Artist Kan Spray Painting Flowers on Grattan Street.

Emily Reese talks to artist Mira Schor. 

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Mira Schor fuses ideas of gender, politics, and representation of the body in her paintings that advocate the medium itself. Mira has shown in 56 Bogart at Momenta Art and Agape Enterprise, and she brings the perspective of someone who has had intermittent, extensive experience with the building in its many roles. 

56B: Firstly, what kinds of work have you featured at Agape Enterprise? How has the space been conducive to your work’s perpetuation of its intended discourse? 

MS: I’ve shown some drawings at Agape Enterprise. I was delighted that Eric and Kiko invited me to be one of the artists they wanted to feature when they began Agape. I love the space they occupy, I mean that room with its wacky fake or cheap dark wood wainscoting, the drawings looked great on those dark walls. I can’t say that experiences at 56 Bogart street have led to new ideas but I think the building is a great gift to all concerned, it’s synergistically good for all the arts organizations to be there and great for the art community, in New York City, not just Bushwick. I’m really happy to be associated with it, through my earlier connection with Momenta Art, and some contact with NURTUREart as well, and I’m excited about the possibilities of doing something at Agape that would not exactly be performance but might fit in with their developing direction.

56B: You mentioned in an interview with Bradley Rubenstein that you formerly painted the body of a female growing into her sexuality, but that now your figuration is a “barely gendered, barely embodied person walking around, sleeping, watching, reading”. You also mentioned that you have sought the loss of control within your painting technique itself.  How does this near-total lack of gender, body, and control supplement ideas about female power?

MS: In terms of your question “How does this near-total lack of gender, body, and control supplement ideas about female power?” I think first of all that any cultural utterance by a woman who is critically aware of gendered power relations in our culture contributes to female power. This is consistent with the theme of my recent work that was shown at Marvelli Gallery, “Voice and Speech.” I am interested in giving “speech” to “voice”—the knowledge of the body, the knowledge of craft, of experience, of visuality—“speech,” speech here meaning the power of articulation in public and theoretical language. In terms of lack of control, what I’m trying to get at in the work is a quality of expression that an come to you when you trust your perceptions and your craft enough to let go of some overdetermination. It’s a bit of a game, because it’s hard to really lose control when you know how to do something but in the little moments where that seems to happen you can get to something interesting.

56B: You grapple with the gendered narrative of art history. How do you fit yourself into the female art historical canon, and how has your perception of your own role changed since you initially started making work? 

MS: How do I fit into the feminist art historical canon?  That is a huge subject and at times a bit of a sore point. I’d refer or have to defer to my essay, “Generation 2.5.” My generation hasn’t fared very well in getting into the feminist art historical canon, even though we are the first full generation who contributed to the development of most of its tropes at the same time or very close to that of the pioneer generation before us. I’ve worked with autobiographical representation and narrative in ways related to Friday Kahlo and Florine Stettheimer, starting before either of those artists were widely known (and before I ever heard of them). That was when I was a student, in the early ’70s. I very early on became interested in language as image. Starting in the mid-70s, I moved from interpreting “the personal is the political” as necessitating my being in the picture via recognizable self-portraiture, to allowing my handwriting, legible and not, to stand in for myself and to put forward the idea of women being filled with language. My works from that period were in line with the appearance and sometimes also the meaning of works by Hanne Darboven and Mary Kelly, among others, but my work from that time was not widely seen and has not yet received the critical attention I hope it will eventually get. 

56B: Is there such a thing as the history of art production as an ungendered whole, or do we inadvertently separate female artists from their male peers through our discussions? Is this fruitful or detrimental?

MS: The idea that the history of art production is ungendered is an illusion and a fantasy that, even now, after forty years of feminist art and the dramatic transformation of art historical practices stemming from the feminist art revolution, still persists and that people cling to. Women artist still want to be seen as artists, not women artists. You can understand why: woman retains associations with second-class citizenship and the term woman as a theoretical category in particular is very devalued, which then has an effect on political activism. Yet work by a woman who is looking critically or with conscious awareness and criticality at her own life and society will somehow invest her work, even if it’s abstract or about other things entirely, with something that enlivens form and iconography. Women who don’t may have more commercial success but they also may end up subsumed to a (male) universal. We separate female artists from their male peers by omitting them from discussion and comparison. If they are seen as the same, the world still tends to gravitate towards male artists while subscribing piously to the myth of the universal. Just recently a young woman artist told me she wanted to be seen not as a feminist or a woman artist but as a human being…of course she does, and she is a human being, the whole point is that whether she likes it or not she will be considered as a woman. It’s a tough issue, constantly in contention, as it should be. If it disappears from contention, we’re back at the (male) universal.

56B: On the other end of art history, where do you think the “art future” (either feminist or otherwise) is headed? 

MS: The future of art? There will always be cultural utterance of some form or another and these days we’ve accelerated the art critical recognition of various forms of cultural utterance as art (gaming etc..). Some of the ways of making or thinking about art that made me an artist in the way that I am, a fine artist, a painter, a maker of individual hand made things, are fading right now under pressure from the digital and the spectacular. Advanced theory demolished aura, and presumed relevance of the non-photographic. The market pushes spectacle and brand. As a teacher it’s hard to instill the potential of painting to express or comment on culture or to be a space of resistance (another old idea!). But you have to feel sorry for all the artists who just can’t figure out how to make works they see in galleries, museums, and fairs, that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to produce. Meanwhile every year at least one art supply I rely on for my work is discontinued.

56B: Have any of the conversations or experiences you’ve had in 56 Bogart led you to explore new themes or ideas, either in your work or in your thought processes?

MS: What I like about 56 Bogart Street is that it’s a human scale situation with art organizations and galleries that have evolved from a community and that remain committed to a diverse range of work that artists can and do produce; it’s not exactly not part of the market of course, but it feels like a more organic and accessible space.

Joana Ricou talks to artist Bryan Wilson. Bryan investigates nuclear technology and its ramifications, with a focus on the legacy of the atom bomb and the management of nuclear fall out and waste.

“The cave is an attempt to create a television show to explicate a lot of this information. I’m building the set for that.”

BW: This began with an interest in trinitite, which is a glass formed from the first nuclear explosion and subsequent nuclear explosions but, specifically, that moment being a literal distillation of the turning point in human history when we started impacting the world on geological time scales. A lot of these nuclear materials are volatile in excess of 100’000 years into the future.

Burial becomes the most economic way to deal with this. So it becomes a very interesting design problem of how do you create monuments, language or symbols to communicate in excess of 50’000 years into the future. What does that look like?

56B: Yes: “don’t open this door.”

BW: I’m reading through designs, strategy propositions, academic papers, and I came across Thomas Sebeok, who was a semiotitian. He put forth this idea that, in addition to whatever monuments we made, there would be a group of people in every generation at these sites that would retain this information, a type of secret society, an atomic priesthood. And he set forth some loose guidelines for that it would have to be: somewhat terrifying, off-putting to the general public.

For this last year I’ve been trying to form what that priesthood might look like, creating drawings, sculpture, the tattoos I have on my arm, a film that is a part of the ritual that was done all under the guise of this…

56B: Are you part of the atomic priesthood?

BW: I’m making it up as I go along so nobody has imbued me with the authority…

56B: I think if you’re making it, you get to call yourself whatever you want.

BW: Indeed. And that’s where this kind of art process starts to step in and it becomes an interesting way of engaging not only history but what the future might look like.

All of this started with me doing a performance: I drove from my home in Montana to the Trinity, which is the test site of the first explosion.

The interesting thing there is there wasn’t much of a crater but there was a thousand foot by ten foot deep lake of green glass - trinitite. Essentially the tremendous force and temperature created by the bomb sucked up and in a flash *snaps fingers* melted the sand to the extent that it started to behave like water vapor and it came up into the mushroom cloud and, just like water vapor as it starts to clump together, it rained back down on the desert floor. The lake of glass is no longer there because it was bulldozed away but the site itself is now a historic monument.

[There’s no lake of trinite anymore but there is an obelisk, made by the United States government.]

BW: Shortly after the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became very political and the result of that was him being publicly humiliated. I kind of look like him so I dressed as him as a way of paying homage to this site, as a way of conjuring his spirit. There was something very sacred about this site and the language about it, trinity, test site. There was a grave feeling about everything there.

We just got funding from the Art Council of England to make a book and do an exhibition of this project. What does that mean like, informing people, getting people present to this notion of we’re all in this nuclear age - we’re still in it. We’re at a point where really action is necessary. What does that look like? What might that world look like?

Sean Alday talks with Eric Heist of Momenta Art.

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As I walked into Momenta Art’s gallery space I saw Eric Heist on the ground installing a piece of drywall for a new exhibition. I waited for him to get it into place before asking if he was ready for an interview.

56B: What brought Momenta Art to 56 Bogart?

EH: This is where the artists were going. My friends from Williamsburg were relocating their studios here too.

56B: How many spaces were open here when you moved in?

EH: Interstate Projects. I believe that was it.

56B: What is Momenta’s relationship to the other spaces?

EH: Peter [of the Bogart Salon] has been on the advisory board for many years.

The model that we worked with when we opened in Philadelphia in 1986 was, we rented more space than we needed and then we sublet studio space to artists. In Philadelphia we rented an entire 5 story building and sublet the four stories above us.

We rented extra space here to sublet also. Each space we sublet is roughly 650 square feet and our space is 1,200 square feet. So we sublet to Studio 10 and an artist’s studio. The benefit isn’t as drastic as our original location, though it does allow us to have a larger space than we had on Bedford Avenue.

Which in turn gives more freedom to the artists we show.

56B: When did you move from Philadelphia to New York?

EH: 1992. I went to Hunter College for graduate school and was working with Momenta at the same time. We started doing nomadic shows in SoHo when the galleries were moving out. We funded that by doing raffles somewhat similar to the benefits we host now.

We were later able to rent a space in SoHo. And after that it was off to Williamsburg in ’95.

56B: When did you move to this building from Williamsburg?

EH: We opened in September of 2011.

56B: What’s the biggest difference between here and Philly?

EH: People come out after the opening is over. It was pretty sparse after the opening, but those were and continue to be successful.

56B: Who do you feel is Momenta Art’s main audience is?

EH: Artists.

56B: You just hosted your spring benefit. Can you give me your feelings about that went?

EH: For me personally… It was a blur [laughs]. I try to blend in and make things run as smoothly as possibly.

We had a lot of artists and a lot of ticket holders. It was a lot to keep track of.

56B: What kind of feedback did you get, both from the artists and the ticket holders?

EH: Everything I heard from the artists was positive. Everyone understands that it’s charity. I definitely understand that there’s a lot of anticipation surrounding getting your ticket called. I think that people come because they know that it’s done to support the artists.

56B: What galleries have you visited in the neighborhood?

EH: Not enough. Let’s see… I’ve been to Regina Rex. I went to Luhring Augustine’s opening. I go to English Kills pretty often. Factory Fresh. Storefront.

56B: Could you pick a favorite show that you’ve seen in the neighborhood?

EH: I really liked Stephen Truax’s works [at Storefront]. I had never seen his work presented that way. I thought it was really nice.

56B: What do you think Momenta’s relationship is to the larger Bushwick community? The arts community in particular.

EH: Well… This building has definitely become a hub. We’re pleased with that, we get an audience that we didn’t have on Bedford Avenue.

I know it creates some friction with some spaces that were already here.

56B: What’s been your gut reaction to the attention that you receive? You were definitely thought of as a big fish after relocating, along with Nurture Art.

EH: We showed up before Luhring Augustine, but they are certainly the biggest fish now.

56B: Do you read what people write or do you measure it in inches?

EH: I do care about what they say. I would like to see real criticism about the work being shown.

I want to know what people are thinking, what their ideas are. What’s the point of making art?

What I saw happen in Williamsburg was an emphasis on the entrepreneurship. I didn’t like that dialogue.

56B: What would like to demystify about this whole thing?

EH: That there’s some specific aesthetic to Bushwick art. That line came out of Williamsburg too, that there was a funky aesthetic to it.

This is where artists are going and they bring their practices with them. They don’t suddenly arrive here and find trash on the street and start making collages out of found objects. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s not how it is. It’s a container for all different types of work.

56B: What’s the future of Momenta?

EH: It’s gotten to the point where it needs to become a bigger organization. One component of that will be an artist-run area, which I will be working within.

I need to keep pushing Momenta to take risks.

56B: Do you think that the move allowed it to take more risks?

EH: I think that the danger is that we will stop taking risks. I have to mess it up a little bit in my role.

There’s an element of chaos that is important in any creative endeavor. Finding a balance in that chaos is the key to success.
 

Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

-Marquis de Sade