The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 9: American Artist
What if each artist had a focus of research? What if all the possible topics that could be explored in art were delegated to different artists? This time, American Artist joins Charlotte Burns.
One of the most interesting artists working today, American produces deeply thoughtful work that is as enmeshed in digitization and technology as it is in history and alternate realities. In 2013, they changed their name to American Artist as part of a constant negotiation of how much of themselves they put into their work.
American talks about how their art tackles police violence in the US. They also discuss a newer body of work centering on the life and writings of sci-fi novelist Octavia E. Butler. This is tough work, says American, but ultimately hopeful: “If I didn’t feel strongly that things could change, I wouldn’t even bother. But I want everyone else to try as hard as I do.”
Courtesy of American Artist. Image credit to Myles Loftin.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! the podcast all about imagining different futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and throughout the series, we’re meeting brilliant people who are helping us explore some big ideas, asking them to imagine what might and could be our reality in the years to come.
[Audio of guests]
On this episode, we’re joined by American Artist, one of the most interesting artists working today. They produce deeply thoughtful work that is as enmeshed in digitization and technology as it is history and alternate realities. In 2013, they changed their name to American Artist—a manifestation and declaration of intent as much as it was an act of erasure—part of a constant negotiation of how much of themselves they put into the work. It also recenters who and what the name conjures whilst being a smart piece of search engine optimization.A teacher themselves, American questions the systems that govern our lives. Conscientiously avoiding the spectacle of violence, American’s work is nonetheless preoccupied with it, and in this episode, they talk about their art dealing with police violence in the US. They also talk about a newer body of work centering on the life and writings of sci-fi novelist Octavia E. Butler, in whose apocalyptic fiction and extensive archive American has found a generative space of creativity.
This is tough work, but ultimately hopeful. American says, “If I didn’t feel strongly that things could change, I wouldn’t even bother. But I want everyone else to try as hard as I do.”
American, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.
American Artist:
Thank you for having me.
Charlotte Burns:
The show thinks a lot about futures and so does your work. And I'm slightly cheating here because this is a ‘what if’ based on a question you yourself have asked of someone else in an interview. You were thinking about what it means to try to imagine a future as an artist. And you found yourself starting with really fraught points in history and then trying to invert them, and you found it really hard to imagine anything completely new.
And you asked them, “do you think imagination always starts as a response to frustrating moments in history? Or is it possible to dream up things that are entirely new?” So I'm gonna ask you that question today. What if it were possible to dream up things that are entirely new?
American Artist:
I was really thinking about the history of computer technology, and particularly the interface and this moment in the 1970s where we transitioned from an all-black background on a computer where you were typing green code, and in that transition, the background of the screen began to be this blank white backdrop, and I was trying to challenge that, trying to think outside of that. And imagine a quote-unquote black interface, both formally black, but also thinking what would be an interface or software motive computation that sort of began from a place of the needs of a Black person, given that a lot of the people that were in these early conversations around computer design were cis, hetero, straight white men. And so just trying to like, think about what it means to have something rooted in a different set of values. How do you imagine something that's totally different that doesn't draw on the histories that we've been informed by in order to even be legible or recognizable?
I found myself going back to this early command line interface where the screen actually was black, and that actually seemed like the perfect place to look because it wasn't that I needed to create it new in the future, but that it had actually already existed.
And so then it was like, okay, let me go back and use this and put it into the future where now it's anachronistic, now it's out of place. So it almost is as strange as something entirely new anyway, but it already has everything that we were sort of trying to imagine doing.
Charlotte Burns:
What we're talking about, in a way, are the biases built into the technology around us, and there is this sense that technology or data are neutral. But of course, they're built by people, and so, garbage in, garbage out. And that slickness of technology that's Apple particularly has been a driver of that idea of that glossy, sleek finish is something that you take task with in your work in lots of different ways. If I think of a piece that you did in 2018, No State [2021], an array of smashed cell phones and you said about that, that, most people don't see data or its technologies as having an emotional weight and that the lightness that we associate with that kind of tech is a success of the companies that they've managed to help us think of these things as transparent and light.
American Artist:
A general conception around computer technology is that most of the computational power is happening somewhere else. When you think of the cloud, it's displaced in a way that makes you think about this notion of lightness or cleanness. Also, there is a huge effort in early Silicon Valley days to render the entire industry as a clean industry, even though it was extremely poisonous to the people that were actually working on these chips.
This title No State, I was trying to say that these phones are neither dead nor alive. I kind of think of them as having a one-to-one relationship with a human figure. These phones that are something we hold so intimately and keep all of our data become very tightly binded to us. So when you see this sort of lot of phones, it has this sort of emotional weight as well, sort of like a sense of loss.
Charlotte Burns:
When I was preparing for this interview, actually more than any artist I think I've ever interviewed, your work is so brilliant, really in the way that often, when people talk about technology, there's this sort of otherness, this over there-ness. And what your work does is really reinforce or ram home in often uncomfortable ways how much our lives are technical lives, how much we exist online, what it means to be viral, what it means to communicate through social media, what it means to have a digital footprint. And there's lots of different ways I wanna get into that with you. But I think I'm gonna start with a work that you did called, A Refusal in 2015, and for a year you posted only blue rectangles onto your Facebook page and you redacted all the text updates and viewers if they wanted to see the images and the text behind the work could do so if they arranged to meet you in person.
On the one hand, it seemed to be a sort of repudiation of the business model of social media in which the users are the product. But it's also personal to you because you'd said that your mom was one of the main people who really had a personal relationship with you through the internet and really relied on your social media. And so to remove her access to your life in that way felt like an emotional and maybe a difficult thing to do.
American Artist:
Yeah. I appreciate the research into these earlier works. This was kind of the first work I made out of grad school that I felt like was, a real artwork, if you could call it that. That was sort of like the gateway for me. And being someone that was born alongside the commercialization of the internet—and I was thinking about that, this sort of like exploitation that inherently happens when you're creating the content for these platforms, like you are the product. The content is like your personal relationships, the people you love. That's how you stay engaged. Your loved ones are being dangled in front of your face. But yeah, I did spend a year just with this blue image. My partner did not like it, she's like, “Can't we just post some photos?” And I'm like, “No. Like I'm doing this performance. I have to stay true to the rules.”
My mom lives in California, where I'm from, so a lot of what she knows in my life is through social media. So those things made it difficult. I remember people describing to me how they encountered it because you're scrolling through your feed and then every once in a while there's just this hard solid blue rectangle that just cleanses your palette. It sort of like wakens you up a little bit. It was just a sort of reminder that there's like an outside to this. I also thought if I really wanted to make this critique, shouldn't I just leave the platform? But I think this work was really about making a conspicuous critique. You know, something that could be witnessed, something that could be experienced within the platform to sort of remind you of your relationship to it.
Charlotte Burns:
That discipline of imposing that sort of slightly almost monastic approach to social media but to your work and life, it reminds me of something that came up in a conversation between you and the artist Simone Leigh, because within that discipline, there's also a distance. And in your work that's often attention. There's, it's a very personal work. It's very based on your life, your experience of the world. This sort of intertwining of technology, your recent work with Octavia Butler—you both went to the same high school. There are autobiographical traces, but the work is always presented at a sort of distance. Is that something you always want to do? Do you struggle with that gap? How much of yourself do you want the world to see in the work?
American Artist:
Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's something that has sort of followed me since I was in school. When I moved to New York for grad school in 2013 and that was right after I had changed my name to American Artist so I was really contending with what that meant. I remember one of my professors asking like, “When does the performance end? Do you ever stop being American Artist?” And no. I think that was the point. That's just who I am. People would ask me, “Why isn't that just a moniker? Why isn't it just an alias?” And part of it was also making a sort of assertion in this very practical way that I don't need to reiterate that I'm American Artist, it just is. And that's why that aspect of it was important for me.
But all that to say that when I was in school, I was really continuing with what that name meant. And I think at that time, I was including more of myself in the work. And I think like over time I've moved away from that and maybe now I'm also like, leaning back in with this Octavia Butler project. So, I guess it's like a constant negotiation. But I sort of have these moments of feeling reluctant to share so much about myself and then other times where I feel like the work is feeling too estranged.
Charlotte Burns:
I want to talk a little bit about the algorithm and going viral. You had said going viral might be the only way for artists without a lot of privilege to become class mobile, but you've done other work that looks at how going viral can be really fraught as well. For example, Bobby Shmurda created a dance that went viral in 2014 and then essentially got consumed by that virality and punished for that. Or the work you created around Sandra Bland and the pieces she'd made in the year before her death in a Texas jail cell in 2015 called Sandy Speaks.
Can you explain the piece to listeners who may not know it and if you still think virality is a way for artists to gain mobility?
American Artist:
I don't know the right word, but it can be extremely violent and also liberating. I think it has the potential for…but yeah, as far as the Sandy Speaks piece, this work was important for me because I wanted to think about a way to continue talking about Sandra Bland after she was arrested and died while in custody because we're seeing such a constant cycle of Black death in the media, which you would hope by now is not the case, but as we can see with the case of Tyre Nichols, this is like happening still now. And so for me it was like keeping that on our minds, continuing to hold her and the other people that have been victims of police violence. Not letting them be lost to the next news cycle, I think, and that sort of reduction that happens was important. It is about Sandra Bland, but it's also about Tyre Nichols, George Floyd, and everyone else that's been a victim of police violence.
Charlotte Burns:
So in the work, you dealt with the fact that Sandra Bland had been silenced, obviously physically, but also digitally. She'd been making this series called “Sandy Speaks,” and she had been texting friends all the way up until her death when everything went silent in terms of digital footprints around what happened too. And so you gave her a voice in a different way, and you presented a sort of alternate reality in which Sandra Bland continued to give video testimonials. What were your hopes for that work?
American Artist:
My hope for that work was, on one hand, I wanted to see it as like a tool for people to actually like, understand their legal ability within certain situations. So you could actually ask questions, you know, what do I do if I'm arrested? Like, how should I approach given situation? So in one sense, it was like a tool to actually try and answer some of these questions for people, and also questions about surveillance within the prison system and statistics and things like that. That was my kind of hope, but also as you mentioned, to continue to share some of the beliefs that Sandra Bland had and that she shared through this social media series of videos that she was making. So it was kind of a way of continuing that and also pointing out the intense invisibility that she experienced once she was actually arrested and trying to draw a contrast between that and everything that she was sharing on Twitter, on, I think on Facebook is where her videos were. So that intense silencing that happened once she was arrested.
Charlotte Burns:
You did another work more recently in 2019, I'm Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die) and it dealt with the police state in a different way by centering the police and Dr. Manhattan. It was an installation and there's a video screen where an animated blue figure speaks out into an empty classroom where there are some desks that look a little bit like shields and they're higher than the average desk, also like highchairs, and there's a blackboard upholstered in the blue fabric of a police uniform. Can you tell us more about that work?
American Artist:
I can tell you about any work. I could probably talk for hours on any of these. It's funny like hearing about them all side by side because I feel like a lunatic, because I don't know if there's any continuation.
Charlotte Burns:
It feels like there is. Yeah, they feel like really similar, the technology is through them, all that sort of visibility and virality and violence.
American Artist:
I mean, I hope so. I hope so.
Charlotte Burns:
And this sort of refusal you have to engage in the spectacle of it. The reason those works are connected in my mind, the questions come after each other, they're on the same piece of paper is because in both of those works, you're dealing with violence and you're dealing with horror and dystopia, but you do it in a removed way. You don't have the violence depicted, you have residues of the violence and you have the sort of imaginative space of the violence. And in the I'm Blue piece, the sort of systems that lead to the creation of the violence and how those things get enshrined into law and lawfare and legal bills of rights such as the Protect and Serve Act of 2018.
So it's very much about what it means to be a human, specifically what it means to be a Black person in America within a heavily policed state. You deal with it conscientiously, avoiding the spectacle of it, but being more critical about how whose voices are lost, who's gained, who has power, I guess. So they seem very connected to me, those works.
American Artist:
Yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. I guess to give some context, so the piece A Refusal that we spoke about earlier, these series of blue images, that was my first engagement with both the use of blue and also this means of a visual redaction that I think has sort of continued to show up in different ways. After that, I worked on Sandy Speaks so it was this shift. It was still related to what it means to be a Black person online, thinking about Sandra's own use of social media but particularly in relationship to police violence. And then with the pieces that were part of I'm Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die), I was returning to the color blue, but originally when I was using it, I was thinking of it as a color that could potentially represent a liberatory possibility. This is the color you see on a screen before an image is present. But then just seeing how over-determined that color blue is, both in the way that the police use it, the way that it's used, nationalistically, it is a very fraught color.
I wanted to look at how are the police using this color, and I was learning about Blue Lives Matter, which is the movement of police that is really in direct response to Black Lives Matter. And it's for police that feel like they're being attacked because they're police. And so they're now identifying as a social group, they identify as blue, like we are blue, we're not Black, white, Asian, Latino, et cetera, we're blue first. And they then put into law a law that protects them in a similar way to a hate crime as if they're not already the most protected group in American society.
I read this essay, “Blue Life,” by Tiana Reid and Nijah Cunningham. It does a really interesting job of pairing like the legal aspect of how this operates with the fantastical aspect of police officers wanting to sort of embody state power in a blue figure. And so I was literally sort of conjuring in my imagination this blue authority figure, and how absurd that is. We have a precedent for that in Dr. Manhattan, who's literally a blue figure, works for the government, all-powerful. And at the same time I was also thinking about Christopher Dorner, who was a former LAPD officer, Black man, was a military officer before that, and he published this manifesto, pointing out the racism within the LAPD and how he had been fired and felt that it was a racist retaliation for reporting his fellow officers. And he went on to kill a few police officers that he had identified in this manifesto. And I was really fascinated by him and his story. As violent as it was, I was also thinking about what it meant for Christopher Dorner to do that and how we might think about his story. And he did that shortly before Black Lives Matter became a thing. So thinking about the maturation of the Black Lives Matter movement and then the birth of the Blue Lives Matter movement, what would it mean to now look back at Christopher Dorner who was blue and Black and tore himself up because he couldn't consolidate those two realities that were so violently opposed to each other.
Charlotte Burns:
And also, you know, Dr. Manhattan, there are similarities. These figures who have power but aren't able to wield it in the manner in which they want; Dr. Manhattan's like, “I can do anything!” and people are like, “Can you just be violent?” And so he disengages and goes and lives in Mars. There's this sense of the failure of power to be imaginative almost within that.
American Artist:
I like the way you phrased that. I do see a sort of parallel in Dr. Manhattan and Christopher Dorner in the sense that they were both essentially weapons of the state. Christopher Dorner was an extremely skilled marksman and he dedicated his whole life to being a military officer and a police officer and felt very strongly about it. But growing disillusioned with what was actually possible in that role and then having this breaking point before going on this killing spree. And I see in Dr. Manhattan him also having this sort of breaking point and then going on to Mars. And so, in that sense, I see some relationship.
Charlotte Burns:
You said that you hope that your art gives viewers a sort possibility for thinking. For instance, entering into critical conversations about policing and how it operates. That's a space of imagination. Do you think that art can do that? I remember in the interview with Simone Leigh you’d said that you were surprised that there wasn't a bigger reaction to that installation. And I wonder the extent to which you think the art world can be a space that is big enough to move those conversations along more broadly in society.
American Artist:
Does art have the ability to create that sense of imagination to what else can happen? And I think it may be one of the only things that can do that, and I think that's why I'm so invested in art because critical theory is one thing, political organizing is another thing, but art also is sort of so spectacularly able to imagine those things and see all of the different variations on what they can be and through that, inspire people to actually go through with it. As an artist, as someone that obviously very much identifies as an artist, that's second nature for me to imagine those things. But I think for people that are not artists, to see those things really does open your mind up, and a lot of times it's like you might see this one weird art piece, and then it's 15 years later it's still in the back of your mind. I don't know like maybe it's sort of a seed that can ultimately, like, grow into something else at some later date.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also something about the inefficiency of art. The constraint is the opportunity, art can kind of create those seeds in the cracks almost. And I think about this in the context of your work, which is so much to do with technology, which is so much to do with optimization and efficiency and consolidation of power. It's something about the imaginative space as being empowering. Whereas there's something about the technology that is infantilizing, or at least when I look at work, like I'm Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die). And there's something about algorithms always being based on past behavior, always being based on past biases. Do you think it's possible to find freedom within that tech, or is it only in that frustration between art and tech that it could happen?
American Artist:
I don't know that I have an answer for that being someone that exists in the space of being critical of technology but also using it. There's often this question do you think it's possible to have an equitable relationship to technology or use of technology that's actually not biased and considers all the different people that are interfacing with it? And honestly, I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things where I don't know if the reality I'm wanting is possible, but I'm still gonna keep hammering away at it because otherwise, the reality I don't want is gonna be here even faster, and with more authority. And I think that is what many social movements have done is, if anything, slow down that progress that's moving towards something that we definitely don't want.
But I may be a little pessimistic. I think there are artists, Black artists, that are using new technologies in interesting ways and that are trying to create realities for those technologies that still use them but are allowing us to experience something life-affirming, I would say.
Charlotte Burns:
You teach at Yale. That work was situated in a classroom. Your work is also really rooted in models of conceptual art and institutional critique. When you are teaching, how much do you think about the models of teaching? Did those things function as roadmaps or limitations? How do you approach that part of the work?
American Artist:
Yeah, I think a large part of my teaching practice is like stripping away the presumed power dynamic that so easily presents itself in the classroom. And that's not to say that there's not a power dynamic still at play as the teacher, but what I mean by that is like when I set the chairs up for a seminar in a circle, and I'm sitting next to my students, they're freaked out. They're like, “Why aren't you at the front of the class talking at us?” And it's weird to me that is weird to them because there has to be a sort of changing of that structure. Even though those seem like minor things, they're actually quite significant, I think, in undermining all of the baggage that is built into academia. Who is supposed to be there? Who's supposed to be a student? Who's supposed to be a faculty or professor? How are we attributing or citing different people whose labor is going into the process?
Charlotte Burns:
Do you enjoy teaching?
American Artist:
I do enjoy teaching.
Charlotte Burns:
What are the most surprising things about it for you?
American Artist:
I don't know about surprising, but one of the things I've been saying is Iike, I feel like there's this sort of continuum between art and education. Like I, I don't feel like there's separate things at all. There's an art to education, and there's an education to art. So when I am creating the syllabus, I do feel like I'm designing an experience that is going to surprise me, and I don't fully know what's gonna happen, but you are creating the conditions through which you're going to go through this event with 10 or 15 people and see what comes out of it. And yeah, I don't know. It's maybe surprising, relative to, I guess like, how I experienced school.
Charlotte Burns:
How did you experience school? The reason I asked this is because I was doing a piece of research recently into art schools, and it struck me that so many artists today are building things because they were failed, because they see a need for change. That's, I guess what I'm asking is where is the change that you are trying to build in the way that you teach? Where is that need for artists today?
American Artist:
Yeah. I'll tell you where that need is because there's really no clear path into art. It's one of those terminal degrees where after you receive it, you have almost nothing to prepare you to enter the real world and what are the paths that artists can follow to create a life for themselves and start thinking about the life that they want to create? How do we do that for more people? In a given class of graduating students, there might be one or two that are still practicing art in five to ten years. And my own process of going from school into where I'm at now has been this gradual introduction of these terrifying realities that like, you need to do this in order to make certain amount of money in order to sustain going on. And it's like this gradual introduction of shitty realities about what it means to be an artist. But you have to sort of like stomach those in order to keep doing it, and you don't wanna introduce that at a point where someone is gonna be entirely discouraged from pursuing the field. So it's like, how do you set someone up to succeed but not scare them out of doing it?
Charlotte Burns:
It's a very parental responsibility in a way. It's “I'm preparing you for life, but not really telling you about it yet.”
[Laughter]
American Artist:
Right.
Charlotte Burns:
What are the shitty realities you, you mentioned you've gotta sell the work? Is it the creep of the market? The ways in which you have to survive to make money?
American Artist:
I definitely think that's part of it. Yes, it is does have to do with the market. It has to do with money. It has to do with that half your job is like admin. Everything you make is gonna come back to haunt you, either because it was so shittily made that it is impossible to maintain or people loved it, can you do more? Or like, all of these different things that have nothing to do with making art.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
It sounds like being stuck in an algorithm.
American Artist:
Right.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Like everything that you've done is everything that you are, but how do you move from there to make something new when the market doesn't want that? Maybe museums don't want that. So where are you finding the spaces that support experimentation and risk-taking as an artist?
American Artist:
Yeah, I think it's a balance of being beholden to everything that you are and that you've done, but also, yeah, finding that sort of area where you can experiment. In my case, like, I'm working on some short-term things that are more related to what I've been doing around, like surveillance or policing, but I'm also doing this sort of, like, slower long-term project about Octavia E. Butler and just trying to create a way that I can spend more time with that project and be in the research phase. Because up till now, it's like I'm always responding to a deadline, and I'm trying, trying, trying to get ahead of the deadline so I can be someone who like, makes work, and then, someone says, “Hey, there's a show, and I can give you a work for the show,” rather than “Hey, there's a show. Oh, I don't have any work. Let me make some work for that show.” And I think this is something many artists aspire to, I don't know if it ever happens, but…
Charlotte Burns:
It doesn't happen for journalists either. The deadline is the all-seeing eye.
So one of our editorial advisors to this show is Deana Haggag, and she said that you taught a class a few years ago about DNA technologies that was fascinating. And she said if her memory served her correctly, attendees brought the things they'd learned about their ancestry while also reading about DNA tracking. And she said it held the tension of this phenomenon really well. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
American Artist:
Yeah. I appreciate that she said that. I was thinking at that time about how within the context of teaching, it's kind of one space where you can ask people to do something that they wouldn't do otherwise, and they'll actually do it. And then I thought, you know what if I have all these students take an Ancestry DNA test? They have to do it if they want to be in the class. And we'll do it together and process the results together. I wanted to do these readings that were very technical about the history of DNA, the history of race, and how DNA technology came into production. So we read, like Alondra Nelson's book, these chapters that sort of talk about the origins of the African ancestry technology and like the academics that were doing this research at the African burial site in Manhattan. And then that sort of ultimately led to this technology and then, we were also reading about the history of race science. But at the same time, I was also having them talk to their family members and ask them these really serious questions. Asking a family member that you haven't talked to very much to fill in the blanks about this other family member or things that would sort of require this very meaningful engagement and we also asked them to tell us about how your parents met, which ended up being a really, a really nice moment of everyone sort of sharing.
Charlotte Burns:
That's such a beautiful thing, and talking of beautiful things, the research you are doing into Octavia E. Butler's archive is a beautiful thing. And I understand this came about as a result of a grant you got from LACMA’s Art and Technology Program in which you had proposed a project called Collective Head. You were gonna build a machine in the form of a rocket motor test inspired by the writings of Octavia Butler and America's second Great Migration. Are you still doing that rocket motor test? Is that still part of the work?
American Artist:
It's shifted slightly, but I'm still working on it. It is now titled The Monophobic Response, which is inspired by this short essay by Octavia E. Butler that was shared to me by Ayana Jamieson. This essay is about why humanity needs the idea of extraterrestrial aliens to avoid facing its actual problems and its need to alienate people and create in other and fight continually amongst ourselves. We're thinking about creating this object from the 1930s rocket tests that were performed by Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab. We're going on almost like 90 years now. I'm wanting to rethink about that moment, though, through the sort of lens of Octavia Butler’s. So having this sort of critical perspective on colonial space science but also, I'm thinking about it in that, in the Parable of the Sower (1993), the earth seed community, their goal is to take root among the stars. And ultimately, they do leave the planet. And so I'm imagining this ragtag group of people at some point, had to have a rocket test of their own. And it probably would've been about a hundred years after this pre-JPL rocket test. So I'm finding a parallel that way. And my idea is to actually have this rocket test out in the desert and bring some scholars and poets to talk about critical relationship to colonial rocket science around this event.
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about Octavia Butler then. You did an exhibition as well off your research and called Shaper of God at REDCAT in LA last year. You grew up in the same area of California and you attended the same high school, which is a lovely twist of fate. And Octavia Butler, for people who haven't read her books, was a science fiction writer, she was labeled as, but really all great science fiction writers was a student of history. A kind of great gobbler of the news and what was happening around her. In your exhibition, you created, for example, a wall as a centerpiece, and in her book, the Parable of the Sower from 1993, a wall protects the cul-de-sac in which the novels protagonist lives in this sort of post-apocalyptic America that's actually set a year from now. So Octavia Butler was thinking about power, and she was thinking about the apocalypse, and you've said about that, that we understand the apocalypse as a singular event, but you see it more as something that we live through and trying to speak about how systems oppress people in ways that are unspectacular, that are banal and quotidian, and we have to navigate them. I just thought that was really interesting because, again, that's another throughline in your work is the ordinariness of oppression and violence and constraints upon our imagination and our freedom and bodies, whether physical or digital. Did you read her novels and situate yourself in that landscape as a child because you were in the same landscape? Or did you come back to them more recently?
American Artist:
I didn't read her writing growing up, and I wish I had, but I came to her work much later, around the time that I had learned that she had gone to the same school as I did. But I think it's very fitting your description of her as a student of history. That's something that I'm trying to take up from her. One of the things I've learned the most through this research that I was surprised to learn is like ways that her process can influence my process. Because she was such a thorough researcher, she saved, like, all of these news clippings about different events that were going on. She has these like envelopes upon envelopes of index cards, and on each index cards, it's like the name of a disease and like a description of the disease or a particular biological phenomenon and then like a description of it. And it's really wild how thorough it would be, and she would do all this research just to describe this one person's ailment, that's like a fictional ailment that feels very real. And she also was, I don't wanna say pessimistic, but she wouldn't give over to uncritical optimism that a lot of people have about the future. She would say if things remain the same, this is what's gonna happen. And that's also how she describes the series of the parables is these are cautionary tales for what's gonna happen if we don't change our ways. And a lot of people are really freaked out by those novels because they're quite violent; they're not a reality that we wanna live in.
Charlotte Burns:
They're clearly dystopian, but there is always this hope in those books, the idea of humanity talking to the stars. Where do you sit on that line from utopia and dystopia?
American Artist:
Honestly, I think those terms are not the most useful. For one thing, it sounds extremely binary but also fictive. Like, “Oh, the dystopia is this like fictional other thing. The utopia is this fictional other thing.” I think that a lot of the conditions we live through are like things that we would describe as dystopic, but maybe happening slower.
Charlotte Burns:
I guess then another way of asking it is hope, which is a simpler concept. Do you feel your work is hopeful?
American Artist:
That's interesting. I would say it's hopeful in a similar regard to Butler's work in that if I didn't feel strongly that things could change, I wouldn't even bother. Also that I'm trying to give you the tools to understand the situation that we're in. And in that sense, it is hopeful because I'm really trying, and I want everyone else to try as hard as I am to bring about this other reality. And yes, in that sense, it's hopeful, but it's not a calm, happy, hopeful. It's like a, we need to get to work hopeful.
Charlotte Burns:
How much of that is about building community around your work? And I asked this because I haven't read about your work in that context, but in the Bomb magazine article with Simone Leigh, she asked you why you wanted to talk to her. And you said you'd been inspired by Black studies and Black feminism, particularly some of the thinkers her work relates to. But you also said that you admired the presence she maintained in the art world and admired her as an artist who is able to materially manifest the concerns of Black studies and also build community around that. And so that idea of building community, talk to me about that in the context of your work, in the context of your ambitions for your work.
American Artist:
Yeah. That's really great. And I am still thinking about that. What I admire about Simone and what she's doing is it's multifaceted. It's on one hand it's, bringing together all of these brilliant Black feminist scholars to share space for the Loophole of Retreat (2022). But also the way that she is employing a lot of people, like younger Black people, in her studio and things like that and she really created a way for me to enter into this industry.
And I am thinking about it a lot because like I feel like there's things I want out of being an artist that are like, unrelated to like what the field is designed to give you in exchange for what you're doing. I recently have gotten a few grants and I'm starting to sell work and it's really cool to be getting money for this thing I'm doing. But it's weird to be awarded in money for something you didn't do for the money. What I actually want is like how can I be in a position to actually like influence change within the industry and create opportunities for people in a meaningful way and with the position that I maintain, how can I actually facilitate that for younger artists, Black artists, other artists of color? How can I, like meaningfully actually help them get to where they're trying to go?
Charlotte Burns:
That's so interesting. What if artists were free from institutional obligation? In one of your conversations about Octavia Butler, someone had asked you what you were seeking shelter from, and you said from institutional obligation, from having to align with institutions that you feel compromise your values. And I'm imagining that's become more pressing as you've been finding a larger audience. So there's a tension between the you that your work is talking to when you say, I'm giving you the tools and the means of getting there. Is the answer to build your own systems?
American Artist:
It kind of is. It necessitates a certain amount of autonomy. I feel like some amount of autonomy is the best way for me to create my relationship to the arts that I would like. Institution building is hard. It shouldn't be taken lightly. I think that's definitely what we're experiencing with our school. Yeah, as far as this like sort of freedom from institutional obligation, having to compromise your values in order to go through with an exhibition or something like that is really a terrible feeling, and so the way that you can shift your working relationships so that happens as, as little as possible is kind of the goal.
Charlotte Burns:
So let me ask you a couple of ‘what ifs’. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night, and what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?
American Artist:
Yeah, I don't know. One ‘what if’ I have, I have this kind of like abstract idea for what could be a short story—I don't know if it ever will be but—what if there's a sort of like fictional society, but it's like about the arts, it's about professional art practice. But what if each artist had a kind of focus of research and you couldn't have one that someone else was already doing. So all of the possible, like topics that could be explored in art are delegated to different artists and they're guaranteed to have work because they have this thing that they're given that only they can do. Everyone is doing their part by tackling that one question.
Yeah, that's my ‘what if,’ like maybe one day I'll write about it. I don't know which ‘what if’ that is, it's one of those.
Charlotte Burns:
I feel like that was an answer to both. How about this, what if you had a magic wand and you could wave it over your practice and have your practice achieve whatever it was that you wanted. What would you do? What would you do to make your practice a dream for yourself?
American Artist:
That's so funny. Well, first I'd ask who made the magic wands? Why did they make it?
[Laughter]
Why did they give it to me? But if I got over that hurdle, yeah, I just want to have what every artist wants, space, time, resources to do and explore whatever you want. I mean, I think I'm gradually moving towards that. Trying to have a studio that I have for a long time, like multiple years, rather than just moving between residencies and then being able to take on less exhibitions so I can be more intentional about what I'm making and spend more time.
Yeah, those are things I'm moving towards. I'd also like to think about other alternative ways to display work, not necessarily mine, but just like in general that are maybe outside of a traditional like museum or gallery system, but that's very like head in the clouds kind of idea.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you have a sense of how that would work?
American Artist:
Yeah. I was thinking about it like if you've been to the Rothko Chapel, not that I'm like a huge Rothko fan or anything but, what I appreciated about that is that it's just like a single installation in a place. So it’s kind of like if a museum was reduced to just one room. It's either permanent or near permanent be cause people who are not our professionals do not go to museums every three months or six months. They go to museum like once every 10 years. So the exhibition needs to be there a while before people even make their way to it. So I think I don't know. I'm imagining what if there's like boutique museums.
Charlotte Burns:
Sort of like Dia Beacon.
American Artist:
I guess Dia Beacon is kind of like that cuz they, yeah, they have long-term installations, but it's still pretty big. If you go there, it's like all day.
Charlotte Burns:
So just these small, little intense moments.
American Artist:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
Sounds great. I look forward to seeing you make it a reality, as I'm sure you will.
Thank you so much for being my guest today. I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I'm a huge fan of your work, so I'm thrilled that you took the time to talk to us. I look forward very much to seeing everything that you do next.
American Artist:
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me as well.
Charlotte Burns:
Big thanks to American Artist. Next time, we’re in Los Angeles to bring you a different kaleidoscopic kind of show, the first of two in which we’re joined by various brilliant guests, asking them, what if LA is the future?
[Audio of guests]
LA is an amazing place to think about what our possible futures could look like.You feel it when you’re here and that’s why so many galleries are moving here, that’s why people are so excited and giddy to be here, I think. I’m not entirely sure why they’re all here, but they’re coming!
Charlotte Burns:Join us then on The Art World: What If…?!
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.