Corrina Peipon Part II
December 31 1969
The Orchard Projects in conversation with Corrina Peipon, Part 2 of 2
Corrina Peipon at the Orchard, October 18, 2008
Read Part 1 of our conversation with Corrina
The Orchard Project: You had a band in San Francisco called Saint André?
Corrina Peipon: That is correct. It lasted about ten years.
TOP: Do you still play music? Are you guys going to get back together?
CP: [laughs] It’s funny because I would have never, ever imagined saying there would be a reunion but yeah, there’s going to be a reunion, though there will not be any live performance if I can help it. We did a recording with Eli Crews right before I moved to Los Angeles. I got a frantic email from Daniel St. André—the base player in the band—that Eli’s been listening to the unfinished tapes every now and then and really likes the songs and wants to finish the project with us. I think Eli is a genius, and I am so flattered that he is so committed to this project that eight years later he’d still like to work on it. I think we’re going to get together in June and try to finish it. The Saint André thing is going to happen but to say I have been playing music since we disbanded would definitely be a stretch. Music’s kind of for the kids—which I love, you know? The kids should go and be super fierce on stage. I will always love music, make music, and be interested in the power of music but there are certain things that are out of my system now.
TOP: Tell me about living in San Francisco.
CP: Being in San Francisco was really enormous. I was there for probably 7 years. In 1994, I moved from Colorado to San Francisco to go to the San Francisco Art Institute. That time of my life has left a number of marks that will stay with me always and created influences and friendships that are forever. That was the time when I was learning to articulate all of the proclivities, tendencies, and preoccupations that I had held all my life up until that time. I was twenty-three and learning to say, “OK. This isn’t just some nebula of ideas; this is part of my life, and this is what it means, and this is where it comes from, and this is what I’m doing with it.” I was formulating my identity in a way that I would move forward with forever. What I mean by that is that I was articulating what my interests were and what I wanted to do with my work and accepting that these ideas were valid. I didn’t know there was such a thing as art school. It took me until I was twenty-one to know there even was such a thing. When I finally figured it out, I just went for it, and I didn’t know where I was going to be, what the people were going to be like, how they would talk, how they would dress, or what they would make. I walked into this situation, and slowly but surely I became friends and colleagues with these people that are now sort of my family. They are really close to me and influenced me so much, and I feel lucky that those people happened to be at SFAI at the same time I was. It’s one of those things I never could have planned.
TOP: I didn’t attend the Art Institute, but from my opinion observing from an outside perspective, I felt that the critical dialogue among the artists in your group was so advanced. I mean, it’s really rare that you have a dozen students or so all analyzing, criticizing, and creating a dialogue between one another so intensely. Granted, you guys were close as friends, but you were also extremely tough and rigorous with each other…
CP: Well, that was the thing. We were pretty competitive, I guess. We were not walking around patting each other on the back, that’s for sure. It was hard, and sometimes it was just annoying. Sometimes I was just like, “Can’t we just hang out?” But you can go to school, and people can tell you things in that way where you learn something... maybe. But you can also do things. You can just DO things and learn from doing them. If you’re around people who are all so hell-bent on making the best possible thing they can that day, you’ll learn things. When one person makes the best thing they can that day, the other person sees it and is like, “Right on! That is awesome!”, and they go back to the studio and make the next thing that’s even better. Then the third person sees those two things and they go, “That’s so awesome. I fucking love that! Now I’m going to take this energy and go to my studio and make the thing that kicks the ass of those first two!” It just keeps going. It was one big energy ball that was competitive sometimes but also really fun and supportive. Once you boil it down, it’s all really a bunch of kids stoked on making stuff, having a good time, upping the ante constantly and wanting so badly to just make art. So, it was fun.
Corrina at the Orchard, October 18, 2008
TOP: Do you think a group like that, with your ability to create an ongoing discourse or dialogue on a critical level is rare?
CP: Well, I only know what my experiences were and that I was lucky to meet really smart, talented, funny, out-of-hand interesting people. I hope a lot of people have that, but maybe they don’t. A part of what I loved about that time in particular is that at a certain point the “school” part of “art school” started to feel like an afterthought. It was just another place where we would hang out, and there were awesome people teaching that we could get some guidance from, and we could just fuck around in this structure. Doug Hall, Tony Labat, Paul Kos, and David Ireland were primary mentors. Also, Margaret Crane was a huge influence on me in particular and really supportive. She and Doug were so helpful for me in independent studies, as friends and teachers. Everything we did was part of our work. We didn’t want to do anything else but make art. School wasn’t about going to school, somehow. School was just a way to make as much art as possible.
TOP: You told me at dinner last night that conceptual art is an end game.
CP: It’s so hard to imagine, if it’s true, but I did say it, so maybe I think it’s true. We started talking about conceptual art last night because that’s the legacy my work and your work has to follow. As an artist, you’re always having to reckon with what comes right before you. A lot of my interests stem further back from between 1965 and 1975. That’s where I go to find the artists I need to rebel against and attempt to move their ideas forward. I can’t do that with the generation right before me. For instance, some of my teachers in graduate school were Diana Thater, Liz Larner, Mike Kelley, and Chris Williams, and I don’t feel like I have to push back in their direction. Maybe it’s because they are still too present.
Also, with regard to current economics, politics, war, civil rights—all kinds of things in our time are similar to that time. I’m very interested in why conceptual art was conceived during a time of incredible conflict and social upheaval and why such an interest is maintained today, a time which is looking very similar, unfortunately. But if conceptual art is an end game, what do you do with it? Conceptual art throws up its hands at a certain point, though it’s also really generative because it’s a challenge. Conceptual art is a challenge. It’s basically a question of reducing something to its simplest parts while simultaneously hurling the most beautiful poetry into the world. It is very much about everyday life, so it’s endless. Even though there are strategies that look like an end game, there are always ways to reinvent those strategies. It’s also impossible to step entirely outside of what one is doing. You can do it a little bit and get a little perspective on what you’re making as an individual and as a culture, but you can’t do it entirely. So there are always the questions like: “Is this all going nowhere? Is it doing anything? Is it having any impact?” I don’t know if the “founders” of conceptual art thought they were really having impact or if they cared, but they had a huge impact on what I do. And on what you do and on art history in general. The bigger conversation of art history is now indelibly marked with this radical move that so many artists made coincidentally, simultaneously.
Corrina at the Orchard, October 18, 2008
TOP: Give us the run-down of your most recent curatorial project.
CP: My most recent project was at the Geffen at MOCA and was called INDEX: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection. I just finished it, so it’s hard to really know right now what impact it will have on me, but I already know it’s a formative experience. It’s interesting because I’ve always been reluctant to specialize. I’ve considered myself a dilettante. I know it’s something that’s not thought highly of, but oh, well… Anyway, I say that because I had this moment working on this show where I realized: If I’m a specialist in anything, conceptual art in California might be it. For one thing, I make conceptual art in California. Lots of people I know are conceptual artists in California too. Inevitably my everyday life is infused with and inflected by conversations linking in some way to conceptual art and artists. I was in this museum that has a permanent collection of about 6,000 works of art, many of which are very significant works of conceptual art. Working on the show allowed me to not only experience my own knowledge about these works, to understand the extent of that knowledge and to look at underlying latent theories I had about work of this kind, but it also gave me the opportunity to make a lot of connections between works that I had not really thought about before. Curating this show threw my whole life into a relief, since it gave me a lens I had never applied to my interests before in such an intentional way.
Doing this exhibition really drove home how important a lot of the work made in this part of the world has been to the overall art historical understanding of what conceptual art is and what any art from the mid-60s is. California has been the focus of some incredibly important, very influential work. I guess I always thought of John Baldesarri and Michael Asher as men without countries until I lived here and understood how indigenous their work is, how much it is of this part of the world. They’re so awesome and so transcendent of anything worldly that I never thought of them as “locals“. But these were people that didn’t leave California to make their art. I co-curated this exhibition with Philipp Kaiser who had been at MOCA for about a year. He’s originally from Switzerland. It was a challenge figuring out how to work on this with a collaborator. His background is all art historical and mine is all studio practice, so it was really interesting to work on this exhibition together.
John Baldessari, Concerning Diachronic/Synchronic Time: Above, On, Under (with Mermaid), 1976, six black-and-white photographs, 28 3/4 x 27 3/4 in., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased with funds provided by Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg, courtesy of John Baldessari
One of the things that was really important to me was to emphasize the art historical significance of the work that’s been made in this region with these types of practices. For instance, post-studio practice was invented here by Michael Asher, and that’s nothing to shake a stick at. That’s one example of many things that have happened in this part of the world with major significance on art history. It was also important for us to explore the legacy of work from 1965 to 1975 and how it has been passed down to the following generations. The show looks at three or four generations of artists in California, with the earliest work being from 1965 and the most recent from 2007. We wanted to explore connections between people and acknowledge the fact that they have broad lives in the world. They are in their studios, but they are also in schools, in bars, at parties, you know, they’re playing golf. Doing whatever. I wanted to get that into the show. When you arrange a bunch of objects in a room, it’s hard to get people into it too. The people are supposed to walk away and the thing—the art object—is supposed to still be there for other people to encounter. But art is made by people, and it’s talked about by people.
Chris Burden, installation view of Exposing the Foundation of the Museum at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (formerly The Temporary Contemporary), 1986, photo by Squidds and Nunns
One of the first works you see when you walk into the exhibition is a work called Los Angeles Friends: Larger Than Life by David Lamelas from 1976, which is when he moved to Los Angeles to make a move called Desert People. It is a work of forty pen and ink portraits on paper and eighty slide projections that he started because he felt isolated in his studio and was having a hard time making social connections in Los Angeles. He invited people to come over and he would draw them in sixty minutes. Baldesarri is there and Tom Lawson, and there are all of these people who have written the story of art in Los Angeles and continue to. They’re all still making work, a lot of them. The show starts with David’s piece so you can get an idea of people coming and going from studios, and it’s discursive in this way. There are a lot of instances in the exhibition where a student’s and a teacher’s works are paired in the same area. One of Mike Kelley’s significant teachers at CalArts was Douglas Heubler, and we have one of Heubler’s pieces in the exhibition that was donated from Mike’s personal collection.
Dave Muller, Smith, 1998, Acrylic and ink on paper, 12 x 9 inches, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee, 2002
Dave Muller, Re-Smith, 1998, Acrylic on paper, 60 x 40 inches, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee, 2002
Two pieces by Dave Muller, one called Smith and the other called Re-Smith, are great examples of this discursiveness. Smith is a tiny painting of a short, negative New York Times review of a Sam Durant exhibition by Roberta Smith. Re-Smith, is an enormous painting of Roberta’s negative review cut up like a ransom note and turned into a positive review. If you’re looking at Dave’s paintings in the exhibition, just beyond that wall are two Sam Durant sculptures. They were both going to school at the same time at CalArts and are great friends.
TOP: What is your favorite ride at Disneyland?
CP: Oh my God! I’ve only been one time when I was 15 and seriously don’t remember it. In fact, I’m not sure I went on any rides, I was just walking around trying to keep my jaw closed. I was like, “What the fuck is this place?” I had never seen anything like it. I think I went to Magic Mountain though. Is that even at Disneyland? I have some random memory of some weird, dark, running-around thing…
Corrina at the Orchard, October 18, 2008