The NewCrits Podcast
The Forum 16 | Banks Violette: Inside the Machinery of Ruin
Kuvaus
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]
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