JEN MAKES ART!

oh mama, this one has been a longtime in the works and often interupted. Jennifer Sullivan (http://www.jennifersullivan.org/) has been making and thinking and pushing things really hard for a minute now (you hear that this shit is soon to be a sneaker blog) Needless to say though, Jen creates work from an extremely accute filtering of that, that be. Seen the videos, the performances, the sculptures, the paintings, the drawings, the mash-ups of the above? Seen Bresson's films? Seen KLUTE? Like Lil' Wayne? Like Trina? Like examples of fully epic human being? Like to be called on your shit/OUR (the biggest our, the meta our) shit...

TRUDI: You wrote me once, "I honestly really can’t differentiate between myself and my work - it's just one big thing - the work affects and changes me and vice versa. I think communication, making art, for me is a gift I am making of myself to the world. Because it's hard to connect, but somehow I am learning to do it through my work."

I feel this is a really great starting point, for me It reminds me when Chris Lipomi said that his work was the hug to the world that he couldn't give and also Kippenberger and the distinctions between his life and art, and the figuring out of this is the interesting part of his work (for me). I see both these sentiments in your work too, something that one can't express in the moment, but want to with every molecule. Maybe that's what makes your work so intense, but if you’re this lightning rod where do you draw the line between life and art? What is precious? What is sacred?

JEN: Ok, it's on, Yo. also, just to begin, I want to say that the interview process interests me a lot as a format. I love how Godard uses it in his films as like a way of just getting to drop philosophy. creating dialogue in a formal sense. I am always wishing that would happen more in life, not just small talk, but big issues. someone just coming up to you in a cafe and asking you about deep stuff... I
really hate small talk actually. I am not very good at it either. I am more assured as a performer than as a social being. I can accept the awkwardness in art better.

But with the issue at hand, self acceptance is at the core of my work, which in turn is really about learning to love. I think all communication is the desire to love and be loved.

We were talking about that Mother show earlier - there's the whole Freudian thing about the mother, and I feel that. I think my difficulties in connecting with my mother are at root of my wanting to connect with everyone else in the world.

ok, ok, so to answer your question more specifically though: I guess I don’t draw the line between life and art. or maybe I do. sometimes I see stuff and I think - that's not art. I remember thinking that terry Richardson stuff was pretty lame in the context of art. but at the same, it turned me on. I was confused about it - I kept going back and forth. I mean, in a sense, he's doing something similar to me - cannibalizing his desires and intimate experiences. but it seemed kind of shallow. which is not to say that I think sex has to be shallow - because I totally see sex as an extension of the
spiritual. but anyway, I believe that we create our own meaning in the world, so "go with the stress"

as far as precious - truth, passion, love, total personal investment, art, change, humanness the human ability to change is pretty sacred to me. I strongly believe in this. that we all have this amazing potential. and it is up to us to realize it. But no one can make or do it for you. we have influences and friends to help all the
time, but one has to find things themselves somehow.

lemme bring it back into art a bit more -
the reason I prefer Sophie Calle to Tracy Emin is related to this idea of human potential. to me, Tracy Emin (though I have not seen her videos) from what I get out of it, is just kind of wallowing in the pain. and there is a lot of truth in the pain of human experience. I feel like my earlier work was more like this, but there was more humor in it than hers and more cultural reference. anyway, I agree, pain is one of the things that binds us - suffering is something we all share. this is kind of where Buddhism begins - we all suffer and we all want to be happy. but I feel like she is not trying to do anything with it. it's just like we're all fucked, we're all pathetic. that's life.
whereas Sophie Calle takes painful experiences and other kinds of experiences and transforms them through her work. she uses the work as a catalyst for change, a tool for survival and a way of facing her fears, breaking out
I called my work a Swiss army knife in my last artist statement. meaning I really need it for survival, and that it has many different functions in my life. it's a tool to me, for sure

TRUDI: I know what you mean but at the same time Calle uses a more intelligent language. Emin’s like reading the tabloids and it makes you feel dirty and not really want to take it further, or just not care, however she got to where she is and her learning what to call art is the fun thing for me, I think too that Richardson works like that with someone like Koons( who you hate right
Oh well.

As much as I would love to talk about other things than just how the feels to be made or what you need in it, the notion still hovers, and for the most part ignored in art texts.

JEN: so, yeah, I totally agree - Emin is tabloid style. and after I said it I felt a little overly harsh for saying her work is entirely about pain. I think there is more than that. She is doing a different kind of self-acceptance than me, one which is very unprettied up which is brave, but my fear is in people becoming lazy or not taking responsibility for their ability to tap into their own potential. like only focusing on the negative maybe? but I also feel a desire to support peoples' ability to resist judgment of themselves.

I don’t know, these are complicated examples for sure. I do hate Jeff Koons, but after writing about him, thinking about him more I have to admit the poignancy and validity in some of this work. I like that silver bunny, I like the basketballs in the glass cases. I am not sure what I think of the porn stuff. he certainly was exposing himself by doing that work, and I admire that kind of bravado. I get sick of porn being the only reference point for sex though. I feel like there could be more than that. I have done a few drawings about that but not lately. I think it's something I might try again someday. I also have this idea for an installation, that probably is far in the future that's like a homemade Chinese food restaurant in the front, city-style, with glass window and stuff and all those pictures of the different food, except the food would be all the food I eat with like a flower resting near by, in that Chinese food sign style. then in the back would be a peep show style set-up and I would be there all day in a mirrored room dancing. I wonder if this could ever really happen? - it would certainly be intense. I think it would differ a lot from a real peep show in that I would be more vulnerable than a real stripper. I don’t think I would get naked either, though I have a lot of experience being nude in public - I was a figure model for drawing classes and privately for artists from age 19 - about 24. I really enjoyed it as a job. I liked that I was being paid to be myself in some way. I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in anything I didn’t care about.

TRUDI: You sent me a letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, with LeWitt saying to learn to say “Fuck You” to the world and try to make some bad work. Do you do this? Where does the bad work go?

JEN: Ok, bad work. toughey. I certainly make bad work sometimes and I do throw things out sometimes. I guess I don’t usually try to make something bad, but I do, do stuff in which I try to suspend judgment. I have a sketch book now for the first time in a long time. it is a really interesting sketchbook actually – it’s called "sketch book with voices" and was published sometime in the early 80s by Eric Fischl and Jerry Saltz before he was a writer and was more of a curator. each page in the book has a quote or an idea or an assignment from a different artist - lots of big names (Vito Acconci, Lyda Benglis, Louise Bouresois) and some of whom I don’t know.

Actually, the quotes are culled from interview that Saltz did with all these artists - that's how the book was made. anyway, I feel like these, in the sketchbook, are some of my best drawings or at least have a totally different spontaneity/lack of self-consciousness, and it is because the sketchbook tricks you into not giving a fuck.

so, no I don’t necessarily really try to make bad work, but I try to suspend judgment until something is finished. I am making a painting right now that has sculptural elements and I’m very unsure of it. I feel like it's either the ugliest painting I’ve ever made or the best. it's almost done, so I’ll see how I feel. sometimes letting things sit a long time helps me too, like working on a drawing and then procrastinating finishing it for months until I don’t feel precious about it anymore, and then I can finish with a feeling of freedom and it usually ends up working. or bringing things back from the brink of failure is good too.

one of the best studio visits I ever had was with this artist Olav Westphalen who I invited to be a visiting artist while I was in grad school. He was very attuned to my aesthetic because he worked in a similar vein. His advice was that, “ideas don’t even matter very much”. he had studied with Allan Kaprow when he was a student. he advised trying to just pick something at random out of the phone book and make a project out of it. I still haven’t done this but I’d like to. I can see that it would be a way of hijacking our own desire to make a finished product and to bring it back to process because it would have to be exploratory, but I also think it would end up still fitting - that one's uniqueness would come through by the way you decided to approach it.
So that when Sol Lewitt says to make bad work, I think he really means to find a way to suspend judgment and trust yourself, which I think is tricky but important; something I am beginning to learn to do. Actually, I think this is why my video and audio work has been successful, because I have the feeling that I don’t know what I'm doing, I'm not very trained in these areas and so I kind of don’t know how it will turn out until it's done.

TRUDI: It's funny how you said that "porn is the only reference for sex" cause even Godard said that porn had changed sex, cause porn has to show the genitals farther apart, I mean even soft core sex in a pg-13 movie is more realistic than porno, but at the same time we grimace at if we've had sex, and if you haven't you're like " ah shit, when I have sex, I have to play some soft R&B in the background and light a bunch of candles, I really think this is a big difference between pubescent boys and girls, the boys get porno from older brothers and random old dudes that shows them its alright to fuck in a bus stop, and maybe girls want some cliché just as bad(I have no idea), but the option is maybe closer to day time soaps.

I really don't know if there's a solution, maybe just experience leading to an ideal, but besides youth always remaining youth, it changes so fast, our reminiscence is nothing that Calle or Emin hasn't done for another generation.

JEN: yeah, I mean I don’t want to come down as anti-porn - I think porn has a time and place and it can be erotic or exciting. it's kind of like hip-hop in some way - totally ridiculous (I like this phrase you used, the ridiculous meter...), there's an aspect of it that you cant really defend intellectually but it can produce a real response in a certain way. even knowing that it's not real, or that it has almost nothing to do with the internal experience of sex. if you have the intelligence to know it's a genre, then you can kind of go with it, and compare it against the rest of the genre, like westerns or horror movies. it's all persona and surface, but playing with that can be fun. but I feel like in art, there could be more possibilities, people could look into sex further than that, though then there's the whole thing that porn becomes real by the fact that it is a real part of peoples' sex lives in contemporary culture. it certainly influences us, for sure. but also to touch on the female fantasy thing - I hope that all women do not want that soap opera fantasy thing. I certainly feel more repulsed by chick flicks, lifetime TV station and women's magazines than by porn. they are far more insidious and fucked up because it is under the guise of choice or whatever - you know? it's so pussed out, so complacent and lame. and even the few porn movies made by female directors that are out there are gross in that same way - like they work in a romantic plot line and a Fabio lookin' dude in a pirate shirt...

TRUDI: I would also say that picking a page out of the phone book is interesting, I mean thinking about this New York show, and artists like you and I, we're a recycled culture, but we're not even in the forefront of that, so I have been making redrawings and then rephotographs(which I did not show) of Richard Prince’s 1977 work and how this happens simultaneously as Richard Hell's and Television's first record, and how Malcolm Mclaren appropriates this and then goes farther. For me this is about the death of images.

I don't know… how do you feel about this recycling/arranging? It’s about a recognition, besides the obvious exercise factor, an acknowledgement, that anything we "create" has already been touched upon.

JEN: I guess I don’t really think in those terms - the death of images - in art. I feel it in popular culture more - how every freaking movie that comes out is a remake and stuff like that. I know that Duchamp and Warhol and prince and all them maybe were trying to have it be about the death of something, the emptiness of it all, but I really don’t read it in that way. I have a positive reading of all of those people that's not about death - I feel something transcendent in their work. Duchamp for instance, was so exciting to me when I first learned about him - the idea that anything could be art, that it was more about your framing, your ideas, your perception, your mind, than creating a perfect object, though maybe in his mind it was more about saying "fuck you" to something. I think Richard Prince may be a deeply cynical person, but there is still a lot of feeling in the work. I feel moved when I look at it. it's in mourning perhaps, definitely there is a lot of sadness in Prince's work, and I feel something very human about it. I mean advertising is all about human desires, it's so wrapped up in primal psychological shit. and I guess death is like the definition of humanness, but I don’t believe in the death of art or images. the main themes in art, the ones of real importance are always going to be the same - life, death, love, sex, war, etc., but each person is a unique entity despite a homogenized cultural experience, these things seep into us but we are all seeing them in different ways and it’s filtered thru our unique personal experiences of the world and personal histories. I mean as long as there are things to express, how can there be a death of images? I guess part of my work has to do with subverting the emptiness of popular culture - I think there are certainly many pockets of realness in it - (karaoke for instance - is totally remaking what has been done already, but putting your own unique feeling and life into it) I am playing those parts up or re-inserting sincerity into things that lost it. so I guess, in a sense I am agreeing with you that yes, the basic underlying themes have been touched on since the cave paintings, but that doesn't make them lose the need to be expressed. maybe it underscores how much we need to express these things.

TRUDI: I know what you’re saying, but I also think you are looking very literally. I mean you are using other people’s images and words in your work, as am I. we are arrangers, we’re not painting or performing or drawing from something new. This is the death, there’s no new language. The artists you mentioned, the fact that we know their names is because they have done something different, but starting with Duchamp, I mean the dude retired from painting and then came back with the ready-made. After him there has been little to do in the “big/meta” art picture without just arranging things, unless you are just carving a niche, be it making very specific paintings or some other type of small place in art, I feel that this is what lead, and created the room for conceptual art, and later for artists that specifically developed themselves as a product. You know like I said before in talks, “identity artists”, now I feel like we’re shifting between “cleverist’s” and “artist-as-explorers”, the latter hopefully being the more lasting choice because it entails more dialogue, more criticism in the work, and probably more work. That said, I think both are a product of art schools, I don’t know though, you came from a big fancy grad program how has this manifested?

JEN: ok, I see what you mean - I can get a little sidetracked with my own agenda. when I was thinking about it more and allowing myself to accept that idea of a death, it made me think of those early photo appropriators as performing imagistic autopsy. Sherrie Levine was the most extreme of that set. but you cant really sustain that level of appropriation. it's an end game. and I don’t want it to end and I think that neither did she, because eventually she pulled back from that extremism.

so if there was a death, then the generations afterwards are all like Dr. Frankensteins - re-combining and re-animating the leftover parts. But I’d like to say, though it's hard to imagine what form it would take, that there could still be big innovations of some kind. Thinking about innovations in the future, I see hybrid forms as a big thing and possibly a re-investigation of the Beuys' ideas about social sculpture. He created a lot of dialogue and he was an amazing artist, but I don’t think he really realized his social sculpture idea. I wonder what he would think of YouTube and things like this. Perhaps his ideas of art as a revolutionary social force could still be possible, though it would certainly be an uphill battle. I feel like once I work thru some more of my personal stuff, I may become more interested in actively engaging the public realm more. I've always been intrigued by it, but it's a very hard space to work in. and most public art is pretty crappy. it's very vulnerable place for art and very difficult to get people to notice anything. I like how David Hammons uses public space - private, un-publicized performances. anyway, technology might be another avenue for innovation, but I’m not sure how that would work, I imagine it more gimmicky than conceptually innovative, but it's hard to know before it happens.

I like this distinction you make between “cleverist’s” and “artist-as-explorers”, sometimes it can be a tricky distinction. sometimes people act like they are exploring but then really it's very formulaic and flippant, which doesn’t interest me very much.

so how has my grad school education manifested? On a personal level, I really needed the time to focus on my work and kind of dive into it more fully. I definitely matured as an artist during those two years. I strengthened/clarified my philosophy of what I am trying to do through doing it all the time and talking about it all the time with lots of different people, some of whom disagreed with my point of view. Critiques, class discussion, writing about the work and having a lot of studio visits all helped in that way. I remember having a pretty positive 1st critique in grad school but even so I was on the verge of tears near the end because they were saying that they wanted more out of me and I didn’t know what that meant initially. Grad school toughened me up a lot. By the end, I could take criticism and decipher whether it was useful or not. I try to look at criticism and take it seriously, but sometimes people have their own agendas and it may not always be congruent with your own. anyway, I had a better inner barometer of success by the end. It's really great and helpful to have honest criticism - it helps to move you forward - sometimes people are unwilling to be honest once you are out of the school context, and some people don’t want to hear it, but I like it now, especially when I know it's where I need to go. But, I don’t think everyone needs grad school and I imagine if you had a good artist peer group and enough discipline you could create something comparable on your own. but yes, grad school does approach the work from the point of view of how to make it better and move it forward. I think it's essential to keep that beginners mind through out one's entire career though.