Vermont Studio Center - March 17, 2019

Alexandra Grant did a presentation as a Visiting Artist in Vermont on March 17, 2019. I have transcribed the entire presentation in this page. 

 

Because of my research into grantLOVE LLC, I have had to listen to many of her interviews and presentations. She tends to reveal little details that would normally be unknown when she speaks openly and freely. So much so, that I have to go back and listen to them again and again in order to fully grasp those details. For instance, in this presentation, Alexandra Grant twice refers to grantLOVE as The LOVE Project. This was new information to me. I did a bit more digging and found evidence that supports this. She used to have LOVE pop-up shops back when she was raising funds for the LOVE House Project.

 

grantLOVE Project = grantLOVE pop-up shop

LOVE Project = LOVE pop-up shop

 

This information is very important as it pertains to her recent registration as a coventurer. She was asked to list every other name that had been used for grantLOVE LLC and this name was NOT MENTIONED. It is often in transcribing that I discover these details as her speech is easier to follow when it is in written form. This is why I feel it is important to do these transcriptions. It allows me to reference them more easily.

 

In this presentation she talks about her new body of work based on the myth of Antigone, her collaborative art projects in various countries where she invites the public to collaboratively draw and interpret text, grantLOVE project and how it and her fundraising all began as well as XAB.

 

A few other things stood out to me as interesting. 

 

I found it a bit offensive that she essentially trashed a public collaborative art installation that occurred in LA at the same time as she was doing her public art collaboration (spring 2013). Here is her quote about that project:

 

"It was interesting when I did the project in LA. Urs Fischer had a show where he invited the LA public to come and 'make clay' with him at MOCA. It’s the exact same time, and he flew in this chef and this pianist and the title said, you know, ‘Whatever is ‘Blobs’ of Clay’… that was the name of his show... I obviously loved this project. But it said Urs Fischer and a thousand Angelinos’, and my project, I was listed, like I said, under G. And so it’s a very different spirit when you name, when you include, when you give ownership to collaborative projects."

 

So, I looked up the project she was talking about and I can honestly say that she is misinterpreting the headlines and the project. The project was fittingly called 'Yes', as it gave permission to all the collaborators/volunteers to create whatever they wanted; to let their imaginations run wild. It was not called 'Whatever is Blobs of Clay'. I do get that Alexandra Grant said that in order to impress upon others that THIS project was not worthy of remembering, but I strongly disagree here. Fischer's 'YES' project started in 2011 and has had numerous installations in various cities around the world; Leeds (England), Hydra (Greece), Moscow (Rusia), to name a few.

 

 

 http://www.ladowntownnews.com/arts_and_entertainment/urs-fischer-turns-moca-into-a-big-fun-playground/article_96bdce50-aebd-11e2-ae34-001a4bcf887a.html 

 

It was set up like a temporary playground within the museum where anyone could choose what they wanted to do with their clay. They could choose to collaborate or work solo. There were no boundaries as to what they could create and how much material they could use. 

 

The artist (Urs Fischer) even instructed the volunteers that there was no need to clean up after themselves. That the chaos and mess was part of the installation. It was not about the finished work, most of which would be destroyed, it was about the ephemera of the work compared to the lasting memory of the experience. 

 

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2013-apr-14-la-et-cm-urs-fischer-moca-20130414-story.html

 

 

Above is the article whose title she was attempting to paraphrase. Obviously, she remembered 'Angelinos' when the headline clearly said 'volunteers'. This was open to anyone, from anywhere, from every walk of life. You did not have to be an Angelino or American to participate. Very young children participated. You did not have to have any experience working with clay.

 

There are significant differences between the two projects. Alexandra Grant's project was a guided one based on Hélène Cixous' text with permanent physical results. Urs Fischer's project was about liberation of expression which would only last in the participant's memory. Completely different if you ask me. The comparison is not valid in my opinion.

Her mentioning that Fischer's name was prominently featured in the article, compared to her project where every participant was listed in alphabetical order and that SHE did not put herself ahead of anyone as she's in the Gs, feels scornful, petty and childish to me. Besides which, if she truly did not think herself more important than any of the other collaborators for the Interior Forest, then she would not have listed it on her resume under SOLO EXHIBITIONS.

https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.29/13d.5cb.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Alexandra-Grant-CV-November-2020.pdf

 

 

And she's neglecting the fact the collaborative "Yes" project was just a part of the very large Urs Fischer exhibit at MOCA, featuring many of his works over the last twenty years. So, it was perfectly understandable that he would get top billing. This was not the case for her collaborative Project - Interior forest - which was not shown in conjunction with Alexandra Grant's other works.

 

Incidentally, it appears that the names of the volunteers are listed at the end of the 'Urs Fischer - Yes, 2013' MOCA video video I posted earlier. 

 

In any case, at the time of this Vermont presentation, it had been 6 years since the project and she obviously still feels some deep set resentment over Urs Fischer's project. Otherwise, why bring it up? What does it have to do with her project then or what she's doing currently? The answer is... nothing. This was just an attempt on her part to throw shade at someone who overshadowed her at some point in time and diverted away attention she felt she deserved. It is simply another example of how she tries to elevate herself by tearing down others. 

 

It is no different than her saying that 'not everyone is an artist. It's a career' or 'that designers are not artists' or talking about her school newspaper project when she was 8 years old and insinuating that she was much more brilliant than all the other students because she presented a full newspaper and they only presented one article to the teacher. It's an attempt to make others see that she is exceptional and everyone else is ordinary.

 

And I can't help but point out how this animosity towards another artist, that did absolutely nothing against her, is a contradiction to the LOVE philosophy she is branding about herself.

 

The other thing that stood out was her lying. This is nothing new, but this time, there were instances where she corrected herself after she did it or as she was doing it. Of course, the lies pertain to her story around XAB and how it got started. If you are familiar with this story you are then aware that she keeps changing it.

'So, we returned to our collaboration in 2013-2014 and I decided… No, that’s not true. I did not decide, I was approached by a magazine, to do a picture or do an image with Keanu where he would do a line of text.' 

 

She, again left Jessica Fleischman's name out as a co-founder despite the fact that she would later mention her as the graphic designer for the book by Sylvan Oswald. Ms. Fleischman was a significant contributor to bringing XAB to life. Leaving her out and only mentioning Keanu Reeves and herself as co-founders is a lie. 

The third instance is when she is about to lie about something, but then pauses and says she's not going to make up a number.

'We’re publishing the first monograph of a wonderful woman who passed away, I think, and I… I don’t… I’m not going to make up a number. (laughs) Like I should probably know that. We’re going to delete that. We’re going to edit that.'

 

I found myself shaking my head as I was listening and transcribing this. These incidents may seem trivial but they show a troubling propensity for deceit which seems to be second nature to her.  

 

You can find the transcription below. 

I've included some time stamps here and there and they are marked in (blue). 

Whenever you encounter this (???), it means that I am unsure of a word or there is a word missing that I could not make out. Please bear this in mind as you read it. 

The full video is available to view below. Or you may choose to both read and listen to it at the same time.

 

Vermont Studio Center

Visiting Artist Talk

March 17, 2019

 

Hi. Good evening. Thank you all for being here. It’s so wonderful and a bit of a weather culture shock to be here from LA, where it was 80 yesterday. And I had a total panic attack about undergarments on Friday and went to Uniglo and was like “I need turtlenecks” and they were like “yeah. We don’t have those”. Like it was this moment of like, I don’t know, climate dysphoria. Um,I can ramble about all this stuff while my name is on the screen. It’s really great.

 

So, I am, I work for her. She is an amazing boss. She has created a very interesting life for me. (yes, she is talking about herself here.) No in all seriousness, I am a painter, and I studied painting at Swarthsmore College, which is outside of... It’s funny ‘cause in California nobody knows what I’m talking about, but I realize I’m on the East Coast so y’all know where Philadelphia is. Outside of Philadelphia, Swarthmore was a Quaker school, a liberal arts college that really cemented my interest, in a way that is different from a lot of my peers, who are abstract painters, in that when I was in graduate school, the California College for the Arts, I asked myself one question which was, well I asked myself a lot of questions but the main important one that I remember asking myself was ‘what will interest me over the long term, and what will interest me when no one is there and when everyone is there. I had this feeling that that would be an important series of questions to have an answer for. I saw the art world then, as it is now, that people were going after, you know, single opportunities but not really thinking through longevity. Like “what will interest me over my life”. And the thing that I knew about myself at age…, in my twenties, was that I loved to read and I was passionate about reading and I moved to LA in part because Los Angeles has an incredible scene of language and text based art from Barbara Kruger and Edward Che to John Baldessari. I wanted to be part of a community that had this really very rigorous conceptual language. Um… sort of 2 and 3D history.

 

(2:17) So, I’m going to share with you some of the paintings that I’ve just been working on secretly for the last four years. Which is kind of a crazy thing to do, to make work, um, without showing it, but apparently this is what I decided because I made a massive stylistic change and then so I’m really, really thrilled to be able to show these in June at Lowell Ryan Projects.

 

And what these are, are large works on paper. Um… here’s a detail so you can see that the text is a rubbing. And it’s a mirror image text, um, I’ve been very interested in cognition, how we perceive language. So most of my work has had the language either doubled or backwards to sort of move you away from a literal reading of the text into trying to make sense of it as though you were a visitor to a country where you didn’t speak the language. So to try and make it a little bit of a foreign entity… You know, when you really have to go to the bathroom and you’re in a country where you don’t speak the language you make sense of ‘bathroom’ in all sorts of other ways. You know, through doors and colors and other kinds of symbols.

 

(3:20) So, this text says ‘I was born to love, not to hate’ and it’s a quote from Sophocles’ Antigone. So, that myth, if you don’t remember, no happy endings in it and it’s a young Antigone, teenage girl standing up to her uncle Creon who has taken over the kingship of - and I can’t say this word in English without laughing because I think you say it Thebes (teebs), Thebes (tebs) that sounds so sexy in French so we’re going to stick with that – the king of Thebes (tebs) – and he has her brothers have fought each other over the ruling of Thebes and have killed each other. And one brought in sort of forces from outside the kingdom so is considered a traitor and his body lays rotting. And King Creon says that he cannot be buried. Antigone declares that there is a higher rule of law, sort of God’s law or natural law, and dares go out and buries symbolically her brother and is sentenced to death. It’s great because then her fiancé commits suicide and there’s no laughter in the play, but it’s an incredible myth, Antigone, because it has been important to every generation because of the transcendent views of grace, of love, overcoming an oppositional politics. I just went on, not this last Friday, the one before, to hear Carrie Mae Weems’ version of Antigone, which was a collaborative cohort of dance and music and images, speaking to the African-American experience of police murdering so many people in our communities nationwide and it was very powerful. What was interesting to me, ‘cause I’d just written the press release for my show, is that there were phrases that she used to describe Antigone that I had also written, like literal phrases, which is the rule of law coming into conflict with this higher law and Antigone taking the position that love or grace is a higher position. And it’s actually not against anything, but it’s a witnessing position.

 

(5:28) So, these paintings are, for me, a mash-up of abstraction. You know you could jokingly say you see some Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler. (5:40) So I’m quoting abstraction, but I’m inserting text into this other position, which I’m going to call the 'Antigonal Position'. But it’s rubbing, large pours of paint that are almost like chemical photography in that I let them dry revealing the image over time. The stripes, meant to symbolize the rule of law. And they’re beautiful. I love pink. I mean, you know, what can I say? There’s, there’s got to be a little bit of that like actual passion for the material and the composition.

 

(6:12) So, I hate to have blazed through my entire painting career but that’s what I am going to show you really about my painting, because I think it’s important, for me at least, to talk abut the artists in the world. Like, I don’t assume that every artist is going to think like me, but I think it’s important for me to speak to how I see myself as an artist in the world. (6:36) I was an only child growing up so I love spending time alone and I love the studio but I also come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. And one of them was spurred on, um,  by fandom. So, I’m a huge fan. I really believe in the fan position. The loving, the amateur position, in the French sense of “I love others” and I don’t seek to replace them, I seek to really just appreciate them. And, one of the writers who turned my life inside out and upside down as a young person was the French philosopher and playwright Hélene Cixous. And she came from the same cohort as Jacques Derrida. You know, northern Algerian, sort of, without a country Jewish Sephardic, founder of the first Women’s Studies Program in all of Europe, put in charge of a little university where Delouse Guitari and Foucault were the guys in her faculties. A real powerhouse, who believed in writing theater and literature as literary texts as well as philosophic texts. (7:47) And so, she gave me, we became friends through my fandom in this weird way. I got to meet her and we started this sort of mentorship, and when Jacques Derrida died, she gave me a book, um, that she’d written about telepathy. And Derrida was obsessed with Freud’s secret texts on telepathy. Freud believed in it, but his followers thought that telepathy seemed to be not scientific enough for this new thing called psychology,y and so repressed them.

 

(8:22) So, Jacques was doing research on them, and Hélene was obsessed with Jacques’ obsession. And so, I was given this text about telepathy. Now, Freud, Derridas, Cixous, Grant; One kid does not belong there. At least it felt like she didn’t belong there. So, what did I do? I invited the French public and the LA public to come and draw this text with me because her whole definition of telepathy was that it was one step further than empathy.

 

(8:43) So, if empathy, if sympathy is, I can see… I can see you in yoga. It’s so great. I can see you’re having a moment of sympathy is ‘I see you having the moment’; Empathy is ‘I’ve had a moment similar to that’; and telepathy, one step further, would be that ‘my experience of seeing you wouldn’t be privileged; that my, I wouldn’t be defined against your thou; that they would be parallel’. So, I love this idea of creating a space where we are truly equals; where the ‘other’ and the ‘I’ aren’t defined in an oppositional way.

 

(9:19) So, long preamble to explain what ‘Ghost-Town’ is and why I’m showing you this eyeball for a really long time. So, I developed this methodology. It’s really, really clever, scientific, with post-it notes, where I would put the text at the top of this giant drawing and the key words circled in the text on post-it notes all over this drawing and I invited the public to come and draw, first Hélène’s text and then… this is in Guatemala in 2016… to come and draw this poetry with me. And to have it be a project of hospitality, so that every person who enters, whether they’re a gardener, or a show cobbler, or an heiress, are on the exact same plane in terms of their participation. Where every participant is named alphabetically. I’m in the Gs. Um, and so, I did this project, like I said, with Hélène Cixous’ text and then was invited to do the Guatemalan biennial and worked with a poet named Vanya Vargas And this was an incredible experience for me because it really opened up my sense of what my studio could be. (10:25) Like, how I could invite and welcome and make people feel safe, other artists and non-artists to participate equally. And what was so incredible, and you can see the quality of the work here, I worked with 600 people in 10 days and the return time was five times. Like, people came five times. So, of the 600 people the participations were… we… 3000 participations. Which meant that on average I was drawing with between 50 and 100 people at all times. It was really unbelievably amazing and what was interesting is that, that words, because they were Guatemalan words, in the sense of Vania Vargas was writing about genocide, she was writing about civil war, she was writing about the ghosts in Guatemala city, that this triggered these wonderful unconscious drawing moments and… In the United States, when I did the collaborative drawing, people suffered from ‘I’m a genius”, like, everyone doing something over other people, large, no problem touching or messing with someone else’s drawing. In France, people, 1 in 4 people would participate. People wanted to come and be warriors. In Guatemala, nobody wanted to touch anyone else’s. So you had tons of super cute little things but this idea of actual collaboration… Like there was a real sense of equality but not of how to join things up. So that became the biggest challenge and again the way I could do that - and this is the drawing that ended up being 120 feet. So, it’s a very long space; hard to document – but was to integrate and get people to draw together and the only way I could do it was by modeling the behavior. So, I had to be there. It was interesting when I did the project in LA. Urs Fischer had a show where he invited the LA public to come and make clay with him at MOCA. It’s the exact same time and he flew in this chef and this pianist and the title said, you know, ‘whatever is ‘blobs’ of clay’… that was the name of his show... I obviously loved this project. (12:31) But it said Urs Fischer and a thousand Angelinos’, and my project, I was listed, like I said, under G. And so it’s a very different spirit when you name, when you include, when you give ownership to collaborative projects. So that was like, you know, again, I share this project because I’ve now done 4 of them and it’s a methodology that I’m happy to share with anyone, if you’re ever interested in doing a project. I train people to work with local poets. All… I’ve trained people all over Guatemala to do murals in this method because it’s really an interesting thing when you get people to work together who wouldn’t normally work together.

 

So, that’s a project that expands my studio, but still is in the painting and still is in the genre of painting. This painting, actually it’s in a museum in Guatemala now and… it’s… they can’t take it down because it’s actually a record from 2016 of, I would say, 80% of the members of the Guatemala art world. And so, someone died right after we did it and I think it’s… people realized that it’s going to be a memorial; like a trace – I wouldn’t say a snapshot and or, you know, but this real record of so many styles in a cultural moment. So I was really, again, pleased to be able to sort of figure out how to be the host and … Oh! And I should say that I grew up in Mexico City. So, I am and still will always be taller than most people but at least the language barrier wasn’t there.

 

(14:06) Another project that you mentioned… thank you for that lovely introduction by the way, and thank you all for being here and thanks to this amazing place. It’s a really special place. I’ve only been her 24 hours and I already feel it. I, I think because of the Quaker background from Swarthmore, but also my parents were both educators, I became, I’ve become really interested in philanthropy and so the love of other people. How do we as artists, not just participate economically where we’re always looking to receive but we also create economic opportunities for others. I mean, I don’t know about the East Coast, but on the West Coast the numbers are dire. I was interviewed for 5 months by a gallery that had one woman, and she was 80 and I finally had to give myself a little, like, ‘they’re never going to take you on’ moment. Like, the numbers are 30% female and I’m not even going to address other kinds of difference.  Museum shows, solo shows, I think it’s 24% at MOCA. I think it’s 27% at LACMA. It’s dire. I teach, 60 % of my students are women, right. What happens to women? What happens?

 

And so, I think as a woman, I used to use this really dirty word when I was taught… Entrepreneur… Whooo, I got in a lot of trouble back in the day. Now thank God for the younger people, who you have to be an entrepreneur to survive. But, but I really believe we have to create. We can’t replace the generosity of donors or artist foundations but we can do little things and a little money goes a long way.

 

(15:40) So, I began this project, called The grantLOVE Project. It started out, this is when my old work used to look like. So, yeah, I’m about to go through like, a major public like, I picked up a ruler guys. Oh! Everything that I learned I learned in kindergarten. That is a chestnut and it’s true. At least it is in my case.

 

(16:00) Anyway, this is a work I did in twenty… 2008, and it’s a representation of the sense of sight. A collaboration with a hypertext poet named Michael Joyce, who teaches at Vassar College. A wonderful writer. And there is a line from the painting, which is really a ‘Beatles’ line. It’s ‘A Love That Should Have Lasted’. I think I listened to a lot of Beatles while making that painting. A sculpture that I made... But there was something about this photo and that love symbol that really, really just… I don’t know… You know… Caught my attention and I realized had a lot of value. In the same way this has a lot of value.

 

(16:36) I don’t know, this is something I learned in art history which was that Robert Indiana never protected his legal rights to this symbol. So he is never, you buy a mug with this on it, maybe… there’s no licensing with his estate but no money that was made from selling this image went to anything he ever controlled because he never trademarked it or copy-wrote it.

 

(17:00) So I, knowing very little about the law, trademarked my symbol and then got into litigation with a corporation that’s very philanthropic in the arts for 2 years. It really, really, really, redefined what being a word artist was for me when you’re sitting being deposed with some, you know, highly paid lawyer. It’s like, ‘well, what gives you the right to own love’ and I’m like “ well  I’m an artist. What give the corporation the right to own love”. You can spend a million dollars fighting an artist. So, I’m able, I still have my copyright. I fought for it because I began to realize that we live in a really crazy time where corporations own words like ‘love’. Think about it. You know, it’s incidents like that that changed my career. You know, I think the biggest piece of advice I have is, forgive me but I’m blonde, so I can give advice…Hm.mm… That was funny to me… Oh… (laughs) Oh! You’re just lucky I didn’t have a glass of wine before this… um… That, they, there are things that are only going to happen to you, right. Now, just think about that. We think of ourselves as artists, as creative or like outside, thinking outside the box, but we often want what other artists have and in fact, the things that make an artist career are the things that only happen to you and only you have the power to recognize.(18:24) So, for me, you know, being in litigation with this luxury brand taught me that I had something that I didn’t know was valuable, right. And so, I’ve run with it. I think if I hadn’t been in litigation I wouldn’t have valued it as much.

 

So, my first project - which 10 years later and we are about to complete it and it does not look like this – it’s called the LOVE House. And the LOVE House is a family house across the streets form the Watts Towers. This is 10 years ago. You can notice that I was not blonde at that point in time. (19:00) And that is Monik, those are our architects and we decided to create a public private nonprofit, ‘artist’, sort of… ‘awesome mom, single mom, raising kids in Watts’ collaboration that would rethink her property and its position across the street from the Watts Towers. And we did this by selling really, really tiny little sculptures… other really tiny sculptures…

 

(19:25) So, again thinking about fundraising or having projects happen in solidarity with the people who want them to happen, not because there is a political agenda from a foundation. (19:36) And so I realized that what I have done in The LOVE Project or what I hope to do and I hope this goes on after my death (I’m sorry. I’m not morbid, but I am, I do have an attorney who nags me about these things.) is to think about this idea of artist currency, right. And also more than that, because it’s not just a materialistic or capitalist strategy, it really is about alchemy. And it’s not just about friend raising it’s about fund… It’s not about fundraising, it’s about friend-raising.

 

(20:04) So I did this project with beach towels and the artist is Devin Tsuno, an LA based artist. Here we are being super cute with our beach towel. We sold and donated maybe $10,000 from the sale of these towels but at the party we threw for the towels, a friend came who met the director, who donated a quarter of a million dollars to the Heart Of Los Angeles. And I live in a very dangerous neighborhood in Los Angeles called McArthur Park where 60% of the kids don’t get to high school but 100% of the kids who go to HOLA graduate high school and go on to college. 100%. And so, I love to think about what is the role that arts education can play and how really it’s a civil rights issue when you’re not teaching people who come from the lowest quintile economically, many of them young girls, how to rotate complex 3D, 4D items in their heads. That you’re really doing a disservice to our future leaders and you’re really discriminating against race and class lines. So, I love to support HOLA. It’s one of the many organizations, we support them, not only the kids but the teaching artists. Many of you have graduated from school remember this experience that you’re un-hirable, right. Like what do I do to make a living? Well, it’s giving money to an organization like HOLA that has artists who are teachers as well as helping the kids and I just… sorry, they’re so cute…

 

(21:40) Um, another… I just did this, X-tra is a contemporary art journal. Los Angeles, we only have 3 magazines and it’s, you know, it’s one of those things. We have to work hard to support public discourse. So I did a LOVE print that supported them.

 

(21:56) Another organization that I love, it’s called Project Angel Food. They… it’s an arts auction but they support people who can no longer feed themselves who are terminally ill. And I can’t express and forgive this, (22:12) you’ll, please don’t walk away thinking I’m a narcissist. But I just wanted… It’s the only picture of the work I could find. (22:19) I sold three of these at an auction in 2 minutes and raised $60,000. And they sent me a letter telling me how many meals it was and I wept, right. So, it’s oftentimes as artists we don’t have a real measure as to whether we are making a difference and for me personally, The LOVE Project has helped me participate in the world in a way that makes me feel good. I’m sorry, I do believe in happiness, you guys.

 

(22:47) But then there’s the dark side, of course. The inner goth… shadows. So, I, yeah, how can I describe shadows?

 

I had one school in grad school that I would never illustrate, ever illustrate. My work would always be text and it would be both representational and I mean, I was so intellectual, it was like ‘oh God, professor Grant’… And so, I got this text in 2010. It was called Ode to happiness. It was written by the very famous writer, Keanu Reeves. And I made him this book called ‘Ode to Happiness’. Which made us both giggle and we published it with Steidl, the great German book publisher. So, we returned to our collaboration in 2013-2014 and I decided… No, that’s not true. I did not decide, I was approached by a magazine, to do a picture or do an image with Keanu where he would do a line of text. And I proposed, because I had no idea how to do this, to take pictures of Keanu’s shadow for this magazine and that he would write poetry inspired by Malcom Lowry’s ‘Under the Volcano’. There’s a line in that book where the gentlemen protagonist says to the lady – I guess she’s also a protagonist… actually, she says to him “I don’t have a home to offer you” – this is the Mexican woman to a European – “but you can always come live in my shadow”. And I just thought that was so beautiful and so I sent this to Keanu and he wrote me within the first night 85 poems. Anyway, the book, the magazine never happened. These photos, were surprising, so were very surprising to both of us. We, I learned how to do In Design because I thought ‘wouldn’t it be great to be able to design the book without anyone knowing that we were making this secret photography project. And so, we made this beautiful book and this beautiful work where the shadow is the source of light. And, you know, I found through Photoshop, because I don’t really know the rules of being a photographer. So, I allowed myself to make the photos pink if that’s what the emotional, you know, the emotion of the text and the image suggested. But I learned how to color correct from Juergen Teller at Steidl. I mean it’s incredible, like again, back to that advice, if something is happening to only you maybe pursue it. And this was definitely a lightning bolt.

 

(25:15) But out of that interest in creating artist books and learning about, you know, publishing through Steidl, Keanu and I founded in 2017, a small company called X Artists’ Books. That’s what happens when I name things. Just really hard to say. X-A-B is easier. And we published 4 books in the first year. ‘The Artists’Prison’ which is a book where I wanted to have the experience of being the writer. So I wrote this project about the art world all being about this many people in a prison called the artists’ prison but it’s closing down and it’s an imaginary future state sort of Kafka-esque. And I had an artist illustrate it named Eve Wood. Very interesting to have done to me what I have done to so many writers (laughs). It was like ‘wow! I didn’t see that one coming’. But it was incredible. We published a book called ‘High Winds’. Sylvan Oswald is a trans male playwright who teaches at UCLA collaborating with Jessica Fleischman, a graphic designer. Again, I’m not sure what this book is. Is it LGBTQ theater? Is it graphic design? I’m sorry. I don’t have the images inside, but all of this stuff is online. We picked up our first institutional book, ‘The Words of Others’ by ... (???), for Pacific Standard Time. A book protesting the Catholic Church’s role in the Vietnam War written by an Argentine artist in exile in Brazil. Very, very polemical. In fact, the current Pope, censored a show of his work when he was a bishop. So, it very interesting to get into the politics of that. And ‘Zus’, you can’t tell anything about the contents other than those tiny little black blobs are political jurisdictions in the venue of Paris, that have the most awful poverty. And, Benoit Fougerol, the artist went and photographed the failure of modern architecture in these particular zones. And it’s been, you know, what a pleasure for me to be able to work with each team on the books.

 

(27:15) Coming up, I’m working on George Herms and Diane DePrima. A book of their collaboration of ‘Haiku’. Etel Adnan, who is both a poet and a painter who lives in Paris from Palestinian background and the filmmaker Lynn Marie Kirby. We’re publishing the first monograph of a wonderful woman who passed away, I think, and I… I don’t… I’m not going to make up a number. (laughs) Like I should probably know that. We’re going to delete that. We’re going to edit that. Um… and so it’s fun, again, to have like the press is a way, an extension of how to create a discourse around certain kinds of practices. There’s only so many books I can publish, you know, on top of everything else I do but I really, I really love that sense of planting a seed. Of the first four books, three of them were performances. That books can become exhibitions. That’s what I learned form Shadows and I wanted to share with other artists through the press. You know that a book can be, because we often think, I mean, maybe you’ve had this thought but you go into an exhibition and you think ‘this should be a book’. Maybe I’m the only person who thinks that but I often think that a book would be a better record often of some shows and that out of the book, real life experiences can happen, not just the haptic experience of holding the book and it’s you know intimacy with self through reading but what can happen when the book gets performed, when it gets re-imagined at being in the world.

 

So, I’m going to stop talking and open up, you may not have any questions or and then you can stay in touch. Oh! That’s it. Too bad. I’ll leave it at that. But if you have any questions?...I’m here all week too and I’m doing studio visits with hopefully some of you so… you can save your question for later in the week but if you want to…