Yoohoo!!!
Delighted to present to you a very long, revealing interview with my friend Gracelee Lawrence. We spoke on March 20th of this year, and life being what it is, I have just now been able to finish editing it down. More interviews are coming, as I finally make good on an early promise of this project to introduce you to fabulous weirdos I know and love.
Gracelee is a sculptor and art professor working out of Climax, NY (!). As her website bio nicely lays out: “Gracelee’s work deals with relationships between food, the body, and technology. It is born in the transfigurative space between physical and digital reality, exploring the ways in which bodies are both gendered and metaphorically fragmented in terms of capitalist-driven material desires, physical sustenance, and the digital spaces we inhabit.”
Below, we discuss archaeological gardening, the speed of fashion, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s sixty-odd dogs, capturing the image-object, the art world’s follies, and Gracelee’s beloved truck.
A quick warning: Some artworks referenced later in the interview feature actual dead bodies. I will avoid posting images of those works here, but some of the links may take you to websites that do.
scraps: Look at this behind you! Oh my god! The Climax Art Palace.
Gracelee: We have a big basket here, among other things.
That is phenomenal.
Gracelee: Yeah, it's great here. Having a house is awesome. Knowing you can continue to live somewhere is really a dream. And it's great because [GL's partner] Ben [Seretan]'s studio is right above mine. I'm loud, but when he plays the piano, it kind of filters down here, which is nice.
That's so lovely.
It's good. We’re kind of at the beginning of spring, which is really exciting. So, like, all the fun plants are starting to arrive, and I'm spending a lot of time outside and gardening.
I see you post the bounty sometimes — Is gardening something you've always done, or are you feeling like you have space now and are getting into it for the first time?
Well when I was growing up, we always had a garden, and my mom especially has always been a real gardener. Actually, the farm where I grew up in the first part of my life is where my parents live now. It's a giant, like, 100-acre working farm, but her family always had a garden that they ate from.
It's been an interesting thing to realize how much of that is just in me. It feels like it comes naturally — I mean, I don't know exactly from where, but it feels like some kind of ancestral knowledge in a way. The people of my heritage, I think all of them were farmers or worked the land.
But also it feels like this way of knowing this little zone where we are and understanding the ecology and the landscape and the environment in a different way, through trying to grow stuff and get plants to behave.
[laughs] Well, yeah, not to, like, abruptly start, but I feel like that must somehow inform what you're doing in the studio, right? I mean, there're like… so many fruits and veggies in your work!
Yeah, extremely! The baskets that I've been working on, they're like harvest baskets basically. They have all these fucked up fruits and vegetables and flowers and mutations and kind of chaotic things that they're holding, but they’re directly linked to this process of trying to kind of gather the energy and nurture plants along as their guide. They have their own desires and needs that I can't understand fully, but yeah, it's really informing my work, and it's an offshoot of my practice now. Gardening is just a part of how I choose to do research.
Tell me about today, specifically. Whaddya got going on?
Let's see… I've been working on a bunch of new work. I have an art fair coming up with my Canadian gallery. So I'm making a new small piece for that, and then I have a bunch of shows this fall, so I'm working on getting things handled for them.
But then also it's looking like — it's always very mysterious because art world people are real flaky and weird — I've been invited to do this pretty substantial commission in Austin, which is great, but that has to be done by June. I'm just starting, and it's really soon.
Mostly I'm just super focused on studio stuff, these future projects, and the garden. We’re still maybe a month away from planting, but I'm in the process of getting the beds prepped and having everything in the way that I want it. And excavating from past people who've been on this site, which is an interesting thing too.
Whoa, say more about that.
I’m undoing and redoing things. The people who bought this property and built this house in ‘96/’97 apparently were pretty substantial gardeners, so last year I was just taking everything they had done and pushing it forward because by the time we moved in, it was kind of late in the season.
So there was a raised bed, there were some other beds... There's a preexisting rhubarb plant, which is really a beautiful friend that I like to go visit. And asparagus and all these things… elderberries… These established seasonal friends that I've watched arrive in the course of being here for a year.
But now I'm excavating these past decisions — like the use of so much plastic and the use of some of the hillside as a trash pile — and I'm kind of going through all of these moments that happened in the deep past and trying to shift the landscape back to something that it wants to be a little bit more. I mean, I assume it doesn't want to have trash in it.
Seems like a fair assumption.
[Laughing] Yeah, I don't know. All these microplastics — I'm trying to take them out of here, but I can only do that to some degree. Trying my best to think about the natural spaces — the non-architectural structure spaces — as spaces that have their own desires that are very unrelated to mine and trying to mediate between them and allow them to still have their own wholeness.
Were people living in the house right up until when you guys moved in, or was there a gap?
When we first looked at the house, it was the second group of people to live here. [They] had bought it less than a year before and immediately got into a horrible, contentious divorce and then tried to sell the house. So they just didn't do anything at all for like two and a half years. The garden grew over, the gutters were full of shit. Like, nothing happened. So we kind of came in in this interesting lapse, where it seemed like a lot of the activity was happening in the deeper past, from the first owners. We're kind of like taking it back up from there.
So there were people here, but they were really inactive. Not even doing basic stuff, which is fine, and is the only way we were able to afford the house. It’s like part of the payment is like reversing these decisions.
[Laughing] Okay, tell me about your truck. I know it’s important to you.
Oh yes, it's incredibly important to me. My truck is one of my main sculpture tools, actually.
When I got it in 2006, it was primarily used for moving horses. Because in my previous life I was a really serious equestrian and was showing nationally and all that stuff. And then sometime in college it transitioned into being more of a sculpture-moving device.
So much of being an artist, especially being a sculptor making large work, is determining where you can carve out agency in your practice and keep things going without external assistance. Or at least that's the method that I've chosen in my own practice. Part of that is being able to pack my own work and transport it myself, because the reliance on galleries, collectors, curators, whatever, ends up creating a power dynamic around my work that I am uncomfortable with and affects the decisions that are a part of the conceptual structure.
But then also, I think [my truck] was one of the first outward presentations of gender code-switching that I did, especially as a teen. I got the truck when I was 17, so at first it was this way for me to assert a more masculine side of myself without that being a part of my physical presentation. And then slowly over time that has changed, and my comfort with my own gender identity and presentation has changed.
Having seen your work in a few gallery spaces now, I'm curious about how you arrived at your way of making work. I think it would be very unusual for somebody to just get up one day or leave art school or even go through a period of research and arrive at what you're doing. It feels very particular.
Yeah, it is. I mean I think sculpture-making in general has to be a really intentional process.
You know, pen and paper are much easier to come by than whatever the fuck you use to make sculpture, and that's part of the problem. Sculpture in the expanded field moves to anything, essentially. Anything from clay to an essay can be a sculpture.
But I've always been really interested and engaged in the physical world and the material world and trying to understand my own body and desires through a material lens. I recognized that when I was really small; even in middle school, I felt like using clay.
Fast-forwarding way beyond that to grad school, I had an opportunity to use digital fabrication to do 3D scanning and printing to make a large outdoor commission, and I immediately had to switch from a material-based metaphor. I had been using food materials to make my work — juice and pulp and pineapple crowns and salt and flour as these replications of what was going into my body, and as the outward form of the sculpture. I had to switch from that to image-based metaphor because I was making large-scale outdoor work, and it wouldn't survive.
That was really the moment that shifted my making from the physical materiality being the meaning-maker to the image, and capturing, really, the image-object. Which is basically what 3D scanning is: taking a bunch of images in order to understand the exterior of an object and then putting that into a digital space where you can continue working on it. At first it was a really functional decision. It was kind of helping me solve this problem of making large-scale outdoor work.
But then very quickly it became more of a conceptual exercise of What does it mean to be pushing objects through digital space? What does it mean to try to use a digital object that then has been printed in physical reality to talk about the transmission of emotion and care across space? And that really happened when I was living in Thailand right after grad school. I had my 3D printer and 3D scanner: those were the only tools I had. My department where I was teaching at Chiang Mai University was quite under-resourced. We didn't even have a drill. We had nothing.
But I had these tools that I had brought with me. And I had distance, of course, from my previous community and distance from my location at the time because of cultural distance and the language barrier and all of those things. So I started thinking about digital fabrication and the transmission of digital information into physical material as this way to try to capture or catalog or hold that distance in the longing and the emotional space.
So that shift happened because of difficulty, as interesting shifts often do.
It's felt, at least to me, more and more relevant because of the world that we live in, because of the complications of digital shiftiness and what it means to put together a reality that is a composite that doesn't only come from our physical understanding. (Which is an interesting thing because it's also kind of false. Ever since we've had the capacity to tell stories, to read, to distribute information, we've had that kind of distance. It's just happening much more quickly and much more globally.)
The thing about technology that I find fascinating is that so much of it has been created so that we can't easily understand as a layperson how it works. That, I guess, is the biggest shift between storytelling — reading a text distributed in the world — and technology distributing information.
So that opacity or difficulty understanding internal systems — I want that to become a part of the physical object. It needs to be a physical object. I don't want it to remain in the kind of black box of digital space. I need it to come out into our world because that's a part of teasing it out and squeezing it from that opacity. It has to come into our space and be with us in reality in order for it to be fulfilling its entirety.
Relatedly, I feel like your sculptures, by way of various seams and grids and materials and presentations, constantly remind the viewer that they are not organic forms: they were made. They have a very made-ness to them.
You also see these wonderful, organic, both human- (especially female) and food-based forms in your work. I’ve read that as a way of thinking through how these technological methods of dissemination you're describing in capitalist production draw from things that are often a source of nourishment and desire.
But when your work leaves the studio, do you expect that audiences will imagine that a particular someone or something has created each object or that the work has emerged from a kind of generative digital process? The fact that they're not organic sculptures in an old school sense is one of the things that really stands out to me about them. I'm curious how you see people seeing them.
Interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before. The closest thing that I've considered to that question is something that I feel like a lot of artists, writers, musicians consider in world-making, or like creating a small universe of vocabulary, whether that be visual, sound-oriented, or otherwise. To me one of the most important unifying features [of my work] is the formal visual vocabulary that's happening. I hadn't really considered the idea of the work maybe coming from an entity outside of myself.
I love that, and I think that's the ultimate form, when you can be the vessel — but I don't know what's on the other side of that communication.
In my dream, it would be a kind of selection of mystical plant bodies that are making decisions about how to make humans understand how to be softer and more symbiotic. These omnipotent plant beings would be trying to teach us through the way the work behaves. I don't know if I could accomplish that, but I would want my work to be talking through them.
That's wonderful.
As a kind of corollary to my last question, I’ve often wanted to buy one of your artworks, but your work often makes me think really hard about how contemporary venues for seeing art, chiefly the internet and galleries, make me want things. The work is already so sensuous and so beautiful and colorful and material, but, as art consumers, we love to have stuff and not just see stuff or experience stuff.
For example, in some of your work, there's an element of display one might expect in a showroom or a dealership (I'm thinking of those mirrored spinning platforms). And so there's this tension between my reading and my desire to possess a meaningful, beautiful object (and support you). I guess I want to know if you feel any of that as an art consumer, or as an art maker? And how do you mediate that relationship?
That's a tough one. I’ve worked really hard over the course of building my career and my practice to have it as divorced as possible, which is of course incomplete, from the capitalist, consumer, really exploitative system of the art market.
That doesn't mean I don't take part in those things. I show at commercial galleries. I sell things. But my practice doesn't hinge on those necessities. And I'm lucky because I have a job that allows me to do that, but that was also intentional.
It's something I think about a lot because I collect art from my peers and artists that I respect, and I love living with it. It's so meaningful to me to have this kind of intimacy and familiarity with artwork.
That's something that I want other people to be able to experience in my work too, because apart from the commercial bounds — which are strong and you cannot remove them completely — I do think that there's a different type of knowledge and understanding and closeness that you feel with work that you live with.
That’s why I have the uneditioned print objects, because I want people to be able to be with the work. It matters to me more that the work is able to distribute across the world in these smaller forms than for it to only be about giant unique objects that galleries sell for, like, tens of thousands of dollars to two people a year. That is much less interesting to me than the idea that the concept, the kind of core base of the work, is able to move through the world at a smaller scale into people's homes that are like me.
I also love making public work and work that is really available and accessible outside of gallery spaces. Sometimes that's outside, sometimes that might be like in an airport, whatever, because it also allows for the distribution of ideas in a way that feels less constrained by the white cube, by institutional control.
We were talking about [Gracelee’s recent trip to] Paris a little bit earlier, and I wanted to know more about that. You were there recently collaborating with [fashion designer] Alphonse Maitrepierre on a line of — would you call them “neck pieces”? “Necklaces”?
Various things! Some of them were closer to normal clothing items or accessories that have names… like a “necklace” or a “bag” or a “ring”. But then the bigger pieces I really thought about as wearable sculptures. That felt as close as I could get to their definition. It was a bizarre process to really shift the focus from the object as a singular entity and then think about the body as a part of the sculptural continuation. That's something that I just started doing, really. It's going to take a lot more pondering and experimentation in order to get to a place where I feel confident with that.
We started really actively working together in November, and then this happened in February. So it was so speedy, and it was my first attempt as an, I don't know, more established arti– I don't know the right way to say that. It was my first attempt, as someone who really has an established universe that I'm working from, at making a wearable object.
Thinking about the synthesis of object and body in this activated way is something that I feel like there's a lot more to explore within. I am fascinated by the capacity for motion and movement and kinetic energy in the forms. That's something you can get in a sculpture — and I do sometimes in the rotators or in other ways — but to have the specific motion of a walking body incorporated into how a sculpture behaves is new.
Something that I also spent a lot of time trying to understand while in Paris was like: What is the fashion industry? What is this world? Why do they do this? Why do they make these big, ridiculous 20-minute shows? What does all of this mean? And what is the end goal? And how am I involved? And what does it mean for me to be involved? And what are the ethical concerns of this world? How am I associated with that? I mean, just so many questions.
I’m just starting to piece that puzzle together.
Access was a really strange thing in the fashion world (or at least in the small specific corner that I observed it from) because at a commercial gallery, anybody can walk in, more or less. It’s free. You can be there for hours if you want. You might not be able to take it home, but you can be with work for an extended time period.
Complete opposite of the way the fashion industry works — The show was twenty minutes long! It was so short, and everything was moving so quickly, and then it was just over! And maybe that's my own difficulty of extremely being in the art world and wanting time to sit quietly with the work and ponder. But the scale of production versus the amount of time and consideration that the objects and clothing are given in those spaces is engineered to get at a different type of scarcity.
Of course the art industry is all about scarcity, you know. Unique objects… There's only one… It's really expensive… Provenance... The way that the fashion world behaves with scarcity is in terms of speed.
And trend, right? Speed in terms of how much and how often things are in and out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm still trying to understand the space between those two things.
Do those objects begin and end with the runway show? Or are they going to be available through the brand or through you in some capacity down the line?
I honestly don't know. As far as things stand right now, those two large-scale objects are unique, and they live in Paris now.
They kind of exist on their own terms, as this kind of 50-50 collaboration between me and the designer. The smaller objects — the more functional accessories — those could be available on a larger scale, but that really hinges on what Alphonse wants to do.
I'm leaving a lot of those decisions up to them. I have boundaries on what I will and won't do, and then past that, I'm like, “You know this world much better than I do, so you get to decide.”
I noticed that you mentioned [on IG] that one or more garments in the show are designed to look like they’ve been slashed through by the sculptures that you made. Are there other moments like that in the pieces that we maybe didn't see on Inst*gr*m? Like, little conversations happening between the garments and the wearable sculptures?
There were many. There were a lot of these little microdecisions that you just couldn't see at the speed at which the runway moves. The speed affects the way that ideas can be transmitted.
Totally. I mean, as a viewer, those are details that would be noticed after careful study. I was just so stunned when you zoomed in on that [slashed garment], and I wanted to know everything about it. In the initial videos, just seeing the forms walking down the runway, it was something I would have totally missed.
I hope more of it sees the light of day.
Me too.
Changing gears a little bit, I think it was about five years ago or so when you were a fellow at Chiang Mai University, is that right?
Yeah.
You were assisting the artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. You told me a little bit about this experience over a wonderful southern Thai dinner in L.A., at Jitlada, with our partners. But I was wondering if you would explain for readers what that was like and what you were doing there.
Yeah, so I was on the Luce Scholars Fellowship. I chose to be an assistant to the artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, and I thought originally that I would be helping her in her studio. That's really what I wanted to do.
I wanted to go to Asia, and I wanted to be a studio assistant at a major international artist’s studio. And she was the most welcoming of anyone that I spoke to. I was told all kinds of things, including, “Oh, you don't know Korean, you're not going to be helpful.” And I was like, “Okay, I'm free!”
But regardless of all of that, Araya was amazing: “Come. It'll be great.”
And so I get to Chiang Mai and she's like, “Oh yeah, so I have a full-time assistant already. I don't really need you to be in the studio every day. Every once in a while, I'll have you do a performance or do something for me. But what I really want you to do is teach in the department that I started.”
She started the first contemporary art practice department in Thailand, in I want to say 2010. 2011? So I was there in 2016/2017, and it was still quite young, quite new. Part of her endeavor was to kind of gather as much international talent and [as many] perspectives as possible and filter them into this department. So we had a Korean woman; we had a Greek philosopher; we had this British man; me; there were a couple Thai professors; Araya.
Quite quickly, my endeavor in Thailand switched from being a studio assistant to being a professor. Looking back, I'm like, “Thank goodness,” because she probably knew what she was doing. Without that [experience], I would not have a job now.
It was beneficial on multiple fronts. I did do work for her, not in her studio necessarily, but I helped her install work at the Singapore Biennial. I wrote critique of her work when she asked me to. I was a performer in some of her performances, things like that. So I had these really intimate experiences with her work and her practice.
But that department was a big part of her legacy, and she was kind of using her influence and power in the world to affect this education system in a still pretty socially conservative country that's ruled by a military that's not necessarily kind to cultural production.
Kind of zooming ahead to the last few weeks I was in Thailand, I had put on a show in Bangkok and had installed it, was about to leave, and for the first time in maybe twenty or thirty years, the military dictatorship was going into galleries in Bangkok and removing art from the walls. So the censorship was starting to kind of filter down into culture spaces, which makes sense because a lot of power comes from them. It was an interesting thing to be both embroiled in that but always at a distance, always at a remove, even though I spoke the language.
So working with Araya and watching the way that she managed both her own practice and this department that was kind of an extension of her practice was really important to me — super beautiful. And also really difficult. I mean, she's so brave. Her work is unimaginably poignant and painful. But I saw through watching the way that she associated with her students and fellow faculty and people in the world and all the dogs that she saves... I saw that her bravery and her power really comes from generosity and kindness. She’s chosen that to be her lens on how she moves through the world.
And so unlike some of these other artists that maybe saw me as a problem or as something that would take more energy and effort, she had enough generosity to recognize that I could become a part of her greater world in a way that was mutually beneficial.
Over the years I've somewhat lost my taste for contemporary performance art, which at times is so antagonistic towards the viewer. It challenges what you think of as art in a cool way that can be really expansive, but at times it speaks more to folks who already have a deep art historical knowledge. But in Araya’s work, there's this dose of old school confrontational performance energy that's legible and in a way is kind of punk: there's something about it that’s so generous, in that it reminds me that intelligent dissensus is not dead. Art can still provoke meaningful responses.
And it's interesting you use the word “generous” to describe her because as I was researching her, I found that a lot of critics actually find her work — I mean, the word they've used is “objectionable”.
I'm curious how you see some of her work that has involved, you know, lying to folks or working with dead bodies, things like that. I'm curious how that squares for you with the generosity that you witnessed in her practice.
I mean, it's such a fascinating dichotomy. The classic phrase: she really does “contain multitudes”. But I feel as though a lot of what she's doing, at least in my mind, is taking the preexisting conditions of our world, reorienting them a little bit and then putting them back, representing them.
So, “objectionable”? Maybe. Yeah, watching a water buffalo die because it has a spear in its heart is going to be hard regardless, but it's happening anyway. Just because you don't want to watch it, that doesn't mean it's not happening. Just because you don't want to think about the dead bodies in the morgue, doesn't mean they're not there*. I see her work as really gently and carefully dealing with these painful moments and circumstances that are preexisting, but the content is difficult because the content of our world is difficult.
*[Gracelee is referring to The Class series (2005), videos in which Araya delivers lectures on death and dying to a handful of corpses she secured in collaboration with medical professionals at a Chiang Mai morgue.]
The world is kind of a horrible, painful place. I think that it’s a huge generosity of hers not to shy away from the pain, because it’s much easier to move further away from it, but she has chosen to hold it. That's the difficulty, but that's also the power of her work: the bravery that it takes to hold the pain.
She’s also a little bit of a trickster, right? She's a little bit of a troublemaker. One of my favorite pieces of hers — I love it so much. I'm going to get the title wrong, but it's something along the lines of “A 40-year-old Professor Comes Back Pregnant”...
“The Nine-Day Pregnancy of a Single Middle-Aged Associate Professor”.
Yes, so good! I love that piece so much! What was amazing is that, while I was there, I knew about that piece, but then I was having her fellow professors and peers tell me about the experience of being on the other end of that work, which was fascinating.*
*[Ken Johnson at NYT describes this piece well: "After a leave of absence in 2003, the Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook returned to Chiang Mai University, where she teaches, apparently pregnant. Her friends and co-workers reacted joyfully to this surprising turn of events. Then, nine days later, she announced that she wasn’t with child at all, and that her fake pregnancy was a work of performance art called 'The Nine-Day Pregnancy of a Single Middle-Aged Associate Professor.' She documented it in a fragmentary five-minute video, in which viewers hear her thoughts on pregnancy and about her colleagues’ disappointed and angry reactions to her deception."]
One of the professors that was in our department was like, “Yeah, I wouldn't talk to her for a year after that. I was so mad. I was so mad at her because I publicly congratulated her in front of our entire department. And then I had to lose face because she wasn’t actually pregnant.” But I was just, like: That's an amazing piece. She was just utilizing the social expectations of Thailand and the space and the time that she was existing in, and then representing them.
Was it a deception? Sure. But also: it's a mirror. The best work is often a mirror. And she is one of the preeminent mirror-holders of the contemporary art world.
A little after we talked [about Araya], I met the deputy director of SculptureCenter, Kyle Dancewicz, at a wedding. Coincidentally, SculptureCenter happened to be one of the only places in the US that's actually shown Araya’s work, like a large portion of it.
So he was really jazzed that you and I had just had this conversation because they had just published this book, I Am An Artist (He Said). It's a collection of her writings: a really, really wild combination of memoir, gossip, analysis, and maybe what you'd call prose poetry or speculative fiction. The writing itself is a performance. The book alternates between passages labeled “He Said” and “She Said”, but the writing doesn’t affect a straightforwardly gendered view of what those words mean. It's a really interesting look at both the literal landscape of Thailand and the art world landscape.
There's a great essay in which she’s discussing the social responsibility of the artist within the art world. She uses as an example Rirkrit Tiravanija’s participatory project pad thai (1990), a famous work where the artist cooks and hosts a pad thai dinner at this gallery in New York. And she uses that work to think through this epiphany that she has.
She writes:
“Suddenly I feel thankful to art for letting me ‘confront’ something as well as ‘avoid the confrontation’ with something… the fact that art is ethereal, wayward, outlandish, and exempt from always having to be real allows me to avoid confronting some aspects of reality that I feel averse to, as art becomes my excuse.
In conclusion:
Through art, I confront something that rarely happens in my life.
Through art, I also avoid confronting something that happens in my life.”
I'm curious if — not only having worked with her, but in your own practice — you would agree that there is a kind of redirection or even a misdirection of our energies when we want to be more politically engaged through our practices.
Yeah. That's a really difficult and large question.
Yeah, sorry.
No, it's great. Araya’s a wonderful person to consider that within because she has both used art making as a kind of lens and excuse to engage with the world on her own terms, but then also she's living her daily life in this way that is absolutely aligned with her ethics and goals.
I mean, her compound in Chiang Mai, last I was there, had like twenty-five rescue dogs. She has another property that has like thirty-plus more rescue dogs that she's taken off of the streets, brought into her world, and is caring for. The university department that I was working for had seven rescue dogs that lived there.
I think I told you this when we had dinner that night — that when I first met Araya and was there in Thailand, I couldn't make work for three months. That is the longest I have gone not making work, not having an active studio practice, since I learned what sculpture was when I was nineteen. It was such a reality-rending moment to see the power of her work, to see the way that she chose to live her beliefs in this practice of teaching, of caring for these dogs, of fostering this department that the university did not want to exist at all, and in this quite behind-the-scenes way. (She's a real private person. She never goes to openings, she doesn't care about any of that.)
It took me a while to square the power of her work with what I felt like was the impotence of mine. I still feel that way to some degree. It has not prevented me from making work, but I still feel like her work is powerful in ways that I can never achieve.
On a final note, I was kind of struck that she dedicates an enormous portion of the book not to aesthetic investigation or hardcore theory or something like that, but to actually taking apart the minutiae of the art world and her trade.
There's so much in here about the bureaucracy, the politicking, the logistics, and the many, many emails required to be an artist and a professor. Her descriptions of these things range from annoying to hilarious to just, like, actually galling.
It can be a real example or not, but could you give folks a sort of abbreviated peek at what it would take you to get one piece (or a set of artworks) from your studio to a show.
Oh yeah: it's a lot. Also, I'm really glad you brought up that SculptureCenter book. I was not familiar with that one, and I’m gonna order it! I have so many of her books; they're stacked up over there because I like to keep her around.
Similar to many other artists of my level in the world, I don't have anyone else in the studio. I don't have an assistant right now. I don't have a studio manager. I'm doing it all. So, I'm making the work, I'm packing the work, I'm doing the emails, coordinating with the galleries, having the studio visit, sending them the PDFs, the whole thing.
It's quite intensive. Like I was recently invited to be in a group show. It opened last week at a really great gallery in New York. They emailed me about a month ago saying, “Hey, do you want to be in this show?” And so they asked to see a PDF.
Well, that means I have to go through and make sure my PDF is updated with all the work I have currently available. I hate doing it. It's horrible. I don't remember what I've made! I just make shit all day. I don't remember.
This is a PDF of things that potentially you could send to them that aren’t tied up with another show or something like that?
Right. Things that are available or varieties of work that are available. So I'll be like, “Well, this piece isn't available, but there's probably something else similar to that.” And so then it's the process of them being like, “What about this? What about that? We want this scale. We want that scale.” And then I'm having to send them more PDFs and kind of go back and forth.
Now, it ended up that they were interested in some of the rotator pieces, but those are older. I was like, “No, those are too old. Let me make you some new ones.” Like a fool.
Wow.
And so then I was like, “I'm just going to make three new guys,” which I did, and that was fine. And for this show, actually, I didn't have to drop the work off, which is amazing. At this point, I just won't do that anymore. You want it? You come get it.
I got other stuff to do, you know: everything else, literally everything else. So it's a lot of back and forth and bureaucracy and whatever.
Even just packing a large sculpture will take me all day. I have to find all the material. I gotta scale it. I gotta wrap it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's silly. It's very silly. I feel like I didn't answer that question directly.
No, no, this is super helpful, thank you. I want readers to appreciate that [your practice] is not just this sort of platonic idea of making the work itself, which is so clearly perhaps not even half the work you're actually doing.
That's the fun part. That’s the enjoyable part. There's all this other stuff that has to happen.
But something else that is an unspoken reality of our current moment — maybe of all moments — in showing work is, like: where you choose to show and how you approach it becomes a political action too.
That’s something that I know that Araya’s work is deeply embedded within. Thinking about the politics of Thailand — of whatever country she's showing in — of permissiveness and all that. That’s just as true now for anyone, if you choose to show.
Like, MASS MoCA is on strike right now: what happens if you choose to put a show on there? You’d be making a statement. It's particularly important as an artist to consider how your work is distributed and digested and through what kinds of organs of institutions it's moving through — and what that means.
I love that. Thank you so much for your time, Gracelee.
Yeah, of course! So nice to chat!
And you, dear reader, you made it!!!!!!!! At this point, you might as well watch Araya talk about the Treachery of the Moon.
love,
alex
PS: All the photos are from Gracelee's website, minus the Araya photos: Two were from the NYT, and the other was from an informative but incredibly badly scanned PDF.
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ʕ ·ᴥ·ʔ SOON: blank plaques on federal land ...... a guy who took it upon himself to fix Caltrans' terrible freeway signs in L.A. ...... why you should care about the Oxford GOTdang English Dictionary!!!! ...... burnin' that sweet, sweet incense clock ......