|
home · articles · art intercom: featuring artist kathryn smith |
New upgrades to icommons.org
We have some exciting new upgrades to icommons.org to report! The latest updates to the site include:
- The ability to upload vertical pictures along with horizontal pictures to the site. We've also set the minimum picture size from 600 to 420 pixels, and you can upload both jpgs and pngs.
- Additions to our list of embedded videos that can be supported on the site - now video... more
|
| |
Art Intercom: Featuring Artist Kathryn Smith
Paddy Johnson · New York (United States) · Jun 11th, 2007 8:47 am · 11 votes · no comments made
|
| |
| Kathryn Smith,Jack in Johannesburg, 2003 Performance still of live projection, by Kathryn Smith |
 |
Kathryn Smith likes good secrets. Not necessarily fun or beautiful ones - in fact her work often reveals those that are dark and violent – but her talent lies in her ability to both find and create hidden narratives, and obscured meaning, within a variety of mediums including film, photography and drawing. This week I spoke to Smith about her interest in the underbelly of filmic coding, how her simultaneous practice as a curator and critic informs her work, and the project she has planned for the upcoming icommons exhibition. Smith marks the final artist interview in a series of six, leading up to summit.
Art Fag City: So in your artist statement you talk about the cinematic still having ambiguous meaning such that they imply a kind of violence. As a cinematic device, overuse of these shots can feel manipulative, and invasive and violence sometimes is a result of this, but I am interested in how you specifically address this in your work.
Kathryn Smith: Well, I suppose I look for [the violence.] That artist statement was written a couple years ago when I was working with films as a primary source material, but what I’m busy with right now, and probably what I’ll do as part of my Summit project, is working with photographs from newspapers or images found online. I feel quite a connection with Joy in that regard . I’m naturally drawn to images that are violent, or imply violence without being overly sensational. I find I can’t deal with too much gore anymore, but I do enjoy images where there is a protagonist whose actions are not really clear, images in which the action could go either way. I suppose that’s what I enjoy about watching films by pausing or watching in frame advance mode, just to see what the narrative possibilities are outside the narrative flow of a given cinematic narrative.
AFC: And do you feel there is a particular work where this shows up?
KS: I do steal excessively from existing film, and I do use the form in that way. I did a performance piece a couple of years ago called Jack in Johannesburg and I made a film resulting from that performance which remixed documentary footage from the performance with as many dramatized and documentary-style narratives around the Jack the Ripper narrative as I could find, and I included as part of the dialogue for that film, soundbytes from Alfred Hitchock’s film Rope which is based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case where two men murder someone as an intellectual challenge, and they discuss this act in the beginning of Rope. So I don’t only do it with visuals. I use the strategy with voice overs and soundbytes that I find and use in this way.
AFC: So this is sort of a broader question, but I think that as artists our interests and goals for our work evolve. So with the qualifying statement that your picks may change can you talk about what work you’re currently doing or have done that you’re most interested in?
KS: Um, yeah, I’ve become increasingly interested, not in any specific artist’s work in particular, but general aspects of the visual realm. How we see and what we see and what draws us to look closely at certain things. And with that in mind I’ve become very interested in the invisible, and I’ve started to make drawings that are invisible or rather, only visible under certain lights and conditions. And the most obvious way is to work with ultraviolet inks, so they do glow under black light but they are completely invisible under natural light. So I started to work with images that are very iconic or images that capture the mass media at a certain moment and try to render those ‘invisible’. So in a strange way, I’m trying to reclaim them for myself. I find especially with documentary images of violent events have become so much a part of one’s day to day that they become banal. I mean, the whole idea of becoming detached from violence is certainly not a new one, but having worked with so many of these images for a long time I became concerned in myself that I too had become desensitized to them. Or sensitized to very particular things in them, and other people found my pragmatism quite worrying. And so I’ve tried to work with them to try and render them invisible, and work with them in a very, very labor intensive way and create images that could much more easily be reproduced as some kind of silk screen or printmaking technique, but are hand done. And I find it interesting being involved in this particular project, and having met the other artists online and becoming familiar with their work, I’ve found I’m definitely the most analogue person involved in the Summit! And when people start talking programming languages I’m completely in the dark. When they started the skillz thread…I was like “scissors and glue?” I’m very interested in the principles of a lot of what Commons is about, and even though the online environment is not my principle focus area, I hope this ‘reanaloguing’ exercise will draw these principles out in different ways.
AFC: Interesting. Do you see your work in any way as being proactively Creative Commons friendly?
KS: I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an activist in that way or go out there and sort of promote it in that way, but I do find it rather difficult being someone who is also active in the art market, as someone who sells stuff through commercial galleries (although my work is difficult to sell – and that’s something I deliberately do – I try to make it difficult to sell in its form or it’s content). But I do think that the Creative Commons approach to things is something that we all inherently do as artists in any case. And as someone who actively steals other people’s work, if you want to put it in that way, that kind of ‘criminal intent’ is an active part of what I do, so I would have to engage on that level in any case.
AFC: And now you’re a critic as well. How active were you as a critic? And has that practice helped your own work develop?
KS: One of the reasons I started publishing some of my critical work was because I found that I do tend to be quite hermetic so if I was to spend all my time working on art projects I wouldn’t get out much, and I don’t get out much. And I obviously enjoy engaging with critical discourse, but I do try to keep the language in the realm of the popular as well. I’m interested in the tension between the critical and the so-called popular. So I started writing critically as an undergrad student and then through my postgrad studies as well. As I got increasingly involved in my own practice, and also now that I’m full time at the University of Stellenbosch as a lecturer I find that time is not on my side, and I would need more time to give certain shows or projects that I’m interested in their due. And so I tend to move quite fluidly between making my own work and writing when I’m feeling like I’m in that kind of headspace, and then also curating shows. When I consider my kind of production and limits and possibilities as an artist,for me it’s all three. So if there’s an idea to put out there that’ll work best as a piece of writing then that’s what I’ll do, or an idea or a particular interpretation of an idea that can be informed through curating a show of other’s people work, I’ll do that. I can’t really draw the boundary between those three kinds of practices.
AFC: Does the technical aspect of curating also inform your art ever? For example, does the practice of arrange the show influence how you think about work?
KS: Yeah, absolutely. I regard myself as a primarily research-based type of producer so I’m kind of slow in making things because the research behind what I do takes up a lot of time and so the technical aspects of curating in that sense certainly inform my work. I find that they can be quite central. My own work is quite specifically focused on the idea of the interface between artistic work and criminal practice, but there are obviously related ideas that I can’t necessarily bring into my own practice very specifically at one point so it might more sense to curate something around that to help me understand what that thing is. It really depends on the project itself. On the point of writing though, it’s also…there’s a very particular kind of trend in South African art writing at the moment. As small as the art market is here, it is experiencing a boom in the sense that there are loads of new galleries opening, so on a market level it’s booming, but I find on a critical level there is a lot of brochuring and ‘vanity’ publishing going on, that would support the appearance of all these new spaces, and their business interests. So I have chose to work on more intense research projects like working on commissioned career-survey monographs for artists. So my critical work is curatorial in the sense that I work as a researcher and editor and kind of ‘curate’ the information in these publications. Publishing is something I’m really interested in.
AFC: Now the project you’re working for iCommons, Community of Property, do you consider that a curatorial project more than something like the film work that you’ve done, or do you not see that connection?
KS: Yeah absolutely I do. They both have strong curatorial aspects of researching, making connections and selections and strategizing a display or ‘publishing’ of the work. Community of Property asks Summit participants and citizens of Dubrovnik to supply me with objects of personal significance that they no longer have any use for, which I hope to use to create a dynamic, responsive installation in the exhibition venue. You know, it’s kind of a new way of working for me as an individual. In 2000 I co-founded an artists’ group called the Trinity Session, and as a collective we were very involved with projects that in the era of Joseph Beuys may have been regarded as social sculpture. And now, there is a lot of talk around dialogical and relational aesthetics that propose a shift from the whole idea of art being object-based, to a focus on how an artistic action or concept creates relationships between people. And from what I was reading around the Commons, it seemed that while a lot of discussion on these issues was happening online, I was interested in the re-analoguing of things. In other words, how I could interpret the work of the commons on the ground. So the Community of Property thing was something that sort of made sense to me. I just hope we can realize some, if not all, of it in the time that’s remaining because it’s very interesting for me to work with this idea of a psychogeography that’s object-orientated.
AFC: Do you have any sort of set ideas about Community of Property will look or is the process much more fluid?
KS: It is a lot more fluid, and frankly I have no idea. I’m very curious to see. You know, figuring something like this out is really kind of risky because you really don’t know what you’re going to get, and then you start having Forest Gump moments (you know, life is like a box of chocolates) but yeah, I’m very curious to see whether people respond at all. Because also, if I receive nothing that is also a kind of response. I am someone who tends to over-think things, so when I decided to put this idea out there it was a real shift for me and I’m quite interested this year in a lot of risk-taking. So I’m interested to see also what this could potentially tell me about my own work.
Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the Summit, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Interviews include MTAA (part one and two), Joy Garnett, Jaka Zeleznikar, and Ana Husman, Nathaniel Stern (part one and two), and this weeks feature, Kathryn Smith.
tags: dubrovnik croatia culture art artists-in-residence summit07 art-intercom
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote