Nathalie Anglès + Monika Weiss

Elements

Nathalie Anglès in conversation with Monika Weiss

Chelsea Art Museum, New York, April 8, 2004. In conjunction with Monika Weiss: Vessels, March 20 – April 17, 2004, curated by Nina Colosi.

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Nathalie Anglès (NA)

In the history of the work you have produced until now, drawing has always held a preeminent position. However, your practice is also very rooted in performance, with strong conceptual underpinnings. In a previous discussion, you mentioned that you incorporated performance into your practice at a later stage but that it was not so much of a shift as a transition. I would qualify your performative actions as acts of drawing – as I would label your drawings as performative acts (when you execute your charcoal drawings, you exert a great deal of physical pressure with your body). Both performance and drawing informs, inspires and co-exists with each other. There is no separation really. “Performative installations” - can you define this term?

Monika Weiss (MW)

My works consist of elements that come both from a time that already happened and from the time now. My works contain an evidence of action. There are traces, visual or virtual, of something that has happened. In that sense, both drawings and installations are performative. I like to use the term performative after Judith Butler.

You define your use of drawing as an “attempt to outline the world”. Can you elaborate this concept to highlight the understanding of your practice?

Drawing captures an interval of time. Maurice Merleau-Ponty once talked about the “flesh of the world.” There is a collision that we all live in, between the self and the world. That collision or gap exists in layers. First comes the boundary between the notion of the self and the understanding of the body as Other. The relationship of body and the spaces around it is addressed in my practice through the symbolic act of drawing.

In your discussion with William Anastasi, you refer to your body as an “immediate sculptural material” and state that all materials in your work are equal: human flesh, paper, sound technology, water, or other fluids. Are you interested in materiality?

I think that my body (and, by extension, any body) is an environment, a space in a continuous state of flux. It is an artistic material. Within performative installations I treat the body as no different nor more important than other elements, such as water, paper, stone, the Earth. By elements I mean the motionless things, that we usually think of when we think of sculpture, but I also mean sound, virtual image, language, and the presence of other people. I try to look at the body as a sculptural object. Not to diminish its dignity. Rather, to be able to be smaller, like a “grain of sand” as Agnes Martin would say.

When you prepare your performances, you establish a set of constraints that you follow during the action. You decide, for example, to be curled up during the whole performance in an embryo like position, that appears to be a recurring type posture throughout your drawings and performative actions, or to keep your eyes closed for several hours. Your performative installations are vital and intense. I would say that this is generated in part by the simplicity and economy of means that you choose to employ.

I want to emphasize that the physicality of my actions derives from an intellectual quest. From early on, in my artistic development, I began using a set of elements that resonated the most with me, intellectually and physically, such as paper, black ink, water, fluids, baptismal font, stillness. I prefer fewer elements, such as in my choice of material, or my choice of specific action. That approach provides a sense of greater focus.

Delving further into your working process - and the physicality of your working process - I was also interested to find out that you experiment with different types of paper whose physical properties vary as they come into contact with your body. Photographic backdrop paper that you use frequently, is very abrasive to your skin. Here, at the museum, you used newsprint paper for the first time. You mentioned that this paper is overwhelmingly noisy as your body rolled back and forth on it.

Paper connotes human skin. For Limen-Meadow (2004) I searched for a paper that would work well in multiple layers, and that would tear apart easily. I am fascinated by the surfaces of industrial papers, which are made without concern for an artistic outcome (such as how the paint spreads or what quality of trace the charcoal stick leaves). In the act of crawling or in the act of drawing, I am interested in combining the surface of my skin and the surface of the paper together. I hope to imply similarities between those surfaces. There is something infinitely beautiful about the fragility of the boundaries in the space between surfaces, in the way we immerse our hands in the surface of water, in how the surface of paper cracks and opens itself further, towards the underlying layers.

What about landscape in relation to the body?

When I lie on the ground, the space opens itself up, it becomes a landscape, as I change my point of view. In Elytron (2003), an installation-performance that I created here at the Chelsea Art Museum, the tension between human figure and the landscape, visual and philosophical, has to do with the underlying fear of returning back to the ground, of dispersion. Standing up implies power. Lying down, curled up, and with my eyes closed, I give away that control. Instead, I listen to the surface of the ground.

Let’s shift to the subject of language, which has a profound presence in your work. The way you use language is very specific. You choose to qualify, or describe the series of works you develop over time, with ancient Greek attributes such as Achea Reon or Ennoia. Are these intended as titles or do they have a different function? When we talked about your relation to language, you said that you were striving to “overcome language”.

I don’t consider them as titles really. Words are objects that carry histories, which often took a long time to build, resulting in complexity of meanings and paradoxes. Words that appear in my work are equal with other elements. They don’t explain or summarize. Rather, they co-exist and co-sound with other elements, offering a possibility of the unfolding of meaning. Several years ago, while reading Gnostic texts, I encountered the word "ennoia". In ancient Greek “ennoia” signifies "consciousness" and “though in mind." In Gnostic cosmology “ennoia” was a small particle of light (or spirit) that accidentally collapsed into this world, and into matter. This notion resonates with my interest in the mater as colliding with the self. I also like the way ennoia sounds, akin to the word “annoyance”, connoting something slightly difficult and talking a long time. I find such sense of circularity in the writings of Julia Kristeva, where no conclusions can be made. I am interested in such circularity or repetition, both in writing, in art, and in singular words. To me, circularity implies our inability to express meaning, or certain muteness, an impossibility to fully articulate the essence. Paradoxically, I think language can point at that inability in powerful ways.

The baptismal font as a sculptural object is a recurring motif in your performative installations and drawings. In White Chalice (2004), exhibited at the Chelsea Art Museum, a large-scale drawing (of the same name as the actual sculpture) was made with charcoal and fluids that you poured directly onto the canvas. You have outlined the baptismal font directly onto the support. Some years ago you came across a baptismal font in a church in Poland. That experience left a deep impression on you, particularly in terms of the font’s scale and when you realized that you could actually look inside it. The strongest sensation you experienced was the physicality of this sacred object. This came to you as a kind of revelation in terms of this physicality. You reproduced the model of this font as a cast-concrete vessel, such as in the early model, Koiman (1998). You placed inside the concrete vessel a skin like layer made out of rubber latex, which has human skin-like properties. Then, more recently, you cast another model of the vessel in resin and polypropylene. In Koiman, you filled the concrete replica of the baptismal font with used motor oil that overflowed, intentionally. It was not until later that you began to immerse your own body inside the font. How and why did this transition occur?

Ever since I saw the font in a church in Wroclaw, I began obsessing about the act of immersion, and imagining figures inside the basin. The function of these fonts was revealed to me in a visceral way. Until about 15th century, people were baptized in them, as adults, with their entire bodies immersed in the font I was attracted to that vision. I began making drawings of my body immersed inside the vessel years before I actually conducted an immersion. When I created Koiman, I put eighty gallons of used motor oil inside the concrete vessel that overflowed continuously. I was drawing sketches of myself immersed inside the vessel despite the toxicity of the oil because I didn’t think they were realistic drawings. Drawings in my practice often precede an action, they are an intuitive sensing of what’s to come. Conversely, I also create drawings as an aftermath or remembrance of my performative actions.

As I looked through the slides of your older work from the early to mid 1990’s, it consisted mainly of drawings in black ink and also oil paintings. If we compare them to the very recent Drawing with Body, Drawing with Sound (2002), which was a performative installation - in which you invited Stephen Vitiello to record the sounds of your drawing body - the marks and the resulting forms of the earlier drawings and this new work bear surprising similarities. In the earlier works, you used your bare hands with your eyes open and you would immediately erase the emerging form or figure with your entire arm. In recent performative production, one can see the emergence of similar shapes that are created by your entire body that is curled up in a very uncomfortable position during several hours. Your eyes are also closed!

The intensity of a moment, both in drawing and in performative action, share similar qualities of intention and focus. In both the drawings and the performances, I don’t stop, I don’t come back in the sense of mastering the piece. Each gesture, each mark, has its own integrity and meaning.

You talk about “mark” and I would describe your performative installations as “mark making” rather than “trace making”. There is a very fine distinction between the two. “Mark” is defined as a "visible indication made on a surface” whereas “trace” is a “visible mark left by the passage of a person or animal or vehicle”. If we look at the tradition of mark making in relation to your own work, there are possible connections to make with the Gutai movement that emerged in the mid fifties where artists used their bodies to create two-dimensional works with paint or mud, or made picture planes of paper. Also comes to my mind Paul Mc Carthy’s famous performance when he painted a white line with his head as he dragged himself along the ground. Naim June Paik did something very similar. Rebecca Horn’s performance Bleistiftmaske is another reference, where she wore a mask from which protruded rows of sharpened pencils arranged so that she could draw with her head. Do you have any particular affiliation with some of these artists or others?

I discovered this specific Naim June Paik’s action through a Japanese curator who came to visit my studio and he thought of that connection. I am interested in the history of mark making within art history. I think of mark making as a revolt against the “eternal darkness” to use a term from Dostoyevsky’s protagonist Myshkin in the Idiot, as he stood in front of Hans Holbein's painting, The Body of Dead Christ. Mark making is about gesture. The act of mark making appears to be hopeless and insignificant, yet it provides an evidence of our existence. I have also always been sensitive and attracted to stains, puddles, leakage, which result from overflow, from the impossibility of containment.

In an earlier discussion you refereed to your attraction to “severe beauty”, such as in Holbein’s The Body of Dead Christ, where the figure is portrayed very realistically, with a cold gaze, where the artist uses a reduced palette of colors. I see something of this severe beauty quality in your work. At the same time, your work certainly has its own place in the larger context of performance art and women artists protagonists, who since the 1960’s, namely over the last forty years, have made some of the most intense and sustained work in the area of performance and process work. Many feminist performance works came out of these artists own life experience and were intended as political analysis and social critique. How do you fit in this picture? Is there a political agenda in your work?

I feel close to artists that work with repetitive object making and with issues of presence and absence. It seems that the specific female and feminist artists I feel connected to, are operating at the boundary of gender. Not bypassing it, rather, going to its core. And the core seems to me genderless after all. I feel close to artists such as Eva Hesse or Mona Hatoum. I think a political context in my work is more of a result, rather than a foundation of my process. My interest in fluids and fluidity, the use the repetition - these materials and actions connote breaking the boundaries, and also point at the impossibility of boundaries. As such they become political. The majority of political systems - such as church, government, army, law, school - owe their existence to the notion of boundaries. This starts with the body. My choice of medium - such as my own body, charcoal, water, paper - also exemplify a somewhat invested agenda. This is why I feel so close to Ana Mendieta who crossed these boundaries by dissolving her body into the landscape. Rather than reading her art only as a return to mother nature, here is an example of an artist who created powerful questions and metaphors through her actions. I would also add that I am more interested in obscuring the gender than highlighting it (in some of my earlier works I worked with male performers who appeared to be women, like in Koiman)

The physical challenges you impose to your body could also be interpreted as some kind of redemption attempt. On the other hand, 1970’s feminist art and artists also used their own bodies in dangerous situations.

The challenges I impose on my body are not great. Through slowness and repetition, or through self-imposed constraints, I hope to create works that address states of becoming, of gradual change, of being tired. I respect feminist artists who endangered their bodies, even though my own investment is different. Defining where the difference lies is not easy for me to pin point. All I can say is that these performances - such as the works of Marina Abramovic - have somewhat dramatic aspect. There is either a culmination or a catharsis involved. My performative installations don't offer redemption. Audience enters an ambiguous space marked by repetition and ritual, where the meaning is gradually erased or enhanced. I submit myself to space and time.

In some of your works there are Catholic iconographic references, which leads me to ask about the relationship of your work to the Catholic religion. Despite yours, at times direct, use of Catholic imagery - such as baptismal font series - it is not at all obvious to me that there is a spiritual message you are trying to convey. Rather, they function as a set of visual metaphors and symbols.

I recently had this great discussion with Hamza Walker at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. I remember we talked about the reoccurring motifs in some of my works that are possibly related to Christian imagery. Civilizations and cultures adopt visual metaphors to express the mystery of existence. Quite often, these are very similar metaphors, such as baptism - an immersive experience of passage - a ritual that occurs across the cultures. But to me the question is rather about what are these symbols conveying, as opposed to which specific religion or culture produces them. On the other hand, with my Polish heritage, I did indeed grow up immersed in Catholic tradition, strangely intertwined with Communism. Western art, history, and literature, testify to the predominance of Christian iconography. Hence, as a European, I cannot help but be influenced by it, at least to some degree.

What about your relationship to temporality? The performances you engage in are repetitive actions. They have neither beginning nor end, and have therefore more to do with continuity. In your conversation with William Anastasi about Ennoia, you say that during your immersions you are mostly interested in “states of duration, endurance and continuity”. In fact, you are proceeding by accumulation, which is a term that Eva Hesse often employed. Continuity is also manifest in the series of actions you develop over time. You don’t just begin a series and move on to the next. Can you elaborate on this?

Since my childhood I have been obsessing about the fact that we disappear. Continuous disappearance of things relates to the infinity of choices. Open, empty white space, in which we have to maneuver. In my performative acts, repetition implies being beyond or outside of the confines of time. Circular motion that I often employ, is about the notion of return; the very slight, subtle changes that occur if you repeat things hundreds of times. These actions are more than, say, the act of breathing. They are conscious, mental choices of limited (through self-imposed restrictions) behavior, like the act of drawing or crawling. When I perform an action within the installation, or when I draw in my studio, I literally don’t know how many hours have passed. This shift in the understanding of time and space is something that I hope to share with my audience.

The integration of new technologies in your performative installations also impacts your relation to temporality. You edit your projected video and you compose your own sound. You also have collaborated with artists such as Steven Vitiello and Mathew Griffin. The resulting video and sound pieces combine live and previously recorded sounds. In Limen-Meadow (2004) we hear a combination of the recording of a private immersion that took place in your studio - the sound of your body in the water - with paper that is being torn during the live performance, as your body rolls back and forth on the ground. Vitiello refers to your performative installations as “sound drawings” which is a beautiful way of describing the interconnectability of all these parts of your practice. For Ennoia at Diapason Gallery (2002) Vitiello placed microphones inside your water-filled sculpture. Can you describe your involvement in the editing process for the audio and video components?

Preserving moments of reality, the paradoxical impossibility of such preservation, is another obsession of mine. In my performative installations, one experiences a combination of live and pre-recorded images and sounds. I am interested in shifting the audience’s sense of time. My interest in technology allows me to combine the real-time recordings with previous recordings of a similar situation, adding another layer or context. These realities are very close to each other, overlapping at the edges. I edit in the same way I draw, implying a passage of time, erasing or overlapping certain parts.

In the 1970’s photography and video were used to record actions and performances for documentation purposes. In your performative installations, filmed actions record the temporal moment but they also take on a life of their own. They operate as a metaphor for memory and illusion. I would say that they also allow you too interpret, represent, and mirror psychological states and processes, including their breakdown. Why do you choose to film your performative installations from above? The camera is suspended to the ceiling and the resulting image is a bird’s eye view of what is happening below, where everything is leveled out into a flat surface.

There is this aspect of looking down, like when you come across an accident on the street. People gather to see. This is an ultimate scene of vulnerability, facing the violent gaze of the viewer. When I am in the vessel or lying on the paper with my eyes closed, people see me almost the way the camera does. They bend over my body; they could even cross over it and walk “through” me like through an image. Sometimes I feel there is a violence in this aerial view, as well as a reference to a painterly representation. The reality becomes a map. It becomes a drawing.

You often employ the term liminality when you describe your creative process. What does this word mean exactly?

Etymologically “liminality” derives from “limen” which means “threshold”. It is related to words such as “limb” or “limit”. Basically, things that connote an edge, a boundary. The issue of liminality, of being on a threshold of something, is important in my work. I think the body is such a threshold, such a place, in which we are suspended.

Let’s talk about your most recent development, Drawing Room (Achea Rheon) (2003) which took place last November at the Whitney Museum and the incorporation of children in the process. Was this the first time you invited them to be inside of your work?

I was invited to propose a work that would include children’s participation, which I saw as a great opportunity. During the performance, I realized that I was as much immersed in them, as they were immersed in my work, with their unpredicted flow of energy filling the sapce of participatory drawing landscape. With my eyes closed, drawing with both hands simultaneously, and with my head often touching the ground, I moved slowly, gradually, within the limited space of action. Many kids decided to follow my movement, drawing in a similar way, while lying on the ground. We were inside the drawing. The camera, suspended from above, was a source of live video projection and acted as a mirror to our movments. Another mirroring element happened through the sound. Together with Matt Griffin, we have incorporated sounds of my earlier private immersion in water, which I mized together with sounds of my drawing action at El Museo del Barrio recorded earlier in 2003. Finally, as part of the sound composition, we could also hear the voices of children playing outdoors.

As this discussion comes to an end, could you inform us about new projects that are underway. You are preparing a new Ennoia that will take place at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, over a period of two months, and that will involve multiple immersions. You are also planning to develop a performative installation in the urban space, perhaps even in New York City?

Drawing the City (Achea Reon) will be an action filmed from a rooftop. A large fragment of the street will be covered with paper or canvas. I will crawl and draw around my body. The pedestrians will be invited to participate. In this project, I intend to open the edges of drawing landscape to the public. The sounds of the street, recorded at an earlier time, will be mixed with the sounds of my immersion in water, providing a sense of the overlapping spheres of public and private experience, and of different times, past and present. I am interested in what happens between the body and the architecture of the city, and between the surface of my skin and the surface of the street. Layers of paper or fabric will tear up, we will see the underlying ground. I am interested in questioning the stability of the buildings or the streets. I hope to show them as porous, overflowing. What is the liminal space? Where does the private or intimate become the public? Lying down in the space of the city connotes vulnerability . It is about becoming one with the ground, merging with the bird’s eye view of the street.

The conversation between curator Nathalie Anglès and artist Monika Weiss took place in 2004 in conjunction with Weiss’ solo exhibition Vessels curated by Nina Colosi at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York (2004).

Nathalie Anglès is the Executive Director and co-founder of Residency Unlimited (RU). Founded in 2009, RU is a Brooklyn based non-profit organization that promotes exchange and diversity through its customized residency program and year-round public programs for US based and international artists and curators. A history and political science major, Nathalie is also a graduate from The École du MAGASIN curatorial studies program in Grenoble, (Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble France). Her extensive experience in the field of artist residencies in the US and Europe began managing the residency program for US based artists at the Frank Gehry designed American Center in Paris followed by the position of Director of Location One’s International Residency program in New York (2000-2008). Nathalie worked in a curatorial and administrative capacity in institutions such as École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (ENSBA) and Union centrale des Arts décoratifs (UCAD) in Paris as well as Sotheby’s London in the Impressionist and Modern art department. In 2008, Nathalie was awarded the French government distinction Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2004 when this conversation took place, Nathalie Anglès was chief curator ands director of Location One in New York.