Liza Lou

The Guilded Cage

Tim Marlow We’ve just unpacked Security Fence, so you’ve just seen it fully assembled for the first time. I’m curious how different the work now appears when compared with your initial ideas a year or so ago.

Liza Lou There were no changes in terms of form once it left the drawing stages, but after it was built, an enormous transformation began to take place as we set to the impossible task of covering it. Quite honestly, I wasn’t certain it would be physically possible to cover razor wire in beads, but once we figured out how to do it, there weren’t many formal surprises, and when they did happen, they were on a very micro scale.

TM Does that mean that the process is simply a means to an end now in your creative practice or is there something about working in this very intimate way which makes it feel somehow essential?

LL That really varies from project to project. There are a few projects where I have become interested in making the process an integral part of the meaning of the work.

TM Security Fence was mainly fabricated in South Africa, in Durban. This certainly may lead the viewer to see the work in a very specific way because South Africa is a nation, perhaps more than any other that I’ve encountered, that is obsessed with security. But you had the idea to make the piece before you decided that you were going to have it fabricated in South Africa. Does the fact that there’s now a South Africa connection in any way change the meaning of that piece?

LL I was initially responding to the images of torture and abuse happening in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But as an American living and working in South Africa with all of the associations with danger, race issues and post-apartheid, and the incredible amount of barbed wire that’s everywhere, I felt like I was working on a project in exactly the right place and time. All of this was further emphasized by the fact that I made this work with twenty Zulu women, all of whom knew very well the darker meaning of barbed wire fences. During apartheid, the whites surrounded the townships with barbed wire fencing so that they couldn’t get out. We talked often about what it meant, what we were doing – one of my workers, Buhle, said, ‘We are covering it with love’.

TM It’s interesting that because of its extraordinary and elaborate intricacy people have approached your work in terms of a kind of baroque or rococco sensibility. But I was struck by the idea of minimalism with this piece, partly because of its structure, partly because of the repetition of form, as well as the repetition of the individual component parts that make it up. Does that have any resonance for you at all?

LL In recent years, my work has moved more and more toward a minimalist approach, and yet, that sounds so odd when one thinks about my earlier work, like Kitchen, which was so over the top – one thinks hysterical overflow – anything but Modernism. Yet even then there were small nods: Carl Andre floor tiles, Richard Artschwager’s wood grain. The constant in my work in relation to minimalism is the repetitive aspect.

TM It’s emphatically not industrially or machine-produced. A hands on engagement with every single component part.

LL Certainly.

TM People will inevitably try to establish connections between the various works in the exhibition, and I suppose there is an obvious link between Security Fence and Cell. Are they conceived, though, as totally separate works or are you, in a way, creating an über installation?

LL One of my challenges in creating this body of work was to make it stand together as a cohesive whole. I tried to create a something that builds to create a sense of dread as well as wonder – or in the words of George W Bush, ‘Shock and awe’.

TM You said that Cell was based on the dimensions of a death-row cell. Is there such a thing as a standard death-row cell? Is it based on a particular or generic or imagined cell?

LL In American prisons, death-row cell dimensions vary from state to state. I based the dimensions of Cell on San Quentin’s death-row, but as I was working on the project, things became less literal for me. I became interested in the psychology of the space. In the making of that piece, I set up many dictates. I began with a large team of assistants and required that we all work in silence. Additionally, I slowed down the process – all of the beads had to be placed one at a time with tweezers, we used beads of the smallest possible variety, all beads had to be placed with the holes facing up, and only whites and greys were used, no colour. On top of that, we layered the piece, so that you had two, three, and four layers – it was incredibly labour intensive. In the end, I decided upon something even more minimal, and ended up chiselling off about a year’s worth of work. I was using time as an art material. TM: It seems as if we’re talking ‘Protestant work ethic’ here? In order to realise anything fundamentally one has to work, put time in, suffer and, in a way, there’s a kind of punishment involved there.

LL Absolutely. I am attracted to the difficulty, the tedium, the seeming impossibility of the task.

TM So, is even this slow process a kind of catharsis for you?

LL Catharsis would suggest an end in sight. I like to keep the wound fresh, and so I keep working.

TM To hear you talk about the recent work, it seems quite obvious that there are connections to the earlier, large-scale installations – to the trailer and, in particular, with Kitchen. Do you think there is always a kind of significant sense of connection between your works?

LL I try to start each project with a clean slate, but I suppose it’s impossible to not respond to the past in some way or other. Certainly in earlier works, things were connected. Kitchen and Back Yard, for instance – nine years of work – they were really one über installation. I conceived of them together.

TM I’m interested in the way that you work with and acknowledge art history. Sometimes you make very explicit references – Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise or Millais’ Ophelia for instance. Is your work, though, invariably informed by an acute sense of art historical tradition or are you influenced more subliminally?

LL I think it’s both, really. I mean, if I am not looking at other art, why should anyone look at mine? But at the same time, I don’t ever make work that is derivative or thumb through some art history books and then try and come up with a new idea.

TM So there’s no sense of post-modern quotation?

LL Maybe there is the occasional wink or nod, but it’s not my starting point.

TM Nonetheless, you did rework Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise using body builders in the guise of Adam and Eve.

LL The starting point of that work was personal – I was raised in the church and in science class we were taught that we were sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. I was struck early on and indeed, very influenced by the idea that our bodies were something to be regarded with a certain amount of shame. Yet it seems to me now that those first steps Adam and Eve took as they were cast out of the garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit was actually a heroic moment for mankind. Adam and Eve risked everything for knowledge. They risked damnation from God. Eve was going to have pain in childbirth and Adam was going to have to toil the hard earth only to have it yield thistles and thorns – it was a big price to pay. So I re-cast that moment of shame, elevating them to giants, and used body builders as models – Eve was a mud wrestler!

TM Do you still have a strong faith? Does religion directly play a part in your life now?

LL I am a person of faith, but it is my own invention.

TM Is art part of the spiritual dimension of your life?

LL Yes, that is implicit, but I don’t think that art always makes people better. It can make people much worse.

TM The film, Born Again, seems to wrestle with shame and guilt and your religious origins. It came from a performance you did and I found it an incredibly powerful experience. How did the whole performance come about? What prompted you to want to get up and re-enact this extraordinary saga of your life?

LL I grew up in a haze of ecstatic spiritual events. We didn’t need Santa Claus. That was kid’s stuff. We had exorcisms. I started to write about some of that. In the beginning, I didn’t approach it with the idea that it would be an artwork – I began the piece for myself.

TM Why do you think you were compelled to do that?

LL I think it is important to have a cohesive narrative in terms of things that have happened. I needed to transform some of my darker, oppressive experiences into something transcendant. Also to find the humour, to bring light to the dark places. It’s the basic need of all artists, I think. To rescue things somehow. To turn fact into fiction, or as Emily Dickenson said, ‘to tell all truth, but tell it slant’. Around the same time that I was doing this writing, I had been asked to give an artist talk and I decided to read to the audience instead of showing slides. The first two rows walked out. These were the people who had presumably come to see the bead lady. It was thrilling to see them go. I thought, well, good. The people who are here are really with me. We were in this together. The response of those that remained was so encouraging that I decided to develop my writing into a full-scale performance work. My husband became my director and after many live performances, we reduced the piece down to its dramatic essence, and made it into a film.

TM Do you feel, though, by turning that performance into a film that, in a way, you’re losing a certain control over the story, that it starts to become other people’s stories?

LL Above all, Born Again is an artwork and in that sense, it belongs to the realm of fiction, so I have no need to cling.

TM Have you ever felt compelled to make work that actually expresses anger towards your father?

LL He walked out on the family when I was six, and I didn’t see him again until many years later. He actually saw Kitchen. He came to see me at my studio – and the completed piece was sitting in the middle of my loft. He stood in front of it for a very long time, not saying anything. His eyes then filled up with tears, and he turned and looked at me, and said, ‘You didn’t have to do it for me’. [Laughs]. So, no, I don’t really feel like it’s necessary to make any work specifically about him.

TM The American Presidents piece that you made I suppose could be interpreted as your most paternalistic and your most explicitly political piece although what it’s actually saying is, like all your work, open to all sorts of interpretations. How did that idea come about? What inspired you to make that piece?

LL I started that project in 1996. Clinton was president and there was a mood of optimism. I made portraits of every single American president in history, thinking to make a rogue’s gallery. Now with eight years of George W, I am a little worn out. I can hardly talk about it.

TM So it’s an ongoing piece.

LL Yes, I am meant to keep adding portraits, and I don’t want to (laughs).

TM : So you’re looking for closure to be quite soon.

LL Yes, I am looking for closure!

TM It struck me when I first saw that piece, whether you admit it or not, that you were quite a systematic artist – You’ve worked with the tradition of landscape – Back Yard – you’ve worked with the tradition of still-life, with the component parts of Kitchen, for example, and in many other ways too and you’ve worked with history, or contemporary history, so the final genre left to you is portraiture. The American Presidents is very much Grand Manner portraiture, which leaves self-portraiture. This is an area you’ve worked with both explicitly and implicitly. Is all your work potentially a form of self-portraiture at some level?

LL I like what you said about it being sort of systematic, because when I approached American Presidents, I had been thinking – well, what’s left? I’ve made a domestic room, I’ve covered still life, I’ve worked with landscape – its time to deal with two-dimensions. When you start to think about painting and all that has come before, its overwhelming. I decided against creating my own fictitious world and decided to do a series of portraits. Also, I liked very much that there were so many presidents, that it became serial in a way. I had done an early self-portrait on a flat plane, around the time I was working on American Presidents. First I made a painting of myself, and then covered the surface with transparent beads, allowing the painting to come through. The end result looked like an Artschwager celotex, which surprised me. I sort of put it away and forgot about it, until years later when I made a life-size casting of myself in the nude.

TM Do you recognise yourself in the more explicit self-portraits or at least feel connected to them or do they seem more like empty vessels?

LL I don’t identify personally with the finished work. In Self-portrait, I was interested in casting a nude, to have a realistic body. In many ways, that work was a turning point for me – the idea of using myself in the work. I had always been so far removed from the work. There was something about standing six hours it took while the fabricator to covered my body in plaster bandages broke me down in some way. I remember when it was over, I couldn’t feel my legs. It was as though my feet were turned the wrong way around. I was weeping, the pain was excruciating. It paved the way for me to do the performance-based work I have been doing in recent years. It also began a pared-down approach to my figurative sculpture.

TM In a work like Heretic you present yourself in a yogic pose – was this a space or site for meditation and distortion?

LL It is both. I was thinking about the body as a gateway to spiritual transformation. It is both public demonstration and personal release. There was a collector who was thinking about buying the work, and his wife said, ‘I don’t want that vagina in my house!’ People just aren’t used to seeing that much girl. It’s Liza lewd. The pose becomes a transgressive act.

TM You mean because of its openness and naked explicitness?

LL Yeah. it becomes a little sensational. I recently went to an exhibition on Buddhist meditational art. There was an animal-headed deity with this enormous phallus, all done in gilt copper alloy. The piece was really old and covered with that ancient kind of dust, all except the penis which was as shiny as a copper penny! I guess people would come by and give it a covert little rub. With Heretic, I was initially attracted to the freakishness of the pose. I relate to it – not only because it is a pose I like to do, but how it sort of sums up what a freak I am. The artist as shaman and the artist as freak.

TM But it’s also you as the most physically reduced self or, in a way it struck me, that you were reducing the body down to the minimum amount of space that it could occupy.

LL Always an attractive option. When I was a kid, I would contort myself into the tiniest shapes that I could to try and disappear. I remember one day a teacher finding me curled up in a big plastic trash bin inside one of the classrooms. It only occurred to me later that she must have thought me strange. She was very nice about it, and asked if I would like to join the other kids.

TM The yogic pose in which you show yourself has reappeared in a very recent work depicting a male figure, whose phallus is then replaced by a knife. I suppose this is an archetypal image. It looks to me like a Jungian archetype. I was reminded of Jackson Pollock’s figure in Naked Man with Knife which was part of the period of his life when he was going through Jungian psychoanalysis and a lot of the work explicitly references that. Where did that kind of image come from for you? Perhaps that’s the anger that I’ve never seen in your work.

LL That particular position always makes me laugh. It is difficult to do and it requires tremendous strength, as well as flexibility to get your head so close to your asshole. I think it perfectly sums up humanity. We are straining to get our heads up our ass, and yet this hubris is what will destroy us in the end.

TM But this is very much a piece about male aggression.

LL Yes, the body becomes a weapon, it is turning in on itself, eating itself alive. Making an image of something that is sort of repulsive fascinated me. I wanted to know if I could make it visually seductive. If it was covered in blood, you wouldn’t want to look at it, but if you can cover it in jewels, suddenly there’s an opening to look or to see something or to face something you don’t want to face.

TM One of the most recent pieces that you’ve produced, which was also done in South Africa, is of a blanket with a tear in the centre. It’s a raggedy old blanket which looks so simple and yet must have taken such an effort to make. What led to this piece?

LL Well, I was thinking about making a piece that’s a container for grief. When you’re a child and you’re very young, your pillow or baby blanket knows everything. It contains all of your secrets, all of your stories and all of your tears – the thousands of tears that a child cries. This is all contained in that one kind of fetishy object. In a way, your baby blanket is your first art object. It’s not just a blanket, it has special magic. You’ve attached special meaning, it becomes much bigger than the inanimate thing that it is. And so I wanted to make a piece that was kind of cold comfort. I love the idea of taking something that’s really laboured over – we spent two months on it and I had three women working on it and it was very labour intensive and yet it’s made very crudely. It’s just kind of taking this elaborate labour and yet having it be falling apart.

TM Is art a kind of comfort blanket?

LL Yes, definitely. I think it gives a tremendous sense of purpose. It’s a way of seeing the world, it’s a way of reinventing the world. It gives a sense of power over matter, over what is, over what it is you’re looking at. It’s really exciting to be able to decide you want to see things in a certain way so you go ahead and do that. And it really doesn’t require any money, just time and a lot of effort. That was something I latched onto early on. Even as a kid, being able to tap into the control that you have that no matter what’s going on around you, you can go into your room and make, or draw what you want to see even when, in the world around you, there’s nothing that you want to see. Even when everything’s so dark and so ugly, you can go into your room and make something. And on that page you have total control.

Tim Marlow is a writer, broadcaster and Director of Exhibitions at White Cube.

First published in Marlow, Tim and Winterson, Jeanette, Liza Lou, exhibition catalogue, (Great Britain, White Cube, 2006)

More on Liza Lou

	Related Texts
CV
Bibliography
Liza Lou Text by Jeanette Winterson

Exhibitions
Liza Lou 3 Mar—8 Apr 2006

	Related Links
http://deitch.com/artists/s... Deitch Projects