Julie Linowes Interviewed by Jack Rasmussen
Rasmussen: Your installation, Stain, is a very moving, very sad, and very beautiful group of video experiences. I was wondering how it came to be. The music, of course, is wonderful, so I'm wondering if you started with the music or if you found the right music as you went along?
Linowes: I came across the music as I went along, but as soon as I heard it, it was all I could listen to while I worked. It struck the emotional temperature that the work was exploring. The starting point for me with a new body of work usually comes when I'm getting near to completing another body of work. I feel this impulse to start casting about for a new direction, new ideas. Often, I wander around looking at landscapes, various locations, looking at objects. Typically, I find myself going to places that are saturated with a kind of history, where there is a deeply layered sense of lives lived. I also look for objects that possess that same quality, that are imbued with some historical sense of significance. I prowl antique stores, flea markets, that kind of thing. I gather things up with little understanding of what will be of use and what will be discarded. All I know at the beginning is that they've spoken to me in some way, and so I'm willing to explore their significance further. The starting point for Stain was when I came across a tallis that my father had worn when I was young. I asked him if I could use it in my work, and he agreed. This was the object that started the journey that became Stain.
JR: What is a tallis?
JL: It's a Jewish prayer shawl that men have traditionally worn when they go into the synagogue to pray. It is a sacred kind of object. There is a yarmulke as well, but this is not something I wanted to work with.
JR: What does it signify?
JL: I am not any kind of expert on Jewish history or the intricacies of Judaism. No organized religion has ever really resonated with me. I have deeply held spiritual convictions, but they aren't contained within an organized religion. For me it was more about ritual, ceremony, family, and culture. Judaism was what I grew up with. The tallis was really about my father and, as I said, ritual and culture not about the Jewish religion. So I found this object that held a kind of significance for me, had an emotional resonance, and that was the jumping off point. From the start, I conceived of Stain as being comprised of both still and moving image. I was continuing my investigation of the relationship between conscious and unconscious experience. Very early on my work developed a surrealist aesthetic and dream-like vocabulary which has persisted to this day. I knew that I wanted the still images to be extremely layered, and I also knew I wanted to have video playing behind a transparent still image though I had no idea how I was going to achieve this. I started with the still image, with photography, and worked on this component for almost five years. Work on the video came in the sixth. This body of work took me nine years to produce.
JL (cont’d): While there has almost always been a female figure in my work, it was in my previous body of work, Fall from Grace, that I started doing self-portrait. This made sense because in that body of work I was starting to explore ideas about subject and object, absence and presence. This practice continued in Stain. But there's also another woman (someone I had worked with in an earlier body of work) and her five-year-old daughter as well, a family of women. In addition to the women, the landscape was really important in this work... the heroic New Zealand landscape suggesting epic journeys and vacant or abandoned interiors evoking intimate spaces.
JR: Have you always engaged in this process of layering still and moving images?
JL: No, but I have always tried for this haunting quality, for darkness and beauty. I have always been driven to create beautiful imagery, whether it be black-and-white, color, or video. I know that my work is challenging on a lot of different levels, and it has always required the viewer to go to an emotional place that I think a lot of people would rather not go to. Beauty is an act of seduction, it's what draws the viewer in and motivates them to linger; it's also the pay-off for being willing to go where the work takes them.
JR: You require a lot of your viewers. They must take a significant amount of time and enter a very dark place to experience Stain.
JL: That's true...both metaphorically and literally. And not only do they have to spend the time and feel the feelings, but they also have to figure out how to negotiate the physical space. I put the viewer in a very active position. When they first enter a room, the experience is overpowering. There are four videos, one on each wall, each highly complex. And there is audio. This experience of being overwhelmed is an intentional strategy. The work is meant to blindside conscious understanding, to force the viewer to metaphorically throw up their hands in surrender, to propel them into some kind of unconscious encounter with the work. Hopefully, if they're willing to spend the time, they settle into the experience and then begin to observe that there's a kind of order...but the disordered order that is characteristic of dreams.
JR: I'm trying to imagine your creating Stain without the tools you have now, the computers. It's so complex.
JL: You're right, it's very complex. I wouldn't have been able to produce this work 10-15 years ago. It was because I learned how to work with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, and because of the advances in those softwares, that this work became possible. All of the still images, which are one layer of this work, were actually shot on transparency film on a 2 ¼ camera. I processed the color film myself. For a very long time—when I first came to see you with this project, I was talking about a very large still transparency image held in a metal frame with a rear projection screen behind that would have the video. It was hard for me to give up the object and to think about creating a body of work that was so ephemeral, that only existed when you turned on the video projector. That took me some time to come to terms with, but I ultimately did it because I felt it served the ideas of the work more forcefully and more directly.
On a certain level my main area of investigation, for over 30 years, has been to devise a visual language that gets as close as possible to expressing the interface between conscious and unconscious experience. Not just the conscious as one thing and unconscious as another, but where they meet, what that interface is, and how we experience this. That is such an ephemeral and ineffable thing; it is so fluid; so transparent and permeable. To me a video installation, as opposed to having this object of the transparency, got much closer to expressing that. It also allowed me to have the still image transform which was an additional bonus. When it was a transparency, it was a fixed thing, and that was that.
JR: How and when did the pig carcass make an appearance?
JL: For the first few years it was all about the tallis. But one day, when I returned to New Zealand after visiting the States, I walked into my organic butcher shop, and there was a full-body pig carcass hanging behind the counter. It was like, "Oh, my God!" First of all, as an object it appealed to me enormously because I love that push-pull between horror and beauty. and, boy, did that pig carcass possess both. This kind of polarity really gets me going. I think that's one of the reasons why I'm such a fan of Matthew Barney and Francis Bacon. My response was that it had to go in, but I didn't know why. I spent several years working with both the tallis and the pig carcass, but I felt extremely uncomfortable about doing so. My discomfort came from not really understanding why I felt compelled to work with these objects. I knew that these were such loaded objects, and I knew that if I couldn't articulate, to myself first of all, why I was doing what I was doing that not only was I headed for big trouble, but I was also being irresponsible. My discomfort was so intense that several times I nearly abandoned the project altogether. But I also trusted my intuitive process and believed that sooner or later I would arrive at an understanding. And this happened. In fact, the meaning actually emerged from a dream. I came to understand that I was exploring the sacred and the profane and how unstable these concepts are; I was interrogating how we come to assign those labels to certain objects and ideas.
JR: Tell me about the blood? Your piece seems to me to have so much to do with blood. I'm just curious if that was part of that experience in the butcher shop or if it comes from other places.
JL: It comes from other places. I did encounter the pig's blood, much later in the journey. The blood at the beginning was more about wounding, wounds, and also about interior body. There is this thing in the work itself, on so many different levels, about interior and exterior and permeability.
JR: The piece is called Stain, and I assume that's related to the blood, and also to your concern with human nature or Original Sin, a condition of being alive.
JL: My previous body of work, Fall from Grace, was dealing with the whole idea of Original Sin. When I start a body of work, in addition to just wandering around and allowing myself to have an intuitive response to places and things, I also launch into theoretical research which is just my process. It's something that happens in the beginning stages as a way of stimulating ideas but soon falls away as the work acquires legs of its own. The kind of theory that I was reading for both Fall from Grace and Stain was psychoanalytic theory. As far as Stain was concerned, I was reading about Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas. I wasn't reading Lacan directly but a wonderful Slovenian cultural critic, a superstar of sorts, named Slavoj Zizek. Zizek interprets Lacan within the context of popular culture. He uses Hitchcock, film noir, even popular romance in his discussion and makes Lacan so accessible. What really snagged my attention and held it was the whole Lacanian notion of "the real" versus "reality." Within this context, "the real" is the stuff of the unconscious, that which can never really be known because the moment we think of it, attempt to articulate it, it is jettisoned into the realm of consciousness and is no longer unconscious, kind of like the electron microscope conundrum. "Reality,” on the other hand, is a fabrication, something we construct and then unwittingly fill with fantasy borne of our deepest, perhaps most hidden, desires. One idea that has stuck with me from Zizek's discussion of Lacan has to do with dreams. He talks about how in any given dream there is a seemingly trivial detail which, if removed, unravels the whole meaning of the dream. He likens this to the Hitchcockian tracking shot which often rushes in on some meaningless visual detail in a scene and acts to completely destabilize the viewer. And this detail within the dream he calls the "plughole" between the conscious and unconscious. This particular idea was the inspiration behind the fourth projection in Stain, "The Unrendered Real." There is that extremely menacing black hole at the top of the woman's torso close to where the heart might be but not exactly in that spot. The woman's finger traces blood down her torso... the stuff of the insides. So, yes, you're right in saying that Stain is related to blood, but more importantly, it's an expression of my idea of the relationship between conscious and unconscious experience where the only knowledge we can ever hope to have of our unconscious is the residue that gets left behind... perhaps in the form of dream memories or reveries or fantasies. To my mind, there's a stain, an evidentiary trace, that is deposited on the membrane of the conscious and it is this that we can examine for clues to ourselves.
Which brings me back to the second part of your question which has to do with human nature and Original Sin or, as you so beautifully put it, "the condition of being alive." I really do believe in that saying, "the personal is political." I think we all carry within us parts of ourselves that we reject, harshly judge, are ashamed of...and I also think that we turn our back on these parts and bury them out of sight, somewhere deep inside. Yet, just because we don't see them doesn't mean that these parts aren't still alive and active. In fact, it is because these parts are unacknowledged that they have a way of seeping out and wreaking havoc. One of the most troubling manifestations of this dynamic is our need to vilify those people or cultures that are different from us and to cast them into the role of the "Hated Other." We see this over and over again on the world stage. The enmity that exists in various parts of the world, whether recent or ancient, has always, as one of its components, this viewpoint of the "Hated Other.” And, really, from an entirely different viewpoint we can simply look at the other party or culture as merely different. The hatred is a product of judgment. And this is where the tallis and the pig come into it. I know there may be people who find the idea of the pig and the tallis coexisting within the same frame as deeply disturbing or offensive or blasphemous. And, yet, this is exactly what the work is asking the viewer to explore and examine. Because, if you take either of these objects and place them within another cultural context, what is reviled becomes revered, what is sacred becomes abhorrent. In the final image of the installation, Always & Never the Stranger Within, the woman has found a way to embrace the pig, she has learned how to have compassion for that pig, to see it for the wound that it is, and, most importantly, to forgive. Ultimately, Stain is about compassion and forgiveness. It is a protest against occupying any position that results in polarizing hatred.. either within ourselves or between ourselves and others.