Tom Lawson the Uses of Representation in Flash Art

Liz Glynn, Made in L.A. 2012, 2012. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

I met with Liz Glynn on July 17 in her Chinatown studio to discuss the work she created for the "Made in LA" 2012 biennial at the Hammer Museum this summer. The three-part installation—with multilayered references to Egyptian pyramids, smuggling tunnels into Gaza, and other spiritual and fabric trade routes, legitimate and not—continues an investigation of the intersection of antiquity and the present that began with her 2008 functioning, The 24 Hr Roman Reconstruction Projection, in which she invited people to assist her build and then destroy a cardboard model of aboriginal Rome. Other related projects include the 2010 III , for which she built a pyramid of shipping pallets on a hilltop in East LA equally the site of a serial of performances, and the 2012 showroom "No Second Troy," which considers the parallel journeys of Trojan gold and Turkish workers to Germany.

THOMAS LAWSON: Let's start by talking about the work at the Hammer. To me, there is something very compelling most the used pallets, the worn wood, the scuff marks, all the accumulated prove of use and age placed against the clean white walls of the gallery. I don't quite know what I want to say about this, but there's something about the presence of that aged lumber in a museum context that seems very poignant somehow. It gives a kind of gravitas to the construction. Maybe it is that sense of overuse, of material that's been worked to death in some manner. You have used these shipping pallets earlier to dandy effect in the pyramid piece in Due east LA. Where did that come from?

LIZ GLYNN: The first time I used them I was interested in the pallets as this anonymous signifier of commerce. They're used in trucking and shipping and used to carry a variety of unlike goods and often used for different commodities over time. They are also vigorously recycled: They get cleaved down; the parts get reused over and over. No single pallet shows any record of its own history, but collectively they bear the marks of a history of this move across the country and even around the world. At that place are a lot of blackness marks that you'll see on the wood, and they're from forklift skids lifting the slice from underneath. I've been using the fabric as a signifier of bearding movement, in a sense.

TL: Which is central to everything that y'all practice.

LG: Yep, very much. I've been thinking near information technology in relation to work that I used to make when I lived in New England or in New York, where there's a lot of edifice cloth that has this very precious surface quality to it, suggesting very specific histories. Merely at that place's something about the interchangeable nature of the pallets. Each one has traveled in a specific management; information technology feels to me more like the motion of people rather than the motility of one individual over fourth dimension. So it's this mass motility, which I similar.

TL: The installation here consists of three pieces?

LG: Iii pieces, aye. When you lot enter the space, it's intentionally somewhat obfuscating. There's a hole cutting into i of the walls, this wooden framed space through which y'all peer into the showtime work, Passage (Giza / Gaza), which is a tunnel that creates a perspectival illusion of space opening up through the wall. When you come effectually the smaller museum wall, you come across the side of the tunnel and across from it you lot see a large bank of similar material, which is the reclaimed forklift pallet slatting. Simply when you lot plough that corner, that bank of forklift pallet slatting is revealed to be a set of drawers, which are painted various colors. If you open the drawers, you discover that they contain a variety of objects that are fabricated of bandage lead and ballistic fabric with resin. These objects are all copies of items that were reportedly smuggled under the border from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. This slice is called Anonymous Needs and Desires. Since the Battle of Gaza in 2007, when Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, there has been a proliferation of smuggling tunnels.

Liz Glynn, Anonymous Needs and Desires (Gaza / Giza), 2012. Detail. Cast lead, dimensions variable. Photo: Gaea Woods. Courtesy of Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles.

TL: And these objects range from garlic bulbs to jars of baby food to personal electronics like BlackBerries, right? I hateful, it's quite a range of—

LG: It'south a range from goods of necessity to appurtenances of almost total fantasy. At that place's a Dungeness crab somewhere in in that location. Tramadol was one of the most interesting objects: It's a pain pill, and information technology's maybe one of the about popular recreational drugs in the Gaza Strip. It has a balmy numbing effect, and people who employ it say information technology helps them deal with life in this tumultuous time. In that location'due south also a lot of edifice material in the piece: copies of wooden studs and also metal studs, and sacks of cement. Some of these items were banned for their potential dual use, for bomb making every bit well as construction. But then at that place are too items that seem more romantic. In the far chiffonier, there's a wedding ceremony apparel and a lemon tree that'southward hung upside downwardly. There'southward ane gentleman who told the story of having had a lemon tree brought in to put on his balustrade so that he could be assured of having fruit through the year.

When ancient Egyptian artifacts are displayed in museums, one oftentimes sees bits of former nutrient or some of these crates and things that were made of woods only simply coated with enough layers of some sort of pigment or something that they held upward over time, too cached in the desert with no moisture to rot them. The idea of this sort of very fragile material indelible, I think, is really poignant in some way.

TL: So the material and the objects all speak in ways big and small-scale near globalization and merchandise. How do y'all think of course hither?

LG: Well, the forms too reference sure histories. For case, the form of the large wooden tunnel called Passage is based on the architecture of the G Gallery inside the Slap-up Pyramid, which is the tunnel that descends into the rex'south sleeping room. There are a lot of historic etchings of this space, and I used these somewhat dated representations rather than photographs I might accept taken when I actually visited the pyramids during my research. Despite picturing peradventure fictive scenes from the colonial era, these etchings provide a good representation of the morphology of the interior forms.

TL: Right, and and then that tunnel is near a purple tomb and so the other is about smugglers.

LG: What was interesting to notice is that the entry shafts of some of the tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip are congenital out of very similar wood that's used to cover the floors of the purple tombs to ease access for tourists. And and then while the shape of these underground passages varies enormously, there is a similar feel to them materially.

TL: This play of similarity suggests big metaphorical readings—the pharaohs were buried with all the stuff they would need to survive in an afterlife; the Palestinians smuggle all these necessities clandestine in order to survive this life. Y'all were talking the other night well-nigh the politics of the situation at that place: How practice yous see that playing out in the work? Or does it?

LG: What's interesting to me is the fact that a lot of the objects smuggled in aren't necessarily specific to the political conflict of that region. As I kept researching the tunnels, I became more and more than interested in the fact that what'due south actually smuggled over the border is less representative of the political imbalance in that location and more about unproblematic human demand. I recollect that people meet the situation in the Gaza Strip, because of the religious history involved and the ramifications of that, as insolvable or completely intractable. So I think what the piece is trying to do in some way is to open up the idea that at that place'due south something very ordinary and recognizable at the core of life in the Gaza Strip. WithBearding Needs and Desires, the thought is, rather than think well-nigh information technology every bit a humanitarian crisis or political conflict, call back virtually the lives of these people. Instead of thinking about the disharmonize as this inapproachable thing that we can't bear on, call up most the situation as something that has implications that are more than universal in terms of the human ability to deal with life.

Liz Glynn, Made in LA 2012, 2012. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

TL: And that's presumably where the open up-ended performative aspect of the piece of work comes in. Your public can come and move things around either in the space or throughout the museum, and in doing this potentially become empathetically engaged in the deed of smuggling.

LG: Yeah, part of the idea behind casting the objects in lead is that fifty-fifty though the objects are very small, they are incredibly heavy. Some of them are much more identifiable to united states, and they are very pocketable—something like a BlackBerry or an iPod tin can only conveniently slip into your pocket. I've besides specifically worked with the museum to position the security officeholder outside of the infinite so that you're able to handle the objects behind the cabinets with no 1 watching you.

TL: Then y'all're setting up a temptation. Or an opportunity.

LG: Yeah, the opportunity, I think. But as well, I'g someone who is hyperaware of having a guard at your dorsum. I'm ever the person who, in spite of knowing how close I can get, ever leans as well close to the sculpture.

TL: Using lead, equally you said, gives these objects a weight that they wouldn't take in real life. But atomic number 82 is a base of operations metallic; information technology carries within it a sense of transformation?

LG: Information technology does. It's one of the alchemical bases for making gold. Another reason I chose to employ the lead was that the Israeli armed services functioning that occurred prior to the border controls condign much tighter was known every bit Functioning Bandage Lead, as in bullets, which seemed kind of chilling.

But for experiential reasons, I am interested in the weight of these objects in your pockets. I actually like the idea that this weight gives you a heightened awareness of these small things as you're moving through the museum and that this might signify kind of an emotional weight to them.

Lead wasn't a material that I'd worked with before, but when we kickoff did them in that location are the unexpected qualities that sally, similar that pb is really malleable and so merely hammering it will yield a mark and y'all can near stick a fingernail into the pieces and leave a marking on them.

TL: Which means you can rapidly get to that feeling of used-ness that you become on the pallets, I guess?

LG: The pieces are clear-coated, but over fourth dimension the metal will oxidize and it volition plow black, so they have to be recoated or polished upwardly. I similar that it doesn't feel similar a stable metal, that information technology feels like something that's constantly beingness used and sort of live in some way.

TL: You're from the Due east Coast, only now yous're based here in Los Angeles. How come up you lot're doing and so much research in the eastern Mediterranean expanse?

LG: Information technology'due south always been a fashion to talk well-nigh both emotional and political ideas that I'thou interested in. At CalArts, when I tried to brand piece of work based on references that were a lot more contemporary, I found that people had already made up their minds, and information technology was harder for them to enter the work.

TL: Give me an example.

LG: I was trying to make a serial of sculptures that had something to do with Buckminster Fuller, and instantly people would say, "Utopia failed." I wanted to accost something about possibility or human agency, just that was immediately brusk-circuited. So that was when I started developing the 24 60 minutes Roman Reconstruction Project, every bit a less direct way to talk about these things. The truism that Rome wasn't built in a day had been used politically equally an excuse for why Iraq could not be fixed or New Orleans rebuilt afterward Hurricane Katrina. I was interested in a physical, performative refutation of this, looking in a more historical sense at empires ascent and falling and thinking of it as a metaphor for the American situation.

I visited Egypt in June 2011, and so six months after the revolution happened, and the younger people that I met just walking around were all incredibly excited. Many of them used the analogy that the time of the corking pyramids and the pharaohs was the terminal great moment in Egyptian history and that now nosotros've hitting the 2d. Whether it proves to exist that significant, I recollect, is much more complicated than that. But that thought of approaching the moment with that sense of history really struck home to me.

In the great pyramids, in that location's this very elaborate physical architecture that is actually a representation for the idea of the afterlife. And the way this metaphor was negotiated in real time was through the elaborate rituals laid out in the Book of the Dead. These rituals immune the deceased to enter the eternal land and alive at that place, with different chapters describing different destinations and the interactions necessary and expected.

Then in III , the starting time pyramid slice that I did [in 2010], the idea was to borrow themes from the Book of the Dead to talk about the kind of uncertainty and superstition that maybe framed our thinking in the context of the fiscal crisis. I was specifically thinking about myself and a lot of the other artists I know, using all these kinds of puddle-jumping ways of dealing with our own financial situations or our own uncertainty about what we're doing in the earth—that whole, "if I pay this nib and not that ane this month, if I exercise this and hope that that bear witness works out" scenario. From this kind of trying to get through to the other side, information technology doesn't seem similar much of a leap to the anonymous transgression of smuggling, whether it'due south trying to become through to the place where you're safer or getting through this skilful that will improve the quality of your life.

Liz Glynn, III , 2010. Reclaimed wooden pallets, sixteen x 27 x 27′. Courtesy of the artist and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles.

At some signal, I realized I was drawing pictures of myself sleeping in the back of a automobile, thinking about squeezing through things, or near unlike points in people's lives that had go uncomfortable. So in the work, something like the specific situation on the border between the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip becomes a stand-in for other ideas of passage, transgression, and anonymous movement. There is definitely a way that I remember some of the themes are much larger and more archetypal. When I was making the drawings for the slice, I ended up only making all these drawings of tunnels over and over, thinking most the office of lightness and dark in painting, or how it functions architecturally inside the pyramids; lightness and dark, thinking about motility between life and death.

TL: You have talked about your travel and almost making drawings as a way of thinking through the work. Tin can you talk a bit more virtually your procedure? I mean, you talk about developing your drawings; there'south the inquiry; there's the travel. How does it start and where does it—

LG: It ordinarily starts with a passing reference in some other text I've been reading for some other project. In this case, I'd done a serial of smaller, really site-specific projects with nonprofits, and looking back at that piece of work after a twelvemonth, I was very unhappy with them. It felt like I was responding to very specific things merely that I needed to figure out in a larger sense what I wanted the work to deal with in the globe. At that fourth dimension we were doing a form on cultural capital at The Public Schoolhouse, which got interesting only when people started talking nearly when they had gotten paid or not for museum shows, the precarious nature of their teaching jobs, and what their lives were actually similar. I realized that conversations similar that can be very hard merely generative and that I wanted to transpose that kind of information into an environment that wasn't just discursive but was more emotional. I wanted to get at the emotions and anxieties, the existent and valid responses to a state of affairs that is usually dealt with objectively through journalism.

The fact that I had washed 3 meant that the events in Tahrir Square resonated, and I began reading more about Egypt, going back historically simply too reading news reports. Thanks to Google News, I was able to read investigative reports in papers ranging from the Christian Science Monitor to the Israeli daily Haaretz. And it was interesting because the politics of each site vary and so widely: Some are highlighting drugs and guns, and others mention milk and baby food. In the case of the aboriginal Egyptian material, I looked at a lot of the British and American archaeologists who first excavated the peachy pyramids, photos from that menses. I also got interested in the Egyptomania at the turn of the century, along with an interest in blackness magic and other strange undercurrents at the aforementioned fourth dimension.

I spent several months doing this kind of research, and then I went to Egypt and tried to see as many things as I could immediate. I emailed some of the English-speaking reporters who had reported on the smuggling tunnels, but no one was there at the time. I went to Cairo hoping that I could go and just experience walking around the street, but it was actually very difficult, equally the cultural gap was a lot vaster than I anticipated. I've traveled a lot in Europe but by myself and walking around had never been an upshot, but suddenly existence an American woman in a Middle Eastern country was sort of like, "Oh, correct, I'm not supposed to be doing this. I should be getting a motorcar everywhere." Which didn't stop me from doing it for another week. I went and looked at all the pyramids, visited the Valley of the Kings, shot photos, made drawings, went to the Egyptian Museum. At that place, I really cried within the beginning xxx minutes considering it'due south so pitiful. It'southward completely overwhelming with the number and wealth of artifacts in comparison with the Met or anywhere else. And they're all kept in, like, dusty cases, mostly without identification tags or labels. The King Tut room and the Ramses room were actually properly lit, but the rest of the museum is lined with cabinets full of jade chaplet or little amulets or any and no notification of what tomb they're from. In part, the idea of these sets of drawers in the Hammer piece came from thinking a lot about a major national museum that foregrounds its storage in its main galleries so that you can apprehend the vastness of the collection, and then also of the history that represents.

I went to Egypt thinking at that place were two possible pieces for the Hammer. There was this 1, or another slice that would have been called The Museum of eighteen Days, which would have been all monumental sculptures based on ephemera documented during the protests and some of the artifacts from the Egyptian Museum that were damaged during that time. Because of the incertitude around the future of the revolution, this project didn't align with the gestalt that is a year of planning leading to a bear witness.

Once I'd decided on the piece, I made a number of models and I apace realized that I wanted the tunnel to penetrate the wall because information technology felt very important to implicate the establishment and the museum, or the idea of a museum, in some way. I wanted to bespeak that the establishment was somehow engaged. And so I made a number of models and drawings, then over a couple months, in conversation with the preparators and the curators, figured out which wall it would be OK to cutting into relative to the rest of the exhibition design, equally other artists adjacent to me were shifting plans as well. We constitute a section of wall that could be penetrated, and I had the general proportions for the tunnel so we started edifice the tunnel. And one of the things that makes my life very difficult is that I can't offset making anything until I've allow the research settle a lot and know what I am making and why. And then when I start making it there'due south this whole other fix of bug that ascend. I spent about five months trying to find someone in LA who would cast lead, and there was no one; it turned out that I concluded up mailing all the molds up to a company in the Bay Area. And then I would get these apartment-rate Priority Mail boxes dorsum full of lead. Information technology was the biggest abuse of the postal service. But that was how I concluded upward casting all of the objects. And coming to the final stretch, I decided to colour-code the drawers, rather than face up them with the forklift pallet slatting, which seemed inaccessible. I had wanted the drawers to be approachable only mysterious. I hesitated at get-go only decided to add a color-coding arrangement so that the objects are originally placed in appropriate places—red for illicit substances, yellow is nutrient, slate blue is technology, night blue is building material, white is fuel. At that place might be i or two more than. There'southward 1 that's clothing; I recall it's a turquoise.

Liz Glynn, Made in L.A. 2012, 2012. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

TL: So when you were talking virtually resetting the installation from time to fourth dimension that's about putting the things dorsum in the correct colour-coded areas?

LG: Yeah, because the piece is interactive, people tin motility the small pieces around every bit they like, and what happens, as far equally I can see from having gone in every couple weeks, is that if it gets arranged to a certain indicate people seem to stop rearranging it. So from fourth dimension to fourth dimension, I just return all the objects to the drawers they came in, leaving a couple of them out to encourage further movement. Some people seem to want to create narratives with the objects—the crab becomes a flake of a graphic symbol, or the tiles will become arranged every bit though they're actually tiles on the floor. They're life casts of ceramic tile. I effort the best I tin non to practice judgment in rearranging things—I don't necessarily go in and make my own arrangement of the objects. I just return them to where they came from and count and see what has disappeared.

mcdonaldmuche1987.blogspot.com

Source: https://eastofborneo.org/articles/artists-at-work-liz-glynn/

Share this post