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A Discussion of Substance
A conversation between Sally O’Reilly
and Katie Holten
Katie Holten: One of the reasons I was interested
in having this conversation with you is that although you've been
getting more and more involved in Live Art projects I still feel that
objects have some importance to you. Am I right or am I wrong?
As my
own practice is, in a way, interested in 'live', I've spent years
avoiding objects. I was much more concerned with actually doing things,
‘making spaces' organizing events. Any objects or installations
that I did make were temporary, not for consumption and often ephemeral.
Like the black and white booklets I’ve made to accompany various
projects. I was obviously really excited to read Sadie Plant's Zeros
+ Ones. Not sure why that popped into my head just now. Probably
the zero - reaching toward zero. Also, all her fabulous tangential
talk, in between-ness, no need for solid endings. Anyway, for me producing
art objects was too close to producing commodities. Something pretty
to be bought and sold, and of no relevance to what I'm interested
in investigating. However, recently I've started making objects. I
came to a point where I needed to use my hands and physically make
things. But they're still not really marketable art commodities -
in Mexico a dog ate part of one object and he pooped it out the other
end.
Sally O’Reilly: I can understand in a way
your tumble back towards objects - they are so alluring and making
is so satisfying. Although it is a very politicized position to circumvent
the art commodity, it is not the only way to subvert a system. The
gift is another process by which the cycle of economy is broken. Objects
can also act as catalysts for events, actions, ideas. The agency of
relational acts has perhaps been over-emphasized over the last decade,
and the fact of the matter is that a relational practice is simply
taking on the model of the service economy rather than the commodity-based
one. It is still a reference to a late capitalist model. Perhaps object-hood,
with its art-historical connotations, might be more subversive in
some situations. Personally, I love the tactility of printed matter,
yet I know this is ecologically bad and the Internet is so much more
democratic. But there you go - we are a mess of contradictions and
it is hard to keep one's nose clean.
KH: Yeh, I'm another fan of printed matter. Simple
- often made at short notice with no resources. For me that's more
practical and immediate than glossy brochures. Also, these pamphlets,
or whatever they are, can be given away for free. Being able to give
something away is important to me, as I've had this problem with making
'art objects' – so I would often just give things away. The
‘gifts’ that you just mentioned. When I was still in college
I left notes under windscreen wipers on the cars parked along the
streets I walked every day. In Venice visitors could help themselves
to all my booklets (as well as food and drinks). That people can actually
pick something up, hold it, flick through it, and take it away with
them - even discard it later - that's realistic. GRAN BAZAAR has
fliers and posters that were distributed around the Centro. The fliers
were particularly important to me as all the local businesses use
them - people hand them out on the street or they're left in little
boxes for people to take; ‘tome uno’.
SOR: Tell me more about Zeros + Ones...
KH: I read it years ago, but what I remember is
Ada Lovelace who worked with Charles Babbage on a counting machine.
Like an early computer. It was called The Difference Machine, I think.
Anyway, the whole book is like a series of notes – tangential
wanderings from one point to another: rhizomes, grass, matrices...
I liked the non-linearity and yet connectedness of it all…the
gaps.
And to go back quickly to the object dilemma – I feel it was
perhaps a greediness on my part, that was one reason to go back to
making things. Maybe I just got fed up with the irony and doubt of
the art world. It was the informal economics of Mexico that made such
an impact on me during my two site visits (as well as the pyramids
at Teotihuacan, and the anthropological museum) – for me it
was obvious that I had to work within this economic, day-to-day space.
And although I was making objects I was at all times completely separate
from the 'art world' and all that economic baggage. There was no gallery
involved. It was liberating and fun, although scary - as I feared
that my 'wares' were less 'finished' then the shiny, plastic, fake
imports. Also, I couldn't afford to compete with the prices of these
things. For example, you can find ‘pulcera’ (bracelets),
on the street for 3 pesos, whereas I had to charge 15 pesos in order
to cover my overheads.
SOR: Doesn't knitting play a role in early computing?
I like telling my textiles students that - it de-feminizes the image
of the discipline somewhat. Knitting would also bear some relation
to the rhizomatic model - interpenetrative structure, etc. Also, it
relates to Spinoza's monadic model - the idea that all elements of
the universe - objects, people, and the spaces in between - are made
from the same stuff. He proposed that matter is a modification of
a single substance – the substance of nature and God. Spinoza
talked about objects as moments of individuation of this substance,
which sounds very Deleuzian, and in fact Deleuze was a big fan and
the rhizome and the monad are closely related. I like this etymological
root of substance as standing beneath our perception of reality. I
think it highlights our muddled relationship to objects and the art
object in particular. It highlights our tendency to relate to an object
in terms of its application, the effect that it has on our pragmatic
life, rather than the actual fact of its physical existence. The art
object brings extra complications to this. Aesthetic pleasure could
be thought of as a pragmatic utility, but I think we tend to prioritize
the representative values of a sculptural object over this, and certainly
over the physical fact of substance, despite Minimalism and the like...
KH: Yes, knitting for sure - but I think weaving
played a larger role in the development of early computing. As far
as I remember that was what Ada Lovelace was working with - punch
cards were used in weaving looms and also in early computers. That's
where the zeros and ones come in - different holes represented 0 and
1.
The objects that I’ve been making all started out as practical
things - containers for plants, pens, books, etc., so of course any
aesthetic pleasure was just an offshoot of the practicality of the
thing. With these simple objects there is no heavy representative
value inherent in them as sculptural objects. It was just important
for me (and my boyfriend as they ended up in his loft) that they 'worked'.
And that's where you could go off on a conversation about craft/process/product
(but I think Andrea Zittel has already done that more eloquently than
I could).
SOR: Let me throw this in: how do you think object,
as in ‘to object to’, relates to what you’re thinking
about?
KH: I've been using the word 'object' while thinking
of it as a noun, referring to material 'things', things that cast
shadows! But it's nice that you've thrown in this question, as the
first objects that I started making (containers for plants made from
‘Fresh Direct’ cardboard boxes) were definitely 'objecting
to' something. I was interested in questioning the ideology, the waste,
the state of things, the piles and piles of boxes accumulating –
where people can't afford the time to go shopping and everything is
done online – social/day-to-day business is being supplanted
by www clicks.
Because it's got such negative connotations I get a kick out of making
these 'things of opposition' while the viewer doesn't necessarily
know this. I don't spell it out. But it's definitely there for the
viewer who's interested. I often try to make reference to it, if not
in the title then in the list of ingredients. I've always preferred
to question things in a silent way, or at least a less aggressive/in-your-face
kind of way, so by ripping up the newspaper, shredding it, and moulding
it into something else, (an 'innocent' white sphere/globe for example),
that's a more subtle objection. We all know that the 'news' in the
newspaper is biased, censored, etc. So I enjoy shredding it, section
by section. The newspapers in Mexico were filled with news of the
election.
Another thing that occurred to me – before I recently started
making 'things' I would use 'found objects' in my installations, Duchamp’s
'objets trouvés'. Objects that could revert back to everyday
life at any point (tables, chairs, books, etc). Whereas these objects
that I'm constructing – they can't do that. Although they come
from the world of utility and function (plastic bags, cardboard boxes,
cups, newspaper, bottles…) I'm creating things that don’t
necessarily ‘function’. I guess they're only there to
be contemplated and looked at. I made a selection of 'jewellery' for
GRAN BAZAAR – but I never intended for them to function,
they’re as ‘useless’ as the trees I've made. Although
some customers chose to wear them, the bracelets are really just coloured
lumps on a little length of wire, rather than a 'real' thing that's
meant to be part of the real world, on your wrist. And the 'globes'
are useless. The maps of the world are drawn from memory - whole countries
are forgotten, obliterated, while others are drawn too large, or too
small. For me personally these globes object to lots of things.
SOR: Aha – I suspected that there were objecting
objects in there somewhere. Objectionable objects are something else
again. I too am interested in objecting to objects, but I would also
like to ask about a more extreme form of object objection. It is increasingly
difficult to justify the production of more cultural artefacts, even
if they are wrought from recycled materials. Sometimes I republish
old texts instead of commissioning or writing new ones. There is so
much excellent writing that has been forgotten and so much new mediocrity
being continually generated that it would be sensible to revisit things
we already know to be superb. How about other artists’ art as
ready-mades?
KH: You mean like Sturtevant? Or maybe you mean
using the actual art object made by someone else? But I guess then
I’d have to steal it, so you must mean remaking them! I think
I’d find that really boring. No mammies!
SOR: I’m also not one hundred percent behind
this sort of absorption of the objects or aesthetics of others into
one’s own artworks. I think you run the danger of committing
all sorts of crimes, like presentism and cultural colonialism. A lot
of artists these days isolate an old aesthetic from its ideological
roots and slap it about in whatever context they fancy. In an apolitical
context isolating an object from its original utility is fine –
this is the wellspring of adhocism – but art is so often tied
to ideology that this becomes dodgy...
KH: The most interesting and exciting (and frustrating)
thing about making work is that you start off at one place and then
work through it (often through a lot of shit) until you come up with
something. So right now it would make no sense to me to use someone
else's object, as it's come from wherever they were and whatever they
were working through. As you say - it's more than likely tied to the
ideology that it grew out of in the first place. It's not a game I'm
interested in playing right now.
One thing about the GRAN BAZAAR project is that it's not
only or simply about 'objects'. It was a social space. It closed a
few days ago and I didn't sell everything. I wonder if that means
I failed? The consumers browsed the aisles and made their decisions.
I didn't know them and they didn't know me (apart from the art people
who came to the opening). Obviously there've been projects like this
before (off the top of my head - Hirschhorn's 'Souvenirs du XXeme
Siecle', and a Kurimanzutto project ‘Economia de Mercado’).
I only found out about this after GRAN BAZAAR was underway.
If I’d known about the Kurimanzutto project before I made my
site visits - who knows, would I have decided to recreate all the
various objects that they had for sale on their stall? That could
be funny, but then that's playing within the art world. It would be
an inside joke and I've never been that excited by making work that
isolates the man on the street.
SOR: Did people barter over the price of items in
GRAN BAZAAR? Do you think the mechanisms of GRAN BAZAAR were
transparent and inclusive, or do you think these art historical precedents
and theoretical back-stories add a complexity of reference and ideology,
whether intentionally or not? Is it possible for an art object to
shirk off its legacy and enter the public realm on its own physical
and economic terms?
KH: No - there was no bartering. It was the first
economic transaction method that I thought about using, but then I
learnt that Francis Alÿs did that in ‘95 or ‘96.
He spent the day traveling on the subway bartering things, starting
with his sunglasses. I can't remember what he ended up with. Anyway,
then I thought about having an exchange situation. My goods in exchange
for household waste or something that should be recycled, like old
batteries. But when you wander around the Centro you can see guys
pulling things apart and smashing them with hammers - they have a
whole recycle network in place; computers, cardboard, etc. So exchange
didn't really make sense. In the end I sold things and used the money
to pay off all the expenses.
SOR: Every year the Published and be Damned
fair in London seems a bit like a rough old market – people
are invited to sell their independent publications, which range from
the shabby little photocopy to quite plush, thick, full-color series.
I love the look of people’s thoughts and efforts laid out on
the tables for sale – it’s absurd. And although everyone
is vehement about their independence from institutional support and
facilitating alternative networks, a distribution deal would always
be most welcome. Implicasphere used to take part in this,
but we now have a distribution deal in the US. We have sold out, you
might say – although we do still carry them around the UK in
a suitcase peddling them like the pair of quacks we are.
KH: What does Implicasphere mean?
SOR: Implicasphere is an Anglicization of a word
‘implicosphere’, coined by the US science writer Douglas
R Hofstadter. He uses it to describe the mental circumferences of
association. For instance, if you say the word ‘bread’
and I move it on to think about toast, then my implicospheres aren’t
so wide at all. If you say ‘bread’ and I think of ravens
or pan-galacticgargleblasters, then my implicospheres are pretty wide.
When they are really narrow the thinker is pretty boring; if they
are really wide the thinker is inventive – unless they are too
wide and no one else understands the leaps of associations, then the
thinker is considered deranged.
Would you agree that objects carry around these circumferences of
associations, like auras or halos of cultural, political and personal
pasts?
KH: I love the Implicasphere story – it makes
total sense. And yes, I hope that objects carry ‘round some
kind of circumference of association! That's one of the things that
has always gotten me really excited - the associations that I bring
to something will be different from what someone else sees in the
same thing, and on and on. So I have always assumed that this 'implicospherity'
is inherently present - whether it's an installation, event, booklet,
object or whatever. I have wondered if this is necessarily a good
thing - to presume that the viewer can draw various lines of thought
together and draw their own lines of conclusion, bring the tangents
together. Should I be more critical and not leave these open-ended
meanderings? But I always go back to working like that. For me it
seems completely rational, logical and a true way to gather as well
as present work.
SOR: How did customers respond to the open-ended
objects in GRAN BAZAAR?
KH: Here’s one of the stories they’ve
sent me from the ‘shop floor’: “there was this
incredible woman who came in one day. She first asked if this “was
worth seeing/looking at". I of coursed assured her that it was,
gave the back-story. I proceeded to comment on how cheaply things
were priced. She responded by saying that she lived in a little room
in which among many other things she had her stove as well. "Where",
she asked "would I put this stuff so that people would be able
to see it?" and I did not know how to answer, so she moved on
to look at the trees for a while, then said "well most
people would probably say 'oh no, these trees are not very nice, they
don’t have any leaves' but I really think it’s beautiful,
there is something that radiates life, for me they are beautiful".
Published in GRAN BAZAAR, Mexico City, 2006
