Pam Martin & Linda Ford
December 31 1969
Pam Martin and Linda Ford, Porta-Peephole, 2007, performance at Queen's Nails Annex, San Francisco.
The Orchard Projects:What is the importance of collaboration in your practice and how does it affect you individually
Linda Ford: It's had such a huge impact on me. I can't imagine never having collaborated with Pam. I have always been kind of anti-social and never thought about collaboration because I thought it would be so difficult for me. Although we first started collaborating a year or two after grad school it really began at the San Francisco Art Institute as we began to support one another and think through things/critique the process together in Paul Kos seminar. We have very similar "problems" and histories and a long history together. Therefore we have an uncanny way of reading each others minds. We have always said that we came over on the boat together from Ireland during the potato famine and helped each other scrap and fight for survival through hard times. You were probably on this boat as well, Brian! This history creeps through our collaboration, inspiring explorations that usually start with "playing" and travel a lot of ground before the final piece is realized. We go from scaring ourselves to death, to laughing hysterically and back again.
Pam Martin:It really allows me to grapple with my worst fears. Working alone does not allow much latitude in this particular area. The collaboration is multifaceted as a result of the intensive dialogue between us and this is very important for me because I have a deeper experience of the work. For instance, when I work alone, I may be taking physical and psychological risks but my perception of the risk is most often limited to overcoming the nausea of my fear. There's a "knuckle- through-it" process, you know, the gut it out routine, in order to execute the piece. However, when I collaborate, the ensuing dialogue spills out of the possibility of more understanding about what exactly is scaring the shit out of me and why.
Paul Kos, Not Whole, 2001, wood, video, audio, 40 x 27 3/4 inches.
LF:One of the most valuable things for me inside this collaboration is how it helps to make the process more conscious. What is usually buried so deeply inside of my own head, that I can access alone sporadically when I write, is more readily accessible because we are always talking to each other and bringing it to the surface by doing so. We also have a clairvoyant ability to coax it out of one another. Which brings me to the other reason why we have been collaborating for seven years: that we give each other permission or somehow bolster each other to go where we need to go for the work, collectively as well as individually. Our differences creatively have helped me be more balanced and loose with my own process. I don't have to follow the "Ford Efficiency Program" so neurotically and control the outcome so extremely or have every single detail add up. I think Pam and I balance each other out well in this regard. Collaborating gives me a sort of freedom from myself! It has also helped me to laugh more at the absurdities of it all and not be so intense and serious all of the time.
PM: Because of our collaborations I have much more endurance. Also, the political aspects of situations arise more quickly and last longer. Who gets what, where, why, when, and how? How do I fit into this equation? Questions of complicity are far more interesting to me now.
Pam Martin and Linda Ford, Porta-Peephole, 2007, performance at Queen's Nails Annex, San Francisco.
TOP:What do you say when someone asks you "what kind of art do you make?”
PM: So much depends on who I think I'm talking to and who I think I am in that moment. Basically, the collaborative work deals with internalized fear as it relates to social critique. My solo work most often resides with language, materiality and death. For the last several years our collaborations have been performance based. Out of those actions, which are the original work, come other forms: short videos, digital prints etc. In my solo work I make drawings, i.e. objects and actions around the meaning of the word "draw". Currently, my solo work is talking to Linda's solo work-- a very different form of the collaboration up to this point. Some people want four syllable answers. Other people want to discuss their notions of art. So what I've found overtime is that unless I'm with another artist or art worker, most people don't care what kind of art I make. It is more a question of "What is art?" That's what they really want to chew on.
LF: I usually respond with a vague kind of blanket statement like, "I do a lot of different things...video, performance, drawing, etc.” I'm not so concerned with categorizing what I do individually or collaboratively. In fact, since Pam and I moved into our new studio, the breaking down of boundaries within our own heads has really become a focus as we are opening up our practices to include activities that we have always done but somehow marginalized from what we were considering as "Art". This has been an incredibly freeing move for me; to bring back into my individual work old activities that I was doing before and during grad school or reassess and reposition activities I had always kept sequestered. Even more important is giving myself permission to graft these activities onto each other and completely hybridize my practice. Even though they may initially appear to be completely separate bodies of work, it's all related in my mind and I'm always trying to work out the same problem. I don't really care to compartmentalize it into little "straight jackets" [laughs].
TOP: How does your work fit into the contemporary art world?
PM: This is an hysterical question and I don't really know for sure how to answer it. What I do know that there are three components to the contemporary art world: value, notoriety and particular groups of people whose practices and conversations I am most drawn to. These components are not stable. Art Forum offers all three and so does one’s kitchen on any given day. Right now my work is shifting gears, going dormant, germinating, mutating, manifesting in other forms. So "fitting" it is not my concern at this moment. Following and making the work is everything. I will fit it later. Like a plumber.
LF: Our work has always been about jamming disparate elements together and in pushing out into contexts other than the gallery. Take for instance Peep-Hole, the piece we did at Queen's Nails Annex [as part of the Professionals performance series] that had to do with activating the Argus Bar next door to QNA instead of the gallery space. I think we have both been interested in the lineage of critiquing the culture at large but have always had an awareness of our own complicity. We always filter any cultural critique through our own personal experience. All of these issues of breaking down boundaries and looking at the art world with some skepticism and questions locate our work within the art world even if we choose to push out into other contexts.
Pam Martin and Linda Ford, Porta-Peephole, 2007, performance at Queen's Nails Annex, San Francisco.
TOP: What are some of your opinions about modern culture in America in general?
PM: Free association and the unconscious like leaking oil spots in the parking lot of human mammals soon to be worried about water. Whose got the do-re-me now?
TOP: Describe one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen.
LF: This is a very appropriate question as we are sort of taking up issues of beauty for ourselves. Watching my father gut and clean a fish or a pheasant or a rabbit for supper was extremely beautiful to me. I was hypnotized by the formal lusciousness of the vermilion color and glossy surfaces while at the same time being disturbed by the violence of the act. Somehow the fact that it was a very practical act seemed to highlight this conflict for me.
PM: Seeing is dicey business. But for many years, up close and far away, regardless of mood or age, one experience is perpetually that of beauty- trees .....bark outlines dead blowing shoots roots mushrooms rotting life loving lungs in the Ohlone hills, along the highway toward Petaluma, and right behind my house...especially the great big old oak. I used to fight off the urge to fall to my knees.
Pam Martin at the Orchard, February 14, 2009.