Interview with Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas on the Occassion of their Exhibition at DAC

Gladly Will I Sell
For Profit,
Dear Merchants of the Town,
My Hat
Laden With Snow

Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas have developed an an art practice that is highly intelligent and steeped in conceptual art tradition while being formally beautiful. Their work is of the highest order of seriousness - in subject matter, execution and comportment - while exuding a wickedly humorous sense of sarcasm. On the occasion of the last week of their exhibition at Dumbo Arts Center, I had the chance to interview them about their work, politics and art, humor, mortality and a displeasure with Kant. Their installation can be seen online here.
-Karl Erickson

KE: The series of fine china plates engraved with Chinese Tang dynasty poems, Lords of the Capital, are all quite striking, especially since the poems have an incredible resonance with today's struggles of economic disparity. The poem on one plate reads:

"Ashamed though I am
Of my high position,
While people lead unhappy lives,
Let us reasonably banish care
We bow, we take our cups of wine,
We give our attention to beautiful poems"

This goes to the heart of a problem many artists have at all times, let alone time of extreme political strife: what roles do they and their art play in culture? This is a long set-up for the question: Since your work quite often has a political edge, what function do you hope for your art to have in that discussion? Related, what part do aesthetics, "the beautiful" play in this discussion? In your statement for the show, you write of contemporary art being "irrelevant activity." If this is so, why reference, or speak of, politics in your work?

Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas: Questions about the political relevance of art are related to the “my kid could do that” comments heard in provincial art museums. Alternative culture feeds dominant culture (see Raymond Williams theories of Cultural Studies). Sometimes memes are co-opted as a style, but sometimes the real essence of the stuff alters the mainstream. Think of woman's right to vote and gay rights: once unthinkable, the tireless expression by an alternative cultural force changed and will continue to change mainstream policy and opinion.

Today’s public sphere determines that any labor without an immediate (economic) use value is irrelevant and therefore abhorrent (Hannah Arendt). So-called "irrelevant" labor such as art and tending to a house-cat is therefore a protest action and confronts our alienation.

We also think of the work as logging a kind of “evidence” for the future.

KE: While installing the show, we talked a bit about the aesthetics of conceptual art, stereotypically low-res, black and white, text heavy. You had mentioned wanting to make your work, in essence, more beautiful than is traditionally associated with "idea-based" art. The show
is gorgeous, and on first blush, appears somber. Closer inspection though, reveals some wicked humor and heavy ideas. What do these tensions between the "conceptual" and the "aesthetic," between the "serious" and the "humorous" do for you?

AB & AS: Tension is good. Yin / yang man. Fuck Kant.

KE: You reference Hannah Arendt and ideas of domesticity and "the art of being happy among 'small things'" in your statement, too. Could you speak to this notion in relation to your work, especially considering that the work in the show, though modest in scale, has as it subject matter big themes: Death, Memory, Permanence and Value.

AB & AS: We should probably blow up all our work to outrageous proportions, it would help our career. Or perhaps we should just hand out magnifying glasses at the door.

Most of us, especially us non-billionaire city dwellers, live in small spaces that we care for with irrelevant tenderness. This is the meaning of life.

KE: In whole, the show feels very quiet and static, even the video is of still shots of marble and granite surfaces! From the wave etched on a granite grave marker to the Tang Dynasty poems to the currency pieces (which are linked to a specific date), to the "freezing" of the Wikipedia and
data error images, the show seems to slow and elongate time. In a sense, to preserve a moment. yet, it also calls attention to the seeming impossibility to preserve anything, if you take a long enough view. So, is the show optimistic or pessimistic about our future?

AB & AS: Freezing time and energy is what reification is all about: documentation of expenditure, dead on arrival. We wanted to preserve moments that are otherwise in flux such as currency exchange and Wikipedia entries. The work is neutral, a series of statements. However, we ourselves feel very bleak about our own futures and the futures of our working class families.

KE: The show was arranged in consultation with a Feng Shui master, Pun Yin, and featured a performance by an Ikebana artist, Lily Pu. These are systems that were allowed to "succeed" in the context of the show. But in other ways, the show is about system failures: Wikipedia entries have to be policed or else the idea behind them of crowd sourcing knowledge can be hijacked. The data error pieces are literarly frozen moments of breakdown. The funerary elements of the patents of grave markers and the Future Monument (death being the greatest system failure). The cash pieces highlight a failing global economy. As mentioned, the show postulates that preservation is not an option, that all of our systems for doing so are doomed to fail. Do the two different systems that were allowed to succeed, Ikebana and Feng Shui, represent a way out of a failing system?

AB & AS: Individuals are mortal, but the immortality of mankind happens via our res publica. Memes and meme systems are archived through us: ideas and traditions are passed down through generations, altered to suit each new condition. Traditions such as Ikebana and Feng Shui come from ancient, murky origins and are passed down, altered, through the generations. Capitalist attempts to freeze traditional knowledge such as the California “master” who tried to copyright yoga poses, or tombstone design, are doomed to fail. The biological archive will outlast the age of kleptomania.

Interview with artist James Leonard

(James Leonard is his "Warbonds Performance)

James Leonard is an intense, dedicated artist exploring consciousness, the environment, history and the artistic process itself. His work is a veritable maelstrom of systematic, complex ideas, wry humor and outrage.

James has shown his two video portraits "Captain America" (narrated by comics-fan Lazzarus) and "Magic" (in which fetish model Jax recounts her ten year history working as a horse whisperer) at DAC over the summer and on Wednesday, October 19th will be performing his ongoing "Warbonds Performance" at 7 PM. He recently had a show at Open Source entitled 927 Days at Sea, which featured his "No Fishing Signs." James generously took time out of his busy schedule to answer a few of my questions about his work, America, his artistic approach and fractals.
-Karl Erickson

Karl Erickson: A lot of your work has a distinctly American vibe to it. I'm thinking of the "No Fishing Signs," the video portraits of Lazzarus and Jax and the barbed wire fences in particular. Each seems to have traditional American concerns: sprawling narrative, independence, and even a sense of manifest destiny. Is a sense of national identity a concern of yours?

James Leonard: I don't think I'm overtly interested in national identity, per se.  At least not in isolation from all the other sources of one's identity such as gender, generational cohorts, personal psychological and spiritual histories, etc.  But I have over the years grown increasingly self-aware that there are elements of Americana laced throughout most of my work. Initially, I wasn't aware that of the pattern.  It was over a decade ago when another artist and friend, Jason Mombert, first brought this observation to my attention.  I was at a different stage of development artistically.  I think the recognition initially sparked some desire for me to run with Americana as a theme, enough that I'm sure it influenced my editorial choices in the studio.  You know how it is when as an artist you find yourself with too many ideas to pursue in any given year and you have to make a decision?  Well I think at first I was weighing those that more overtly played with American iconography, I probably weighed those ideas more heavily.  Ironically, in just the past couple years, I think I've been actively trying to get away from such overt American icons.  It's funny that you include my most recent body of work, the "No Fishing Signs," in your question.  But I see how those too could even be included as an extension of my engagement of these American icons.  I guess some habits are hard to break.

It's also interesting that you mention Manifest Destiny.  That notion is mentioned by name during the "Warbonds Performance."  I have a number of works, topographic paintings, map pieces and the barbed wire fences that all engage our relationship to landscape.  The "No Fishing Signs" are definitely the spiritual cousin of these works, directly engaging in some ways our industrialized relationship to the seas.  Despite it being my own work, I've never really thought of these relationships to landscape as also a relationship to the notion of Manifest Destiny.  But I think you may be onto something there.  I think I have a strong ambivalence regarding Manifest Destiny.  I see cultural and policy biases based strictly upon utilitarian relationships to the land getting us long term into a lot of trouble.  Peak oil.  Soil depletion. Collapsing oceans.  And yet there is still something seductively heroic about the mythology surrounding American Manifest Destiny.


(Jax in James Leonard's "Magic" video portrait)

KE: To continue with the American theme, how does the self-made and the hand-made inform your work?  I draw a distinction between the two in that the self-made has the aura of "pulled up by one's own bootstraps" and the hand-made is literally that: made by the artists own hands.

JL: Our relationship to the hand-made is definitely something that directly informed my work for many years.  I explored this theme mostly by actively working against it, mirroring what I saw happening in our consumer culture. As more and more industry has left the States during my lifetime, I witnessed us transforming from a nation of capable craftspersons to a nation of consumers.  I think factory made objects for most Americans are accepted as a fact of nature, as much as any stone or leaf, when in fact they are all really human contrivances.  I think for at least eight years, I was interested in directly addressing this cultural reality.  I actually find this shift in our relationship to manmade objects rather depressing.  To me it implies many members of our society getting locked into an eddy of consumerism.  Endless plastic crap.

("No Fishing" by James Leonard)

In the past four or five years, I've made something of a departure from addressing the shift in our relationship to objects from makers to consumers so directly.  This has coincided with my own personal growing interests outside my artwork in things like the slow food, slow money, sustainable living and most recently the Occupy movements.  I have at times wondered what the cultural shifts represented by these could offer contemporary art. Does contemporary art as we know it, primarily an exhibition based manifestation of the arts, even have a place at the table in a sustainable future culture?  It's not an easy question to answer.  One could run away entirely from exhibition arts and focus on something such as knitting wool caps to be sold at the Brooklyn Flea.  But after dedicating so much of my life to exhibition artwork, from our historical era and from others, that evokes deep spiritual intellectual aesthetic experiences--where the whole brain and body continuum participates in the generation of meaning--well, I'm not quite ready to walk away from that yet.  I firmly believe that an active robust internal spiritual and psychological life are essential to each of our abilities as individual productive citizens making relatively sane choices and positive contributions to the world.  I think the kind of art I produce has deep value for society, even if it is not direct utilitarian value.  So as we move into this next chapter of human culture where we in the developed world begin to restrain our consumption and alter our lifestyles, a significant amount of adjustment and reinvention of our role as artists making art for art's sake is in order.  And this is where notions of the self-made come into play.  Both within the arts and more widely as we begin to challenge and remake our culture.  It's part bootstraps and part postmodern road warrior scavenger.  Invention and recycling coexisting in the same space.

KE: Your work also has a "grand vista" quality to it, in that nothing is small, either in length (the oral histories of Jax and Lazzarus), extremely large editions of multiples (the un-Suicide Note, the "No Fishing Signs", the War Bonds) or in repetition (the figure drawings, the multi-dimensional cube drawings).  Is the goal to overwhelm the viewer and/or yourself?

JL: Scale is very important to me.  I have a fractal understanding of the universe, fractals being shapes of partial dimensions with patterns repeating over a scalar dimension.   As you zoom out our in, certain forms and shapes repeat.  It happens in coastlines.  It happens in trees and leaves.  It happens in social networks.  I can't help but see many more abstract philosophical and phenomenological aspects of our existence through this lens.  I think that sometimes I'm swapping the fractal scalar dimension of D with a time dimension of T in effort to draw out fractal like patterns of meaning that emerge over time as themes and notions seem to reiterate themselves.  This is also very akin to the phase space of any strange attractor--a concept I try to make a little more widely accessible in the Warbonds Performance.  The strange attractor is a mathematical form representing the collapse of an infinite range of possible outcomes of a given self-sustaining dynamic into a tighter range of possibilities.  In short, it's a mathematical means of proving that though something like our weather systems will never be 100% predictable, we can say with certainty that it is never going to rain gumdrops and Yankee's shortstops.

The goal never really has been to overwhelm myself or the viewer with this material.  Instead, that's always been just a side effect of the more successful ventures. Increasingly in my studio practice I am directly engaging trance states and altered states of consciousness.  In part because I think much of what I am exploring currently lies at the limits of our cultural and individual consciousness.  The multi-dimensional cubes you mention are specifically in this territory.  I started doing freehand drawings of those 4, 5 and 6 dimensional cubes in an attempt to gain some sort of direct phenomenological understanding of higher dimensional spaces--something many mathematicians and engineers regularly navigate from a numerical perspective.  But I wanted to understand these higher dimensions spatially as an artist.  The result?  A total headtrip.

KE: So, if you go into this headtrip, do you want the viewer to get lost as well?

JL: I don't think getting lost in the work is necessary.  But I think if someone really engages a number of my pieces over time--getting lost is inevitable. I spent the greater part of a decade, including two years in graduate school, studying modern complex systems theory.  I think a majority of the insoluble problems we currently face as a civilization--peak resources, peak fossil energy, over population, unavoidable significant climate change, increasingly dysfunctional systems of civic representation, collapsing financial systems--will only be able to be addressed when many of the basic understandings present in complex systems theory find their way into popular cultural understanding.  Paradoxically, I think that many of these tenets will only become relevant to most peoples as we actually begin to seriously tackle any of these problems.

I often imagine that for many people, the shattering of the heavenly spheres and the geocentric universe that accompanied, was a similarly overwhelming experience intellectually and spiritually.  During massive rapid cultural transformation, I imagine that most of us will feel like we are falling for a bit.  So I guess for the greater good of mankind, I hope we do get lost in these heady, exciting spaces for a bit.  But not so lost that we never find solid footing again.

KE: There is a tone of violence carrying through your practice as well: overtly with the Warbonds, as subjects in Lazzarus's re-telling of Captain America, and implied (the barbed wire fences, the "No Fishing Signs").  Is violence equitable with anger in your work?  If so, towards what?

JL: I don't know if it's anger.  I mean some of it likely is.  But in some cases it might be alarm.  Or in other cases just more descriptive.  Though violent, a tornado or an earthquake aren't really angry.  They may be poetically speaking.  But through many lenses, their inherent violence is just a matter of rapid change over a timescale that makes most living things, us included, horribly uncomfortable.  And in some cases, the violence that is present is more playful and boyish, like the violence in a videogame.  I think that's where parts of both "Captain America" and the "Warbonds Performance" are coming from.  Of course there are some moments of horrific clarity that suddenly drop any façade of play throughout both pieces, such as the retellings of the Tuskegee experiments or the red scare in Captain America.  And there's a moment in the Warbonds Performance where I turn to the audience and say "To turn your back on science? Well that's just hateful to our way of life."  And I mean it.  There I am angry.  I'm angry at the moronic Young Earthers who think that their religious opinion is as valid a fact as science and should be taught as such.  In general,willful ignorance makes me angry.  So does corruption.  Corruption of fact. Corruption of charity.  Corruption of good will.

Though much of my work engages deep philosophical and heady intellectual ideas, these emotional realities do find their way into pieces.  I think much of the work I do is dramatic.  I want people to feel genuine emotions that somehow loop back and touch the real world, either via very private internal experiences or shared, immediate global concerns.  And I suppose anger and it's sibling outrage are two valid, legitimate emotional responses. But as you've noted in your prior questions, so are awe and wonderment.  I think many of bounce around in our emotional response to themes as large as those that I tackle.  So I think it's only appropriate that my work illicit such wild vacillations.

DUMBO ARTS CENTER (DAC) High School Art Lab 2011 Exhibition

DUMBO ARTS CENTER (DAC) High School Art Lab 2011 Exhibition

55 Washington Street, 2nd floor, Brooklyn, NY (September 24-26 2011)

This exhibition of student work was produced by students who participated in the Dumbo Arts Center’s High School Summer Art Lab. The DAC Summer Art Lab provided a unique learning opportunity for high school students interested in art-making, community involvement and arts administration. The program sought to instill civic pride, encourage creative thinking and problem solving abilities. Students learned new art-making skills, developed new ideas and created their own works for the 2011 DUMBO Festival. This exhibition featured the work of Mir Mahmood and Isaiah Johnson who worked with teaching artists Victoria Calabro and Hiba Schahbaz. These young artists also got a chance assist Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas while the artists were installing their show GLADLY I WILL SELL FOR PROFIT, DEAR MERCHANTS OF THE TOWN MY HAT LADEN WITH SNOW in the DAC gallery.