Interviews by Frances Stark
What was supposed to follow was a medium-sized essay about my work, by someone other than myself. As fate would have it, certain circumstances - luckily having nothing to do with me - prevented the writer from submitting a text. I, of course, was dying to see what this writer would end up writing. A couple of years ago I remember reading a letter from the editor of a small LA publication in which he, in effect, was calling on more artists to strike up a discourse with each other, half-punitively conjuring up the image of an artist racing to the news stand to eagerly take in the handful of words that had been churned out in his or her honour. Granted he was referring to newspaper and magazine reviews, which are pretty different from lengthier, more considered essays, but even so, the presence - or absence, as the case may be - of someone else's protracted attention immediately reveals the economy of insight-production. So, faced with this glaring attention deficit and a fast approaching deadline, I thought, why not ask a little from a lot of people, rather than a lot from one person. I made a quick list of people and then tried to think up some very specific questions. There were a lot more people I thought of asking but to whom posing questions wasn't so easy, and then there were some pretty good questions that I couldn't gather the courage to actually pose, and then, of course, some people are pretty difficult to get a hold of.
Richard Hawkins, artist
Remember when I saw you on the corner of Fair Oaks in Pasadena and you said you wished you had made the cat videos yourself? If they were your videos what would you say if I asked (without sarcasm), 'what were you thinking when you made those videos?'
I remember seeing you. And I remember thinking that but I don't actually remember saying it. (Note to myself: look up 'encroaching senility'.)
Tables turned, I would of course have said, 'Oh well, you know. Nothing really.' Which would be true but I don't think that's what you're looking for here.
Vince Fecteau once told me that after seeing some early pieces of mine, magazine pages with post-it notes stuck on them, he'd thought to himself, 'You're not supposed to be able to do just that'. Meaning, he explained, that he kind of giggled at such a dumb and minor alteration, just one post-it note on a torn-out magazine page, framed and in a gallery. That giggle, to me (especially coming from Vince whose work I admire), was the perfect response.
With very little information Vince was able to imagine a dabbler - so he said - who sits next to a pile of browsed-through magazines, tears out pictures of the cutest guys, slaps on post-it notes - either to remind himself of a particularly cute one or to simply block out parts of the picture he doesn't like - and, in the end, picks a few out of the stack that seem better than the others. A dabbler (or if he were a sculptor, you could say 'tinkerer') does merely that. But, and this is where Vince absolutely 'got' what I may have been thinking at the time, isn't there a kind of 'effective mereliness'?
I'm not sure how much that explains. Underneath your own question is the same impulse as Vince's: 'You're not supposed to do just that'. What would I have been thinking if I had made those cat videos? Whereabouts would I get the wherewithal to just think that my cats are interesting enough to point a video camera at? Who, in effect, would have given me permission to do something so potentially mundane, half-baked and self-indulgent?
Not to go into this too awfully much, but acquiring permission is a bit weird for me. My shrink says it's due to a 'punitive extroverted superego'. Which is to say that there are always more reasons to not do something than to do something. When it drives me too much toward inertia I have to create for myself a counteractive force, a 'permissive extroverted superego', if you will. Which doesn't always do that much good since you could imagine a seagull painter using the same excuse to make yet another dreary, bland seagull painting. So it has to be a 'perversely permissive extroverted superego', a kind of combination fuckedupness-barometer/permission-giver who, with one eye winking permission, has the other eye turned critically toward whatever's goofy enough, fucked-up enough and sincere enough to be worth doing.
I often call to mind Morticia Addams for this purpose. I imagine my Wednesday-self proffering up for approval some always-already genius (this is fantasy, ok?) bit of demonality. Ghastly smile drawn, Morticia pours her eyes over my latest work and drinks in all of its, as I've said, goofiness, fuckedupness and sincerity. 'Did you clean up the blood?' is usually all the permission I need.
So, then, the voice of Morticia is probably the one which might have said that making videos of my cats would have been ok. 'Sure, by all means, as long as somebody gets hurt.'
She might have said, pressed by me for further description, that despite my stumbling onto something, decisions that are totally my own have already been made. That cats playing at being scary is profoundly goofy. That, in contrast, dogs at play - with their groomed handsomeness and trained amicability - would not have been on the same level of fuckedupness; they're already camera-hogs. That these cats in particular have developed tools that they inevitably trot out, each distinct but given to transposition: one, a paws-forward clambering, the other, an arched-back bristle-tailed stare over its shoulder, and that these tools are always being recombined and contextually reinvented, motifs that occur and recur in seemingly endless reinvention, their only purpose to keep the game perpetual. That indulging my cats to scratch floors and claw up furniture is a permission I siphon back toward myself when I can't find it anywhere else. That, overall, despite the dumb casualness of simply turning the video camera toward some cats, my own insights are on display and are, in fact, quite evident. Which, in turn, makes a potentially innocuous video of cats at play absolutely well worth doing.
I doubt if Richard Hawkins would have been thinking all that if he had made Frances Stark's cat videos. But it is how I would have thought of them in retrospect.
Does that answer the question?
Elinor Jansz, greengrassi, London
I deliberately didn't pose any questions to any of my galleries but somehow I thought it would be nice to hear from you. I don't know exactly what I want to ask you yet, I just know I want to ask you something ... let's see ... I could ask you about that little mimeographed edition I made there in the office, since you bought one, or I could ask you about those two collages I just sent you, since you said you really liked them (that way I'm not totally fishing for compliments, I'm just fishing for the fleshing out of compliments, I guess). So...?
It's hard to imagine saying anything in the knowledge of what's been said before. I am trying to write about Frances without decorating my words or hiding behind someone else's, and I'm starting to feel a certain congruity between what I am struggling to do here and the challenge Frances sets herself, in order to make work in her own voice of what she describes as a porous relationship to her experiences. Her delicate notations carry spirals of aching enthusiasm for others which lead into an internal world of minute observation and enquiry. She made a booklet to accompany a show in 1998 using a mimeograph machine which combines low-grade technology and handcraftedness. Frances bound the pages with a staple gun and inserted a sheet of parchment between the two parts so that the booklet rustles reassuringly as you turn its pages. The pale-purple carbon letters only just make contact with the page hovering above it in loose clusters and constellations that have a material fluidity echoing free associations from backyards to Bjork to Novalis to Bob Dylan in endless imaginative digressions.
Susan Kandel, editor, artext
Since you have experience editing my writing, is there anything you would like to say about the relationship between my writing style and my visual work? (Hopefully it won't have to do with my utter failure to meet deadlines.)
Frances, you're two-faced, but don't worry - I mean that in a good way. First things first, and what's first, in your writing as well as in your artwork, is fragility. Talk about meandering, false starts, back-tracking, second- and third-guessing, laments about what you don't know and can't do. You enter and exit without fanfare; you tread oh so lightly. But this lightness is only one side of everything you make and say. The other is sly and utter control. I've figured out why your column comes in dead last every issue. Your wonderfully self-deprecating excuses aside, you don't want me to have time to fuck around with your words. Passive-aggressive comes to mind here, and it's been highly underrated as an aesthetic/textual strategy. In your case, it sure gets the job done. To put a mythological spin on things, think of the Roman god, Janus, usually represented with two heads, placed back to back. He could see in two directions simultaneously, but I suspect he could still learn a thing or two from you.
Laura Owens, artist
For some reason I want to ask you if you were surprised when I first showed some paintings, but of course you knew they were coming - can I ask you, what did you think when you saw them?
I was really excited to see her paintings because I felt Frances entered into a dialogue with other painters and paintings. This seems like an obvious statement, however, for me it was an important addition to thinking about her work that was perhaps not so explicit before. The piece of paper and its materiality (i.e. a bend, a watermark, ink stain) has always been so deliberately considered in her work, as has the idea of paper as a place of writing and a place of drawing. I was curious how this type of hyper-attention would play itself out.
The surface of these paintings are amazing. It is better than an eggshell, more matte, more smooth. It is not like paper. I remember touching them and being shocked at how incredibly silky they felt.
Another interesting thing that happened with the paintings was that with the transition to a more three-dimensional structure, perspective appeared. With the works on paper there is a deliberate flatness, the space of writing, the page of a book. I remember one painting that was like a table, the legs made out of language, literally a space to write. I asked my friend Edgar, a painter himself, if he remembered when he first saw Frances's paintings. He pulled a book out of his bag that Charles Ray, his teacher, had loaned him. The book was about Thomas Eakins and he began to tell me how Eakins's father was a writer. An interesting link was that Eakins portrayed his father, and many other men, either writing or doing some other activity (such as surgery) while sitting at a table. Eakins was obsessed with writing, and in all of Frances's previous work it appears that she was too. It is interesting that when making a painting, she, like Eakins, chose to portray the place where writing takes place.
Since she started to make works on canvas it seems that both the paintings and drawings have an added depth of field, whether it is through slight ideas of perspective or through washes of colour imitating landscape. These are just a few thoughts, I would really like to see a lot more paintings from her.
Laurence A. Rickels, theorist/therapist
You own 'W' is for 'Werther'. Why did you buy it?
Sometimes an author's great notion and commotion will exchange a thousand words for the fitting pictogram. What saw me coming was the WordPerfect symbol for 'file', emptied of former contents, forming a return-carriage repetition column (the stencil effect doubles the computing still or overkill back onto the typewriter, a doubling that's right on the mark also in the genealogy of these media). The Sorrows of Young Werther has served a mascot text in all my books beginning with Aberrations of Mourning (1988) and continuing through Nazi Psychoanalysis (to appear in Spring 2002). Goethe's best-seller, which doubled on contact with reception as its own copy-cat suicidal following, internally staged Werther's own reduction through his thoughts and his art - the 'thought dashes' and his silhouettes - down to the typeface of his text. It is a reducing plan that suggests a merger going through, a replicational text-act caught up in the act of 'suicitation', at the same time as the hero's self murder. The closing line of the book, the reference to Werther's improper burial as suicide, could be the opening line of a vampire fiction. And through the outer-corpus experience of this Werther effect, the suicide epidemic infecting his close readership, Goethe acclaimed to be afflicted by the haunting of a brother's improperly buried ghost. And thus I have relied for some time to come on The Sorrows of Young Werther for what I have seen it to be: the owner's manual of what I like to refer to as the 'Teen Age'.
DeWayne Stark, my father
As you probably know, I have used the IBM card when making artworks. Could you explain what those are, how they work, where they came from (things like that)? And if you have any thoughts on how they might function in a work of art I'd be interested to hear...
Old-man Hollerith's card has fallen into disuse lately. I'm not sure when its use peaked but I can recall that during the Vietnam war people were shipping their data to the Far East where it was punched into cards and the punched cards were returned to the States for use. The card, when blank, is a piece of card stock of the colour and print design of one's choice. When the card is a virgin it contains no information but, after punching, it can contain just about anything: your age, birth date, sex, rate of pay, number of hours worked, etc.
A primary use of the punched card was the dreaded timecard. At one time in my life a timecard was a great producer of stress. Getting the card into the time-clock before the start of the working shift everyday took all my effort. Punching it out at the end of the shift ended the working day. Actually the time-clock didn't punch the card but printed a time message that was hand read by the timekeepers who placed a pencilled daily total on the bottom of the card. The pencilled-in data would later be punched in the card and the card fed into the computer. Keeping the card in machine-readable condition was necessary for the system to work. The saying 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate' existed for a reason. I have seen many a talented engineer or scientist whose most important job of the week was to make sure the timecards got in and were filled out right.
Before the coming of the personal computer, access to the computer was through the punched card. Each line of a programme was punched into a card, and a programme might consist of boxes and boxes of cards. These programme cards were input into the system via a card reader. As the system grew in size the speed and capacity of the reader increased. Just imagine the frustration of loading a three-thousand-card programme into a system then finding just one card with a single punch in the wrong place and having to do it all over.
A card could be punched by a keypunch machine that was operated much like a typewriter, with one major difference. You couldn't backspace and correct an error. Once a hole was punched it was final. Many a final grade in college was determined by how well one could keypunch. When a mistake was made while punching one could take the card in error and eject it, place it in the punch's reader and dupe up to the error column. Knowing the short cuts on the keypunch could save countless hours of frustration. Checking the keypunch stock to make sure it did not have pre-existing punches could also help one maintain one's wit. The computer's card reader will only accept certain punch combinations and illegal multi-punches caused by someone putting used cards back into the new card hopper could drive a programmer to drink (many did anyway).
Besides the use as timecards another very popular use was the payment coupon. At one time I was involved in the design of products that used punched-card media in the input/output devices. We had just finished a circuit-board interface for a small Burroughs card reader. We were about to test it but couldn't find any punched cards anywhere. We went looking in the dumpster behind the building but the cards we found were too damaged to use. Our next search was through all the cabinets and drawers in our small office. Finally we discovered thirty-six payment coupons for the company president's new Cadillac, which we ran through our reader over and over that night for testing. When we were done we replaced the cards in his desk. He never knew and the next day we ordered a keypunch from IBM but that is another story. [And another story is IBM and Hollerith's instrumental involvement in the holocaust.]
Odene Mitchell, my mother
All my questions have to be loaded, to a degree, but not too loaded. With you I'm finding this is an especially difficult balance to achieve. Because of your interest in something described as 'the work', I have become increasingly aware of how often art is referred to as 'WORK'. Could you say a little about your concept of 'the work', where it comes from
I have often drawn parallels to something called 'the work', and what an artist creates. My personal interpretation of 'the work' is work on oneself, observing one's own behaviour and attempting to adjust the way one sees and interprets the world so that one's behaviour becomes more supportive of all of creation. It's really a 'soul-building' activity, one that strengthens that part of our being which helps us to interact in the physical world in a transformative and nurturing way, and is as ancient as man's ability to contemplate himself in the universe.
An artists 'work' manifests their own vision of the world, and challenges all of us to further examine our own understandings and beliefs. Your specific body of work has a subtle seduction into the most minute aspects of language. Not meanings, but the rhythm and texture and colour of words. I also see that as 'soul building'. You show us the beauty and flow of the language we use everyday to interact with others around our personal experiences of life. I have always been in awe of your intellect, and expected 'the work' to be reflected in your published writings and teachings. I am delighted that you have chosen the visual arts to tantalise us into a new way of thinking about the words and world that we see everyday. I'm not so sure it is as necessary for me to understand or 'interpret' your work, as it is to reflect on what it evokes in me, and how I can use that for my own personal growth. I believe that is how most of the general public approaches the 'work' of artists.
Cerith Wyn Evans, artist
I just made a piece that used this sentence (from Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities): 'It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never such kaleidoscopic effect.' Do you want to say something about this sentence?
This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of
heroisation; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection ...
the appearance of a new modality of power in which each individual receives as
his status his own individuality and in which he is linked by his status to
the features, the measurements, the gaps, the 'marks' that characterise him and
make him a case.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Does the novel, whether founded on verisimilitude or fantasy, pretend to do
anything else but be lifelike - life being movement - or does it pretend
to substitute illusion for life?
- Fabre, 'The Art of Analysis', La Princesse de Cleves
For a long time ordinary individuality - the everyday individuality of
everybody - remained below the threshold of description.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Morgan Fisher, filmmaker
FS: You are an archivist, I presume, so since, as you've said, you have one of my most ephemeral - and possibly anomalous - pieces in your archive, would you be so kind as to retrieve it from the files and speculate on what it is?
MF: I wish I could say that the impulse to save things, especially things my friends make, makes me an archivist. It's not an archive until you can find something when you need it. When I looked for your piece I couldn't find it. I know it's around here somewhere, I just don't know where.
FS: I don't know how much you know about my work, but what I know you know is that I am a huge fan of your film Standard Gauge. Perhaps you would like to speculate on my passion for your voice-over... (which is not to say I'm not passionate about that which it's actually 'over').
MF: Maybe you like it for the best of all possible reasons, because it embodies something that you recognize in your own work. Perhaps it has an exact equivalent in your work, although it appears in a different form. What your work and Standard Gauge share is the principle of commentary on a fragment. This is the activity of paleography, and a part of paleography is the act of negotiating a relation to a text from another time. So, not to interfere with your pleasure in the voice-over, which of course makes me very happy, I want to suggest that the voice-over, the commentary, only does its work in relation to the fragments that the film shows you. No fragment, no occasion for commentary, nothing for the commentary to be attached to, no distance to be registered and to be meditated on. In your pieces that go on the wall, you aren't the author of the fragments of text that your work elaborates. Someone else wrote them, and you found them. They mean something to you. The question is what to do about that feeling, how to make it manifest. I found the fragments of film that make up Standard Gauge. They meant a lot to me, I was obsessed with them. The question was what to do about that obsession. A part of the power of the fragments was in their autonomy, their distance from me. I had to accept that distance, rather than thinking of them as things I could make my own, or bring closer to me, through reworking them by visual means. They're like relics, so that would have been sacrilege. To preserve their autonomy as visual artefacts, I was forced to another medium, words. The pieces of film are there for you to look at, to form your own relation to, quite apart from what I have to say, and my talking is the elaboration of how utterly enthralled I am by them, how much they mean to me, how much I believe in them. In your work the originary fragments of text are there for people to form their own relation to, but they are surrounded by your elaboration of your feelings about them. But because the fragments you work with are already writing, the response you don't allow yourself is to write, that is, to compose in words. Your writing is writing as copying, inscription, writing as labour. Inscribing over and over again a fragment of a text of which you are not the author is a demonstration, an acting out, of belief in the power of the fragment. It's a way to meditate on the distance, always insuperable, between you and the fragment of which you are not the author but exercises power over you. And it's copying in a double sense, not just the words, but recreating by hand the appearance of words set in type, which only reinforces the notion of enacting belief through labour. And at the same time this simulation of type enacts the notion of not allowing any kind of self-expression in written form - composing, handwriting - to exist in the space of the written that as a sort of sacred object the fragment alone should occupy. If this summons up a picture of you as a one-woman scriptorium, perhaps it's completely to the point. But now to return to what I suggested at the beginning. In your pieces the repetitions of text produce a field that registers as a visual event, a picture. It's a little diagrammatic to put it this way, but Standard Gauge starts with visual fragments and elaborates them with writing; your works start with written fragments and elaborate them with pictures. My voice-over corresponds to your pictures-out-of.
Dirk Snauwaert, curator, director Kunstverein München
Would you care to comment on the title of the exhibition I did with you: 'Ich suche nach meine Frances Starke Seite'?
The title 'Ich Suche nach meine Frances Starke Seite', at first made me smile. Ironically, it mirrored the Kunstverein's appropriation praxis of certain phrases and sentences for exhibition titles. The reactions to these titles were mostly disapproval since there seemed to be no way for the addressed to figure out what to expect in an upcoming exhibition. The functionalising of titles in order to transport some sort of product message has alienated the phenomenon 'title' from its specific genre, which has more to do with literature than with descriptive journalism, it is more elusive than communicative. The laws of brand politics in communication transfers are neglected by this title, that's for sure. My Schadenfreude for such a proximity in failure to compressable communication, soon shifted into sympathy due to the level of the melancholic introspection the title suggests. The reference to the self as subject of analysis as much as an author of the artwork and the exhibition, should make us feel uneasy considering the exhibitionism some current photographic practices confuse with the analysis of inhibitions and behavioural codes. The introspective parameters this title maps out and the ambitions it triggers, are that of an uncompromising dissection of the 'I', but then again only if one considers that the 'meine' and the proper name correspond to one and the same person, Frances Stark. According to the initial signals and parameters, the verb Ich suche set the directions for the automatic link of the quest for the intention of the artist, her deeper motivation in existential and psychological terms. Romantic literary traditions appear to be about the search for unknown dimensions of subjectivity and the quest for the ultimate inner core of the self. Stark's patient re-copying of hypnotic phrases taken from the great novel tradition or of icons used in data processing, cryptically evoke the basis of perception in the linguistic procedures of reading, writing and symbolical construction. The ambitions implied in this trope of the quest suggest that an in-depth scanning of the different aspects and consequences of the artists own aesthetic program was the focus of this exhibition, a kind of re-questioning of the `State of Things' in the work. This reading of the title made the proposal shift from an autobiographic melancholic journey to the depths of the self and evolve into a reflection of a possible analysis of both the 'authors' name, a brand logo for in the spectacle of cultural consumption and market value. The reduction of a practice to a streamlined recognisable logothetic icon, such as the author name, functions in the exchange values of the cultural industry, is also indicated here as a goal of the quest, that of finding a strong side in the competition, and the way a monographic, synthetical exhibition like the one at the Kunstverein Munich, operates as a canonising process of ones own work for the institutional context. In this oscillation between the prozaic German introspection reading and its translation into English, the word stark receives another quality and spectrum of interpretation. It brings in a narrative line, which Stark has refered to before in the Virginia Woolf 'Room for oneself' question, the location of the place for women in the landscape of cultural production. In retranslating the title into English, the 'strong side' points to the still problematic question of the role and position of the female author in the art world.
- Frances Stark
