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.

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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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”