Interview with Nathan Sharrat

Image from performance of Be My Blood Brother ©2011 Nathan Sharratt (Photo by Mona Collentine )

1) What is the inspiration for Bloodbrothers?

This goes back a ways. In 2004 I was living in New York City and working as a designer and photographer in the magazine industry. At the time, I didn’t really know who I was as an artist or where I was going or what I even wanted to do. I just knew I had a lot of shit building up inside that had no way out. Since I wasn’t finding any success with external sources, I started looking internally to the things that created the greatest personal emotional response. A big one was my family. No matter how much crap life threw at me (unemployment, homelessness) they were always my rock of stability. I had just finished a book by Margaret Atwood on writing called Negotiating With The Dead, and in it she talked about how the dead wanted our blood. Dead being our ancestors and blood being a metaphor for life and creativity. At least that’s how I choose to read it. I had also read an interview with Stephen King, where he was asked how he, a family man with children, could imagine and write such horrific stories. He replied that if he wrote it, it wouldn’t happen. So I decided to use those sources as a starting point. I took a color-printing class with a coworker at the International Center for Photography, and used that as a way to explore these themes of family and protection. I drove upstate to my family’s home in Cooperstown and took some portraits using a borrowed plastic Holga camera. I gave each family member, excepting my father, a tool from my father’s workshop and covered them with fake blood (http://nathansharratt.com/section/215401_Family_Portraits.html). At the time, the fake blood was an analog for real blood, and the portraits were meant to be a protective mantra.

            It took another 4 or 5 years before I started examining family in my work again, mostly at the behest of my sculpture professors. This time I began to get really interested in fake blood and the whole concept behind its existence. We, as humans, are obsessed with not spilling our own blood, yet we have such a bloodlust that we’ve created this blood analog to be used strictly for entertainment purposes. We love watching violence as long as it’s pretend. Action and horror films are just public executions and gladiator fights without the actual death. I started realizing the vast amount of content available in using fake blood as a material. The difficulty was in the execution, how to elevate fake blood as a fine-art material and have it be seen for what it is—and what content it brings to the table—and not just as a non-biological blood substitute. I made some object-based art using fake blood, So I started making connections between the constructed qualities of fake blood and my own constructed family history: my biological father (Robert) left before I was born, and my mother met my non-biological father (Dwaine) when I was two, and they’ve raised me ever since. When I was five my non-biological father wanted to adopt me, but Massachusetts’ state law didn’t allow adoption for a minor with a legal parent or guardian, so my mother had to give me up to the state for all of ten minutes, or however long it took to fill out paperwork, then they both adopted me. I remember sitting in the cavernous marble hallway of the statehouse while all this was going on. I was no longer Nathan Kaczynski, I was now Nathan Sharratt. The connection I felt to my parents had not changed, only some paperwork. So the idea of a constructed family led me to think about constructed bonds in general, and how we create this social construct called “family.” The fact that my father isn’t my biological father is such a non-issue in my family that my mom even forgets sometimes, and warns me about genetic health issues on my father’s side. There are no “half-sisters” or “step-fathers,” we’re just family and we love each other and in my opinion that’s how it should be.

2) What is your obsession with blood in general?

For me it’s a material, so it’s kind of like asking a painter what is their obsession with paint? Any material has a pre-existing connotation that viewers carry with them, and many materials were resisted in their initial introduction as a fine-art material (David Smith’s welded-steel sculpture comes to mind). Blood is one of our most primal common denominators. It’s also the challenge of using a material that isn’t traditionally associated with fine art, and seeing if I can find ways to elevate it to make new connections that maybe viewers hadn’t thought of before. Also, I went pretty in depth about it above.

3) You are interested in creating multiple layers in your work, what do you think is the most missed meaning/layer in 'BloodBrothers'?

Probably the connection to my personal history. I don’t make that a large part of the performance because the whole installation is about me, so when I’m bonding with a new Brother, I want to make it as much about them as possible. I give my Brothers my absolute undivided attention during the ritual, and try to be a mirror through which they can see themselves. I make my name really small on the ticket so that when it’s pinned to the wall you see their name most prominently, not mine, and I give them the opportunity to share their story through the www.wearebloodbrothers.com website. However, I will be adding a few new hidden clues to the room for sharp-eyed viewers to find.

4) What other projects are you currently working on?

I’m still looking for participants for Words On Shirts Project (wordsonshirtsproject.com), and I’m working on a public art installation for Art on the Atlanta BeltLine that should be up soon. I’m also building a sound-trigger box for Martha Whittington’s 100 Whispers installation, in addition to being her studio assistant for the MOCA GA Working Artist Project grant. I’ve been slowly peppering donated clothing with It’s All My Fault labels (http://nathansharratt.com/artwork/2115157_It_s_All_My_Fault.html) and last but certainly not least I’ve been hard at work on my Dashboard Co-Op “Ground Floor” installation which is coming in October.

Nathan Sharratt's "Be My Blood Brother" preview

Here is a link to images from the performance that will be the subject of my next article on BURNAWAY: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathan_awesome/

Seana Reilly at Whitespace

Seana Reilly is currently in a two person show with Ann Stewart at Whitespace. 

Seana Reilly Mean Curve

There is really only one way to describe the formal aesthetic of Seana Reilly’s current work on display at Whitespace: undeniable.  In a series of experiments with liquid graphite, Reilly posits myriad dualities that coexist harmoniously to produce art that calls for serious contemplation, perhaps even meditation.

According to http://www.insightatlanta.org:  “Vipassana meditation…was taught by the Buddha as a means for investigating the nature of reality through cultivating awareness of present experience with acceptance.”  Reilly cites Vipassana meditation as a source for the insights for her practice, which is apparent in her process.  Reilly sets up resists or boundaries around which she allows the liquid graphite to freely flow, establishing the symmetry between human will and letting go.  Her awareness of her materials, and the moments in which they interact result in images of sublime beauty and delicate balance.  The viewer is given a wide open space to peacefully exist in the dialectics of drawing and painting, light and dark, organic and geometric, order and chaos, presence and absence.

But the work is not without regions designed to create tension and unease.  Reilly also sites as influence her experience as both a justice and healthcare planner, a career that surely imbued her with a desire to analyze, predict and control.  In many of the works, especially the smaller pieces, Reilly goes back into the work (after it has become a historic document of the aforementioned process) to articulate a pseudoscientific analysis in its margins.  It is in this act that her work separates itself from a Romantically idealized mise-en-scène, and asserts itself as a battleground of contemporary semiotics.  It is in this duality, between the mostly organic relationship established in the experimental stage of the work, and it subsequent analysis, where the most pressing issue arises for the interpreter of meaning. 

It seems understandable that there are dualities, and that in one way or another these dualities assimilate into a workable medium that is life.  This is a quotidian understanding of Yin-Yang, a basis for much Eastern Philosophy.  The problem of contemporary awareness comes with the monkey wrench that is Western Philosophy.  Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the rest of Western history delivers us the hegemony of Science.  While, theoretically, Eastern and Western philosophies are not necessarily at odds, the implementation of science as a predictive, thus active awareness, separates it from the more accepting, passive consciousness of Eastern thought.  What becomes difficult to grasp for many thinkers of either school is the way in which self-aware observation alters our perception of any such dualities.

By quantifying, thus categorizing the results of the experiments that take place in materializing her work, Reilly pin-points the problematic of scientific inquiry: when we observe a phenomenon, we necessarily alter that phenomenon.  There is a growing number of scientists studying quantum physics who would go so far as to say that our observation causes the phenomenon.  To complicate the matter, Reilly’s analysis of her process mimics scientific notation, a codified language that, except to its author and her cohorts, is a meaningless series of marks and signs.  So what could have been a simple experience of a phenomenon becomes a self-sequestering feedback loop.  

Reilly’s work puts the impasse of actual experience and our attempts to control our experience in our face, causing us to ponder: If our passive awareness generates reality, then does an active awareness destroy it?  Returning to the idea of Yin Yang, perhaps it is this relationship, the codependence of creation and destruction, that gives meaning to the show’s title: Perpetual Assembly. 

The Dream of Reason

The Dream of Logic Produces Reasonable Monsters (© Casey Lynch 2011)

It is illogic, not logic, that makes humans human.  If a dog thinks at all like a human, then when he is hungry, he thinks, "I will eat."  Then to the best of its ability, he will eat as soon as possible.  When a human thinks, "I am hungry," he/she will go through a long list of reasons to, or not to eat, and when it would be best to eat.  Further, he creates all sorts of rules on the appropriate way to eat.

Humans seem to possess a multi-tiered logic, meta-logic, or more simply, social self-awareness, that causes us to play out many if/then scenarios in theory before acting.  I think that we have the ability to create too many scenarios, somehow forgetting our initial intention, to the point that our 'then' statement often ends up no longer matching our 'if'.

Even sound logic may become illogic when we make assumptions about another's needs or desires.  This kind of other-awareness is at best empathy [which elsewhere I have called the unconscious,] and seems to be a foundation of civilization. 
So, it is possible that society is based on illogic.  If this is true, then culture, being the pinnacle of society, is the apex of illogical discourse.  This seems clear presently, as it could be argued that Art is (and maybe has always been) based on illogic, i.e. make believe, hope, or the denial of the probable.  Of course, in the exponentially growing feedback loop between the mirrors of culture and society, what was once illogical is now logical.  This illogical logic is Reason.

Making and Breaking Meaning: A Critical Mash-up of Trecartin and Mallarme

Below is an essay comparing Ryan Trecartin to Stéphane Mallarmé using only a computer mouse to complete copy, cut, and paste functions.  All text was borrowed from the Wikipedia entries on Stéphane Mallarmé, Fin de siècle, and Ryan Trecartin; and Brian Droitcour's article Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet as found on Rhizome.org's website. 

None of the individual words was composed by me, only the rearrangement of the language found in said sources.

If you own the rights to the sources above, and do not approve of this usage, please contact me and I will remove it at once.

Stéphane Mallarmé  (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism,Surrealism, and Futurism.

Ryan Trecartin (b.1981, Webster, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles.^[1] He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004.^[2] Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.^[1]

Mallarmé's earlier work owes a great deal to the style of Charles Baudelaire. His later fin de siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the next century.  Roberta Smith grasped for precedent, naming Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Pipilotti Rist. But, she admitted, the comparisons fell short. To find another artist who engages a plurality of art forms with simultaneous, equal intensity—all while rethinking what art is and how it touches its audience—you’d have to go back to Wagner. The critic and translator Barbara Johnson has emphasized Mallarmé's influence on twentieth-century French criticism and theory: "It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature.

Trecartin says he starts each work by writing a script. Language—the primal, biological system of symbols—is the model and vehicle for art and commerce and every other manifestation of social activity. And the forms of all the aspects of Trecartin’s work—the camerawork, the editing, the music, the makeup, and the costumes, as well as Lizzie Fitch’s sets for the videos and “sets” for their viewing in “Any Ever”—are prefigured in the way he works with words.  Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem.'"^[3]  The space-time properties of attending suit the names. These are not distinct individuals, but inflections

Punctuation was invented to represent the pauses and pitches of speech; long after it moved beyond this purpose to become a set of standards for clarifying the meaning of written language, punctuation marks were remixed as emoticons when writing began to take on the phatic functions of speech. Trecartin’s unruly use of punctuation draws on all stages of its history.  It has been suggested by some that much of Mallarmé's work influenced the conception of hypertext, with his purposeful use of blank space and careful placement of words on the page, allowing multiple non-linear readings of the text. Trecartin’s writing responds to the internet, but it defies an assertion made by Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of ubuweb, who wrote that flarf and conceptual poetry are the quintessential poetic responses to the digital age because they employ cut-and-paste techniques.  This becomes very apparent in his work Un coup de dés. When, in the script’s first lines, Mexico Korea says “Yaw,,,,,,”, the comma does more than make a pause. It’s a winking eye torn from a smiling face, repeated until it’s a nervous tic.

 Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English.^[1] The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry.  One plus one is two ones and the ozone emitted by their collision. Combos like these are a favorite device of Trecartin’s. So is the willful disregard for parts of speech. A character’s “first name” can be a noun or an adjective or one of each. Grammatical difference meets geographical difference as both are jettisoned.  When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé's Sonnet en '-yx'opens with the phrase ses purs ongles ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c'est pur son ('it's pure sound'). Indeed, the 'pure sound' aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions. These phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.^[2]

Trecartin exploits the coincidence of homophony to elide the difference between an ontological position and a physical one. Just as the corporation’s abstraction of the body is returned partially to the concrete, identity sits somewhere between a state of mind and the location of the body.

Both reject traditional ideas of authorships by imitating the impersonality of machines. Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century".^[2] The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning.^[3] The "spirit" of fin de siecle often refers to the boredom, cynicism, pessimism and the widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence, Trecartin keeps everything. His flamboyant use of the patterns of chat and ads and other types of cliché isn’t a direct form of copying, but a concentration of a normal condition of language use: A speaker is obliged to use words that come from outside her—and can be understood by others—while making them her own at the moment of the utterance, in order to make it seem like the utterance comes from inside her.

Mass-market things become fluid and ephemeral, subject to exaggeration, misunderstanding, repetition and play. Their origins are indistinct or irrelevant, and the same things are used in other contexts by millions of people. They are like words.

Relational Aesthetics IS NOT Situationist

Debord was a marxist, thus a communist.  He saw situationism as a rejection of the spectacle; that situational art would be integrated into everyday life the way that labor is integrated into the everyday life of a communist. The situationist takes aesthetic pleasure in the day-to-day, thus relieving oneself from the need (to pay) for fetishized and commoditized art, in turn weakening the institution of capitalism. Further, everyone becomes an artist in his/her making aesthetic experience of the everyday by way of recognizing aesthetics in the everyday.  Debord sought to lower the value of the spectacle and raise the value of common experience as a political critique against capitalism.

There is an inherent contradiction in calling public art or performance Situationist, in that by Debord’s definition, it is a private art, (as well as a private revolution)  devoid of spectacle.  He does realize that this is a tall order, and states:

“The critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday life, before being carried out naturally by all people, must be undertaken in the present conditions of oppression, in order to destroy these conditions.” 

In many ways, this is currently being played out through the aestheticization of everyday life already happens online.  The experience of aesthetics in everyday life will not happen by everyone until it first begins inside of capitalisms current structure.  Facebook, Twitter, mylifeisaverage.com, etc., are arenas in which this critique and re-creation of everyday life happens, yet under the (seemingly only mildly oppressive) capitalism of the Internet.  We share with everyone what we just ate, how we are feeling, or what our cats are doing as if these things are spectacles to be considered.  The only catch is that by and large, we, as online situationists fail in that we also seem to be playing into the hands of capitalism as we fall prey to the illusion of freedom supposedly found in leisure.

Situationism should be kept separate from Relational Aesthetics, as it is much more radical.

Bourriaud on a boat. Sorry for the lame image, I promise I will replace it with a better one soon...

Bourriaud is a post-marxist, which means that he accepts the incongruities and inconsistencies that are inevitable when one makes a go at Marx's ideas within capitalistic society.
Everything that Bourriaud calls relational aesthetics is NOT situationism because, regardless of its subtlety, it is still turned into a spectacle by entering into the fine art gallery context.  Further, Bourriaud makes claims of Relational Aesthetics being a type of Modernism, and definitely an avant-garde art practice.  Conversely, in so many ways Debord sought to eliminate art as such. To quote Debord, "The revolutionary transformation of everyday life... will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities..."  Although many Relational artists synthesize works that try to distance themselves from capitalism, their relationship to commercial galleries nullifies any such critique. [If you haven't heard of Hennessy Youngman yet, see his famous critique of Relational Aesthetics here.]

Non sequitur : As much as one can call a work aiming to be Relational a 'micro-utopia,' if that work is in the public sphere, one must recognize that it is also simultaneously an artistic act of micro-colonialism.  

As with all things, when public space is examined more closely, aporias arise that point out the inherent contradictions of the idea.  Thus any Utopian vision of public interaction is brought into question (and even "micro-utopian", an idea many readers of Bourriaud like to cling to.)

Public space is simultaneously a site of freedom and oppression.  If people are allowed individual freedom in an arena, then theoretically each person may do what he/she pleases.  But at the exact moment that one person chooses what he will do, he eliminates at least that one possibility for another.  For example, when in a public house (which of course are actually always private businesses) if a person lights up a cigarette, anyone who wishes to not breath in second-hand tobacco smoke is denied.  The inverse is true for the smoker when smoking is prohibited to secure the rights of the non-smoker. Quickly and undeniably we can see how the giving of rights to one is (or more correctly, can be) the taking of rights from another.

When one person, or a small group of people decide what the whole population should see (and call art), that is a form of oppression.  It is only through the lens of democratic society that this can be rationalized through the belief that the majority rules.

What is Progress?

If everything is relative, how can we determine if progress is a real thing?

Seek and Ye Shall Find  ©Casey Lynch (2011)

We know when we make progress towards simple goals, like cutting the grass, but what about complex goals that include ideals, like scientific progress or peace/utopia?  Is it all about the process, not the end?