10/6/2016 Interview with Artist Adam TurlAdam Turl’s studio at the Dollar Art House in St. Louis, Missouri (2016). AHC: Can you tell us a bit about your process, themes & inspirations? Adam: First of all, I see the art space as a theatrical space and the art object as a theatrical object. Second, I see my work as part of a popular avant-garde tradition. Third, I borrow from the history of romantic, surrealist and critical irrealist approaches to art. Fourth, I want to invoke a sense of “differentiated totality” or the carnivalesque. Art is more than isolated objects in a white cube. The white cube is a space designed for art to be a commodity. I have no problem selling work but that cannot be, in the end, what the work is about. The white cube also separates art, ideologically and literally, from the world. It appears to float above social relations – separated from the reality of social class, racism, gender oppression, and so on. But this is an illusion – as evidenced in the recent controversy at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2016/09/30/gallery-defends-kelley-walker-artist-under-fire-in-cam-st-louis-exhibit Unfortunately, however, we do not live in a world in which we can, sustainably, make art a part of everyday life. Seeing the art space as a theatrical space is a strategy to make art interact with the world within the art space. I create a fictional context for the art objects; a story about working-class life in a world of racism, class exploitation, gender oppression and war. The white cube is a 20th century invention of capitalism. http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/commentary/the-white-cube-and-the-german-ideology-gallery-space-as-bourgeois-farce?rq=white%20cube The theater is an ancient social and spiritual platform. Borrowing from the “Total Installation” ideas of the artist Ilya Kabakov http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/essays/interrupting-disbelief-ilya-kabakov-narrative-conceptualism-and-anti-capitalist-studio-art?rq=kabakov and the “Epic Theater” of Bertolt Brecht http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/reviews/opera-beggars?rq=brecht I try to invent a new world within the art space for the art. But as Brecht argued capitalism has a way of taking the poison thrown in its face and turning it into a drug. The uncompromising egalitarianism of Martin Luther King, for example, is intentionally forgotten every February. McDonalds placemats celebrate King while their employees barely make enough to pay the rent. The same happens with critical art. Outrage becomes decoration over time. We have to put the “old things” in contact with the “bad” and “good” new things (to borrow from Brecht again). But our artistic experimentation can’t be separate from the real concerns of everyday life. This happens too often in contemporary art. We have, as Boris Groys described it, a “weak avant-garde” making weak images. http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/weak-avant-garde These images avoid complicity but also criticism of the status quo. We need a popular avant-garde that deals with popular concerns (paying the rent, getting an abortion, escaping anti-trans violence, escaping war, falling in and out of love, depression, etc.). For me this includes telling the stories of working-class people in installations and paintings – but transported to fantastic contexts that also present the dream-life of working-class people as unique individuals. My current project is about a barista who thinks he can see the future – a rebellion on a colonized Mars, the first days of World War Three, a future in which every single human being is their own nation-state. We are constrained and distorted in this society. We are alienated from each other. This is why I try to combine my art into a carnivalesque “differentiated totality.” We are all unique individuals but most of us are also collectively trapped. I see this last aspect of my work as a modular sort of muralism. We are not, as some of the post-modernists argued, merely individuals performing our identities. Nor are we, as the reductive Marxists argued, defined only by our relationship to social-class. We are both. I use painting to valorize and give weight to working-class stories. I incorporate the materials of working-class life into paintings and sculptures. For my installation and series 13 Baristas http://www.evictedart.com/13-baristas/ I painted with coffee. There were coffee cups marked with crosses – memorials to the working day (as a critic in Las Vegas described them). Barista Who Could See the Future, installation in progress, Dollar Art House in St. Louis, Missouri (2016). 13 Baristas, site-specific installation, acrylic, coffee and mixed media on canvas with mattress, cups, found objects and model, in St. Louis, Missouri (2015). AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create? Adam: I always loved to draw – and invent my own worlds. I was an only child and I spent hours in my own head at my father’s church. Later I went to art school. But I dropped out of art school in the late 90s when I became a Marxist. This was around the time of the WTO protests in Seattle. I became a political organizer and spent much of the next decade trying to make a revolution. We organized against the death penalty, for labor solidarity, immigrant rights, for equal marriage rights, against the war, etc. Around 2010, however, I became very depressed. I could barely get out of bed. After a few months of this despair I went and got some paint, some canvas and dug my easel out of my parents’ basement. I started to paint in my kitchen. I sort of came back to life. The first thing I made that I didn’t hate was a mixed media painting of oil and acrylic paint, cotton and ash that was a celebration of General Sherman’s “March to the Sea.” Art is not therapy – but it is not merely communication either. It is a unique necessity in human life. Through art my imagination allowed me to escape despair and depression. My fidelity to being an artist – for the rest of my life – stems from that. 13 Baristas, installation detail, cups painted with coffee and acrylic, Brett Wesley Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada (2015). AHC: Who are some of your artistic influences? Is there anyone outside of the art world who has had a huge impact on your work or who just generally inspires you, writers, filmmakers, musicians etc? Adam: I already mentioned Ilya Kabakov and Bertolt Brecht. I would also have to add the artist Emory Douglas (who made much of the art for the old Black Panther newspaper) http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/essays/emory-douglas , the South African artist William Kentridge (who also makes theatrical drawings in films, video and installations) https://vimeo.com/66485044 , the 18th and 19th century Spanish artist Goya (for his gothic romanticism and naturalism), Kerry James Marshall and Diego Rivera (for their various takes on the mural). But artists steal mercilessly from other artists. There are too many artists for me to acknowledge here. I admire the aesthetic materiality of Anselm Kiefer but dislike his politics. I owe a great deal to the German artist Joseph Beuys, the Columbian artist Doris Salcedo, and of course Andy Warhol, Max Beckmann, Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman and the punk artist Raymond Pettibon. Because of my interest in the popular avant-garde I am very interested in DIY art and music movements; the punk music houses of the 1980s and 1990s, the early days of Hip Hop in the Bronx, etc. And because of my interest in the theater I am shaped by the ideas of Brecht, and those influenced by him (and the surrealists) in film – Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel and Pier Paolo Pasolini (especially his 1966 movie Hawks and Sparrows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8riUlf9dAaY ). I like art that sees the human being as both a social and spiritual animal. Art that only does one of these things, however well, is incomplete to me. Kick the Cat, installation detail, Project 1612 in Peoria, Illinois (2015). 13 Baristas, salon version, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri (2015) AHC: Could you talk some about your involvement in 13 Baristas collective and some of the ideas you laid out in your article '12 Concerns for Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Studio Art'? Adam: The 13 Baristas Art Collective (13BAC) was a fictional group of artists. They were coffee shop workers in Chicago, in the near future, who were also artists and political radicals. They chronicled their lives and the lives of their co-workers in a series of paintings and drawings. One of their co-workers had, according to them, given birth to a magpie. The magpie counseled this young woman to leave her hometown and her misogynist boyfriend. The bird told her, “after you leave I will castrate him.” Another co-worker was the grandson of Black Panthers who had been shot by police. He imagined a civilization that was “part Rats of Nimh, Part The Littles” inside his bedroom walls. The little people had a revolution in the floorboards and abolished their own police. 13BAC chronicled the story of an alcoholic woman who hung out by the liquor store panhandling. It turned out that she was some kind of witch that protected the neighborhood. She was diabetic and grew sick. She went blind and her legs turned to stone. And the neighborhood was no longer protected. The 13 Baristas, these fictional artists, met their own sad fate when riots and protests swept Chicago. Their members were disappeared by the police. A few escaped and continued to make art far from the city. But the men and women that started the 13 Baristas were lost. Of course I made all that up. I wondered, what if there were still art movements? What if they were made up of working-class people? What if they had a newspaper? What if what they did actually mattered? This story flowed from the questions and points I laid out in “12 Concerns for Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Studio Art.” http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/evicted-art-blog/post-title The twelve points were meant to counter a particular and faulty line of reasoning in “serious” art – the problems of the weak avant-garde I mentioned earlier. First of all, art should tell a story – the stories of working-class people. It can and should deal with the debates and history of art. But no great art is solely about art itself. Secondly, we need a kind of narrative conceptual art. Third, the working-class subject is constrained by this society. The performance of identity is twisted by capitalism. Fourth, we need to “interrupt disbelief.” The residual post-modern suspicion of all metanarratives and theories, like Marxism or socialism, needs to be destroyed. I think of this as almost an inversion of Bertolt Brecht’s ideas of interrupting the suspension of disbelief in theater. One of the problems with TINA (“There is No Alternative” as Margaret Thatcher put it) – the idea that neoliberal capitalism is the best and only possible world – is that it devastates the imagination. Just as it destroys our ability to imagine a just world it also deadens our art. Interestingly, the same mechanisms Brecht used to expose the artifice of fiction work to return aura to the image and story (by creating distance – all “aura” is ultimately about distance). It is why I use paintings within my work to valorize the working-class subjects that are currently disregarded. I like to leave clues that it is a construction – like placing the prices of paintings within an installation. Fifth, the return of the crowd – in Occupy, in Black Lives Matter, in the Arab Spring – means a return to collective politics. I wanted to reckon with that democratic impulse aesthetically. The working-class comes together – not like the false equality of the rhizome, nor atomized in the sense of Foucault’s discursive ideas of power. The best description I could find was in the ideas of the carnivalesque. I try to present a differentiated totality in my installations. The paintings, which I think of anthropomorphically, come together like a crowd. They are not all the same but they are not alien to each other. Their meaning changes when they are grouped. Then they are sold off, one by one, as commodities. They are like us. We sell ourselves everyday – working-class people anyway. And when we do we are less than ourselves. And we should be furious. Red Mars, salon version, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri (2016). photo credit: James Byard/Washington University Red Mars, salon detail, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri (2016). AHC: In a debate that would create a distinction between art and political art, do you, like Jacques Ranciere, just see art itself as being inherently political? That the distinction is really just a hold-over from bourgeoisie culture which pines for the days when it had art and the potential of 'any and all' that art harbors, to itself? Adam: As usual I both agree and disagree with Jacques Ranciere. It is true that art is, objectively, political. Because its use value – its social-spiritual function – is alien to the utilitarian demands of the market, it is in some ways alien to capitalism. But as the old joke goes, a capitalist will sell you the rope you plan to hang him with. Art obviously has an exchange value. More important, the nature of the market distorts art itself. Why do we have zombie formalism? Why do we have dot paintings that mean nothing by Damien Hirst? Why must we all forgive Marina Abramović her sins? Why is Jeff Koons a part of the cannon? Why are racist images passed off as critical and discursive at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis? The bourgeoisie controls the art market and most of them don’t want challenging things hanging above their couches. They want things that make them feel better about the barbaric world they have, as a social class, created. Or they want things that flatter their own conception of that world. To be clear there are lots of great gallerists and collectors. Most of my collectors are not rich (most are working-class) but I appreciate them all (including the few well-healed ones). But the market overall is, despite demands for the “new,” quite conservative. Ranciere is right. All art is political. But not all art has good politics. Making art is not, in itself, a radical gesture. Bourgeois culture is still here. It will only be abolished along with the bourgeoisie. They may long for their heroic past – and the heroic artists of capitalism’s birth – but they also want to forget that past. They don’t want other social classes to get any ideas. Capitalism is all about amnesia. A Painter of Our Time, installation, “Safe Space” at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (2014). AHC: I'm curious to know what your thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street movement are? In the park encampment in NYC there were cardboard street signs dubbed Kropotkin Alley and Trotsky Alley, and revolution and resistant art making were very much in the air then, from people's think tanks to teach in's by a diverse group from Zizek to Spivak to Graeber to activists from the Egypt uprising, what are your thoughts about these movements world wide which are certainly continuing in different forms to this day? Adam: I am glad socialists and anarchists are keeping alive historic divisions in street naming. I took part in Occupy – not in New York but in southern Illinois. We had an encampment at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois (SIUC). The police attacked it. Students who slept in the camp were threatened with expulsion. We organized solidarity with the faculty who went on strike at SIUC in the middle of Occupy. More than a thousand students struck in solidarity with their professors. The students were called pawns of the unions. They weren’t. We even held an Occupy Art Show at the camp. Occupy was defeated – but not destroyed completely – by three things. Too many of us got sucked into the black hole of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party. It pretends to care about workers, Black people, immigrants, women, gays and other oppressed people. But at the end of the day it is dedicated to maintaining order for Wall Street. They only look decent in comparison to the lunacy of the Republicans. So thousands of people were suckered into the 2012 elections. Secondly, Democratic Party mayors sent police to destroy the camps. Thirdly, the left-wing of Occupy did not have a coherent strategic answer to these things – how to genuinely contest state power either at the ballot box or on the streets. But these are just the immediate things. The bigger problem is this – the defeat of the working-class movement. The health of any radical political movement depends on its connection to class struggle. Without that lifeblood the left is only an echo of what it once was. The neoliberal turn in the 1970s and 1980s decimated the working-class and it hasn’t recovered. The mutually reinforcing dyad of a weak working-class and a weak radical left helps explain the defeat of the Egyptian revolution and the rolling back of the Arab Spring. The biggest step forward in the U.S. since Occupy has been Black Lives Matter – and the main reason it has been a step forward is that young Black activists refused to listen to those who counseled patience in the face of an unmitigated disaster – the ongoing and almost daily murder of unarmed people of color and poor people. The Bernie Sanders campaign in the U.S. began to crystalize some class politics but Sanders destroyed that potential – at least in the short term – by delivering on his promise to endorse Hillary Clinton. We have, according to reports on climate change, crossed the carbon tipping point. The tragic reality is that we may be a few decades from losing our absolute economic surplus. An economic surplus is the precondition to creating an equal society. As far as some of the “new” Marxist philosophers and writers go I am more partial to Alain Badiou than Ranciere (in terms of art and culture anyway). The connection Badiou draws between the existential and political quality of theater is very insightful. I find Zizek to be reductionist and something of a European chauvinist. Most underrated, in terms of Marxism and art, is Michael Lowy. His book with Robert Sayre on Romanticism should be required reading. As should the late Ernst Fischer’s book The Necessity of Art. When in doubt I always go back to Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Their “Gothic Marxism” is central to my own work http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/evicted-art-blog/a-thousand-lost-worlds-notes-on-gothic-marxism . There are lots of serious Marxists trying to explain the present moment – Neil Davidson, Kim Moody, David Harvey, David McNally, etc. I am partial to the new journal Salvage http://salvage.zone/ . People should read them. And read the work by my excellent comrades at Red Wedge. More importantly, people should do something practical to help organize the class. Help your local Socialist Alternative, Solidarity or International Socialist Organization branch. If you’re an anarchist organize with the IWW or something. Do whatever you can to support Black Lives Matter. Your art is not your activism. And your activism is not your art. Cultural theory and art are all fine. They are even necessary. But they won’t change the world. Power concedes nothing, as Frederick Douglas argued, without a demand. We need organizations, protests, strikes, direct action, civil disobedience. We need our own political candidates. We need to build the fire next time. Think of it this way. Food is a human necessity. Cooks make it. But capitalists control the food supply. It is the same with art. It is a human necessity. Artists make it. But we do not control the art supply. Only the class struggle can free art. It is a bizarre conceit to think a painting, a play, a film or novel would have more power than the self-organization of the exploited and oppressed. To mitigate such conceits, a popular avant-garde needs a working-class and radical left audience. It needs to be organically connected to the real source of social change. 13 Baristas, installation detail, Brett Wesley Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada (2015). AHC: What is the first work of art you encountered that took your breath away? Adam: Speaking only of visual art – I would have to say an Anselm Kiefer painting I saw at the Kunstgalerie in Stuttgart when I was fifteen. I don’t remember which painting it was. I was absorbed in it completely. After that I would visit the Kiefer paintings first every time I went to the St. Louis Museum of Art. In film (not counting my childhood obsession with the original Star Wars trilogy) – Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In music – Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in a three-way tie with Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. In theater – Marat-Sade by Peter Weiss. ` In poetry – Rodney Jones’ “Mule” – “Here is a horse from a bad family…” and Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around” – “I happen to be tired of being a man…” In literature – I’m loathe to admit it but it was probably Herman Hesse. Each of these was a transcendent thing (at the time). In comedy – Monty Python and the Holy Grail or the first season of Ren and Stimpy. The Barista Who Could See the Future, installation, Dollar Art House in St. Louis, Missouri (2016).
AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about? Adam: My friend and comrade Craig E. Ross and I just launched a project called the Dollar Art House http://www.dollararthouse.com/ . It is a DIY art house in St. Louis. In our opening statement we wrote: “As global cities are progressively taken away from working-class people through gentrification we feel that we must create the platforms for a new art wherever the currents of neoliberalism have deposited us. “While we wish to engage in the debates of the art world we are just as concerned with being part and parcel of the debates within the working-class, in the new social movements, and among the revolutionary left (socialists and anarchists alike). Part of the struggle for a socialist world lies in the dreams of this one. “But we are also aware that time is running out. The existential catastrophes that face the working-class and oppressed will soon be joined by the planetary disaster of climate change. We call ourselves Dollar Art House because that is where we are stranded; hustling at the margins of a corrupt and inhumane system.” Our first group exhibition, The Hard Times Art Show http://www.dollararthouse.com/hard-times-art-shw/ , is currently on display, featuring work by Craig and myself, Holly McGraw, Jesa Dior Brooks, Husni Ashiku, Jason Wonnell, Anna Maria Tucker, Jon Cornell and VHS Girl. I am working on an expanded version of The Barista Who Could See the Future for exhibition in the spring – and I am about to do a residency at the Cité International des Artes in Paris. I am also an editor at Red Wedge Magazine http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/ and we have a lot of exciting plans in the works there. I will also be desperately searching for an adjunct teaching job when I get back from Europe – so I can, you know, eat and pay rent. If anyone out there wants me to teach art classes at your college or university let me know. Thanks to the present economic reality and the decline of the U.S. Empire I come fairly cheap. For more information visit www.adamturl.org/ Comments are closed.
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