cc >> Tell me if I get a little
too loud, 'cause I get real animated sometimes.
I just wanted to turn on a little bit of background
music, but by all means, if it gets too loud,
y'all please let me know. How's that?
Can you hear that and still hear me?
It's a little ambiance. And it's not very much time,
so I'm just going to flash. This is on automatic.
I'm going to just try to talk to you about how it is
that I work. Then eventually, I'll go through
a little introductory period and move to a few projects
towards the end. Hopefully, this sort of music
will slow me down at a certain point and we can fit
some questions in. Because questions will engage
more, because there's a lot of material I'm going to show you.
And just flash it on automatic. So give me just a second here.
Okay, well, as you understand about me by now, is that I had
a little period as a fashion designer in New York City.
And that happened quite by accident.
I was completely never intending ever to be a fashion designer.
I grew up the daughter of a painter, a writer, who
is also a third generation bee keeper in turbulent '60s
down in south Georgia during the civil rights movement.
And that affected my work and my life politically, socially
through present and into the future.
And this little period, well not little, actually it
was about 20 years of fashion design history was
brought on quite accidentally by some installation work
I was doing as a graduate student at the School of the
Art Institute. And to make a long story short,
I sort of went to study about Depression Era clothing
for this particular conceptual project that I was producing
that also was about dwelling. And if I don't get back
to dwelling, I want someone to ask me about it, because
it's very important to my work. So clothing, dwelling, thinking,
is very important. And the thing that happened
to me was that I went to the Metropolitan Institute
of Costume, and searching for these Depression Era clothing,
that I couldn't find any specimens of
in any museum in the country. And the curator told me
that they did not exist. I was flabbergasted.
I just thought how can this be? This is a whole period
of our history that's just gone. It made me realize, and
brought me into the institutional critique forum,
that our institutions were collecting, you know,
aristocratic, Euro-centric, you know, very specialized
collections through a particular class through history.
And that was very epiphanaic for me, and disturbing.
I suddenly realized there's this huge vast field of work
out there to be done. And now already, you know,
I was an installation artist, just totally driven by
the material, complex, field of installation practice.
But really frustrated by its sort of systems of exclusion,
i.e. the art world. And I knew that I wasn't going
to function in that world in a regular way.
So what I proceeded to do was to try to run through this
project that I was working on about Depression Era clothing.
And what happened was, as people responded more to the clothing
than they did the installation itself.
The installation was one thing, but the clothing,
people wanted to buy. And I got commissioned to do
a body of clothing for architects, writers,
painters. So I just thought,
this is something. And then at a very early stage
in my development, I realized fashion
was an intersection for me. It was an intersection
of everything that I believed in and that I wanted to do.
And suddenly could thrust me as a studio artist,
installation artist, into a practice
that was more social and public. Now, why do you think
that might be crazy? I believe that fashion
is a system that is used, negotiated, or imposed,
by every person on this planet. Every person.
And I challenge you to just dispute that.
There's no other system of communication.
No other universal system that actually touches
every person on this planet. And I found it a rich field
of negotiations. And a series of things evolved
from that moment on for me as a young artist, and
they are still evolving today, hopefully.
So what you're looking at right now is sort of that
fashion history of me sort of experimenting
in a public sphere. And I said the other day
to the grad students, you know, the thing about my practice
is I immediately had to make my studio a public place.
I opened up a series of retail stores in Manhattan.
And I knew nothing about the fashion industry.
And it was really ironic, because people sort of
walk over that retail threshold and say, "Fix me."
"Do me." "Seduce me."
But the fact is, you know, I came out of art,
art history, contemporary art. I was just sort of like trying
to get them to read into the conceptual projects
I was doing through fashion. So you're just getting flashed,
you know, with a bunch of fashion images.
But it was a very early experimental period for me.
Uh oh. ( laughter )
To go into the cosmos where I am now.
( laughter ) Which is a current project
that I'm working on now with Spurse, the collective.
So that's going to happen. Will you just...
Okay, thank you, because I'm not watching the images.
So y'all tell me if that happens again.
Like for instance, this erotica series, you know, people really
got upset by this the other day when I showed this
in the PC world of Madison, radical institute.
But this is actually, you know, early response, you know,
to the way fashion functions. And there was a whole
embodied installation, discourse, visitation, salon.
My stores are like salons, so I would invite
my artist friends, my theory friends,
my curator friends. And it would become sort of
a little salon forum of discoursing around projects.
I didn't do a traditional fashion show.
I would do more installation, presentation, performances
around these projects. What you're looking at right now
is when a moment when my fashion business closed,
my wholesale business closed because I was such
a bad businessperson. I hired all the wrong people.
And behind the doors, you know, things were happening and
my business grew really fast. I became an international
little starlet on the fashion scene.
With that kind of fast growth in capitalism,
this series of problems occur. And you just can't keep up
with it. So in 1997 I closed
the wholesale division of my company and created
a project where I bees waxed and petrified
the entire corporation. And I'm going to come
back to that a little bit later. I was always working
collaboratively. An important point
about my work, an important point that I make politically
about moving through the world today, is that
there's no way, I believe, and you're going to hate
to hear this, that you as studio artists,
or you who are studio artists are going to be able
to function in the future if you continue to have
these romantic notions about your practice,
that someone's going to come in and discover you
and pull you out, and you're all brilliant and say,
he's the one that's going to go and have a show and sell art.
It's not going to happen. You know, the thing is
that you have to engage with the world.
And I think, in my opinion, my deep political position, is
that exchange and collaboration is the only way that
we as artists can do that. And so you're just looking at
a series of early collaborations that will follow, that
I continue to use collaboration as my primary mode
of methodology in a work. When I start to talk about
particular projects, you'll see that demonstrated,
in that I can't find a place that, you know, or presume
that I'm the one who's going to have the final say
in any given thought or thing. There are too many things
out there. And I just feel like
I'm a great mediation to activate a site sensitively,
socially, intelligently, theoretically,
anthropologically, historically. You know, we got to move
through this world where it's not just about one thing
sized up in a gallery, plopped down, and you're telling
somebody what your idea is, and they're supposed to get it.
"Ah ha, I get it." I believe that what
you're going to do in the world is take on
the whole multiplicity of things and activate them
in every which way you can. A sort of...
( speaking German ) which is a German term that's
not really easily translatable in English, but it's sort of
whole art, artful as a whole world.
And it's a way to think through your life.
A lot of my work is extremely autobiographical,
like this grafter shack, which is about my family history.
I come from, now four generations,
five generations of beekeepers who are queen breeders.
And this particular project was in discourse with Mark Dion,
my partner who does a lot of work about nature,
culture, conversation and the representation of nature
in a contemporary world. But this was not only that,
it was sort of showing that, you know, we're at the nexus
as artists of many things. And it's so important
to take them all on. This is what we do best.
Grafter shack was at Wave Hill in New York.
Did it do it again? ( laughs )
I think, another important method of the way I work is
just immediately am concerned with not what I can do, that
I'm not going to call out and dream up a project, and
tell you what the outcome is. And this is a real problem
for me as an artist in contemporary world.
Make note, if you're vague they just interpret you
as vague. But my problem is not vagueness.
It's a real particular intention to keep those multiplicitous
doors open for activating any given thing at one time.
A site. If I go into a site, and
I'm usually inspired by a site. And I look to the quotidian
in search for some kind of common language that I can
speak to a large body of people, you know, a large group
of disciplines. But if I go into a site,
I immediately want to set up a set of non-parameters
so that something can emerge. Something called
an emerging community. And this is the thing that's
different about my practice and other practices
that sort of get slotted in social practices,
or community-based practices, or other, or merely
project-based practices. I'm not moving through a site
with expectations of a thing. I have hopes and dreams.
And I fantasize what could possibly happen.
Sometimes, I'm really disappointed.
Often, I'm really disappointed. But by golly,
I'll do the best I can to try and activate that site
in every way I can through its history,
through its economy, through its psychologies
from the individuals that get involved.
But the main thing is that it's not community based
in that sense, where they're thinking--
And this is what the institutions want to hear--
What's it's going to look like, or what it's going to smell like
or what's going to happen? But those are the doors
that I want to keep open, because it's entirely emergent.
And that's the only way it can really truly, honestly
become part of a social weave, a community, is that suddenly
it's not that you enforce yourself onto the community.
You enforce your politics onto them and say, this is the way
they should think, but actually something, the people
who choose to collaborate and exchange with my projects
suddenly become a part of them. We all evolve together.
And the hope is that we're all transformed.
So it's this transversal reality that suddenly happens
that's not just about me, it's about a situation
that I might have just proposed, and something else is happening.
And you're looking at Cottage Industry right now,
where a famous example has been published many times
in South Carolina where I collaborated with that family
of those three women. And I still am in a dialog
with them to this day. Another important thing,
none of my projects ever end.
They are just part of my life. So I don't think up an idea,
and think that it's going to ever leave.
I move into it. It becomes like a virus in me.
And then it takes over. It surfaces.
I can actually then get invited by somebody,
and then go I got a project for that place.
I'll just do that. But then it never leaves me.
I still have a relation with that place.
I still have a psychology with that place.
I still have friendships, long lasting friendships,
with those places. And that's so important to me.
If I can't leave a place without those kinds of engagements,
you know, I just feel like I haven't gotten there.
I've failed. Failure's not bad, though,
don't get me wrong. I failed.
But I've spent 20 years in that fashion industry
failing every day in my open studio
where hundreds of people would come in daily
and watch me make the biggest faux pas, because I knew nothing
about fashion, completely self-taught.
You know, I just had a knack for architecture.
I was really secretly an architect from,
you know, since I was a child. But anyway, to move back
to architecture and dwelling, almost all of my work
goes to dwelling. Very important point,
and I call out, you know, these great thinkers,
Thoreau, Burrows, you know, great, great thinkers who
actually, you know, a dwelling, a single room dwelling
was an important and revolutionary part
of their practice and their writings.
And those kinds of examples are why my obsession with
the little shack dwelling shed is a big thread through my work.
So clothing, dwelling, thinking about those things.
And particularly into the future.
Cottage Industry was such a love of mine, because it was
I was given an abandoned building.
Mary Jane Jacob was really a collaborator in this,
because she brought the building to me, you know.
And Mary Jane Jacob is a curator in Chicago.
I'm sure a lot of y'all know about her.
And that building was just rich with history.
History. I'm going to, before
I talk about the next project, I want to just say something
about history. Because when I come into a site,
there's one thing that I sense right away,
is that the histories are pressing in on us
all around us. It's like the history
of the site is primary. I mean, that's a regular tool.
Right? You go to history.
But what we forget is history is contemporary.
It's our contemporary notion of history.
And history's kind of convoluted this way, too, because
it's not only about what our contemporary notion is,
but it's so riddled as artists with this sort of
avant-garde, highly aestheticized notion
of what is contemporary. You know?
George Jetsons? Andrea Zitell?
You know, actually those are retro, in a sense.
I love Andrea Zitell, she's a friend of mine.
You know, not a critique. But anyway, you know, I often
get mistook for sort of working in this 19th century realm,
as does Mark Dion. He battles with this as well,
a friend and collaborator. But it's about, sort of
not getting caught up in the nostalgia
of what history brings to us in a contemporary moment.
I believe that in this room, in this very room,
and maybe let's just look at your clothing.
The Victorian is with us right now.
You know, the modern is with us right now.
I mean, it's all pressing in on us
in this claustrophobic way. And it's we who activate it
and engage it, so I just want to make
that important point. What you're looking at
right now is a really important work.
I'm reluctant to walk over here because it's so bright,
but I'm a mover. "R.N., The Past, Present and
Future of the Nurse's Uniform." We were invited
by the Fabric Workshop. What is it called?
The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia
to do a major work. We took over the entire museum
and did a three- to four-year-long study
of what the uniform was. We used the nurse's uniform
as our focus. Now the uniform, as we all know,
is so specific to set up those parameters
between body and body, system and system,
class and class, you know. And it's been so paramount,
particularly in nursing and the medical industry.
And I'm going to skip over a lot of material here,
because this is a huge, vast project with so many
fingers and lines of flight going in all different
directions. But what we found out
is that there was no uniform. There is no uniform.
The uniform got broken down to scrubs.
And it's been a real trauma, not only to the medical
industry, you know, the practicing nurses,
student nurses, but to the patients, even.
Patients. We did this huge questionnaire
on the Internet, and visiting all of the hospitals
in Philadelphia area. And we found that everybody
was so traumatized that there was no uniform.
Which is just an interesting thing about us
as a species. But I don't have time to even
philosophize about that right now.
But what we did was we sort of broke down the uniform
into all of these categories, the nurse's uniform,
even looked at popular culture. We created a think tank
with retired nurses, practicing nurses,
student nurses and really, even graduate art students
at a couple of different schools and came to identify
what that problem was and then try to tackle it.
We found that the only way to really tackle it
was to go create these tropes into the future, which was
another part of the project that emerged right in the middle.
We'd always sort of fantasize that we'd do these
fashion illustrations about, you know, with the conceit about
a museum show that was looking past the nurse's uniform.
But actually we decided what we had to do to
make that conceit complete was think about the tropes
of the medical industry into the future.
So this project became kind of a Sci-fi project.
We had to invent what the future would look like
and think like, and how it would
philosophically exist. So we invented four,
actually we invented a lot of Sci-fi nurses.
But four of them we could actually produce
in this project. A bioterrorism nurse,
the diagnostic nurse, the post-apocalyptic nurse
and the intergalactic nurse. But also at the same time
we were working with students' ideas of what an ideal
nurse's uniform could be. So not only were we looking now
at the future and the past, but we we're trying
to take those knowledges and produce a present.
This is what we ended up with using the cutting-edge
of medical fiber technologies. This is all
silver-coated fibers. I'd love to speak
deeper into this, but there's just not enough time.
But one thing, too, that we did that was the universal thing
that came out of this project, was we created an emblem
that could become a patch that was adopted instantly by
the national nursing community. And this project was praised
and won awards for creating this universal patch
that says "RN," which you've seen several times.
And they now, when you go to a hospital, you most likely
will see that patch on every registered nurse.
And then you'll see other renditions of it where
they've expanded it out registered nurse, x-ray,
blah, blah, blah. You know all the other
little educational acronyms. But you're now looking at
the diagnostic nurse uniform. We actually invented
and produced them at the Fabric Workshop.
These are fiber technologies, all computer nodes
and technologies embedded into a weave.
And they are hypothetically able to connect to a data system
where the diagnostic nurse will hug a patient and have
those fibers read diagnostically to a data system, and then
send back to the nurse the data of how she needs
to treat this patient. So it's just more empathic
and proprioceptive kind of mode of healing and prognosis.
This is the post-apocalyptic nurse.
And this of course, she's out in the field.
This uniform was made from all sorts of architectural
fibers that now buildings are being built out of.
Imagine that these have exploded and she is just piecing
these together with Ziploc seams, so nothing's stitched.
It's all Ziplocked together and glued.
Intergalactic nurse, which is based on a trope
of knowledge into the future that we've looked back.
We've gone through all of these evolutions, and now we're
looking back onto self-healing and how it is, you know,
to try to holistic healing. Try to heal one's self.
And so this uniform is based on the acupuncture charts
of the chief flow lines in acupuncture.
And so we did a whole little miniature study.
And there's a great thing about my projects
and the way I work is that, you know, I follow my curiosity.
Curiosity is the thing is drives me.
I don't even think of a project, you know, until I have
the curious moment like, what, how does that work?
You know, what is that going to be like?
Or, I don't know about that, so how can I learn about that?
And if I'm in the middle of a project, I will definitely
go to where I don't know, because that's where
my most creative moment is going to be.
You know, I can boldly move into a territory naively
and ready and willing to take it on.
Now I often tell my student friends--
I love this project. This is one of my favorite
projects. I also tell my students that,
you know, there's three things that you need to know
to be an artist. You don't have to be able
to sculpt or paint. You don't have to be able
to carve or, you know, do digital anything.
You don't have to be anywhere or there.
But you have to be willing, willing and willing.
That's my motto. This is what you're looking at.
That word, which means "Smuggling Across Borders, Inc."
This is a little corporation that I formed
for a project in the show called the "Interventionists
at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts." And I created a little--
I took over one of their back galleries,
and I created a little squat of a factory.
I actually wanted to-- I was much more ambitious
than they could handle. I won't go there, but
I created this little shed that I got from--
And this is how detailed I go. It's like the shed came from
the backyard of the daughter of an employee that died
who, because of the die works that he was doing
in that factory when MASS MoCA, the museum,
was a mill. It has a deep, deep,
deep history. And mill history
is one of my favorite studies. Because, you know, I'm just
so starting from the textile. But this project was in me
for many, many years wanting to do a project
about mill history. And MASS MoCA was a site
where I could sensitively move through all of its
personal history and build this project
that has also a nickname, called the "Multiple Suit."
So I opened up this little corporation in the back gallery.
I moved in, as I do, with me and my projects
with all of my material, culture and collections
and artifacts, and set up business.
There are sort of, this project kind of folds within itself.
It's a project within a project within a project.
The project within the project as an installation
was just me as an artist trying to co-evolve
with an institution. Trying to come up
with a creative way to finance this corporation,
'cause here I am, an artist, setting up a little business.
I have no money. You know, except for a little
pittance that they had for me as an artist.
And I had to creatively come up with an economy
between us, where we could actually function together.
Artist and institution. And it was sort of my
positioning to sort of do away with institutional critique,
do away with critique all together, if you ask me,
and move into a more constructive field.
It was a real problem. And it was also harkening back
to a moment in my career where I got caught up
in my fashion business, and a partner that I hired
fired me from my business. So this work was really
kind of like, how could that happen?
You know, this was a friend of mine.
How could business allow that to happen?
This life work I lost in a day. And so, inside this project
was that little autobiographical curiosity of, like,
what is inside of a corporation that causes that kind of
dog-eat-dog, you know, back biting horrible
sort of ethical component, where you can get away with murder.
You can actually murder someone. And so, I used that conceit
and went in and started studying the history of machismo,
and went through clothing. It was my only avenue.
It was the only place where I could launch from.
So really, sort of going into, then, what was management.
And what was corporate management?
What was the three-piece suit? And I went through
popular culture. You're looking at
several things. I used the footprint,
the architectural footprint of MASS MoCA.
I used this wonderful 1956 Rod Sterling movie,
called "Patterns." And if you've not seen it,
it's really this brilliant sort of study of human behavior
around corporate behavior. And I sort of went through
all of these mechanisms to try and dredge up this history,
and then find a way to interconnect these
disparate modes of thought. This is going a head of me
a little bit here. But what happened was,
algorithmically, which somebody can ask me about that later,
about these pieces, I was able to bring
all of this information together and create a new suit
to reinvent a multipled suit. That which was more complex,
and took on more drama. And it actually became
like a 36-piece suit that actually comes together
and comes apart as a suit, a jacket, a pant, a dress,
a skirt. Crudely, we're using buttons
here, but constantly searching for new technologies of a way
for this system to work. So this system
is still in the works. We're still a corporation.
My collaborating partner that came in the middle
of the project is Iain Kerr. And he and I have further gone
into investigating how we can architecturally
move this piece through some kind of new mode
of being clothing. It's just the most challenging
thing I've ever done, and still is the most exciting
thing that I'm doing. And it's also sort of moving
into other current projects that I'm working on with Spurse
and Spurse design, which I'll demonstrate a little bit later.
Ooh! It did that thing.
Those are the technical glitches that we had earlier, that I was
trying to straighten out. So you're seeing
these examples of the way that those 36 pieces come together
and become other things. A skirt, pant, a coverall.
So these are all the pieces sort of being fitted together.
Now within another project folded inside of the project,
sort of this invagination into machismo, ironically,
is this other project where a person can actually
come into that installation in the back galleries
of MASS MoCA and make an appointment
for touching and fitting. And this was the most fun,
because wherever we... Could you turn that down
just a pinch? Wherever we were, Iain and I
would converge at the site with the customer,
potential customer, and we would enter this
collaboration with the customer. So another sort of yet
mode of emergence occurs where, then, we with them,
try to figure out a way the suit can exchange
with their lifestyle, their existence.
So those are the pieces. That, I wish I could
talk more about. But we would give a whole
performance about the history, we'd open a bottle of, you know,
decant some whiskey, you know, have a little exchange
of whiskey, have this whole little speech and performance,
and then we'd do this series of touchings and measurings.
It was very much like frisking, that they do at an airport,
or a police frisking. It was very kind of sensual
and intellectual engagement in a private
little touching and fitting. This is another sort of chapter
of this project that moved into France,
where we actually hired a retired couturier
to be our stitcher. And to develop and push
the pieces into another future of what this multipled suit
could be. So here, we're in France
in the countryside of France doing our business,
setting up nomadically anywhere, even in the middle
of a wine vineyard. This was our agent
of mediation, sort of the French representative
who was negotiating with the couturier and with the sites
we were sort of habitating at that time.
There she is. So this is just a few slides
about the future of that project.
I'd love to talk deeper into it, but I'm not going
to have time to do that. Again, this project has got
many unfolding chapters. We've now moved it into an area
we call just right now comportment.
And what that is. And politically, it's just a way
to take on-- These are new fibers,
technology fibers that we're moving into the project.
Comportment as a political position of how we can invent
new modes of being in the world and new modes of communicating
with each other, culture to culture.
So we're using the suit as a way to get to that.
I'm moving backwards now into that body of work,
that beeswax work called "Wholesale To The Trade Only."
I did an exhibition last year at Alexander Gray, where
I revisited those histories of that archive.
I had gone through this elaborate drenching of beeswax
in Switzerland and a huge show in Switzerland
at Fribourg Contemporary Museum. And now, I've sort of come back
to revisit those histories with a different set of tools.
And it was a much different environment in addressing,
so I'm just showing you a few pictures of that.
And I can talk to that if there are any questions.
I don't have much time. I see I'm going to move into
another project next through Spurse.
You're going to see a few slides of Spurse.
Spurse is an international collective.
It has many, many, many people. I'd say about 100 people
at this point. But they're really
just sort of looking in. It's Internet based collective.
But they're about seven to 12 of us who actually
are working solidly together. And within that collective,
there's another collective called Spurse Design.
And many of these projects sort of fold over
into Spurse Design projects. And they're really a big part
of my practice, although I'm not going to be able to talk
a lot about Spurse tonight, unless somebody
asks me a question. But these are a handful
of projects that we've worked on in the last three years,
I'd say two or three years. And we're currently working on
a major project with Grand Arts. I've tried to tie in
some parts of the university here into the project, because
we collaborate with people all over the world.
And we're currently working on the notion of deep time
and rapid time. It's an environmental project
about the old great inland sea and the desert.
And Kansas City and Grand Art will be the site
of the exhibition in 2009, I think fall of 2009.
So we're going to that heavy right now.
I do a lot of food projects. One project that's not up here
is called the Public Table, that we can talk
about that too, later. But what you're about to see,
and what you're listening to right now, this music
is called "The Lost Meeting." And this was a project
I was invited to by a curator, Julie Courtney,
I just mentioned a few names. I'm so sorry I haven't mentioned
all the names. In my longer lecture, I'll go in
and I'll mention every name of the people who are working
on these projects, because there's so many.
There's just not me. I can't do all of this alone.
It takes many people to do something.
And you've got to always forget that--
I mean, remember that. Never forget, you know,
as Bruno Latour writes, is that we often ignore, or forget,
or push away, how many people go into making us who we are.
It's a silly thing. Of course, you think
my parents made me who I am, but it's not true.
It's like, your friends, the person you're sitting next to
and having a dialog with, they're having as much to do
about who you are as your parents,
and probably even more. The history of this country
is steeped, you know, in Quaker history.
You know, these were, you know, dispersed people
who came here from Europe. It's part of, you know,
all of that religious migration that still has formed us
as a puritanical nation today. You know, but Quakerism
was unique because they still, you know, a fundamental theory
in their culture is being active.
Activism. It's not just a simple term
where activism is, you know, politically being active.
It's actually a term that you're activating the world.
And this is something very important about my practice.
I learn through Quaker culture that it's so important that
I probably could be a Quaker. It's about activating
every part of your life that you can possibly activate.
It's not just relegated to the studio.
It's not relegated to just your dialog with your, you know,
studio partner or your roommate. It's actually, if you're
really truly an artist, how can you creatively
and inventively activate every part of your life?
I speak to this in my new project called "Mildred's Lane,"
where we have a contemporary art complex that we're reinventing
and reassembling the terms of the Contemporary Art Museum
on our compound in Pennsylvania, called Mildred's Lane.
And we speak to a mode of living we call work styles.
And I'm going to speak about that tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m.
in the sculpture department. And anybody who's interested
in coming to Mildred's Lane, we do three or four
intensive sessions every summer. They're three weeks long.
They're very particularly about our network of artists, dinners,
friends, speakers, lecturers, modes of thinking, researching,
dwelling, living. It's life as an artist.
Kind of a finishing school for artists, if you ask me.
Lost Meeting, to get back to that, was an investigation
of the pattern. We sort of broke
the Quaker culture down into what their concerns are.
And it's a big argument about mediation.
To God, to earth, to culture. Mediation became a primary
point convergence for us. We sort of broke down the tools
of that place, that culture, that situation, sociologically,
anthropologically, scientifically, architecturally
artistically and created this little studio
that completely emerged out of the rubble
of its very being in history. That again, is an algorithmic
problem that I can talk to in questioning.
But we created what was called the "Lost Meeting."
Why the Lost Meeting? The building itself
and its history was nicknamed the Lost Meeting, because
it was built out of a schism in the early part
of the 19th century, 1827 to be exact.
And that schism was all about the Orthodox Quakers
and the Liberal Quakers, what were called the Hixsite Quakers,
arguing about what was it about mediation.
You know, that the Hixsites, which were the liberals, were
thinking there's no mediation. We have a direct experience.
And these are philosophical issues, mind you.
The orthodox still wanted there to be a mediating experience.
And so the building, this building was built
out of an argument where 19 Orthodox Quakers
stood up out of the meeting, the Abbington Meeting in
Philadelphia, and walked out and went over
and built their own building. They were so mad.
And so, that history of that building is how this whole
project emerges, and what it philosophically speaks to
and what we produce there. So we get to somehow,
skipping over a lot of material and a lot of history,
to the pattern. And so we create
this elaborate drafting studio. Architectural drafting,
pattern drafting, industrial design drafting.
What it is to get to an object, a thing.
And how does that thing move further than it is.
So again, we're emerging these ideas within the project,
and we're going to material culture around Philadelphia,
Quaker material culture. These things that you're
looking at now are such things in Quaker material culture
that we've pushed down the pattern methodology
into these three-dimensional digital forms.
So, a Quaker bonnet becomes that in our project.
In a way, I just want to say-- There's a good example
of what's going on. But all of my projects,
I want to say in sort of closing up, because
we're running out of time, sort of bend back over
or fold back in or pleat into another project
or another form of life. And I just want to point out
this intergalactic pattern that was created for "RN"
became an architectural path and study for a commission,
architectural commission for Spurse Design.
We used that very pattern to create this
piece of architecture. So I just want to sort of,
in a final note, show you how my practice never ends.
It's a part of my life. It completely encircles and
gets regurgitated, reassembled and moves back into
the real world in some way. And that's very, very,
very important to me as an artist.
Mildred's lane. End of my lecture.
I welcome questions. ( applause )
If y'all, I know some of y'all have to leave.
I know I'm competing with Barack, sadly.
But if y'all, anybody who wants to stay and have questions,
please move forward so we can just, you know, have a chat.
Yes? >> I have a question about...
( inaudible ) >> Can y'all hear
what she asked? >> Not a word!
>> Is there a mic that we can pass around, 'cause
that was frustrating last week, I know, that no one can hear
the questions. And I'm going to be so bad
about repeating the question. Good question.
It was awkward for me. Especially, as a young artist
coming out of romantic notions of art school, and what I call
the Van Gogh theory, is that we're all supposed to be
crazy, and weird, and eccentric. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.
>> I was asking about, you know, in the early ages
in the fashion... ( inaudible )
And I'm wondering if that felt strange, since it seemed
contrary to kind of anti-establishment,
anti-economic establishment undercurrent.
>> This is what I thought, was so good, I mean, just to go,
I'm starting from the end of your question, because
there's several questions within a question.
What's been so fun for me in fashion is that I was kind of
an intervention. I was always an intervention
in that world. And they never got that
until the end. They certainly thought
oh, that art girl, damn her. ( laughs )
But, you know, I want to talk to certain pieces of that,
and if I get off track, bring me back to it.
Because, you know, I always say to students
trying to be artists, it's like, and I said the Van Gogh theory.
There's this romantic notion that we exist, you know,
in this other world. In this higher culture of art.
And more and more, that's just getting out of hand.
I think now, there's suddenly a huge movement and backlash
in the 21st century. In the late 20th century,
it really got out of hand. And I'm trying to bite my lip
right now, because I know I'll go off on a tangent.
I just think there's this nostalgia about
what being an artist is that ignores the fact
that we have to make a living. And I've heard you, and
I've talked to many of you throughout the week that I've
been here, is that you think that when I get out of school
I'm going to go do this, or I'm going to do this.
But it's never. I have not heard one of you say
when I get out of school I'm going to be an artist.
And it's disturbing to me, because I learned in those early
days of being a fashion designer where I said oh, yeah,
I'm going to go start a company, by God, and make my own rules,
is where I was coming from, and create my own world.
But I haven't heard any of you say anything
remotely close to that. And this was back in
the early '80s that I did that. And it's really disturbed me,
because that is the new revolutionary ground.
You know, there are great thinkers who speak to this.
Stingers, Masumi, who talk about capitalism
and industry as a way for us to, you know, enter into
the greater global discourse. And it's the only way that we,
as creative and inventive political artists, can enter
is to move through a world that everybody else is moving in
and intervene in a productive way,
not in a critical way. Not in a critical way
by means of, you know, post-modernism
and, you know, darida. Not in a critical way where,
you know, you're sitting in your studio and you're
telling each other what you think of their work,
but in a productively critically engaged way
where you're thinking as you go. You're learning as you go.
And I think in my early, you know, attempts at this
whole project, you know, I was a really young artist
fresh out of graduate school. I was thinking,
what, how do I do this? I was still learning as I went,
and figuring out the whole system as I go.
I realized that it's nothing different
than what the art world does. I have a gallery in New York.
I see what he does, and I speak to what he does.
That whole system has this sort of double standard,
because they don't talk about the economics, you know,
of the culture of art. And, you know, I may have
gone off on some tangents, but I'm trying to sort of
stab at the things that you threw out to me.
>> Has there also been, this is sort of a follow-up question.
Has there been an aesthetic? There's this big debate
as to how much aesthetics has to do with politics.
I guess a follow-up question I have is that there's this
big debate among our circles. ( inaudible )
Can it be, you know, productive in a certain political sense?
And I guess I'm wondering, too, then have you adopted...
( inaudible ) Did it exist even earlier?
>> I think absolutely. And you know what that is?
It's not just aesthetic. It's complexity.
Complexity on a more abstract level.
Aesthetics is to, you know, it's a loaded word.
It's truly complexity. You can't just
call out one thing. It's got to be, that's sort of
how I came to work. I think I learned how to work
like this in the fashion system. And I realized very early on
that complexity was my friend. And we as a culture
and Dalou speaks to this in his control society article
that I keep trying to dredge up to pass around to people,
because it's a really important and turning article for me.
Jill Dalou's postscript on control societies where,
you know, it's like we've been so trained
to not accept complexity. We're "no" people.
We say no, no, no. We need to like hone it in,
hone it in, hone it in. Curators.
Hone it in, girl. ( laughs )
( inaudible ) >> No, I think it's--
I do it to myself. I am like my own worst enemy,
you know. Walt Kelly's Pogo.
May I quote the great socialist comic strip from the '50s
that my dad was a great enthusiast of.
"We has met the enemy, and he is us," you know?
Yes? >> So could you explain...
( inaudible ) >> I'm not a gallery artist,
and my gallery knows it. As a matter of fact,
I was invited to work with this gallery
because he knew that. He was somebody
who had watched my career since the day I came into
New York City in 1988. He knew everything I had
ever done, and everything that I, you know, every store
that I did, every project that I had done internationally.
And I said to him, you know, I'm not a gallery artist.
I don't make things like that. I make events, situations
and something emerges. And he just said, I know,
I don't care. You've got to think of me
as your agent. And he was a radical
beckoning to me. Also, it was a moment where
I was becoming, you know, kind of financially unstable.
I'm a single parent with a kid, you know, with a lot of friends.
And my partner is my best friend and my business partner
in our venture Mildred's Lane. But I figured well, I need
to step into that arena, and let me figure that out as I go.
But I'm certainly not thinking of it as a place
where I can, like, make a painting and sell.
I'm thinking of it as a situation that now I have
an agent and a place where I can actually move into
and in and out of, and we're in a dialog to try a find a way
for that to work. You know, my projects
come in many forms. Like I say, a business,
corporation and sole proprietorship, a thing,
I'll still sell a piece of clothing off my back
just to make a buck. I got to make a living,
I got to support myself. It's still
a very complex system. There's no black and white here.
I'm not suddenly plopped in a gallery, and now I'm just
going to sit in my studio and make things.
I'm just trying to activate as much as I possibly can
in my life. It's the only way
I can survive as an artist. And I would say,
I would challenge you all to do that, and not get stuck
in one thing, but you apply your creative and intelligent
and inventive self, and invent a place for yourself.
Don't go by, you know, the rules that you've been handed to you,
and the degree that you've been handed to you
and say, "Oh, I got credentials now."
It makes no difference. It makes no difference.
It's just about how you're going to activate a situation
at any moment, at any given time,
anywhere on the planet. That's what
being an artist is to me. A good artist.
Yes? ( inaudible )
>> To change the subject a little bit, I'm really curious
about the fact that... ( inaudible )
You touched on how history, you're not a nostalgic
sense of history... ( inaudible )
>> Yeah, you know, I have to say or I have to confess,
I hate that word, "confess," you know.
My daddy was an atheist. I have to say that my huge work
comes out of a lot of autobiographical experiences.
At least, I don't talk to my history.
But the best thing I can do, and the best, most comfortable way
I can come to a project is starting from me, somewhere.
But the best thing I can do as an artist
is to move it out from me. As fast as I possibly can.
But to be integral for me to be a part of the project
and a part of the world, I have to start with what I got.
And whatever tools that I have in my conceptual tool box
of things, of experiences. And I use that conceptual
tool box of experiences to have more shared experiences.
So, and I have to be maybe a little hypocritical
at this point, because it is a little nostalgic
where it starts. But then it quickly jumps into
my experiences as a fashion designer, which is also
autobiographical. I have to take on
those situations and experiences that had happened to me
during that period of my life. Then I quickly use those to
move out into different vectors. I try to move quickly
across a greater terrain, not so it's focused on me,
but it's focused on my shared experiences.
I'm not the only one who's had these experiences in this world.
I actually am part of the human species,
and I know the sadness is-- everybody has it, you know.
So it's just in my particular situation, or event,
or experience is going to be particular to me.
I can immediately, empathically and proprioceptively
engage a situation and gather up, you know,
with my tool box, all these other tools
of all these other people. >> I mean, I understand
where it goes, I get that. But I guess what I'm trying to
get is, I may be wrongly perceiving as it's sort of
a love of this kind of historical aesthetic.
It seems like it's stemming from, and maybe
you're saying universally, it's this personal affection
for that kind of... >> But like I said before,
I still believe that historical aesthetic is contemporary.
I drive that. >> I'm agreeing with you, but...
>> It's just my particular, you know, avenue
of getting to it. And that is completely based on
my history as a person. >> Right.
>> In the deep south. Turbulent Civil Rights time.
My father, the way I was raised. Very unusual
kind of poetic childhood. Now, I say I spend my entire
life trying to live up to the quality of childhood
that I had, because it was just so rich.
You know, there was nothing-- Everything was alive and drama.
It was that political moment in history in the early '60s,
all of the '60s, that so affected my life
and my family. Sorry, if I'm not getting
exactly. >> I think what I'm getting at
is that it's a difficult thing to kind of articulate,
in some ways. ( inaudible )
I guess my problem is I have a sort of similar problem,
I'm certainly attracted to sort of historical...
>> Things, things. >> If it's possible,
make it contemporary. It just happens naturally.
I have a similar attraction to that.
( inaudible ) That's come up as a criticism,
and I personally don't get it. It's almost only
in the art world does that come up as criticism.
>> Yeah, in our world it is. ( inaudible )
In advertising and fashion, it's perfectly legitimate
to look back to move forward. Somehow in the art world
it's not allowed or if any of it has been done.
>> Right, right. The art world is very rigid.
>> Yeah. >> It's extremely rigid,
and don't think that it's not. It's even more rigid than,
you know, than maybe being an automobile mechanic.
I mean, what I want to say to that is like, I brought up
Andrea Zitell. Often, I get juxtaposed,
Andrea Zitell and me, because we sort of, you know,
have these parallel venues. You know, I have Mildred's Lane.
She has Deep Desert Sites. She's working in clothing,
modes of dwelling, design. I'm also doing that, but I'm
assembling and reassembling. So we get compared when people
write about these things. And it's always confounding,
because what happens in the tally of the writing
is that Andrea, and she's my friend, you know,
and I love her work, I'm a big fan of hers.
We're actually going to be collaborating on a project
coming up. But she gets sort of identified
as the future, you know, her having that modern aesthetic.
And I get sort of summed up as the history,
an end of segmentation and stratification of these
issues in the art world. But Andrea really
speaks to retro design. She is calling upon modernism,
retro design and speaking specifically,
you know, to history. And we haven't actually gotten
into deep, you know, dialog about this, but we will
I'm sure at some point. But I call upon history
with conscious effort to reinvent a future.
It's like to create a perspective on a future
you have to critically look at the past, and you have to
reconstruct. We, as present beings in the
world, have to reconstruct these histories in order to create
and invent the future. And I am interested in what
the future looks like, as my practice.
>> It's curious how what was once considered sort of modern
has now become retro... ( inaudible )
>> It's changing all the time. ( inaudible )
>> Imagine a post-apocalyptic future...
>> But we can play with these things, you know.
It's just stuff we can play with.
( inaudible ) >> Yeah, yeah.
Question? >> It seems like when
you started you were really interested in the vernacular...
>> I still am. >> And not interested in...
( inaudible ) Rather than focusing on
aesthetic requirements... ( inaudible )
And how we lose the vernacular, and you lose all that history
of everyday... >> I still am interested
in that. But I still am interested in
vernacular as a term to activate
as a common language. Vernacular, not as a term
that immediately is our nostalgic thinking of it,
you know, vernacular architecture,
little dwellings, you know. I mean, that's where
I come out of, I love that. But vernacular as a meaning
of a common dialect, a common language,
a common place to converge. And I think I sort of have
theoretically sort of tried to move the vernacular
through another field and into another field.
But I'm still concerned with the same things, I think.
I think that I just don't have time to talk to it right now,
you know, because it's such a lot of material.
You know, I've tried this lecture many times.
I sometimes go to a class like this is, and I just talk
about one project and I touch on these things.
I showed you 350 images, so there's no way.
I apologize for that. But I just, you know,
I'm experimenting in this. And I was trying to do
a new lecture, but my technology got bogged down today.
If I speak about one project, I would go deeper into that,
and I think, you know, talk to that a little bit more.
But I think I still am there with that.
Question? Yeah?
You're going to give me hell aren't you?
>> I'm sorry! I'm just going to speak loudly.
You mentioned about the turbulent '60s and I wonder.
I know nostalgia is not an obtainable word.
( inaudible ) But I wonder if you sometimes
feel like you're nostalgic for that turbulent, chaotic...
>> It obviously stained me. ( laughs )
But no, I'm not nostalgic for it.
I mean, it stained me. And it's like, I think
I just was formed to think a particular way.
That's my little boy Gray Rabbit right there.
I think that I was, I don't know, you know.
I would call in a psychoanalyst. ( inaudible )
>> I think we're all nostalgic. >> Well, I think we all are,
you know, and I say use it. Not in that sort of self,
you know, collapsed sense, where you're the artist
in the studio, and you're painting the Van Gogh theory,
you know, cutting off your ear. Not like that,
but use it productively. It also goes back to my
positioning about, you know, the placement of critique
in the 21st century. It's like no,
no critique. Just disband that.
Let's do something collective, and let's critically
think through a problem situation, site, dialog.
Not canceling out one thing or the other.
The history of philosophy makes me so mad.
You know, it's just like one guy canceling out
the last guy. And it's only been
in the last decade where thinkers stopped doing that.
Where they finally woke up and said no, we can't do this.
We can only add on, make complex, you know,
move through. There's no one thing
canceling out another. We have all these cultures,
and identities, and theories, and philosophies,
and a whole history of things. What the hell can you do?
It's overwhelming. I might as well faint right now
if I start thinking about it. But it's, you know, it's like
use what you have and what you know,
and try to move into the world and invent new modes of being
in the world, before, to, with the world.
And that's what I try to do, as best as I can.
Maybe I don't do it so well all the time, but by God,
I'm going to continue trying. ( applause )
Thank you.