Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll share artist interviews and insights about this year’s ON SIGHT visual arts line-up. You can experience all of TBA:09’s visual arts installations from Sept 4 – 13, every day 12 – 6:30 pm. And join us for a free opening night party September 3, from 8 – 10:30 pm at Washington High School (map).
Figure XI: robbinschilds C.L.U.E. photo: A.L. Steiner
Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, robbinschilds presents a full-spectrum video with acutely visual live dance, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski and edited in succinct rainbow-hued sections. Each sequence features robbinschilds in monochromatic outfits, acting in contrast and communion with their surroundings. The artists traverse through desolate desert landscapes, darkened parking lots, and geological formations, responding to the environment through choreographed duets. In a style that is obsessive, persistent, and often humorous, robbinschilds reveals their observations of the human imprint on the world.
KK: When we first spoke about presenting C.L.U.E., I mentioned my initial thinking about the mass of projects that make up the program. I was interested in the illusion of hope and the potential for newness, utopian visions in concert with dystopian realities. Between then and now we have sorted out all kinds of details, and your installation is now housed in a deconstructed geo-dome structure. How did the decision to adapt the piece for this specific site come together? What are the implications of showing C.L.U.E. in the dome?
robbinschilds: A geo-dome is an organic structure made of many triangles, sort of like a snowflake or a crystal, repeating shapes clumped together until they become structural and semi-spherical. Our dome is representative both of a human made architectural form and a quasi-natural formation resembling the slope of a mountain glacier or dune or an animal dwelling. Our partial dome, covered in carpet, like kudzu overgrowth or moss, grows up out of the schoolroom’s carpet tiled floor.
Referring to the locations within the video, often abandoned, or seemingly uninhabited or disregarded decaying places, this built dome expresses the meeting place of the natural and unnatural worlds. In our video, through editing and our choice of locations, we join together dystopic disposable architecture-human imprint- with the unceasing natural world.
Our eroded half dome is either unfinished (like many buildings in New York city lately) or in the process of decay or both. Not perfect and in a state of flux, shifting and responsive. In this way, we allow the schoolroom to have influence on the work, to locate the viewer and invite participation in this process of seeing and experiencing their present surrounding.
AJ: A geodesic dome is an instantly perceivable merging of nature and humanity–or a re-merging of humanity with nature. It is a flower, a crystal; it is math, engineering; it is a linear sphere–rigid and soft. And so an eroding and morphosing dome, melting into (or is it emerging out of) the carpeting of the world is all those qualities inverted, or extended. The hooded night dancer on the misty country road.
Figure XII: robbinschilds C.L.U.E. photo: A.L. Steiner
KK: Your project traverses many distinct landscapes; they feel connected to something: a trip, a journey, a statement, but, they also highlight isolated moments. Can you talk about how the film came together. Is the piece uniquely American or is the landscape of “another world” or “nowhere”? Is it of this time or another?
robbinschilds: The experience is non-linear, with no fixed starting or ending places. We share our curious and available state, jumping from one location to another linking fragments of time and place, a simultaneousness with this moment now. Saturated color (represented in our outerwear) becomes the vehicle to commune with place and time, like a pair of glasses to see through or a vantage of feeling and experiencing. Yes, I’m talking about a psychedelic state of being. At the same time, I think we are expressing something uniquely American for sure. The American road trip has a long history of exploration, westward expansion, manifest destiny. We filmed in 2005 at a time when I think a lot of us were less proud to be American than we may be today. When we set out for eight days filming through desert, mountains and coastal California, we were liberated and sharpened, heightened by the ritual of the car=freedom and the vastness of natural beauty and the sadness of all the spoil and the sense of pure discovery of all of it so big. And then there is also that kind of nostalgia that is immediate from communing with the past and present at once.
AJ: States of industrial decay evoke feelings of bittersweet nostalgia. In looking at a forgotten cement factory we imagine the lifeline of the factory, its construction, the hustle and bustle of its hey-day, and the gradual slowing down of operations until its total abandonment, and then the slow creep of nature, rusting and rotting it down until it has completely re-merged with earth. All of those separate moments are experienced in the instant we see it and they waver in and out of the periphery of our minds as we continue to look and inhabit that imaginary time line. But the melancholy of the process of “dying” is subliminally enlivened by the excitement of witnessing the process. At the front of our minds we see decay and ruin but inside we understand that we are witnessing the same majestic processes that make up and mellow down the mountains.
Each landscape, each moment in the film is the same place, the same process, of rising up and falling down, slithering across. All of time and all the places compress, unify together into one, and then in the next instant the image jumps, the mind blinks and suddenly the chaotic, infinite, and historical vastness of everything is exhiliratingly back.
KK: What is robbinschilds’ favorite color?
robbinschilds: every color, we are decadent like that.
AJ: Magenta.
Steiner: Rainbow.
KK: In the Festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world?
robbinschilds: This is a can of worms that I could talk about for a long time. There are some big differences in the two worlds. For one thing the venues themselves: the drama of the theater space offers the power to control the staged environment: lighting, sound, raked seating and the expectation of the audience that they are your captives for an hour or so…versus the wandering attention spans of the gallery-goers in brightly lighted flat rooms for one thing.
When we were making C.L.U.E., we thought that we’d make a video and it would be a finished product and we’d be thrilled with a feeling of completion of a thing. But we’re a very experiential collaborative team, so naturally the work is never finished or finite. We describe C.L.U.E. as: A work permanently in progress, adapting to the space it temporarily occupies. In an on-going collaboration, we continue to find an activated state of seeing and being and wish to share the discovery of that state. robbinschilds is enjoying the straddle between the visual and performance worlds.
We like mixing it up and being trans-genre.
About
robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) have presented choreographed and video works since 2003 in venues including P.S. 122, Marfa Ballroom, and The New Museum. robbinschilds has created original choreography for David Byrne’s 2009 world tour and recently premiered their newest evening-length work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, at The Kitchen (NY).
A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, performance, and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. She is a collective member of Chicks on Speed and a founding member of the activist group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Steiner is based in Brooklyn, NY, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann.
AJ Blandford is an artist and constructor. She works with individuals, architects, artists, and organizations to help create and build environments, sets, and artwork.
Kinski is a four-piece rock band from Seattle.
www.robbinschilds.com
www.kinski.net
