I ASK MYSELF by TOM BURR
Tom Burr is here in conversation with himself; for a project due to show in Milan in March, before its perpetual postponement, the artist set to questioning himself, producing an interview in which he plays both parts. As memory work, the piece is reflective of Burr’s interest in temporality and subjectivity. The transcript marks a moment that never happened, irrevocably intertwined with Pasolini’s screenplay for a film that was never made.
Now rendered in print, the piece has become a work in its own right, both preceding and replacing the show. For Burr, Modern Matter has become a curatorial platform: an unofficial catalogue, exhibition space, and site for art production.
Interviewer:
Your own biography is a theme in your work. A couple of years ago in New Haven, the city where you grew up, you took over the ground floor of a vacant Marcel Breuer building. Throughout that project, and much of your work in general, there is a preoccupation with yourself, using aspects of yourself or your biography. Do you think this preoccupation ever runs the risk of sentimentality, or even narcissism?
Tom Burr:
For sure. I risk sentimentality continually. I can be very emotional. And I’m plagued by a kind of narcissism that is like engine fuel, it’s a productive force that compels me to reflect on things… and I am one of those things. It’s an ethics of sorts, of looking at myself looking at the world, and the reverse as well, considering what I look like to others. It’s matched or maybe surpassed though by my adherence to audience as a central component of my work. Alongside all the materials, the plywood, the mirrors and the tacks, etc. etc., and alongside the myriad references and subjects touched on, there is the idea of audience as a very material component of the work.
I:
Do you feel that there is the same sort of self-reflection/self-obsession in this new exhibition you’re preparing?
TB:
No. Probably.
I:
Can you explain?
TB:
I’d rather explain the structure first, of how all the pieces play together and weave a sort of anti-narrative performance through the space, a sort of non-narrative structure that nonetheless makes narrative references. It is really a series of fragments. I want the viewers to go through a choreography, a series of movements that are somewhat determined by the forms and obstructions that have been placed there. So bodies are directed in this way or that, confronted with barriers or reflections, passage ways and containers, as they make their way from the front of the space to the back. This spatial trajectory was the place I started with as a backbone to the exhibition, this long walk through the large front chapel, into the narrow connecting hallway, and into the even larger back space. And along the way I wanted to prompt a series of confrontations or encounters, ones in which the viewer feels a bit implicated – seen even – in the sense that they are very clearly an integral part of the work and are not rendered invisible. There’s also a sense of an architectural language that is framing the situation: barriers that are also supports and also need support themselves; opaque screens that are also reflective enclosures, and so on…
I:
And what exactly are these encounters along the way, and what do they have to do with your title, ‘Conversions’?
TB:
I thought about conversion from several angles, since the story of Saint Paul and his dramatic conversion gives the church its name. I became involved with the descriptions and interpretations of that conversion, including the intense bright light that defined the moment, resulting in Paul’s temporary blindness. I thought about blindness, and sightedness, on multiple levels. And it’s a form of trauma really, that is described in the story, which can be thought about in terms of Functional Neurologic Disorder, or as it’s also been known, Conversion Disorder, where a person experiences paralysis for instance, or blindness, or other symptoms affecting the nervous system that can’t be explained simply by a physical illness or injury. In these cases the symptoms typically begin suddenly after a period of emotional or physical distress or some form of psychological conflict, which was interesting to consider in relation to Paul. And I also began to think about so called Reparative Therapy or Conversion Therapy, the nasty practice of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation through any variety of physical and psychological methods. I thought about coercion and control, but also the resiliencies and doggedness that bodies can confront their opposition with, this exchange of power. And here again, the issue of sight, and losing sight, or having different forms of sight, became of deep interest. But little of this is actually visible in the exhibition in any clearly obvious or legible way, I mean there are some concrete moments, but mostly it’s more there as a system of footnotes or thoughts in the margins, running alongside and through the forms and objects. Am I being clear?
I:
I’m not sure.
“Are you saying that visibility itself is one of your themes?”
TB:
I think I am.
I:
Or even blindness?
TB:
Yes.
I:
Right.
TB:
Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t.
I:
Ok, but is that a logical extension of what I was suggesting before, this preoccupation with your self and your own body, but one that is usually presented in a veiled manner?
TB:
What do you mean by ‘veiled’?
I:
‘Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t’?
TB:
Yes, I think there’s something to that. In this exhibition I thought about my presence as a sort of striptease, of revealing part of myself systematically, sequentially, through the spaces. Recently I wrote a short text for another exhibition that was essentially about exposure, and exposure in relation to exhibitions and exhibiting… exhibitionism really. And exposure as both an active and passive act, to expose and to be exposed. Throughout Conversions there will be pieces of my clothing combined with different elements and structures, creating a trail, and again taking the logic of the trajectory from front to back of the space as the staging for this. The scene is this: I’ve come home late, tired, or drunk, leaving articles of clothing along the way from the front door to the back, to the bathroom or to the bed. I thought of this stripping along the way like a line of breadcrumbs, simply an indication that I have been there. Maybe this physically deconstructed and dispersed me-as-my-clothing is just a connective thread in the form of a seduction.
I:
You’ve used articles of your own clothing in your work before. You’ve also used many of the physical types that you’re planning for this exhibition, the metal railings for instance, or the large black plywood forms, and maybe most recognizably, the mirrored folding screens.
TB:
Yes.
I:
Would you like to elaborate?
TB:
What would you like to know exactly? If I’m running out of ideas?
I:
I’m not suggesting that. I’m curious how conscious the repetition is.
TB:
It’s conscious. It’s about crafting a language, a physical language that deploys itself over time, and can be scooped up again and reused, almost quoted. I like the idea of things… ideas, forms, returning in my work as it spans time and being re-contextualised again and again while producing echoes of earlier moments. Some of that difference of context becomes registered and pronounced this way. It also feels closer to how history and politics function, sporadic and circling back on itself. Specifically in this show each one of the elements or types – or however you want to define the things I’m using – I’ve used before in some form or another, but here they are new, and transformed to address this specific time and location. I was struck when reading more Pasolini interviews while I was preparing for this show, how he would often reference his earlier films as if they were tools at his disposal to work through again, suggesting that he was going to make something ‘more like Accettone,’ or ‘closer to Salo.’
I:
Speaking of which, there will be titles and inscriptions taken from a work by Pasolini that will make their way into Conversions, correct?
TB:
Yes.
I:
Can you talk about that?
TB:
Yes. I tried to avoid him, but it didn’t work out that way.
I:
What do you mean?
TB:
I mean that I had him in my mind generally, as I have in the past with other projects, and I re-watched Teorema again and read that screenplay, because it takes place in Milan for instance, but it didn’t feel urgent enough or something, it didn’t click, so those thoughts just hung there and I tried to block him out. Then I discovered, which I hadn’t known about before, the screenplay that he wrote about Saint Paul, which was never realized as a film.
I:
This is Pasolini’s Saint Paul: A Screenplay that was later published after his death?
TB:
Yes. This was exciting for me, reading his reworking of that conversion story, transposed geographically and into the 20th Century, the conversion itself takes place in a black chauffeured car somewhere between France and Barcelona! He describes the film as an ‘episodic tragedy’ and this staging of sequential episodes or moments made sense for me, as a model for what I wanted to do at Converso. Also it was the fact that the film had never been produced that made me want to integrate it somehow… that it didn’t have pre-existing images associated with it, it was a sketch without visuals, an armature. But again, you won’t see anything really, I’m just lifting some of the text from his screenplay for the titles of some of the works, and in the case of the railings those titles are etched into the material itself, so it’s there and not there. Seen and not seen in a sense. But I think what the association does, of connecting to this particular screenplay, is two-fold, it furthers the emphasis on power dynamics and constructs of control that I wanted to get at, through the filter of Pasolini, and it also adds Pasolini to the list of materials which brings with it all sorts of resonances and speculations, as well as assumptions.
I:
But as a figure, does he perform a role for you? Is he a character in your adaptation of his screenplay, if I can call it that, or is his presence something else more traditionally referential?
TB:
I’m not sure I understand the question.
I:
Well, it seems to me that many times in your work you find and use a figure, often a public figure but not always, and situate that figure in relation to yourself in some way. That’s how I read your recent engagement with Hélio Oiticica for instance, that you almost created a collapse of identities, his into yours, yours into his, perhaps to make a third position. I know you’ve incorporated Pasolini in projects before, this is yet another repetition in the exhibition, but what of the psychological dimension of including him in the exhibition, is that relevant or something you were thinking about?
TB:
You know, I’m always searching for ways to both reference myself and step out of myself, or even lose myself. So I think you’re right to say that I’m invested in the idea of collapse of identities, the breaking down of what appear to be unified and stable subjects, and allow them to be more fragmentary, and also more porous. And with that comes a curiosity about where the boundaries are, of public and private, within our bodies themselves. I think that’s why the spatial arrangement of Converso, of the church itself, seems to frame these questions in such an impactful way, the two sides of the church being historically separated from each other with two distinct spaces with two distinct publics, the congregation in the front and the community of nuns in the back space. With only an aural relationship, the nun’s singing filtering through the cage-like opening in the central wall…
I:
…and invoking a sort of blindness, or sightlessness through obstructed sight lines… I have a final question, you referred to one aspect of your presence in the space as being like a sort of striptease, rife with the risks of exposure. Can you talk a bit more about that, and the potential pleasure that is involved as well?
TB:
Pleasure is elusive and always bound to desire. One of the satisfactions I have in using myself, my role, my body or various details of my life, is to set up a kind of decoy where I appear to be the subject. But hopefully a broader context is exposed over time and what
appeared to be a self-portrait, for instance, is really a wider landscape of ideas, and also a direct reflection back onto us as an audience, in all our pluralities. There’s pleasure in exposing conditions, suggesting connections, and creating productive deflections. I’m not sure if that answers your question or not…
I:
Not exactly.
I:
And what do you make of postponement? Does the fact of having the exhibition, and the exhibition making process, stalled, make the project lose some of its power and momentum, or even interest for you or for others? Or do the ideas and forms retain their relevance and their urgency over time?
TB:
Well first of all, I can’t really speak for others. But you’re right in thinking that I think about postponement as another condition that will inevitably shape the exhibition, whether it becomes a fully realized, physical experience, or not. How could it not have an effect? But it’s left a void for sure, a sense of loss in a way, and clearly a sensation of ‘not getting it done,’ which is nagging and relentless. But at the same time I find myself accepting what has already been thought, considered, played with, fabricated, re-worked, and so on, as a given. As a sort of found object. And in that sense, it’s complete. But if I allow desire into the room again, which I often do, it’s clear to me that I want more, that I want to build on this found object as if it is existing architecture that I can layer over, expand and react to. I am released from the need to start from scratch, which I really abhor anyway, … I’m much happier building on or responding to something that is already there. And so while the exhibition, in this nebulous and incomplete state, does already exist, I’m ready to delve back into its structure and tease out new parts and pieces, find new forms of continuation. And the Pasolini screenplay allows for this, with its complex temporal shifting and its multi-sitedness, and its own hovering in a state of potential, of possibility.
I:
I, myself, would love to see this project come to fruition.
TB:
Thank you, me too.