"Black/White (Plaster)", at the Marina Abramovic Institute West, 2009

The Orchard Project: Lately I have been drawn toward things that have absolutely no reason for being together; like a unicorn with a potato stuck on its horn. Last night I went to the county fair, and I wanted to go to the visual art section. You know what you are going to get when you walk in there: lots of sunsets. In a way I admire artists that toil over those kind of pieces. But there was one painting in there that I thought was amazing. It had to be from a savant, because it was gripping. It was a bucolic nature scene, and in the corner there was a squirrel head that was having a stare-down with the viewer. There was no rhyme or reason for having the squirrel head in the corner of the painting. I admired this because I have way too much education to ever find that place. Anytime I try to do that it fails.

Jennifer Locke: Someday, I'll get back to that place.

"Black/White (Glue)", at the Marina Abramovic Institute West, 2009

OP: Can you talk a little bit about your former job? Any crazy stories, such as someone just walking out?

JL: I did have people walk out. I had one who wanted heavy humiliation, he came in --I don't really remember the scene at all-- and I think its going well, and suddenly he gets up and says, "I'm not going to take this from you." And he put on his clothes and walked out. I have had wrestling clients get mad, if I was winning. (And I realize, too, that people ask for things and they don't know what they are asking for, especially with psychological play)

OP: What do you think of people who are into baby play? When they put on their baby gear and when they get the gear on and assume that role, is it a release for them?

JL: Yes, totally. I think people crave that power exchange because they want to be taken care of and want someone else to be calling the shots. It is totally cathartic. There are various aspects of it. Lately I've been thinking about this movie directed by Terry Jones that I saw when I was younger called "Personal Services." It's about this woman, or Madame, who starts an S&M house- well, actually it is a house of prostitution but it caters to clients who want something kinky. I remember thinking it was so funny, and looked like so much fun. Everybody is playing dress-up: old men are dressed up like school girls. It was totally ridiculous and fun. When you are an adult, "pretending" is not really allowed. So this is a situation where you walk in, you make an agreement with another adult, and then you choose roles. Like, I am the mean principal, and then you are the student. Maybe you want to be spanked, so I get to do this scene where it's like, "Johnny, you know why you are here don't you?" It's fun. It is acting, but also accessing a part of yourself which is already there, but you never get to let out. How often do you get to really beat the crap out of somebody, and they enjoy it? Sometimes I’ve played, I’ve been shocked at the things that come out of my mouth. Someone gives you a frame, and says, “here is this world, we are going to go in there together, and we are going to have this adventure, and we’ll hopefully both have a really good time,” and then you are done. It's engaging in taboo behavior, in a context where it is safe and agreed upon, and I got to make a living at it.

OP: And usually the other person leaves feeling a release.

Jennifer: Yeah, well it would be like if you and I were to having a screaming match with each other, and a fist fight, with rules, like you are not allowed to punch me in the face. And then we did and knew it was pretend. Imagine what a release that would be. Because it would be like, “okay, you can call me anything you want.” It is going to this taboo dark place where there’s all this repressed shit that you feel like doing all the time.

I would never want to actually injure anyone, but imagine this frame where you could channel some need that you don't usually get to express.

"Black/White (Ink)", at the Marina Abramovic Institute West, 2009

OP: Do you think that the way these people act during play is directly related to something in their life that they don't have control over, or they have too much control over?

JL: That is really difficult to answer, because people always want to know why someone is into a particular thing. I can't tell you how many people have asked, "why do you think I like this?" I think it's just such a weird, incomprehensible thing that no one really understands. Some people have a very formative, specific memory that allows them to understand why they presently act the way they do. But others really can't, there is nothing specific, and it is very subjective and individual. So it is complicated.

OP: What about couples?

JL: I've seen couples. I had a really good client, and once he started dating someone, they started coming in together. There have also been couples that haven't been equally into it. I would try to make sure that at least they were both okay with it. I had one couple come in, and I could tell she was a little uptight, so in a situation like that I would try to make a connection with the woman. Later they both revealed to me that the man was feeling really bad that he had these urges and drives to do something like this; they were Christians and had been praying over it together. For some people it is like a sexual preference; you cannot control it. It is just a really intense need. So I figured all I could do was give my opinion, and let them know that I don't think that there is anything wrong with it. And I don't. I think that the human psyche is a mystery; you are here on this planet you might as well indulge your pleasures. As long as no one is getting hurt, or you are hurting yourself, this kind of activity is not really harmful hurting. Some people are really tortured over these feelings; they are self-deprecating or have religious values that conflict.

OP: I was going to ask you about that. You know that character that was outed recently; a very famous evangelic preacher. He had a huge congregation, he was interested in little boys and did crystal meth. Maybe you can speculate on this; but do you think that he being a forthright pious man and his duality with a dark-rooted sin (in his mind) does that make it more exciting for him? He was also Bush's spiritual advisor. How would you evaluate where he is coming from and what did you see in people that saw you?

JL: Sure. I saw all ranges of people. Some people don't make much money and save up. I have also seen a judge, I've had some very rich clients. But my boundaries in the last five years became so strict that it didn't really matter because I had a set rate, I didn’t hustle for more money. But in terms of the psyche, and duality, I don't think that only relates to S&M, but I will say that crossing or transgressing some kind of boundary or threshold is always exhilarating. So guilt, shame and all these things that might be considered negative feelings, seem to heighten experience. I'm not saying that you can't have an incredible experience without these feelings, but I do think it makes it more enticing. Especially if someone has a binary way of thinking, thinking of things as good and evil. Like, I am a good person, but I have these urges! It's funny because I was listening to this radio show on the way down here, and I felt that the tone was Christian. They were talking about this guy who had a sexual addiction, and it was interesting, because if you took that language out of it, I could see and relate to what he was saying on some level. But at the same time, they were using this language of sin. Which is very different than just noticing an obsession with something and wanting to spend some time away from it. It is saying that an omnipresent force doesn't want you to do this one thing. To me, it is a deflection of responsibility. And some people are really tortured over their thoughts and urges. One guy that used to see me was getting married, and he kept saying that he wouldn't see me after his wedding. Like he was going to start a new life and would think and feel differently. Also, a lot of people don't even want to tell their partners about it. I can't, and don't mean to speak for others, but I know for a fact that not only did some of my clients feel like they couldn't experience this with their partners, but they weren't even willing to discuss it with them. And the lack of communication is what is really scary to me. It' s interesting how uncomfortable people are with themselves, yet they are willing to go to a stranger to expose their vulnerabilities.

OP: I would imagine that would be less of a risk.

JL: Right, that is what it is, no strings attached. Going to a professional is totally anonymous, I didn’t care if they used real names, I just asked that they stick with the same one. Really, no one had to tell me anything about themselves. People would get very confessional, of course, but that is why people go to a professional. It would be like the difference between getting a massage from your partner and a massage from a masseuse. The latter will actually give you a really massage, whereas your partner might give you a short one, or it could start turning into sex.

"Black/White (Plaster)", at the Marina Abramovic Institute West, 2009

OP: If you could come up with one event or memory where you escaped death?

JL: Oh that's easy. When I was a teenaged drug addict and shooting speed, I was at my dealer's house, and usually I never got free drugs ever, but when I hung out at her house, I got free shots. We were hanging out and I was cleaning her house or something, and at one point I did a shot and everything went black. I couldn't see but I was coherent, so I told her, can you keep an eye on me? I think I just did too much. I sat there and was in blackness for five minutes. And then fifteen minutes later was doing more drugs. That was a small situation, but the fact that I got out of that whole thing without catching a disease, or dying is kind of amazing.

I almost poked my eye the other day. My friend came over, it was my birthday and I was in Portland because I just had done a show at Rocksbbox. My good friend and I went out to dinner and she brought me this plant as a gift. I've been really into gardening lately, so I wanted her to help me identify this one plant. It was super dark out, and the flash light that I keep outside wasn't there. I thought it was fine, so I picked up this mystery plant in the backyard and then I go to put the plant down, and a stake that I had put in the ground hits me a millimeter from my eyeball. I thought of Equis-- this play that they turned into a film with Richard Burton, where this kid has a sexual thing with horses and he puts their eyes out with a spike. Also it reminded me of Oedipus Rex. I was having visions of being blinded.

OP: Is there artwork or performances you have done that in retrospect you would have done recently, or even regretted?

JL: Yes! A couple that were not so good. One that stands out, I did not too long ago and somebody kinda talked me into it. I wasn't really..well, I don't really want to talk too much about it, actually. I learned from it, but I wish I hadn't done it. I just didn't feel comfortable with it. With performance, there's no "redos." It's really risky which is why I like it. Problems seem to arise when I don't have everything formally situated exactly as I want it. Going in half-cocked. Maybe it was okay, but it seemed not really in control. Which is funny, because I’ve walked into SM scenes all the time with specific activities and then just kind of improvise. I was doing a lot of talking in the piece, which I don't usually do in my work. And, it was bad. I hated it. I felt completely demoralized.

OP: When you are performing, do you view your audience as passive or active?

JL: I would say that when I'm thinking about the piece the audience and how it is watching, and how I am allowing my piece to be perceived is really important. As far as thinking of them as passive or not, I don't think of them as passive, as I want them to be really observant. I see them as an extension, or a part of the piece, definitely. I don't want to be hitting them over the head, but at the same time they are a part of the piece. The audience is a huge part of the content. I feel like I am often asked, "Who is your audience?”

I honestly don't think about demographics very much, whether I should or shouldn't as an performance artist. The bottom line is that most of the people who see my work are an art audience, though it certainly changes at every venue. I did a show at the Garage once, it was a part of "100 Performances in the Hole," and it was a rowdy show. Each performance was two minutes in duration. That was totally different than doing something at a space like Yerba Buena. So, I think more about the venue and how the audience is situated in the space than the type of people watching my performance. I also have been considering the actual word "performance," and calling them “actions” instead. At this point, the word feels convoluted. The show I did at YBCA was organized by the performing arts curator. I was in the show with dancers, and we were all performing consecutively on a theatrical stage. The original piece was supposed to go on for an hour, people could come and go during that time. After I realized that I would be performing on a stage, I tweaked my piece a little bit, but in the end the context was a bit wrong for the piece. But, the advantage of the stage allowed me to get some amazing documentation. This made me start thinking about how even if the performance itself isn’t what I was expecting, I may end up with some really good footage. It's really interesting to me that as a live action it wasn't a success because my audience had an expectation being entertained. That is just really wrong for my work in general. I'm also interested in the idea of videotaping an audience and either adding that to a piece, or making it one in itself. I think it is related to my own interest in power dynamics.

OP: Would you ever consider taping two audiences viewing the one of your actions? Such as, one group who knows very little about art, and another that has a background in art education.

JL: Well, I think that if we are comparing a group of gallery-goers who might view my work in a museum, versus one that might be teenagers from somewhere such as East LA, it starts talking about politics a little bit. This theme is not directly interesting to me. Also, I never really do the exact same piece more than once. The piece I did at YBCA occurred three nights in a row, but I changed each performance slightly. It was interesting because I so rarely do the same thing more than once. Having a piece be a repetition for the purpose of various responses could be of interest to me, but having a piece compare specific demographics isn't so much. But I do think the idea of repetition and the variation that may happen within it could be very interesting.

"Black/White (Plaster)", at the Marina Abramovic Institute West, 2009

The Orchard Projects: Okay, tell a story.

Jacob: To do this story justice, we'll have to go back to Apathy Ranch. My mom lived in this place that we started calling Apathy Ranch, because she didn't have enough resources to fix everything. She basically could just barely feed the animals. She lived in Canyon Country. She had  two chows, she gave horseback lessons and rides, and she lived with my brother James. James was a skinhead, and at the time doing a lot of meth. Her two chow dogs were Ming and the other name I can't remember.  One of these was really sick, and we would tell her she would have to take this dog to the vet because it was essentially rotting. Visibly obvious, like a piece of overripe fruit. I have no idea how this happened, but it was a form of leprosy, or some kind of flesh-eating virus. I don't know what it was, but it was disgusting. It would lose patches of hair, and you could see the flesh being eaten away. We would bring this up with my mom, to which she would say, "Nooo, he's fine. He's gonna be fine!" Basically she would say anything to get out of taking them to the vet.
I wasn't there when this happened, but James relayed a story to me about the dogs that was horrifying. They were watching TV, the dogs were laying in front of a fire they had going, and the one who was rotting lay in front of the fire on its side. The dog gets up and walks away, but its tail is still laying there. My brother goes, "Um, mom, the dog's tail just fell off."  Without saying anything or acknowledging it in any way, she gets up, picks the tail up, throws it in the fire and goes and sits back down. Just a day in the life of a dog on Apathy Ranch.

Chroma Box, 2006

Jacob: She never had enough money. A visit to the vet for one of her horses was considered important or necessary because it brought money in, but in the case of dogs, they come and go. They get hit by cars, they wander. Just as easily as she could lose a dog, another dog could just as easily come onto her property, which meant she had a new dog.
This, more than anything, is a perfect example of Apathy Ranch. It was a ranch, a working ranch but a lot of things would just slide. This scenario was one that an outsider would find this amazing, but if you saw something like her rotting chow dog, you might think, "Oh…here is a rotting, zombie dog of the dead."
I made a really ornate sign with the intention of advertising her horseback lessons to cars as they drove by. A month later I asked her if the sign helped, if people saw it and came in, and she said,"Oh, yeah... that fell down awhile ago." So I said, "Oh, well, did it get put back up?"
"No, no…noooo. Oh no."
Her response was like I was crazy for asking if it got put back up. I feel like small things like a sign, show that at the Ranch there were combination of disfunctionalites. To this day, it's like this. The last time I went out there I was with my sister, and my mom picked us up from the airport. I had some surfboards with me, as well as a suitcase. My mom was an hour late. I felt like her timing was a recurring thing. Throughout my childhood I was the last one to get picked up from school or practice for something. Then, on top of my mom being late to airport, she's driving a roach coach, like a sandwich food truck. There were sandwiches everywhere and no room for me or my sister. I could only fit in there without any of my stuff.

Psyche Wall, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, 2005

TOP: What was she like when you were  a little kid?

Jacob: I think every kid thinks their parents are cool at a young age. Which I did, I thought my mom was cool.

TOP: When did you start noticing that things weren't as they appeared?

Jacob: When did I notice the enormous cracks in the facade? She and my father separated when I was about fifteen. At the time were living in Iowa. Shortly after my dad left, our electricity was shut off in the middle of winter. We would sit around electric heaters and read by candle light. We had no plumbing, and we had to pump water to flush the toilet. At that time, I realized the situation qualified as not the coolest, and certainly not normal. It was an eye opener, but also not all her fault or responsibility. My dad also just bailed.

TOP: You had surgery on your back. When that happened, were you in Los Angeles?

Jacob: I was living in San Francisco, and I came down to Southern California for the surgery. I knew I didn't want to stay with my mom. I didn't want to live on Apathy Ranch. Around this time, my brother was trading meat for beer with some guy who was missing a hand and had a hook, in place of his hand. It was like Hook, or some movie character. The guy actually had a hook for a hand.

TOP: Sometimes when I watch movies, they really strike a chord with me. I make a connection between the way the movie narrative is being told to my own life. For example, Napolean Dynamite. When you look at that movie, despite how great it might be as a film, you recognize characters that resemble yourself. Is there a movie that when you watch it, you think resembles your own life?  

Jacob: Parts of my life, at certain moments. Actually watching Napolean Dynamite was weird because I lived in a rural area for awhile where I worked in a chicken coop, it was disgusting. Watching the movie was bizarre because I had that same job when I was thirteen or fourteen, the exact same job as one of the characters in the movie.

TOP: Do you have any memory or can you recall one time that you have escaped death?

Jacob: Not really, I mean, maybe bad driving situations, but never where I thought I might die.

TOP: Have you been in a car crash?

Jacob: I've fallen asleep at the wheel, but it wasn't that bad aside from being scary. I've never been in a situation where someone has pointed a gun at me, or something like this.

TOP: How did you choose to go to school at SFAI?

Jacob: I went to City College in San Francisco. I lived with a girlfriend who was an artist. She was a painter who took a lot of classes and was telling me about how she went to art school. These conversations made me realize that there was an opportunity to go to school for something I found interesting, and she helped me figure out what classes I should take at City College. From there, I got a scholarship to go to SFAI. It was pretty expensive, but to go to a school that told me I was going to owe $40,000 was similar to telling me that I owed someone $100. I was always broke, so I  just pretended that the money didn't exist at the time and I could figure it out later.

Still shot from  "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ Head", an on-site sculpture/8 channel video installation

TOP: When you got to SFAI who inspired you, or who did you see as a mentor?

Jacob: There were a bunch. But the first was Tony Labat. Going into his class, I was thinking I would just take a performance art class for the experience. My instructor at City College told me that whatever I did, I shouldn't become a performance artist. So of course, my first inclination is to sign up for one of these classes to see what it was all about. Tony's class was a huge eye-opener. I remember a few things I saw in his class, and I thought, "Holy shit, I have no idea what is going on." Daniel Hipolito did a thing where he played an Alice Cooper song as his performance, and afterward I stood up and made a proclamation of how his piece wasn't art. Everyone in the class thought I was an idiot and told me to shut up. So I had to sit down and figure out why I was wrong. That was a huge moment.

TOP: In retrospect, do you think that was art?

Jacob: No, I think it was. Maybe not good art, but it was art. It was his work, and definitely art, but I couldn't understand the context so I dismissed it immediately.

TOP: So would you call that an epiphany?
 
Jacob: In some ways, that moment was because I had to struggle with it and figure it out. After that class I went to the library and became more open to ideas.

TOP: What did you study to change your opinion?

Jacob: I just started asking what people where looking at, and thought about how I could understand that. I asked professors what I should be reading. Tony told me to shut up and sit down. I think he had a larger dialogue around what I thought was art, but it was clear that my naiveté couldn't warrant a larger debate.

TOP: Can you remember a time when your schooling there "clicked"? When you began to realize your own language and what you really wanted to do?

Jacob: No, not specifically. But by the time I left, I felt like I had the tools to make works that were competent. But still in that context I think you are simulating or trying to be a part of a conversation and trying to learn the tools of the language of that conversation. When I left, I felt like I could engage in a conversation with my work that I couldn't have when I got there.

TOP: A few days ago we were discussing how when you finished school, very few spaces where showing experimental work. You were living on Mission Street, and I am wondering what drove you to participate in the levels of performance you are now known for as an artist.

Jacob:  I think it was wanting to keep making work and realizing that there was a route of showing work through galleries and my work didn't fit into that context, so we created a space where my work would make sense. We were essentially curating ourselves into our own shows with our friends. We created an environment and context for our work.

TOP: Can you talk about who you were showing at the time?

Jacob: We were all in school together. I think a relationship started with our work before a friendship, because we were the people who were always at school. There was a rigor to the work that made us notice our similarities as people. We shared a struggle with the same issues. We had an awareness of struggling with being an all boys club, as well. A majority of these friends were male. I think there was  a feeling that came across as being a boys club. But that was a feeling that started in school; a lot of male instructors would gravitate to male students and give those students priority. But this is another conversation.

TOP: Sure. I feel like there was a dynamic that was occurring there, and from what I observed you were fortunate to have that.

Jacob: That started at school but certainly once we left the school it dissipated.

TOP: You became the forefather of performance nights.

Jacob: When we started doing this, Tony said it reminded him of the early '70s. But those nights were for excitement to the art scene in San Francisco, but certainly there were people already doing performance art in the city. It was a way to make work and activate it. If you are working on something, you don't want it to just sit in your head or studio, so you write or find a place where you can put it on.

TOP: What is it like now that you have been in New York for almost ten years, what was it like leaving SF and moving to NY?

Jacob: It was time for me to go. Also, Eamon declared he was leaving and were putting on the 1947 space and before I left Eamon said, "I think I am going to stay." When I first moved there, I got broke really quick. I didn't want to get a job in a restaurant. To make rent one time, I made tacos and sold them for a couple bucks and I made rent. After that, instead of being the guy in San Francisco who had an interesting space, I became the guy who sells tacos at parties in New York. People were asking me to go to their parties and sell tacos. We had a show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts featuring food and we made a big dinner, it was called "Another Universe". 5475 Love. I was fine with what it was, and got into grad school and Skowhegan.

TOP: What kind of experience did you have at Grad school?

Jacob: I didn't have the greatest experience, or feel that I connected with people the way I did in San Francisco, which is fine. I think that a lot of people in New York are forging a community. Or maybe I just didn't let myself fit in.

Corrina Peipon at the Orchard, October 18, 2008

Read Part 1 of our conversation with Corrina

Read Corrina's biography

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

Corrina Peipon at the Orchard, October 18, 2008

Read Corrina's biography

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

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.

Ishan Clemenco's temporary studio at The Orchard, May 3, 2009

Read Ishan's biography

The Orchard Projects: You had a studio at the Headlands Center for the Arts earlier this year, right?

Ishan Clemenco: I had a studio at the Headlands during January and February and into March. I was in the west wing of building 945. It was an interim period between HCA residencies that allowed me to work site-specifically in that space, one that I've contemplated working in for a long time, and to engage with aspects of the architecture and the history of the building itself, and also to bring into the equation elements of a project that I've been working on for nearly twenty years.

TOP: Do you want to elaborate on the 20-year project?

IC: I've been spending time over the past twenty years taking walks on a very remote part of the coast of Marin County, which is a protected area. It's one of the most protected environments in the world. It was never allowed to be developed commercially, unlike great portions of the California coast. It was tribal land, and it's a pristine natural environment.

It is located off of coastal fishing routes, and part of the early work consisted of collecting fragments of sea nets and ropes cast off by fishermen along the shoreline. There was initially a dual interest. One in the artifact and how it relates to the culture and the environment. And two, in the opticality of the particular sea fragments and ropes that I was collecting, which were specifically two colors, a particular green and a certain orange, which I would find in very small quantities, mostly in tiny snippets - one or two fragments per walk on the coast over a period of around twenty years.

I collected objects and artifacts and materials with the idea in mind of working at the Headlands in a way that I felt was unique to that site for several reasons: the importance of its military history for seventy five years, and its situation in the coastal environment.

Ishan Clemenco, West Wing Building 945 HCA, 2009, courtesy of the artist

TOP: That's a long project. It takes commitment.

IC: What was conducted during that time was research, studies, and the formation of an archive: an index of materials, notes, drawings and photographic documentation, which I added to and stored carefully in a set of boxes and archival piles awaiting the proper opportunity to bring them out. The Headlands project, Maritime Field, represents a completely separate endeavor from the main practice of my work for the past eight or nine years, working with site-specific wall drawing and chalk line installations.

The residency at Orchard Projects has opened up another direction, shifting from the ocean to the rural agriculture of this specific region. It represents a significant opening into a new direction. Rather than being a maritime project, it's more of an “orchard project,” really. I've already had my eyes opened to obsolescent technologies that are here, similar to those that informed the collection of materials on the coast. Many sea routes are now closed or disused and the nets and ropes aren't being cast off in those regions. They're no longer found.

So, at the Headlands, I made a work dedicated to Terry Fox; a wire piece that relates to my background in sound going back many years, which has been a source for my spatial and visual work. I employed the architecture of the large room, which contains a double row of iron posts, which are patrician columns, and are functional. They're also displayed in a symmetry that is architecturally related to the genesis of building going back to antiquity. It's often been aligned with an empirical presence. On galvanised wires I suspended fragments of sea rope which had taken years to collect. The length of the diagonal lines extended in space, partially loaded with these collected fragments, corresponded proportionally to the amount of time that I had taken to collect them. So there was this coming together of the way that the work was installed and the way that the work was collected and put together.

Ishan Clemenco, Calipers, 2008-09, courtesy of the artist

TOP: You're kind of an archaeologist in the way that you collect data and artifacts.

IC: There are certain threads in the work that extend back to what was going on in the ‘60s with land art and minimalism. I have a dialogue with those artists. I continue a conversation in my work with certain lines in their work to which I hope to add. I see this as a living tradition. In that sense, archaeology is involved. There's a non-denominational or non-religious ritual aspect. You might say it's abstraction, but in a sense it's also really about perception and things as they are. The lines themselves and nothing much more or less, really. I have an interest in how what exists from the past can be brought into the moment and taken into the future without specifically invoking any particular age or era, rather just bringing up elements that I find.

I'm also interested, in terms of the collaborative process, in who we meet in our lives and work with and how that fits into the equation in real time. How things exist, rather than simply opportunities to plug one idea or one aspect of work into another situation. There's a flow and, in this particular situation, being invited here at this time, there is a possibility of making another body of work together with other people.

TOP: So who are you collaborating with these days?

IC: The present collaboration is here at Orchard Projects. And it's really a new direction. A very fresh development out of some things that I've been working on recently, earlier in the year, at the Headlands. More specifically, a new turn in the direction to the site here, relating to the location and the history and the environment of the land. And specifically working with you and Brian, personally and in a creative context. In terms of collaboration, the open-ended situation here is one that I've just begun to explore.

TOP: Would you consider your chalk drawings and line drawings to be a time-based medium?

IC: I would. I would say that the instantaneous aspect of the snap is one thing. I was thinking about this yesterday, when we went off to play tennis with the master, Brian. Listening to him volley off the wall and hearing the totally consistent rhythm of his backhand, forehand, and realizing about the speeding up of beats from a very slow return into a line that suddenly, if oscillates fast enough, becomes a tone. There is this aspect of time and in the hanging chalk-line installations, residual dust from the chalk-lines when they're suspended, falls onto the lower limits of floors and exists as an element in time, as well.

Ishan Clemenco's temporary studio at The Orchard, May 3, 2009

TOP: These snap drawings, these chalk-line drawings, in a way they capture that moment, much like how a note is struck on a piano, but they're lasting. They have a longevity and a history to them. You can't sustain the key of C for a lifetime, but you can definitely capture that in these drawings.

IC: Well, it's an interesting point because there's a direct relationship in this work to what is known in music, in terms of description, as minimalism, which goes back to La Monte Young and later Steve Reich, the idea of drones, the idea of a continuous sound, which, I think, has a generational attunement. Many of us, for the last fifty years, have been drawn to work that's immersive, that's patterned and cyclical in construction. So the suspended chalk-lines, I consider to be optical drones. They are fixed from a high place and they're static. Yet they are able to be experienced in the field from a variety of perspectives, and one is not able to take them in, in one continuous or complete view. In that sense, the drone aspect is key to the whole process.

La Monte Young on minimalism

The vibrational aspect exists in the line itself. When it's snapped, it makes a double snap from the vibration of the line itself. You'll see the separation in the vibrational impression. In the case of the impressions, there's been a gradual development of surface and lines which has taken direction in the end game of obsolescent photographic materials, working with Polaroid sleeves that are left from 4 x 5 photography and on film itself, which finally becomes the most sensitive register of the snap. Here at the Orchard, I've been working with various powdered materials and ashes from campesino fires in the orchards.

Steve Reich, Eight Lines, composed in 1983, performed by the London Steve Reich Ensemble, Royal Conservatoire, Den Haag, Neatherlands, December 15, 2005

TOP: You were explaining today about how you were actually able to get or retrieve that ash. It was quite a process.

IC: First of all, it’s wonderful to see an agricultural setting so unsullied. The obsolescent technologies that are in the orchards, and wells that were once used as aqueducts being abandoned, the very basic and simple means of conveying water to the trees. These towers with propellers that move air about. The obsolescent kettle furnaces are which are in the orchards everywhere, are like columns. There is an archaeological reference in that kind of verticality. I've worked with suspended columns of paper cups and other vertical installations. Ash I've wanted to use for some time, it has a kind of purity when it's made from a fire that hasn't burned anything but roots of trees and avocado wood. I took white ash from the top of the fire and sifted it carefully, until it became a grayish white powder and snapped lines with that. Being able to transfer lines onto the metal irrigation plates I found in the orchard is an interesting new line of activity.

TOP: You were a piano player, correct?

IC: I was a pianist and fretted, stringed instrument player.

TOP: How has that filtered and crept into your visual work?

IC: I developed an almost primary relation to strings from an early age. Tuning instruments, stringing instruments, having strings under my fingers, having keys under my fingers for as long as I can remember. Then, leaving that for long periods of time, due to an interest in living without necessarily being constrained by a certain feeling I have about sound making in general that informs what I'm doing rather than becomes the specific focus of my practice. And sound and music are definitely a primary source.

Ishan Clemenco, Untitled (Suspended Chalkline Installation), Detail, 2009, courtesy of the artist

I've noticed that people who respond to the work respond almost immediately. And those that don't respond, necessarily, come and go as they will. Rather than direct attention to the work, I make an installation as it evolves. The goal is almost for it not to be seen in a sense. It's not meant to be different from the surroundings and it's meant to be balanced, to complement or somehow exist in the space in a way that doesn't really draw attention. It depends on the context. In the case of the installation at the Headlands or any work that would be produced here or in the orchards, or in a site-specific sense, there's a different process than say a gallery installation or a museum installation. I think that aspect of engaging with the specific site and with the specific concerns and interests that I'm involved with during that installation time make each particular project slightly or uniquely different from each other. That aspect interests me very much; how a particular phase in time evolves in a specific space.

TOP: I'm glad that you brought up site specificity. Obviously not every space is the same, not every box is the same, not every museum is the same. So when you enter a space and you're asked to do an installation, I'm wondering how that connection and that relationship between you and the space actually plays a role in the development of your installation.

IC: Given the proper amount of time, and again it can be more or less time, there's an initial attunement and assessment of the space, a visiting of the space. I usually measure the space, do a drawing or an elevation, start to look at the numbers involved with the measurements, and I reference those observations with meaning that I've experienced with particular numbers or directions or dimensions. I can expand or contract given elements of the space to work within a set of dimensions I might be interested in, or with the building or the exterior space or whatever the environment I'm working in can dictate. Some aspect begins an active engagement with the space. At a certain point, all the gridding, figuring, and contemplation give way to a more centered response, an intuitive response. That is a sense of feeling the space and ultimately, tuning, I think, is really what it's about. It's a visual, body-centered, tuning based on a number of factors.

TOP: So the space actually serves as an instrument?

IC: In a sense, I'd say.

TOP: It seems like each of these pieces is sort of this very condensed history of mark-making and drawing in itself. Of the idea of looking in and realizing the occupation of a space, and trying to express that, in its simplest form: a single line or marking. In terms of the history of drawing, what mark makers, what artists have you followed?

IC: I'd say Leonardo, I'd say Turner, I'd say Beuys.

TOP: Beuys? For what reason?

IC: His integration of object, artifact history, and line. An admiration for his draftsmanship and his sculpture. Also his school: Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel. Various aspects of painting from that time have influenced my work. And Judd, definitely.

TOP: What land art?

IC: Early Dennis Oppenheim, for sure. The early work I like very much. Aspects of Michael Heizer because of his background with archaeology. Walter De Maria, Nancy Holt were of interest to me. The work at the Headlands leads to the work at the orchard and for me it represents arriving at a place of engaging my work directly with the land again in a new way that's exciting to me. I like to walk. I've been walking these orchards a lot and I find that walking in clustered orchard space contrasts with walking down an unfettered coastline. It's an interesting change.

Ishan Clemenco, West Wing Building 945 HCA, Detail, 2009, courtesy of the artist

TOP: I was going to mention Vito Acconci when you were mentioning your practice of walking on the beach at the Headlands earlier. If you were Vito Acconci, what would you be following?

IC: I'm following a trajectory of work that probably has its basis in Russian Constructivism, Tatlin, the use of faktura and the tensile properties of various materials and an interest in color that goes back to early Renaissance painting and going into Judd's exploration of color, and Kelly and Newman, for sure. A dialogue with those artists that's filtered through experiences that don't relate at all to the art world. That come from other directions. Antiquity. Indian art and ritual. One image that informed the hanging chalk line installations is a bell temple in the Himalayas, in a remote village that I walked to that was filled with bells that had been brought by pilgrims for hundreds of years. The ritual of the temple was simply to ring the bells, and they were hanging on individual ropes, various bells from all parts, and I liked that simplicity. There was no liturgy, there was nothing to be said. And hanging chalk-lines carpenter tools are sort of optical bells as I see them. They contain their pigments. They have the potential to make a line, or they can recede into the tools themselves and be simply what they are. They're found objects and what they come out of is the tradition of workers and engineers; people who anonymously use that instrument for practical purposes. It's become a visual language, a spatial language. I guess it relates in some way to Flavin's discovery of the light tube as his language. It's not something I really considered in terms of attempting to translate one language into another. It all sort of arrived over a long period of time to be a working vocabulary.

TOP: Speaking of discovering a working vocabulary over a period of time, what's it like being married to an artist as an artist?

IC: It's an extraordinary experience to be able to share a life with someone else who's working out creative things all the time. We've had the opportunity to work in tandem and alternately on our work. We don't have a collaborative process, per se, although we work with each other on our work. I feel it's very special to have a partner who's an artist. It can be perhaps simpler to have one artist with one person who's not an artist, who might simply enjoy the work or support the work consciously or by some sort of sympathy. In the sense of a marriage with two artists together, it's challenging and it's rewarding and it's deeply meaningful.

TOP: Do you ever find each other's work informing yours, or processes of work informing yours?

IC: Absolutely. During the process of the anti-portraiture project and earlier bodies of Cheryl's photographic work, I began to use her cast-off Polaroid sleeves, which I noticed because she was using them and I began to make chalk-line drawings on those and this led to further exploration of obsolescent photographic materials and I contacted Polaroid Corporation and they provided me with rolls of photo substrate, large leaders. Right there is one example of being given the gift of a piece of paper that floated onto the floor in her studio. And other incredible suggestions and observations from daily life together, just things people say to each other.

Ishan Clemenco's temporary studio at The Orchard, May 3, 2009

Read Cheryl's biography

The Orchard Projects: Tell us a bit about what you’re doing as a conceptual photographer.

Cheryl Meeker: In my latest project, Depleted Selves, I use photography as a means of examining the use of depleted uranium in the world and potential responses to it. Almost viscerally, I decided to try to turn portrait photography upside down in response to the fact that our country and other countries continue to use of depleted uranium weapons when they’re so harmful to everybody and everything, ultimately, regardless of whether or not you’re a direct victim of them.

TOP: Why did you choose portraiture, as a very specific form of photography, as a means of examining this issue?

CM: Though the issue is more about us, I’m actually using portraiture because it leads to other things. I’m not interested in art that illustrates a concept per se; I’m more interested in art that opens up other connections. As important as it is, the political and social problem of using depleted uranium is just one of many topics that we could pick up and examine in a similar way. Portraiture leads to a broader conceptualization about ourselves; in a way I was already looking toward the idea of depletion of our environment, depletion of monetary fundamentals in this country and around the world, and the depletion of ourselves. Using portraiture is a way to fundamentally address something that can allow for a broader way of thinking about one topic. It reflects back on us, it addresses who we are and what kind of identity we have. Yet there is no individual identity in these “anti-portraits” I’ve made. The irony of it, of course, they were able to communicate who they are and to reflect their personalities and viewpoints through the collaborative process and ultimately determine how they were to be pictured as their response to the materials I gave them to read. So the portrait still reads even though it is not what I think of as being superficially identified to the physiognomy of the subject. Maybe in this way it is even more reflective of who they are.

Left: Cheryl Meeker, black hood, 2007, c-print, 24 x 30 inches, courtesy of the artist; Right: Cheryl Meeker, shroud, 2008, c-print, 24 x 30 inches, courtesy of the artist

TOP: You were on KPFA radio recently and the moderator asked you, “are you an activist.”

CM: I didn’t really want to answer that question because, at the time, I wasn’t ready for it, though I wish I had given a more articulate answer. The problem with that question is that it is yet another symptom of our whole cultural problem of specialization. We have people who are ‘activists’ and then we have people who are, I guess, ‘pacifists.’ So it was a problem in my mind and why I laughed and replied, “well... Yes. Sort of. Maybe… Or something.”

I think art is collaborative, in a sense, when it actively engages with an audience. The idea that some people are activists and the rest of us are just consumers dismisses a real activation. So the real question is how do we engage ourselves? How do all of us engage ourselves to affect a real change?

TOP: Jean Genet describes dusk as being “between dog and wolf,” the time of day when people half hope, half fear that the shadows they see will transform into a wolf. David Levi Strauss suggests this as an apt analogy to the way people react to politically committed art.

CM: It's a place where you can tell the truth and potentially get away with it or you can lie in a way that might be interesting. You can do anything in that realm and let it play out.

Diagram showing depleted uranium in commercial aircraft

TOP: Most of the figures in your photographs are covering their eyes and face. The Depleted Selves website refers to this as a blindness, but couldn’t it be more of a way for the subject to hide their identity? In a similar way to how the Gorilla Girls’ masks functioned, could this be a way for your subjects to dislocate their specific histories?

CM: Yes I completely agree with you. The piece on this project’s website which talks about blindness is written by Valerie Imus. The curator of my exhibition at Mission 17, Clark Buckner, also refers to it as blindness. I don’t like to use that term myself I don’t feel that's what the project is specifically about -- especially having a brother who is blind. What they’re referring to is that we’re kept from seeing this information on the use of depleted uranium in the world around us.

TOP: Also, if their identities were revealed in support of your project they might find themselves on a government list somewhere.

CM: Exactly. I didn’t want any of my projects to have those sorts of repercussions on any of these people yet I wanted to give them the opportunity to engage with it. I wish everybody knew about this. By giving the subjects the choice to participate and to read the information, my project became successful if they carried that information on with them. After reading the information I provided, if they chose to participate in the collaboration of this anti-portrait they had free license to express themselves however they wanted. They could say what they wanted to in the photo without holding back from fear of their identity being revealed. I was blown away by how some of them took full advantage of this freedom. I didn’t take control over how they did it. They had the option to shoot on location some place, my studio, wherever. I actually got really paranoid over their brazenness for a while. I would tell them they could remain totally anonymous and they responded, “why?” I came to realize that if they were this blasé about it they probably didn’t know much about the issue.

TOP: This project is very much a collaboration then.

CM: What was fascinating about this project is how I had the opportunity to collaborate with the experts in this field. These people were incredible, Dan Fahey and Gretel Monroe, Doug Weir with the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons. I was completely amazed.

Checkered Facts: Steven Wolf discusses facts and fact checking, a panel discussion in conjunction with Depleted Selves at Mission 17

TOP: You have been working on this project now for about 4 to 5 years right?

CM: Figuring out the lay of the land in the world involved in the banning of uranium weapons and deciding the best people in the field to contact was a rather exhaustive process. There is a coalition of seventy-two organizations all over the world working on this subject. I contacted these people with my project and they were really supportive and willing to help me. So when it came time to choose those experts for the panel discussion I didn’t choose those who had been discredited already and so I had this list of names from my research. Dan Fahey had just given a lecture and presentation in Brussels for the U.N. At first Dan didn’t want to do it at all. The “Left Wing” had quoted facts incorrectly in their zeal to dramatize the situation, which in turn had been flamed by the “Right Wing” cheerleaders as over-exaggerated bullshit. After I explained the project to him more fully, he understood I was trying to be careful not to provide misinformation. I was fully aware of the damage that had been done, from his point of view, and why he was extremely careful about the topic. So, He understood and realized that he could give a better contribution and thus agreed to participate. He was incredible!

TOP: Can you give us a little history of Stretcher.org, the online publication where you’re one of the publishers?

CM: It’s simple, really. There were a few people sitting around and complaining, as usual in San Francisco, about a lack of printed discourse centered on art and cultural production. People wanted an intelligent and relevant publication and there was only one locally produced art publication at the time. So basically we decided to attempt to fill that void.

TOP: When you were talking about not being interested in work that is illustrative of a concept but rather work that facilitates connections between different concepts, do you approach Stretcher.org in the same way?

CM: Definitely! That's what I really like about it. The same kind of collaborative process is involved. Stretcher, especially working with other people, creates something that's much different than anything we could have created individually and the pieces we write and publish on Stretcher definitely reflect upon each other. It is similar to the way that pieces relate to each other within an exhibition context.

Depleted Selves

www.stretcher.org

Cheryl Meeker at the Orchard, May 3, 2009

Biographies

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.

www.muistardeaux.com

We set down with Tom and Eric after the pair ravaged the greater Los Angeles area, soaking up booze like a wet/dry vac from Arkansas. They somehow made it back to the orchard around two in the morning and we decided that would probably be the best time to ask a few questions that had been nagging us.

The Orchard Project:Could you elaborate on the Muistardeaux collective? What it means and how it came to fruition? Eric Gibbons: It was created because we needed a third artist for a group show we were included in while at the San Francisco Art Institute. We made up a fictitious artist, Cassup Muistardeaux, to meet the minimum amount of artists required in a student show. We then realized that we were working for her. She is from the French Guiana and is quite attractive. Now, the work that Tom and I do is under the umbrella of the Muistardeaux Collective. Cassup can come and go as she pleases and maybe have an exhibition of her own in the future. We would help her with the fabrication of her work. TOP: What does she look like? EG: She’s a red head and at times she’s also a brunette. She’s very good-looking, very domineering in some ways as a red head, and other times she’s a slinky brunette that's been a little bit more passive in her sexuality, but definitely passive aggressive. We’re her style counsel now.

Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons, two-thirds of the Muistardeaux Collective, at the Orchard, March 7th, 2009

TOP: How did you guys begin your collaboration together? Tom Borden: We were working around each other last summer and realized that we both enjoyed playing music. I had Eric come down and play with my band, The Dolfs, to record a sound track for a T.V show on cable access that I was doing. Eric ended up playing The Dolf’s one and only live show at Jack’s on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. We observed the way that we made music and the way that we made music as friends. The way when you just sit down and someone starts to play something and other person starts to riff off of that groove, ultimately creating something. Creating something that you don’t have to think about, except that it’s musical. You do the work beforehand by learning to play an instrument, but once you actually sit down to play, you’re not actually thinking about scales. You just let your mind and body take over and it works. TOP: So, would you say that music influences how you make work as visual artists? EG: Yes, absolutely! We’re making art just like a band would function. TB: We like to think that the way we make music is similar to the way we make art, because it should feel like, "this is fun... So damn fun!" When you’re playing music you don’t let your brain kick in and say, “Oh should I play it like this or that?” You just let go and I think there’s a certain amount of that in art making It’s similar to music in the sense that you can’t get something that's going to sound good in the end unless you do some planning or forethought and lots of practice. When we sit down and play, we don’t practice to get better. We practice to get better at playing, so when we actually sit down to play, it should feel natural.

Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons, two-thirds of the Muistardeaux Collective, at the Orchard, March 7th, 2009

TOP: What do you guy’s love about Art? EG: It helps me think exponentially; otherwise I wouldn’t do it. Connecting ideas and linking them up making this chain: That's the philosophy. I like how we use a lot of stuff like public domain, the internet, or popular culture. We can hook those up to make something that extends the thought. I love it because it has all of those things. It’s being a rock-star, it’s being a doctor, it’s all of that. I like to do a little bit of everything, so if we wanted to sit down and do a piece that was us being electricians for a year, then we would do that. If I wanted to become a lawyer and represent a friend in a divorce trial, then I could do that. TOP: So in a way, there are no limitations to your creative process? TB: Yeah, but there’s no pre-conceived limitations to the process in terms of what it can be, but once a process starts, the structures start to get dropped in. EG: Because some ideas don't work and other stuff is just stupid. TB: You have to be able to conceive and act on the stupid idea, as well as the racist idea, or the idea that's simply not going to work. It's the pursuit of these ideas that allow us to intelligently determine the good from the bad. TB: Inevitably, by the time you get to that point where you realize that an idea’s not gonna work, your brain has already branched off into a tangent that's somewhat related, whereas without the initial bad idea, there wouldn’t be a tangent to begin with.

Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons, two-thirds of the Muistardeaux Collective, at the Orchard, March 7th, 2009

TOP: How would you explain what it is that you do to someone who may not have an understanding of the vocabulary employed around modern art? EG: (Sighs) I don’t know. I just don’t want to make any excuses. What I do is: I take everything I’ve learned or thought about in regards to art and make fun of it in order to understand it. TOP: So that your life becomes Art? EG: I would hate to say that, but it is and so is yours, or at least it should be. I think that everything we do should be as artful as possible. TB: In many ways it’s shining a spotlight on ourselves as products of everything that we’ve done and everything that has happened to us, as well as every environment that we’ve been in for our whole lives. It’s the idea that, as American white males born and raised, that we are products of that physically and psychologically, so we’re objectifying this in a four dimensional way. EG: Pretty cool, huh? TOP: How does your work differ from say, the Theatre of the absurd or spectacles as art? TB: We do spectacle, we do shoplifting, we do getting drunk in sushi bars screaming “I LOVE L.A!” It’s just what we do. There are elements of the spectacle in it because that's part of our personalities but there’s always this kind of bigger thought behind it that ties it to our own crazy logic that has a reason for dramatization. EG: If we do spectacle, it needs to retain some bit of poetry. It’s not about just going Gonzo. TB: Personal poetry.

The new front porch of the Orchard Project

TOP: You guys use Tom Selleck a lot in your work. What’s that about? EG: We identify with Tom Selleck as the archetype for the “Man’s Man”, a ladies man. He was also recently on the cover of Cowboys and Indians Magazine and we were amazed at how good he looked, and the memories of watching Magnum P.I. and how we encountered Magnum and how we thought he was one cool motherfucker. TOP: Does he emulates a sort of cultural demi-god? EG: He became an icon and a mascot for us and plus he’s got a bitchin’ moustache. TOP: Do you think Tom Selleck would find it flattering by the way that you use him in your work? TB: Not quite sure. EG: Maybe, sometimes. TB: I think he would have loved what we made yesterday in his honor. EG: We went to the walk of stars in Hollywood and found Tom Selleck’s star. We got down on our knees and each of us worked on a rubbing of his star. One on tracing paper and one on regular paper. TOP: Will he remain a consistent thread in your work? EG: Yeah, he will. He won’t be as prominent, but he’s one of our materials and is at our disposal. TB: He won’t ever go away. EG: Now we can employ him. TB: Yeah!

Thanks for the new porch (orchardporch!), Tom and Eric! Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons, two-thirds of the Muistardeaux Collective, at the Orchard, March 7th, 2009