Sunday, October 19, 2014

I can't tell if I like LA... but I think I don't like it?


Doug Aitken @ Regen Projects

I want to blog about LA, but I don't know if it deserves the hype it gets, positive or otherwise... It's fine I guess...

I don't think I like being here, and perhaps it's because everyone I've met with an art degree is either a little full of themselves or is stuck answering phones... If this is the place where people are following their dreams, I think that they've sufficiently lowered their expectations and no one probably cares what I think because I probably don't know anyone important. And I'm so glad they're right.

LA is not a place where "it is what you bring to it" because a city with this many people with so much more money than you really couldn't give two shits about 'what you bring to it', they're probably too busy finding parking and you're too busy trying to keep yourself from saying something out loud about how awkward everything feels.

Dashiell Manley @ Redling Fine Art

(For a good example of awkwardness, try not to bring up how expensive CalArts is as an 'experience' while at the same time not knowing if the person you're talking to actually teaches there, most likely for not enough money.)

Competition is considered a plus, but then again I've just left a state where Libertarian attitudes have an ever growing stronghold. (See: Ayn Rand) But while on the subject of adult careers and jobs, it seems like there are only 3 modes: 1. Work until you hate yourself 2. Start your own business so that you can abuse others rather than be abused. 3. copy whatever your friend just did, what outlandish outfit are they wearing today? Copy that too, but with a floral pattern.

At its worst, LA is made up of hundreds of bubbles (cliques), jokes and un-fun games, anti-union sentiments, environmental righteousness, personalities that demand respect, dangerous precedents and no easy public transportation.

Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst

Many conversations I have end abruptly when someone realises that I can't continuously pretend to enjoy talking about sports, celebrities, gadgets, business, tv shows or health trends. Maybe I should wear a Detroit baseball cap and say that I'm doing an impression of Harry Dodge?

Actually I should be ashamed, everything would be going much more smooth if I had actually taken a Spanish class in college, I think it's actually a good thing that people are mildly impatient about my slow attempts to communicate anything after "Quisiera..." and then I stop because I don't even remotely know what is in front of me... is that intestines or skin... uh... I'll just take a small order. Yup, it's all of the above that I'm eating...

I opted for this cheerful image of myself instead of an image of the food that turned out to be layers of tripe.
At its best LA is a place where people have jobs, fruit is affordable and abundant (even in this desert), where Hispanics who don't believe in god and dress well aren't just hipsters, almost everything is reasonable (unless you're driving). I think the weather is nice, but then again we're in Santa Clarita where it hit 110 and humid for a while... not to mention having enough money to have the free time to enjoy such things would probably be even nicer.

This is the only place where the 'trickle down' affect may actually occur between the super rich and Hollywood giving meager wages to people willing to do the work. In a wonderfully stereotypical fashion, I acquired a job because I name dropped someone, showed up with resume/cover letter in person to the right person at the right time, and I was even asked if I could work pretty much that very same day. But do I want to live in a world that functions this way? I feel like it's a fine line from being part of the problem.

I wouldn't say that LA is friendly but at least there really is place for everyone to feel at home (gentrification moves just a bit slower than sprawl), the contemporary art galleries are spacious, gorgeous, they flaunt extravagance with understated grace. Also all the good ethnic restaurants have an A rating for cleanliness and usually some small perk for signing in on Yelp. (But I refuse to believe that $12 average for a meal can still be referred to as 'cheap', I'm looking at you Yelp...)

Christian Rosa at Ibid Projects
I feel like LA is draining me somehow, it has to do with feeling like I need to have the right jokes at the right time, but also I am still looking for 'my people': Those who make artwork based on research that they live, those who don't talk about bullshit mumbojumbo while attempting to get at what-is-most-meaningful in life, those who take total strangers to places where no one can take advantage of one another, but creativity is facilitated, those who can laugh at themselves and make us feel better about ourselves.
Soho House artwork by the pool table and I was immediately told not to take any photos since it was a private club with private art.

LA feels like the fake best friend that tries to get you to make fun of others with him so that both of you can superior, this city doesn't make me feel like I can lift myself and others up, it feels like a break from whatever I didn't like about Detroit, but it offers nothing that I want to put in my backpack of skills, in fact I'm not sure how I can use a range of who I am in this place, it feels like a wave of mediocrity is meant to bring special people to the surface and acidically blend everyone else who have the same taste in movies and aspirations. Those who did rise are bleached from the process and act as if it is more of a burden to continue to be a businessman that has to oil the gears and that it was never a choice. No one seems to imagine that they could start over, but this time, with feeling.

Thank god I don't have some kind of addiction to drugs right now, because this feels like a place where people blend in the more 'out of it' you are, that's a neutral stance, to let you slip into the abyss. Just standing around being self-conscious or being depressed however... this is not a good place to be.

Getting around LA feels like going from meaningless speck of light to another farway meaningless speck of light. To keep from getting confused I take a lot of pictures so that I can process things later.
But I also feel like I'm in a place where I feel like I have to hold my tongue because sometimes someone really has said the dumbest thing I have ever heard, but I don't want to start off on a bad foot. Somehow bitching about things felt like a second nature in Detroit where something was always fucked up, but at least the next day we were working on how to make our own lives a little better and I actually felt like I could see lots of ways that people were creating humble alternatives. I often felt like people could call out bullshit too, but more often than not they were being cheerleaders (Gilda Snowden). I miss being amongst my people, because it was so expansive. Even if someone wasn't some kind of cheerleaders for me, they were cheerleaders for someone I really cared about. I don't just like small towns, I like places where people look out for each other.

Here, the best a good guy can do for you is to help get you a job...

14 dollars an hour, 9 to 5, in an office with a time table so demanding that it's not unusual to take lunch at your desk, and a one hour and fifteen minute commute one way, hopefully before 7 am, and back while the sun is setting, another hour and fifteen minutes back. By the nature of this job I can't stay up later than 11 pm before a weekday.

Thank you?

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree bringing up some kind of mythical 'social contract', when I should just appreciate when someone is letting little ol' ME know, some REAL SHIT, like the best place to get ice cream. I might not remember your name, but I'll remember which ice cream shop you referred me to because you described it with such intense beauty, I would have mistaken it for getting head while watching the sunset. I can already feel myself turning into a shallow motherfucker, don't let it take me.

One day, LA will be one large gated community pumping in water from thousands of miles away...

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Trust Movement (an insomnia inspired diary entry)

I couldn't sleep last night, in part because so many things at this moment seem exciting, well that, and I accidentally overdosed on electrons which kept the synapses firing. (Although I do love this computer program called f.lux that brings down the brightness of ones screen to match the time of day and thus helping to wean you off of the damn machine.)

Usually I get a creative window at 9 am - 1 pm and 10 pm - 1 am, but this time I awoke at first at 3 am and then stayed awake during the thunderstorm last night, like a pathetic fallacy or something, and I urgently felt that ritualistic pang of 'what the hell am I going to do next?'

Thankfully it was different from the normal anxiety of: you need to get a real job, you need to finish your website, you need to go to bed, you need a real schedule, you need to stop overthinking everything...

One of the pieces from my solo show across from 'The Office'


I was excited from that day because I am genuinely looking forward to a new friend to join our art studio, Jane Orr who will share a wall with mine even though I will be more 'out' than 'in' the studio.

I finished creating a loose script for a choose-your-own-adventure style interview for Ian Swanson, I finished collaborating with Rachel on some works, framing and photographing the work. I also am excited about the possibility of a curator coming to my studio but also finishing a book that will be released as another nice addition to "We Need More ________|"

and then Facebook happened to keep my attention for 2 hours straight thinking about personalities from looking back on a retrospective of Sigmar Polke, an Aphex Twin release from 1994 that was streaming online, I watched someone describe their obsession with Soda Pop, got a small glimpse of Bedwyr Williams' work for the first time, remembered how I really want to watch Pina, re-discovering Epic Rap Battles of History and Drunk History and wondering what must it be like to get that production together because they are quite short, but the production level is appropriately ridiculous. I think that I went to bed thinking about how people chase their dreams, and about how movies get made since... they don't just cost under a million dollars nowadays, and there is so much great stuff that starts off probably pretty silly even though it will eventually cost a million dollars...

So rather than the internet turning into a wormhole time-suck it only gave me insomnia thinking about  what it takes to make the best work possible and how much this really occupies my mind, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. From somewhere shallow, my desperate mind always believes that it would be an easy enough thing to ask tough unanswerable questions to practically everyone I meet, like HOW and WHY on top of WHY on top of WHY.

This is a kindof unrelated picture, since I'm talking about when I am in any artist talk or whatever, but perhaps teaching is an appropriate outlet to thinking too much. This is a handful of students from the EMU Design class I taught who silkscreened their own stuff, I made some crazy in depth presentations such as: "Color Part 1" and "Suggestions for pursuing your dreams"

I can recall the tone of my voice in the search for answers, when I really should have approached my questioning to actually give a sense of safety, not risk: "Could you expand on how X became research material for you and how you strived to push it to be as radical as possible?"

What I am getting at perhaps is this thing that sometimes people refer to as hitting the next level. I know how oversimplified and even cheesy it can all sound, but I do believe that there is some truth in there being crucial moments whether an artist knows it or not where there is a kind of crossroads, perhaps between a conservative route/a conservative outcome and an unknown one.

I should back up and maybe explain something, in my process of becoming ok with being an artist I realized that I keep embarking on journeys that have finite beginnings and endings, and each time there are broad lessons that I work through if I'm going to be making artwork for the rest of my life, which is really the only goal I have.

In undergrad, when I first realized that I am actually going to do art there were a lot of moments I felt left out of both the teachers and artists, and I felt treated as an outsider because I didn't go all-in to either field, but I felt captivated by the discourse between the two. (In retrospect I realize now that my personality thrived with what MSU's art program offered, a very DIY program) There was something else I discovered though, and it was that, for the first time ever in my life, I was making pretty good art, and that I could notice when some other people were holding themselves back. I understand that this is going to sound like a luxury and privilege but one of the most important patterns I noticed was that for every project that was going to have a chance of being good (and for learning to occur) I had to drop at least 100 dollars to make sure that I had all of the right materials I would need.


Although I really enjoyed sculpture, I was convinced I wasn't nearly as good as many of the other students so even though this work "Courage for Love and Courage for War" won an award I thought it would be better to stick to painting. It wasn't until just before graduate school that I felt comfortable enough to attempt sculptures again...

Shoot forward to the end of graduate school and one of the realizations I had there was that in order to make a new piece that wasn't contrived, it takes a year to plant the seed if it is a collaboration and six months for the work to go from being just an idea to actually existing perhaps even having it be exhibited. All-nighters unfortunately were already a given, as well as stress, but at least one can plan to fail early rather than end up with a rushed shamble of incoherence or worse, an overly designed product.

So these are the two levels in a sense that I learned from my different points in my education that eventually everyone accepts in some form:

Level 1: Money should be no object when it comes to the production of your work, quality is the point.

Level 2: It takes time to make quality work, it cannot be rushed, you must be patient, perhaps fail early and often.

Although there are probably many other 'lessons' I picked up in between Level 1 and 2 but they don't seem to make that difference in cracking that code for reaching for quality: "deadlines help to create finished work", "blending two of almost anything together seems to create something original", "beg, borrow, steal and add also rely on others' expertise as well as learn how to delegate"

So now I'm wondering what could Level 3 be? Learning how to not rely on your immediate resources to facilitate works? Learning how to trust your own voice? What does risk really look like? Put your dignity out there? Most likely I will find out when I get to LA what my work on another level may mean...

I am also so concerned with this idea of quality levels because I felt like graduate school, although different for everyone, plays an important role in forming a kind of radical research process that is very personal, and that there is a trend that whatever an artist does in their first year out of graduate school, that will be a make or break moment for if you will be making crucial artwork and perhaps it will turn into a 5-15 year long obsession that might even pay off if you're lucky.

Leon Johnson talking about the importance of research in his own work to the class I taught at CCS. Remember when that guy taught at CCS? Are we allowed to talk about that yet?
Going back to how one of my faults is how I am almost aggressively inquisitive, I became obsessed with asking people how they made that transition between graduate school and the next step, and I've generally been good at transitions, which I guess I still am considering I had a two-person show that I am very proud of that took place at the CCA, and a solo show since returning to Detroit. Group shows aside, these were opportunities to put forth my values in the 'real world'.

So what surprised me from my interactions here and there, there was something interesting I discovered that reminds me of the phrase "it takes a village to raise a child", and that is that when it comes to art, "it's up to you". As much as I feel like this strikes me as incredibly lonely and perhaps libertarian, there is a harsh truth that I almost wasn't open enough to get.

When talking with Douglas Gordon I got the sense that things were pretty good in the past and they're pretty good at this moment in his life right now, and the Glasgow Miracle isn't a model for success, it's a statistical anomaly. It is in part because so many of his friends came from a working class background, there was a struggle inherent in this and much experiences to make work about, but it wasn't about everyone just supporting each other, but pushing each other to make their own good work and that's why it worked out, it just happened that everyone figured out how to bring their work... I guess to another level, oh and some curators happened to be around, so right time and place for a bunch of people. Again, it wasn't that there was an ideal support system, but it's as if they knew they needed to figured it all out themselves for real.

Anthony Schrag also voiced a similar sentiment when I asked him if things would have been easier if he and his peers all rallied together, something that I naively wanted to push for our own MFA but in the end it was unnecessary. He voiced that it probably would have been a longer and more difficult road, because he has relied on only himself and he is one of the few remaining from his graduating class still going at it.


Anthony Schrag Artist Talk & Discussion (excerpt) from cedrictai on Vimeo.
Anthony Schrag was invited to be a part of "Restart Plug In" in a former mattress and furniture emporium. The talk took place on August 2nd, 2013 prior to the opening of the show, in the same space as the exhibition and was geared for recent graduates in art. The entire clip is about an hour long and has been made privately available for the Glasgow School of Art's Masters of Fine Art students. This presentation is all part of the Glasgow Masters Series 2013 which can be perused here: http://www.theglasgowmastersseries.org


Now that I've left Glasgow I wish I could be talking to all these people I was surrounded by again, and ask Duncan Campbell (not actually the best link to be introduced to this artist, but notice how baffled the critic is?) or Corin Sworn or all of these other artists from the MFA questions I forgot to ask: what jobs were you doing? How did you keep yourself from doing something more conservative? The kinds of questions that help humanize these soon-to-be art legends, the kinds of questions that take down from the pedestal we put them up on, helping us to realizing the space between what I'm afraid to imagine and what others dare to imagine. Or maybe on the most basic level understanding how my anxiety is only the same as what others also struggle with.

I can recall a conversation at 71 Garfield in 2011 talking about models that might work for the studio they want to help facilitate, and there were a lot of disagreements about what was possible, but also how limited we really are, even in our own goals. I can remember Francis McKee saying with confidence that he gave it some thought about what Detroit should do, and how it was so simple because it's what everyone else does, move forward, that's it. I see myself about to do that by going to LA with Rachel and understanding how important it is for me personally to support her to be able to make the best work possible, I can't believe how happy it makes me to have someone to worry with, rather than someone who can quickly reverse my sour attitude, we're looking at fear in almost the same direction.

A photo of a book Rachel made while in Glasgow while working on her project "May our civilities never be too civil" More at RachelYezbick.com
But do I see that for all of my friends? I feel like I have the most hope for those that are on their way out, or at least artists that talk about ditching Detroit like a bad habit and it sounds healthy because it's not turning our backs on the relationships we have in the city, but stopping relying on it to give us a sense of rest or meaningfulness, and not assuming that it is the right place to be to push us to be our best selves. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you don't have to move to Detroit to help Detroit, that's probably the most selfish thing you can do, but I'm also not against doing anything selfish, making good art is selfish, but again it comes down to something surface and bullshitty about branding and about our projections of our identity and it gets in the way of letting Detroit be what it needs to be, not what we wish it was.

In three artist talks I have given since being back (CCS lunchtime talks, informal discussions at Re:View, Sean Tilson and Lou Casinelli's not-even-soon-to-be-published-art-podcast) I have misspoken about the need for Detroit to 'brand' its art scene in order to garner support, all that branding is two steps backward. Rather than get too deep about what has happened here and what should happen here, I can say with confidence that being in Michigan (but perhaps the US?) promotes a conservative approach to having an art practice. Having a Plan B and C has taken over the will to fight for things that we probably care much more about than we act on, and people are much more concerned about the relationship between one's career and our identities that there is probably a reason that we don't have an awards/programs as radical as the Turner Prize or Art Angel. We have geniuses prizes and prizes attached to the well-being of others and it all reeks of professionalism, like so many adjuncts striving for tenure. I don't give a shit that I don't have 'realistic alternatives' to offer anyone, I am simply looking for my own 'next level'.

It perhaps gives me less expectations that I need to know what I will do next, so that I can undertake risks that can benefit perhaps the work even more than myself.

Ok LA, here I come, I hope I figure something out, but before I do, our friend Lisa is in town from Glasgow, there's our wedding reception, gotta make that website, making an advisory committee for bringing Glaswegians over to Detroit... so much work to do in July etc etc etc.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Artist Interview: Isaac Richard Pool "A Alternatives" at What Pipeline


"Isaac Pool - A Alternatives" at What Pipeline (Curated by Daniel Sperry and Alivia Zivich)
http://whatpipeline.com/exhibitions/04isaacpool/1.html

(all images below are courtesy of What Pipeline and Isaac Pool)


1. Since leaving Detroit and also finishing graduate school how has your practice developed? 

Isaac Pool: Leaving Detroit was a necessary move for me and graduate school was an available method for that transition. The switch from working within a very small arts community to entering the massive number of artists in New York was   energizing but totally perspective shifting. In Detroit, I was working mostly within provisional exhibition sites and discussions about "selling" or "the market" were totally alien to me. Whereas in New York, things feel much more institutional and commercial even in "alternative" spaces. I think that being in graduate school helped me understand different forms of art making that I hadn't been exposed to in the Midwest, and levels of rigor and critique that were unthinkable living in Detroit, but the value of my work in relation to a community or a public feels very different here. Languages relating to embodiment and lifestyle that mean something radical in the space I was inhabiting in Detroit mean nearly the opposite in the context of a fully functioning, commercial zone like New York. That's just one example, but I think I'd say that's the largest thing that changed for me during the move - understanding how much language can change in context.





2. How would you describe the importance of these greater networks to your practice? (From God Club to Jessica Posner, and to seeing Alivia Zivich in the video who also started What Pipeline.) There is the feeling that wherever you go, so do your friends.

Isaac Pool: I think that my practice is kind of meaningless, or certainly less meaningful, without collaboration. The idea or image of the solitary, genius artist is so boring and patriarchal but also false - no one exists in a vortex, especially not artists working within a history of shared images and ideas. "A Alternatives" was kind of about this - for the lead character, Sally Johnson, I chose to cast 3 women in addition to myself to imply that Sally was more of a social body than a centralized, singular voice. I end up carrying most of the film myself with a monologue that acts as a treatise on self-agency, but the project ultimately ends with questions about the rhetoric of "agency" and what good speaking as a singular subject can actually do. The answer to this is ultimately that things actually happen in transit, among individuals in collaboration and/or conflict - that a center of authority is both impossible and undesirable as an embodied personae. 





3. You employ such a wide range from producing music, mood boards, sculptures, publications and even panel discussions as art pieces. In particular with your video work, do all of the different materials and formats relate to each other?

Isaac Pool: This kind of ties into the question about collaboration - I think that all of the projects relate to each other in that they are largely products of the social environment that I participate in by co-producing things like readings and discussions and performances. I've often used video to formalize these relationships. In Transfer Progress, which was the precursor to A Alternatives shot in Detroit in 2010, I used Sally as a fictional outsider to make a document about my relationship to a group of people I was sharing a nightlife culture with. It was a way to objectify myself and make the more manipulative aspects of documentary filmmaking more transparent - it was a protection of agency and a celebration of style whereas I think A Alternatives is the deflation of that. But both of these discussions came out of my relationships at the time and the spaces I was trying to create in Detroit through different parties and events I was either organizing or performing at with friends. Similarly, a lot of the photographs that I show in exhibitions are presented as documents. The collages at What Pipeline featured many photos that were production stills taken with disposable cameras while filming the movie paired with small accessories to offer small, ephemeral spaces for reflection. 




4. You have also released an eBook "Alien She" which has a review by K8 Hardy referring to a "new feminism". Could you talk more about this and perhaps the relationship between the use of "she" and "it" within the poems and how it relates to A Alternatives?
I am definitely interested in the moment where humans and objects slip into one another as things/subjects. Sally is a character who believes that distilling her personality down to a hyper-stylized, controlled look can further her viability as a subject. This ultimately makes her a more viable consumer subject in the sense that her "look" becomes her, but it also allows her a certain level of freedom to express dissonance or disinterest in becoming "average" or "conservative" in public. There's a level of objectification that Sally commits herself to by relying so heavily on a look, but I think that this is a way to operate strategically within the language of capitalism and that the "look" Sally becomes is so garishly feminine that even as a product it retains a necessary vulgarity. This sort of relates to Luce Irigaray's ideas about mimicry and I think may have something in common with the "new feminism" that K8 is referring to. Sally's persona plays off of certain pop cultural affectations of a superstar or a rom-com / sitcom lead but she does so poorly - she kind of mis-performs in this way that is both adherent to the melodrama of those archetypes while also leaving room for doubt.



5. I really like this statement: "My relationship to "being political" through Sally's performance is not apathetic or disillusioned but ambivalent - very much concerned with two, often opposing, frames of mind/points of view. It isn't impossible for a person, or a character, to be invested in superficial elements of lifestyle and in critical practices and political agendas. In fact, I would argue, that this knowing display of style doesn't posture as "objective" or "no-nonsense" in the problematic neo-liberal tradition of chastity. I honestly think that reactions to stylization and excess are homophobic leftovers from the demarcating of homosexuality as "bourgeois decadence" in Marxism. Excess is an important gesture and I often think it's misunderstood syntactically which, again, makes it a language problem."

How would you describe a way forward for ambivalence to be productive and taken seriously? It seems to be similar to how Simon Critchley describes a faith for the faithless. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/a-kind-of-faith/

Isaac Pool: I hadn't read this interview with Critchley but he's certainly speaking to some ideas that I share, and that are shared by other writers and philosophers right now. For instance, I think that Sally's character was definitely shaped by a reading of Lauren Berlant and Eve Sedgewick's writings on affect. Recently, I've been thinking about the idea of coping as an answer to the pragmatics or viability of ambivalence as a form of resistance. Coping is something we think of in direct relationship to trauma, but I think it's a really productive way of thinking about "lifestyle" in a way that isn't tied directly to capitalism or neo-liberal logics of "self-help" humanism or new age ideologies that are just as prescriptive and classist as their counterparts. Coping is always in relation to time and to a body moving and becoming out of a situation. In this way, the subject is already destabilized and their actions are stratified across their own body but also the bodies of their peers, their object choices, their hangout activities, etc. Coping refers to a contingency of individuals to experience that is at once active and hopeful but not necessarily "committed" or definitive by any means. This is an ambivalent form of political action that I think is well suited to framing some of the conversations happening right now. 

Interviewer: Cedric Tai

Artist interview: Tsz Yan Ng's "Factory Setting: the space of labor"

"Factory Setting: the space of labor" An installation by Tsz Yan Ng at 2739 Edwin (Curated by Steve Panton)

1. In the project description of your project, it is described in part as a "case study", what did this mean?

Tsz Yan Ng: It is a case study in that it stems out of both my own direct experience of designing a factory/headquarter building in China for the fashion label Lafayette 148 New York and subsequent research in textile manufacturing in the contemporary global context. The photographs are from documentation of the building and the activities within, highlight the labor of handcrafting and the value of these skills that’s fast disappearing in mass production. This company is exemplary in how they take care of their work force by providing them with a great space to work in along with medical care and education to some of the workers’ children. It is not always the case for textile manufacturing companies to provide social benefits so I wanted to distinguish what is shown in the weaving as a particular case that I have access to rather than a comprehensive survey of the subject matter. The weaving is more a project that opens up the conversation about the value of labor in the 21st century rather than focusing on extreme living and working condition polarized in the media. I was interested more in a nuanced look at the lives of these workers. Hence, I included a set of black and white photographs of factory workers in the 60s, not only to suggest the trajectory of textile manufacturing from a different historical period, albeit at a smaller scale, but also that there’s a strong social bond between the workers, talking and laughing, becoming lifetime friends through shared experiences. Nowhere in the exhibit did I mention that one of the seamstress in the black and white photographs is in fact my mother mainly because I wanted to keep the conversation as a general discourse rather than a personal narrative that others may not have access to. But in a way, the photographs discuss the other side of labor, one that is not necessarily defined by economics but more about human relations. This aspect is not visible on the surface when we talk about textile manufacturing so the aim is to highlight aspects of labor that is not always apparent.


 

2. There were two shows in a sense, can you speak to the importance of this?

Tsz Yan Ng: That’s actually interesting that it seems like a two part show. It’s true that the performance aspect of weaving, as in actually weaving in the gallery during the course of the month, is one part and the finished textile exhibited at the closing reception is another. I actually saw it as a continuum. The size of the weaving was intentional to point to the labor and time it took to make it. It’s so large that it’s palpable to understand the object in question as intrinsically tide to human labor. So even though at the closing reception, I wasn’t weaving, one can imagine that there’s an entire production involved before calling it finished. It’s not that different than analogously understanding that the clothing we have on right now, as a manufactured product, embodied a tremendous among of human labor before we purchase them in the stores. That whole side of manufacturing is invisible to us. So part of weaving at the gallery was to expose this other side. What was fascinating was that at the closing reception, Joel Silvers showed footages he took of me during the weaving process. The focus on the hand movement, the sound, the strips of lines crossing were mesmerizing for some. What was clear was that the people who only saw the finished weaving, without seeing the process, wanted to know how it was done. Only after seeing the video did they understand the scope of the work. So it was pretty interesting that it may seem like there’s two lives to the exhibition, but in fact they were really expressions of different stages that make the visitors wonder about the other aspects that are not immediately present. This was quite satisfying for me in that the object, while necessary to bracket the subject matter, was just a vehicle to discuss what it means to make and produce things. The response from people who saw the weaving process that came to the closing reception was less focused in the finished object but more astounded by the amount of effort it took to make it. So it came back to labor and that is where I wanted the discussion to reside. There is of course an aesthetic to the weaving - the colors, and texture, the different scales one is supposed to see it, from a distance and up close in detail. But this crafting is very much a part of labor as well.




3. How did you use the concept of an exhibition as architecture?

Tsz Yan Ng: As far as treating this as an installation, the sense of inhabitation was important. It wasn’t justmaking the gallery the site of production that was the spatial transposition but also the precision of designing the set up itself. I actually deployed an illusion technique called faux terrain (literally means false ground) that was used in 19th century panorama construction. It essentially is a 3D staging in the foreground of the canvas that is matched perfectly with the 2D image behind. This gives the illusion that the physical space is part of the perspectival extension of the 2D image. The view used for the weaving, the interior of the factory floor, was chosen specifically so that the custom loom and the working surface in the gallery would blend together when the viewer stands in front of it. The series of continuous horizontal cutting tables in the factory within the image is in perspectival alignment with what is in the gallery. So when people are checking out the loom and the working surface, standing in front of the weaving, they unknowing are co-opted into the perspective. There are two workers in the image, facing the same direction but deeper in space. This positions the gallery visitor to be in the foreground of that perspective, allowing others to see their inhabitation within the space of the factory. The installation as an inhabitable space relies on participants and the set up is intended to underscore the presence of people. But it is also important that it’s not about one looking at oneself, rather, is about seeing people OTHER than oneself. This type of spatial transposition or illusion has a long history within architectural design such as theater stage sets and natural history dioramas. While the subject/object relation is maintained for these precedents, I was trying to insert for the exhibition different criteria for viewing and contemplation – same technique but under very different circumstances. Beside the exhibition itself. I think perceptions of architecture as a professional design field is really skewed in terms of the emphasis on the final building. The actual ‘design’ of any built artifact is but a small fraction of the amount of work and effort in design development, management, and coordination. Even for this project, what was necessary in terms of production before anything is fabricated consisted of an entire month of material testing, prototyping, and calibration. This is labor too and it’s also invisible. The invisible intelligence of any ‘design’ work, whatever scale it may be, is a form of architectural thinking and production. Even conceptualizing the order in which things has to happen is itself a form of complex navigation. So while there may not be a physical object of interiority and exteriority that constitute ‘architecture,’ though I would probably argue for a conceptual and experiential one, I actually think the entire process of this installation, from ideation to its final outcome, is in keeping with architecture as a practice.



4. What was it like to work with Steve Panton?

Tsz Yan Ng: Steve is a careful critic and curator. He actually was the one who suggested for me to use the gallery to produce the work as a performance instead of hiding out in some other space to make the work where that labor would be rendered invisible. I think he saw the significance in relation to this issue of labor value that is critical to the project. That is for the public to engage the process itself and to reflect upon their own mode of production in life and in work to ask where value lies in one’s own form of labor. The gallery being in Hamtramck is great given the diversity and historically as home to industrial manufacturing workers. Steve by design was literally establishing a public forum by opening up a space for people to engage and reflect. It wasn’t just people coming in and absorbing the work. People stayed for long periods and some even came back multiple times throughout the month to track the weaving development. Conversations with Steve about the work made it that much more richer and as a true curator. He brought out the best in the work.


How will the project expand from here?


Tsz Yan Ng: Well, this project actually marks the second in a series. The first one is a 4 ft X 6 ft weaving of satellite views of highway interchanges called Shuttling the Grid. One set of spaghetti is from LA  century panorama construction. It essentially is a 3D and the other from Shanghai. The former, exemplary of urban formation based on car culture of  century, and the latter, of the continued valorization of car ownership in the 21stthe 20thThe context to which this was produced was a group exhibition called Un-Privileged Views, in WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles in 2012. It was highlighting images of the city outside of that iconic postcard image. The weaving technique developed from this project was intended to resist the focus on any singular image but to focus on a blended third image produced by the weaving. The simultaneity was an extremely interesting visual effect. But I wanted to explore this technique further, especially in scale, since there are very specific material concerns in terms of production. I usually like to develop each installation project based on context and venue. For the last eight years, I’ve been looking at different aspects of global textile manufacturing and industrialization/urbanization in China. I’d imagine that there will be other studies, just depends on what space I’m working with and if there’s a larger thematic question.



Interviewer/
photographer - Cedric Tai