Corrina Peipon Part I
October 18 2008
The Orchard Projects in conversation with Corrina Peipon, Part 1 of 2
Corrina Peipon at the Orchard, October 18, 2008
Read Part 2 of our conversation with Corrina
The Orchard Projects:What made you decide to be an artist?
Corrina Peipon: I think that I always had some kind of understanding that my life was about aesthetics and my major preoccupation was with how things look and why things look the way they do, how meaning is made and how when people communicate, in any shape, meaning is made. I never articulated that to myself in any formal way until I developed and matured as a person and as an artist. There was no singular moment of realization, and I believe that, as silly as it may sound, I was responding to some kind of call that led to a response on my part which created call which lead to another response and so on. I think a lot of what being an artist is is making some kind of a path for yourself and making things up as you go along. That was always what I was inclined to do with anything in life, whether it was eating lunch or making a work of art.
TOP: So you discovered this creative journey or use of your imagination at a very young age?
CP: Well it took being an adult to put language on it. I guess what I’m implying is that you just are doing your life and then you finally figure out there’s a vocabulary, there’s a word for what you are doing. It’s kind of like you have this epiphany that, “oh wait a second. The way I approach things actually has a rich history that is there for me to learn from and to participate in.”
TOP: How has curating had an effect on you as an artist?
CP: It’s a little bit of a “chicken or the egg” question with being a curator and being an artist. I’ve always organized things. I’ve always been an arranger of stuff. Arranging artworks is a big part of what you do as a curator, and so you’re arranging objects and they happen to be artworks.
The practice of being an artist and the practice of being a curator are related in complicated ways that I still don’t think I’ve completely sorted out. You have to use very different parts of your brain to have a studio practice and to have a curatorial practice. It’s different muscles. I often can’t have my artistic practice. If I’m really heavy duty into making a show I can’t also be in my studio because it’s so taxing. I mean it’s just hard work. Both of them. If I’m really in my studio then my curatorial work suffers too. I’m very accustomed to this kind of thing though. I often have a few balls in the air so it’s kind of like one thing might be really ramped up and the other is just on a simmer, you know, on a back burner. When I get back in the studio after focusing on a curatorial project, there can be a lot of struggle to reengage with what it is that I do. I have to ask myself a lot of questions, and I have to do a lot warm ups. I have to do a lot of sweeping the floor in order to actually make something. It’s also philosophically demanding because there are a lot of questions like: “Is it really possible to be an artist and a curator? If I can go ahead being a curator-- being anything else besides an artist-- am I just a fraud? Or vice versa?” That’s really difficult because it means that you have to constantly throw your identity into question, and that’s not fun. In fact, it might not be healthy. But it’s something that is interesting to me because it requires a constant reevaluation of my own commitment and reasons for doing things.
Corrina Peipon at the Orchard, October 18, 2008
TOP: I think that a lot of artists and a lot of very young curators coming out of programs are striving to achieve the level of success that you have found yourself in and have worked very, very hard to achieve. As an artist and a curator, what do you think of curatorial programs being institutionalized in art schools which traditionally focused on creating fine art?
CP: It’s great that new curatorial programs are emerging, and we’ll see what it does over the next ten years as these people come out of school and try to figure out what they’re going to do: if they’ll want to be part of an institution, the commercial art world, or if they’re interested in being independent curators. I think these programs are super interesting. They are totally new and nobody knows where they’re going and what they’re going to be. I think that’s amazing because it’s not that often something new emerges in the functioning of art institutions. Some of these students will end up inventing new ways to present art and that the whole model we’ve known for decades might get transformed, to a certain degree, because of the popularity of these programs.
For about five seconds I flirted with the idea of trying to do an art history degree--which would be the traditional way to go into a curatorial field--at the same time as I was doing my MFA. Then I realized my work as an artist involved a lot of research, and so, rather than go ahead with an art history degree, I chose a really rigorous MFA program within which I would be required to write a serious thesis paper and defend that thesis to a committee of my professors. If I were faced with the same decision today and had this new field of choices to look at, I would stay on the studio practice side. I would not pursue a degree in curatorial studies or art history. I wanted to be told things by artists. I wanted to have conversations with artists about other artists, about my work and their work, about art history, who won the Dodger’s game, what band you’re listening to right now and those kinds of conversations. I didn’t want to have those conversations with art historians or curators really.
TOP: Do you think that curatorial and artistic practices go hand-in-hand with one another?
CP: I don’t think so necessarily. I know that’s the case for me because I always have been on the making-art side of things versus the studying-art side of things. A big part of what art is, to me, is people. I don’t want to make enormous generalizations here, but art historians are mostly engaged with words and books and pictures and not as much engaged with people. Art history requires a certain distance that is vital to the criticality and analytical scrutiny of contextualizing and historicizing art. It’s a really different point of view than getting in there and saying, “okay, I’m making this happen.” I would not by any means say that art historians are not passionate about what they do; they are so exuberant and passionate about their subjects, and that’s a really important thing. Art history does not require a dispassionate disposition but a different approach to art.
TOP: Is there a work of art that changed your life?
CP: There are a lot of them. Probably too many. It may mean that none of them have, I don’t know. One of the first works that really blew my mind was the four page Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969! by Mierle Ukeles. I had no idea that anyone was allowed to do that. There are certain works artists see in their lives that give them permission to do everything…
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art Performance Series, 1973-74, Photograph of performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut.
I had the chance to talk to Ukeles about this piece, and she described its origins to me. She was really frustrated; it was the middle of the night, and she was so exhausted. She had a family and was just at her wits’ end with very little time to be in her studio. She couldn’t sleep, so she got up and just started writing. Within the piece she lays out this new direction for her work. The manifesto, which would drive her practice for the next forty years, describes actions of maintenance-- cleaning floors, doing laundry, taking out the trash, things like this-- as potentially infinitely generative. She describes--very eloquently, much more eloquently than I can do right now--this desire to aestheticize maintenance. Rather than allowing maintenance to take over her life, she took over maintenance and made it her art. Reading that manifesto and looking at some of the work that came out of it--namely a performance that she did at the Wadsworth Atheneum that included scrubbing the stairs leading up to the museum entrance--gave me a deep understanding of what was possible in art. Her work really gave me permission to go ahead with a lot of ideas that I realized needed to come out.
Yvonne Rainer, Lives of Performers, 1972, 16mm film.
Yvonne Rainer’s film Lives of Performers (1972), was also really important to my understanding of what I wanted. I can’t believe I’m going to making this analogy but it’s kind of good: In 1963 or ’64 the Beatles were doing their whole, “I wanna hold your hand” kind of pop songs; great pop music. Then they heard people like Bob Dylan talking about the Vietnam war, poverty, having his mind blown by this or that and holding up this incredible mirror to the society in which he lived. Once the Beatles heard this they made a huge one-eighty and started making music that was about telling some kind of truth which feels important to tell. Seeing Yvonne Rainer’s work was like that for me. Rainer laid down this gauntlet in her work. It’s so raw but also structured and articulated with this incredible visual interest that is something nobody but Yvonne Rainer could make. It was so strong and powerful to me.
Left, The Beatles circa 1963. On the right, The Beatles in 1970, just before they officially disbanded.
Corrina Peipon at the Orchard, October 18, 2008