Whether you feel intimidated by art--or visit every museum you can--you will appreciate Nina Katchadourian. Nina approaches the world with wonder and curiosity. She is a world-renowned contemporary artist (her work has been shown all over the world, including at the Met and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, and the Palais de Tokyo, among many other locales), but her approach to art is so down-to-earth, humorous, and deceptively simple that it is accessible to everyone. Nina often focuses on what is figuratively (or even literally) underfoot: one of her works was about dust in MoMA. Nina has a show at the Morgan Library in New York through May 28, 2023. She is also a professor at New York University. Interacting with Nina's work--and listening to her in this episode--will help you see not just art, but also your everyday world, in a new way.
In this episode:
Want to know more about Nina?
Want to know more about "What It's Like To..."?
Whether you feel intimidated by art--or visit every museum you can--you will appreciate Nina Katchadourian. Nina approaches the world with wonder and curiosity. She is a world-renowned contemporary artist (her work has been shown all over the world, including at the Met and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, and the Palais de Tokyo, among many other locales), but her approach to art is so down-to-earth, humorous, and deceptively simple that it is accessible to everyone. Nina often focuses on what is figuratively (or even literally) underfoot: one of her works was about dust in MoMA. Nina has a show at the Morgan Library in New York through May 28, 2023. She is also a professor at New York University. Interacting with Nina's work--and listening to her in this episode--will help you see not just art, but also your everyday world, in a new way.
In this episode:
Want to know more about Nina?
Want to know more about "What It's Like To..."?
Curiosity for me is really a kind of primary guiding principle and, many things that are around me in the world, I end up being interested in.
And for a long time I don't really necessarily know why I'm interested in it. So sometimes the process of making art about it doesn't happen for a while.
When my kids were in nursery school, pretty much all of their time was spent being creative, painting at the [00:01:00] easel, making up games, in the play yard, dressing in costumes, drawing. But as we become adults, very few of us continue having creativity front and center in our lives, which got me thinking about those rare people who do.
Fortunately, I have a good way to find out. My childhood friend Nina Korian, just so happens to be a world renowned contemporary artist. She works in several media, including sculpture, photography, video performance and sound. And her work has been shown all over the world. The Met and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice bi, pa de Tokyo, to name just a few.
Nina currently has a show at the Morgan Library in New York City, and she's also a professor at New York University. Nina, welcome to the
Thank you. Good to see you.
It's been a
it has been a while. Well, I think it's just fitting that I knew you as a child, and I feel like when I see your work, it brings out a childish [00:02:00] wonder in me because when I look at your artwork, it makes me look at the world in a new way.
It makes me think about things. Hmm, How is that happening? Why is that there? It makes me curious
then I'm
I wonder.
job. No, that's I think you, you've put your finger on something that's really important to me and, since you brought up sort of what it's like to be a kid, I do think that, Don't question our questions that fall into that kind of question category.
When we are kids, it seems to ask why and how come about everything. And then often we get a little bit intimidated out of that when we get older, I think. but yes, curiosity for me is really a kind of primary guiding principle and, many things that are around me in the world, I end up being interested in.
And for a long time I don't really necessarily know why I'm interested in it. So sometimes the process of making art about it doesn't happen for a while. [00:03:00] There's a sort of first step process that happens much earlier, which is just to keep being interested in the thing and eventually to figure out why I'm interested in it.
and, that's often really chapter one.
So can you kind of take me to then how it would maybe work if you see something and it sparks curiosity in you, do you make notes about it and or does it just a mental note in your brain? And then a month, a year later, you circle back to it. How do these ideas percolate and eventually become projects?
right. I
Or does it differ? Probably project to project.
it does differ. It also sometimes is structured by an invitation that might come my way. So there might be an institution or a curator that approaches me and says, Hey, we're making an exhibition about X, Y, or Z, or Would you like to do a project in our museum using A, B, or C? And then I have sort of parameters that need to work a little bit within, and that honestly is one of my favorite ways to work that [00:04:00] feels.
Like a much better and more comfortable way for me to work than a situation where it's just a wide open field and I can do anything I want. I actually don't like the feeling of that very much. I find it kind of overwhelming. And if, I find myself in a place where it feels too wide open like that, what I do is I give myself parameters.
And a lot of the methodologies what I make, I think have to do with placing constraints on myself. So I build myself a sort of smaller box. I give myself a set of rules and then I can see what I can do within that space. so I this is all sounding very abstract. Maybe I'll give you an example of a way that that might work.
Uhhuhso one project that works very much that. way I'll tell you about two, maybe. One of them is an ongoing project I've been making since 1993 that I overarchingly, call Sorted books, and sorted books
Oh,
began when I was in graduate school, so I was like 23, maybe 24, and a bunch of grad school friends.
We decided to spend a week in a house in Half Moon Bay make art with whatever [00:05:00] we found in the house. This house belonged to the parents of a very kind friend of ours who let us move in and invade them for a week. And so we came with nothing. and decided to sort of see what was there, and I got really interested in this couple's books.
They had been married at that point for about five years. They had each been previously married, and when they moved in together to this house, they merged all their books and they had a lot of them. and. What I loved was seeing, first of all how they had organized their books. Did they keep their books separate?
Did they merge them? Did they keep similar topics together? For example, if they had two copies of the same book, would they put them side by side or would I find them sort of spread out? All these kinds of things were interesting to explore, and after a while I, started almost playing a kind of game with the books, taking 'em off the shelves, arranging little groups of them so when you read the titles in order, they would form short sentences or stories or poems or riddles or kind of corny haiku sometimes.
And doing that for a while I realized what [00:06:00] I sort of ended up doing was making a portrait of these people using their books. That's what in the end sort of reflected it, reflected their book collection, but And, I've been making these projects ever since. There's a brand new commissioned project, using a certain slice of the Morgan's book collection in this show that just opened at the Morgan.
And so, every time I've done it, it reveals something different because the person's different. The books are different, the collection is different. And also I'm thinking about different things and my own sort of ruminations about the world leak into some of these constellations of books that I organize.
But one thing I like about that project is that I show up with nothing. I show up with a stack of index cards and a pencil and spend a lot of time with the books that are already there. So that's sort of what I mean by something that's already bounded. I'm already limited by the number of books that are there and the things that the book owner has already determined as part of their library, and I have to work within that.
kind of one
and to give a couple examples.
Yeah.
because I [00:07:00] love that. and actually a book came out about this, about sorted books. But, just a couple of examples. at the Akron Museum of Art, you sorted books that said primitive art.
Just imagine Picasso raised by
Right? Yeah.
Thanks That's one of my favorite
ones
then?
too. Yeah,
that was done
in Art Museum's research library. So what I did on that site is actually work with all these books that were kind of behind the scenes that only the curators and the research people at the museum ever saw. But then the way we showed them was to bring these actual book stacks out and put them in the gift shop.
So we had these clusters kind of merged into the gift shop, and that's where people saw the project. So there have been times when I've shown it most often as photographs, but sometimes as the actual books too. That has happened.
you mentioned sometimes a museum will come to you with an idea or give you the parameters, Is another example I believe, was it at the MoMA in New York and you did something about
Yeah. [00:08:00] that
was a
can you talk about
Yeah, that?
was a good example of one of those. that had zero parameters. So I had to find some,
this project came about through the education department at MoMA. And that's a very interesting way often to kind of get inside a museum.
It's very different than when you work with the curatorial side of things. Education said to me, we would like to engage you in a project where you basically make something that will, I think their wording was engage the public. And it's like, wow, well that's as broad as you can possibly, but I imagine that's anything
make
So I really spent a long time first just trying to think about, what is MoMA like to visit, I mean, for me as a person who started going there in high school now and then, and was kind of overwhelmed by the place, it was like this temple of, modern and contemporary art.
And then even going there, once I had become an artist professionally, it always felt a bit imposing and intimidating and like sort of the pinnacle of something or other. and [00:09:00] now I was in this position of having a sort of backstage pass to the whole place and a kind of interesting way. And I thought the first thing I wanna do is just figure out who's at MoMA.
Like how does this place work? I mean, there are probably lots of things here that I don't know about, like, when I say how it works, I really mean like how the building functions, how people keep the art collection safe and protected. all of it, every part of it, not just the front facing art part of it.
So I spent a long time, months and months and months, I'd say the better part of. Going on these one-on-one walkthroughs with different museum staff, people from, buildings and maintenance or security. I had a fascinating tour from the head of security one day where we went through an entire exhibition and didn't talk about the art at all, but only where were the cameras placed and why were the guards standing where they were.
And it totally shifted the way I
saw the, building and the galleries. And of course, I talked with curators and I talked with conservators and I talked with people in visitor [00:10:00] services and all these different facets of, how they run the place really. And since I was at MoMA a lot, I also would, of course, at the end of these one-on-one conversations, I would go and look at the art collection a bit.
And I developed an affinity for this one favorite spot of mine, which is alleged that sits about. Four stories up off the atrium floor. MoMA has this giant, giant open atrium in the middle, and on that ledge there's a pane of glass that separates the ledge from the gallery, but you can't open that glass window to clean that ledge.
So it's so high up that it gets covered with dust. I mean, dramatically covered with dust, little dust roll around on that ledge. After, while, and I found myself so fascinated by this, you know, I was standing there in these galleries with Picassos behind me, but I was looking at little dust balls and thinking, why is this so interesting to me?
And I mean, maybe this comes back to the kind of early comment I made about [00:11:00] sometimes, for me, I just have to keep asking why is it, why is it, why is it until like, something starts to reveal itself back a bit? And I realized that dust was in fact, A sort of hub, topic or subject that connected in lots of ways.
All of these people that I had just been speaking to, it connected to conservation because you have to figure out how to get dust off the surface of an artwork, or it could be damaged, it connected to buildings you gotta get it outta the air or it's bad for, the artworks and bad for the hygiene and look of the museum and, you
knowUhhuh you yeah. And then relevant to all kinds of curatorial questions too, because there are artists who have worked with dust as a material and have considered it in a kind of philosophical, metaphorical kind of way. And dust is in fact this really interesting material because it is bits and pieces of all of us, of our clothing, fibers, of our skin, of our hair.
And then it's literally stuff that has fallen from space, from the atmosphere. So you get the kind of high and the low and the celestial and the mundane all in one [00:12:00] place, and. there was just a moment where I thought, that's the topic I know now just is the topic and what is the form gonna be? And I thought, well, the same way I had the benefit of taking all these interesting tours behind the scenes and looking at things and talking with people that the public never meets.
I would like to provide that access for a visitor. So I will make an audio tour and it will work the way any audio tour does, which is you have stations and you stop at them and you hear about a dust event. So, we visited the Dustiest MoMA and we visited artworks that are to and we talked about.
so many different things. If anyone ever gets curious, it's still up on the MoMA website. that was supposed to be a sort of six month long project and I think it spanned nearly two years by the time we were done. It just kept revealing Wow that was my moment of getting to be a bit of a radio person.
Cuz that's what I grew up and thought I would be. I had no intentions of being an artist. I wanted to work
So there's two things I wanna talk about here. I wanna go back to [00:13:00] how you worked your way into the art world instead. But I also wanna make the point that this dust project really kind of symbolizes so much of your work, because I think you notice what is seemingly mundane or maybe that a lot of people are brushing off or walking over and you're bringing it to our attention and saying, this is worth looking at, or this is worth considering, or let's, look at it a different way.
Let's highlight it. and you do it with, not only curiosity, but with humor and with inquiry. And you're Making it art more accessible in a way it's not like to go to the museum and revere these old paintings.
You're really bringing it to a human level. I
Well, all really nice to hear, and those things do matter to me. there is a lot literally underfoot that I often think is, worth taking a look at. But yeah, I I do sort of march behind this flag of, we, you overlook a lot that I think are more worthy of attention than we think.
[00:14:00] and I guess the point of doing that, of giving them some attention is that, for me anyway, it activates everything. there's more to think about. There's more to engage. everything becomes, More alive and my alertness, increases. one of the nicest things that I feel anyone ever says to me after they've encountered something I've made, like one of the things I'm always happiest to hear is, you know, after I saw your piece about blah, blah, blah, I noticed that thing in the world from that point forward.
And I'm like, okay, good. That's
then a little bit
yes.
the drudgery of what a lot of life consists of might have been, shifted a bit perhaps. so I'm happy you said that. Thank you for saying that.
I learned a lot from the Dust project. it also has a lot to do with.
The strategy that I took towards the show at the Morgan, because one thing I learned from making the dust audio tour is that one of the best questions you can ask in any museum is who's already here and what do they know? And that's exactly what I also asked at the Morgan. I staff members to [00:15:00] show me favorite objects from their collection, and to sort of show and tell them for me.
And a lot of those objects wound up in the show and a lot of those objects were not things I would've discovered on my own at all. There's just so much at the Morgan,
I would love to go back a little bit. So young Nina thought maybe she'd be a, radio presenter or something different. And so how these years later did
you become an artist? What was this path?
well, so in high school when we knew each other, I was with theater and I was playing music. I love to sing. I didn't take a single art class in high school. visual art was not at all part of what I was doing at all.
I was on the school newspaper,
With me
yeah
Yes
And so loved writing. the challenges of even high school journalism were you know like, how can I get inside a topic or try to sort of understand what makes a person tick, in this efficient sort of, again, very
A
But again a very format, right you had a [00:16:00] certain number of column inches, to fit it into a certain amount of time and. I was actually doing some radio in high school. I was producing a short music program, for Finnish National Public Radio.
I made this real radio thing that was sent off to Finland and, aired once every two months, I think. And I loved working with sound. I loved working with my voice. But then, I got to college and I think one reason this changed is cuz the college radio station where I was, was a big commercial, totally uninteresting radio station.
And I just was so disillusioned by I quit, had podcasts been around probably would've become a very, but instead I studied a lot of literature in college and then did end up taking an art class or two.
And it got a lot easier to get into the art courses if you declared an art major. So I actually did in part cause of that and then whoops. an art major and then this was sort of interesting and, and I think the big aha moment was that.[00:17:00]
It at some point dawned on me that all these different things I was interested in could be contained under the umbrella of the word art or the term artist. And I thought, ah, this is a useful calling card. this is a sort of alibi or job description that allows me to wear many different hats.
And that's sort of always the way I've approached the things that I make. Some days I'm working on a project in one medium and other days it may be another. But more importantly, there are sometimes when I feel I'm operating a little like a historian might, or an archivist might, or a journalist might, or, that aren't sort of squarely within what you might describe.
Artist or art making. and it's artist is just a really great capacious term. and I'm not unique in working this way. I feel like this is a pretty common way to work in contemporary practice these days, but it was a little bit less so when I started making art and I felt I often had to apologize for like, ah, no I don't do the same thing twice.
I must be, you know, hopelessly scattered. and years of doing it, [00:18:00] think I came to realize it wasn't so much a problem as it was a methodology. It was actually very central to the way I wanted to approach things was to, sometimes as I've put it, just gotta pick the right tool for the right job.
So here's an idea, here's a thing I wanna make or make something about. And I have to sort of think about what's the content and what's the form. And one sometimes determines the other, but not necessarily in the same order.
I think one thing that is particularly admirable about it is that not many people have the guts to go after it especially young people moving up in the world think. Yes, being an artist sounds lovely, and to wear that hat that can cover a lot of interesting ground, but how are you gonna make money?
What's the career path? it's not grounded in anything that I know I'm gonna have my benefits paid and all that. and I love creative fields and I love creative people, and people who went after it and stuck to their passions So Did you ever have any of that
worry
of course And I mean you should ask
gonna [00:19:00] hold
parents this question I mean I remember this funny
My I will say my have been unbelievably supportive throughout, never have they tried to talk me out of pursuing this. but my dad did admit to a moment at my college graduation when, he came to the art department for our art department graduation and looked a little bit wistfully at the people heading to like the business know, the parents gonna that graduation. Cause it was like, yeah, they're kids, we to maybe worry about them. I mean, yes, of course all of these are important real life concerns and I think, anyone deciding they wanna pursue an art career is going to have to also be willing and ready for a certain kind of nimbleness that is absolutely required to, work different kinds of jobs, to do things that aren't.
always directly related perhaps to their art making pursuit and some sense, to have more than one job for a really long time. just to maybe zooming ahead to the present moment, I am a professional artist and I spend a lot of my average year exhibiting [00:20:00] working on projects and all those kinds of things that you would imagine are part of a professional artist's life.
But I also have a teaching job, which I love, and I think that teaching makes me a better artist. Actually, I'm really fortunate to teach at New York University, but inside a school within NYU that's called Gallatin. And it's not the art school, it's a thing I like a lot about being there, is that I'm teaching students who are not only studying art, it's an interdisciplinary program where study all kinds of things in combination with all kinds of things. So teaching becomes a kind of research opportunity. For me, it's a chance to, sometimes design a class, which helps me think through questions I'm interested in, makes me go and do a bunch of reading about things that I've been meaning to read or think more sort of academically or rigorously about.
And, turn it into a course and then think about the topic with my students. That is just one of the great pleasures of teaching. but you know, it is also a job and it takes up a lot of time and it is like having two careers. That's how I started this rumination.
and you [00:21:00] know, if you live in a city like New York, yeah, you better be prepared to have another job because it's gonna take a while. I think for most people to. Be able to, live off their work only. And honestly, there are so many people I know with very successful careers who still do not do that version of being an artist.
a lot of people teach, and a lot of people, for a long time are juggling a couple different things to make it work out.
And did you do that always?
Yeah, did.
when was your first sort of professional success,
so I finished grad school in 1995. I moved to San Francisco where I thought I was gonna stay forever and ever and ever, and had a year of a bit aimlessly. I made zero art that year. in fact, all I did that year was play music.
And then I kind of spontaneously threw my name in the hat for a couple of programs in New York and got into one or two and thought, oh gosh, okay, I guess I'll spend a year in New York.
And I did, and then stayed there for, something my first jobs in New York that I can think of. One [00:22:00] summer when I worked at a tech agency, I worked at a cafe. I lied and said I had a lot of catering experience and catered some crazy events. of this catering company, did anything needed
Just to
make
pay the rent and then I got a very interesting job that I had for three years at a graphic design firm called Trahan GeMar. they're a very old and respected graphic design firm, known for doing a lot of really groundbreaking logo design among other things. But they had just started at that point in time, an exhibition design wing.
And I was sort of brought on as an ideas person in a way. they said, well, you have zero graphic design experience or, knowledge of the computer programs. You'd need that, but we like the way you think and we would like to sort have you here part-time 20 hours a week I think.
and they knew I was an artist. They knew this was sort of the thing. I was also very invested in doing and very supportive of that. And I had an amazing couple years there of researching, doing a lot of writing for them. I wrote a lot of [00:23:00] the didactic texts that go into exhibitions. I did brainstorm a lot on design ideas, but it also taught me how to design exhibitions.
And this was tremendously useful for several projects that came later. I loved that job and I left it because I got my first part-time teaching job. And then the next 10 years I'd say mostly occupied with a lot of adjunct teaching, which, oh boy, it's a pretty messed up and very inequitable system in this country.
adjuncts are a hugely important way that schools fill their curricular needs, but they are paid. A pittance compared to full faculty. There's a huge disparity there, and it's kind of expected that you buck up and take the, poorly paying jobs and gradually kind of work your way up the ladder.
And then if you're really, really fortunate, you end up getting a, in quotes, real job as full faculty at a school. And, I spent a lot of time teaching out of town. [00:24:00] And then eventually, I had taught a course at Gallatin and an actual, quote unquote real job opened up there, which I applied for and was really fortunate to get.
So now as of the last 10 years I've been on the faculty there and I've had, a very wonderful job, but also a financially stable base. And, that has been really helpful. the last few years have been really good years in my career commercially. I have, worked with.
A gallery in San Francisco for ages and ages, Catherine Clark Gallery for 25 years almost. And they have stood through me through thick
and and as of the last also worked with a New York Gallery called Pace, which is a really big gallery with galleries all over the world.
And the two galleries work with each other very well. And we're sort of all in this together. It's been very harmonious and very nice. But, it's also provided me with a lot more exposure and a lot more opportunities. So it's a busy time. I'm glad for that.
it's quite great. Good to be busy. Yeah. I've sometimes, read about, say actors especially [00:25:00] in their leaner years, maybe they're catering or waiting or something, and. They use all of those jobs as opportunities to grow their craft. you know they would look at how people are interacting
and using behavior traits and all that, and I wonder if you used all of those different jobs as just other places to explore and notice and think and help kind of grow your
Yeah, glad you asked me that. certainly, the exhibition design things that I learned at True Life and Geiser were
really, later. I've had a few exhibitions where it really effectively was like designing a small museum about the topic at hand and to be able to think, okay, I can remember for this show, we did this or that with the wall text, or these kinds of things tend to, yeah.
So, know, it all came into play in a very useful way. the thing that can sometimes be very, very soul crushing, if you're an artist with a job far [00:26:00] outside of the arts, no one really gets this other more important life that you have this more important pursuit, and you can end up wildly, split schizoa, you know, uncomfortably kind of straddling, two identities are completely invisible in a way to the people that you're around.
And I'm very happy. I have not had to have a lot of those kinds of jobs, but I do remember one miserable summer of temping in New York where I wound up at some, bank opening, some guy's mail, and doing zero, and just feeling like
is such a waste of my time. and none of these people even know what actually care about.
I actually realized that I really important job. I skipped a hugely important job along the way of my little summary there. I worked for about seven years at a really fantastic museum institution in New York called The Drawing Center. Before the NYU job started. the drawing center, it's a small museum that focuses on [00:27:00] drawing, but in a very wide and expanded sense of the term.
And they had a program that was called the Viewing Program, and they would always hire an artist to run the viewing program. And the idea was that artists could come in and show you their work and talk to you about their work for half an hour and they would get feedback from you. so I was called the Viewing Program
and I met about 250 different artists a year and looked at their work.
It was a lot of looking and again, of those things where I often
felt like felt like a journalist. It was like, I have a half hour to figure out what makes this person tick. Like how am I gonna do that? All of these years of talking. And this is gonna come back around to your question about jobs, because often we would end up talking about like what the person did as their job.
And part of my job at the drawing center was to curate a show every year. and one of the shows I put together was called Day Job. And it had to do with exactly this question how is the work, work, connected to the work? [00:28:00] And, came from the funny question you sometimes hear artists ask each other, it's like, how's work going?
and the response, by me, do you mean work or do you mean work? Work? which work
are
recording.
there's so many kinds of work. and I had, this sort of goal that. The work in this exhibition would not be a kind of, oh, I hate my job. It just gets in the way of me making art.
I was interested in the opposite. How does the job feed the practice maybe you steal supplies from your job and use them in your work, but you steal ideas, maybe you acquire skills that end up being used in your work. all kinds of things. And of the many shows I curated over those years, that was by far my favorite one.
I'm still in touch with a lot of the artists actually from that show. so I don't think it has to be
that's interesting.
I think the thing that a job also gives an artist is it gives structure to life, which can be very hard to structure. This is back to my eyelight constraints theme, but, if I be somewhere 20 hours a week
those hours [00:29:00] that were, shaped by the job helped give shape to the time that was not the job, if that makes sense. So, it was really helpful for me to have the structure of a job. besides just the financial, the importance of that.
Yeah, I can imagine. Because It's sort of the analogy of, sheep and a meadow. they do better if there's actually gates
than they could just
They need to know where the boundaries
I've never that, but I really liked that.
when you're starting something new, do you just think about what is interesting to you or do you think about a potential audience and what other people might find interesting?
I think the most important thing to say to that is that I don't always know when I'm starting something new That's the thing. There could be something that I have been looking at and paying attention to for a long time and during that process, it may not even occur to me that this is the start of an idea.
it's a very hard thing to try to explain. But, sometimes I do things for a really long [00:30:00] time without any intentions of them becoming art. maybe a good example here is that, for years I was winding up on the phone on hold, as we all do from time to time, and hearing like the scrambly on hold music and wondering what is this What's this song Sometimes I would know what the song was but sometimes it would be like what is this genre of music I mean does someone
Is stuff that came a record or or where is it coming from? And one day I remember I was on the phone. On a landline phone and I took my cell phone and just shazamed the song to identify it.
And then that began shazaming on hold music and it was sheerly like, these songs be already out there in the world or can they be identified? And I, amassed this whole weird playlist you could sort of say of interesting and horrible on old music.
And then years and years later, I was invited to be in a [00:31:00] show on the subject of boredom. And these curators, this is a really funny studio visit, they came and they said, we're curating a show on boredom. And we thought of you. And I was like, well, thank you. Actually, I take that as a total compliment.
I
think Thank you.
I am interested in this like dumb stuff in the world often that is often thought of as boring. I would love to make something for your show. And they were eager to have me make something new for the show. But then, A long time went by and I was not having any ideas at all.
Like absolutely drawing a blank and thinking, God, I'm gonna have to tell these people like, I can't come up with anything. I'm so sorry. I have to back out of this exhibition. I'm just coming a blank. And then one day at home, my husband was on the phone, he had the phone on speaker. I heard this music coming out of the phone.
I had been on hold with that music so many times in the past, and suddenly it I was like, okay, I have an on hold music playlist and this music, which you're usually hearing when you are [00:32:00] inactive, bored as inert as can be. all you want is to not be hearing that music. Right.
Driving you crazy.
it can.
And I thought, how can I exactly the opposite? Like use this music to trigger something that would be very active, very physically even active, Make the music into the center events, like the music is the main thing. And I thought I want to make an on hold music dance party that would fulfill all of those requirements.
So I contacted DJ friends of mine,
and the three of us became this little sort of and together made this on hold music dance party, which we performed.
Several, several times over the years. it's hardly a project that's over. We just haven't done it in a while. But it was so much fun to make this, and it was very strict. I said, we are not importing anything that I have not recorded off the phone lines. we're not adding beats. We are not mixing this with other music.
we want beats, [00:33:00] we have to make them out of dial tone or we have to make them out of static, or we have to make them outta a beat that's already in the song. So that's what we did, and dance to it. It's really fun.
That is brilliant.
Well, another project that I know you're very well known for that supposedly came out of nothing is your, self-portraits in the laboratory
laboratory self-portraits in the
Flemish
In the Flemish
style, the Yes.
And as far as I understand, You were just on a long haul plane flight.
Yes.
so the laboratory self-portraits in the Flemish style are part of a much bigger project called Seat Assignment. And, way back at the beginning I said I was gonna examples and I gave sorted books and then I was gonna also talk about seat assignment as a project that is also very constraints driven.
in 2011, I sat down on a domestic short flight from New York to Atlanta. I think it was about two and a half hours long. And I thought, why is it that I'm already kind of thinking of the next few hours as time that doesn't [00:34:00] count, that is boring, that I wish wasn't happening to me, and that I can't wait to be over.
And I thought, that's if I believe these things I keep saying about the world as this kind of interesting place, then there should be something of interest here too. And, what could I actually do at this time? So very spontaneously I thought. I will just try to make things the whole way to Atlanta.
And what I have to work with is whatever I've got I've phone, I've got the in-flight magazine, I've got snacks, they pass out, whatever's in my bag and so on. And so to make a very story short, this project then, spanned the next 10, 11, 12 years. And, keep feeling like maybe now it's over.
I think the pandemic changed travel so much that I haven't actually added to the project now in a few years. And it may feel like I've moved on from it, but for a good 11 years, this was a very intense and ongoing pursuit for me. And among the many things I made, on a very long haul flight to New Zealand a residency and an exhibition there.
Made a lot of self-portraits in the [00:35:00] bathroom. same rules. Only what I find, only using my phone. And in this case it was, you know, tissue paper seat covers that I would s scrunch together to make kind of and those photos have been really, really popular. It's been it kind of exciting and also somewhat complicated experience to have them go viral a whole bunch of times.
I love the enthusiasm with which people have, embraced them. And there's also kind of a problem because the internet and art. Hmm. we're there a lot looking at things in the spirit of like, Ha, ha ha, you know, swipe to the next thing. Ha ha ha ha. Swipe to the next thing. I do this too.
I love this about, social media and lots of stuff online, but it's a little bit problematic sometimes for me with that project to have it taken up as essentially a kind of one liner, like a prank. And for me it's connected to a much, much bigger set of questions, which is, as I've been talking about with you today, like one about parameters and what's out there and how can you pay attention, and how can you be resourceful?
How can you be fiercely inventive,[00:36:00] under circumstances where that just doesn't even seem possible at all. and that's a set of artistic questions for me that I take very seriously and want to have a serious conversation about. So what's a little bit, frustrating for me is when it becomes like, ah, you're the crazy lady who did that in the bathroom.
Ah. And it's like, okay, yes, but there's more. Just cuz you laugh doesn't mean I also don't have something actual to say here.
Right. and that also brings up a question for me of, art versus just sort of a one.
Right.
anybody could put something on their head and think, oh, isn't this funny? But they need to put it in context and you always, have a series of, whether it's images or videos, and you write very thorough, explanations.
and put it, in a historical context everyone needs to be more thoughtful about these things as well. And so I can see how just having a just one-off doesn't put it in its proper perspective
it's
its intention
[00:37:00] was the way I speak to this kind of dilemma is that, I, I have no, problem with humor. I use it as a tool. I'm very aware of it as a strategy, as an artist. I am in control of how I'm using it. I know what it's gonna do to the viewer. I use it because it's bait often,
Like, I can get you to come close to me and I open the door for you in a warm and generous way, but then I've got you, and then I can say something else sometimes also. And so, it's never something that I would be sort of like, no, no, no. I don't want my work to be seen as, having Not always, but often a, temperament that has some humor in it.
There are also a lot of different kinds of humor. it deserves to be said. and often Humor is one of the only ways you can talk about extremely serious things and people have lost their lives doing so that also deserves to be said. You know my stakes have not thrown in jail or, beheaded.
But, it is serious business sometimes and comes with very high stakes. But I just want the conversation to be able to encompass both humor [00:38:00] and rigor about that humor. rigor is really important to me.
I think doing something once might make it a kind of, Quippy one liner, but committing to doing something a lot of times and really seeing it through, I mean, I made 24 portraits in the bathroom on that one flight. And, there are many more that I made that didn't make the cut.
But for me, often it's about linking humor or playfulness with a kind of rigor so you don't just mess around and have a, lighthearted little, experiment with something. You do it like 200% commitment and then sometimes it will prove for me to have, interesting, artistic content, you could say.
But the trick is you don't always know when you start. So back to your earlier question, likelike I don't always am I just doing something for fun or I doing something because it's gonna lead somewhere? play is also research and kids know that, you know what you started off by saying that's what kids are doing when [00:39:00] they're drawing and playing around and putting on the costumes.
They are trying to understand the through doing those things. It is lighthearted, but it is serious stuff too,
that's interesting. So you don't always know where you're going. You're sort of improvising as you're going along. And not everything makes the cut. Is that right? Like sometimes you might try something
Oh,
and it ends up on the proverbial cutting room
Oh yeah. There's a big, big like compost pile that no one sees much because I don't exhibit those I have to do, a lot of experimenting. one way I sometimes describe this is you have to cast the net really wide and just haul in a lot.
And then once there's enough to look at, you sort of step back and think what do I have here? And then you can put on a slightly different hat. You're not the kind of gatherer collector researcher person anymore. You're a little bit more the archivist or curator. That word is really overused these days.
But the person who then imposes structure and [00:40:00] meaning ultimately on what it is the raw material is about. And sometimes it takes me years to know what is the raw material? Why have I been interested in this thing? it can take a long time to figure that out.
I find this so interesting that you have these long, long projects, so they kind of weave in and out of your life. You're not just sticking with one thing, finishing it up, putting a bow on it, and moving onto the
next These things are all coming
in and
talking about the long ones, but you know, I have to say alongside, its punctuated by lots of shorter things too.
I think also maybe in recent years I've had
the leeway, the trust in some ways the luxury also to be able to take more time with things. And so, I point in my career, it would be so nice if I could just go to people and say like, just trust me. Like if you let me work with your materials in this or engage this or that thing that I'm asking you to give me access to please just trust me that I'll come up with something that [00:41:00] will be worthy of attention at the end.
And, I wasn't at a point in my career for a long time or I had enough of an exhibition record or a reputation or anything that would let people, be willing to trust me. a little bit more like, that has changed and it's a really, really nice feeling to have the kind of open invitation come with a lot of, we trust you cuz we've seen in the past that you have managed to come up with things when there's been a loose and open structure.
So that also I think, has affected the time span a bit. I can take a few years sometimes to kinda work something out.
It's great. You've created your reputation over
Well, somehow that somehow kind of happened and I don't know, I'm so nose down, like head down nose to the grindstone that it makes me quite uncomfortable to kind of think about like my career and what it is and, I don't know, I don't find it helpful to contemplate that.
It doesn't seem the point really. it makes me squirmy.
I'm just curious about, kind of how you go through the world, because one of my daughters is a very [00:42:00] creative soul. she sings all the time and she just finds wonder wherever she goes. that's just how she sees the world. And I think that's the kind of person you are too. Obviously you're curious but can you turn it off or do you feel like you're always looking for, new ideas and are you always being an artist or can you sort of,
Yeah.
asking are you always working.
Yeah, it's a really good question. it's, no. And yes, so the no is no, I'm not walking through the world all the time going like, where's material? Where's content? Where's stuff I can use it? It's not that kind of feeling, the way I go the world is just the way I go through the world.
So sometimes some of that ends up becoming an art thing and a lot of it does not. I'm gonna contradict myself now, but yes, there are of course also projects where I'm asked to do something quite specific.
So it's there's a task at hand. How am I going to kind of solve the puzzle or, meet the request or do the commission, whatever the thing is.[00:43:00] but I think I'm trying to kind of let the world also just be itself, I'm trying to be a keen observer of it.
I don't feel like I wanna go out there and in an extractive way, like squeeze it for content for me. that feels very bad. That spirit would be bad. And I think I would make very stiff and brittle and uninteresting work if I tried to do that. I guess it feels important to proceed with sort of a loose touch, but,
Thinking about what you said about your daughter. I think these are all also acts of interpretation and we are all doing that no matter what our profession. We are sort of trying to understand and interpret and make sense of the world for ourselves. And some of us just do it through this particular filter.
I don't think art is a better filter or a worthier one than any of the other many ones we could put into the equation here. But, this for whatever reason is sort of the way that, my mind helps, me understand my way through things. And then I feel like my profession is also to try to make those things legible and visible for people who encounter [00:44:00] what I make and to pass the observations on so an exhibition to me always feels like, Hey, here's what I saw. Here's what I think. What do you all think? What do you all see? And that's one of the great pleasures of showing work is that you get to then enter into a communication with others about the stuff that's been in your head.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. you can write a book or make a movie, but if no one reads it or watches it, is it still the same experience? So I wonder that for you, there's joy in making it and there must be a, different level of joy in presenting
there
having it seen
yeah. And I've always thrown up a flag for example, when I had that job at the drawing center, anytime an artist came there for one of these meetings with me and would say, people can think anything they want about my work.
And, I would make it, even if no one ever saw it, and I would always say it, I completely do not believe that because you would not be in the room with me if you didn't want, to be talking about it or communicating about it or having people see [00:45:00] it I mean, even showing it to one person, is it communicative act and I don't believe any artist is happy to accept anything people think.
I think people have ideas in mind and they have specific things they would like to, communicate. I mean, that doesn't have to mean ideas. It could be, I want people to have a certain feeling or,
experience when they encounter the thing I've made, but I do not believe it is a kind of everything's okay field there.
So,
for me it is really important at the end to share things and to make them public. And there are things sometimes where I've started making them just for myself and then it might not feel right for a while to, share it further. I'm always kind of watching to see like, when is that moment where it suddenly does feel like it's okay to turn it into something that I might have just made for me or like for our home, you know?
And then decide to put it in a show.
Uhhuh. Well, I thank you for putting it all out there. As a person in the world who gets to absorb the artwork,[00:46:00]
Thank you. That's really nice. I put some of it out there. there's a lot of stuff that is not interesting and didn't work out, and where it's just like, okay, that was the first pancake. that's also part of the process.
I know, but we need all the art in the world. we need that to get us thinking differently, whether it's slowing down or turning our mind upside down or looking at things differently.
I had a, friend in college. Bound from medical school, really close friend. And I was grappling with this, like, am I gonna be an artist? I didn't even like the word artist. It sounded deeply pretentious to me and full of privilege and presumption. It was just horrible word. And I remember saying to her I can't believe I'm thinking about doing this and you're gonna go and do this thing that's so useful.
And she looked at me and she was like, listen, I'm gonna go do what I do so that then people can participate in the kinds of things that you.
do. that is also the point, of living. And it was
such a helpful thing to hear. And I still [00:47:00] sometimes feel jealous of people who have a kind of, extremely direct and palpable impact, like, doctors,
But I've come to see artists as just another job description. It's just one thing in the world among many things that are very important. I would've made a terrible doctor and terrible accountant and terrible lots of things, but, this seems to be the thing
Me
yeah Right. So we also kinda have to do what we think we can do best.
Well, Nina, thank
you. for your work and thank you for sharing all of this with
me.
[00:48:00] [00:49:00] [00:50:00]