The Forum 19 | Rachel Rose: Psychic States, Motherhood, and the Moving Image

Description

She works through feeling, perception, and narrative — Rachel Rose on interior weather, unstable perspectives, and art as a way to process what cannot be easily named. Rachel Rose moves between film, installation, and painting, using sound, light, and narrative structure to explore how experience is shaped from the inside out. Her work often begins with an emotional register and expands into systems of history, perception, and embodiment. In her recent film The Last Day, she turns inward, tracing the psychological and biological complexities of motherhood, identity, and crisis without resolving them into clear frameworks. She explains: * How personal feeling becomes a starting point for building larger perceptual and narrative systems. * Why motherhood, postpartum depression, and identity loss resist clean cultural narratives. * How sound and light can destabilize reality and reorient one’s relationship to the world. * What it means to make work that stays with ambiguity rather than resolving into message. * How falling in love with characters becomes a method for discovering structure, rather than imposing it. * Why occupying unlikeable or unstable perspectives creates more honest and generative work. * How art can act as a container for experiences that are culturally unspoken or difficult to locate. (00:08) Welcome + Intro(00:31) The Last Day and the Mrs. Dalloway Transposition (01:37) Motherhood, Identity, and the Book Read Twice (03:35) Lake Valley, Saturn Return, and the Invention of Childhood (07:19) Excerpt: Lake Valley (2016) (10:57) Art School, Painting, and the Crisis of Meaning (15:01) Editing as Voice, the First Video, and Finding the Medium (22:34) Transcendent Experiences and the Power of Art Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8pGHKThZ_o&t=6s]. Follow RachelWeb: https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibit/rachel-rose-the-rest/ [https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibit/rachel-rose-the-rest/]Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/worrrld/ [https://www.instagram.com/worrrld/] Rachel Rose (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. The work of Rachel Rose explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, Rose directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Recent solo exhibitions include: Science Gallery, London, UK (2024); GL STRAND, Copenhagen (2023); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2023); CC Strombeek, Strombeek (2022); Pond Society, Shanghai (2020); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2020); Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); LUMA Foundation, Arles (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2018); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017); Museu Serralves, Porto (2016); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Geneva (2023); 3rd Jeju Biennale (2022); 9th Beijing Biennale (2022); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2022); Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, US (2021); Artspace, Sydney (2021); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2021); A Tale of A Tub, Tlön Projects, Rotterdam (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Pittsburgh (2018); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 32nd São Paudalo Biennial (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (2016); Okayama Art Summit, Japan (2016). She is the recipient of the Future Fields Award and the Frieze Artist Award. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here [https://www.newcrits.studio/events].Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio [http://www.newcrits.studio/]. — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Can you tell us a little bit about The Last Day? Rachel Rose: It’s a film that I wrote. Loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the book, but maybe I’ll just summarize the book briefly so that you understand what I did. The book takes place in a day, and it was written after World War I. It describes a bourgeois housewife, Clarissa Dalloway, going about her errands in her day at 50, about to throw a big party for her husband in the evening. She has an 18-year-old daughter that’s kind of separating and rejecting her. There’s a foil character, who’s equally important in the book, named Septimus Smith, who’s a World War I vet who Clarissa sort of passes by. It’s almost like sliding doors throughout the day. He’s suffering from severe PTSD from World War I. Clarissa throws a party and at the end of the day he kills himself. I had read the book in high school and not thought about it much again. I had always been into Virginia Woolf and that was that. And then one day, I have two kids and I was getting our Tesla fixed in Red Hook at the Tesla dealership, and I was texting my friend sitting there in the waiting room. She’s said oh, what a Mrs Dalloway day you’re having. And I was like, oh am I Mrs. Dalloway? Let me think about that. So I read it again and I was completely blown away. As a mother reading it, I now understood the book totally differently than I understood it as a 16-year-old because obviously the perspective and consciousness changes as that’s what Virginia Woolf does. But now I was sitting in Clarissa’s position, obviously I’m not 50 and my kids aren’t 18, but I was feeling her pain, her rudder, her sense of loss of identity, all the kind of acts of self-actualization she had reversed or given up in exchange for her motherhood. I was incredibly moved and so I decided to transpose it into a modern day New York story, and the Septimus character, I transposed into a labor and delivery nurse that was suffering from severe postpartum depression. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. Rachel Rose: Which is something that I also suffered from. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Rachel Rose: So I kind of, in different ways, felt myself in the different characters. Ajay Kurian: So much of what I’ve understood about your work prior to this moment is like larger systems in which humans find themselves in. It feels like this movie is a shift to the internal weather, rather than the external weather. I know it's just a matter of what the focus is. They're all kind of an ouroboros of sorts, but did it feel like a shift? Did you feel like you were going into something more intimate with the film? Rachel Rose: Before making the film and also before having children, so much of my experience in making works was a combination of I’m feeling this thing. For example, I’m feeling really anxious. Could I attach it? Now of course there’s all kinds of internal reasons why I might be feeling anxiety, nothing to do with, let’s say the weather or something. Ajay Kurian: Sure. Rachel Rose: But can I attach it to something I’m spotting outside, and make the artwork the container for that connection. So the work was always coming from something that always began with a personal feeling, but the difference is, that you’re right to point out, in this film it doesn’t go beyond that. A guess if you’re talking about motherhood, but the film isn’t a political comment on motherhood structurally in society. It’s actually totally not that. Ajay Kurian: What you’re saying there, there was a moment in an interview, I can’t remember who you were talking to, but you were talking about the process that you go through to make anything. Which is almost like you’re a sensor that’s like feeling things around you. And then as soon as you feel it and kind of know that you’re feeling something that’s worth noticing, that you then almost zoom out to see what the feeling is doing. Rachel Rose: I’ve done it in some really rudimentary, almost stupid ways. Ajay Kurian: I love stupid. Rachel Rose: This film The Last Day, than I made, is me contending with my ambivalence, confusion, pain and ecstasy around being a mother. For me, that’s why I made it. To kind of figure something about that out and give voice to a crisis I feel many other women experience, but there aren’t clear places to put that necessarily. For example, if I think back to when I made Lake Valley when I was 28, that was a work that I made in the beginning of my Saturn return. Actually, it was just the year after I had that Whitney show, and I was beginning this new stage of oh, I’m a working artist now and I have a career and I’m like a grownup. Of course we all become grownups to a certain extent when we’re 18 and we leave home. But then there’s this second thing, which is your Saturn return. Many of us know it, where you experience a new version of adulthood, like what’s this thing gonna look like? So this work came from that. Questioning, what does it mean to turn 28? It sounds so, honestly trivial, but at the time it didn’t feel trivial to me. It felt somehow kind of big. Ajay Kurian: 28. I guess I thought you were older at that time, ’cause there’s so much that’s related to childhood here. Rachel Rose: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: Now it makes sense that it is a reckoning of the idea of leaving childish things behind, but then also those things translating into this, as you’re gonna see in a second, very baroque visual language of all these different ways of storytelling coming together. Before we continue, let’s just play this excerpt. This is an excerpt from Lake Valley from 2016. Rachel Rose: 10 years ago. So weird. Just to give the texture of this, at the time, I found and then scanned tons of early children’s, the kind of early proliferation of children’s books, 18th or early 19th century. That’s what all these textures and the surfacing of everything is made up from that and hand collaging, well on Photoshop, but collaging these layers. Ajay Kurian: And it’s kind of the story of this Rabbit-ish figure that gets lost essentially. Rachel Rose: Yeah. Lives in a suburban housing development and goes into the little tiny greenery right next to the house. But then it turns and imagines it as though it’s this forest, but it’s kind of just a whatever space. Much of this was a kind of return to how childhood is formed, culturally. and that it’s kind of a modern invention. Even the idea of the storybook is so modern, and this coincides with the Industrial revolution. The idea that you sit down and read your kids a book and that there’s an illustrated thing that they look at. This is like a totally recent thing. Ajay Kurian: So that structure that seems part of the scaffolding of this —before that, what was the feeling that started this project? Rachel Rose: Saturn return, becoming an adult, understanding ourselves through a childhood, which is a very recent — super recent idea. I mean, Freud, that’s extremely recent. But even the idea that there’s a separation between childhood and adulthood and that we define ourselves as different is also very recent. So I was questioning, why do I now feel like an adult and I didn’t before? And what does that mean in the history of where we are today? So that was the inception. Ajay Kurian: And then getting into that history takes you into the Industrial Revolution and the foundations of how we start thinking about that separation. Rachel Rose: Yes. And then separately, which is true for all my work, I also always have a thing I wanna learn how to do. “I don’t know how to do this” is to me, an essential project and point of making an artwork. When I complete the work, I might know a little bit more about how to do it. So in this case, I’d never done an animation before. I had no idea how to do it. And actually, I don’t think I had ever written a proper script, because up until this point, the two or three works I had made had been basically essays. This one, because it was an animation, I had to storyboard everything. So I had to write a very clear script. It was actually the first time I ever wrote a script. Ajay Kurian: What did that feel like? Rachel Rose: I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing. So it was that, and then it was the storyboarding, and then it was working on a traditional animation because this is hand drawn. Ajay Kurian: Let’s go back even further. Because you went to art school and you went in for painting. But then you started moving into film, seemingly suddenly. Was it like, I can’t think in this medium anymore? Rachel Rose: Yeah, I mean, I got obliterated in all the crits. Everyone hated on everything I did, and I felt so bad about myself all the time. Which wouldn’t necessarily happen in this. But yeah, I felt so bad about myself all the time and I felt like, why do I have to feel bad about myself for this pointless thing? I don’t think painting’s pointless, but… Ajay Kurian: You have a painting show that’s opening in like a few days? Rachel Rose: I don’t think the painting is pointless, but at the time I felt a major existential crisis, right? And when I say this is pointless, I meant all of art making, start to finish. What am I doing here? I wanna do something meaningful with my life. I want to affect change, I wanna contribute. What can you do in art? Seemingly like nothing. Ajay Kurian: So that was the takeaway. Rachel Rose: Well, no, that’s the crisis that I had at that point. And then I thought, if I became a documentary filmmaker, that could be politically actionable. So then I started learning how to make films immediately, thinking that when I graduated I would try to make my way into the documentary film world. So the best thing I could do is learn all the skills I could in the meantime. Ajay Kurian: Did it come as a shock to your professors at the time? And when you started making that first video piece that you thought was gonna be a documentary — when did you know that it wasn’t? Rachel Rose: I knew it wasn’t when I started editing, but not up until that point. I was driving around shooting this footage and doing these interviews. I didn’t understand how much it wasn’t a documentary film until I started editing, which was the first time I ever edited anything. And I just fell in love with the medium. I felt that this is it, this is me. I’ve been waiting all this time, and I was in the middle of my second to last semester of school at that point. It was like, let’s say November of my last year when I was finally editing. So I was like, oh my God, this is it. I love this medium so much. Ajay Kurian: Did everybody in the crits just shut the fuck up? Rachel Rose: I mean, I wasn’t showing anything at that point because I didn’t have anything to show. I was just working on my project or whatever. Ajay Kurian: But then you had a final piece. Rachel Rose: Yeah, but I guess what I’m saying is I fell so in love with editing. I felt like this is my voice. Ajay Kurian: I mean, that’s when I met you, when you were graduating from graduate school. Rachel Rose: That’s right. That’s when we met, because you were in that show. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I was in the show that Ian was in, at PS1. Rachel Rose: And I was coming over and bothering you guys during install, I remember that! Ajay Kurian: Yeah. So Rachel’s married to Ian Chang, another artist, they both show at Gladstone. An amazing artist in his own right. And we were in that show together and Rachel was asking for studio visits from everyone. Rachel Rose: Yes. I’m sure I was. And Josh came and changed my life Ajay Kurian: I believe it. To every person you were like, I’d love to show you this. And I was like, wow. I remember seeing it and I was like, this is her first video piece, that’s stupid. It really blew me away. It really towed that line. I hadn’t seen that much video art that felt borderline popular that could have been released in a gallery and it could also be released by Vice. It felt like it had the makings of something that were highly specific and rigorous. And in that particular piece, it was thinking about the border slash limit of life and death. What happens in that transition? How do we codify those things? And seeing it, it really shocked me. You were so proficient in doing this so quickly. It’s obvious that was your voice. It was a no brainer. Rachel Rose: I remember that feeling, I felt high during that period because I felt like after all this time of feeling like I actually wasn’t an artist and like I was wrong and it was time to pivot. Then I found this medium that felt like I could channel myself through it. And at the time, also in the art world, there was a place for making work like that. I think that’s changed now, but at the time there was. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I feel like your rise was in a moment when new media and video was being shown constantly. Now it’s harder to come by exhibitions like that and people that are gonna put the money into it. Because, what you can’t see in this excerpt, is that your videos are installed incredibly specifically. Actually, we can just see it on the website. Did you know that in grad school, was that already something that you were thinking about? Rachel Rose: Yeah, I had this position, I guess at the time, of hanging around in the art world. Which is okay, if I’m gonna do this, if these things are gonna be shown in exhibition spaces and not black boxes, then I should really use the exhibition space for what it can offer. I had screens made out of tapestries and carpets, and all kinds of ways that particularly address the way that the film sat in the space. So yeah, this was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we wrapped the room. You can’t see it in these images really, but the room is wrapped in this scrim. The same scrim that we’re projecting on, but it’s double wrapped. So it created this kind of moire effect with the light. And that moire effect was also in the film. So experimenting with things like that. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I guess your first solo exhibition was at the Whitney Museum. And even there, it was the scrim and the way that light was coming through the room. You couldn’t call it site specific, but it was site sensitive. Rachel Rose: It was, that’s exactly the word. I went in and actually edited and played with the blacks in the space. So the idea was that when there was black on the screen, it would be porous because obviously that is a dim projection of light. and you would see the outside world. So I projected a scrim that was in front of a glass. The whole film was about what we can access. And what we can in light and sound is obviously biologically determined, but what does it mean to take our biological form and extract it from this one? Let’s say you become an astronaut or something. What can you see and hear differently? Can you extend the limits of human perceptual capacities, not through drugs or alcohol or whatever else, but through just moving our body into a different environment off of the earth. Ajay Kurian: And what was the thing that you wanted to learn in this piece? Rachel Rose: Well, this piece came out of something really simple actually. I don’t know if it was a thing I wanted to learn, but it was a feeling I wanted to explore, which is that Ian and I had gone to see Gravity in Battery Park City. When we left, we walked home to the Bowery where we lived at the time. I can remember it exactly now, the feeling of leaving the theater and walking on the street and looking at the street signs and the traffic lights. Just like New York City laid bare and feeling actually very alienated from it. And it took that walk, or maybe a few blocks of that walk, to kind of resettle. Actually we never left America. We never left New York City. We were here the whole time. Because I found that film so transportive and seeing it in the theater so transportive, which I think is something to do with the way it was shot and the time and the moment. Then I remember saying to Ian it’s so weird that just sound and light did this to me or to us. That’s all it was. We were just sitting in a black box listening and looking. And yet, a streetlight feels alien to me. So I started to wonder about sound and light and how it enters the body and what it can do to us. Ajay Kurian: And seeing if you could conjure something similar. Rachel Rose: Yes. But first I think I was interested in, what are the extremes of this? Then I heard this interview with this astronaut about a spacewalk he had done in outer space, when he was repairing the International Space Station and the Earth was on the night side. So I guess when the earth is on the night side, the earth is nothing and it just looks black. At least that’s how he described it. Maybe it’s something about the position of the — I can’t remember the details of it, but it was like a void. He described this experience of total blackness in outer space and then what it’s like to come back to earth as an astronaut, which many astronauts have talked about. Having to relearn how to walk, how color is different and sounds feel different. Ajay Kurian: It almost feels like a microcosm of how you think about an artwork in general because there’s something about compression and distortion that happens repeatedly. Where using compression and distortion is a way to unground your viewer and to have them see the world anew again, where there’s something liquid and something destabilizing. You’re using extreme experiences sometimes, but it’s to induce the vertigo of the everyday. Rachel Rose: That’s right, like that image on the screen. Then I got really interested in Douglas Trumbull and early special effects designers from 2001 Space Odyssey and actually how homegrown and simple these effects were. Like that’s just milk and ink, and learning how simply you can suggest something. Ajay Kurian: So there’s just a lot of liquids that Rachel was mixing together, and when you see them, it’s so alchemical. Especially in the age that we live in today, you would just assume that it’s rendered, like it doesn’t look real. Rachel Rose: But it literally was just in my kitchen. That’s all it is. I was really interested in that, which I think is similar to this thing of, I was actually just at the movies and many of us probably saw Gravity. It’s not that big of a deal, but you know, it can also change your relationship to living for a second and that’s meaningful. Ajay Kurian: I mean, outside of how a documentary can potentially move politics if it does. It depends, right? Depends what we’re thinking right now and maybe the world is past documentary help. But there’s also that feeling that art can be a transcendent experience that pushes you out of your body into a place where you can experience yourself in the world in a very different way. Those are very life-changing experiences. I remember when I interviewed you during Covid, I asked you whether you’ve had transcendent experiences with the work of art and you adamantly were like, yes I’ve had many. One that you mentioned was a story by Joyce Carol Oates. Rachel Rose: Maybe I was reading it at the time. Ajay Kurian: You had just finished reading it. It was a short story called Feral. Rachel Rose: I can’t even remember this. Ajay Kurian: Oh, man. It was intense because you kind of narrated the story and then you were like, I wanna cut that. But it’s a story of a couple that have been trying to have a kid for quite a long time. They finally do. They’re so pleased. The child’s very calm, pleasant and lovely. And then, unfortunately, almost drowns and the child’s revived. Then his demeanor is completely different. He’s like a feral child. He’s running around constantly escaping every situation, almost demonic. And throughout this, what you described is that the language is very simple, not flat, but just simple and matter of fact. And then in this last section where the child disappears and runs out into the woods, all of a sudden it’s like time is distended and every single thing is described in high definition. The end of the story is that you see the child howling in the woods with other children. Rachel Rose: It’s such a crazy, beautiful story. Thank you for reminding me of that. Ajay Kurian: It made me think of weapons if you saw that. Rachel Rose: Yes. Ajay Kurian: That came to mind and I was curious if that director had seen that. If you haven’t seen weapons, it’s actually really worth seeing. But it also just tapped me into that feeling of distortion and it made perfect sense to me why that would be one of those experiences that had that effect on you because it feels like a feeling that you chase too. Rachel Rose: You know what’s cool about that story? That I forgot about. Is that as a reader, when you’re reading it, the whole time, you’re in the position of the parents, right? I can’t remember exactly whose consciousness, but you’re in their position. Maybe you’re the mom. I can’t remember. Ajay Kurian: I think you are. Rachel Rose: So you’re like, why? You know, it’s all the bad stuff that’s happening to her because of her messed up kid and this kind of mid loss. What happened to my kid? His brain is damaged by the water and you’re in this whole detective story about, can she get him back? When’s he gonna release her to love her again? And then at the very end it’s revealed that this way bigger thing’s been happening the whole time. And who knows what happened under the water. Maybe it was just a little thing, it’s meaningless. Or maybe he was down there and he met a spirit. It just flips the whole relationship to the problem that you’ve been following the whole time. Ajay Kurian: That’s so weird that I didn’t think about that moment in the water. I guess I assumed that it’s like a life and death experience, but when you said who knows what happened in the water, it kind of gave me goosebumps. Something happened in the water. Rachel Rose: Or not. Ajay Kurian: Or not. Rachel Rose: Or nothing happened and he was born feral. Ajay Kurian: Have you had any transcendent experiences recently with the work of art? Rachel Rose: I have had two in the past four days, which is very unusual because I don’t know if it’s like this for a lot of you guys, but there are long stretches of just nothing. I saw Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a Belgian choreographer on Thursday night. I don’t need to paraphrase the whole piece, but it just completely blew my mind so much that I got Ian a ticket to go alone on Friday night, and made him go because I was like, our relationship needs you to see this. I can’t be the only one who saw this. That’s the level of masterpiece I thought it was. Then on Sunday, we took our kids to see hoppers, which also is just mind blowing. It’s like a Pocahontas story or Avatar. Now we’re in the animal world and we’re here to save the animals, and people are bad and they’re violent. They’re like there to destroy nature and we hope that humans will learn a lesson or something. Kind of exactly like Avatar or Pocahontas. Then it weaves into something much more complex and a kind of forgiveness and empathy for human behavior. And locating it within the kinds of needs and drives that all animals have in different degrees and is organ principled and organized in different ways. In the end it sort of offers human destruction and behavior an enormous amount of empathy. It’s a super complicated movie. I really don’t know how it got made. Ajay Kurian: In thinking about animal consciousness, witches and thinking about all the things that start to get banished from the world because there’s a particular kind of colonial rationality and also the beginnings of capitalism that are happening in this moment. I mean, this is the grounds for the film Enclosure and I’m sure you can speak to that in terms of what that means for that proto capitalist moment. But I’m gonna show this first. Rachel Rose: One of the ways that people thought about healing other people during this time was through transferring consciousnesses into bodies of animals. So if someone was sick with the flu and nothing was working, they might kill a goat. I don’t remember exactly, but you kill a goat and stick the goat next to the person to try to transfer the death into another body, for example, or the illness into another body. Ajay Kurian: And then you have a show that’s opening this week at Gladstone Gallery, which is called The Rest, where you’re thinking about landscape and politics and the stories that we tell ourselves, but again, through this sort of distorted lens. These are really beautiful paintings. I don’t think I’ve actually seen one of these in person, so I’m excited to see it in person. Rachel Rose: They’re small. They’re a little big, but they’re small. This is something I’ve been working on for maybe three or four years. It’s not actually in the Bible, but this allegory of the rest on the flight into Egypt, which is this moment that has been depicted throughout European Western painting from Caravaggio to Flemish to Southern, everywhere, of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph fleeing. Basically running to safety in Egypt as Herod’s army is on their back trying to persecute and capture them. And Jesus, I think, is three days old. So she’s like breastfeeding, very new mother shit. There’s this moment, it’s called the rest on the flight in Egypt, where they stop to rest and Joseph gets them food and usually there’s a water source. And usually symbolically, there’s this hay field that sprouts up automatically so you see Herod’s army is blocked and can’t find them. Mary sits in the center just breastfeeding Jesus, calmly. And at her feet often grow the exact herbs that she needs to feed him and feed herself. There’s this thing where the tree branch bends down to give Joseph the exact olive or depending on where they are, pear, whatever that he needs to give for her. The donkey just waits there and everything is perfect for her and for this moment. It’s a kind of time warp space thing. I’ve interpreted the allegory many different ways in different shows and different ways of working with the paintings. In this show I decided to reset the allegory in Northern Westchester. Now from the perspective of Mary. Taking Mary, Joseph, and Jesus out, and looking at the symbolic elements that she looks at in the painting as transposed to Northern Westchester now. And kind of experiencing the world from her perspective in that moment. So that’s what the show is. Ajay Kurian: Beautiful. Go see the show. It opens on Friday. Rachel Rose: Yeah, that’s it. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Forum 17 | Ebony L. Haynes: The Terms Of Autonomy

When David Zwirner approached Ebony L. Haynes, the conversation didn’t begin with vision statements or prestige. It began with reality: exhaustion, uncertainty, and the question of whether staying in the art world was even possible. What followed was recalibration. If she was going to continue, it had to be on terms that reflected how she actually works—through care, risk, and sustained presence. That recalibration became 52 Walker. Drawing from her time at Martos Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster, Haynes speaks candidly about what it means to build exhibitions from the ground up: buying furniture on credit cards, drilling into gallery floors, maintaining impossible works by hand, and staying late because the work deserves it. For her, autonomy is not branding or independence for its own sake. It is the ability to stay present with artists, to hold risk without spectacle, and to let rigor coexist with joy. Rather than framing curatorial work as management or authorship, Haynes describes it as a practice shaped by trust, repetition, and care—one that resists burnout not by slowing ambition, but by rooting it in pleasure, responsibility, and belief. She explains: * How Foxy Production taught her to do every job herself, and why learning the whole system changed how she values labor. * Why belief in the work often comes before money, and what it costs to act on that belief anyway. * How maintenance, repetition, and care are not secondary tasks but central to exhibition-making. * What quarantine, racial reckoning, and institutional fatigue revealed about her limits—and her resolve. * How 52 Walker emerged not from a master plan, but from presence, honesty, and the willingness to say, “I have this idea.” Timestamps (0:00) First Encounter and the Permission to Care (4:00) Foxy Production and Learning by Doing(7:00) Installation as Commitment (16:00) Belief, Debt, and the Couch(18:00) Maintenance, Repetition, and Joy (21:00) Quarantine, Burnout, and Almost Leaving (25:00) Martos Gallery and the Small Fish Problem (27:00) Shoot the Lobster and Experimental Freedom (32:00) 52 Walker and Building a Program (41:00) Artists, Power, and Staying in the Work Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube [https://youtu.be/MzT9CkromXI]. Follow Ebony Instagram: @ebotron [https://www.instagram.com/ebotron/] Follow 52 Walker Web: https://www.52walker.comInstagram: @52walker [https://www.instagram.com/52walkerstreet/?hl=en] Writer, curator, and phenom Ebony L. Haynes is on a mission to reconfigure the art world. Working her way up from her first New York City internship at contemporary gallery Foxy Production (then based in Chelsea), the Canadian-born Haynes would eventually become the director of Marts Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster. In early 2020, Haynes was approached by David Zwirner for a sales director position. She countered with a pitch for an exhibition model resembling a kunsthalle, wherein exhibitions would last 3 months and allow for visitors to spend more time truly considering the art before them. That idea led to the October 2021 opening of 52 Walker, David Zwirner Gallery's TriBeCa location, with Haynes at the helm as director. Unlike traditional commercial galleries, 52 Walker does not represent artists, and is instead dedicated to curating programming at a pace similar to that of a museum — giving artists more opportunity to challenge themselves and experiment freely. The recruitment of an all-Black staff at 52 Walker garnered disproportionate attention, but her two-pronged approach to catalyzing change in the art world is more far-sighted than mere identity politics. In challenging the ever-shrinking attention spans of a cultural milieu that increasingly consumes art through social media, Haynes aims to empower artists to take risks and dig deeper in their work. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here [https://www.newcrits.studio/events]. Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio [http://www.newcrits.studio]. Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: What does it feel like to watch this right now? Ebony L. Haynes: You know, I haven’t watched this in a while. It stands so clear in my mind. The first time I experienced this artwork of perfection… Ajay Kurian: This was what I read and gathered was the first art experience where you were really rocked to your core. Ebony L. Haynes: There was a small space run by this formidable woman, Ydessa Hendeles in Toronto, who at the time I knew nothing about. I stumbled into this space based on some kind of art map. I was emotional, I remember crying the first time. I went back at least a half dozen times and it made me feel like pursuing something in the art world could really mean something. It was the very first artwork I ever remember feeling like this shit hits and there are so many layers to it. The first time I walked in, I didn’t know who Shirin Neshat was, you know? And it’ll be one of my opuses. I already had one. I thought Gordon Mata Clark and Pope.L is a show I did, and I’m like, oh, I can’t top it. But working closely with this artist and something around this work would be the next major emotional insurmountable moment for me. You have to visualize this two-channel video, before I knew what two-channel really meant. You know, I don’t wanna pretend like I was encountering this work and I knew all of the ways to talk about it. I walked into the room, and there were two screens. This window was a screen and the wall facing each other. So these performers are essentially facing each other and you’re sitting in the center. It was a purple carpet, very well installed. I come from a music background, so immediately I was like, the sound design was impeccable. Somebody really thought about six channels of sound and knew how to put the subwoofers in the right place to make me feel it when it hits that note. I was like crying for this woman. And also feeling a little bit for the man and I mean, it was… Ajay Kurian: There’s layers. Ebony L. Haynes: There’s layers. It’ll be a chapter. Yeah, it was huge for me. Ajay Kurian: It’s also such a different experience. Because I was watching this on my laptop and I was like, this is crazy. Then hearing it here, the hair on the back of my neck went… Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah when you see it, it was floor to ceiling, so it was larger than life bodies belting in front of me. I almost felt like I could feel the air out of the speakers. I mean, I was also there alone every time I went. Ajay Kurian: Wow. So this clocks as one of the formative experiences a hundred percent. In your sort of art upbringing, I’m gonna fast forward a little bit to when you actually make it to New York. Is your first job in the art world interning at Foxy? Ebony L. Haynes: Intern at Foxy Production, yep. Whenever I’m about to talk about Michael and John, Michael, Gillespie, John Thompson. I make it sound like we are really good friends and I hope we are, but we don’t text and call each other. But they know how important they were and are to my story. Foxy production was one I wrote to because of their program. I felt somebody, who at the moment when I applied, had worked in music mostly and that was my only full-time experience and writing about music. They were really kind of schmutzy and unmastered is what I remember saying to John in my letter. It was like this underground basement, party of a gallery where they were doing a lot of new media before many galleries. Maybe not. You know, I don’t know, but from my perspective. Ajay Kurian: They have that reputation, yeah. Ebony L. Haynes: So I just wrote them a letter and I was like, do you want me, I’d love to come and work for you for free. And they were like, cool, come on down. I did, and it was life-changing. I really expected it to be an internship where I go back and get a job in Toronto and it turned into a job for them. Ajay Kurian: And that’s when we met. Ebony L. Haynes: That’s when we met, so many years ago. That was 2012, I think. Something like that. Ajay Kurian: With people that are in the gallery world or in the commercial art world — my gallerist for instance, Oliver, he worked for Alexander and Bonin. And he really credits them as being the ones who really gave him his grounding and his understanding of what it meant to be a gallerist. Do you feel similarly? You worked at Foxy, then you worked at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, then you worked at Martos. Of those three experiences, what has felt like the one that’s grounded you the most? Ebony L. Haynes: Grounded me, probably Martos. You know, Martos and Shoot The Lobster. I have to say both because I was tasked to program three galleries bicoastally at the same time with a staff of one. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Ebony L. Haynes: Sometimes an intern or assistant, eventually it grew, but it took years. Foxy though, made me really appreciate what it means to learn everything about my job. They taught me how to make an invoice, what a performer was for shipping, what the difference between national and international crates are, and how to hang an art fair booth. Registrars and production art handling are my complete IV lifeblood. If my registrar and my art handlers are not happy… I’m the queen of Donuts install morning or let’s get some pizza. When it was Martos time, I’d do some beer after hours, but not at David Zwirner. Because. I remember one story, this show at Martos, Invisible Man. Pope.L created a new work for me and it was a fountain that hung upside down. I’d hired an art handling and production company to help me build that plinth and figure out how to hang it safely and successfully from the beam. No shade, in case anybody is associated with that experience, and much love to the crew. But they bailed before it was hung. They claimed, and to their credit I think it was hard, but they just were not gonna be responsible for it. So I had to figure out how to rent scaffolding and enlist somebody, who I’m thankful is now a partner in all things in my life and at the time was just my art handler and production manager, and another friend who I knew was art handling for another gallery. One night I slept there. Just so many late nights for this show right before we opened. I have so much love and appreciation for people who say they come into 52 Walker and it feels like an installation and it’s always new. I have to be involved. I would never ask anybody installing a show for me to do it without my involvement. I’m really respectful and admire people who are willing to troubleshoot with me, and especially those who feel excited by it and not burdened by challenges because some people do. Some people have an attitude of, it’s not my job, this is not what I signed up for. But those who really get excited by problem solving and we’re in it together — I will vacuum up the floor while you are mopping. We have to do it ‘cause then it just looks so good. Ajay Kurian: I think also sometimes there’s a fear that the curator will get in the way and when you can actually fully collaborate that is a beautiful thing and it’s something that I think artists would want more if they could trust it. I’m wondering when you felt like artists started to trust you? Was this Martos? Was this Foxy? I think you always had artists on your side. You were always friends with artists. You were always in the mix of things. But when did you feel like, oh, I’ve earned this trust now? Ebony L. Haynes: I would say it happened early, but you know, there’s different levels of trust. I remember one time at Foxy production, this wonderful artist who I now call a friend, Sascha Braunig, had her second exhibition there. First of all, the gallery needed to be painted. Ajay Kurian: You painted the gallery? Ebony L. Haynes: With Sasha. Ajay Kurian: You’re kidding. Ebony L. Haynes: We texted in the morning and was like, can you bring an extra shirt, like painting clothes? I have to preface what we continue with our conversation to say I’ve never advocated for a kind of paradigm shift with 52 Walker. Of course, my practice is my own. Everybody is afforded the right to their own practice and opinions. But if you didn’t make art, and a lot of curators did. But I didn’t make art in the studio, I studied photography. I only worked primarily as a commercial photographer. So to really understand how the artist is working. I can’t imagine asking someone to move a painting one inch on blocks on the floor for me. Ajay Kurian: Really? Ebony L. Haynes: I hate it. I actually save a lot of money with art handlers because I don’t book anything until it’s really time to hang. I move the blocks, unless they’re really big and I need help, of course. But I feel weird and they’re always so generous. Art handlers are the blood of the industry. They don’t feel weird hanging back and waiting for me to take 10 minutes to look at a wall, but I feel intrusive and disrespectful of their time, just having them be around. So I do a lot of my installing after hours. I do a lot of facsimile printouts, even just 8 by 10 and tape them together to move things that are not worth $10,000 or a million dollars, and just move the paper. There’s something about feeling like I’m connecting with what I’m hanging that feels important. Ajay Kurian: Oh yeah. When I am hanging a show, I’ll move something and then I’ll walk out the gallery and I’ll walk in and then I’ll move something again and I’ll walk out of the gallery and I’ll walk in. Ebony L. Haynes: Me too. Ajay Kurian: And I just keep doing that over and over again because what is the choreography of this emotional experience? Testing it as many times as you can to see does it hold and does it do the things that I thought in my head? And trying to separate yourself from what was happening in the studio or what was happening in a different moment in time to what’s happening in this space right now. You’ve had so much experience putting together shows. This signaled to me what Ebony was gonna be about. This is the artist Peter Williams. I think we both agree, maybe an underappreciated artist Ebony L. Haynes: A hundred percent. Ajay Kurian: I didn’t know that many people talking about Peter Williams. I don’t remember if you were the one who told me about him, or there was some moment when I was looking at this work and I was like, holy shit, this guy is incredible. Here you were doing a show of the work and making sure that he was taken care of. He had his share of health issues and required some real care. It felt like this was a moment where you really gotta showcase an artist and show people a world that they hadn’t seen before, which I think we’ll start to see more and more. And then 52 Walker happens. Ebony L. Haynes: The show is heartwarming for me on so many levels. This is just gonna be an ode to Foxy production. Michael and John, to their credit, it was an artist who had been presented to them and in front of me. I was very privileged to be the only employee. The owners of the gallery really heard me. They really listened to my opinions about the work. We had engaging conversations about the work, and they said, why don’t you go to Delaware and meet with Peter? This was one year out of grad school. I mean, I’m sure there are many good bosses out there. Ajay Kurian: No, that’s special. Ebony L. Haynes: For these gentlemen to put me on a train, not a plane, but put me on the train. It was more than just a studio visit. It was an invitation to, not just a show, but representation. There were no titles at Foxy production. By any measure, I was a gallery assistant, but I was also their registrar, art handler, and did the fairs with them. This was my real first experience with an artist bringing in an archive that was on slides in binders and really bonding with Peter and helping with his New York show. Ajay Kurian: I feel like Martos was when you planted a couple of flags. Invisible Man being the first where you could start to make a stake curatorially. How do you create a relationship with a gallerist, specifically a white gallerist, where you’re like, this is what I want to do, these are the shows that I want to do, and get the support that you need? Because I’ve proposed shows that didn’t happen because there wasn’t the support that I needed, but you pulled these things off and made it work. Ebony L. Haynes: For better or worse. I was unaware of what anyone else thought. I probably should have taken note a little more and I try to learn from that now. I knew that this show had to happen. Many questions were put to me as to its financial viability, production, and installation. I didn’t have answers, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t all peachy, you know? I got in trouble a lot, not just with Jose. I mean, not in trouble, but I had to have many private conversations with people I worked with and for — here’s an example. In this picture, this couch, Kayode Ojo. I was such a believer in this complete installation that I bought this couch myself on two credit cards. It was only $600, which makes you understand what my credit card situation was like. I had to resell it on Craigslist at the end. For Kayode and I, the belief in this work and the conversation in the show was so much more important than me to think 10 steps ahead. I just thought two steps ahead. And so the blindness of that was rewarding for me as a curator. You know, how are we gonna get those Jessica Vaughn’s up? Let’s figure out how to do this large format printing for the seats. And you know, there was no Patreon then, but I did some sort of crowdfunding. Ajay Kurian: How did you maintain this steadiness and not just burn out after doing a show like this? How do you not just crash and be like, fuck it, I’m never doing a show like that again. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, it’s so fun. Look at it. Look at this floor for context. I went to Red Hook a year before the show even opened to look at flooring that is reclaimed oak. It was pretty expensive. And the first show I do, I tell my boss, I love this floor. I am gonna drill a hole through it that will leave a mark for the life of the gallery and it’s still there. If you go in, you see I kept the piece, but the line marks this hole. Ajay Kurian: Oh, this is like your own little Gordon Matta-Clark. Ebony L. Haynes: It is. I mean art is so fun, you know, even the challenges. I think when I stop having fun in the challenges of each show, maybe my career will change. But I love working with artists. I love the conversations. I really have a good time. I’m not begrudgingly approaching an install because I have to stay till midnight. For me it’s more what’s for dinner at the gallery? Let’s go guys. Maybe when that changes, it’ll feel different. For this, I didn’t know what people would think. I didn’t know if it would be successful. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was excited for people to come in and see it. This Fountain, Pope.L was like fuck you, you’re gonna have to get on a ladder twice a day. First fill it with newly filtered water, and at the end of the day, drain it. Every single day, reset the timer. This was for eight weeks. That’s a lot of draining and filling. I would just laugh every time and send him texts and be like, you motherfucker, fuck you. I love you, but this is crazy. You know, it’s fun. That’s the answer. Ajay Kurian: There’s joy. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, there’s joy for sure. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there’s a moment in museums and art culture at large, after George Floyd, where everybody’s scrambling to figure out how they can address, what to them seems like this explosion of a crisis. Where it’s just been there all the time and no one’s been looking at it. So I think a lot of black creatives, a lot of black artists, a lot of anybody in the field, was trying to figure out how to not fucking quit and how to keep moving forward. That was right when you left Martos. It was the in between period, right? Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, it was in between, by default because we were quarantined. I mean, I can say a lot. Like many non-white bodies in the art world, I felt very angry. I felt sort of like this new moment of realization sociopolitically, where, oh, my neighbor’s racist. We knew that, you know, all these things were just bubbling to the top. And then having to deal with what I’ve always felt and then what became more apparent to others and making them feel comfortable. I reached a tipping point with this online programming — for those who remember the quarantine of online viewing rooms, experience in 3D, QR code this, and here’s a talk virtually. That was my first and only time so far where I was really literally almost out the door of the art world. I was really ready to go for my seventh life. I was like, this is it for me. I can’t do it anymore. Ajay Kurian: Is that before David? Ebony L. Haynes: It was really concurrent. Here comes my shout out to a friend in the room who gets a chapter in my memoir. You know, it’s about the people who are there at the right time. I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Mark, while we were quarantined. I remember just spewing my guts of frustration of just I just wanna do cool shit and make somebody realize that it’s cool and pay me to do it. I know it’s gonna be good. Don’t question me with your budget meetings and your bullshit and just just wanna fucking do it. Ajay Kurian: You sound like an artist. Ebony L. Haynes: Maybe I feel like an artist sometimes. It’s your practice. It does feel like I wanna create. I’m a little more like I wanna produce for my artists. And Mark said, what does that look like to you? In this moment, I don’t know, fucking I advising for Kanye. It was mostly really this moment of one person, not just Mark, but a few people very close to me hearing me spew this confession. I have imposter syndrome but maybe a little less in this moment when all these idiots around me are doing some bullshit posturing and I really wanna do something that means something and can we just get someone to pay for it? Then a few people encouraged it, whether they had the answer or not. Ajay Kurian: They didn’t slam the door. Ebony L. Haynes: No, they didn’t slam the door. And it was concurrent with David Zwirner, because before COVID is when I was approached by the gallery. But I was approached to work for them in a much more traditional way as a director which is what happens in the gallery world. There’s this kind of unspoken rule of three to four year life at any gallery and then you get poached, which is a problematic word, but I use it anyway. Or you have conversations about lifting or expanding your career. And at the time when I had my first conversation with somebody from Zwirner Gallery, I thought I couldn’t do any of this. I felt like a small fish and was kind of afraid to be honest about working with big fish. So I had the conversation to attempt to be professional and leverage myself as a business woman to go back to Martos and be like, make me a partner and big fish want me. I don’t know what it was. I don’t even know how to say it. Ajay Kurian: You were leveraging Ebony L. Haynes: I was trying and I thought I would, but I didn’t have to because of the way things played out. My second interview or what was to be a meeting with Zwirner Minds was the week they announced quarantine. And I got a text from somebody, who is now a colleague who I really appreciate, she’s really and truly the backbone to a lot of how 52 Walker came to be. It was a very casual text like, oh, when COVID and quarantine blows over. Remember there were news casts about clorox and wiping down your groceries. That was the week I was supposed to go in and I was like, yeah, let’s just see how it plays out. Months go by. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Ebony L. Haynes: Silence. I’m spiraling. I wanna buy a container and put it on a small piece of land. I was feeling very fiery in the way that I wanted other people to feel heard and seen. Then it was like, people are actually back at work and doing business. So it was almost like the interview that was meant to happen, in February or the second week of March, was happening six months later. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Did you have a vision of 52 Walker in that second interview, or was it something that was kind of iterated with them? Ebony L. Haynes: I had a vision largely through conversations throughout the pandemic that really solidified what my experience at Martos and Shoot The Lobster had affirmed for me in a way that I loved working. Shoot The lobster, for background, was sort of a project space of Martos. It was for sale, but we didn’t represent artists. I was the art handler, director, curator, programmer for New York and Los Angeles. I would install it after hours, I’d leave Martos and walk over to Shoot The Lobster. Ajay Kurian: It was at that moment, you were a restaurateur that opened their second restaurant and you were just scrambling between boats all the time. Ebony L. Haynes: Just all the time. I wanted to live in Chinatown because I spent every moment there. But there was something that happened for me as a curator where I could see the benefits of both worlds in that relationship where Shoot The Lobster felt free for artists. With me, it was like, no one’s paying attention. Let’s cut this ceiling open and break the pipe and nobody cares. Let’s put a video out on the street and it’s like Elger Street and nobody pays attention, but we tried it. We tried it out and it worked most of the time. Then I had Martos where we represented artists, we did art fairs, and a program that was representative of Jose and the history of the gallery with new artists that I was there to bring on. So it was four and a half years and the melding of both of those mines started forming 52 Walker. Ajay Kurian: That makes so much sense. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah. If I could do Shoot The Lobster bigger. But I had nothing planned going into the interview. Ajay Kurian: When you look at 52 Walker now, it looks very planned. There’s a vision of the catalogs. It seems like they are inspired by many different things from Cy Twombly drawing catalogs to Octavia Butler to magazine culture. I think the magazine culture is actually one of my favorite things about the editorial note, because it reminded me of how I think about introductions. It’s an editor’s note. It’s something that is about changing how we can be hospitable in art spaces and what voice do we use? Is it a voice where we’re looking down like this, or is it a voice where we’re like this and we can talk to each other as if we’re all just horizontal? Ebony L. Haynes: Totally. Ajay Kurian: It feels like there’s an ethic, rigor, but empathy with 52 Walker. Did you know that you wanted catalogs? Did you know that you wanted all of it to look this way? Did you have a sense of the first artist and then kind of importantly, the way that you were thinking about risk and safety? Because this is commercial at a much larger scale and you already said feeling like a little fish next to big fish. This is one of the biggest fucking fishes there is. So how do you make that transformation? How do you meet that and say, all right, let me do my shit. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, I’m always gonna be honest and transparent. I really don’t know. I don’t encourage anyone to wait until this moment of fight or flight. But I truly felt like I had nothing to lose when I pitched 52 Walker. Which made me probably seem more confident than I am because if everyone said no, I had a container plan. You know, I studied art criticism. It was an art criticism and curatorial practice program. My through line from the beginning was criticism. I wanted to write, I wanted to be critically engaged with practice and the canon and publish. I wasn’t studying exhibition design in a way that maybe I would now. So I kind of was like, this is what I wanna do and if nobody wants to, I don’t know. I’m really good at growing cucumbers. I would hope that I could encourage anybody who feels any sort of inspiration not to wait for this dire moment, you know? Otherwise though, to be honest, I was in front of David Zwirner and I didn’t have my next interview with a partner or director. It was David Zwirner and Ebony Haynes in a room. We talked amicably and professionally about me coming in as a director. I’d never met him before either, full disclosure. I was just riding a vibe. That sounds so unplanned, but sometimes you feel people are listening. Or you could really have a conversation with somebody and it’s reciprocal. And I just sort of said, I have this idea. It’s real, that’s what I said. I have this idea. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Ebony L. Haynes: And the things that you’ve done during COVID and rethinking models and how to offer different kinds of support. Here’s my idea. Ajay Kurian: This is almost like an out-of-body experience. You’re saying things that are very matter of fact and I want to give commentary to the matter of factness. Do I have consent to do that? Ebony L. Haynes: I will share as much as I feel comfortable living online. Ajay Kurian: I think there’s a lot of situations where people walk into a situation and you might have preconceived ideas. You might come in with frustrations, angers, structural inequities, that you’re like, this is my fucking moment to speak truth to power. I am trying to decide whether that’s the angel or the devil on your shoulder. Because I think what Ebony did in that moment is that she met the situation in full presence, staying completely present in that situation, to say the thing that was on her heart and just seeing where it lands. I think that’s when people pick up what you put down because there’s no animosity. It’s simply stated, these are the things that are happening. These are the things that are happening in the world. This is the thing that I want to do. And I think it could change things and it doesn’t put that other person on the defense to say, I need to defend myself in A, B, and C ways, which in so many other contexts, maybe he should. But that’s not the context in which you’re gonna get something done and it’s not the context in which you can grow something that you’ve grown. To me, seeing the zen of that moment, I think is really important and a great lesson because it’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to maintain your presentness in thought and mind and spirit when you’re confronted with somebody that represents a lot of things, more so than just them as the person. When a person gets seen in that way, their defenses go down and you might be able to accomplish something different, which you’ve clearly done. Ebony L. Haynes: That is too generous. I mean, it’s so heartwarming for me to hear. I’m not trying to dismiss what you said, but it really feels generous. So maybe that is how it is landed outside of my experience. Ajay Kurian: I’m just trying to see it because in my head it’s coming from an honest place. I’m not trying to gas you anything. Ebony L. Haynes: No, I believe you. That’s why I’m really taken aback by it. It makes me feel joy to hear. Ajay Kurian: And to flip it, I think it also means that you’re okay in those moments of pushing those other concerns away momentarily. Even if you’re not thinking of it as the long-term vision, even if that’s not the goal in your head. I’m doing this because I want this in this many years. There is a presentness of mine to say, I’m gonna get this done and this is how it can happen. Otherwise it doesn’t happen and I’m just gonna move on and I’ll do something else and I’ll live number seven. But there’s a lot of complications and a lot of interesting things that happen there. I think for people trying to navigate this incredibly treacherous terrain, it’s good to hear shit like this. Because you also have a program that’s not easy either, you know. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: From Nikita Gill, who’s up on the screen right now. To Nora Turato, who is after that? Ebony L. Haynes: After Nora was Tiona McClodden. Then it was Tao, then it was Gordon Matta Clark and Pope.L. Ajay Kurian: That run of Nikita, Nora, and Tiona. Those are three shows about ruin, destruction, and failure. About the systems that have not served large swaths of the community, specifically people of color, specifically black people, and that these systems have failed and they’re fucked. They need to be torn down, burn, or they’re already in ruin. How do you find a way to talk to collectors that have benefited and continue to benefit from the maintenance of those systems? Ebony L. Haynes: Yikes. That is for a different talk, my friend. That is a deep talk. I’ll give you a little answer. Ajay Kurian: Give us PG-13. Ebony L. Haynes: PG-13 answer is… Ajay Kurian: Give us 2025 PG-13, which is like R from 1990. Ebony L. Haynes: In your in Ajay’s intro to me, you know, you mentioned eating shit, which is an analogy I personally use all the time. Because I had to early on find power in eating shit. I say early on as early as grad school, you know, I was the only black student in a cohort of 12. There were no black professors. I had to get two external black professors and I was the only one to do an extra semester. I mean, it just felt arduous and systemic in its bureaucracy. Realizing I could come out of that with something like foxy production and opportunity and then more opportunity. There’s always shit. As a non-white man, you have to eat and if you can work your muscle. No disrespect to the white men in the room, by the way. You know I have to say it because they’re near and dear to my heart. Ajay Kurian: I have plenty of white friends, but they can hear this. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, they can hear it. Because we’re talking about the general category, right? The general label. If you are not in that group and probably what feels more powerful to me than any space I open or program or show I curate: if you don’t feel like shit when you go home because of the amount of shit you’ve been given, you’re a fucking champ. For real, you’re a champ. And don’t think that you have lowered yourself to anyone’s expectations or lack of expectation. It’s like your petty funny bone. I’ll be like, okay, I see you, collector from eight years ago, who’s come in the gallery, who doesn’t remember what you said to me or how you spoke about me in French, because I’m fluent in French. And we were in Brussels and I had to storm out of the booth out of anger. I see you being respectful is fuel for me. It makes me feel a small amount of authority or power. Power doesn’t come from me in this space or these shows. These shows, for me, are only powerful because of my artists. Some of my staff, who are wonderful, they’ll be like, oh, I went to this bar and I was wearing my T-shirt — I gift them 52W merch every Christmas. And someone was like, oh, you work there? That’s so cool. And I was like, girl, nobody said that shit to you. You are totally clowning. She’s like no, they did. I was like, I was out at Art Basel and get introduced as Ebony of 52 Walker and get, oh, what’s that? I mean, there’s two sides of the coin. That happens to this day, and I don’t care. I embrace it all like that. That is power and it’s just part of the journey of the space. Power is that I’m still here. I am smiling. Shit tastes like cheesecake. I’m telling you, this is the one lesson you should all take away. Nobody can feed you shit unless you feel like it’s shit. You take it, you bring it home. Don’t get depressed ‘cause depression is our crypt like fuck depression. You are just as powerful as anyone else. And if you could just wait 10 to 15 years, you will show them that it tastes like cheesecake. Just give it time. Be kind to yourself. The world was not kind to me. The art world was not kind but I didn’t care. Ajay Kurian: That’s the part that’s so fascinating to me. That you didn’t care. Ebony L. Haynes: I think I’m just too stupid to have acknowledged it, to be honest. Ajay Kurian: If everybody believes that you’re too stupid, that’s not stupid. Ebony L. Haynes: Not stupid but oblivious. Ajay Kurian: Is this ‘cause you’re Canadian? Ebony L. Haynes: Maybe. You know, I won’t listen to this again, not because it’s not wonderful. I have a podcast and I’ve never re-listened to an episode. I don’t reread interviews that I give. It’s sort of like fight or flight always. I let it go and there it goes. You could hate it. You could love it. Both reactions are great. I’m already thinking about September 2027. Ajay Kurian: Exactly. Ebony L. Haynes: It’s all okay. I love criticism of what I do. And accolade, it’s all fine. I don’t know if it’s because I’m Canadian. It’s because I didn’t study art history, that’s why. Ajay Kurian: So I’m gonna end with what the future holds. Because I think in a way, even if you say you’re only planning a couple steps ahead, it somehow seems bigger than that. And you’ve just been appointed as… Ebony L. Haynes: It’s a word. Full is a mouthful. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, global… Oh, you’re gonna make me try to say it. Ebony L. Haynes: GHCP. It’s Global Head of Curatorial Programs. Ajay Kurian: What does that look like? Do you have a sense of what that looks like? Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, I feel very present and purposeful in what I’ve achieved, but I do have to acknowledge the forces around me. Like Foxy production, like Lucy Mitchell-Innes who taught me all about secondary market, took me to my first auction, allowed me to work with Pope.L. Like Jose Martos, who trusted me. I feel really fortunate to have people in my life who I’ve worked for and with, where I’ve never felt stepped on. My current job is no different. You know, I felt the ability to pitch something to David Zwirner the first time and I felt supported in ideating this new potential of what the role could be. Ajay Kurian: So this is something again that you brought to them. Ebony L. Haynes: To full disclosure, it was definitely co cooked. I think without knowing we were cooking something, it just started, it just felt like I needed a change and I wasn’t sure why or what. David was trying to suggest a change and it was a long time. This wasn’t like one week. I feel lucky to have support and dissonance. You know, if you have somebody who tells you you’re the shit all the time, don’t, it’s your demise. Somebody who questions my intent, my proposal or my show, or makes me try to fight for something and I make them fight for their opinion too. It’s been really generous in my experience. I feel really lucky. Ajay Kurian: Especially when it comes from a place of care. No one’s trying to fuck you. Ebony L. Haynes: And it’s care on both sides really. I wanna figure out what growth means for me and the program. I’m not sure if growth means being in the same space for another five years if I’m being totally honest. And that’s kind of exciting as somebody who loves exhibition design and curating. We have to keep moving. We have to figure out what it means to challenge like an artist. I do think curatorial practice is truly a practice for me. I need to practice a bit more. What does it mean to do a show in Hong Kong? I don’t know, but I could know soon. That’s new, you know. I don’t know what it will bring really, but I’m excited for a new muscle. Ajay Kurian: I think even in the moments when you were like, I don’t know how to answer that, the way that you go about it, I think is so revealing about the state of mind that it took to keep doing these things and how you’re gonna keep doing even more. I’m excited to see it. Ebony L. Haynes: I love you and I wasn’t gonna say this, but Ajay had a show that was as inspiring for me, which I’ve mentioned also in interviews but he didn’t reference. His show at 47 Canal in 2013. I was like, who is this artist who’s making these motherfuckers build walls and put tanks inside with new wiring? I went there six times, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you live here and there’s lots of shows, it’s a lot. Ajay Kurian: That’s a lot. That’s more than I saw my show. Ebony L. Haynes: It was so good. I mean, talking about pushing things, stretching yourself, and what you’re comfortable with. Ajay Kurian: I really appreciate that. Thank you. Ebony L. Haynes: Remember that show. Top 10 New York shows. It’s true. He didn’t pay me to say it. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I’m gonna, that’s the end of this. Ebony L. Haynes: It’s in print. It was interviewed. Ajay Kurian: No, thank you. Everybody, a round of applause for Ebony Haynes. Ebony L. Haynes: Thank you. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

9. Jan. 202653 min

The Forum 16 | Banks Violette: Inside the Machinery of Ruin

He built a career on dark stages, scorched metal, and fragile narratives. Banks Violette looks back at the neo-goth label, the toll of self-destruction, and what it means to walk away from the art world and return on his own terms. Working between sculpture, installation, and sound, Violette treats subcultures, violence, and fandom as unstable stories rather than fixed identities. From Slayer panic and satanic scare headlines to burned stages and Jägermeister firepieces, his work tracks how trauma gets turned into image, how labor disappears behind polished objects, and how an artist survives a system that rewards collapse as much as rigor. He explains: * Why “neo goth” was a convenient label that flattened a generation of young artists and obscured the real story of illness, addiction, and burnout. * How murder cases, satanic panic, and The Sorrows of Young Werther reveal a long history of fiction being blamed for real-world violence. * What it means to make work about calamity and Weegee’s photographs without treating trauma as raw material or spectacle. * How class, fabrication, and hidden labor structure the work, from doing everything by hand in Brooklyn to orchestrating 14 chandeliers for Celine across the globe. * Why drugs once felt like the only rational way to survive a tiny career window, and what it took to trade that pace for a decade of near silence, family, and fishing. * How fan-level enthusiasm for Void, Smithson, and Judd can coexist with critical rigor, and why reentering the conversation matters if art is to function as a real dialogue. (0:00) Welcome and the Weight of First Impressions(3:00) The Blowtorch Narrative(7:00) Noise, Sunn O))), and the Gravity of Sound(12:00) Polke, Richter, Danto, Judd(19:10) When Stories Justify Violence(22:00) The Accomplice Problem: Art, Trauma, and Ouija(26:00) Invisible Labor, Class, and Who Really Makes the Work(34:00) Drugs as a Work Tool and the Decision to Disappear(47:00) A Decade Offstage and What It Means to Come Back Follow Banks: Web: https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbFVOTGhfb0pCVjhqMTBFbnUxVXRWOUY3YTI3UXxBQ3Jtc0ttWUJScnVlaGlfUng5T1l4aUVSdXFlelhadGtXNkw5dGtSSkxkcTB5NUNDTnBEa2VCdnBsOU0ySG1DaXBPc1VyZFZXQ2RKNlF5NlpBLTROTHZrOW1pcE44U25NUVBoT0t2aTlEdjVKcWpHcnBGcEhHSQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aaron-studio.com%2F&v=8eJD1jAZPwkhttps://ropac.net/artists/85-banks-violette/#Read: https://vonammon.bigcartel.com/product/banks-violette-no-title-gas-station-black-version [https://vonammon.bigcartel.com/product/banks-violette-no-title-gas-station-black-version]Instagram: @banks_violette_616 [https://www.instagram.com/banks_violette_616/#] Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Banks Violette: I feel like I’m catching up on sleep still at age 52. All the sleep that I missed in my twenties and thirties, I still feel like I’m trying to balance the books. Ajay Kurian: That’s fair. You know, there’s a camel theory of sleep that you can kind of keep it and grow it in a hump, and deposit it when you need it. Banks Violette: I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds absolutely accurate. Ajay Kurian: This was the project that I really did foresee, and this was the moment that the press was largely calling a neo goth moment. There were a handful of artists at that time that were really maybe engaged in a neo-goth visual culture. But I wonder, did it feel like the right way to talk about your work at the time? Banks Violette: No. It felt like a convenient way of talking about the work because it was a way to organize a group of disparate artists and make them legible in a way that was easy for people to encounter. Ideas that were potentially easy to dismiss unless there was some kind of lens attached to it. Whether or not I ever felt like I shared a lot of commonalities with the artists that I was grouped with — not necessarily. Ajay Kurian: Of that sort of generation, were there artists that you felt like were your peers or fellow travelers? Banks Violette: It was always presented as if there was much more closeness, or similarity in our practices, when there wasn’t necessarily in actuality. So the person I can point to that I think I had the most in common with when I was working actively, was probably somebody like Gardar. He had a preoccupation with a specific period in art history, a specific kind of discursive lens that he was attaching to things, and a certain kind of political bent. I think that there were a lot of ways that we dovetailed, but then there’s a lot of ways that we were totally different. The one thing that I did have in common with a lot of the artists that I was grouped with was that we were all young and pretty engaged with self-destructive behavior. And you know, the artwork kind of reflected that. So on one hand, there was this goth thing, which is an inaccurate way of organizing that work, and then there’s what was actually taking place. Which was, here’s a bunch of people who were all probably not well, and let’s lump them together. But you can’t really be like, oh look at this group of artists who are all drug addicts. So instead, you know, there’s an easier way of doing that and say oh they’re all goth. Ajay Kurian: So they almost said that though. Banks Violette: Yeah, it was implied. Ajay Kurian: I want to go back to that era where you started in New York in order to understand where you are now. The image that I feel like was paraded around the most was probably this one where you’re lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch. When you search the name Banks Violette, this was the image that used to come up. Now I think Vanity Fair has the rights to the image and they’re not putting that on Google. Banks Violette: I had this experience, and I know a lot of other people, my friends and my peers, all had this kind of experience with people coming to the studio to take photographs of you working. And it would somehow turn into the “hey, do this, hey, do that”. And yes, I did definitely light my cigarettes with map gas, a hundred percent, hand on the Bible. I use propane to light cigarettes all the time, but that was definitely somebody trying to elicit that. So on one hand, that’s accurate. On the other hand, it is a totally theatrical presentation of what that moment in time looked like. If I had been necessarily in my right mind, would I have chosen to reveal that part of myself publicly? Probably not. I think there was a lot of that. People weren’t necessarily in the greatest position to author the way they were being perceived by people. Ajay Kurian: It was a fascinating thing to watch in the studio. Because on the one hand you were really private and there were things that I think were just for you and your world. And then on the other hand, seeing how you were able to move. For instance, I think the first time that I met you, I was an intern at the Guggenheim and they were doing this young collectors thing and came to the studio and you had this giant Jagermeister piece that you were working on. It was an incredible performance. It was all the ideas that you were thinking about, but it was the first time that I was hearing it. So you’re stringing together Smithson, Hegel, satanism and all these things that I am hearing for the first time. And I was like, this dude’s a fucking genius. Not to say that you’re not, but — Banks Violette: If I’m stringing together Hegel, satanism, and Smithson, then yeah, I’m definitely not. Ajay Kurian: What was fascinating to see after that was that you’d have other studio visits and this performance, it would be the same speech. And I was like, oh right, there’s some preparation to this. For a young artist, it dialed me in because it made me think about how none of that was untruthful and none of that was coming from a dishonest place. But you’re asked to do this thing again and again, and how do you not think about what this looks like, feels like, and appears as. How much of that was on your mind in that, like period of time? Banks Violette: The things that I refer to, gravitate to, and cite within my practice are things that I care deeply about. But they’re not necessarily things that somebody has deep and intimate knowledge of. Smithson’s practice or satanism or whatever it happens to be. These are the things that I think about a lot and I don’t wanna misrepresent them. Part of doing these things is figuring out a way to translate what is potentially this kind of esoteric language or something potentially marginal, and making it into something that other people can find themselves within. You know, the perfect example of that is a band called Sun, that I’ve worked with a number of times. Incredible musicians, incredible composers. But the last time I saw them — they just played at Lincoln Center last year. What they played at Lincoln Center was identical to what they were playing in Brooklyn in like 2000 at some lousy club. What they were doing in Lincoln Center is the same, but those things are really sophisticated. It is really easy to get caught up in the more outrageous aspect of what they’re doing or pointing a finger at something and being like, oh look how crazy this is. That’s never been something I’ve been interested in. I’m interested in these things. Deeply, sincerely, and I’m trying to communicate that. And there has to be a way of translating that. Sorry, this is all very vague. Ajay Kurian: I want to come back to sincerity ‘cause I think it holds a major role in how the work comes about and also the positioning of certain things. But maybe it’s also a good time to talk about where that deep sincerity for expressing yourself came from? What’s your background and your background with art? What made you gravitate towards art in the first place? Banks Violette: I’ve always made things. That’s kind of how I understand the world. I was always a kid in the back of the class, sitting and drawing and definitely not relating to anything outside. That’s always been how I view things or related to the world. I didn’t have any kind of background with contemporary art and certainly didn’t really know that much about art history. I had one of those sort of perfect, kind of what you hope for is the experience that people have in college. Which is not a vocational route, but you go there and you’re exposed to new information and your world expands and that’s how you discover what you want to do. So I went to undergraduate in New York City after a very long roundabout route of dropping outta high school and doing all sorts of other shit. Then going to undergrad and my intention was to parlay this kind of thing that I’d always done being the kid in the back of the class just doodling - and turning that into something, or being an illustrator or a graphic designer or something practical. Ajay Kurian: And your grandmother was an illustrator? Banks Violette: She was a really prominent illustrator and she illustrated some of the original Wizard of Oz books and she was one of the first King Features Syndicated artists. She had this amazing career as an illustrator. So within my family, it was always looked at as a very responsible career path, which is fucking not practical. So I knew a lot about the history of illustration, but I didn’t know anything about contemporary art or much about art history. In undergrad, I realized this is the kind of discourse that I want to be engaged with. And I was in school in New York City, so there were plenty of opportunities to meet professional working artists and galleries. That’s how I got involved with that. Ajay Kurian: You know, I like to draw too. And it was a skillset that I was like, oh I can do this thing. But then in high school, I had an art teacher who kind of showed me that it was a way to think through the world, to think through ideas. That you could embody philosophies into an artwork or a sculpture or a drawing, whatever it might be. That was through Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Arthur Danto. Those were the things that lit me up where I was like, holy shit, I had no fucking idea. Who were the artists that lit you up in that particular moment? That you were like, oh this is the club I wanna be a part of. Banks Violette: For contemporary art? Ajay Kurian: Or whatever, ‘cause if you’re an undergrad and you’re saying this is something that I want to do. What was that clique in art history that started to itch at you? Banks Violette: I mean, this is gonna sound strange, and I remember when we had a previous conversation in Connecticut it seemed kind of odd. But just seeing images of Judd and Marfa. There’s something about that that I responded to immediately. You know, as a teenager and making album covers, art and fire art for punk rock bands and playing in bands and stuff like that. Sort of assembling and creating this kind of culture that I was a direct participant in an active way. I think that there’s something really specific to that experience. The idea that you have to be an active participant in the culture that you are consuming, right? Instead of turning on the radio and something is handed to you, but instead you have to manufacture these things all out of whole cloth. So that sense that art had some kind of connection to a broader social thing I already had in my head. Ajay Kurian: In a DIY sense. Banks Violette: In a DIY sense and, you know, seize the means of production kind of sense, that you were responsible for creating things. That sounds very Pollyanna-ish, but there was something about seeing Judd that fully realized a landscape that this art inhabited and it was architected around this person’s vision. It was like, oh shit, this is not that dissimilar to designing this t-shirt for this band and now that is part of a collective social and cultural history that all these people are engaged with. There’s a thread that unifies those things. Ajay Kurian: And it is about contributing to a culture and potentially shifting a culture. But it’s not about the singular genius. You see yourself as contributing to something and that’s potentially the charge of it. It is something larger than simply one person’s gesture. Banks Violette: I think that was the biggest part about going to school and being exposed to people who were actively showing. This is what a gallery is, and this is you. Anybody can go there. If you don’t have a relationship to that and you’re looking at it from the outside in, it all seems very terrifying. It is designed to be a wholly exclusive space that is condescending in the extreme and then you suddenly get involved with it and you’re like, oh shit, it’s not. It’s a forum like any other. Like booking a VFW hall for your shitty hardcore band is not much different than curating a group show, kind of. Ajay Kurian: That’s great…But you went to Columbia for grad school and you had your first solo show while you were in grad school, right? Banks Violette: Well, yes and no. I was in the first year of grad school and I met a woman who’s an incredible video artist, Laura Parnes, who ran a not-for-profit art space in Williamsburg called Momenta with her husband. I had seen her at a show at Participant when it was on Broadway. It was this really amazing, very gnarly kind of punk rock video kind of thing. So I wanted her as a visiting artist at Columbia. She came to the studio and she was into what I was doing. She invited me to do a two person thing at Momenta, ’cause that’s how they did their programming. They would do two person, sort of spotlight shows. So I did that at the end of my first year in graduate school and it kind of just went out into the ether. But I did have one person who responded to that. It was this guy named Jose who had just opened this gallery Team in Chelsea and he had his own long, weird history. He came to the studio when I was in grad school and he invited me to do a show. So I already had a show in a gallery lined up by my second year of grad school, which probably made me like the most insufferable fucking person to be around, to be honest. Ajay Kurian: I hope you don’t mind me bringing this up. The story that I remember, and I need you to correct me if I’m wrong, but that the dean at Columbia said that you couldn’t show the work for that show as your thesis show and that you had to make a new body of work. Banks Violette: The story is way worse than that. I got in an argument with a guy and ended up throwing something at the wall. I didn’t realize that he was standing right by the wall, and it was a whole thing. There was like a departmental restraining order, which I’ve never heard of before, but it was this thing where I could not be in the room with him. It was right at that moment when Columbia was transitioning from it’s older, Madison Avenue, second generation Abex teachers, to staff that had been kind of poached from Yale. They were trying to shift the emphasis of that program. So there were some internal conflicts in the way that program was structured and I think I was kind of the casualty of that. Also my aim was not fucking awesome, apparently. Ajay Kurian: So the show that you ended up doing at Team Gallery, was that Arroyo Grande? Banks Violette: Yeah, it was. Ajay Kurian: It’s hard to find pictures of that one. To me, I think there are some immediate concerns from that exhibition that still carry through to what’s happening now. You know, it’s based on a very specific event, which is the murder of this young girl. Banks Violette: Yeah. I’m not unhappy with the show. It was a way of working through a bunch of different ideas and having them coalesce. But I can look at it now and be like, oh, that was a clumsy first attempt at addressing these set of concerns. Be it, you know, subcultures and the way people organize themselves in these potentially very antagonistic kinds of ways, the exigencies and accesses of faith, you know? What does it mean to look at something that is a horrific thing? What does that mean for a viewer? Those are all ideas that later on spun out into things like the Whitney show that we started talking about. It may have been a much more flat-footed attempt at addressing those ideas and kind of sorting out why am I interested in these things in the first place. Ajay Kurian: So this was a murder that was documented where these teenage boys murdered a young girl. I guess purportedly because they’re listening to Slayer. Banks Violette: They had a band, there was some dim idea on their part, and it’s always one of those things where you’re like, how much of this is true? How much of this is somebody writing this to make it conform to these preconceived ideas of what this looks like? Teenage boys in Arroyo Grande California who were huge Slayer fans, had a band, and decided that they were gonna kill their classmate as a way of propitiating, and having Satan or the Dark Ward support their shitty garage band. Even describing that is glibly skipping over that this is a tragic thing. I think that kind of tension at the heart of it is fundamentally really interesting. That the narrative becomes a way that we can wall off trauma or calamity or render it legible. If you are engaged with manufacturing that narrative, you are complicit in that process, and alienating the horrific fact of what you’re referring to. Ajay Kurian: So then this story becomes kind of a veil to cover up something else. Banks Violette: Yeah, and it’s also that idea of, we’re now talking about stories and that this group of teenagers believed this story and believed it to such an extent that they had to enact it in real world terms. And what’s the ultimate period at the end of any sentence? It’s death, you know? So the way of realizing that in its grossest form was the murder of their classmate. And that’s not an alien event. I mean, we started talking about Tipper Gore and that hysteria that I experienced in the eighties, the satanic panic and all those kinds of things. But you could trace that backwards to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and how that was supposedly responsible for an endless series of copycat suicides to the point where it was banned in some countries and cities. So the pedigree for these ideas isn’t solely based on a bunch of Slayer fans. In the 1980s, it was a thing. A kind of queasy relationship to fiction that proceeds and anticipates that in a number of different points in instances throughout history. Ajay Kurian: So there’s a difference between being the artist that basically causes a death, where that hinge between fiction and reality opens up and something fucked up or psychotic happens. In your work, it tends to be that you are always observing or playing the role of accomplice. I remember you had a Ouija show in Germany? That was a really fascinating premise because it was a similar condition where, this is a photographer who’s kind of going to these insanely gruesome events. There’s a complicity of documenting something like that and blowing it up. Banks Violette: The part where I find it queasy is the manipulation of the photograph. It wasn’t purely documentary. It was manipulated and it was manufactured to a certain point. And what does that mean when you elaborate calamity and trauma and tragedy as a fiction? Which is what happens when you start editing out parts because it just doesn’t work. It’s hard for me to process. I don’t know if that’s myself personally, but that is always something that I’m asking — what does that mean? What does that mean if I’m referring to these things and I don’t think you can do it casually. Hopefully I have not done it casually. I can’t say that a hundred percent, but I’ve done my best to make that idea apparent. Ajay Kurian: I don’t think it was ever casual. I think that it doesn’t matter how serious you are about your own practice, people can look at it and say, oh, that’s fucked up. He’s doing fucked up stuff. Fuck him. Banks Violette: That’s the weird fucking irony. What we first started talking about, which was that grouping that took place, that categorization of myself and my peers. I’m obviously preoccupied with the idea of being subsumed within a narrative and then having a personal experience of what that looks like when there is a narrative that is being draped over you that you don’t necessarily agree with. It doesn’t fit really well. It’s super fucking uncomfortable, but it’s still exists and is kind of choking you. Ajay Kurian: This was a dual show at Gladstone and Team, and I don’t even remember what you had to go through to get the fire department on board, but having open flames like this inside a gallery is not easy. We didn’t get the fire department on board. Banks Violette: Also not OSHA approved. Ajay Kurian: This is the Jagermeister piece that I saw in the studio. You would think that the studio is like some airplane hanger. But it was pretty big and crowded. It was like, you know, you’re a real worker. There was a moment I remember, when I was working for you, and people would come up to me and ask me where we get our things fabricated. And I was like, we do everything. There was an ethic about that. When you’re talking about the discomfort of what it means to talk about these ideas and to be in that place, I think part of the honesty of it is that there’s an honest labor relation. There’s an honest sense of this is what I grew up with, this is what I think about, this is what I love. I also know there’s a darkness here that I’m trying to think about and work through. Then it all kind of spills out into these forms that have to do with complicity and almost being late to the performance. Banks Violette: I like the idea of being late to the performance, or that kind of anticipatory experience of waiting for the thing to happen and that idea of the pause. Those are all things that I find incredibly beautiful. And that idea of fabricating everything by hand. This is a total digression, but another thing that I’m also very interested in is a class language or class vocabulary specifically in an American sense, whatever that might mean. I think anybody who’s worked in an art warehouse has had an experience of throwing out their back moving a dematerialized art object. Ajay Kurian: I herniated a disc. Banks Violette: What does it mean when you’ve rendered labor discreet? What happens when the act of fabrication is something that happens over there with a series of anonymous actors? After grad school, I had worked for other artists and been a fabricator and knew lots of people who also had that job. I mean, there’s this whole sort of strata of people who are responsible for the creation of things that don’t have an identity, you know? I think there’s something kind of fascinating about that. I’m not necessarily saying that it’s purely problematic, but it is a seam to pick at. Ajay Kurian: Right. There’s so many new ways to fabricate too. There was this purity about painting for quite a long time where it’s always the artist’s hand. Now there’s just so many people that get their paintings made in China and then ship it over. There’s a way to think about the complicity in that, if you’re being honest about it. I think that if that’s a part of production for you, then that’s a condition of what you’re thinking about and talking about. Banks Violette: Absolutely. You have to think about that. If you are just doing it because that is a thing that you can access and as a way to go from point A to point B, I find that kind of lazy. But instead, if there is a structural logic for why you are making things in a certain way – I know an artist who does have paintings fabricated in China, but that is part of the discursive framework that he’s erected around his work, you know? That makes sense. Then there’s other people where you can see it’s just a lazy way of doing that thing. It’s an unconsidered gesture. And what I respond to with art, most of the time, is that it is something that is thoroughly considered. It’s not necessarily a rational gesture but it is somebody thinking through the totality of a problem or an issue or an idea. Ajay Kurian: Like Judd. Banks Violette: Yeah, absolutely. Perfect example. This is somebody who is exploring all the dim unlit corners of this particular idea. And the idea is just a box that’s on the ground. Fuck, that’s amazing. Ajay Kurian: You were talking about the rigor that artists might have that you sort of believe in when you’re really affected by an artwork. But on the other side of that – do you see a difference in the world of art journalism when you were coming up and art journalism now? Banks Violette: No, not necessarily. And this isn’t really even a criticism directed at writers. I just think it is an apples and oranges kind of thing, and there is no one-to-one writerly way of translating our ideas and vice versa. There is always gonna be some gap and some kind of slippage, and there’s always gonna be, as a consequence, resentment when you didn’t get it right. But it’s impossible to get it right. That’s just the nature of it. So I think that is a constant condition that exists in art writing. So yeah, I don’t think that there’s much difference between then and now. I just think there’s an inherent structural flaw. Ajay Kurian: Going back to the moments when you’re doing flyers for shows, was music journalism like a different space? Did it feel like it was more in the fabric of the scene? Banks Violette: Okay, now this is me undermining exactly what I just said. There is good art writing. Absolutely, no question. But I like writing on film. I like writing on music. I find the people who write about those things, or the product that they put out there in the world is much more interesting, much more engaging than a lot of what is written about art. I couldn’t point a finger at why that’s the case. Ajay Kurian: I think it’s only just to say that people are trying to figure it out. People are trying to figure out what are the problems with art writing and what are we missing sometimes? I feel like with music writing, you can feel a diehard fan. And with art writing, you’re not supposed to be a fan. I think that when you read something and you understand that this person loves this shit too much, it’s a negative. But there are those moments when it can transcend the form because there’s such a love there. Banks Violette: It’s funny, you know, music is this thing that you sort of experience viscerally. And in cinema, it doesn’t matter if it’s horror, porn, or comedy, those elicit a visceral response. Art is this thing that is supposed to be rarefied. It is not visceral. It is a mental experience. I think that is sort of cultural bias that’s built into the way things are written about and interpreted that you’re not supposed to have that fan response to something. Which I’ve always found very off putting because I absolutely have a fan response to stuff I like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Void song or a Smithson artwork, my response to that is, holy shit, unadulterated enthusiasm in the dumbest kind of way possible. Not dumbest, but just like a raw joyfulness in relationship to something. So it doesn’t mean that it’s not critical. The criticality is still there and that’s still the lens. You can’t get rid of it as soon as you’ve built it. Ajay Kurian: I think that might be more you, though. I think there are people that see something that hits a nerve and they’re completely uncritical. But the thing that’s fascinating about how your work has moved throughout the years is that there’s something you felt, something touched a nerve that was real, that reverberates. Then it’s almost trying to puzzle out what the fuck is happening and why. What is it? Is this connected? Is that connected? It’s almost as if so much feeling pushes you into a space of figuring out the conspiracy of your feeling. Banks Violette: That is a really great way of describing it and it’s probably pretty accurate. But it’s also needing to know the broader context that these things exist within. So it’s not just purely the object in isolation, but what is the kind of framework that is allowing the object some kind of ability to resonate. So again, going back to the Marfa example, which is not just the object, but it’s the stage that the object sits on. The use of the word stage is really specific. And tying back to what you were first talking about with stages and theater, where it’s not just the event, but it’s the framing device surrounding the event. Ajay Kurian: And then you left the stage. Banks Violette: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: So, why did you leave? Banks Violette: Health would be the first reason. You know, I saw and you saw what my studio was like. My reasons for working the way that I did still make sense to me. Absolutely still agree with them, but it was just not sustainable like that. Maintaining that kind of schedule, maintaining that kind of weird prominence that I sort of managed to get at a certain moment in time. You know, maintaining this idea that I had to consistently produce everything by hand to a degree. All that was just sort of psychotic and the only way to resolve that and make it not psychotic was a shit ton of drugs. Which is clearly not the best way to navigate anything. So at a certain point, the drugs went out and it was just, okay, do I wanna keep beating my head against this wall or do I wanna get healthy? I’m also not happy with the art world. I’m not happy with having watched a few of my friends pass away and see the way people respond to that. It was a whole lot of unhappiness fueled by a whole lot of unhappy things. So I chose to absent myself and I thought it would be a brief break. Take a week off, and then it became two weeks, and then it became three weeks, and then three years and yeah. So a decade and some change later. That’s how long it took. Ajay Kurian: And how does it feel now? Banks Violette: Weird. But it felt weird then. There’s some internal consistency running through so that’s fine. I still maintained relationships with galleries and I still produced work. I just wasn’t eager and enthusiastic about the idea of presenting work out there in the public. And I had, almost accidentally, two events that kind of butted up against one another in 2023 or 24. One was, I did a museum show that turned out to be kind of a retrospective in Belgium. Suddenly, I was in this position of encountering works that I have not physically seen for years and years, pulling them out and being able to see them again. And go, oh, this is making me think about things again and here’s some threads that I wanted to pick back up. Then Hedi [Slimane], who is the designer of Celine, invited me to do this big project. So I was making new work. I was suddenly forcibly confronted with older work and being asked to make newer work by somebody who I deeply admire and have a preexisting relationship with and trust. So if those two things hadn’t happened, and if they hadn’t happened back to back, would a decade have turned into two decades? Fuck if I know, but possibly so. Ajay Kurian: That seems really possible actually. Banks Violette: Yeah, totally possible. Ajay Kurian: The collaboration with Hedi is deep. I mean, you designed when he was at Dior. You designed like the back showrooms or I can’t remember. Banks Violette: Yeah, in Osaka, and that was around the time I did that show at the Whitney. Ajay Kurian: So it was a longstanding relationship. Banks Violette: Oh, a long, long standing relationship. I think he took that photograph of me smoking with the propane tank. So that’s his fault. Ajay Kurian: I mean, he’s good at playing certain things. He’s really good at that. Banks Violette: But I think in the moment when you’re doing something where you’re like, oh, this person is being very knowing about it. You forget that this is ending up in vanity fucking fair, and will then haunt me for the next God knows how long. At the moment it seemed like a great idea, but that’s sort of true of almost everything I’ve done. Ajay Kurian: I didn’t even smoke cigarettes and I was lighting cigarettes with a propane torch. It’s good. Banks Violette: It’s good. Ajay Kurian: This is a more recent collaboration where there were 14 chandeliers that went essentially across the world in different saline stores. Banks Violette: They all have very specific footprints because of the limitations to the spaces. So everything had to correspond to that footprint. It wasn’t that they were custom made specifically for that. They’re meant to have an identity outside of that they are as sculptures. But they were meant to be in 14 different locations all being installed within a very tight window of time. So they had to be made in a certain way that people that you’ve never met would be able to sort of decipher these instructions, which also necessitated me shifting from making all this stuff by hand to now I have to work with fabricators. Which is this thing that I’ve steered away from for many different reasons and establish a relationship with these people. So it was a whole fucking huge transition and thankfully it worked out really well and I’m super pleased with it, and it allowed me to reimagine how I might make things in the future. Ajay Kurian: The way that I’ve thought about fabrication for myself is that it’s always based in relationships. I think you took a long time getting to know Aric and Serena. So Ark and Serena run a fabrication company called ShisanWu, where they do many artist’s fabrications, and they’re incredible. It feels very homespun when you work with them. Banks Violette: They’re the loveliest people possible. But I still have it in my head that they’ve gotta be somebody who I’d be comfortable with at five in the morning. You know, doing something like, hey, let’s see if this looks better, if it’s burning, that kind of thing. It is not unrealistic to describe that as a trust thing. Ajay Kurian: Who was the dude at that steel deck? Oh, Christian. Banks Violette: Yeah, he was down for burning everything. Anything. Didn’t matter. He’s a really great guy. Ajay Kurian: He was a fabricator who helped fabricate a lot of steel, well any kind of steel structures. Banks Violette: Yeah, he did. Then it just turned into, well, I want to do that and I don’t wanna rely on this guy. But he had a studio very close to mine in Williamsburg, and he was part of an English company that made steel staging decks. You can see them all the time, you know, it’s a really very distinctive design for a decking system. It’s this huge company, but it was really just this one guy on a tremendous amount of drugs with a lot of heavy tools, just building these things in Williamsburg. So clearly we got along great. Ajay Kurian: I came to the studio right when you were trying to get clean. I had never done any drugs at that point. All of a sudden I was working in this studio where a big dude would come to the door late at night and we’d get deliveries of cocaine and then that would fuel everybody else till the wee hours of the morning to get work done. Then I’d go home around two, ‘cause I was like, I just can’t do this. But then it felt like there was an urge to get clean. There was like an urge to sort of leave that behind. Did you feel like it was part of you as an artist at that point? Banks Violette: The reason why I was doing drugs, you know, I was not having a good time. It wasn’t like going out and getting crazy or anything. All I wanted to do was be able to work and if I could stay up for 48 hours, that was great. If this would allow me to stay up for 48 hours, that seemed like a reasonable fucking trade at that moment because the window is really tiny. Ajay Kurian: So this is a real story that I, to this day, still kind of don’t believe that I saw. But banks would disappear from time to time. Banks Violette: Like a decade. Ajay Kurian: Well, yeah. But we’d be working in the studio and we’re like, where the fuck is he? It would be like a week and then you show up fucking nuts. And he built out a whole wall of cabinets and a level area for our chop saw in a day. Everything was level, everything was perfect. We just see him and it was one of those cartoon montages where you see someone and then it’s just finished and it was done and we’re like, this is really good. It was all sound. It wasn’t about you partying. Banks Violette: Yeah, it was purely work. Ajay Kurian: It was a bizarre thing to witness. Banks Violette: And it’s, call me super lucky, I’ve got an atypical response to opiates. They make me stay up and work really hard. You know, it’s how somebody might describe doing meth or something like that. I do heroin and I work really hard. It’s really fucking weird, but it is true. Ajay Kurian: The come down’s not so great. Banks Violette: Come down sucks. It’s not fun. So yeah, that was kind of the backstory for it. But in that period I was just being hyper conscious of this very tiny window. And the way this window was being constructed was like, oh, you and all your young friends who are young artists and cool. But I’m not gonna be young at some point, so I need to make a volume of work that overcomes this kind of built in flaw in the way the work is being described as solely a product of youth. Right, and I’ve gotta get ahead of that somehow, which is a psychotic kind of expectation to have to yourself daily. In my very dysfunctional way of navigating that, at that moment in time, the solution was I’ll just do a ton of drugs. And I was surrounded by a peer group and a moment in time when that wasn’t that atypical. Ajay Kurian: I mean, it was noticeably toxic. Banks Violette: It was fucking terrible. Ajay Kurian: It felt like, when does this run out? Banks Violette: Seeing, you know, Dash Snow, who’s got such a distinctive face. His work is constantly sort of being churned back up and seeing him being used almost like a meta him for a moment in time where we’re all young and crazy and you’re like, dude, that’s a tragedy. That was a sad thing that happened and there’s no sense of joy to that. So, yeah, I’m still queasy about that when I see that and sort of discussing that moment in time. Ajay Kurian: If there was an artist that you could bring back from the dead, it would be Steven Parrino. Banks Violette: Bruno easily, a hundred percent. I would be just fascinated seeing him respond to people. He did not sell a lot of work while he was alive. People certainly knew who he was, but not to the degree that they do now. And to the degree that he’s discussed and the regard of his work as hell. I think he would find this shit funny as hell. He would find it hilarious, but I also would like him to have the vindication of being like, you know what, you were absolutely right what you were doing. He was the loveliest, most generous person that I had the good fortune to have known and be friends with. And he had this community of people that he supported and was deeply involved with and cared tremendously about. So just to have the hey, yeah, people will acknowledge and recognize that you are very important. *Audience Question* Banks Violette: If I’m understanding correctly, what did I do with myself for a decade? I got married, I became a stepdad. I had a normal life, which I did not have when I was in New York and working all the time. When you’re presented with a situation where being a drug addict seems like a rational response to your environment, then fuck, normalcy is kind of great. So I was just normal and quiet and I’m still producing art and still thinking about art. It has left me with this happy thing of doing a number of shows now, and each time somebody invites me to do something, I’m like, oh, great, that’s covered, because I’ve got 10 fucking years of back inventory. For lack of a better description. So it’s really easy to sort of show me the space and I’ve probably got something that I’ve thought about that will work exactly with this. So does that answer the question? Audience Member: Yes, it does. Also, how does it feel to speak again, like within your visual language that you wanna showcase? Banks Violette: It actually is really nice. Again, I don’t want to give the impression that I think art can take place in a vacuum. That, like me, monologuing in a studio is being a practicing artist. Because I don’t think that’s the case. I think art is fundamentally a communication that is a dialogue with the outside world. And that is a necessary thing for an art object to have its status as an art object. Reentering a discussion is reentering this thing that I love deeply. So yeah, it feels really good. Ajay Kurian: You did a lot of fishing too. Banks Violette: I did. Audience Member: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: Everybody, thanks to Banks. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

17. Dez. 202553 min

The Forum 19 | Rachel Rose: Psychic States, Motherhood, and the Moving Image

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