QUANGO CREATIVE BRIDGES 2008 LECTURE SERIES
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 3/20
DAVE ANOLIK:
Cara Tomlinson has taught at Dartmouth, Carnegie Mellon, University of Iowa, University of Minnesota, and is currently at Lewis and Clark in the painting department.
Sean Regan comes from all over and has taught at several colleges and universities. He’s shown his video installations and performances in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Syracuse, and at Cincinnati Museum of Art among others. As I’ve mentioned, Sean and I share a connection of similar schooling twenty years ago. Given that, please enjoy yourselves and we’ll have a question and answer period afterward. Let me turn it over to the pros.
SEAN REGAN:
Cara and I will be talking about the collaborative process that we undertake and we’ll be asking questions about collaboration: What is it? Why do individual artists turn to collaboration?
But before I do that, I’m going to show some of my work to give you an idea of what I do as an individual artist. One of the things about the intermedia department [at the University of Iowa] is that it comes from the tradition of the avant garde. So a lot of the pieces that you’re going to see has no interest in aesthetics whatsoever, and it is more interested in the ideas. I tell you this as a preface and as a warning.
I’ve been a video artist, an installation artist, and a performance artist. Generally, I call myself a time-based artist. For me, my artwork has always been about reflection, self-reflection in particular. All my work has been time-based in the sense that it is a reflection on context, and context is always situated context being in time and place. My work is always about time, place, and context. Context in this situation reflexively concern with what it is to be in time and place. For me, I see being as contextually situated. My work has always addressed this situated nature. That’ll become obvious in my work.
The first piece I’m going to show is Metempsychosis. It is a video installation piece. I’ll tell you exactly what this piece entails first before I talk about the idea. For this piece, I had two walls constructed. On one end, I had a video projector and on the other end, I had a monitor. The projector would project and image through lenses that I’ve constructed from old eyeglass lenses. The lenses vary in size.
Shows still images of construction
As you can see, the walls are alternating black and white. The projected video is passes through the lenses and is distorted more and more through each passing until it reaches the other wall where there is a monitor displaying a video. And on that video, called “Calamitous Conditions”, you have images of an hour-long loop of calamitous conditions. It displays storms, and devastating forces of nature. The projected video is called “Birth”. It’s a tweaked birth imagery and we’ll take a look at that in a little bit.
I used the eyeglasses because each one is an embodiment of its history in a way. I accumulated these from opticians, and they are used lenses. For me, the object is the embodiment of its history; particular the piece is charged in a way because people have lived their lives through these things. That’s why I chose them [the lenses]. Also, I chose them for their reflective qualities and I like them because of their distortion of the image from beginning to the end.
So on one side, you have a distorted image projected onto the wall and the calamitous conditions projected in the opposite direction. And they create a circuit of a sort, but not a circuit of clarity, but a circuit of different kinds of refraction, a circuit of multiplicity.
The work is called “Metempsychosis”, which means a transmigration of souls. I took the name and turned it to ‘metum-pike-osis’ and I got the name from James Jocye’s Ulysses, which influenced me greatly, more so than any other artist. And in that work he talks about and takes his point of departure that we live in a big mundane world. But that mundane world is encased in history and that history speaks through that world and conditions it inextricably. That’s where this piece finds its way.
You can walk around the lenses and you can look through these lenses from different degrees and lenses. Ultimately, this piece is about how an individual and experience finds its way from birth to calamitous conditions and the circulation from the future and the past. Let me show you the videos now.
Shows “Metempsychosis”
Let me say that I never intended that the birth ever be completely clear. It is constantly distorted by the refraction of the lenses but it also begins as distorted. The audio is very ambient in this piece. It’s not that big of a role. But it is the sound of lightning and arching electricity repeated over and over.
I have a very elaborate philosophical construction with a lot of my pieces. Those constructions are always in my mind points of departure. I hope that all my pieces have an immediate visceral impact that doesn’t need a philosophical commentary in order for someone to have enjoyment for it. As in the case of some of my later work, I like someone to really ask not only, “why would he do that?” but also “why anybody would do that?”.
The next piece, I also address this notion of historicity and I also take a lot of instruments from James Joyce and his work, Finnegan’s Wake. In this piece, I created a wedge-shaped room. And in this room, you see a chair and a fishing pole attached to this hanging, reflective surface. And there’s this small, dim—very dim—bulb in there. The room also has, off to the side, a very narrow corridor. When you walk in to this room, you will hear some sound and maybe a little bit of a blue light coming through there. Naturally, your tendency is to want to look. And as soon as you go over to look, it triggers very bright lights and loud noises so you can’t actually see the video. So in order to see the video, you’ll have to very deftly and slowly manipulate the reflective surface and watch the video that way. Here are some images.
Shows stills of room
It is not a beautiful reflective surface, it is functional, but it distorts the video a lot. Now the video is an hour-long loop of a collage of 1) a performance, but 2) also imagery of mobilization of people in crises, moments of warfare, pornography, and mixed with a performance in which I read Finnegan’s Wake with a magnifying glass.
Plays clip of video collage
The choice of Finnegan’ Wake in this piece is very significant. There’s no other book like it. Each word is torn apart and compounded with many different words, not just randomly, but in a very controlled way to reference a very complex and deep rich history of the world: Multiples of languages, multiples of cultures, and it is the hardest book to read. But it is also a very beautiful book. And it can be read on the surface as an enjoyment of language.
So in regards to this piece, although we are encased in history, we are also burdened by history in a way. It is a history that you cannot confront directly; it will blind you. It’s also a piece about the frustration of trying to see something. Because manipulating the reflective surface with the pole is difficult.
I didn’t provide any directions on how to use the pole; it was a discovery process. Although I know that if you slowly walk down the corridor, you can watch the video.
The next piece is a site-specific performance video installation and this took place in Germany at an abandoned brewery in Dortmund, a gigantic brewery at the heart of a metropolitan city. I went there with a group of artists and we were given time to explore the site. As I explored the site, I discovered these ladders that were all over the site in various places. There were many floors and dark dungeons and a lot of ladders. And some of them have been there for I don’t know how long. This brewery goes back to the 1400s or something. Being interested in the history of this place and being an American there, I wanted to acknowledge my relationship to this place in a way.
I gathered all these ladders and I did a performance with them. I culminated and edited the performance in this installation. With this piece, I was really addressing my history and relationship to it and in Europe, Americans are really not supposed to have a historical consciousness. I struggled with that because I partly think its true. I also felt an unusual site, because this site has been bombed by American bombers during the war. And my father was a colonel who commanded hundreds of B-17s that bombed the city. So I have this very strange relationship to the history of the place. I wanted to know more about it so I did this performance, which is not just about that history, but it’s also about things like trying to strive for understanding in some way or another. So I took the ladder and did this performance just for myself in front of a camera.
Shows video of performance, “12 O’clock High”
12 O’clock High is a term aviators use when airplanes are directly above and it is also the time of the showdown in the westerns and when I did the performance.
The next piece I also did during that during my time there and it is a site-specific performance video installation and it is a little bit complicated. What happens in this piece is that in the center of Dortmund is a very ancient road that is in the ring of the city. It is a multi-purpose public space and is the center of the community there. Everything goes on there. It’s been there for centuries and what I did in the piece, is that I arranged for people to race me there in a car, pull me out in a burlap bag, set me loose, tie my hands, paint my face, and attach a harness that has a camera pointed at me. And I would slowly walk the length of this ancient road and pointing [ahead of me]. Every 15 minutes, I would have someone come out of the crowd with a large crowd and slap me and force me to look at it. At the half-hour mark, someone would add more paint to my face. I would walk down this road being subjected to the eye of the camera from behind me that [was on the harness] and from the cameras in the audience. Unfortunately, I don’t have video of this piece because the [regional formats are different]. After an hour is up, I’m wrapped up and carried off in a car and driven off.
Shows still images
The eventual piece has perspectives from the inside and the outside on two separate monitors that face opposite directions. The piece is about the construction of the self in the crossfire of internal and external perspective. So the piece is called “Subjection”.
A lot of my pieces are philosophical in its point of departure and it increasingly becomes less so. My first interest is in philosophy and it’s an endearing interest to me. The next piece is a video piece. It’s some more recent work that I’ve done and it’s a collaborative piece. I took part in the “Kitchen Sink”, which is a collaborative effort extravaganza where people would work with artists they have never worked with before. I worked with three different artists and it didn’t work smoothly at all, but it culminated into a piece about work that I enjoy. What happened was that we tried to get together but nobody was willing to take the lead so we ended up doing our own idea, which was fine with me because I liked my idea and went with it.
This piece is called “What Work?” and it is about work, and nothing but work. The manner in which I did that was that I set myself a goal and I completed the goal. The goal was working without a goal. This piece is an example of my later conceptualization, which I have a structure in which I fulfill. The structure is an empty variable that conditions what actions what I’m going to do to fulfill the piece, and the piece fulfills itself by working within that structure. The structure for this piece was that I would dig a hole and fill it up, for 24 hours straight. The condition of the shovel-full was conditioned by the hour of the day. It’s not a very complex structure, by any means. The original loop is over two hours long.
Shows “What Work?”
When editing this video, I only put in parts where the shovel is moving, so the video is only about work. It is always working.
The majority of my work is not what I’m showing you, but which is single-channel video, which means that it is meant to be looked at as an audience watching a screen.
Before, distribution of videos was unlike today, and there were a lot of festivals that showed these types of videos. There aren’t many of these festivals today. In fact, much of the larger ones are struggling now. I was involved with these and I did a lot of work for these. It gave a feeling of community, and gave the opportunity to bore their audience in order to explore and experiment to try things. That’s actually something I like to push in my work, to see what people find interesting.
This piece is a conceptual piece in that I have a predefined structure. It was also a collaborative piece with some other artists who submitted to the structure I defined. Basically, the structure was they should have dinner and talk about dinner. And then I took the results and subjected them to a predefined editing scheme.
Shows video piece
Seeing as I usually think of myself of doing single-channel work I’d like to show you more, but I’m going to let Cara talk. But first, I like to read a statement of the last piece to see if I can conceptualize the piece. This is the statement: This video is about talking and eating, imperialism and fast food, about Morse code, codes and structure and dismantling the obvious what is said and not saying, and what is not said and saying.
All right, I’m going to turn it over to Cara now.
CARA TOMLINSON:
So, I’m a painter, and I’m an abstract painter. I became an abstract painter particularly because I like being alone. (Laughter.) And I also really like being in the dialectic process of working with my work—going back and forth and looking at my work, and I think my work really develops in the dialectic. I work both abstractly and representationally, in paint, in drawing, in 2-D, in 3-D, with the singular and the multiple. But, even when working alone, I define my role as an individual artist as a collaborator. I take a role with my materials, ideas, history as a coworker. I literally feel like a coworker with my materials. So materials and ideas really have inherent properties. They bring something to the table. My work respects their specific qualities.
I’m going to start with an image. The first image I’m going to show will be an image of the eyes of Saint Lucy. This is a sixteenth-century French painting—a detail. Because her name means “light”, she very early on became the great patron saint for the light of the body. She often is shown with a platter of disembodied eyes. One obsessive motif in my work is the eye. My recent paintings and drawings really ask several questions, and one of them is what it is to see—what is inherent in that act. Also, what it is to think through matter, as a painter I think through a medium. As physicists tell us, matter and consciousness are inseparable. And finally, my work is concerned with the search for form—distilling a visual vocabulary and language.
Shows “Stoma”
This is an early painting called “Stoma”. I’m going to show a few earlier pieces that have indirectly influenced my most recent paintings. This one is from 1998. Stoma is Greek for “mouth”, it’s an opening. In plants, its cells that exchange and create photosynthesis, it’s the passive reflex. But it’s contrasted here with the activity of the eyes gazing back at the viewer. The object looks back, quite literally, restating the flatness of the canvas and denying the window space, which becomes important in my later work.
Shows “Flirt”
This next image is another image using the eye motif. This is a painting installation called “Flirt”. It really examines the official system of “looking”, or “looking at looking”. There’s a binary off and on where the eye is open and closed and this imitates the way the eye scans—or accumulates—and makes meaning. So these pieces come out and come into the viewer’s space. And here’s a detail.
Shows Detail of “Flirt”
Shows “Mouths or Eyes”
Another early piece is this drawing called “Mouths or Eyes”, which represents an interest in looking at biological systems as different ways of organizing information and clustering.
Shows “I am I”
And this is another piece that’s also doing that. This is a piece called “I am I”. This led me into more exploration with organizational systems and repetitive work.
Shows Selection from “Eye Code Drawing” Series
This is a fairly large drawing from a series called the “Eye Code Drawing”. These were drawings that were really intuitive codes, or random pattern meditations. My hand would create eyes facing up, down, top the right or to the left in any random order and I would just follow that out very intuitively. Then I coded them with a filtering system, so I would take out one of those directions. I saw this really as a metaphor for knowing and understanding. Perception itself is a filter. It takes out certain options. These also start to become for me a map of consciousness—revealing the code that is inherent in the hand-eye variation over time. I wasn’t using any system of logic for that, it was all intuitive. I was also interested in the idea where the simplest variations over time equaled the most complex forms and create complexity in systems.
Shows Selections from “Eye Code Drawing” Series
Here are some more of these drawings. I think they’re also concerned with this idea of the digitization of culture. Making this—quite literally—hand-done work was something that I was really wanting to do.
Shows Selections from “Eye Code Drawing” Series
Here are some examples where several of them are represented and you can see the variety of different patterns. That was an ongoing series for about two years. It also came out of losing my studio, having a baby, a whole bunch of different things that changed in my life that made me need to do things that I could quite literally do on my lap and put them down and pick them back up, and not have something that I needed a whole space to do it in.
So now I’m going to show you some of my recent paintings. These paintings that I’m going to show you are about the process of constructing a painting. They refer to the construction of a painting as a physical object as well as the process of ordering of thought. The studio is a site for thinking about painting where notes tacked on the wall, color charts and string outwardly signify the inner process.
Shows “Attention Span”
This is a painting called “Attention Span” where quite literally, that string that moves through the painting defines a line of thought—and perhaps the idea of an attention span. Color is really an important part of my painting and it’s really become much, much more of a conscious issue, partly because color is disarming, in this case we’re getting some strange coloring that doesn’t actually exist in the painting. We respond to color before form, it always effects more than just the optical, it’s sensuous and it effects the whole body.
I think about the act of painting in a ritualistic and metaphorical way. When I’m painting, I’m standing before the painting at one moment. There really is a kind of an archeology of painting, I think. So I stand before the painting at one moment, singled out in a time continuum. The painting is a repository, a time capsule, holding a strata of minerals, suspended in mediums. The layered strata describe a month, a year—and in some cases, several years. They represent images, pictures, decisions, all so doubted and unreconciled as to be refused and occluded by another decision, another possibility. Finally, there is only one painting, the painting that faces the viewer. This painting reconciles the past doubts to the present.
A lot of my painting is about this idea of building up and taking down, building up and taking down, and finding the form. And it’s really the very basis of my study of painting. In that way, my work is in the tradition of modernist abstraction. This tradition really describes a root of questioning about the nature of seeing things, beings and activities, and the medium itself. Color is essential to the work in how it evokes the mood without being specific. The paintings—in my case—are found in the act of painting them. The reflective nature of the process of painting—or positing form, erasing, positing, erasing—is metaphorical for the evolution of the self, or that’s how I see it.
Shows “Workbook Paintings”
I have a five-year-old daughter and I’ve been learning from her since she was born. Most of this group of paintings (these are very small paintings, I call them the workbook paintings) explore the imaginative space of childhood. In that space, there are these basic physical organizing activities such as clustering, stacking, cropping, sorting, linking, tying, and discarding that also present a cognitive organization of the world.
In painting—as in childhood—the boundaries between the animate and inanimate are indistinct. These paintings, I consider sort of verbs, each one is doing one specific thing and it’s about one kind of plural activity, whether it’s stacking, whether it’s an examination of the way the brush is working with the color.
So my most recent paintings explores the tensions between simplicity and complexity of self and others, the one and many, and I’ve drawn inspiration from such diverse places such as emblem books of the 17th century, intertidal zone, demographics, geology, improvised architecture, and of course the long history of painting.
Shows painting examples
I’m going to end with this painting and share a little bit of what I think about painting. Painting is a way to practice living, to be conscious. It’s through painting that I can meditate and know what it means to be in the world. And in my case to make painting reflexively reveals patterns of consciousness. It is important to have a practice and medium in which one can know the world and translate the world. The painter, Bridget Riley, says
“Artists are people with text that need to be translated. The job of the artist is to translate his or her text. The translation is always difficult; it’s never a direct correspondence. There are compromises, things left out, things added to make the meaning clearer. It requires the right tool and the fluency with the material and deep listening and patience. But first, we must find our own text.”
For me the text only becomes clear through the doing of the work. The painting reveals bits here and there. I’m still working on the text. I don’t have a whole picture yet and maybe I’ll never have that. But the pieces come. Is this true text? Is this what I need to say? Finally, painting really is about trust and trusting that it will come. And what I’m doing is the text. With that, we would like to show some of our collaborative work.
I’ll start talking and Sean will jump in. Since our individual work so obviously different, what do we gain from working together? What has collaboration given us as artists? We’re going to show you this one piece that we’ve done.
This piece has been shown in a couple places. It’s a video soundscape drawing installation. Each element in this piece is a separate entity. It’s related but separate. And we took them on as separate medium. The title of the conversation piece refers to the attempt to converse with another species and the process of collaboration with another artist. The resulting video, sound, and drawing are the traces of the series of conversation. Each successive conversation reflects and elaborates on the process of translating between species and between two people. The original conversation began as an experiment on communication.
During the winter months, an ant colony moved into my studio. I began feeding it in order to observe it more closely. I think I found myself collaborating with an intelligence that seemed alien and familiar. I fed them text and words and the words became tools they used to access their food. I began to videotape these experiments with text and language, which gradually evolved over the months to include many, many different kinds and types of actual text. We tried all sorts of different things.
The drawings are a map of the activity of the ants overlaid onto other maps and geographical areas where I used to live. These were derived directly from the video and there are several layers to the drawings. They examine the micro and macrocosm and emergent patterns, and I used the videos to actually derive the patterns I was tracing and examining like a biologist would examine a population.
Shows still image
And this is a still of the video that we will show you.
SEAN:
We set up a video camera to document them and we took the footage and I edited it together and to highlight the experimental attitude and relationship to the ants. And also when we had it installed in the room, it was a very large room, the sound was on the other side of the room. The sound was really at the other end. The sound is to be thought of as a piece of itself, but it relates and syncs with the video and there is a relationship but they can be separated. The sound that I used came from sound footage and audio of institutions that are centered on knowledge and the development of language and culture and industry. The original loop was 30 minutes long.
Shows video of piece
CARA:
We thought that we would talk really briefly about our collaborative methods and then we’ll have one more process to show you. I’m not sure if you know this, but we’re married as well as collaborators, so we know each other quite well. In terms of our artwork, we both have very both ideas of what our work should be doing and so when we collaborate, it’s contentious and kind of like fighting and holding ground. It’s not an easy collaboration.
Actually, that’s a good thing. It’s a challenging for me and I enjoy it as an artist. It pushes me quite a bit further as an artist, but it is not comfortable. So what I want to say about collaboration is that it isn’t a comfortable process. For this piece, I had to let go of what I wanted in this piece to work with Sean, but he did things that I wouldn’t have considered that could be done.
SEAN:
When we first started working together, I was a painter at the time. We would do a lot of paintings and drawings together. That process turned into a ritualized form, and we would take turns and the process of undoing was a major part of the construction of the piece. It was not just contentious, it was revealing of how much you cared about these little marks you put in and how angry you could be when someone did something to it. But it would push your own sense of composition and structure and direction further. It would really enhance it.
I think one of the things about our collaborative process and the reason why I think it works is that we have very differences. Her differences enhance my differences. I don’t know if you noticed it, but I start with language and move to form and I see how I can find form. And I think Cara has formal intelligence that is very profound and starts with form and moves toward language and I think we have this relationship that really benefits the opposite sides of the spectrum.
Now we’ll show you another piece that we’ve been working on with another artist, Rachel Hibbert.
CARA:
This is a piece that we’re doing at the Goodwill Bins. We’re both long-time bin users. We love it for its culture, its community, and we feel very much a part of that community. There are so many different niches in that ecology of a place.
We’re doing a video and sound installation and drawing project that will be in the Portland Building this July downtown. For those of you who don’t know about the Bins, this is an inside shot of a Goodwill store in the northeast.
Shows still image of the interior of Goodwill store
This is a growing phenomenon. This is a space that we see an enormous amount of consumer goods both from other Goodwill stores and donations and they’re brought out on these rolling carts and they’re out on the floor for about 15 minutes when it’s busy and people will go through them before the bins are brought back. There is an enormous amount of material goods going through this space and it is quite phenomenal.
There are a lot of people who are making their living in the sense that it is their workplace and they go in and have a niche of certain things they are looking for. Some people are making a very good living.
So what we’ve done is that we got permission to photograph and film inside the store as well as the outside to do interviews. We are doing it in a traditional, formal, documentary-like way of filming.
SEAN:
The collaborative process in this piece is yet to really find itself. It’s going to be shown in July at the Portland Building. But as artists, we’ve been so busy with other things it’s very difficult to take the time and talk about it. So right now, its very nascent and it’s just the beginning.
We’re bin users. I tried for a while to make a living out of it. It was fruitless. We all found it thought provoking and we found it emblematic of so many different things. It reveals how communities form around resources, which there are a lot. We discovered this when we talked to the people. You can see the relationships that develop when you go frequently. It is also an expression of capitalism and waste in the twenty-first century and how everything gets used.
We found out a lot about the things that leave the Bins. It’s about detail and difference, just the amount of stuff. It particular fits in with my earlier work because it is about history. Each one of these pieces has a history and you can feel that when you go there. You see things in which you’ll wonder, “Who died?” or “Why would they let go of this?”. You can feel that. It’s fascinating. The place mirrors biological processes in many different ways. And we found it a celebration of community, and we wanted to celebrate the place too.
We discovered that relating to it is a very difficult thing because we are coming at it from the outside, hover, almost as we’re anthropologists and we don’t want to subject the place to any condescension from our educated perceptions. All classes and strata take part in this place and its not just gleaners of lower economic levels. We were really reticent about that. It’s very possible to objectify. Those were one of the issues we were dealing with.
I just put together something to show you an example of some of the imagery of what we’re working with. I’ve only downloaded two or three of the reels that we’ve shot, and we’ve shot about 30. Let’s take a look at it.
Show current collaborative piece
SEAN:
So that’s what we have. It’s not color corrected or anything. That’s not going to be the way it’s going to be edited. We have no idea. We are going to work together collaboratively to decide. We have a small space that [we will work with in the Portland Building].
DAVE:
I really appreciate you guys coming and talking. It was very wonderful and I found that the collaboration side and your attempts to collaborate have great relevance to what we do and looking for patterns and communicate those patterns. Thank you.
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 3/20
DAVE ANOLIK:
Cara Tomlinson has taught at Dartmouth, Carnegie Mellon, University of Iowa, University of Minnesota, and is currently at Lewis and Clark in the painting department.
Sean Regan comes from all over and has taught at several colleges and universities. He’s shown his video installations and performances in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Syracuse, and at Cincinnati Museum of Art among others. As I’ve mentioned, Sean and I share a connection of similar schooling twenty years ago. Given that, please enjoy yourselves and we’ll have a question and answer period afterward. Let me turn it over to the pros.
SEAN REGAN:
Cara and I will be talking about the collaborative process that we undertake and we’ll be asking questions about collaboration: What is it? Why do individual artists turn to collaboration?
But before I do that, I’m going to show some of my work to give you an idea of what I do as an individual artist. One of the things about the intermedia department [at the University of Iowa] is that it comes from the tradition of the avant garde. So a lot of the pieces that you’re going to see has no interest in aesthetics whatsoever, and it is more interested in the ideas. I tell you this as a preface and as a warning.
I’ve been a video artist, an installation artist, and a performance artist. Generally, I call myself a time-based artist. For me, my artwork has always been about reflection, self-reflection in particular. All my work has been time-based in the sense that it is a reflection on context, and context is always situated context being in time and place. My work is always about time, place, and context. Context in this situation reflexively concern with what it is to be in time and place. For me, I see being as contextually situated. My work has always addressed this situated nature. That’ll become obvious in my work.
The first piece I’m going to show is Metempsychosis. It is a video installation piece. I’ll tell you exactly what this piece entails first before I talk about the idea. For this piece, I had two walls constructed. On one end, I had a video projector and on the other end, I had a monitor. The projector would project and image through lenses that I’ve constructed from old eyeglass lenses. The lenses vary in size.
Shows still images of construction
As you can see, the walls are alternating black and white. The projected video is passes through the lenses and is distorted more and more through each passing until it reaches the other wall where there is a monitor displaying a video. And on that video, called “Calamitous Conditions”, you have images of an hour-long loop of calamitous conditions. It displays storms, and devastating forces of nature. The projected video is called “Birth”. It’s a tweaked birth imagery and we’ll take a look at that in a little bit.
I used the eyeglasses because each one is an embodiment of its history in a way. I accumulated these from opticians, and they are used lenses. For me, the object is the embodiment of its history; particular the piece is charged in a way because people have lived their lives through these things. That’s why I chose them [the lenses]. Also, I chose them for their reflective qualities and I like them because of their distortion of the image from beginning to the end.
So on one side, you have a distorted image projected onto the wall and the calamitous conditions projected in the opposite direction. And they create a circuit of a sort, but not a circuit of clarity, but a circuit of different kinds of refraction, a circuit of multiplicity.
The work is called “Metempsychosis”, which means a transmigration of souls. I took the name and turned it to ‘metum-pike-osis’ and I got the name from James Jocye’s Ulysses, which influenced me greatly, more so than any other artist. And in that work he talks about and takes his point of departure that we live in a big mundane world. But that mundane world is encased in history and that history speaks through that world and conditions it inextricably. That’s where this piece finds its way.
You can walk around the lenses and you can look through these lenses from different degrees and lenses. Ultimately, this piece is about how an individual and experience finds its way from birth to calamitous conditions and the circulation from the future and the past. Let me show you the videos now.
Shows “Metempsychosis”
Let me say that I never intended that the birth ever be completely clear. It is constantly distorted by the refraction of the lenses but it also begins as distorted. The audio is very ambient in this piece. It’s not that big of a role. But it is the sound of lightning and arching electricity repeated over and over.
I have a very elaborate philosophical construction with a lot of my pieces. Those constructions are always in my mind points of departure. I hope that all my pieces have an immediate visceral impact that doesn’t need a philosophical commentary in order for someone to have enjoyment for it. As in the case of some of my later work, I like someone to really ask not only, “why would he do that?” but also “why anybody would do that?”.
The next piece, I also address this notion of historicity and I also take a lot of instruments from James Joyce and his work, Finnegan’s Wake. In this piece, I created a wedge-shaped room. And in this room, you see a chair and a fishing pole attached to this hanging, reflective surface. And there’s this small, dim—very dim—bulb in there. The room also has, off to the side, a very narrow corridor. When you walk in to this room, you will hear some sound and maybe a little bit of a blue light coming through there. Naturally, your tendency is to want to look. And as soon as you go over to look, it triggers very bright lights and loud noises so you can’t actually see the video. So in order to see the video, you’ll have to very deftly and slowly manipulate the reflective surface and watch the video that way. Here are some images.
Shows stills of room
It is not a beautiful reflective surface, it is functional, but it distorts the video a lot. Now the video is an hour-long loop of a collage of 1) a performance, but 2) also imagery of mobilization of people in crises, moments of warfare, pornography, and mixed with a performance in which I read Finnegan’s Wake with a magnifying glass.
Plays clip of video collage
The choice of Finnegan’ Wake in this piece is very significant. There’s no other book like it. Each word is torn apart and compounded with many different words, not just randomly, but in a very controlled way to reference a very complex and deep rich history of the world: Multiples of languages, multiples of cultures, and it is the hardest book to read. But it is also a very beautiful book. And it can be read on the surface as an enjoyment of language.
So in regards to this piece, although we are encased in history, we are also burdened by history in a way. It is a history that you cannot confront directly; it will blind you. It’s also a piece about the frustration of trying to see something. Because manipulating the reflective surface with the pole is difficult.
I didn’t provide any directions on how to use the pole; it was a discovery process. Although I know that if you slowly walk down the corridor, you can watch the video.
The next piece is a site-specific performance video installation and this took place in Germany at an abandoned brewery in Dortmund, a gigantic brewery at the heart of a metropolitan city. I went there with a group of artists and we were given time to explore the site. As I explored the site, I discovered these ladders that were all over the site in various places. There were many floors and dark dungeons and a lot of ladders. And some of them have been there for I don’t know how long. This brewery goes back to the 1400s or something. Being interested in the history of this place and being an American there, I wanted to acknowledge my relationship to this place in a way.
I gathered all these ladders and I did a performance with them. I culminated and edited the performance in this installation. With this piece, I was really addressing my history and relationship to it and in Europe, Americans are really not supposed to have a historical consciousness. I struggled with that because I partly think its true. I also felt an unusual site, because this site has been bombed by American bombers during the war. And my father was a colonel who commanded hundreds of B-17s that bombed the city. So I have this very strange relationship to the history of the place. I wanted to know more about it so I did this performance, which is not just about that history, but it’s also about things like trying to strive for understanding in some way or another. So I took the ladder and did this performance just for myself in front of a camera.
Shows video of performance, “12 O’clock High”
12 O’clock High is a term aviators use when airplanes are directly above and it is also the time of the showdown in the westerns and when I did the performance.
The next piece I also did during that during my time there and it is a site-specific performance video installation and it is a little bit complicated. What happens in this piece is that in the center of Dortmund is a very ancient road that is in the ring of the city. It is a multi-purpose public space and is the center of the community there. Everything goes on there. It’s been there for centuries and what I did in the piece, is that I arranged for people to race me there in a car, pull me out in a burlap bag, set me loose, tie my hands, paint my face, and attach a harness that has a camera pointed at me. And I would slowly walk the length of this ancient road and pointing [ahead of me]. Every 15 minutes, I would have someone come out of the crowd with a large crowd and slap me and force me to look at it. At the half-hour mark, someone would add more paint to my face. I would walk down this road being subjected to the eye of the camera from behind me that [was on the harness] and from the cameras in the audience. Unfortunately, I don’t have video of this piece because the [regional formats are different]. After an hour is up, I’m wrapped up and carried off in a car and driven off.
Shows still images
The eventual piece has perspectives from the inside and the outside on two separate monitors that face opposite directions. The piece is about the construction of the self in the crossfire of internal and external perspective. So the piece is called “Subjection”.
A lot of my pieces are philosophical in its point of departure and it increasingly becomes less so. My first interest is in philosophy and it’s an endearing interest to me. The next piece is a video piece. It’s some more recent work that I’ve done and it’s a collaborative piece. I took part in the “Kitchen Sink”, which is a collaborative effort extravaganza where people would work with artists they have never worked with before. I worked with three different artists and it didn’t work smoothly at all, but it culminated into a piece about work that I enjoy. What happened was that we tried to get together but nobody was willing to take the lead so we ended up doing our own idea, which was fine with me because I liked my idea and went with it.
This piece is called “What Work?” and it is about work, and nothing but work. The manner in which I did that was that I set myself a goal and I completed the goal. The goal was working without a goal. This piece is an example of my later conceptualization, which I have a structure in which I fulfill. The structure is an empty variable that conditions what actions what I’m going to do to fulfill the piece, and the piece fulfills itself by working within that structure. The structure for this piece was that I would dig a hole and fill it up, for 24 hours straight. The condition of the shovel-full was conditioned by the hour of the day. It’s not a very complex structure, by any means. The original loop is over two hours long.
Shows “What Work?”
When editing this video, I only put in parts where the shovel is moving, so the video is only about work. It is always working.
The majority of my work is not what I’m showing you, but which is single-channel video, which means that it is meant to be looked at as an audience watching a screen.
Before, distribution of videos was unlike today, and there were a lot of festivals that showed these types of videos. There aren’t many of these festivals today. In fact, much of the larger ones are struggling now. I was involved with these and I did a lot of work for these. It gave a feeling of community, and gave the opportunity to bore their audience in order to explore and experiment to try things. That’s actually something I like to push in my work, to see what people find interesting.
This piece is a conceptual piece in that I have a predefined structure. It was also a collaborative piece with some other artists who submitted to the structure I defined. Basically, the structure was they should have dinner and talk about dinner. And then I took the results and subjected them to a predefined editing scheme.
Shows video piece
Seeing as I usually think of myself of doing single-channel work I’d like to show you more, but I’m going to let Cara talk. But first, I like to read a statement of the last piece to see if I can conceptualize the piece. This is the statement: This video is about talking and eating, imperialism and fast food, about Morse code, codes and structure and dismantling the obvious what is said and not saying, and what is not said and saying.
All right, I’m going to turn it over to Cara now.
CARA TOMLINSON:
So, I’m a painter, and I’m an abstract painter. I became an abstract painter particularly because I like being alone. (Laughter.) And I also really like being in the dialectic process of working with my work—going back and forth and looking at my work, and I think my work really develops in the dialectic. I work both abstractly and representationally, in paint, in drawing, in 2-D, in 3-D, with the singular and the multiple. But, even when working alone, I define my role as an individual artist as a collaborator. I take a role with my materials, ideas, history as a coworker. I literally feel like a coworker with my materials. So materials and ideas really have inherent properties. They bring something to the table. My work respects their specific qualities.
I’m going to start with an image. The first image I’m going to show will be an image of the eyes of Saint Lucy. This is a sixteenth-century French painting—a detail. Because her name means “light”, she very early on became the great patron saint for the light of the body. She often is shown with a platter of disembodied eyes. One obsessive motif in my work is the eye. My recent paintings and drawings really ask several questions, and one of them is what it is to see—what is inherent in that act. Also, what it is to think through matter, as a painter I think through a medium. As physicists tell us, matter and consciousness are inseparable. And finally, my work is concerned with the search for form—distilling a visual vocabulary and language.
Shows “Stoma”
This is an early painting called “Stoma”. I’m going to show a few earlier pieces that have indirectly influenced my most recent paintings. This one is from 1998. Stoma is Greek for “mouth”, it’s an opening. In plants, its cells that exchange and create photosynthesis, it’s the passive reflex. But it’s contrasted here with the activity of the eyes gazing back at the viewer. The object looks back, quite literally, restating the flatness of the canvas and denying the window space, which becomes important in my later work.
Shows “Flirt”
This next image is another image using the eye motif. This is a painting installation called “Flirt”. It really examines the official system of “looking”, or “looking at looking”. There’s a binary off and on where the eye is open and closed and this imitates the way the eye scans—or accumulates—and makes meaning. So these pieces come out and come into the viewer’s space. And here’s a detail.
Shows Detail of “Flirt”
Shows “Mouths or Eyes”
Another early piece is this drawing called “Mouths or Eyes”, which represents an interest in looking at biological systems as different ways of organizing information and clustering.
Shows “I am I”
And this is another piece that’s also doing that. This is a piece called “I am I”. This led me into more exploration with organizational systems and repetitive work.
Shows Selection from “Eye Code Drawing” Series
This is a fairly large drawing from a series called the “Eye Code Drawing”. These were drawings that were really intuitive codes, or random pattern meditations. My hand would create eyes facing up, down, top the right or to the left in any random order and I would just follow that out very intuitively. Then I coded them with a filtering system, so I would take out one of those directions. I saw this really as a metaphor for knowing and understanding. Perception itself is a filter. It takes out certain options. These also start to become for me a map of consciousness—revealing the code that is inherent in the hand-eye variation over time. I wasn’t using any system of logic for that, it was all intuitive. I was also interested in the idea where the simplest variations over time equaled the most complex forms and create complexity in systems.
Shows Selections from “Eye Code Drawing” Series
Here are some more of these drawings. I think they’re also concerned with this idea of the digitization of culture. Making this—quite literally—hand-done work was something that I was really wanting to do.
Shows Selections from “Eye Code Drawing” Series
Here are some examples where several of them are represented and you can see the variety of different patterns. That was an ongoing series for about two years. It also came out of losing my studio, having a baby, a whole bunch of different things that changed in my life that made me need to do things that I could quite literally do on my lap and put them down and pick them back up, and not have something that I needed a whole space to do it in.
So now I’m going to show you some of my recent paintings. These paintings that I’m going to show you are about the process of constructing a painting. They refer to the construction of a painting as a physical object as well as the process of ordering of thought. The studio is a site for thinking about painting where notes tacked on the wall, color charts and string outwardly signify the inner process.
Shows “Attention Span”
This is a painting called “Attention Span” where quite literally, that string that moves through the painting defines a line of thought—and perhaps the idea of an attention span. Color is really an important part of my painting and it’s really become much, much more of a conscious issue, partly because color is disarming, in this case we’re getting some strange coloring that doesn’t actually exist in the painting. We respond to color before form, it always effects more than just the optical, it’s sensuous and it effects the whole body.
I think about the act of painting in a ritualistic and metaphorical way. When I’m painting, I’m standing before the painting at one moment. There really is a kind of an archeology of painting, I think. So I stand before the painting at one moment, singled out in a time continuum. The painting is a repository, a time capsule, holding a strata of minerals, suspended in mediums. The layered strata describe a month, a year—and in some cases, several years. They represent images, pictures, decisions, all so doubted and unreconciled as to be refused and occluded by another decision, another possibility. Finally, there is only one painting, the painting that faces the viewer. This painting reconciles the past doubts to the present.
A lot of my painting is about this idea of building up and taking down, building up and taking down, and finding the form. And it’s really the very basis of my study of painting. In that way, my work is in the tradition of modernist abstraction. This tradition really describes a root of questioning about the nature of seeing things, beings and activities, and the medium itself. Color is essential to the work in how it evokes the mood without being specific. The paintings—in my case—are found in the act of painting them. The reflective nature of the process of painting—or positing form, erasing, positing, erasing—is metaphorical for the evolution of the self, or that’s how I see it.
Shows “Workbook Paintings”
I have a five-year-old daughter and I’ve been learning from her since she was born. Most of this group of paintings (these are very small paintings, I call them the workbook paintings) explore the imaginative space of childhood. In that space, there are these basic physical organizing activities such as clustering, stacking, cropping, sorting, linking, tying, and discarding that also present a cognitive organization of the world.
In painting—as in childhood—the boundaries between the animate and inanimate are indistinct. These paintings, I consider sort of verbs, each one is doing one specific thing and it’s about one kind of plural activity, whether it’s stacking, whether it’s an examination of the way the brush is working with the color.
So my most recent paintings explores the tensions between simplicity and complexity of self and others, the one and many, and I’ve drawn inspiration from such diverse places such as emblem books of the 17th century, intertidal zone, demographics, geology, improvised architecture, and of course the long history of painting.
Shows painting examples
I’m going to end with this painting and share a little bit of what I think about painting. Painting is a way to practice living, to be conscious. It’s through painting that I can meditate and know what it means to be in the world. And in my case to make painting reflexively reveals patterns of consciousness. It is important to have a practice and medium in which one can know the world and translate the world. The painter, Bridget Riley, says
“Artists are people with text that need to be translated. The job of the artist is to translate his or her text. The translation is always difficult; it’s never a direct correspondence. There are compromises, things left out, things added to make the meaning clearer. It requires the right tool and the fluency with the material and deep listening and patience. But first, we must find our own text.”
For me the text only becomes clear through the doing of the work. The painting reveals bits here and there. I’m still working on the text. I don’t have a whole picture yet and maybe I’ll never have that. But the pieces come. Is this true text? Is this what I need to say? Finally, painting really is about trust and trusting that it will come. And what I’m doing is the text. With that, we would like to show some of our collaborative work.
I’ll start talking and Sean will jump in. Since our individual work so obviously different, what do we gain from working together? What has collaboration given us as artists? We’re going to show you this one piece that we’ve done.
This piece has been shown in a couple places. It’s a video soundscape drawing installation. Each element in this piece is a separate entity. It’s related but separate. And we took them on as separate medium. The title of the conversation piece refers to the attempt to converse with another species and the process of collaboration with another artist. The resulting video, sound, and drawing are the traces of the series of conversation. Each successive conversation reflects and elaborates on the process of translating between species and between two people. The original conversation began as an experiment on communication.
During the winter months, an ant colony moved into my studio. I began feeding it in order to observe it more closely. I think I found myself collaborating with an intelligence that seemed alien and familiar. I fed them text and words and the words became tools they used to access their food. I began to videotape these experiments with text and language, which gradually evolved over the months to include many, many different kinds and types of actual text. We tried all sorts of different things.
The drawings are a map of the activity of the ants overlaid onto other maps and geographical areas where I used to live. These were derived directly from the video and there are several layers to the drawings. They examine the micro and macrocosm and emergent patterns, and I used the videos to actually derive the patterns I was tracing and examining like a biologist would examine a population.
Shows still image
And this is a still of the video that we will show you.
SEAN:
We set up a video camera to document them and we took the footage and I edited it together and to highlight the experimental attitude and relationship to the ants. And also when we had it installed in the room, it was a very large room, the sound was on the other side of the room. The sound was really at the other end. The sound is to be thought of as a piece of itself, but it relates and syncs with the video and there is a relationship but they can be separated. The sound that I used came from sound footage and audio of institutions that are centered on knowledge and the development of language and culture and industry. The original loop was 30 minutes long.
Shows video of piece
CARA:
We thought that we would talk really briefly about our collaborative methods and then we’ll have one more process to show you. I’m not sure if you know this, but we’re married as well as collaborators, so we know each other quite well. In terms of our artwork, we both have very both ideas of what our work should be doing and so when we collaborate, it’s contentious and kind of like fighting and holding ground. It’s not an easy collaboration.
Actually, that’s a good thing. It’s a challenging for me and I enjoy it as an artist. It pushes me quite a bit further as an artist, but it is not comfortable. So what I want to say about collaboration is that it isn’t a comfortable process. For this piece, I had to let go of what I wanted in this piece to work with Sean, but he did things that I wouldn’t have considered that could be done.
SEAN:
When we first started working together, I was a painter at the time. We would do a lot of paintings and drawings together. That process turned into a ritualized form, and we would take turns and the process of undoing was a major part of the construction of the piece. It was not just contentious, it was revealing of how much you cared about these little marks you put in and how angry you could be when someone did something to it. But it would push your own sense of composition and structure and direction further. It would really enhance it.
I think one of the things about our collaborative process and the reason why I think it works is that we have very differences. Her differences enhance my differences. I don’t know if you noticed it, but I start with language and move to form and I see how I can find form. And I think Cara has formal intelligence that is very profound and starts with form and moves toward language and I think we have this relationship that really benefits the opposite sides of the spectrum.
Now we’ll show you another piece that we’ve been working on with another artist, Rachel Hibbert.
CARA:
This is a piece that we’re doing at the Goodwill Bins. We’re both long-time bin users. We love it for its culture, its community, and we feel very much a part of that community. There are so many different niches in that ecology of a place.
We’re doing a video and sound installation and drawing project that will be in the Portland Building this July downtown. For those of you who don’t know about the Bins, this is an inside shot of a Goodwill store in the northeast.
Shows still image of the interior of Goodwill store
This is a growing phenomenon. This is a space that we see an enormous amount of consumer goods both from other Goodwill stores and donations and they’re brought out on these rolling carts and they’re out on the floor for about 15 minutes when it’s busy and people will go through them before the bins are brought back. There is an enormous amount of material goods going through this space and it is quite phenomenal.
There are a lot of people who are making their living in the sense that it is their workplace and they go in and have a niche of certain things they are looking for. Some people are making a very good living.
So what we’ve done is that we got permission to photograph and film inside the store as well as the outside to do interviews. We are doing it in a traditional, formal, documentary-like way of filming.
SEAN:
The collaborative process in this piece is yet to really find itself. It’s going to be shown in July at the Portland Building. But as artists, we’ve been so busy with other things it’s very difficult to take the time and talk about it. So right now, its very nascent and it’s just the beginning.
We’re bin users. I tried for a while to make a living out of it. It was fruitless. We all found it thought provoking and we found it emblematic of so many different things. It reveals how communities form around resources, which there are a lot. We discovered this when we talked to the people. You can see the relationships that develop when you go frequently. It is also an expression of capitalism and waste in the twenty-first century and how everything gets used.
We found out a lot about the things that leave the Bins. It’s about detail and difference, just the amount of stuff. It particular fits in with my earlier work because it is about history. Each one of these pieces has a history and you can feel that when you go there. You see things in which you’ll wonder, “Who died?” or “Why would they let go of this?”. You can feel that. It’s fascinating. The place mirrors biological processes in many different ways. And we found it a celebration of community, and we wanted to celebrate the place too.
We discovered that relating to it is a very difficult thing because we are coming at it from the outside, hover, almost as we’re anthropologists and we don’t want to subject the place to any condescension from our educated perceptions. All classes and strata take part in this place and its not just gleaners of lower economic levels. We were really reticent about that. It’s very possible to objectify. Those were one of the issues we were dealing with.
I just put together something to show you an example of some of the imagery of what we’re working with. I’ve only downloaded two or three of the reels that we’ve shot, and we’ve shot about 30. Let’s take a look at it.
Show current collaborative piece
SEAN:
So that’s what we have. It’s not color corrected or anything. That’s not going to be the way it’s going to be edited. We have no idea. We are going to work together collaboratively to decide. We have a small space that [we will work with in the Portland Building].
DAVE:
I really appreciate you guys coming and talking. It was very wonderful and I found that the collaboration side and your attempts to collaborate have great relevance to what we do and looking for patterns and communicate those patterns. Thank you.
