contemporary art magazine issue # sixteen december ... - Karyn Olivier

MOUSSE / NEW YORK-MILANO / PAG. 114
che non emergevano come ci si sarebbe aspettati, dal chiaro allo
scuro, ma piuttosto attraversavano un intero intervallo di colori, in
base agli agenti chimici attivati sull’emulsione. Così un colore blu
diventava rosa e poi viola prima di diventare finalmente blu. Spero,
avendo reso visibile la formazione del colore, di aver fornito allo
spettatore un modo per pensare al processo altamente ideologico
attraverso cui erano stati nominati i colori Crayola e, infine, che
cosa imparavano i bambini usandoli. Presenterò il progetto con
Harris Lieberman ad Art Basel Miami in dicembre.
A New York artist born in 1975, Lisa Oppenheim
has risen to international attention
due to her use of an original language that
takes a critical look at the entire legacy
of conceptual photography, intertwining it
with deeply political themes that have never
been so topical as in the era of Obama. Her
films and photographs retrace the history
of the United States, from Walker Evans’s
1930s images of the American dream, to
the moon landing in ’69, to pictures of the
Iraq war. Cecilia Alemani interviewed her
as she was preparing an upcoming project
to be presented at Art Basel Miami Beach,
with Harris Lieberman.
You are one of the very few artists I know who was born in New
York City. How does it feel to be a truly genuine New Yorker?
What was it like to grow up in such a metropolis?
Well, it makes it very difficult for me to live anywhere else. I
think it’s great to grow up in New York, obviously I have no
other experience I can compare it to. I grew up in downtown
Manhattan and as a kid, a lot of my friends’ parents were artists,
so it seemed like a kind of normal thing to be when I grew up.
I don’t think I knew any adults who were lawyers or business
people, almost everyone was an academic, a shrink or somehow
involved in the arts. In this way, I am lucky that I was surrounded
by examples of how one could live as an artist and did not have to
deal with resistance from my family or larger community.
Let’s talk about your artistic training: what brought you to art?
What did you study?
I did not go to art school; I went to Brown University where I
thought I was going to become a poet. But to be honest, I could
not deal with living as isolated as I needed to be to write with
any regularity. I began taking classes in the experimental media
and critical theory department at Brown, called appropriately
Modern Culture and Media. I met a great community through this
program, and found it was a lot more fun to read and make films
and art with kooky people and live in an old warehouse than to
lock myself in an attic somewhere trying to write. My writing had
always been very visual anyway, so it was not such a leap. I pretty
much taught myself the technical side of what I do, so I guess
that is why I have always maintained a kind of scrappy aesthetic.
It seems one of the main fields in which you work is in relation to
the legacy of conceptual photography. Can you tell us about your
relationship with the photographic medium and with its physical
nature?
I think the way I came to work in photography is opposite to
the experiences of a lot of artists working in photography and
moving image. I came to photography through experimental film
rather than the other way around. My training was really in film
Lisa Oppenheim, Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans, 2007 - courtesy: Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam
and I have always been particularly interested in structuralist
films from the 1960s and 70s. Artists such as Michael Snow, Paul
Sharits and most importantly, Hollis Frampton informed much of
my thinking about film and photography.
After university, I briefly took a job working for Martha Rosler. I
necessarily became very engaged with her practice and archive.
This was sort of my introduction to conceptual photography. I found
the overlap between the work, of say, Hollis Frampton and the
work of Martha Rosler to have a lot of relevance to things I was
thinking about in my own work, such as the relationship between
the discursive and the visual, artistic structures embodying social
structures. And, of course, the ways in which meaning is produced
through and from the particularities of different media.
There is an unmistakable archival impulse in your work, visible
in series such “Upside-Down Portrait” (2005) or “Damaged”
(2003-2006). You often appropriate archival materials from public
archives or from the web. Are you fascinated by history, or do you
simply find the past more interesting than the present? How do you
choose the archival material you want to work with?
I have always been interested in the way photographs are not
simply a representation of a particular moment in time, but how
they also record the passing of time. In the “Damaged” series, for
instance, I only printed the parts of a glass negative that were clear
because the emulsion had disintegrated. The images I printed from
these negatives became a record of the decay that had occurred
over the years since the photograph was taken. This change over
time points to how photography, like film, is a time-based medium.
I am interested in working with how historical images can be
re-framed or re-viewed in the present. Damaged images have a
particular appeal to me because the visible imperfections allow
for a break in the visual plane of the photograph, a break through
which something else can often be explored.
Who do pictures belong to?
The Internet.
Although sometimes the images you present are difficult
to recognize, you always provide the viewer with a key to
deciphering it – the title.
I don’t fetishize obscurity. It is important for me that there be
something for the viewer to get. I am also interested in accidental
abstractions, how something in the world can end up looking
abstract through a series of processes or devices rather than out
of some expressive desire of the artist. In my most recent double
16 mm projections, No Closer to the Source (July 20, 1969),
images of the earth and the moon taken the evening of the first
lunar landing become more and more degraded through Xeroxing
each image at 101%. The images slowly degrade and move off
the page. The imperfections inherent in Xeroxing lead to this kind
of abstraction. Because these experiments can sometimes drift
pretty far from whatever the “source material” is, I like to find
ways to rein in the work so that it becomes legible as something
other than pure abstraction. In No Closer to the Source (July 20,
1969), the event is referred to by the date.
Can you tell us about the genesis of a project such as Killed
Negatives (2002-2006)? What I found very fascinating in it is the
almost obsessive accuracy with which you work.
I first got the idea for this project flipping through the New
Yorker. Some Walker Evans images with holes punched through
them caught my eye. The damage functions to destabilize the
image by breaking up its plane. I was reading Roland Barthes
and was very interested in his idea of the “punctum”: these
were images that had been physically pierced. The holes had
been punched through the negatives by Walker Evans’ editor
Roy Striker to prevent them from being printed because he
considered the images imperfect. The negative space produced
by the hole for me became a generative space to look through
into another time and place, the one in which images are viewed,
the present. This opened up the possibility of something more
than a one-to-one relationship between past and present and
allowed for a variety of readings of the images.
How important to you is the use of obsolete technologies such
as the 16 mm projection? Among young artists, the use of such
technologies is related to a sense of nostalgia – the sound made
by old projectors, the click of the slide carousel – whereas one
could simply adopt more recent digital tools.
To be honest I think I am one of the last in my generation of
artists to actually have started out in film-based technologies.
I have never really worked in video or digital anything. I have
always shot 16 mm film and I printed my own photographs in a
traditional darkroom. I found with video there were too many
options, I always had too much footage and did not know what
to do with it. The expense of film made me more careful and
precise. So I guess I am more of a stalwart that never made
the transition to digital technologies in the first place. Even with
images I find on the Internet, I almost always output them to
some analogue form; translate them to a medium and technology
I am more comfortable working in.
Even though it has become more common at this point, I
still think there is something very special about film or slide
projectors in a gallery. Digital projection is the standard way that
time-based media are presented, so different and antiquated
forms of presentation are a little jarring to the viewer. I think
this is a productive thing. The foregrounding of the chunkiness of
the apparatus draws attention to the making of and the material
of the work. Films and slides get scratched up and fade during
the course of the exhibition, changing the appearance of the
work over time in a way that is both inevitable and cannot be
controlled. Everything becomes marked by the ravages of time.
This makes working in film-based media scarily human to me.
Another crucial aspect in your work seems to be the relation
with language and its visual representation. I’m thinking of Story
Study Print (2005), two 16 mm projections showing all the letters
in the alphabet on one side and the visual representation of the
letter on the other. But something is slightly unfamiliar about it,
since we don’t see the cheerful pairs we were used to seeing
at school, like A for apple and Z for zebra, but rather loaded
associations such as A for Afro, M for March, or R for Revolution.
Can you tell us about this work?
I have always really been interested in pedagogical tools, the way
children are not only trained to read and write, but they way that a
kind of political consciousness is learned too. I’ve also done a lot of
work with Crayola color names along similar lines. As a child, I went
to a very progressive school, where social justice issues and human
rights were taught along with reading, writing and arithmetic. I also
went to socialist summer camps that emphasized similar issues
and politics. I know it all sounds kind of ’70s and utopian now, but
I think I was profoundly affected by these experiences and am still
working through them in my artistic practice.
I began reading about other such progressive schools and came
across didactic tools common to many of them. Alphabet cards,
for example, were often used in non-traditional ways to reflect
the experiences of different communities. In Story Study Print,
I used a combination of alphabet cards from several different
communities in an attempt to reflect a range of positions. One set
was called the Black ABC’s and another came from a school run by
the Syracuse Workers’ Coalition. I filmed visual representations of
the texts from these cards, such as M is for March.
I should also add that when I show this work, I show the texts on
one 16 mm projector and the corresponding images on another.
MOUSSE / NEW YORK-MILANO / PAG. 115
The two projectors are not synched, so the text and image
combinations changes and it becomes a bit of a memory game
to figure out which text goes with which image. This hopefully
allows the viewer to participate in the production of meaning of
the piece as well. The associations between the two projections
are either somewhat random or produced by the viewer
remembering the ‘correct’ combination.
A similar sense of displacement interwoven with a subtle
political meaning is also visible in The Sun is Always Setting
Somewhere Else.
When I made this piece I had just moved back to the U.S. from
two and a half years living in Europe. I was shocked how the war
in Iraq was portrayed so differently in European and American
media and was frustrated by how images of war had been
sanitized and sterilized for public consumption in the States.
While trolling around on photo sharing sites on the Internet, I
found that there were many photographs of sunsets taken by
American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought of
these images as a kind of postcard, something for the people
at home to know they were all right. I was very moved by these
images and wanted to do something with them. The visual
clichés of sunsets in the soldiers’ postcards function to displace
representations of violence. Therefore, I thought it would make
sense to use them to comment on how violence was somehow
left out of the media’s reporting of the war. I made this work by
organizing a bunch of these images in order of the position of the
sun on the horizon and held them in front of a setting sun and
photographed this gesture over the course of an entire sunset.
Can you tell us about your upcoming projects?
This is the last year that Polaroid is producing instant film, and
I wanted to do a project that addressed this loss. I have just
finished a series of photographs where I documented Polaroid
images coming into existence, at the same time documenting
the medium’s demise. My source materials for this project
were colors from a set of Crayola crayons produced after
September 11 called “Patriotic Colors”. I made Polaroids of
colors with names like “Land of the Free”, “Sea to Shining Sea”
and “West Virginia Coal Miner” and then re-photographed the
Polaroids at twenty-second intervals as the colors formed. What
is so interesting to me about watching colors form in Polaroid
photographs is that they do not emerge as one would expect,
from light to dark, but rather go through a whole range of colors
depending on the order in which the chemicals are activated on
the emulsion. So a blue color turns pink and then purple before
finally become blue. I hope that by making this color formation
visible, I can provide the viewer with a way to think about the
formation of the highly ideological process through which Crayola
colors are named, and ultimately, what children learn from using
them. I’ll be presenting this project with Harris Lieberman at Art
Basel Miami in December.