Interview published in the December/January
2015-2016 issue of The Brooklyn Rail
THE MIGRANT AS CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR - JOSEPH
NECHVATAL with Thyrza Goodeve
Portrait of Joseph Nechvatal by Phong
Bui.
Pencil on paper. From a photo by Zack
Garlitos.
Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual painter, media and audio
artist, art theoretician, and the Paris correspondent for Hyperallergic. He came
into prominence in the early Õ80s downtown New York art world for small, dense,
semi-abstract, apocalyptic graphite drawings that were sometimes blown up
photo-mechanically. In the late Õ70s and early Õ80s, he worked as the Dia
archivist for La Monte Young; this Fluxus-inspired avant-garde tradition has
permeated his theoretical and artistic work ever since. In the Õ80s, he was a
member of Colab (Collaborative Projects) and helped establish the non-profit
space ABC No Rio and Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine. In 1986,
he began to produce computer-assisted paintings, following the (so called) Òdeath
of painting.Ó He received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and technology in
1999 under Roy Ascott at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive
Arts (CAiiA) (now called the Planetary Collegium at Plymouth University, U.K.)
where he developed his concept of viractualism, an
approach that creates art interfaces between the virtual and the actual. He is
the author of Towards An Immersive Intelligence:
Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality
1993 Ð 2006 (New
York: Edgewise Books, 2009), and Immersion Into Noise
(Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press,2011). In November, Thyrza
Nichols Goodeve met Nechvatal on Ludlow street at his friend Seton SmithÕs loft
to discuss his exhibition Odyssey pandemOnium: a migrational metaphor (November
15 Ð December 16, 2015) at Galerie Richard (121 Orchard Street) and the
publication of his first book of poetry Destroyer of NaivetŽs. Although
Ludlow Street had been NechvatalÕs New York City home since 1980, he was
evicted in 2012 and now lives in Paris.
The paintings are filled with contorted calamities as the
subtle lip between interior and exterior reveals a hint of aestheticized
corporeal excess, which, in turn excites, if not detonates, an apotheosis of
digestion. Such tantrums are beguiled by insolence. The unholy farthing reaps
its vengeance by sustaining the omniscient cursor that moves unevenly
throughout the incendiary birth of scented language.1
ÑRobert C. Morgan
He
feels that our learning to self-modify (self-re-program) ourselves is the
entire point of art.2
ÑYuting
Zou
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (Rail): You arrived in New
York City from Chicago in the mid Õ70s, lived in downtown New York through the
Õ80s, started to commute back and forth to Paris in the Õ90s, and now, having
been kicked out of your apartment on Ludlow Street, where you had been since
1980, live in Paris full time. There are a number of fictional books out now
about New York in the Õ70s, like City on Fire by Garth Risk
Hallberg or The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. So, why not start with
what the Õ70s were like for you?
Joseph Nechvatal: At the time, I remember thinking that the
disco mid Õ70s really sucked compared to the rocking Woodstock non-profit head
space of the late Õ60s. But the rent was cheap, and that was key. I moved to 18
North Moore Street in Tribeca in 1975, into a storefront studio that cost sixty
dollars a month and been Fluxus artist Joe JonesÕs Music-Store. I immediately
started going to museums and galleries and The Poetry Project at St. MarkÕs
Church, but at first I mostly hung out with musicians and filmmakers in
Tribeca, like James Nares, Eric Mitchell, and Amos PoeÑpeople that would help
shape the No Wave movement. I started going every night to the Mudd Club and
Tier 3 to hear No Wave bands like Theoretical Girls, DNA, and James Chance and
the Contortions, and painting and drawing during the day. Artistically, the
scene was poised at the end of Conceptualism, at the end of modernism, with
artists such as Carl Andre, Mel Bochner and Donald Judd at their reductive
zenith. It felt like a moment of artistic climax for reduction in both
painting, with Robert Ryman, and in Minimal music, with Philip Glass. Modern
art had reached an apex end point. So the question was where to go after that.
Rail: So where did you go? Was there a catalyst?
Nechvatal: Yes, I was particularly influenced by the
No Wave performer Boris Policeband in 1978 at a concert to benefit ColabÕs X
Motion Picture Magazine. I was entranced with how Policeband appropriated
police scanner radio transmissions and merged them with his dissonant violin
and hilarious voice. His brand of post-Minimalism had an influence on my
striving for my own form of post-minimal art as chaos magic, based on magical
gazing. That year I had been reading Aleister CrowleyÕs book Magick in
Theory and Practice. What I conjectured from Crowley while listening to and
watching Boris Policeband, was that a noisy aesthetic visualization process
could be used to create feedback optic stimulus to the neocortex in a kind of
Òcop freeÓ project of foreseeingÑan attempt to scan into an un-policed
futureÑbased roughly on the basis of magical gazing. I had been doing rather
minimalistic paintings then, but I eventually dropped painting and started
making all-gray minimal graphite drawings that actually had a ton of stuff
buried in them. So I flipped the art history script a bit, moving my art from
reduction into glazed overload.
Joseph Nechvatal, Uplifting (1983). Graphite on paper. 11 x14 inches. Collection of
the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota.
Rail: IÕve never heard of Òchaos magicÓ before, or your
influence by Aleister Crowley. Is Òchaos magicÓ your own term? It sounds like a
phrase thatÕs applicable to your theoretical writing on noise.
Nechvatal: Yes, but as a concept, Òchaos magicÓ only
worked on a very intimate, personal scale in my own head! I learned about the
term from studying the artist and magician Austin Osman Spare who I discovered
in a magic-book store in the Village around the same time I was into Crowley. I
write about Spare and chaos magic in my book Immersion Into Noise.
Rail: When was your first New York show?
Nechvatal: It was a DIY affair in 1979, called Methadone
Median.
I did it while squatting in an abandoned methadone center on west Canal Street,
in Laurie AndersonÕs building. The space was haunted with emotion. It had been
recently painted in various bright colors, but it was never used. I put some
small paper pieces on the walls and served cheap white wine in the little meth
plastic cups that were left behind. That is where I first met some of the Colab
people, like Alan Moore, Becky Howland, Joe Lewis, Kiki Smith, and Tom
Otterness. They, and many others, did the Times Square Show, and then the
Real Estate Show. I joined in with the Times Square Show action at the last
moment with a little drawing and was very involved with the Real Estate Show. My association
with Colab stimulated me to introduce anti-nuclear bomb politics into my art.
Rail: Whereas before the work had been more abstract? WerenÕt
you even doing white paintings?
Nechvatal: I started to do mostly white paintings with
simple shapes around 1976 for a few years, partly because I was studying Ludwig
WittgensteinÕs picture theory in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with Arthur Danto
at Columbia. Also I admired some of the New Image Painting going on then,
particularly that of Jennifer Bartlett, Neil Jenney, and Robert Moskowitz. I
was trying to figure out how we recognize shapes that come towards us and
shapes that go inÑthat kind of optical reading of reality. WittgensteinÕs
picture theory interested me because I had read that Jasper Johns was really
interested in it, and I had been interested in Johns. And, happily, Danto was
doing this course on Andy Warhol and Wittgenstein. It was extremely important
to me in terms of seeing representation in a new light. Just before that I was
making combine pieces using wood and stone in relationship to a white
painted field. I remember I was using a lot of white oil stick at the time to
get a physical, textured surface that became a kind of a representation of
white noise. I eventually dropped that and started making small, gray, dense
graphite drawings based on pictures in magazines and newspapers. This appropriation
of media images was in the wind. But I used appropriation differently than
people like Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine. They just moved the context of
the image. I used appropriation as a starting point, not an end point. I would
start by drawing clichŽ images from the clippings I collected, and then build a
deep palimpsest drawing field using one image piled on another to the point of
excess. I became very interested in excess in terms of the nuclear buildup
going on then under Reagan, but also the excess typical of the popular
distribution of electronic media. In the early 1980s, I, along with many other
artists, was interested in the distributive capacity of art based in
reproduction. Most were inspired by the 1968 essay ÒThe Dematerialization of
ArtÓ by John Chandler and Lucy R. Lippard, which argued that Conceptualism had
a politically transformative aspect to be delved into. The other inescapable
text at the time was Walter BenjaminÕs The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. Well-known practitioners of this art-and-reproduction
fusion were Colab member Jenny Holzer and Colab associate Barbara Kruger; I was
inspired by both of them. At the time, I was photo-mechanically blowing up my
small drawings, making Xerox books, audio art, and street posters. Colab was
interested in Fluxus-like low-priced multiples, and Colab first funded my audio
cassette publishing and mail distribution network Tellus Audio Cassette
Magazine. A post-punk sense of underground distribution that used media
against itself was very much in the air.
Rail: When did you begin to work with computers and the
theoretical issues of the viractual?3
Nechvatal: My interest in the ideology of media led me
to using the possibilities of computer-robotics as a timely alternative art
tool, a new way to make conceptual paintings that addressed issues of
distribution through excess. There were no PCs then, of course, this was 1986.
But the studio I was working with in Midtown had access to a big computer
painting machine that had been developed in Japan. So I started making
computer-robotic assisted paintings like The Informed Man, and that led me to
Documenta 8 in 1987, and things took off from there. I was participating in
the Brooke Alexander Gallery scene that included numerous Colab artists like
Judy Rifka and John Ahearn, and my solo gallery career was pretty much launched
out of there. But I was still playing around with writing poetry and art theory
essays and making noise music.
Rail: So your interest in noise and music goes way backÑwere
you ever in a band?
Nechvatal: Music has always been a passion of mine.
When I was sixteen, I was a drummer in a band at Hinsdale High School in
Chicago called The Men, which is so pathetic because we werenÕt even men yet! I
recall that we used to play a version of CreamÕs ÒTales of Brave Ulysses.Ó I
continued to play drums and guitar throughout my college days, but I abandoned
music as a professional goal. I never lost the desire to make, collect,
distribute, and consume music, though. I love noise music the most these days.
Rail: Although you are in New York for the opening of your
exhibition Odyssey pandemOnium : a migrational metaphor, you are not just a
visual artist, but a theoretician,4 critic for Hyperallergic,5 audio-artist,6 and the current exhibition coincides with the publication of
your poetry book Destroyer of NaivetŽs published by Punctum Books.7 Yet even this poetry book comes with a
soundtrack.
Nechvatal: Destroyer of NaivetŽs is something IÕve
been writing, bit by bit, for twenty years. ItÕs an epic sex-farce poem broken
into nine sections. After I finished writing it, I showed it to my friend, the
composer Rhys Chatham, with whom I had worked on an Õ80s No Wave opera called XS, and more recently
on an animation installation called Viral Venture that we showed on
the large screen at the School of Visual ArtsÕ Beatrice Theatre in 2011. I
asked him to consider it for a recording project. The first thing he said was,
ÒWe have to find someone really good to do the voice,Ó so I showed it to the
spoken-word artist Black Sifichi, who also lives in Paris, and he agreed to do
it. Black and I then handed the reading track to Rhys who created an intensely
rich and beautiful soundscape underneath it, using flutes, trumpets, and
electric guitars. We are looking for a gutsy publisher for the hour-long CD
now. I played the recording at my Punctum book signing event, rather than
reading some of it out loud.
The poetry in Destroyer of NaivetŽs is very flamboyant.
I took liberties. I wanted to explore a vocabulary that is anti-banal and much
more like that of Jean Genet. ItÕs about the flamboyance of human sexual desire
and the role the eye plays in our time of virtual reality. It takes inspiration
from the books of Genet and many other sex writers, but also from DuchampÕs The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the drawings of Hans Bellmer, the
film/performances of Bradley Eros, and Francis PicabiaÕs book of poems I Am
a Beautiful Monster.
Rail: You describe Rhys ChathamÕs soundscape for it as
Òbeautiful.Ó How does this relate to your work and interest in noise?8
Nechvatal: My art, whether it is visual, as in the new
paintings in Odyssey pandemOnium, or audio, as in my viral symphOny, asks for time and
effort on the part of the viewer or listener. It is anti-pop in that respect.
It is not about easy consumption. But youÕre right, if there is anything that
ties it together, it is my interest in the beauty of the art of noise,
particularly the idea that if you took time and looked into a vague field, you
could discover layers of subliminal imagery. This is as true of the imagery I
produced for my show at Galerie Richard as it is of my graphite palimpsest
drawings from the Õ80s. The paintings in Odyssey pandemOnium are conceptually
situated within my immersive noise theory in that they make use of a
complicated turmoil produced from close exchanges within figure/ground
relationships that challenges us to think outside of the normal system of human
perception. Classical-looking figures are embedded into a complex and subtle
ground so that the normal figure/ground relationship more or less merges. The
viewerÕs eye must navigate the visual pandemonium in a way that suggests
OdysseusÕs wanderings.
Rail: What is noise to you?
Nechvatal: In everyday use, the word ÒnoiseÓ means
unwanted sound or noise pollution. I look at it and listen to it differently:
from an immersive perspective. In music, dissonance is the quality of sounds
that seem unstable, with an aural ÒneedÓ to ÒresolveÓ to a ÒstableÓ consonance.
Despite the fact that words like ÒunpleasantÓ and ÒgratingÓ are often used to
describe the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or
tonal basisÑeven music that is perceived as generally harmoniousÑincorporates
some degree of dissonance. The enigma of noise is what interests me.
Rail: But itÕs beyond enigma for youÑin other words, itÕs not
just noise as some punk modernist irritant or disjunction meant to fuck with
people. Noise is an avenue to a higher level of consciousness for you, isnÕt
it? In her review of your book Immersion Into Noise, published in the Brooklyn
Rail
in 2012, when it came out with Open Humanities Press, Yuting Zou said, Òthe
function of an Ôimmersive art-of-noiseÕ is to provide us with an artistic
environment of clamorous cultural information capable of expanding our
consciousness, disjunctively [. . .] disjunctive noise consciousness may
lead to a new ontological unification based in Ôself-re-programmablity.ÕÓ9 This is important and complex. Can you
elaborate?
Nechvatal: The art of noise is the sensitive use of
what Duchamp called the essential element in his art: delay. Noise, in the
visual sense, is a delay in perceiving signals, and that delay offers up
opportunity for the viewer to fill in her own phantasmagorical content. That
puts the imagination to work; if used often enough, imagination can aid in a
beneficial transformation of the self.
Rail: The addition of the word ÒimmersionÓ is also important.
Your collection of essays published by Edgewise Press in 2009 is called Towards
an Immersive Intelligence and immersion is something you have been writing about
since your doctoral dissertation. I now understand the connection in a way I
didnÕt before: with noise, one is immersed to the point of losing oneÕs perceptual
anchorsÑthere is no up-down, left-rightÑwhether it is visual or audio noise.
Nechvatal: Yes. Think of noise as a suspension of
clear location. That is how the art of noise is so central to getting what I am
doing with the virus and the image as host in the Odyssey pandemOnium paintingsÑand how it
relates to the migration crises happening in Europe due to the wars that
started with BushÕs stupid invasion. Odyssey pandemOnium refers to that
homeless situation and the natural yearning to return to oneÕs home and oneÕs
language. This pertains to me also as I am coming home, with an epic poem in
hand, to the Lower East Side, after being expelled by the gentrification war on
artists that went down here.
Rail: Do you have your notebook with you? Could you read what
you read about noise at the Punctum symposium, In Service to Nothing:
Intellectual Inquiry in the Open, at The New School?
Nechvatal: ÒThe art of noise today is a psychotic
outburst that disrupts smooth image operations with an explosion of buried
visual hysteria that echoes our highly diverse chaotic world. Its
incomprehensibility by design connects us to the world media frenzy through
what I think to be a type of chaos magic. The art of noise creates the
visualization bridge between form and intuition, as its uncertain images have
more information in them than a clear, certain image (or sound) where the
information quickly becomes redundant. Thus the art of noise gives rise to new
thought. It promotes the emergence of new forms of an old story: art.Ó
Rail: This also reminds me of your idea that art in itself is
immersive: ÒTherefore, the role of immersive art remains the prosthetic task of
artificially facilitating such an unrestricted state, as such, it remains
associated with the most fleeting elaborations of artistic consciousness.Ó10 How does the use of the computer virus
connect to noise?
Nechvatal: In 1990, my Computer Virus ProjectÕs initial goal was
to produce physical paintings by using algorithms implementing ÒviralÓ
processes. ItÕs based on a simulation tool which allowed me to virtually
introduce artificial organisms into a digitized reproduction of an earlier
artwork, the host, and let them transform and destroy that original image.
During these ÒattacksÓ a new still image can be extracted and painted on
canvas, which is a way to realize themÑto bring back the virtual into the real.
Rail: The context of the Õ80s is crucial hereÑnot only all
the theorizing at the time around the real, the simulated, and what you call viractual, but AIDS.
Nechvatal: I attribute the birth of the Computer
Virus Project to my direct experience with, and exposure to, the deadly virus
through my relationship to the tormenting AIDS death of Bebe Smith, Seton
SmithÕs twin. That and the AIDS death I witnessed of my friend and neighbor,
the Pyramid Club performer Tron von Hollywood. That period cracked open an
emotional range in me between dread for oneÕs life and happy memories of a
fading wild sexual freedom. The negative connotations of the HIV virus as a
vector of disease is reflected in the principle of degradation of the image.
But here, the virus is also the basis of a creative process, producing newness
in reference to the major influence of the virus on evolution in biological
systems. In the current work Odyssey pandemOnium you can see the
virus weave and unweave figures within the ground. Also you can see the way I
put William S. BurroughsÕs 1971 text Electronic Revolution, where he talks
about the virus as the beginning of language, through a computer program that
connects his word ÒvirusÓ into a frequency relationship flow chart with other
key words. But my virus projectÕs full aesthetic function in terms of painting
is achieved by writing a dynamic mechanism for automatically evolving the code
typical of genetic algorithms. This chance-based intertwining activity is
itself an example of my theory of subliminal noise painting with its deep
connection to John CageÕs chance-based art.
Joseph Nechvatal, drifting telemachus (2014).
Computer-robotic assisted acrylic on velour canvas.
42 x66 inches.
Rail: Why call them paintings?
Nechvatal: Because they are one-of-a-kind painted
canvases that have been airbrush spray painted through a computer-robotic
driven mechanism. Of course this calls for an expanded definition of the craft
of hand painting, one connected to Minimalist art fabrication techniques and
also Fluxus-like Conceptualism. They are post-Conceptual paintings that build
upon the legacy of Conceptual art, where the concept or idea involved in the work
takes some precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.
Conceptual art focused attention on the idea behind the art object and
questioned the traditional role of that object as conveyor of meaning.
Subsequently, those theories cast doubt upon the necessity of materiality
itself, as conceptual artists de-materialized the post-Minimal art object and
began to produce time-based and ephemeral artworks. Although total
dematerialization of the art object never occurred, the art object became flexible,
and that malleability, coupled with viral computer processing, has resulted in
post-Conceptual painting.
Rail: So the virus is wandering around and living off one of
your host art images in Odyssey pandemOnium, creating new
painterly situations much like the notion of wandering in HomerÕs Odyssey?
Nechvatal: Yes. I had been kicking around a copy of The
Odyssey
since the time I migrated to New York City and it is one of the books I took
with me when I moved to Paris a few years ago. IÕve read this Penguin version
three times, at leastÑthere are certain phrases I like to remember, like
Òstruggle with the seaÓ and stuff about the Lotus Eaters. Now the paintings of Odyssey
pandemOnium are not illustrations of the Odyssey. As mentioned
above, what is important is intentional enigma. The paintings need to be both
seductive and obscure to the degree that their codes cannot be immediately
discerned. I think that the phantasmagorical obscurity, the mystery of the Odyssey
pandemOnium paintings, is increasingly desirable in a world that has become
increasingly data-mined, mapped, quantified, specialized, and identified in a
straightforward, matter-of-fact way. My goal is to disrupt instrumental logic
and contradict, counteract, and cancel out false reason and hollow feeling.
Suffering and joy, like figure and ground, are tied together in frenzy, neither
one without the other. Thus works in Odyssey pandemOnium may suggest or
produce stress in us. One might even say an anxiety of disintegration.
Dedication to its merits, if there are any, might well be described as vaguely
heroic when experienced as a lost lyric poet. They take off from the poetic
idea of imagery floating free on the internet. Everything is mobile and
floating around now. Add that to the plight of the migrants escaping war by
entering Greece by sea, near where the Odyssey is set. Overloaded
boats regularly capsize, drowning hundreds of people. In September, I showed a
virus projection called viral castratO at the Budapest Art Factory during
the crises in the train station there and spoke to people about the situation.
I was thinking about this a great deal when I was there and now again as Paris,
a city I love, has become a zone of killing and conflict. Desperate people
fleeing Syria and other areas of conflict, these migrants flowing across
Europe, scaring the hell out of many Europeans and fueling the rise of the
far-right anti-immigrant political forces. And I saw the sad heroism of the
migrant act, which is actually an act of conscientious objection opposed to
war. They are fleeing war, whereas Odysseus was a war hero. I wanted to flip
that classical Greek script of HomerÕs and give it a new interpretation in
light of our actual lived situation.
Rail: In the news, the route the migrants take keeps changing,
which makes your allusion to the Odyssey that much more poignant, although
from the opposite end.
Nechvatal: The Odyssey is about the
King-hero conqueror trying to get back home. These people are the conscientious
objectors to war. TheyÕre fleeing the war, fleeing Syria, fleeing the combat
zone, so in these paintings I wanted to give them hero status by making
Odysseus and his story the host in which their viral travels may wander.
Endnotes
.
Robert C. Morgan, ÒJoseph NechvatalÕs ÔnOise anusmOs,ÕÓ
Brooklyn Rail, July 4, 2012.
.
Yuting Zou, ÒNechvatalÕs Immersive Noise Theory,Ó by Yuting
Zou, Brooklyn Rail, April 11, 2011.
.
According to Nechvatal, with the increased use of
micro-electronics, the virtual now co-exists with the actual (thus the term viractual). Christiane
Paul, in her seminal book Digital Art, discusses NechvatalÕs concept of
viractualism (58). One of the images she chooses to illustrate that
section of the book is his painting the birth Of the viractual (2001). Joe
Lewis, in the March 2003 issue of Art in America (123 Ð 124),
discusses the viractual in his review Joseph Nechvatal at Universal Concepts
Unlimited. Frank Popper also writes about the viractual concept in his
book From Technological to Virtual Art (122).
.
Towards An Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of
Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality 1993 Ð 2006 (New York:
Edgewise Books, 2009).
.
Hyperallergic.com.
.
viral symphOny.
.
Destroyer of NaivetŽs.
.
Joseph Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise. (Ann Arbor:
Open Humanities Press, 2011).
.
ÒNechvatalÕs Immersive Noise Theory,Ó by Yuting Zou, Brooklyn
Rail, April 11, 2011.
.
pp. 24 Ð 25.
THYRZA NICHOLS GOODEVE is a writer living in New York. She
received her PhD from the University of California in Santa Cruz under Donna
Haraway and James Clifford. She is faculty and thesis director of the MFA in
Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts, and Program Coordinator for the MICA
summer intensive in DUMBO.