Artist Interview with Clement Valla

"Mechanical Turk is also twisted," said Clement Valla, who uses the interface to engage people creatively. He has written a software program that enables Mechanical Turk workers to create collaborative paintings made of up 1600 discreet one-square-inch pieces. He titles these works Seed Drawings because they emanate from a single tile that multiplies iteratively. Users are asked to copy the tile that is next to their own assigned blank tile, but because each new copy is essentially made by hand or an inexact process, each newly-filled tile ends up looking slightly different than the previous one. Sometimes a user decides not to follow the instructions, and whole new patterns evolve in the paintings.

Mechanical Turk is an Amazon.com platform for employing human users to perform tasks that a computer is unable to carry out. In an interview with Artists Speak, Valla explained the origin of the name. An 18th century contraption, the Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton that appeared to be a robot. A reputed chess-champion, capable of beating most human opponents, the Mechanical Turk was actually a human disguised as a robot. Behind every automaton lies a human hand.

Before developing the software that would spawn his Seed Drawings, Valla elicited the help of distant human artists for his Master's thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studies and teaches in the Digital + Media MFA program. Encouraged to work in an unfamiliar medium for an assignment in a theory class, Valla took on the challenge by ordering custom paintings from Chinese artist villages. What started out as an experiment would transform into an entire body of work for his thesis.

Fully embracing the digital paradigm of instruction-based art, Valla asked the Chinese painters, who all had Western names, to paint the view outside their window. Unlike most of the orders they received from other clients who asked for copies of famous Western paintings, like Monets and Van Goghs, Clement's instructions sought to humanize the process of ordering copies from a production studio accustomed to mass customization in an outsourcing economy. For the 2009 Wassaic Project arts festival, Clement ordered an oil painting that combined three different contexts and eras from the Wushipu Chinese Painting Village in Xiamen, China. Set against a background sky of a painting by the Hudson School painter Frederick Church and a Google Earth relief of Wassaic, NY is a building in Xiamen. The building just happens to evoke the stature of the Wassaic Mill, which is where the arts festival is held each year.

Drawing from the minimalism of Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner, Clement Valla explores the structural potentials of form-making. His work examines repetition in a digital medium within the confines of a pre-existing system. When ordering paintings online from China, in order to communicate with artists, Valla subjected each image that was produced to a digital critique. He would send instructions to his overseas workshop by email, and with each exchange, a copy of a copy would insert itself into the internet-based feedback loop and ultimately make its way into the final object. The difference between the Wushipu paintings and the Seed drawings is that the former participate in an additive process where each new layer masks what was there before, whereas the latter record and divulge each additive transformation in horizontal and radial format. Nonetheless, for his thesis show, Valla had ordered copies of copies of copies of copies of paintings from artists working in China, and structurally, his commissioned, instruction-based collection looked a lot like the more abstracted and minimal Seed drawings that were to follow.

Digital production and hand-made craft combine nicely in Clement Valla's work, whether he is crowdsourcing the production of his Seed drawings or outsourcing his MFA thesis. The results are beautiful and document a modern-day palimpsest of working class creative output through a critical-productive framework.

Read Clement Valla's Master's thesis Original Copies:
http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_65/7166000/7166262/2/print/thesis.pdf

Artist Interview: Jesse Boardman Kauppila

Jesse Kauppila has remastered Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" so that it can be played on a record player or printed through a printing press.

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I hate to say it, but a lot of my work really benefits from the white cube environment. My work often requires precise lighting conditions and little distraction to see subtle differences in the results of the often repetitive processes I use to create my work. Also, the white cube allows the viewer to see the subtlety of precise intentions.

Occasionally, I like to create work for abnormal locations and situations (bunkers, barns, fields, fountains). This allows me to build on what is already present, to riff on it, add to it, or spring from it. It's an interesting challenge and a lot of fun, however, I consider my more sophisticated projects to be better presented in the white cube because I like to build systems from the ground up and show everything I have done. The white cube provides the opportunity to see a stand alone project.

I also like to do performances in non-standard settings. I like to do conceptual work in these settings because I am able to show people that might not otherwise be interested in conceptual art what I am doing and win them over. This sort of "missionary" work is something that is really important to me, especially when done in rural settings.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us? What does art do best?
If there were a spectrum of apparatuses between expository writing (used to prove a point) and geometry (used to describe objects in space), I would say that modern art tends toward expository writing. An essayist (though not a novelist) establishes his/her thesis and sets out to prove it within a given piece of writing, the artist has no such luxury. I also don't believe that art is used to describe the world in the way that geometry is (at least modern art doesn't operate in that manner). What makes art unique is that artist establishes their own criteria, which they fulfill in the creation of their work. The viewers then use their own criteria for understanding the piece. It is this gap, the question of criteria for judging, which creates much of the confusion around contemporary art. I think most art is more interesting when you have some notion of what the artist is trying to do and then you can evaluate the artist against his or her criteria and against your own criteria.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you like them to know about your work?
I really like to make work that is accessible, period. I like making work that is accessible to different people with different backgrounds. A lot of my work relies on my knowledge of printmaking. I like it when printmakers see my work and “get it;” they know the technique on which I am basing my work. Similarly, I like stories and like it when people know the story on which I am basing my work. I am also interested in science and math and appreciate it when people understand those aspects of my work.

I guess I like a curious audience best - an audience that is able to understand my work on its own terms.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I like retinal art - particularly retinal art that is conceptual. If I don't find work to be visually interesting, I rarely spend time to figure out the other aspects of the work.

That being said, different people react to different inputs. I like work that is interesting to the eye, the ear, the mind, etc... If an artwork provides more than just retinal points of entry, more people can open up to the work.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?
I don't think there is room for movements. The most recent sort of notion of a movement was probably "relational aesthetics," which I thought did a particularly poor job of encapsulating what that sort of work was all about. With studio movements such as surrealists, dadaists, etc... you can see a real core of people controlling what the "movement" meant from the inside (often by expelling dissidents). Perhaps this is what enabled those movements to retain their aesthetic coherency. I don't think anybody can really exert that sort of control these days. This might be due to mobility these days: artists can't really develop together for long periods of time, because people are all over the place all the time now. I've regretted that I haven't been able to continue to work, uninterrupted, with many artists I have collaborated with.

I am really interested in artists reworking and working within preexisting movements, riffing on them or whatever. I'm really interested in work like that, I find work that tries to do something new to be quite tedious often. It's the whole standing on top of giants thing. By basing your work in that of others you can go so much further.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please feel free to answer it.
Recently I have been interested in the role of the gimic in my work and art in general - the role of humor; but one of the most pertinent questions for me is the role of tradition and its meaning. For a long time tradition and traditional art forms were really important to me. There seemed to be something really authentic there that I didn't find anywhere else. I wrote my thesis on tradition in contemporary Haida and Yoruba art, and my pursuit of printmaking was rooted in an interest in traditional printmaking.

That being said, the stuff that I'm interested in doing now isn't really all that traditional, but there is still a certain rigor and it is of traditional methods (perhaps its craftsmanship) that is really interesting and important to me. I try to maintain this rigor in whatever work I do, whether my work be traditional or not.

Artist Interview: Ben Cuevas

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Ideally? At the Whitney or the Venice Biennale! I jest (sort of). I have a tendency to dream big, which is why I seek out out venues that afford artists ample space and an eager audience. As an emerging artist, having just graduated from Hampshire College this past May, I've been very lucky to exhibit at two art festivals (The Wassaic Project in NY and Smokefarm in WA), as well as in a solo show at Canal Gallery in Holyoke, MA. Canal Gallery was an ideal space for me in many ways. It is an enormous industrial warehouse with two floors of exhibition space, including a 40'x40' white box room. In general, I find the white box to be a very appealing place in which to install work for its endless possibilities and conceptual neutrality, as well as for allowing the focus to be entirely on the installation. However, I also enjoy the challenge that alternative spaces provide. Working within the architecture of any given space, or the varied terrain of the outdoors, can further enrich the concept in ways no white box can.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us? What does art do best?
Art expands consciousness. It transforms the mundane into the profound, challenges ingrained thought processes, and transcends preconceived notions. Art is the impetus for growth.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you like them to know about your work?
All I expect from my audience is an open mind. While craftsmanship is an integral part of my practice, I'd like to remind the viewer that much lies beneath the surface of the material.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp is right on. Art should be more than something to look at. It should incite change. 

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?
I think art movements are happening all the time, but the nature of them is constantly evolving. In a rapidly globalizing culture and an economy where emphasis increasingly is placed on the "niche market," art movements will be as pluralistic and varied as the infinite niches that exist within the human psyche.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please feel free to answer it.
Do you have gallery representation? Not yet, but that's a major goal of mine. If someone would like to contact me about representing my work, they can email me at bencuevas@gmail.com

Industrial Cathedral of Arts: The Wassaic Project

Climb up the narrow stairwell at Maxon Mills in Wassaic, NY and peek into the dark openings overlooking a seven-story shaft that murmurs and hums with a deep, damp hollowness and the sound of various recordings by Leah Rico at each landing. The space is sublime. So is the artwork that sits within its cathedral-like exterior.

Artists from all over the United States exhibited their work at the Wassaic Project on August 13-15, enliving the small hamlet, which is part of the town of Amenia about two hours north of New York City along the Harlem Line of the Metro-North commuter rail train. Visitors poured in from all directions and populated a designated camp ground with their tents and then rushed toward the Maxon Mill, once used as a grain elevator, to see the art and enjoy the live music on the front porch of the hotel that adjoins the seven-story industrial structure. The hotel is also no longer a hotel. Small rooms with slanted floors and half-height walls that allow natural light into the spaces through heavy-timber columns and beams housed a photography exhibit consisting of medium-size pigment and inkjet prints. It would have been a squeeze to have more than two people in each room perusing the exhibit. On a chiaro-scuro mezannine, a lone piano basked in the sunlight streaming through the windows, its keys rising and falling and clicking. No sound was produced. It was an exercise in silence and automation. Back on the main level of the hotel a tilted wooden model of a city block with photos pasted to the rooftops invited visitors to look through a magnifying monocular, which deciphered the contents of the photographs, otherwise too small for the naked eye to see. The piece referenced an ongoing participatory public/private urban spaces activity accessible by emailing the artist, Jo. Q. Nelson.

By no means was this the end of it. The exhibit wound up another section of the building with jubilant momentum. But safety first. As a volunteer at the festival, my job was to monitor the number of visitors climbing up the narrow fire stairs so that they did not exceed allowable capacity. I also had to make sure that nothing caught fire. Also acting as gatekeeper to the exhibits accessible through the back staircase, Gwen Charles's Safety Project provided orange life vests to visitors who wanted to wear them free of charge. "If you are not wearing a life jacket, it's not going to save your life," was written on the booth showcasing the vests. On departure, visitors could opt to buy these psychological failsafes for $45. Many who were wearing them commented on how comfortable and safe they actually felt with some degree of due irony.

With over one hundred artists showing their work, the festival could have easily become a maelstrom, but the narrow stairs controlled the flow of people very efficiently through the vertical stacks of the industrial space. When I took a break from my volunteer job, I had a chance to glance through the 2nd and 3rd floor exhibits. I stumbled upon a dark room with a wall-width projection of names. Stephen Eakin's In Memory Of, a compilation of names of deceased individuals allowed visitors to enter the name of someone they wanted to commemorate through a user-friendly, touch-based interface. Dim lighting gave the space the somberness of a mausoleum and the visitors the privacy of remembrance. I entered my grandfather's name in the dense pattern of names and returned to my post at the base of the stairs where I had an excellent view of Brinton Jaecks's Unconscious Collective - a vortex of carved wooden beds attached to the ceiling and to each other with smoothly carved wooden chains and spanning across most of the ground floor. The piece references institutions and has a musical quality expressed through compositional tension and axial rotations of the individual beds. It is also a fine work of carpentry.

The festival accomodated both digitally produced work and manual processes. Clement Valla engaged 1600 individuals in the creation of two composite paintings on mylar through online software. Mary Lydecker created imaginary cities with traditional collage techniques, but the intersections were so seamless that the places became believable in their own right. She combined imagery from Stockholm and Hong Kong or Cocoa Beach and Stockholm, establishing a picturesque ambiguity about the sense of place. Her collages bridge geographic distances yet seem perfectly familiar at first glance because the patterns of development over the last century have produced odd stylistic and scalar juxtapositions.

Although there were other noteworthy pieces participating in innovative and polemical trends in the arts at Wassaic, for the sake of brevity, the remainder of the article focuses on the work of four artists who made a particular effort to engage their audience.

Jesse Kauppila
Printmaker Jesse Kauppila performed live demonstrations of his Bitmap Machine project for his audience. Collaborating with a mathematician, Jesse is generating combinations of "bitmap" prints, which will function as 2D, scannable barcodes. At the festival, he could be found shaking a box he had constructed to print the custom barcodes and explaining the process outloud. A ball-bearing grid underlay a metal, pixellated grid. Each time he shook the box, the ball bearings would land into random quadrants of their underlying grid and push up on the individual pixels of the grid above them. Jesse would then ink the end result and print the bitmap impression on Japanese rice paper. He was able to carry out this process without a press because the box he had built for himself performed all of the functions of a printing press. His individual prints became part of a larger twine-stretched grid, which he used to hang his pieces and keep track of the random combinations generated by the way the ball-bearings fell into place. His project aims to marry traditional print-making techniques with digital barcode technology. Throughout the duration of the exhibit, Jesse never tired of elucidating his process and answering questions.
He is based in San Francisco, where he practices printmaking and seeks collaborations with other artists.

Ben Cuevas
Installation artist and avid knitter, Ben Cuevas is inspired by British artist Damien Hirst and French social thinker Michel Foucault. When his frind taught him how to knit, Ben focused on how surgical the process seemed. His knitted hearts, skeletons, colons and scrotums among others, appear soft and plush and evoke the sense of comfort that any knitted apparel might. Structurally they are familiar because they are based on medical illustrations rather than photographic images of human anatomy. It is difficult to remember that they represent a disembodied grotesque. However, Ben insists that his work is not about representation. The installation piece he chose to showcase at Wassaic Project features a knitted skeleton seated atop a pyramid of Borden's condensed milk cans and a cloud of screen prints on Plexi glass suspended above it. The prints are of disembodied anatomical parts photographed in high resolution with diagrammatic illustrative overlays. Ben conceives of the piece as a reference to material culture and Wassaic's local history (The Borden Company had a condensed milk factory in Wassaic.) and a meditation on transcendence. The knitted skeleton is seated in the lotus position. His piece, like many of the other installation pieces in the exhibit drew the attention of the improvisational dance troupe comprised of dancers Charmaine Warren and Ashe Turner and musician John Ellis. Ben is based in Los Angeles and attended Hampshire College in Mass.

 
Josh Atlas
Josh Atlas wants to make you laugh. His doughnut-covered disco ball, frosting-laden beach gear and picture frames jammed in buckets with foam cushioning evoke Wayne Thiebaud's pastry paintings. Josh's work is 3D, however. It responds to lighting conditions, and both kids and adults love it. In order to prepare the doughnuts for his disco ball, Josh had to coopt another artist's studio and set up a drying abacus. To preserve the piece, he coated all his doughnuts in urethane and the frosting in epoxy. In order to provide a stable substructure for his disco ball of doughnuts, Josh used a beach ball as the core. His meticulous and finely-crafted drawings demonstrate the care and effort that went into creating his wondrous glazed amalgamations. Their precarious balance is due to a finely-tuned process.

A visit to Josh's studio affords a glance at a large photoprint of Josh submerged in a bath of doughnuts. He invites all to take a dip or watch him bask in the pleasure. One question we can all ask ourselves is whether such quantities of doughnuts express a love of them or an uncomfortable overabundance. Josh says he is just obsessed, and that this is an object-oriented turn in his work. He is also based in Los Angeles.

James Weingrod
The cosmos in a petridish comes to mind when James Weingrod starts painting with his custom-created water-soluble pigments and resins. He uses a clay-surfaced wooden base and films the process. A drop of silver fizzles and bleeds outward melting into the black, phalo blue and veridian green sea that Weingrod calls the universe. He invites participants to create the universe with him and explains doppler effects and supernovas as he reconstitutes the painting laying flat. It took him three years to master his materials and learn to control and predict their behavior. Weingrod's materials come from a small independent store called Guerra in New York City. Although he does not claim to be a chemist, Weingrod mixes all of his own paints. Dressed in a Tyvek suit and a Fedora hat, he has a knack for his participatory act and is not shy about engaging an audience and opening up his simple yet mesmerizing and infinitely engrossing process to all willing participants.

The Wassaic Project is an annual event, and it is organized by artists for artists. All the co-directors - Eve Biddle, Bowie Zunino, Elan Bogarin and Jeff Barnett-Winsby - had pieces in the exhibit and spent all year planning the well-attended, three-day event.

Artist Interview: Josh Atlas

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?

I want my work to be able to find its way into as many homes as possible. Because I aim to put a lot of my personality into my work, being in some one's home becomes a way to form a personal relationship. The work can spend time with the viewer. That allows the meaning/value to become something truly personal to them.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us? What does art do best?
I can't remember who to attribute the quote to, but I'm going to go with "Art is just an excuse for people to fall in love."

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you like them to know about your work?
Because my work is based in comedy, I want to challenge the way the viewer internalizes the piece. Rather than simply remembering a description, I hope that they will come up with a joke that compliments the piece.   

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Joyful agreement! Most art is still best viewed and experienced in physical space (as opposed to a digital form). If an artist is going to demand that a viewer needs to visit a specific location to see their work, then they owe it to the viewer to create a more full body experience.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?
Yes. Perhaps more than ever. As people get more and more connected, a variety of visual forms will take hold with new and varied audiences. The artist does not need the traditional means of success (a solo show at MoMA) to reach a community that finds value and meaning in what you do. 

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please feel free to answer it.
Do you have any upcoming exhibitions?

I will have work in the Wassaic Project Festival, in Wassaic, New York. The festival runs from August 13-15. More information can be found at www.wassaicproject.org