Phone Tag: Interview with JD Reforma

Posted on February 19, 2018 by Linnea

Installation view, Coconut Republic, 2017, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

I speak with the Sydney-based artist JD Reforma about Kardashians, car parts, the American landscape, and, of course, art in this Phone Tag interview. Former Phone Tag participant Giselle Stanborough knows JD through art school and connected us for this interview. JD earned an MFA from the University of New South Wales. He often considers contemporary culture in his work, from celebrities and pop to geopolitics and imperialism, as well as his own background as an Australian born to first-generation Filipino immigrants in the suburbs of Sydney. In addition to an interdisciplinary artistic practice, JD is a writer and curator, and he currently works for the Sydney Biennale.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

LW: “If you had to briefly describe your practice, what would you say you make?”

JR: “I make a bit of everything…It is usually informed by whatever kind of idea I’m exploring. Ideally sculpture and installation. Lately a lot of video—just because the economy of it is so much more accessible to me now. I particularly like video, because I can communicate a range of interests aesthetically—subject, narrative—more so than you necessarily could in sculpture and installation. There’s an economy in it: it’s easy to produce, easy to scale, and I quite like playing with the different textures of video, like the cinematic or pastiche and collage or text. It’s a really plastic medium. But, definitely through art school and some time after, I was playing with sculpture and installation and had a very material practice.”

“The work I make is informed by a lot of ideas, but it inhabits a space of pop cultural critique, and embrace as well. I lived for a great deal of time in the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s an interesting community because it inhabits the space of the ‘Aussie battler’—of an aspirational middle class. That fed really well into my practice. I lived in a gated community. I was really interested in aspirational aesthetics, but have kind of moved away from that now.”

LW: “Looking online at work on your website I can see that, but I also see a kind of global geopolitics writ large. Is that fair?”

JR: “Yeah…. The political through the domestic.”

Nothing comes between (foreground), 2017, reconfigured Calvin Klein underwear, marble; and oK ok OK (background), 2017, site-specific computer-cut vinyl, altered Calvin Klein logos, installation view, Coconut Republic, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “What are you working on now?”

JR: “Right now I’m trying to think of a work on television. So I work—and, the way that Sydney is structured, a lot of practices are centered—around opportunities. I don’t have a studio-based practice. I work full-time, which makes it hard to have that. So you get an opportunity, you make a work. I have a show toward the end of the year…and you know when you have a show and you have an idea for a work, and you’re just trying to get them to meet in the middle somewhere? The show is around television, and the curator is great. I don’t even own a television. It’s a bit anachronistic to think of an idea for television. But I’ve really wanted to make this work for ages and ages and ages and ages about Kylie Jenner.”

“I’m taking a break mostly. I recently had an exhibition in a gallery in the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s a particularly interesting space because it’s located in this post-industrial context. There is a highway called the Princes Highway that skirts Sydney down the south coast and goes all the way through the southwestern suburbs. It’s called that because the Prince of Wales visited Australia in the 1920s. This roadway already existed and because of his visit they renamed the existing highway the Princes Highway. I never knew that backstory. Everyone knows the Princes Highway. It’s very post-industrial, geared towards car sales, car repairs, rims, supercenters—there’s an Ikea there. It’s very dreary, very neglected. There’s this one place along the Princes Highway—Tempe Tyres. It has this incredible façade where it’s just two or three stories of glass frontage built with a grid of chrome wheels.”

LW: “Oh my god.”

JR: “It’s amazing. It’s beautiful actually. It’s a perfect grid. Years and years ago it used to move. All the wheels used to move at different speeds. It’s kind of a perfect analogy of the highway itself. All these little wheels moving at different speeds and then, over time, it has completely fallen apart. They stopped getting the wheels to move because they started breaking down, they started falling out. So they haven’t replaced the wheels.”

“Everyone in Sydney knows Tempe Tyres. Particularly anyone who is from the west knows Tempe Tyres. So I took a 16:9 shot of Tempe Tyres with the road reflected in it. That was nice for me. I don’t actually do my video work; I work with collaborators in that sense. I asked a good friend of mine, Kate Blackmore, who’s also an artist, to film with me at Tempe Tyres and we sat there, trying to take video. And the guys were coming out asking us what we were doing. We were like, ‘Oh it’s an art project. Do you mind if we take a few photos and videos?’ and they were so happy for us to do it. To me, chrome is an analogy for suburban masculinity and, particularly around that area, there’s a lot of marginalized communities for whom signaling status and wealth happens through objects and hotted out cars. I was interested in making that a tribute to them in a sense.”

“Like I said at the beginning, I have a very plastic practice. I try to mold it to the context. [This work] was so specific for that particular gallery. In a way I kind of wanted it to feel as if it had always been there.”

Installation shot, Princes Highway, 2017, 55 Sydenham Road, Sydney. Photo: Stelios Papadaki

LW: “The work you showed in the space was as video?”

JR: “It was a video. Not quite 1:1 scale of the actual Tempe Tyres, but almost. I try to match ideas to contexts.”

LW: “Just judging from a few recent projects on your website, it’s not like you install a set of objects in a room; it’s really a whole room all working together as an environment.”

JR: “Yeah, an immersive environment is something I am interested in.”

LW: “So when you’re thinking about the show you have coming up, you have this idea and you know you have this physical space—you even know what it looks like. I wonder how that affects the process, and I wonder how that affects the process with the curator, because they aren’t just coming in and picking out objects and putting them in a room.”

JR: “No, no, I wish they could. It would be so much easier. [Laughs] It’s a very interesting gallery [for this next show]. It has a kind of a pentagonal shape. It houses this huge archive of Australian television and radio. I’m not so interested in making a work about Australian television and broadcast, more about the texture of television. They way that television is consumed today, which for me, largely, is through my phone, through the internet, and how sort of I grew up watching television as a part of my schedule, like when I came home from school. It’s part of your routine. Which it still is, but now, rather than it taking up a section of my day, television and the televisual run parallel, with that you consume it in 15-second grabs, or 1-minute-long grabs, rather than episodically.”

“I know it is broad to say I want to make a work about Kylie Jenner, but I quite like the Kardashians. I like them as the characters of the show but also the way in which they inhabit this kind of televisual space. They are characters but they are also family members. They have multiple shows running concurrent to each other; they have these apps which are running on another, entirely different time scale to their television shows. They also have the media landscape, which they’re feeding into, so it becomes this feedback loop. And they are broadcasting themselves through their own television space, through their social media. So it is this huge, huge, incredibly complex feedback loop which is so tightly controlled by them. It’s not so much about the Kardashians as a media empire, but more of them as these time lords in a way.”

“Now with their makeup lines, particularly Kylie Jenner’s which started and now Kim Kardashian’s, I’m thinking of them as artists, because they are working with these palettes and working with color. Anytime I’m exploring an idea, I’m also trying to think, why does this need to be considered through art? And you know the lip kits are kind of what started it. Anyone can enjoy the Kardashians or any of these reality television shows independent of contemporary art. But now that they are exploring this makeup, it kind of enters this realm of body politics and the relationship between the consumer and the body, and women and the body and color and the screen, with branding and politics.”

A Novel Merchant (performance documentation), 2015, performed as part of 48 HR Incident, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “So, Kardashians, other artists… this question is meant to be very open—who has influenced your practice?”

JR: “I’m probably more influenced by film directors, or maybe just a whole range. Film directors and photographers, Bruce Webber, Herb Writ. Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein. Paul Thomas Anderson, I love his films. Stephen Spielberg. Roni Horn, I love her work. Felix Gonzalez Torres. I love his work.”

“Who has influenced me though? I think a lot of American creatives and producers. I think it comes through in my work, that American film sense—in particular the two last works that I made, thinking about how Philippines is still so connected and filtered through an American lens. They even learn American English, and how that, alongside the way Australian culture is learned through and influenced by American culture. Even the language of comedy that I know is American comedy. So, I think that’s why a lot of my influences are American, probably mostly American vogue though.”

LW: “I though in Australia there would be a strong British influence—British humor, British whatever…”

JR: “There is quite a lot, but I never engaged too much with Ab Fab or—what’s that other one that everyone always references, it’s got John Cleese in it…”

LW: “Monty Python?”

JR: “Yeah, Monty Python, or Little Britain. I don’t watch much of that or engage in it. I don’t know why. They’re not the cultural references that were for me growing up. My dad loved Elvis and John Wayne, and my mom was obsessed with beauty pageants.”

Confidently Beautiful, with a heart, 2017, video installation, with site-specific wall-painting and computer cut adhesive vinyl, video duration 8 minutes, installation view, Halò, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “Sometimes I feel like we just stay our whole lives the way that we were when we were five. We keep so many of those same characteristics.”

JR: “I totally agree. I don’t know how many times I’ve been at an event or party and people are making these British references, and in my mind, I’m thinking ‘I really need to watch Monty Python.’ Yeah, very American, I don’t know why. Maybe because of the cultural influences my parents consumed. Also, I think I was interested in nationalism and this idea of American pride. It feels so much more acceptable than Australian pride. Australian pride is connected so much more to British colonial rule, and also thus to our kind of colonial history, this colonial legacy. You would never see in the pages of an Australian magazine Kylie Minogue draped in an Aussie flag. That’s just an image you would never see. I think there’s more of a shame celebrating something like that for us.”

LW: “There certainly is a good deal of patriotism here. Have you ever been to the U.S.?”

JR: “Yeah. Last time I was there was ages ago, in 2012.”

LW: “Did it live up to these ideas of America?”

JR: “I saw so many more U.S. flags out on balconies. Definitely I did. The size of it. America’s bigness impresses itself strongly on any visitor. And also, it looks like a film set. I remember when my cousin and I went to Las Vegas, we went to the Grand Canyon, and it is just enormous. It looks like—because it’s so big—it looks exactly how it is drawn in Road Runner. That’s the far away wall that’s been painted, and this is the middle ground, and this is the foreground where you are. Space in America feels very much constructed from a foreground, middleground, and background in that sense. It has that kind of dimensionality. I don’t know if you feel that.”

LW: “I don’t know; I’ll have to think about it. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

JR: “Probably when I was in high school. I think a lot of people start thinking of themselves an anything when they are forced to, which is when you go to university. I thought of myself as an artist then because it was the thing that I excelled at in school. At that age you’re so conditioned to do what you think you’re good at, because it will provide you the greatest advantage, so probably when I started art school is when I started thinking of myself as an artist. But I wish I had started thinking about this a bit later, because maybe I got into the wrong thing.”

“I don’t know if I still think of myself as an artist. No, I don’t. I know that when people ask me what I do, I say: ‘I work at the biennale in Sydney.’ And then I’ll say that I’m an artist. It’s hard to rationalize the latter.”

LW: “Yeah, you mentioned working for the Sydney biennale and also it coming to an end. When it ends, do you become an artist again?”

JR: “I think so. Whenever the shoe fits, I’ll wear it.”

LW: “I think it’s great to have a more flexible identity.”

JR: “Absolutely. And yet there is this cultural impetus to choose one thing or another. More and more, I’ve become less attached to that. I think of myself as someone surviving. [Laughs] And if art helps me survive on this day, then I’m an artist, and if working at the Sydney biennale helps my survival the next day, then I’ll work at the Sydney biennale. It has to be flexible.”

The Source, 2013, 1L spring water bottles, LED lights, custom MDF plinths, installation view, The Source, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photography: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “So, my next question is, what is an ideal day in the studio? But if that doesn’t fit, what is an ideal day making?”

JR: “My studio is on my phone. I keep folders of references. The thing I do with making—it sounds so tacky—but I guess what I do is create mood boards in a way.”

LW: “But you do it all on your phone?”

JR: “Lately I do, the past few years. Not because I wanted to but because I don’t have a studio. I haven’t had a studio since 2015. I’ve become really good at organizing ideas into lists, folders of images, bookmarks of links to articles or texts that I’m reading. I don’t want to say that an ideal day is on my phone, but it is on my phone, kind of across the bunch of things I’m reading. I haven’t read a book in so long. I read mainly on my phone. That’s not true; I read a real book last year, How to Train Your Virgin, one of those Badlands books. But that was because it was like 100 pages long and I read it in like 3 hours by the pool. I like the phone as a studio because it’s much more like a rhizomatic studio, to go from here to here and there to there.”

“And once that process is done, I’m up on my feet a lot. Going to the hardware store and looking at materials; going to that store and looking at materials. Going to a fabric store, looking at materials; going to a department store to buy Ralph Lauren bed sheets for material. I try to structure my studio around my day. I take a lot of photos. I think it would change if I had a studio. There would be things on the walls, and I’d collect a lot more material. Collect a lot more paper material. For now, this works.”

The Source, 2013, 1L spring water bottles, LED lights, custom MDF plinths, installation view, The Source, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Photography: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy JD Reforma

LW: “My last question is whether it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, like a Sydney, and you know it’s expensive and there’s a lot going on and institutions. Or, on the other hand, to be in a more remote, smaller place where you can focus on making.”

JR: “I actually think I was much more productive when I didn’t live in the city. When I was living at home, it was about a two-hour commute. I think I was productive in order to fill that time in which I didn’t feel productive, which is when I was commuting. There’s definitely benefits to both. The seclusion, that feeling of alienation, can be really rich and nourishing as an artist. I feel like a nut saying that.”

“In the city, obviously, you have access to institutions; to go see, interact; you have community. I think definitely if we’re talking about practicality as an artist, it is probably easier to live in a big city because there’s just so much with networks and feedback that we have understood to be critical to an artist’s practice. But I don’t think that you can’t be an artist in the regions or in the suburbs. In Australia, there’s actually a lot of support for artists outside the center. In a sense there’s a lot of institutional and government support, but in a way it still feels like supporting marginalized artists is a way of feeding the center. When I lived in Ingleburn, which is where my parents are living, I got a lot of support from institutions giving me shows and whatever, but there wasn’t necessarily an attempt to create that kind of a community out there. But having said that, there has been much more of an effort to create centers in Western Sydney that stay in Western Sydney, which is nice. But I guess, the answer would be both.”

LW: “Totally. Thank you.”

JR: “You’re welcome.”

Phone Tag: Interview with Giselle Stanborough

Posted on September 23, 2017 by Linnea

Giselle Stanborough, Giselle Dates, 2016, performance documentation, photo by Zan Wimberley

This August, I Skyped with Giselle Stanborough, an intermedia artist who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, having received her MFA in 2015 from the University Of New South Wales. Prior Phone Tag participant Marian Tubbs met Giselle through mutual friends in Sydney. Coincidentally Giselle recently moved into Marian’s former living space, a live-work space intended by the local government to foster artists through subsidized rent for a year. Giselle and Marian also share an interest in the permutations of identity on the internet. Currently Giselle is developing a series that relates online dating and the gallery experience, drawing parallels between the expectations people can bring to both.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

LW: “What are you working now? Where are you focusing your energies?”

GS: “I have this ongoing project that uses internet dating services, like Tinder and OK Cupid as well as a site that I made, that organizes to go on dates in galleries and particular exhibitions. It will be having another iteration in a year in Melbourne. We rejig the content for whatever particular exhibition it will be a part of, whatever particular city. I just started looking at how to change the work for that context, which involves a lot of sitting at the computer. I’ll be doing a lot of that this week.”

LW: “To back up, could you describe this project? It’s connected to your website GiselleDates.com, right?”

GS: “That’s right. I guess the project is a way to look at those high lofty ideals about art—connecting consciousness, overcoming existential loneliness, creating deeper connections with another kind of experience of life in the world—and to look at how that exists outside of the gallery and in people’s daily life. So it is trying to create a kind of cohesion between the goals of art and dilemmas of isolation, of consciousness that is not in the silo of contemporary art but just part of life, like people trying to connect on social media and apps and stuff. It’s also to try and have conversations about art with people who don’t have a vested interest in art. Which I always find really interesting and refreshing.”

LW: “Absolutely. I think the most challenging thing is when somebody who’s not into art asks, ‘What is this? Why is this art?’”

GS: “That’s the best question. That’s the most important one. And you can forget to ask that.”

Giselle Stanborough, Giselle Dates, 2016, Installation documentation, photo by Zan Wimberley

LW: “So for this project, you are going on dates with people. Do they know it is an art project?”

GS: “Yeah. Just because it is an art project doesn’t mean I’m not dating them. I’ve had relationships that have come out this project.”

LW: “There we go! That’s an outcome you don’t always see.”

GS: “Art can be a conduit to connection or a conversation piece for a day, rather than—I don’t know if you’ve been on many dates with people that you met online: they tend to be quite rehearsed and really boring and really career-oriented. At least the appeal of going to an art gallery is that it gives us something else to talk about…that’s not a monologue. You can have conversations that you don’t anticipate.”

LW: “Do you think of it as performative?”

GS: “Yeah. But, I think of most things as performative.”

LW: “Well, maybe dating is already performative…”

GS: “Exactly. Yes, it’s performative, but what isn’t?”

LW: “Is there an exhibition display when you show this project?”

GS: “There has been, but I’m not sure if there will be for this upcoming show in Melbourne. I’m going to make a series of ads. I know that in America you have the Bachelor [TV show]…”

LW: “Yes.”

GS: “…and I’m interested in that performance of heterosexuality. I’m interested in the idea of bourgeois heterosexuality as performance. So, to make a series of ads that sort of position me as a bachelorette-style person, which internet dating profiles do anyway. Those will be on screens in the galleries, but I often use screen spaces that aren’t technically for exhibition—screens that are out by the front desk or near the elevators. Or they might have user feedback screens. I use those screens because they have a kind of anti-viewer, art/not art way of being experienced by people who walk into the gallery.”

Giselle Stanborough, The Lonely Tail, 2012, 4 channel digital video (still), 3 mins

LW: “One of the things that I think is interesting is how you’re inserting yourself—not a character, not some idea—but yourself into these digital spaces. Is it important that it be you?”

GS: “Yeah, it is. Questions of selfhood are really, really complicated.

I think in a time of user-generated mediums and pop culture, we’re used to having an abstracted sense of our own self. Like: ‘Yeah, it’s me but it’s not the whole of me. It’s a part of me.’ It is a way that we are accustomed to accepting our positionality in the world. We are too big to be in any one spot at once, on a Facebook profile or a Tinder profile or a performance art work or with our mom, but we can accept that part as very authentic. Does that make sense?”

LW: “It does. At the same time, I think people often have an idea of the internet as this space where you can create the perfect self.”

GS: “The interesting thing is, yes, you can create your perfect self, but you can also be your most loathsome, despicable self. People say our generation is narcissistic, and there is an awful horrible element as well. It isn’t an experience of yourself from behind your own eyebrows—you’re already abstracted from yourself. And it’s not just self-love online; there’s a lot of self-loathing as well.”

LW: “You describe a lot of screen time in your practice. How does that figure into an ideal day in the studio, and what does an ideal day in the studio look like for you?”

GS: “An ideal day… I also do installation elements or physical or performative component, so I would like to do screen stuff, do some animating, and then I would like to do stuff with my hands. Today, for example, I put on all these stupid little rhinestones with this glue stick for a work. It came in this stupid little rose box but the rose was crushed from being sent from China and I had to set the iron on the lowest temperature and iron out the little fake leaves. It was nice, doing stuff with my hands. I don’t know if it was an ideal day, but it was pretty good.”

Giselle Stanborough, Lozein True Love, 2016, digital composite

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

GS: “In terms of other artists—it’s not a very unique answer—but Mark Leckey has really had a profound impact on the way that I see art and objects intercepting, and an interest in the precedents of cyber space. Instead of saying ‘Oh, this is so new. There was nothing like it before,’ Leckey looks at other parallels, even heaven or the way that the internet carries a narrative about where to draw the line between what’s human and what’s not. Or what’s animal, what’s mechanical, what’s divine. Those sorts of things that have been going on for a long time, and that cyber space is the most recent type of.”

LW: “When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

GS: “It fades in and out…I don’t really think of it as something that I am, but as something that I do. Every now and again, when I’m going overseas and I write my occupation down on the immigration paper, then I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m an artist.’ I try and stay away from those identity things about being an artist. Because then I’m scared about the kinds of things that come along with it, like art being middle class or male. I just don’t even: I take little baby steps, so maybe I don’t think of myself that way even yet.

As well, I know a lot of people that work in the arts and are artists, all my neighbors here. When things are normalized, they sort of become invisible. It is just a part of our lives and we don’t think about what that means in relation to other careers. You don’t really know what other people do. What do stockbrokers do? Actually do? They feel that way about us. What do I actually do all day? ‘Oh, I iron out shitty little rose leaves from the internet.’”

LW: “You’re in Sydney. Do you like it?”

GS: “I think about this. Some people have a strong sense of place. For me, it is not that significant. Maybe because the internet has so much to do with my practice. Sydney is all right, so are other places.

[Laughs]

No, Sydney is awesome. Thank you, city of Sydney, for subsidizing my rent.”

Giselle Stanborough, Lozein Pride, 2016, digital composite

LW: “Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, a Sydney or a New York, with all that entails: expensive rent, opportunities to show work, to be in a cultural scene, or to be in a small place where you can focus on making and maybe not have all of the pressures of rent or making it?”

GS: “That’s an interesting question. In 2015, I moved back home for a while, which was really quite isolating but also kind of a cleansing experience, where you find your own values. When you’re in the big city, it is easy to get swept up. Things and cultural economy have their own kind of impacts. After that period at home, I didn’t give a shit. There’s all sort of weird things that are part of the industry, rather than art itself with a capital A. I find after that period it’s easier for me to be like, ‘Oh, this is about the manifestation of art and capitalism in Sydney’ or ‘Oh, that’s like capital A art.’ Leaving Sydney for a while for a quiet place was really good for me, but I don’t think it is sustainable. There’s not as much employment opportunity.

Also, Sydney is not a big city like New York. It’s a small city. New York is a big city. I think a lot of Australians have a reverence for centers of America and Europe, and I think now we are looking other spaces. Post-colonial narratives allow us to look to our closer neighbors for other ways that art impacts society.”

LW: “Are you thinking of anything in particular when you say that, a certain place?”

GS: “I’ve been interested in a post-colonial kind of queer identity politics, and looking particularly at a Southeast Asian context for that. A lot of that does come through Sydney because they are our neighbors and because of the diaspora. It’s something that I’ve really enjoyed watching come to the art scene here.”

LW: “Well, those are my questions. Thank you for participating in Phone Tag.”

GS: “Thanks so much!”

Phone Tag: Interview with Marian Tubbs

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Linnea

Marian Tubbs, i am series of chemical changes, 2017, Pigment print on silk

Earlier this spring, I Skyped with Marian Tubbs, an Australian artist based in Sydney. Previous Phone Tag participant Kate Newby connected us, and in this interview we discuss how the two met in New York, some of the ramifications of operating as an artist with a more international purview and how that can relate to social connections. Marian investigates images and materials that are so poor or ubiquitous as to be unnoticed, often sourced from the digital, through sculptural objects and installations that are undergirded by a philosophical framework.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

Marian Tubbs, Quiet revolutions and enfant terribles, 2017, Installation view

LW: “Kate mentioned she knew you through a show at SculptureCenter.”

MT: “Yeah. We come from proximate worlds—she’s originally from New Zealand and I’m from Australia—but exhibit and work a fair amount overseas. I became familiar with her work through shows that were on in Sydney at galleries that I also work with, but strangely we did not meet until installing in the cold underground caverns of SculptureCenter. I took a break from my mess, walked around the corner and said “Hey I’m Marian” and she was like, “No way, I’m Kate.” When we finally met, it was lovely, there was a genuine appreciation of each other’s work. This year she is in the Sydney Biennale and I’ll work on some stuff in NYC so we will get to hang again. We’ve talked of doing a dreamy show together…”

LW: “So you were in New York recently, and you’ve been here before as well, right?”

MT: “Yes, I’ve been visiting New York since 2012 for things; first I came to present at a philosophy conference. And the next year, when I was running away from my PhD, I lived there for six months. I was pretty young and into seeing what the place was about. It’s a great city to drop out in, because there’s so much going on you don’t feel like you’re dropping out. I think those months were the most that I ever enjoyed the place— I had no agenda, so I could just go walking, do yoga, and see music. It was low pressure, though I ended up being in a couple of exhibitions before I left. Since then, I’ve come back to be in or curate shows.”

LW: “Tell me about your philosophy degree.”

MT: “It’s a Doctor of Philosophy, practice-led—…could be singular to Australian universities?”

LW: “So related to your art practice?”

MT: “Yes, very much. My PhD was on aesthetics and philosophy. Specifically how poor materiality, like found objects, images, or words play roles, as minor voices in artworks and mess with value. I wrote about practices that I learn from, philosophy, and my own work.”

LW: “So was it separate from your practice of making, or a chance to think through issues related to making?”

MT: “Yeah, I used direct examples from making to direct the questioning. Finding a voice for this can be tough but ultimately rewarding. It’s something that I hope continues to have a future in Australia, but I think we’ll be fighting for as long as cuts keep happening and the conservative government keeps being in place.”

Marian Tubbs, Abstract Sex, 2016, Installation view at the Bard Hessel Museum

LW: “If you had to say in a nutshell what you make, what do you make?”

MT: “I guess I look for objects and materials on- and offline that are not valued highly or thought through very much and by playing with them, I change this for myself, that’s the personal aspect, deepening my being in the world by relating to stuff. I think this is the nice affinity with Kate’s work. That we both go on walks and look at things and kind of see outside what objects are and can be.

I pull and push the ‘real’ into the virtual, or the ‘virtual’ into the real. For instance, I take a bad photograph of something, flatten it so it becomes a video assemblage, or the reverse: find something online and animate to give it a new narrative property, print it out and make a photo-sculpture. Right now I am heading toward some augmented reality stuff.”

LW: “Looking online at your work, it seemed like there is a dialogue with abstraction.”

MT: “Definitely, yeah. It’s funny, you know, it depends who you talk to whether your work is didactic or obscure—”

LW: “Or whether either of those qualities is desirable—”

MT: “Whether you need to have less narrative or, ‘Be less of a difficult artist, Marian.’ The linear and the non-linear I find interesting, because I think that’s where the poetry is. When the work is saying something overt, something that’s kind of really obvious, there’s another abstraction to it because it’s not necessarily me. Rather, I take floating statements, or memes that float around that I find I have some attraction to, but they’re abstract because simply appropriating does not literally communicate my opinion. This could be versus when you get the material or color just right, and it needs no explanation and you hope that someone gets that.”

Marian Tubbs, Contemporary Monsters, 2016, Installation view at Minerva, Sydney

LW: “What are you working on right now?”

MT: “Academic things. I’m writing a lecture that I’m giving loads of attention to because it’s a complicated subject, on queer digital art, or ‘queering the digital.’ This is a guest lecture for a theory course to a large cohort of students across fine arts, theory, design, and media. I’m doing very detailed research because I think it’s a) necessary, and b) I question if I’m even the one that should be giving such a lecture. But I do work with the digital and the feminine, and I’m also a massive fan of so, so many queer artists. I want to avoid presenting information that presents ‘queering’ as a co-optable methodology, so I’m excited for the complexity.

In terms of my own practice, I’m working on new sculptures, which are following on from some of the SculputreCenter’s works, creating these gestural objects and mosses with very fast curing glasses and resins. I’m creating these fairly weird pieces that are a cross in between the organic and plastics manufacturing. I’m also working on getting a studio.

I have a few shows coming up around Sydney, all quite different, curated and collaborative. A show in a curator couple’s house, a group exhibition with the gallery I work with here, Minerva, also another at a relatively young gallery called COMA, and a collaborative sculpture show—for which I am making work with a best friend. I have also just won an award, that I am going to use to assist in changing up my work. Instead of being immediately responsive, I’m going gestate on developing skills (digital and analog) and make a couple of exhibitions over the next while with longer investment.”

LW: “Are you making new work for these smaller shows?”

MT: “Yes. It’s exciting. It’s all in the starting processes right now, calling in favors, moving stuff around.”

LW: “Right. Have you had a studio before in Sydney? Why are you looking for a new one?”

MT: “Right now I live in a place for artists that has been subsidized by the city, and we all have to move in a month, so I have to find something. Even a desk space can be extraordinarily expensive in Sydney.”

LW: “What’s an ideal day like in the studio?”

MT: “I remember saying this when I used to have a studio: that it was simply half day in the studio, half day at the beach. The beach and water in general is productive for me, staring at the water all my thoughts can be emptied out. So ideally a sunrise beach swim, then get to the studio: think, stare at walls, play some music, read, figure stuff out, maybe organize some stuff. Return to the beach, run or yoga. Then do that again the next day—that would be the perfect life.”

Marian Tubbs, Contemporary Monsters, 2016, Installation view at Minerva, Sydney

LW: “It sounds good. I don’t know Sydney, but it sounds like you have the New York issues that we have with rent. One of my questions is: do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city like Sydney or New York where there’s a strong cultural scene with museums and galleries and opportunities but it’s expensive, or to be somewhere totally quiet—like the beach—where maybe the focus could just be on making?”

MT: “If I retreated, maybe that would be a sort of curiosity and people would continue to contact me, but there’s that drop out factor. I live in Sydney, rather than up north near water and family, because I earn a living here, so it feels kind of square at the moment. I don’t make work that sells immediately so I need to be employed—and I also find it very wonderful to work with young minds whose politics are fantastic, these conversations give me a lot of energy. I can’t speak for every artist—as the questions beckons—but there are indeed pros and cons to removing yourself from the circuit for sure. That said you can drop out in the city as well and stop being social.”

LW: “You said in passing that you don’t make work that sells, but you have been supported by different grants.”

MT: “Yes, over the last couple of years I received a couple of grants. Also sometimes pieces sell, mostly overseas and to institutions. Actually I’ve had unexpected and great support from commercial galleries. I just try to cover my ears sometimes—not hear too much—when they look at works and go ‘Oh, these will sell.’ I don’t want that to filter through as an impression impacting what I make next. That’s why I shaped my life so that teaching would be integral, so I could figure out a way to pay rent first and not get to a certain age feeling hungry that I needed to accelerate a career. If that makes sense.”

LW: “I know what you mean. It is just an interesting thing to function within that system and resist that system as well.”

MT: “Sure, and it’s not ever a refusal toward someone wanting to be with a work, take it home, or buy it—that’s such a pleasure for me. It’s about not overtly selling into a market but maybe creating new affections, we come back to challenging ascriptions of value here. And taking the risk to do this, means often as an artist, embarrassing myself or making things that don’t look like something that I recognize or have words for.”

Marian Tubbs, Untitled, 2016, Digital print on vinyl, acrylic, 50 × 60 cm

LW: “Who, or what, has influenced your practice?”

MT: “Well maybe this is two-fold. I find an ongoing silly dialogue with friends inspiring, being in touch with other peoples’ lives and chatting about trivial things while I’m doing things. There are possibilities now to be virtual with each other no matter what you’re doing or where. During day-to-day work, and when travelling, we keep joking and pushing each other, sharing generative conversations that could be read as Dada-ist, nonsensical, or neoliberal strategy. A massive sense of humor is super inspiring, because you can say, ‘Yes, you’re doing all of these things, but none of it really matters: its art and its funny and serious.’

In addition I read when I can and spend time thinking about stuff I don’t understand.

In terms of artists that inspire, I think of those who show moments of throwing absolutely everything at it. Those that have gone for the immortality of their work tend to capture me…”

LW: “I liked how you talked about how conversations with friends kept you going. Do you have a strong community in Sydney?”

MT: “Yes, the Sydney scene is very supportive and defiantly growing, no matter the lack of structural support. My convos are also international. As my work spread via the internet, I’ve found cute friends I have never physically met. Being fortunate to have had a few shows overseas and interstate, you meet the people you love and continue to talk to.”

Marian Tubbs, Contemporary Monsters, 2016, Digital video built with gaming technology (still), 6 min 10 sec

LW: “I wonder, do you think your work works well in an international circuit or is there a local element? I’m thinking about how you’re working so much with the internet and that’s the conceit of the internet: it’s this free, open international space. “

MT: “It should be, but it isn’t completely. In terms of the market, it favors material objects. There are obviously some name artists that have gotten through but deterritorialisation is a post-modern idea/fallacy; everything is still centralized and commerce happens in major cities. So conversations about your work can go to different places and that’s incredible, but also it is not a complete game changer. I am very much involved in my local community, but I wouldn’t say my work looks ‘Sydney’ or ‘Australian’ other than the fact that a lot of beach vibes seep into my works.”

LW: “Final question: when did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

MT: “I think I was in year three—that’s like when I was eight or nine years old. I did a drawing in class and I think it was good. I went home and I kept it and I realized drawing was knowledge, it was thinking. There was also some minor support, you know how family or faculty can see you are interested in something and praise you. It was that mix of doing something that I really loved with an inch of encouragement, and I was like, ‘That’s it then.’ ”

LW: “Great. Well, thank you for participating.”

MT: “A pleasure.”

Marian Tubbs, Vulgar Latin, 2014, Digital video (still), 5 min 39 sec

Linnea West

Category Archives: life

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