Aram Moshayedi & Jedediah Caesar
May 15 2009
Aram Moshayedi (left) and Jedediah Caesar at the Orchard, May 18, 2009
Read Aram and Jed's biographies.
Aram Moshayedi: I was reading an article this morning that made a distinction between film made by major motion picture industries and art film or cinema. It made me think about the term “industry” and its relation to film, as opposed to “industry” as in industrial manufacturing. That’s basically the impetus for this conversation, which is not to say that there is any relationship to film in your work. They are seen as opposite realms— industry and artistic production. Your work has certain relationships to industry, in that the process begins in your studio and then move to a machine cutter in… what’s the city called?
Jedediah Caesar: The City of Industry.
AM: The City of Industry. Of course there’s a whole lineage and history of Minimalism and a critique of Minimalism that Rosalind Krauss would make. There’s this invisible network that is at play in art production. Your work becomes a very pragmatic conversation with the people who are involved with the cutting process of your sculptures. The exchange with those people is a really important part of the work and the of the process of production. For instance, Rosalind Krauss’ critique of Minimalism wouldn’t be about those relationships-- which is a relationship in a really base, Marxist kind of way: a relation with the working class-- Rosalind Krauss just considered Minimalism's tendencies toward fabrication as having an adverse effect on the work because it adheres to the same logic as late capitalist production.
JC: I hate using the term Minimalism as an umbrella for talking about a number of different artists. There is a lot of variety in practice that is specific to a particular artist’s relationship to production, and some artists acknowledge those nuances more than others. Carl André brings those relationships into play with his work a lot. The question is what he thinks of as “working class,” or how he defines his position within class production.
Installation view of “Holding Station” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 2009, Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Photo credit: by Gene Ogami
It’s probably more complicated and mannered than he really speaks about. I do find it to be a curious aspect of Minimalism that it continues a lot of the attitudes you see in the marketing of other new products. The transcendent quality that garnered Minimalist work a lot of monetary support is also the transcendental quality of a new car.
I hate felling like I’m still trying to deal with the whole Minimalist question. On the one hand, it would be nice to totally work from a different position. When it comes to making objects, putting them out into the world, claiming that space, and even the energy consumed in maintaining those objects, I think of it as delaying an inevitable decay. I don’t want to work in a reactionary way or tread over the same problems. On the other hand those problems certainly don’t seem to have been resolved.
AM: I think that is certainly true. That assessment runs the risk of only addressing one historical lineage for your practice, and it would be wrong to assume that position is the only one. I think that is an important point because, largely, what is involved with your work is a way of dealing with origination and presentation. This probably is the case for many artists as well, but it is often taken for granted. Maybe it is obvious to say that a work of art must adhere to an exhibitionary logic, but it is interesting to me how your sculptures move the materials through various presentational modes.
JC: I did a show in 2007 at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Austin, Texas. Because of the nature of the work, we agreed that I would drive the sculpture there as a way of accomplishing what I wanted within the museum’s budget. That exercise was really good for me and formed questions that might not have necessarily come up had I just made the work and someone packaged and delivered it for me. Normally, the work is your responsibility up to a certain point and then other people take over that responsibility. In this instance, it was interesting for me to physically move from one place to another with the work and maintain somewhat of a quality of display throughout transit. Some of the weird transportation networks that exist are also really fascinating. Someone told me recently that there are only a certain number of shipping containers in the world.
Some of the weird transportation networks that exist are also really fascinating. Someone told me recently there are only a certain number of those big metal containers for cargo ships, you know?
Jedediah Caesar, Bright Hot Day Long Dark Night, 2008, Installation view at the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.
AM: Because those transportation systems are standardized?
JC: I imagine they try to maintain a mode of transit where they’re always moving, loading, or unloading in as much a balanced position as possible. In a way, one can think of all those containers as one massive object that consist of many different parts that are almost metabolic in how they work together as long as they’re balanced. There’s a certain quality in transporting and delivering work that I’m interested in.
A piece’s context is shaped so much by where and how it is shown. Works of art that are exhibited over and over again--that object is like an idea and it is introduced over and over again into the world, which leads one to the question of multiples. All these things tie into the way that art becomes so international in its scope.
AM: We generally have access to the beginning and end points – to the studio or place of production and to final site of exhibition. Everything that happens in between, in transit when the artwork is temporarily displaced, are processes to which there is no access as a viewer. I think the task of understanding those acts of displacement is an interesting way of understanding your practice.
JC: There is so much work that addresses its own display and so many artists who are playing with the idea of holding information back or excluding information from the viewer in hopes of getting to the “psychic presence” of the work. These artists try to find out how much information is naturally embedded in the work. To imagine a work of art displaying itself as a certain kind of object, even if there’s no audience present, is very strange. In that shifting of display, the “art” becomes something else.
AM: Do you mean in the sense of an accumulation of value or of meaning that occurs throughout time as an art object circulates?
JC: Yeah, but that it also becomes different with time as well. Although a viewer regards the works in a show as an exhibition, there are other vectors of time and place that are implicit. For my most recent solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Projects in Los Angeles, I was interested in the spaces between the works, in the way the works had been previously shown and how they related to other pieces that were not included in the exhibition. For instance, there was a white rectangular box with the center cut out and removed; that missing core was simultaneously being arranged for a different show in London. But if it were another kind of object like a car, for instance, with half of it in Los Angeles and half in London, it would be obvious that the physical object had been disconnected and strung out over a distance.
AM: This is interesting when one considers the possibility of a singular object’s multi-vocal mode of address, and how an experience of this is heightened when a given work is shown in different contexts and in different pairings.
JC: When I place works into an exhibition I choose and arrange them in such a way that I am proposing my own agenda. That is also something you do as a curator and a writer; it is something collectors do, something that anybody involved in this does. Everyone combines their gestures with those of other people, and objects, on their own, represent an agenda, sometimes to the point that important aspects of the actual work get buried.
Just, for example, take someone like Carl André and you might find the way his practice is discussed doesn’t really deal with the more interesting aspects of the work, which to me is when the pieces start slipping out of their rigid dogma and start blending with their surroundings. His works that were installed outside on uneven ground are really radical and interesting in how they deal with space and point out the role of a level floor in allowing so much sculpture to even exist. André was able to point out how the level floor we take for granted dominates such a large place, but his work is mostly talked about as “modular units” and being “self-contained” when his most interesting work isn’t self contained but, rather, a direct result of and comment on its surroundings.
Of course you then have artists that just don’t end up in the dialogue at all, that end up outside of a particular historicized agenda. They end up forgotten, which is another extreme example of this problem.
Of course you then have artists that just don’t end up in the dialogue at all, that end up outside of a particular historicized agenda. They end up forgotten, which is another extreme example of this problem.
AM: As someone who is looking at the history of art and trying to find some of those forgotten figures, the question of why they were overlooked becomes important. What was it about the works themselves? Was it an arbitrary condition of the market that led to this historical oversight? Or, was it something else?
JC: I think we over emphasize the market in all of this. That’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook. Plenty of it is just plain old human exchange. Exchange is before and beyond any market, right? It’s almost inevitable, I think, as we try to understand the parameters of things and as we try to articulate something about it that we end up excluding.
AM: I’m not suggesting that power in the market dominates the understanding of art’s history, the circulation of objects, and the exchange of ideas, but that it is a way to help construct histories. It becomes shorthand for many historians of art. Then the question is raised: what is it about the works themselves that evade inclusion?
JC: Do you think works that have a structural integrity over a long term have a better chance of a narrative being written around them because people know they will be able to return to that physical object? Is that a problem for conceptual work, necessarily?
Part of the whole question in my practice about pushing the same materials through different processes is that you end up with work that has different levels of iconic quality, structural integrity, and complexities in terms of installation. I think, in some way, it undermines the stylistic integrity of my work. It seems like there is less of a clear agenda. Maybe that is a personal concern; that the whole question of taste dictates that certain works are more successful than others, that less successful pieces must be missteps within that logic.
AM: When someone says, for instance in relationship to your last show in Los Angeles, “the white sculpture in the corner is so strong,” what is discernable in that statement?
JC: I’ve heard that at least fifty times. It is interesting to think about. What does that mean? Is it anything I can use to think about my work? Does that mean I don’t continue to do the other parts of the show?
AM: As if from now on you can just continue making white corner sculptures…
JC: Right. You don’t want to deny the power of what people are interested in. At the same time it only works as a show when there is this whole collection of things which are not alike, but that are looked upon in relation to one another. To me, that’s the real work. It’s not really in any particular piece.
AM: Which is also an interesting way to think about a relationship to seriality in your work—the checkerboard pieces, for instance.
JC: Well they’re units that are fairly similar, not super similar but…
AM: As an installation of discrete parts it is a varied series of objects. Your last show as a whole engaged with the architecture of the gallery space so well, and there was something about the white sculpture in the corner of one of the rooms that seemed sidelined in some way.
JC: It embedded itself into the space.
AM: The piece was largely invisible and easily overlooked.
JC: But it ended up dominating as something systemic.
AM: There was an overall feeling that each room was treated as a different container.
JC: That’s what was great about that space for this particular show. It was really about this series of containers. It was similar to how a whole cargo container full of things becomes a certain idea based on how it is filled and what it contains. The show was called “Holding Station.” It acted like a temporary depot for this body of work, which was eventually split apart and moved around. The works wont ever have that same configuration with each other again. They have since been dispersed, you know?
AM: There is something that I think is so melancholic about the gesture. Just thinking about the show as the last moment that these objects will share a physical relationship with one another. They were once whole units that were then distributed as a body of work. It is like a goodbye party or something.
JC: Yeah it feels like that. It had been maybe five or six years of collecting materials, embedding the materials into resin and then cutting the sculptures from that. It’s not like I feel the whole thing has run its course, but the parts of the pieces are starting to take on a different meaning for me. There was a time when I felt that even if a work was cut into forty pieces, all forty pieces needed to travel together in the world and they needed to stay together so the total original object would be retained. I feel that is not as important anymore. I’m not sure exactly why that is the case, but I guess I started to think that there is always a little bit of space between these parts, that they are always moving away or toward each other. I can reconstruct six of those pieces as a box and it will look like one container before it was cut, more or less. Or they can be split and feel like separate pieces that, to some degree, say their own things. And if they are bought, or sold, or exchanged, then they spread, geographically, further from one another. They are factually in the world now. They are not going to stop being in the world anytime soon. They will always be constricting away from and toward each other, I figure, until they are gone for whatever reason. As long as they exist, they are taking up space somewhere and they are bending that space into the forms of themselves. I always imagined the Gleanerstone at night. It would be the least like a public sculpture at night because it wouldn’t be visible in the same way as during the day, yet its physical presence would still there.
Jedediah Caesar, The Gleaner Stone, 2008, Urethane resin; mixed media; wood, 31 x 92 x 44 inches, Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Gleaner Stone was commissioned by LA><ART Public Art Initiatives, Los Angeles supported by LA><ART and The City of Culver City.
AM: That sculpture was completely exposed in a way, and there was a certain amount of vulnerability with it sitting in the public..
JC: Well it was an indoor sculpture placed outdoors. So it just didn’t quite follow the logic. It didn’t have the physical protection needed to fully live outdoors. It seems important that there are all these moments you don’t have control of. There is all this interaction with the work that you don’t know about when it is let out in the world to act as its own agent, I guess. At some point maybe there will be a show where all the pieces come back together again, including the core. The Gleanerstone wasn’t a part of my last show “Holding Station,” but it still really held a ghost presence, you know? A lot of it is just about the potential of these things to part ways and be used in the world.
AM: It is kind of unrelated, but it reminds me of this painting that Robert Rauschenberg made in the ‘70s that was divided into numerous parts to be given to his friends. He gave each of his friends a section of the painting so, that when it was shown, they would be considered lenders to the exhibition and then be invited to the opening. It is like the parts of the whole coming together again.
JC: That’s nice. Well he thought of a lot of things, so…
AM: Do we end with Robert Rauschenberg? Or should we fold it in on somewhere in the middle?
JC: Nah, it can end on him, why not. I’ll go ahead and acknowledge my debt. That seems fair enough.
