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ARCHITECTURE VIEW On Being Post-Sequin An Interview with Theresa Himmer BY KATIE CERCONE Theresa Himmer is a contemporary artist working primarily with urban installation, video and sound that splits her time between New York City and Reykjavik, Iceland. A recent graduate of the Whitney Independent Study program, Himmer was included in the Young Artist’s Biennial, Bucharest in 2012 and has produced extensive public art projects in Iceland, Mexico and Russia. Trained formerly as an architect and still very much informed by the discipline, her work deals with urban landscape related to diasporic experience and intersubjectivity, the dynamics of spatial perception and architecture as a semiotic structure. You may have seen (and heard) her work in the elevator of Art in General last spring. For All State, a 6-hour long site-specific sound installation she produced for Art in General which is currently installed at Reykjavik Art Museum, Himmer scavenged sounds from the given milieu of the elevator. Utilizing “the crisp bell that marks the passing of floors, the squeak it makes passing 2nd and 3rd, the hidden emergency phone’s empty duut, bellowing doors opening and closing and the sharp click of the mechanical switchboard in the engine room on the roof,” Himmer investigated each sample for its parametric variations in rhythm, spatio-temporal reverb, tonality and inversion. As a final score replayed for visitors to the site as they rode the elevator, All State was a sound wall weaving an inexhaustible system of variations layered over the daily noise of the elevator’s utility. Interested in the border territory suturing the constructed space of the social with the veiled reality of the psyche, often her structures and audiovisual projects are a unique expression of a type of institutional limbo. In an interview with <strong>Revolt</strong>, Himmer talks about her recent installation in Russia, queer and feminist readings of her practice, her current video project and why she’s content to see the last sequins of her Mountain Series in Iceland thrown to the wind. KC: I’m interested in the interdisciplinary nature of your work, when did you make the transition from architecture to art and what was that like? TH: I trained as an architect and received a professional degree from an architectural school in Denmark. Initially when I applied I wasn’t interested in becoming a “real” architect, I wanted to go into the set design department. It turned out REVOLT <strong>Magazine</strong> Number 4, 2013 that department wasn’t great and I ended up in a very experimental department that was teaching architecture in a way that was very open. Somewhat Bauhaus based, the program was very wide in its approach to talking about what architecture is or can be. My thesis was an urban public space landscape project on the roundabout where the Holland tunnel exits in Tribeca. I made a park around a grazing field for the police horses who have their stable around the corner. That program was my initial training and then I did practice as an architect for several years. I learned all the hard-core architectural disciplines from the initial conceptual phase all the way to building and detailing practicing with two really good studios, one in Denmark and one in Iceland. Of course the practice of architecture proper is quite different than practicing as an artist, although I never really feel that I left architecture to go into art. My artistic practice is coming through and out of architecture and it is still very much dealing with architectural disciplines – aspects of place, the relationship to a context, and the ability to read a context and insert oneself into that in a special way. In terms of formal studies there was a point of transition when I decided to study Fine Arts. My practice exists in an overlapping space between art and architecture. Exploring that space from within an art context during a 2 year MFA program at SVA, I began to think about the dynamics of spectatorship and the optic dynamics that are tied to creative practice in general. After that I spent one year at the Whitney Independent Study Program which became a kind of unifying process where I was able to combine the two sides with a more theoretical foundation. SVA was quite unstructured in an academic sense. As a community it was amazing and as a program it was open enough that anyone could make of it what they wanted, depending who you end up studying with and in what groups. Meanwhile, as you know there wasn’t a lot of theory. Getting that theoretical and critical foundation from the Whitney Program was a big step for me, Double Vision (2012) installation view. Public art project in the city of Perm, Russia. Photo courtesy of the artist. and then integrating that with my prior knowledge. KC: Can you explain some of the differences you’ve noticed in terms of rules and regulations governing work with structures/public space/buildings in Europe and the U.S.? Is one more open to a hybrid and innovative approach to spatial configurations? TH: I actually haven’t done any public art projects in the States yet but I have done quite a few in Iceland which has a Scandinavian kind of logic to the way things are regulated and I recently finished one project in Russia. In Iceland it’s very free and easy to do projects like that. For my first installation in Reykjavík we didn’t even ask for permissions from 36
On Being Post-Sequin continued... the city. Because it was part of a public art festival they kind of backed me with verbal support and positive vibes. I did get permission from the three people that owned the house that I was working with. For me that was really important as it was private property and it was someone’s home. I was very respectful of that but I didn’t even think about applying to the city. I don’t know if it would be possible now but at that time it was. As a contrast for my recent project in Russia I was invited by a public art fund under a newly established art museum in Perm. The Museum functioned also as a producer so I didn’t even come near any of the regulation and permission problems but I think it’s a completely unimaginable bureaucracy. So I’m not actually sure where the United States falls in that spectrum, but I imagine it’s somewhere in between. for granted? Why do we take this system for granted? There could be a million other variations. TH: Yes, I think that was also embedded in your question. I am interested in creating these kind of in-between zones where energy stands still between values associated with something being beautiful. Something that I thought a lot about in connection with the Russian commission were these Hal Foster and Miwon Kwon aspects. All these ideas of the itinerant artist and the artist who comes to a site KC: What is your process when you work on some of these large-scale site-specific outdoor projects? How much time do you spend at the site and how much in the studio? Do you consider your work post-studio? TH: My process is very much informed by coming out of architecture. It’s very much research based and conceptually based in the sense that there’s a research phase where the conceptual boundaries of the project are laid out. This goes for all the projects that I’m involved in whether video, sound, photography or urban installation. There’s a development phase and then there’s a production phase. Usually most of the project is in place before it comes to production. I would say to the poststudio question – yes - at this point because I’m traveling in between places my practice is in a way tied to my laptop. At least the development phases of the project before they become physical, if they even do. For example the video project I’m working on now is actually not site-specific in that sense. It’s a project that I started while I was at the Whitney Program doing research and making some initial studies relating to it. I recently returned from a trip to the Czech Republic where I was shooting for ten days at two different locations. That’s sort of typical, mapping out gathered material and then editing. KC: I’ve noticed in your work you often set up a situation in which one might begin to interpret and even challenge relationships between “structure” and “institution,” opening up a space where we can begin to imagine the boundaries between these entities as porous and fluid. Can you talk about these notions in relationship to your work? TH: It is definitely a theme that’s reoccurring in my work also in the sound installation that I did at Art in General. That was in a way operating on a similar level only in audio instead of video. My project Double Vision in Russia also operates similarly but on the level of urban space. That project is about questioning the signifiers of that type of space. It’s taking architecture and making it a sign and simultaneously addressing what our vision is being directed at through corporate promises and advertising. KC: It’s almost like you’re making this figment that’s related to the structure but it’s almost an imaginary space, as if a parallel universe where we question, why do we take this structure Parallel Memories (2013), video still. Photo courtesy of the artist. two poles and there’s a gap in which we can see the surroundings critically or from a new perspective. It’s then we explore exactly what is being taken for granted. By flipping the relationship upside down we see what goes usually unnoticed. For the project in Russia I was working with this really everyday space, this ordinary piece of facade that suddenly by reframing and reconfiguring that in relationship to the site, an opening was created. It allowed for a critical reading of that site in its cultural context. KC: Is there anything else you want to say about the piece in Russia in particular? TH: I can talk briefly about the background because it’s typical for the way I work. I was given an old department store as a site to work with. It was built around the mid 70s during the Soviet Union era and is a known typology. They were all over the Soviet Union. It is a white rendered modernist structure, and there were these bright yellow McDonalds M’s. It’s an angled building so they were on all sides visible from every corner. A McDonalds had just opened on the ground floor. On the roof were Cyrillic neon letters that spelled the store name from back when the building was built. That transition became the starting point of the project. It became about these two types of signs: the neon signs and the golden M’s. I read the building as a type of semiotic structure; if the neon signs point back to the 70s when the building was made as a manifestation of Soviet Era ideals, then the golden M’s point toward an abstract promise of a global corporate future. There’s kind of two directions and I wanted to insert myself within that conversation and make a third type of sign which just points directly to that which is near and present both in space and in time. I wanted to direct the gaze simply to that which is close as a potential space or quality, beyond what we think of as the surface and is supposed to do something site specific and clever. Coming to the city by the Ural Mountains, it’s such a complex context. It’s a really dynamic city with a heavy history. The public art program is amazing and they’re doing really amazing and important projects. Meanwhile the whole idea is based on an artist being invited into a situation in which they’re validating an urban renewal project on a larger scale. Initially I was really hesitant to do anything visual because visually, any urban square or open space is super charged with the memories either of the 2nd world war or the Soviet Era. There’s a real danger of making something superficial, and how can you possibly know? I wanted to steer away from that so I initially proposed to make an audio installation. They liked it and said they hoped we could make that too at some point (perhaps just a polite rejection) but meanwhile said to me, “We just think that our city looks not so good, we just want something with sequins.” I’m thinking - oh my god - really, okay, I can really understand that utterance. In a way it makes total sense. That became part of the framework, their wish for something beautiful, for something pretty. It’s also about cultural context in relationship to a material. Making huge installations out of sequins in Iceland where you can meet the President in a grocery store, it’s kind of a cliché but it’s not far from truth… Iceland is set within a Scandinavian social democratic landscape. The sequin material is all about glitz and lure, it’s used for signs and the sequins are morphologically an interpretation of coins. Displacing that material from Scandinavia into a contemporary Russian context totally changes the meaning, there anything glitzy and glamorous can’t help but allude to nouveau riche culture. All these aspects were what in the end manifested itself in the actual project. KC: I’m personally excited about the Eileen Gray retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris. I find it interesting that many feminists have named her as a sort of early Sapphic “non-heroic” modernist figure, calling her buildings and furniture sites
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