and

an interview with david lachapelle, also for whitewall, visible here (in slightly wonky form)

GOD HELP US ALL

An Interview with Andres Serrano

by Sarah Kessler

Since the late 1980s, Andres Serrano’s photographs have delighted and offended a broad audience, from conservative Christians to art world insiders alike. It all started (the story goes) with a 60 by 40-inch print whose bluntly revealing title provoked a veritable shitstorm. Part of a series called “Immersions,” Piss Christ (1987) came to fruition when Serrano submerged a plastic crucifix in his own urine, casting an eerie golden glow over Christ’s tortured body. The National Endowment for the Arts rewarded Serrano for his artistic effort, while Republican Senator Jesse Helms accused him of sacrilege, declaring, “[H]e is not an artist, he is a jerk.”

“The photograph, and the title itself,” wrote Serrano in a letter to the NEA, “are ambiguously provocative but certainly not blasphemous.” He went on to propose that, “In a free society ideas, even difficult ones, are not dangerous. The only danger lies in repressing them.”†

Representing the repressed might be Serrano’s core obsession. Fascinated by the subjects, objects, and ideas that most citizens of the free world are trained to find distasteful, Serrano turns out images so seductive that we are unable to avert our eyes. His newest series, “Shit,” debuted at Yvon Lambert’s Paris and New York galleries this September. Whitewall spoke with him via email in October, before the election.

Whitewall: Your work has often tended towards portraiture, but in your newest series you’ve replaced human faces with piles of feces blown up larger than life. When did you first alight upon excrement as your subject of choice, and why photograph it portrait-style?

Andres Serrano: I once said I would never work with feces, and in addition to making work to challenge myself I also make work that will challenge and confront my audience. If it’s not interesting for me, how can it possibly be interesting for others? Most of my work is portraiture – portraits of Klansmen, portraits of the homeless, portraits of the dead, portraits of plants (cycads) – so it made sense for me to photograph excrement as formal portraiture as well.

WW: The sheer size of your “Shit” portraits forces us to literally “look shit in the eye.” In doing so, other senses are stimulated. (For my part, I smell excrement when I look at these images.) What sorts of bodily sensations were you hoping “Shit” might inspire in viewers?

AS: First and foremost, there is the visual impact, much of which is due to the scale of the photographs. The feces are photographed close-up, made monumental. You have to look at them; there is no escaping that confrontation. The project is also just as much about language and the use of the word “shit” in the parlance of our times – the cultural references and innuendos that exist in that word. Many of the works’ titles go beyond the descriptive and the literal – they are symbolic as well. Bullshit is both literal and metaphorical, as are Freudian Shit (feces from a therapist), Holy Shit (feces from a priest), and Self-Portrait (all 2007). You are not the only one who thought they smelled excrement while in the presence of the photographs. Many people at the opening felt the same thing. It is the power of suggestion.

WW: Humor often surfaces in the titles of the individual works in “Shit”—Bad Shit (2007), along with the photographs you mention above, evidences this trend. What role does humor play in your work?

AS: Humor plays a big role; you said it yourself. I think I have a good sense of humor, and I can laugh at myself. I purposely gave my critics plenty of ammunition to hurl back at me with titles like Dumb Shit, Stupid Shit, Evil Shit (all 2007) and Bad Shit. You have to be one step ahead of your audience as well as your critics.

WW: What prompted your decision to install Piss Christ—arguably the most controversial work you’ve produced—along with the “Shit” portraits in your current solo show at Yvon Lambert in New York?

AS: Yvon Lambert suggested it and I thought it was a great idea.

WW: Do you feel that Piss Christ has (in some sense) come to represent your oeuvre, due to its iconic status in the art world and beyond? To your mind, why is this older work of yours still so heavily referenced?

AS: Piss Christ is so heavily referenced because it made an impact on artistic expression and freedom of speech that still has relevance today.

WW: What were you searching for during the early 1990s, when you photographed a diverse array of subjects ranging from KKK “Wizards,” to street people, to nuns, to the corpses of AIDS victims? In other words, what connects “The Klan,” “Nomads,” “ The Church,” and “The Morgue?”

AS: What connects those series’ is that I’m driven to make unusual portraits. For example, with “The Klan,” I thought, “How do you make a portrait of someone who is hiding behind a mask?” I decided to make this series because I myself am not white. If I were white, perhaps it wouldn’t have been interesting for me and there would have been no point in doing it. When I did “The Church” in Spain, France, and Italy, I tried to photograph the Cardinal of Paris. His press secretary asked me, “Why Piss Christ?” The point is that I like to do the things I’m not supposed to do. For me, the question should not be, “Why ‘The Morgue,’” or, “Why ‘Shit,’” but rather, “Why Not?”

WW: Seven photographs from your 1995-96 series “The History of Sex” were vandalized just last year while on exhibit in Sweden. How is it that the depiction of an unconventional sex act (fisting, for example) can upset people to such a violent degree? What was your reaction to the events in Sweden, more than a decade after producing the “offending” images?

AS: The people that attacked the show at the Kulturen in Lund last year were Neo-Nazis. I was surprised there were Neo-Nazis there because I’d just been to Lund and was struck by what a peaceful and magical town it was. I heard that there was a Neo-Nazi riot there last week. This time, I didn’t cause it.

WW: With “America” (created in the early 2000s), last year’s “Les Sociétaires de la Comedie Française,” and now, “Shit,” your work appears increasingly theatrical. Is this observation off base, or is theater/theatricality in fact central to your current practice?

AS: There was nothing theatrical about “America” for me. I started working on “America” a couple of weeks after September 11th. I spent three years making the 116 portraits. I did “America” for myself – it was my personal response to America being attacked by people who have no idea what America is. “America” was my way of documenting who we are. I felt that I had enlisted in the war effort, and this was my contribution. I remember speaking with an Austrian a few days after September 11th and she pointed to my arm-band of stars and stripes and asked me, “Why the arm-band?” I thought to myself, “If I have to explain it to you, I can’t, so I won’t.”

I try to make my subjects bigger than life, and if that’s being theatrical, then I suppose I’m theatrical, but I think of my work as more human than anything else. One of the most stupid criticisms I’ve seen of my work recently is that I’m doing it for the attention. Does that mean I should make work that gets overlooked and ignored?

WW: In what ways do you find the United States cultural climate to have changed since 1989, when Jesse Helms and others took the NEA to task for funding Piss Christ?

AS: Things are a lot worse. The question is no longer whether or not the government should support the arts; the question is, can it? America is faced with a new reality, both economic and political, and art is the last thing on most peoples’ minds. We are now faced with the greatest financial crisis of our lives, and there will be a tightening of the belt on all levels, especially on the level of the arts. Most Americans are too concerned with how they are going to survive to even notice, or care about, the country’s cultural climate. In times of strife, art can be the catalyst the people need. I expect to see more dissension.

WW: Are you optimistic about the upcoming election?

AS: Not really. Either way, whoever ends up in office will face the same problems. But, how these problems are handled will make all the difference in the world. I don’t see how anyone could possibly think that spending ten billion dollars per month on a war that few people want is good for the country. I also don’t see how electing people who are obviously not qualified for such high offices is going to help. The election will swing the pendulum one way or the other. God help us all.

† See the Congressional Record of May 18, 1989 for Helms’ full commentary. Serrano’s response is reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings by Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz (University of California Press, 1996).

http://artforum.com/archive/id=18963

please visit!

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: OPPOSITES MUST NEVER CEASE TO COME TOGETHER

BY SARAH KESSLER

Attempting to uncover the essence of Torbjørn Rødland’s project is like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. No interpretations fit, but I have the sense that with further labor I will ultimately get where he wants me to go. I soldier on, generating hosts of half-functional analogies in the process. Each reading fails when I am greeted by another photograph that contradicts my new theory. Most confounding is that this photograph inevitably seems at home alongside the rest of Rødland’s images. I want desperately to explain but can only do so partially, at best.

All words are misfits; only their incongruities can be taken for granted. All metaphors are necessarily inadequate (nothing is precisely the same as anything else). When I tell Rødland that one of his newest photographs stymies me, he responds that I should think of its strangest attribute as “a swear word in a love poem.” Centered in the frame is the bust of a redheaded young man with a chiseled physiognomy; his head appears dense, drawn downward by its own weight. A playing card — the metaphorical swear word — affixed to his forehead immediately breaks my concentration.

“Something on Your Mind” is one of the popular names of this card trick. According to the trick’s logic, the redhead should have “on his mind” the number of the card. My sense, however, is that behind the youth’s impassive face lies little worth hypothesizing about. Reading his mind is not the point, nor is conveying (or even suggesting) his subjectivity the aim of this portrait. A swear word vulgarizes a love poem, demotes it to street level. In the process, perhaps, the poem is redeemed, rescued from disingenuousness, or at least the use of bad metaphors. “Portraiture must be saved from its implied humanism,” Rødland e-mails me. A mood spoiler par excellence, the misfit playing card inhibits undue seriousness.

I Want to Live Innocent, the title of Rødland’s new book published by Steidl, suggests a desire to wipe the slate clean. The statement’s contradiction lies in the notion that wanting might lead to the opposite of wanting: that desire might enable freedom from desire. Thus, portraits are emptied of false insinuations by guileful gestures, rendered innocent by tricks. If this principle of reversal seems overly simplistic, it is. Look again at the redheaded boy, at the sunlight illuminating his curls, at his withdrawn expression. I feel slightly sorry for him but quickly realize the feeling is one of empathy rather than sympathy. The joke is on both of us, it would seem. Rødland’s images are strongly affective, and my inability to manage my own unavoidable emotional response leaves me feeling had, but still wondering whether I have, in fact, been tricked at all. Each photograph has an alibi; together, the images vouch for each other.

Take the atmospheric depiction of the coastline. The view is, no doubt, from Stavanger, Norway, where most of the photographs in I Want to Live Innocent were taken. In this image, the rising sun is interrupted, bisected by cloud cover. Its reflection melts into the water, which is at once placid and seething. Dark weather (though the sky is clearing) and steam (though the fog is lifting) evoke the aura of wonder that often envelops natural disaster. I have the distinct impression that an event is occurring, but its nature remains disturbingly ambiguous. Among the adjectives that fail me are “ominous” and “hopeful,” along with every other adjective I have employed in this paragraph. And yet, waxing poetic seems obligatory — I am again caught in Rødland’s double bind.

“Opposites must never cease to come together.” This aphorism (or axiom?) is one of Rødland’s favorites, and he has put it to me in several different ways during the years I have known him. What interests me most about this paradox is its assertion that opposites exist to begin with — its placement of opposites as originary entities that unceasingly converge. A host of binary oppositions spring to mind: light and dark (Rødland’s previous book with Steidl was titled White Planet Black Heart), beauty and ugliness, surface and depth, innocence and experience. An avid deconstructionist, I have been schooled to reject these sorts of classifications wholesale, but something about the quality of Rødland’s photographs compromises me, draws me back in. I find myself thinking in terms of beauty and ugliness, though I am sometimes confused about which is which. Frequently I become angry with myself for submitting to the seduction. Are Rødland’s images sadomasochistic? Or is this question simply another misplaced attempt to theorize them?

Identifying opposites proves to be a game that can’t be won. The picture of the puppy hunched over the hairy hand might be taken for an allegorical representation of harmony between weak and strong, but whether the puppy is eating from, or retching into, his owner’s cupped palm remains unclear. The devil is in the details. A deceptively obvious opposition is thrown into crisis — who gives and who receives? I want to assign vulnerability, even shame, to one member of the pair, but which one? Clearly, I am projecting. Puppy and owner stand innocent of all emotions conferred upon them. Rødland appears to have forced me to recognize my interpretations as belonging to me and not to the photograph, that clean slate.

No photograph is, in fact, a clean slate. The metaphor fails, as do they all. The diminutive dog cannot but move me on some level. Rødland chose it for precisely this reason. (Surely it moved Rødland, too, when he first caught sight of it.) Baffled by mixed messages, I will accuse Rødland of trickery. Quickly and efficiently, he will furnish proof of innocence.

www.canopycanopycanopy.com

please read it! all of it! (especially “thinking through images,” a piece i co-authored with craig kalpakjian.)

direct to the piece: http://canopycanopycanopy.com/pieces/legacy_piece/1

Depilation as Metaphor

by Sarah Kessler

Caramel, Dir. Nadine Labaki, Now Playing

Those of us dying for a decent woman’s film may now—at least temporarily—curtail our pining. Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s Caramel unlaces the proverbial corset, breathing new life into what has become a disturbingly constricted genre. A good woman’s film (like a good tampon) is ideally made both by and for women. Making a good woman’s film entails posing the eternal question: What do women want? While this question is of course unanswerable, attempts to address it can lead to complicated, sensitive portrayals and gross oversimplifications alike. Labaki’s charming first feature does us some of the justice we deserve. Labaki’s women possess a formidable range of desires, from the lust for a good bikini wax to the forbidden longing for another woman.

Layale (played by Labaki) directs a slipshod beauty parlor in Beirut. An unmarried Christian twenty-something who lives with her parents, she is engaged in an illicit affair with a married man, and hopes in vain that he’ll leave his wife. Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), Layale’s partner and (Muslim) friend, has a legitimate (Muslim) fiancé, but fears he will notice she’s no longer a virgin on their wedding night. Divorcee Jamale (Gisèle Aouad) is menopausal and youth-obsessed: she competes with teenagers for acting jobs and gets a rush out of faking menstruation with food coloring. Meanwhile, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), the salon handywoman and Lebanese sister to Shane from The L Word, finds she loves ladies but can only wash their hair.

Acts of depilation structure the film. The ongoing process of hair removal provokes a bittersweet combination of constraint and liberation, pain and pleasure. In the protected space of the beauty parlor women are free to let it all hang out—to expose their unwanted fur and stubble, have it ripped away by a sister in the struggle (someone who undergoes the same torture), and be soothed in the aftermath. To document Caramel’s most pivotal waxings and cuttings, Labaki’s camera moves in close, framing brisk hands at work and moist, attentive eyes. Her women feel each other’s pain, literally and figuratively. Labaki’s men are less empathetic. The one male character that wins our hearts (as well as Layale’s) does so by agreeing to have his eyebrows waxed and his moustache shaved off. Submission to depilation emasculates him, leading to a leveling between man and woman otherwise deemed impossible. In contrast, Rima’s love interest, a raven-haired beauty, agrees to part with her long black locks after Rima extols her gorgeous face. Delivered from her hair’s oppressive weight, she skips giddily home, emanating a post-orgasm glow.

In addition to its subtle yet powerful break with hetero-centrism, Caramel capitalizes on the performances of non-professional actors. Labaki, Al Masri and Moukarzel are so at one with their roles that their most minor facial tics become emotional signifiers. Aouad furnishes more of a caricature, but that makes sense, given her character’s palpable desperation. Adding more depth to the film’s exploration of modern femininity is the presence of Aunt Rose (Siham Haddad), who has devoted her life to caring for her crazy older sister Lili (Aziza Semaan). Rose believes herself too old for romance, and after entertaining a brief and unexpected possibility for love, resigns herself to spinsterhood. In this chronicle of compromise, there are no unequivocally happy endings.

The best scenes in Caramel feature Layale, Nisrine, Jamale and Rima hamming it up in concert. Each member of the Fab Four has her own unique appeal, but the group’s chemistry is explosive. Insults abound, followed by declarations of love. Layale and Jamale ridicule Nisrine’s bad French en route to the clinic where Nisrine hopes to get herself stitched up (and thus reclaim her virginity); Nisrine, Jamale and Rima comfort Layale after she has been stood up by assuring her the cake she’s baked for her boyfriend’s birthday is utterly disgusting and he wouldn’t want it anyway. Taking the piss is a survival mechanism in these parts, and makes the film damn funny to boot.

Caramel fulfills one of my core desires as a viewer and in life. The film welcomes me into a community of intelligent, witty, conflicted, sexy, mutually supportive women—a luxury, given the current backlash against anything remotely resembling feminism. That such a luxury hails from Lebanon is revealing. What does it suggest that the intricacies of Caramel—the product of a culture our own so often condemns as unerringly sexist—far eclipse the facile preoccupations of the contemporary American chick flick? When the complexity of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is reduced to the saccharine triviality of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I have to ask, “Did I shave my legs for this?”

Swords, Sandals and Sex

by Sarah Kessler

Caligula (1979), Dir. Tinto Brass (Image Entertainment, 2007)

Caligula is the stuff, or rather the spunk, of legend. The 1979 epic T&A-fest is based on real-life legend: the rapid ascendancy and downfall of Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (“Little Boots” for short). Caligula is also a Hollywood legend, revered and ridiculed from the moment of its cinematic conception. The film’s production history is difficult to piece together, but goes something like this:

Gore Vidal wrote a screenplay. Unable to secure adequate funding, he appealed to Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. Fiduciary aid was provided on one condition—that Caligula take the orgy to the next level. Vidal accepted Emperor Guccione’s demands. Italian director Tinto Brass, of Salon Kitty (1976) fame, signed on. Danilo Donati, a favorite of Fellini’s, was hired to construct ostentatious sets and render trompe l’oeil backgrounds. An all-star cast was assembled. Debaucheries were orchestrated and shot. Chaos soon descended. Guccione championed the inclusion of several minutes of hard-core pornography. Vidal and Brass both renounced the film, at different times and for different reasons. Malcolm McDowell has described his experience of Caligula as rape-like. Helen Mirren has more positively invoked an acid trip.

Like much mediocre porn, Caligula is a vehicle for sex. Its narrative is of minor importance, useful mostly because it provides ample opportunity for fucking, bloodletting, castration and other extravagant atrocities. Caligula (McDowell) accelerates his accession of the Roman Empire by inciting one of his henchmen to murder his sickly uncle Tiberius (Peter O’Toole). Upon taking the throne, Caligula continues his incestuous relationship with his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and marries the notoriously promiscuous Caesonia (Mirren). As he grows nuttier and nuttier, the Empire becomes even more hedonistic than it was during Tiberius’ reign and that’s saying something. When Drusilla dies of a fever, Caligula’s grief pushes him over the edge. He pronounces himself God, kills all who irritate him, fashions an imperial brothel of Senators’ wives and attempts to “conquer Britain.” Before he can run the Empire into the ground, Caligula, along with his wife and young daughter, are stabbed repeatedly. The End. Two hours too late.

Caligula could have been a contender. A description of its storyline makes the film sound campy, sexy, tragic and, best of all, perverse. Unfortunately, Caligula’s attempts at depravity are not polymorphous enough to remain captivating. Guccione’s obvious additions, visible only in the unrated version of the film, are stock porn fare. There are glimmers of interest in a graphic lesbian sex scene skillfully intercut with Caligula, Drusilla and Caesonia’s comparatively chaste threesome. Guccione’s other major contribution—an interminable blowjob in the imperial brothel—is forgettable, to say the least. Brass’ treatment of the film’s extended banquet and orgy scenes is repetitive. As his camera crawls, snail-like, over piles of pasty, writhing bodies, one’s eyelids begin to droop. “More conviction!” one wants to shout, but Peter O’Toole, whose performance is one of Caligula’s rare gems, already used the line.

O’Toole is convincing as Tiberius, a repellent old codger who glories in his own moral bankruptcy. He rounds out the role with the appropriate hint of existential despair. But what to do with Malcolm McDowell? His piercing, blue-eyed stare and chronic ADD grate on the nerves, but perhaps it must be so. After all, he does play a spoiled man-child who inherits the Roman Empire. And when McDowell shines, he shines. An uncharacteristically brilliant scene has him rape a virgin bride on her wedding day. “Open your eyes,” he taunts the groom, whom he sadistically forces to witness his future wife’s deflowering. This disturbing act is carried out on a butcher’s table, as wedding guests celebrate the “happy union” just beyond the kitchen door. Unable to bear his exclusion from the joy of others, Caligula wreaks havoc and returns to the festivities. He suffers from a void at his center, much like the film.

Image Entertainment’s appropriately excessive “Imperial Edition” release includes three discs, bearing two versions of the film (one “unrated” cut and one “alternate” cut), several droll commentaries and endless special features. Immaculate DVD transfers draw attention to Donati’s skillful deployment of color in the film’s mise-en-scene. Every little bit helps.

http://artforum.com/archive/id=18963

KENTUCKY COUNTRY NIGHT SCHOOL A Conversation with Stephen Irwin

by Sarah Kessler

Stephen Irwin is the kind of person you remember. The shock of curly, orange hair above his twinkling brown eyes and impish grin renders him visually striking. His idiosyncratic manner leaves an even stronger impression. When I met Stephen, I’d just flown from New York to Louisville on a few hours’ sleep. I had a slight hangover combined with what I now realize was PMS and compounded by the temperature at touchdown—a balmy 110 degrees. A dinner party in a lovely, air-conditioned manse provided a welcome respite. Stephen was there. He’d apparently been cooking all day and man, was that some fantastic barbecue! We barely spoke. Stephen scurried between kitchen and dining area, platters laden with meat and scoops of homemade ice cream in his muscular hands. I was fading fast. Just as my eyelids began to droop, Stephen materialized at my elbow. “Follow me,” he whispered.

When we arrived at the empty buffet table he handed me a miniature candlesnuffer. “Would you like to put out the lights?” he asked. The elaborate chandelier had candles in place of bulbs. One by one, I extinguished the tiny flames. When I’d finished, Stephen explained, “I thought you might like to do that.” I had liked it. Snuffing out those candles was pleasurable and comforting. I felt at home, as though my bed awaited me upstairs. Spread with an equestrian-themed quilt.

During the next two days I learned a lot about Stephen. We ate, drank, and shopped together. We slept… down the hall from one another. And we talked. A lot.

A native Kentuckian, Stephen went to college in Murray. As is often the case, art school didn’t translate directly into a full-time “art career.” Six years ago, after working in a number of different fields—design, bar management—Stephen re-prioritized. His art became his central focus, and his practice continues to reinvigorate. Showing almost exclusively in Louisville, he has exhibited work at the Speed Museum (his Skin Diary installation), the New Center for Contemporary Art, and several local galleries. This November at the New Center, he will mount one of his largest exhibitions to date.

While Skin Diary (2004) comprised a series of seductive drawings of blemishes and bruises on fragile sheets of Japanese paper, Stephen’s current work derives its inspiration from elsewhere. Consolidating the belongings of friends who’d passed away, he found a treasure trove of pornographic magazines from the 1960s and 70s. Removing layers of ink from the graphic images within, Stephen creates drawings that are by turns ghostly, odd, disturbing, and dear. In one delicate depiction two faces hover near each other with bodies faded into whiteness; in another our attention is drawn to a veined cock entering a vagina. The face of the orifice’s owner floats above, scarcely visible.

The conversation below covers Stephen’s new drawings and some recent site-specific projects. For one such project, entitled Chromatherapy, he hung strips of multicolored freezer pops in the window of the New Center to form a radiant curtain of liquid sugar encased in plastic. If this sounds unusual for Stephen, it isn’t. Read further and see for yourself.

Sarah Kessler: What should we talk about?

Stephen Irwin: I want to talk about pussy.

SK: You want to talk about pussy?

SI: [laughs] No!

SK: Oh, ok… We don’t have to talk about pussy.

SI: Or cats. [SI and SK laugh]

SK: A friend of mine once said he wouldn’t touch a vagina with a ten-foot pole. I told him, “Thanks a lot, asshole.”

SI: I’m not that frightened of it, but I do have recurring fantasies about the vagina dentata.

SK: Really?

SI: No. I’m just trying to make this sound like a good interview.

SK: So… you haven’t decided what you’re showing at the New Center in November?

SI: I have a lot of space and a lot of work. I keep thinking about process. I’d like to install a bunch of finished work and then maybe work on some things while the show’s up. It’s a three month-long show.

SK: You’d do some work in the space?

SI: Mmm hmm. I think the process of making art is a mystery to people and yet it’s just about working. If you go to work every day you accomplish things (hopefully).

SK: Do you get to the studio in the morning and work throughout the day?

SI: I try to. The greatest joy to me is to be able to work uninterrupted on a daily basis. In recent months I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that. I’ve sold some work; I’ve made some money here and there from freelance jobs… If I make a little money I immediately don’t work for as long as possible. Which can be irritating to other people.

SK: Because you’re only available sometimes to do other stuff?

SI: Right, and other times I’m just not interested. I’m not interested in having a career as a designer anymore, in designing restaurants and bars. It takes too much out of you. I’ve had a pretty serious heart condition since I was thirty. I have a pacemaker and I’ve had a bunch of open-heart surgeries. I totally disregard it almost all the time. [laughs]

SK: You smoke, for Christ’s sake!

SI: Not a lot! Just a little bit. And though I still treat myself badly sometimes, the studio is the one place where I don’t treat myself badly. It’s the place where the things I do restore and nourish me, replenish my energy. If I do commercial work it’s for commercial reasons and it doesn’t give anything back, whereas spending a lot of time doing a piece like the one across the street [Chromatherapy, then in the window of the New Center] is physical but not exhausting in the same way.

SK: That’s how I feel about writing. There aren’t many creative returns from the work that I get well paid for because I’m doing it for someone else.

SI: Right, and you have to wrap your head around that. And not let it eat at you.

SK: It’s great when you can achieve a balance.

SI: And you know that other work gives you the means to do what restores and replenishes and nourishes. That’s something I had a hard time learning. It’s always been easier for me to do things for other people and make things nice for other people. I never felt that those kinds of things were necessary for myself.

SK: You’re a natural host. Last night I got that sense. You have this boundless energy for making sure everyone’s ok.

SI: But see, I used to own a bar for ten years and it took a huge toll on me. Nightlife is empty. And I’m a generous person, so I was putting all this energy into something that was ultimately about sex and drugs. I tried to be positive about it, to give people a place to be expressive, but there’s something about that nighttime thing—it doesn’t enter into the daytime world. It becomes about gratification.

SK: It’s ephemeral.

SI: Right, and I don’t mind making ephemeral things because I’ve done that for years—design and decorative work, even artwork. I don’t mind making ephemeral artwork but it can’t be about emptiness… It’s hard to put into words.

SK: It seems the process of the [porn-based] work that you’re doing is somewhat subtractive. It’s almost the opposite of ornamentation.

SI: It’s about stripping things down to their essence. As I get older that’s what I become more and more about. I want truth and honesty and good people in my life. I don’t want to be involved in emptiness and facades and all the stuff the world’s about… The things I’ve lived through have led me to that. Now I know that I should be in the studio; I should be working; I should be trying to find a way to express the things I’ve learned, if not for anybody else, for myself.

SK: These images seem to be about intimacy. There’s something really intimate about the stuff that you were just showing me—the subtractive work.

SI: I think it’s about a longing for intimacy.

SK: That’s what porn is about and that’s also what porn is absolutely not about. It’s not a one-dimensional thing—for some people it’s about intimacy; for others it’s about distance. Or it’s some crazy combination of the two.

SI: It’s about intimacy and the loss of intimacy.

SK: And these images come from friends you lost…

SI: Someone saw these works and said they found them sad. I don’t see it that way, but I respect that.

SK: They said the work was sad because they knew where the images came from?

SI: No, they said it seemed sad as a whole. I didn’t get that.

SK: When I look at them it’s like entering a warm space.

SI: What do you mean by that?

SK: There’s something private about them. Porn has such a complicated history because yes, it’s sex for public consumption, but it’s not so public. Especially gay porn. Public and private are defined differently in that context.

SI: You wonder about the people that appear [in porn]. If it was forty years ago, how many of those people are still alive? Being in that industry they probably didn’t survive the AIDS years. That component is odd to me because you’re jerking off over the dead. It’s that Susan Sontag thing about how every photograph represents death. I don’t know if I agree with it, but…

SK: Chromatherapy is different—it’s an abstract piece. Do you make other work like that? Or was that a site-specific project?

SI: It’s a site-specific piece, but it’s related. Chromatherapy is an obscure, holistic, un-traditional treatment. I’ve been reading about it for years. While I was organizing the piece I started thinking about how the colors relate to the chakra colors (in color therapy each color relates to a chakra). It also seemed like a piece that was for Market Street and the public. And I’d seen a show by Rudolf Stingel. His work is very generous in spirit. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and it seems that the piece has a real crowd appeal. People pass it every day; kids pass it and we give out popsicles. It’s a commonplace object. I’ve always worked with common things, things that don’t have a lot of material value. And a lot of my work is about a conversation with history. We were talking about how Chromatherapy relates to the abstract expressionists, and a lot of [the porn-based work] relates to draughtsmen like Dürer and even the surrealists. I was thinking, too, about Morris Louis’ striped paintings that were just about “stripes.” Chromatherapy makes fun of that in a way, but also celebrates it. It’s also supposed to be a fun summer thing, to evoke memories of summertime for people. To make people happy! Sometimes I think we forget that art should—

SK: Should or can?

SI: Can! Can! It’s not that it should be, but there are times when it can be. Just light… But now Chromatherapy is decaying. Time has entered into it—ants are feeding off the sugar and dying. This totally unnatural object becomes part of a natural cycle. It’s amazing. I’d hoped that would happen, because I’d done a test in the studio window for months but the ants never got up to the second floor. [SI and SK laugh]

SK: Do you see yourself making more work like that?

SI: I hope so. I hope that the show at the New Center will have site-specific components because of the space’s relation to the street, to the community, and to this little microcosm down here [on Market Street]. The women’s shelter is right here. Chromatherapy enables me to have a conversation with the children and women who live at the shelter, which is fascinating. I’d love to have more opportunities to make work like that. I couldn’t tell you what form it would take.

SK: You wouldn’t know in advance.

SI: I’m interested in using the space to define the piece so that the space becomes part of the piece, but again, you have to have the opportunity to do it. That’s what I’m trying to work out with this [points to a light drawing/collage of the silhouettes of several differently shaped and sized vases over the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace in the studio], but the problem with this is that I can do it in here because it starts speaking to the history of the building; it works because it’s over an old fireplace. I couldn’t do that in a gallery. I could do it in somebody’s home and it could speak to their history in the house. What bothers me right now is that it’s not very personal—I just grabbed whatever images were here on the table that seemed like they would work, and I was in this fever, and cut them out…

SK: You could come in and not know that it wasn’t personal. I wouldn’t have known. It looks like the trace of something that used to be here.

SI: Well, there used to be this bottle collectors’ society that met here. There were all these bottles coming through the building and that stuck in my head…

SK: This is an interesting environment to work in. Even what we saw coming in. [SI and SK entered an antique store, walked through a courtyard, and ascended decaying wooden stairs to access Stephen’s studio. In the courtyard were a group of antique aficionados having an afternoon meeting, with cookies and kittens.] This really old building…

SI: It’s so evocative.

SK: You’re surrounded by this community of quirky people.

SI: Eccentric, yeah. Even though this area’s been gentrified, there are still all these people who aren’t, and that has a lot of resonance for me. I’m able to observe everybody’s comings and goings. And think about the layers of this building: it’s from 1838, but these windows [in Stephen’s studio] were a Victorian addition. They opened them up and made them bigger because heating was getting better. Downstairs there was a barbershop, so there’s this terrazzo floor from the 1930s. These layers are really meaningful to me.

SK: Do you feel that way about Louisville more generally? A lot of artists are itinerant and have worked in a bunch of different cities, but you’ve been here for a while… I hate this phrase, but it seems Louisville is kind of “up and coming.” In terms of the art scene.

SI: Yeah, Louisville’s a strange place. Talk about the North and South division and it’s hard to locate it. It’s funny—there are a lot of musicians from here who are widely known in the “indie world,” like Tara Jane O’Neil, Will Oldham, Slint—people who are well known in the U.S. and abroad. Here they walk down the street and they’re under the wire. They don’t do shows very often; if they do a show it’ll be announced the night before and it’ll be someplace totally random. So there’s this—it’s not a fear of success, but there’s this distancing thing. Like, “I don’t want to be too interested in the trappings of fame because then I’m not credible.” There’s a lot of that around here. People doing their thing and living their lives. That’s what’s nice about this town.

SK: Is that like what you were saying yesterday about Southern warmth with Northern distance?

SI: Yeah. And I think it extends to people’s art. In many ways my work pulls you in and it can be attractive and then there’s that moment that pushes you away, that says, “This is porn” or “This is a bruise or a scar; it’s not just a pretty picture.” There’s that layer of tension or unease where you don’t quite know what to do. You’ve been pulled in and pushed away. Does that sound right? [laughs]

SK: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, actually.

SI: I have family in Louisville, and I came to Louisville a lot when I was a kid. When you meet somebody in Louisville they don’t ask where you went to college, they ask where you went to high school. It’s a big joke here. If they know where you went to high school they can put this framework around you. So people would ask me, “Where did you go to high school?” And I’d say, “Uh, Kentucky Country Night School.” ‘Cause there’s this really famous school here called Kentucky Country Day, where all the rich kids go. [SI and SK laugh]

SK: You didn’t go to high school in Louisville.

SI: No! In a sense I feel like part of this place, but in another sense I’m on the outside looking in. I have enough distance to be safe, to have perspective, to not get caught up in unimportant stuff. Like… society. [laughs]

SK: That’s crucial. I’ve always been really glad I never grew up in New York. Everyone I know who did is profoundly fucked up.

SI: Mmm hmm. But all the biggest freaks in New York are people who come from other places like this, or from fuckin’ Pigeon Forge, or, you know, Sevierville, Tennessee.

SK: That’s actually the name of a place in Tennessee? [SK thinks SI has just said “Severe-ville.”]

SI: Yeah. It’s next to Pigeon Forge. It’s an abomination, too. It’s everything that’s wrong with this country.

SK: Have you been?

SI: I just went there! My friend’s father owned a house in Sevierville he couldn’t sell. It’s in the Smoky Mountains, but there’s nothing to do there—it’s a dry county. We went to, like, douche the house and make it sellable. [SI and SK laugh] When we got there it was all curtains and fake flower arrangements, and we got a dumpster and douched the place. I wanted to bury a St. Joseph statue in the backyard and couldn’t find one, so I got a statue of the Pope and buried him upside down. My friend’s dad got an offer and sold the house at full price two weeks later! He’d been combing the market for like three years.

SK: Where did you get a statue of the Pope?

SI: Out of a vending machine! There’s a big Latin population down there and there was this vending machine with all these saints. But there was no St. Joseph! When I put my quarter in I got the Pope. I figured, “It can’t hurt.”

SK: So you buried it…

SI: Upside down…

SK: In the hope that the house would be sold? [SI and SK laugh heartily]

SI: So what do you want to do the rest of the day?

Vintage Van Sant

by Sarah Kessler

Mala Noche, Dir. Gus Van Sant (Criterion)

Bright-eyed, unkempt Walt (Tim Streeter) clerks in a store in a seedy section of downtown Portland. He’s infatuated with Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), a teenage Mexican idler who train-hopped his way to the Pacific Northwest from Los Angeles. The year is 1984. Luscious Johnny shines amidst the parade of winos, homeless, infirm, and insane who frequent Walt’s workplace. As he vends coffee, cigarettes and nitrate, Walt muses, “All I wanna do is caress him…”

Johnny speaks no English and distrusts the “faggot.” He is, however, willing to hang out if free food, beer and car trips are involved. And while Johnny won’t sleep with Walt, who initially attempts to pay for him, his friend Roberto (Ray Monge) sometimes gives it up. Walt contents himself with this arrangement but fantasizes his love will someday be reciprocated. He speaks Spanish like the worst of gringos and teaches the boys to drive. He lends them a hand in times of trouble. Walt insists he understands that “Just because I see someone attractive like Johnny doesn’t mean I should be able to have him, to buy him or whatever…” We don’t quite believe this assurance, and neither does he.

Completed in 1985, Mala Noche (“Bad Night”) prefigured Gus Van Sant’s entry into the American indie directors’ canon. The film takes its simple narrative from the 1977 book of the same name by Oregonian poet Walt Curtis. Curtis, who is still writing, came of age alongside fellow Pacific Northwesterner Ken Kesey, and his work exudes a raw, sexually explicit Beat sensibility.

Van Sant’s adaptation marries the Beat of Curtis’ writing to rich, rough-and-tumble, black-and-white imagery. The graininess of his celluloid—catnip for the cinephiles in the audience—echoes the grit of the rainy city. The chiaroscuro affected by his low-key lighting melds with the occasional oblique camera angle to quote film noir. Less frequent images of the open road and countryside capture a subtle range of grays, offsetting the film’s urban sequences. Van Sant’s signature shot—clouds churning above a flat landscape—was first scrawled here.

No mere “first feature,” Mala Noche has a low-budget visual decadence that alone makes it worth seeing. Streeter’s amateurish performance as Walt ratchets the film significantly closer to must-see standing. Streeter does Walt’s inner monologue best, striking a perfect balance between (self-serving) earnestness and desperation. As Walt cranes his neck from his car window in hopes of spotting one of his amigos, his voice intones, “Fuck it, do I need him that badly? Am I that desperate? Of course I am.” Matter-of-fact delivery renders the self-deprecating gesture more hilarious than pathetic. Or is our narrator being ironic? Much of Mala Noche’s interest lies in Walt’s apparent disingenuousness, courtesy of Streeter’s elusive tone.

Perhaps the most beautiful scene in Mala Noche is the one that captures a wild nighttime car ride. Rapid cuts connect high-contrast close-ups of Walt’s terrified countenance and the vehicle’s speedometer. The voiceover turns rhythmic—spoken word-esque—as Walt reflects on Johnny’s insanity behind the wheel. Van Sant’s fast-paced formalism mirrors the cadence of Curtis’ writing, resulting in an edgy, artful interlude.

Those acquainted with Van Sant’s oeuvre (especially his 1991 My Own Private Idaho and the more recent Elephant) will salivate over this Criterion release. Special features include an interview with the director, a storyboard gallery, and a quirky 1997 documentary on Walt Curtis. Are you getting antsy waiting for Paranoid Park? Familiar yet surprising, Mala Noche will tide you over.