Lucie Stahl X Olga Balema
Het toeval wil dat de een net als onderhuurder in het huis van de ander getrokken is. Maar de reden dat ze hier met elkaar in gesprek gaan is een zekere affiniteit met elkaars werk en vooral de wereld waartoe het werk zich verhoudt.
‘I recently got all my stuff out of Vienna and stored it in Berlin. It felt really old school to move all my belongings, to carry around all this actual material. It seemed somewhat redundant to hold on to all of that today. I despise having so much stuff, but I also miss having it around. As you know, I’ve been moving around constantly in the last three years, and it was weirdly substantial to be surrounded by all these things, by their physical presence. Since we both have a very physical approach to making works it made me wonder if this is something you relate to. Also, you’re currently subletting my apartment in Berlin so you’re living with the things I left behind…’
‘What you are describing seems a bit like a nightmare to me. I am kind of afraid of stuff, mostly because I have moved so much recently. I’m keeping sublets and I’m living with other people’s stuff. I think that I’m not so much afraid of stuff, as not used to it. I have moved at least every four years since I was seven. My favourite thing about staying in other people’s houses is to see their book collections. I loved reading Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and recognizing small parts that maybe influenced your works. It talks about a time when most of the stuff is gone or is not being produced anymore, but is being recycled to the max. The characters are wearing bed sheets as clothes, eating facemasks, and making coffee from twigs. I was curious if you consciously relate to works of fiction or if some ideas and images just kind of seep in and mix in. I also had to think about the movie The Stuff. Have you seen it? It’s about an amorphous, edible desert substance that the world becomes obsessed with, but it’s actually a parasite that takes over the brain and turns its consumers into zombies.’
‘’Seeping’ in is a pretty accurate way to describe how various topics influence my work. REN, my show at Freedman Fitzpatrick in early 2014 was influenced by the Atwood trilogy, alongside other subject matter. I’m not sure anybody got that, and maybe it’s not important. The things that influenced me at the time were pretty dark and existential, but I think the show also had a humorous, positive side. I had just done a lonely road trip through the United States, from LA to NYC – I guess I had to prove something to myself. I wanted to set the show up like a walk-through ride of my trip, but also a very analogue idea of a video game, designed by someone who has no idea how video games function. The trip (through the show) lead through heated, deserted landscapes, alongside sun-bleached cans and peepholes that entered into different realities – the office or the actual life in the strip mall where the gallery is located in, for example – into the cold, into isolation, solitude. Of course it had to end with a joke. But a sad one. The lonely Pinocchio mirroring himself in eternity.
The title of the show, REN, is the name of one of the main characters in the books. In my head I mixed up the story of the books with a video game called The Last of Us, which is also set in a post-apocalyptic scenario – humans get infested by this mutated cordycep mushroom and turn into zombies. There are a few human survivors, including Ellie, the main character, whom in my head I sort of fused with Ren. Actually, the movie that you mention sounds a lot like it. Around that time I had read an article in The New Yorker called ‘Death Dust’, about Valley Fever, a scary and dangerous disease caused by certain mushroom spores which damage people’s organs. It only occurs in particular areas in California and Nevada. My best friend from high school who went to the US for an exchange program and lived in the Valley for a year got infected, around ’93 I think, and became really, really sick. She recovered, but it was devastating. I hadn’t heard from this disease ever since, until I read the article. There is a huge prison in this area in Nevada, and lots of inmates, many of them incarcerated for minor things, become infected. A lot of them don’t have health insurance. It is pretty bleak.’
‘Wow, I read the article about Valley fever. It is scary that this mushroom occurs so randomly and that the spores move with the wind, so that the air that people breathe becomes a hazard. The most disturbing thing is the behaviour of the real estate developers, who do not disclose the presence of this spore while advertising the cheap housing to minority populations who are most susceptible to become infected for some reason. Also, the fact that the U.S. military considered using those spores to develop a biological weapon in the 60’s, and there is no vaccine for it. It really is like a horror movie. It makes me think about how uncontained our bodies are. They support so many other organisms, some beneficiary, some parasitic. In your catalogue I came across a couple of older posters that depict stomachs as well as stomach tables, which made me think about your work in relation to digestion, and made me read and interpret the posters as giant stomachs. Information and images are collected and digested in a kind of goo. The texts are also very kind of gutty or gutsy, words that have been swallowed. Everything is sealed up; the scans are acting like x-rays, showing the things the pictures chose to ingest.’
‘Yes, I can see where the idea of the poster works as a digestion system is coming from, and in a way it’s not far from how I’ve been setting up a lot of the older poster works – they were often a big mash of various influences, objects, my own texts – sometimes related, sometimes not. Either way, all the things inside the frame have to cope with everything else. I like to think that the relation between the objects and texts is not hierarchical.
Coming back to the idea of ‘stuff’. Since you live in my apartment you’re also living with your own work for the New Theatre play Farming in Europe, which is sitting in my room – a piece of bent steel with thin slices of cucumber stuck to it, which form letters that read EUROPE. I really like this piece because it’s so simple, and yet it evokes so many things – ridiculous former EU rules that were trying to regulate the shape of cucumbers or bananas; genetically modified crops; acid rain; bee disease…
Tess Edmonson’s press release for your recent show at Croy Nielsen came close to our shared Atwood reading list, don’t you think? I think your work has just as much to do with these subjects as mine, but maybe in a more abstract way. Your pieces that attach themselves to the ceiling, to the spaces, like mould, like organisms that take the space hostage. Abject-looking, substance-filled balloonish things, almost like living creatures. Cannibalism, genetically modified sheep that have pink mohairish fur, maggots… I’m assuming this is something you also relate to. The amazing thing about MaddAddam is that it is so literal, so close to what already exists, and yet the slight shifts, which sometimes are so ridiculous, also make it such an amazing vision. Men with huge blue penises, peeing in a circle; their urine creating a sort of protective boundary…’
‘The apocalyptic end of the world and scarcity of food in the book pushed the protagonists beyond ideas of ‘morality’ into complete survival mode, hence the passages about cannibalism. The body of work that I prepared for Croy Nielsen was titled Cannibals. The pieces were composed from older works, in a way that they kind of fed on them to exist. Like microbes the artworks have to be fed too. I used soft PVC from the flat works and metal structures from the biomorphic attachment pieces. They are definitely kind of abject creatures eating away on themselves, but I think also very soft and sensitive. Reading the MadAddam book, especially the very few passages about cannibalism made me wonder how different the world would be if we humans were back on the plate. If we would have more empathy with our food, or if it would make us even more aggressive towards our environment. Also, the whole thing about Europe regulating the shapes of bananas and cucumbers kind of blew my mind. So funny and sad at the same time. To the right of me I’m looking at Europe, the cucumbers rusted and browned on the steel. I considered including similar works in the last show titled One re-enters the garden by becoming a vegetable. Europe is a heavy word today, and I feel like dystopian narratives become more and more a frame of reference for relating to the world. A further developed sense of empathy would have served human kind well.’
‘Chuckle. I am very much with you on this, though. It is the biggest struggle to decide when and how to allow this sort of ethical questions in the works. In general I think I’m trying to ask questions, but avoid answering them, because that would just be too embarrassing. I guess the only way I feel comfortable pointing into this direction is with a joke, sort of like this.’
‘I’m enjoying all these different dietary movements though, like veganism, flexitarians, paleo, etc., and how they almost become substitutes for religion. Alkaline water, for example, has an almost sect-like following, it’s funny. Some of it is so absurd and removed, some of course makes sense. The really awesome thing about the MaddAddam Trilogy was how Atwood managed to intertwine all these ideas so perfectly. How the beauty industry relates to processed food, consumer culture and prison spectacles to vegan sects… everything is interconnected. Lately a lot of processed foods, packaging, etc. appears in my works. Mainly soft drinks. Coca Cola, Big Gulp, Arizona Ice Tea.’
‘Coca Cola vs. Purified Alkaline Water. Governmental regulations that just show how almost impossible it is to compete with these massive corporations. Like NY mayor Bloomberg trying to ban the sale of oversized soft drinks, which was such a tragic and funny example.’
‘Ha, I think it’s interesting, the fervour with which pre-packaged foods were accepted. Progress, laziness, but maximized productivity. The desire to be as modern as possible. Now we are in a bit of a hangover from that, trying to make it right by going as far back as possible, with movements like the paleo diet. I wonder if there will be a movement that will aim to bring not only cuisine, but also lifestyle back to pre-agricultural times: I guess the apocalypse in MaddAddam was a bit of a forced version of that. But I would be curious to see the ad campaigns for the voluntary return to the hunter-gatherer days, which apparently were much more egalitarian and non-hierarchical (hint hint, Lucie).’
‘Don’t put ideas in my head…’
‘But back to packaging, when I first moved to the West, pre-packaged foods were so interesting to me. Processed cheese for instance, the way it was so neatly square and packaged into that particular cellophane. I still have a soft spot for it. I almost feel like these kinds of gooey, foamy, jelly foods could be to blame for the sensibility of my work, being attracted to the textural alien strangeness of it all. Maybe they are to blame for a lot of artists’ sensibilities, these consumable abstractions. Chicken nuggets for example, taking the chicken out of the chicken.’
‘That makes sense, I feel like I really get the textual sensation of your work now. Don’t know why I never put that together myself. I have a bit of a similar situation. When I grew up, corporate toys, excessive sweets with cool packaging, advertising, all of that was deemed ‘bad’. My parents weren’t fundamental about it, but it was a bit of an issue. We didn’t have a TV until I was eight years old, so I had to binge-watch and catch up at my friend’s places, which turned TV shows and advertised products into an even bigger attraction, a forbidden pleasure. Instead, my parents would take me to this theatre group for kids called GRIPS-THEATER in Charlottenburg. Grips is a slang word for having a brain. All their plays are left-wingish and critical with a lot of singing. Today it seems so funny, but also awesome. It was so serious in its attempt to educate kids. Since we were already on the topic of bananas, one play, called BANANA, was about a Latin-American boy who is challenging a big banana corporation, sort of like Chiquita, by singing critical songs. I had the record version and was obsessed with it.’
‘I’m wondering about the humour in your work, a lot of the texts you write are quite funny. I was reading the text for your show with the mummies and had to laugh out loud when thinking about having squeeze past a pregnant mummy on the way to the bathroom and then having it wait for me to come out. Especially one pregnant with ‘planet Hillary’. I’m just wondering if it’s a device that you use to kind of draw the works together, or to draw the viewers in, or maybe to process what is going on around you.’
‘Humour, yes. It might be the most important ingredient of my work. That doesn’t mean that I’m not serious, because I am. But the humour is a way to make it all bearable. I am dealing with all these semi-serious subjects in my work, and I don’t want to be preaching. I was actually quite astonished to find out that we seem to share so many topics. Of course I could sense a certain realm of interest in your work, but since it’s more abstract (I read that ‘semi-abstract’ is the term that you use), I wasn’t sure if you’re influenced more by the quotidian or by a more removed, theoretical spectrum. What about literature? There was something about Nabokov in a press release…’
‘I think the quotidian is very inspiring to me. I get a lot of input from the stuff around me. But most of my work comes together by simultaneously holding different thoughts in my head and then forming objects that try to contain all of them, the strongest subjects kind of sticking until the end… Maybe that’s where the ‘semi-abstract’ (which is a term I once used in an artist statement in 2009, and that has been dug up again) comes from. For example, I think the flat water pieces came partially from living in the Netherlands and seeing all the puddles and canals. At one point, seeing some of my steel works outside in a puddle rusting away. But also wanting to make an object that was really ‘difficult’ and pointing to objects having an existence outside human consciousness. Then also going on a residency in China and experiencing environmental degradation on a level that was much more advanced and much more palpable, while at the same time reading this Nabokov short story which describes a protagonist walking into a painting and feeling the texture of the paint engulf him, feeling what it’s like to be inside a much more viscous world, where the air feels heavier.
On the topic of stories, I was wondering how much or often you write and how the whole language aspect comes into being for you.’
‘The language is a topic, but I have to admit it’s one that I hardly think about anymore. I don’t know when I started writing in English. Most of the stuff that I’m writing about, or used to write about earlier, is heavily US-American-themed. I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles and it would just be strange to write these German texts and maybe present them there, like I’m trying to be so exclusive. Also, the English language is so direct and straightforward. Subject, object, male, female, human, animal, sun or trashcan, all get the same treatment, all get the THE. So equalizing. No gender attached. I like that. I don’t write so regularly, unfortunately. I kind of write in bulks – sometimes I have stuff to say and I write it all down, it’s all very important and urgent, and then the writing leads me to think about other stuff, makes me want to write more. I do everything in bulks though. There are also periods where I’m not doing much, just taking in. It’s sometimes uncomfortable to accept the not-doing-anything as part of the practice, but maybe it’s necessary.
By the way, have you seen the Kurt Cobain documentary, Montage of Heck? I am thinking of it because it put a big emphasis on his constant stomach pains which I think informed his output a lot.’
‘I did see it! I thought it was interesting that he considered his stomach pains as a kind of talisman, protecting the music from losing its edge. I wonder if he was maybe actually gluten intolerant. It’s somehow a touching relationship to the idea of suffering for your work.’
‘Yes, I know the idea of suffering for your art is a really weird thing, artists being afraid to quit their habits because they think it would be detrimental to their practice. Interesting though, so you believe in gluten-intolerance? I always file it under ‘made-up illness to support lifestyle choices.’
Lucie Stahl
