested in a certain solidarity that is like the 99%. And particularly like working within the gallery wanting to deal with, not even about bringing them into the work, but having a relationship with the team that works in the office, the people that work on the front desk or whatever. But realizing that I inherently represent someone that goes back and forth between worker and like doyen of these wealthy people, you know. So it’s like at the gallery dinner, I’m seated at the top table, generally feeling very like alone, but also in a huge position of privilege. I don’t know, it’s like such a complicated position to find oneself in when you don’t just want to fully give yourself over to this financial capital extreme money laundering, like, hell that is that version of the art world, you know? And there’s, there’s no real like answer to that. But I’m, I guess I’m stuck in this conversation that maybe I’ve been dabbling in different pools or something… and it’s just really difficult. It’s really hard…. without wanting to be like “boo hoo, poor me.”
VJ: Yeah, no, I mean, I was thinking about that. Just in following your previous question about, you know, was this, yeah, this question of you mean, in a way, this work has been so weird and complicated for me that I’ve been working on because it doesn’t feel like it has a home within that kind of 1% or, or, or I’m cognizant of, of what, what kind of conflict intention that feels like at its core or something. And that actually, it complicates this question of solidarities Because I think we’re also getting to a point in knowledge production where we’re understanding that everything is just specific. And we don’t always have to be looking for these kind of global linkages between things. And sometimes that’s the sort of, there’s a sort of an impure, like a neo-imperialism to that desire for constantly finding sort of like solidarities or, or. Yeah. So it’s yeah, it’s really, really. That’s when things get really kind of complicated and almost irresolvable.
PS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I find myself… I don’t know how this is for you guys. But I find myself often looking for models or ways of being, often with like older artists or people, and often feeling like it falls very short, you know desiring to find a way to be like: okay, how do I retain making the type of work that I make but it moves, is starting to move, into these different contexts? And one thing to then speak to these like senior is who fish I feel like you probably work with a lot of them wanting to be like, how do you keep doing this? But actually like no one is ever really able to offer much solace. And also feeling very much like you start to see people not want to trouble the conditions you know, like, for instance, without wanting to, like, get messy and sort of name names. Like I had a really negative experience with a large institution last year when I was beginning to work on a show with them, and I was at the same time, being involved with the workers at the museum who were unionizing. I went into the institution and immediately went to them, said: okay, I’ve been invited to do this show, please let me know what I can do to be in allegiance with you guys and like work with you. And subsequently, I was treated very badly by the senior management of that institution, and ended up pulling out of the show. And it was very lonely because I wasn’t part of the union and this and this artist worker who sort of temporarily passes through the institution. But I didn’t really feel like there were any other artists that I could talk to, to even have some sense of solidarity like we’re talking about. Yeah, it’s my therapy session now.
EM: I once heard this really big curator say like: “Yeah, we have to give space for this political work. Otherwise, those artists will go after us, as a museum.” And that was just so…
Mario Ontiveros: Institutional sustainability. Yeah. A bit of dissonance and that we get back to business as usual.
EM: Exactly. Yeah. And I was just, it was, I was really young at the time. And I was just so shocked to hear because this was also a curator that I really liked, had respected and been like: oh, she puts on such great stuff. And then I was like: oh, it’s just that’s why. Yeah, I mean, I think part of my strategy with that has been to also work in non-art spaces. And that has its own loneliness too. Because you’re the only artist, you’re like this kind a weirdo with these weird ideas, you know, and you don’t have that communal understanding that maybe you do with other artists or artist professionals. And the art world doesn’t care at all about what you’re doing. But at the same time, the people that you’re working with and the community that you’re working with are just totally stoked most of the time or just like, are really, you know, are surprised and curious, at least if they’re not stoked. And, and so that’s been just a nice back and forth. Like, I just did a residency at the Los Angeles Clean tech incubator downtown. And, you know, yes, I was kind of like this weirdo artist that these startups didn’t really know what to do with. But at the same time, I was meeting and engaging and collaborating with people that were thinking about the environment, and impact. They’re also thinking about capitalism and money, but like, but they were thinking about these like social causes that were… it was so inspiring to me just to think about impact in, like, a different way. And to think about different things rather than like, oh, who was getting written about in x publication or who just got x big grant or like who was in this big show or whatever. But it is, it is hard because in that loneliness, because, you know, like, like I said, most of the art world just doesn’t care what happens outside of its walls. So…
MO: Do you think, it sounds also, connecting some of the previous conversations that we’ve had, one of the topics that has come up which I hear again, here as each of you are rethinking the notion of an artist and that the very idea of entering into a conversation with the community as I’m an artist often can foreclose a discussion or even foreclose solidarities. But then I hear the way the various strategies that you’ve had about trying to reconfigure in the work that you’re doing with others what an artist can do, as opposed to what an artist is. And so those solidarities can happen maybe because you’re pushing against those traditional notions of what an artist can do, or should do or might want to do.
ASA: Mm hmm.
EM: Yeah, I don’t think I mean, I was thinking about this recently when John Baldessari passed because I was thinking about like, Oh, just my own work and his work. And I was like, Oh I’m so… my interests are very different. But also related. But I was like, I’m not, as I get older, I’m like, not as much interested in, art history in terms of like, as an artist, how can I speak to art history and like invent something new because I don’t really think that I don’t really believe in that anymore. But like, I am thinking about like, as an artist, what can I do? Like what’s possible? How can I, like, instrumentalize my activity, my vision, my role and like, make things happen instead of working so much with art history as, like, my goal, I guess. So, I don’t know how you guys feel about that. But…
ASA: Yeah, I feel very like absolutely resonant with that. I think like one of the weird… I think it was meant as a compliment, but it feels I don’t know if it was like a compliment on our artistic, like, acumen or whatever. But so we had this in the market space that we started out with in the corner, we had like a rat problem, which was ,like, bad until we had a cat, Walter Benjamin Medica was the cat’s name, like, but whenever we would arrive to this stall, I would have to like sweep up all of the like rat droppings and like filth and we would have to do all this cleaning before we welcomed people in. So it was like a whole project of disinfecting before we could, like, start to make art, you know. And so one day, a couple of the shop owners were just like watching us, because it was particularly bad. And they came over it and they were like, you know, before we met you, we didn’t know that like, artists worked hard. Because there was like this kind of romantic idea of like the solitary artists did like a studio or something like toiling in their mind. And I remember we laughed, because I think, implicit also to that compliment was this, like, you’re doing this wrong, like you don’t like nobody taught you how to art right. And it goes back to that, yeah, like the expansion that you’re talking about that… like I think maybe more interested in art is like work and then what can like work do in our practice that I think we’re interested in? Yeah, I feel very resonant with that.
EM: Yeah so back to your student. It’s like, it’s like yeah, art history is totally important, but or AND like, you can be, you know, invested in these other histories or these other ways of working are being that are informed by but not like, held captured by or something.
VJ: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been really interested just in how fragmentary things have become in a really, actually, I think that that’s a positive thing like is, you know, I don’t know. And it’s interesting to see how these things shift. Like I was thinking, you know about like the MOMA’s rehang of their collection in this kind of, like, you know, in certain ways, there is something quite beautiful and impressive about actually how they managed to sort of begin the process of sort of decolonization or something of their own kind of collecting practices. And yet, I remember leaving the museum and thinking I don’t think I remember any indigenous folks in that museum and, and then speaking to one of the curators, and, and, and I actually kind of appreciated his response, he said: well, we weren’t going to just go willy nilly and throw in some things. We really have identified that research needs to happen. And this is going to be a longer process before we start sort of whatever, telling that side of the story or something like that. And it all felt sort of complicated to me because it was like, well, yeah, I mean, like, is this institution the one that we want to actually do that work? Why do we actually hold this institution so centrally as in terms of its importance? And like, will, is there, you know, when we see this institution, attempt to include the global south in its story of art or you know, include histories of you know, black artistic production in the United States or things like that, is it also always framed, like, in relationship to this central canon? And it truthfully is. So yes, there’s some impressive shifts, but I don’t know that we actually see a kind of erosion of that sort of very deep rooted column of kind of, like, cannon.
EM: Even the word inclusion.
VJ: Exactly. And that’s where it’s sort of, like, you know, I think that’s, you know, like these processes of decolonization or inclusion or etc, like, like, like, I don’t know, how possible they are within these institutions, unless we completely dismantle these institutions in a lot of ways, you know, because they really risk just becoming… I don’t know, there’s always this sort of risk that something just becomes this kind of or it fits too carefully into also neoliberalism.
EM: Yeah, I’ve just been struck by the last few Whitney Biennials, and like how reticent that institution is to just even opening up space for conversation of dissent. Like, you know, let’s all just–maybe we won’t change anything or whatever, but like–let’s have a discussion. You know, just like there’s such a stranglehold on the communication or discussion that’s possible. And that’s, that’s hard. I think, for me, it’s frustrating as an artist. Like with each biennial, it’s like there’s a new controversy and then, but there’s no like: okay, we acknowledge, like, our shortcomings and, like, we’re opening up space. Yeah. So…
VJ: But then it’s, you know, kind of reminds me of like the Academy Awards conversation… we all are still sort of playing along by centralizing the importance of this. Yeah, like actually, maybe we just, like have to, like, similar to the Whitney Biennial, like, it’s like, what why are we? Why are we as a culture so attracted to kind of these things that represent excellence or represent the kind of tower that one wishes, you know. It’s sort of like, we can shift the character of it, but actually, just our aspiration towards it is already the thing that needs questioning.
MO: But don’t you think each of you though, I mean, I wonder if just there’s also a pressure of you. There’s the politics that arrives with accepting that invitation. But then you’re not limited to just that space. I mean, part of what I hear you all saying is that you’re working in multiple tiers, multiple art worlds. And so sustaining that engagement with a Whitney Biennial, but also recognizing that there are other art worlds or art centers or art relations, relations around art that matter. And so part of me feels like: well, why would I want to give up that I actually want to be able to intervene, because that’s not my only intervention. And I’m just wondering because it feels like that’s, there’s the pressure about sustainability is also the exhausting part of it is: what if I, if I could only just focus on the Whitney Biennial, amazing, right? But the fact is that each of you have all said that, but I’m not just interested in that. And so it’s like trilingual, right? I mean, it’s not just a bilingual practice. It’s a trilingual practice.
MD: We have to think about it politically. It’s like, yeah, like recognizing that the state isn’t the agent of transformation or change, please still vote because it could be a lot worse, right? Like how do you make the institution potentially less violent? Even where it’s like it’s not even transformative or de-centering it, but like how do you make it enact violence slightly differently, slightly less injury upon bodies of color, upon histories–like how does it not erase them? Even if it isn’t the institution that will celebrate them or like will preserve them in any significant way. Yeah, it’s a very low bar I think. It’s just like, how do we just not make it harder for ourselves to exist as parties who have been for so long erased and not centered and abused in different ways? Yeah, so it’s definitely an all hands on deck also kind of situation. Where you kind of exist in as many different forms as you can. I think like this comes up for us sometimes in relation to like, oh, like, how do you define your work? Like, is it border art? Or is it like Chicano? Latino? It can be whatever you want it to be–whatever it’s gonna allow us to, I think exist and facilitate as much connection as possible. So it’s also like, I think what I sensed in some of the conversation earlier was like this kind of recognition of, or this needing to be cognizant of, not being instrumentalized, right, like whether it is by institution or even by community groups that are sometimes you know, just seeing labor as that and not as like something that is tied to a greater political end. But sometimes, I think we do maybe turn that into like: how to instrumentalize like certain resources within an institution. How to mobilize resources that wouldn’t be available otherwise. So I think that I don’t know if instrumentalized is the right word, but maybe like activate or maybe redistribute, thinking in Marxist terms, resources, but um, yeah, like how do you tap into these to as many pools as you can given that the scale that you’re trying to especially, I think, navigate these different scales of change. Yeah, and that can be a tricky thing, because you often end up being in a position where you can also be instrumentalized. And so it becomes a complex negotiation.
EM: I really appreciate practices like all of yours, and I would love for artists to not just use their creative energies on the artwork, but also use their creative energies in like the presentation of the artwork in their thinking about their careers in general. And I feel like sometimes creativity is just segmented towards like a studio situation. And I feel like there’s like all aspects of one’s life, that creativity could be a career, that creativity could be applied.
MO: Can you talk a little bit about unlearning? Because the other part of the other thing that’s sort of come up is this, I mean, part of what we’ve learned through graduate schools and institutions is how to work within those institutions, how to perform for them and make deliverables. But I also like the strategy of reflecting action, reflecting unlearning, which was some of the key words that sort of came up and just as an unlearning strategies, each of you sort of found different ways, whether it’s with a student or a gallery, or in a neighborhood setting or in your gallery. Unlearning it’s sort of a learning process in real time, but this is what I’ve learned as an artist I’m supposed to do but now, I need to unlearn those and rethink and come up with different strategies to sustain my practice.
PS: Yeah, I, unfortunately, I think that all of my moments of unlearning have been preceded by some sort of fuckup. Can I swear? It’s rare that the sort of unlearning happens from its own, like, meditative holistic moment of, like, okay, I mean, like, yes, yes, I sort of, you know, one one easy example of that is that I went to an art school that based a lot of its teaching and deeply like combative and competitive models. So we were really encouraged to be kind of like hot house. You know, you win a crit by kind of tearing down a pier, and there was a it that didn’t require me to have some awful experience. Well, it wasn’t an awful experience in itself, but leaving that school and being like: oh, actually, I really need to need to undo a lot of what was taught to me there about how I relate to other artists. That I suppose is not necessarily one where something catastrophic had to happen. But I do think that more often than not, it comes out of an experience with a gallery or a collaborator, or even a simple interaction with a senior figure within the art world or something like that. Where I’ve most often walked away and been like, okay, I really need to undo what I’ve received as being this is the way that our world operates on this is the way that I am meant to behave as an emerging artist or this already or whatever, you know. Yeah, but I wish there was an easier way to sort of, like, implement that unlearning. Rather than what feels genuinely kind of comes out of trauma…
ASA: It’s funny, my mother used to come with us to a lot of openings and events and to like, yeah, she’s just a very supportive lady. And I thought it was really funny, because when she was at an opening, and there were people who, like I really respected and kind of admired there, sort of like these senior artists figures, but my mother didn’t know like anybody. She was a social worker, right. So she like and worked, like in social services and education. So she was just kind of there for the party, so she had like her glass of Chardonnay and was hanging out. And then I was doing something and she started, she went over to somebody who’s work I really admire and was like: Oh, hi, like, nice to meet you. I’m like, oh, well, what do you know, you’re an artist, so is my daughter. What do you like. So she started, like, leveling these really, like, kind of, like, critiques without, like, meaning to just like in a very like mom-way of like: Oh, my daughter does that kind of thing too. But oh like oh, but if it’s a collaboration, why are you directing it? Like I was like, whoa, like, whoa, and I felt like actually, yeah, like inviting. I think one of the ways not from trauma that happened for me in my life is just inviting people close to me who I have love for into that experience so that I can like see it through their eyes. And I think that goes back to the point about interdisciplinarity and just kind of like inviting other kind of epistemes into. Because I was like: Oh my gosh, like I yeah, thank you, Mom. But also like: Whoa, like I don’t think you understand that that maybe was, like, hurtful or something, I don’t think and it wasn’t it wasn’t meant that way. But anyway.
PS: That’s incredible.
MO: That’s actually a perfect story to sort of wrap up. That’s really, really cool. Yeah. Well, thank you everybody for being here today, and we’ll be in touch with you, everybody.