WPA Talks Elections and Art with artist Nina Katchadourian

WPA recently sat down with artist Nina Katchedourian to discuss her work and practice, including her upcoming installation Monument to the Unelected, a work consisting of 56 election signs for presidential hopefuls who came in second place, on view at The Washington Post building starting September 10, 2012.

WPA:?Thank you for talking with us today! So, how did you get started in the arts? What is your background?

Nina: Well I guess I never meant to be an artist (laughs). At the point in time when I got to college I was interested in radio journalism, writing, editing, theater, and music, but I had never taken an art class. Art was something that I discovered once I got to college. I took a class at RISD which was a course on conceptual bookmaking where the idea was to link the form and the content of these books that we were making, and it was sort of a huge revelation that form and content could have this kind of a relationship and that art was not just about drawing something realistically, it wasn?t about that as a skill base at all. So that was huge for me. And so, suddenly, a lot of new things opened up from that.

By the time I finished college I felt much more interested in and engaged in the question of artistic practice and decided to apply to grad schools, and then did go to grad school really as a way of figuring out how important all of this was to me and how serious I was about it, and had an amazing experience in graduate school at the university of California san Diego and when I was through that I really felt kind of ?dug in? at that point.

WPA: Did you have a specific way of working immediately out of your graduate program?

Nina: A lot of my experience at USC was about beginning to work collaboratively, often site specifically, I?d say my practice has always kind of been driven by a conceptual approach to things but the idea dictates eventually how the thing is manifest and how it?s made so you know, even then I was working with combinations of things. It was photography for some projects, video for others, public sculpture for others and that?s something that has become over time, it?s a very engrained way of working for me and one that feels very natural. And there for a while, I might have felt like ?what?s wrong with me!? I never do the same thing twice!? you know (laughs).

It is really not just part of the methodology but arguably part of what the work is about, kind of finding subject matter in the located in the everyday and often in places where you don?t expect to find anything that you would be able to import into art or, so there is a lot of flow for me between what we might call art subject and that realm of things that we think of as art and sort of all those things that don?t seem to count as art at all. And as such I often do look to, you know, the ?dumb? stuff around us with the question of what might be there, what else is there that is interesting that we don?t give any credit for being interesting.

WPA: Monument to the Unelected definitely seems to fall into that category.

Nina: The show in DC soon is very much along those lines. These election signs are sort of this familiar and kind of mundane part of the American landscape in the months leading up to an election.

WPA: How did the project begin?

Nina: The back-story for this project started when I was invited to come to Scottsdale, Arizona to make a piece for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, this was in 2008, and they were planning a ten year anniversary show on humor, the artists were supposed to engage humor in some way. It?s a funny invitation when you are asked to come somewhere and think of something funny? I mean its kind of impossible actually (laughs) and although there is a lot of humor in what I make it?s not something that I kind of plan on having there so it was very weird to be for the first time trying to be funny because I?m never trying to be.

In Scottsdale, which was a brand new place for me, I was trying to get a grip on where I was. And often I think this is what is so useful about residencies or experiences where you are invited to a brand new place, is that you start to notice things there that might have even been around you in the place you lived but suddenly you are kind of looking more at everything and therefore those kinds of things suddenly appear and that is exactly what happened.

WPA: Did politics directly and initially influence or inspire the work?

The visit was in October and November and it was a very tense and exciting time. There was the big face off between Obama and McCain/Palin and Arizona being of course McCain?s state added an additional layer of intensity to that and so I kept noticing these signs and thinking about the fact that, here these things are, and half the people that appear on these signs are names that we will probably see for the next few years and a bunch of these other names are going to disappear and we will never think about these people again.

I think that all of those thoughts turned me toward wanting to make a piece that thought about the American past. And so when those election signs came up, it was proposing this piece was a way of thinking of one strain of our past collective history and the decisions that had been made as a society, and to think about how other decisions might have led to different things.

What is going to happen in DC is that we are taking advantage of that interesting window of time leading up to [the election]. I?m really excited about showing it there because I think that in my experience it tends to be a very politically literate population, a lot of people are in professional situations where they are thinking about and engaging politics in one way or another and I?m imagining people probably know their history in a way that perhaps is more acute than in other cities. I?m really curious to see how the response is to this.

WPA: What do you think about the recontextualization of the piece? In The Washington Post Building, in the capital of the country, in a presidential election year, how do you think this changes how the work is received?

Nina: I think that remains to be seen ? I think that I?ve tried showing this piece now a couple of very different ways. Its been outside shown as lawn signs, in front of someone?s house, for example. And then the other place I?ve seen these signs turn up, people put them in their windows. And I think that is the thing I felt excited about when the window site was proposed. Of course as with every other time the piece was shown, there is something completely overloaded about how the signs appear. Instead of one lawn sign you?ve got 56, so it looks like some nutcase that doesn?t know what year it is living in this house and this kind of ?who the hell are they voting for!?? and I think at The Post site there will be a kind of resonance with that tradition of putting the signs in peoples windows, again a whole lot more of them than you?re used to seeing. The other thing that I hope will happen at The Washington Post site is that the signs will announce themselves in a funny kind of way as news, and I?ve been thinking bout that especially since I heard that they added that news ticker above the windows. So I think that is kind of interesting you may sort of as a passer by have the mindset of oh this is a building, a place where you find out about things, so you take things up as informational you take things up as fact and you take things up as contemporary and so what will someone think when they suddenly see a name that perhaps is familiar to them but then they think ?wait a minute, wait a minute, Roosevelt? What?s going on with Roosevelt now?? There is kind of a double take moment, and the context might really make that interesting.

WPA: That?s very interesting. So do you consider the piece being partisan in any way?

One thing that has been really important to the concept is that the piece, in a strange sort of way, is as politically neutral as I can make it. I mean, I have not tried to make the democrats signs look one way and the republicans another it?s, I hope, a kind of productively ambiguous piece where any person regardless of their view has the opportunity to feel happy or sad about any one of those signs.? You can think, ?thank God that person lost!? or ?Oh, I wish that person hadn?t lost.? When people make inferences about the opinion engrained into the piece, I think that?s a very good thing.

I tried to make a political piece that is apolitical in a strange way. I mean, maybe that?s what this is. I?ve thought about this over the years and what I want it to be is an opportunity to think about all these decisions in our collective past. And in a way it has a kind of built in history quiz aspect, because you look at some of these things and you?re like ?OH. I remember that person. On yeah that happened there, then and that?s what was going on in the country?? and then other people, for me any way, have been giant blank fields of I have no idea what is going on. So it has been a little bit humbling to realize how shoddy my own knowledge of American history has been and I?ve certainly learned a lot more about it making this piece.

But, you know, there were some errors that I had in my list. There are some very confusing elections in the early years because of the way the elections took place its not the sort of two party system that we have now. On occasion I thought that the results had gone one way and I?ve had historians correct me and say ?actually that?s wrong.? So it is interesting that even after all this time there are still things that I realize are murky for a lot of people. It?s just not a history that we all know consistently through and through.

WPA: And that is also one thing that remains current? how murky things still can be, and how the facts appear to be so malleable in today?s politics as well. So, how long did this take you to research before you were able to make all of the signs?

Nina: The piece was produced over about six months. The research took a while; I consulted a couple of historians, one at Stanford and one at Princeton, to check with them about some of the trickier decisions. The logic for whose names go on the signs is that it?s everybody who came in second.? You can sort of say it is everybody who ever ran for office and lost. But of course, many more people run for office and lose than the one person who wins. So in some ways it is more accurate to say who came in second, who was almost president.

The graphic design was a delightful but also a very long process. I worked with a really excellent graphic designer named Evan Gaffney who is here in New York. We had an interesting working process. I would find imagery of existing signs; I did a lot of image research on the net and found signs from small local elections, and I would say for example ?hey, please model the Jefferson sign on this one. And then I tired to come up a set of size and color variations that, again were often modeled on what you see out there. And then its funny, there is a certain look to these signs, they try to look often confident and patriotic and positive you know, confidence inducing, there is a certain kind of design sensibility that is very typical of them and so part of the project was thinking through what is that what about that trope of having a box with a check mark in it? Obviously a lot of red white and blue, allusions to the American flag, all of that.

WPA: So you, yourself, really had to become educated in the language of these signs before you executed the piece.

Yeah, I did. And Evan was amazing, he has a fantastic sense of humor and he is very ?font-fluent? so to speak, so he was able to not only know what fonts were in use on any found sign but also was able to import other fonts into the project that really carried a lot of humor with them. We were thinking in a loose way that the signs should appear like the person could have been running for office at any time within the past twenty to thirty years. They looked kind of contemporary but sometimes perhaps not entirely of this present moment. And then of course there is the whole issue of advertising and what these signs really are advertisements for a candidate and how that in American politics these days is incredibly present and important. And how much money goes toward advertisements for candidates. That was something that I did not think very much about in the early part of this piece but it has been a consistent response by viewers and those who have written about the piece, but was something that dawned on me later that, of course the piece is also about how we promote spend money on advertise and elect these people and that those things are all, for better or worse part of a continuum in this country.

WPA: You recently were interviewed by Nightline. What was that like and what did you talk about?

They contacted me after having seen a group of photographs that had a viral moment online and were interested in knowing more about that project. Those photos were a set of self portraits that I had done in an airplane lavatory where, using the materials I found, I dressed myself up to look like 15^th century Flemish portraits. Those portraits are part of a much bigger project called Seat Assignment. And Seat Assignment is a project that I?ve been most busy with over the past two and a half years. They called me up and I said ?Yep, those photos are having their strange and independent life apart from this project but there is also a lot more that is part of this project that I?d love to tell you about.? So we talked and discussed things, I wanted to make sure that the producer was going to come at this in a contextualized and respectful way. I think I have a little bit of a suspicion sometimes of the way that mainstream media if they cover art sometimes lean very hard on the kind of prank like or entertainment aspect of it. Although there is a lot of humor in the project that I wouldn?t want to deny, it?s also about a lot of other things that are, you know, more serious to me and are not one-liners. And they understood that and we had great conversation about the larger context of the project and then what they wanted to do. I?m waiting to see when it will air, I don?t know yet.

WPA: Do you worry that people will treat Monument to the Unelected in the way that you were describing, focusing on the entertainment or shock of it, or as a prank?

Nina: Its funny, I haven?t felt as concerned with that piece in that way. That is a good question. No, it hasn?t been taken up in that spirit. There is something very absurdist about getting into an airplane bathroom and dressing yourself up and of course I?m aware of that. To me though that gesture is part of a much larger set of gestures that have to do with the question of can you make something out of nothing and can you make something where you don?t think there is anything art worthy about where you are. Can you shift your mindset and really invest in the idea that the world is an interesting place if you look at it that way.

WPA: That seems pretty core to your way of working generally.

Nina: Yeah, it is, and Monument to the Unelected comes out of that too, in a way. We could in a way write these signs off but I?m trying to take that form and inject a content into it that I hope hooks people initially because it is familiar. But, something isn?t right so you have to be like ?wait a minute, what is really going on here? and then that forces you to confront a situation that is also on one level absurdist but which is also a lot of factual information there. And perhaps if you engage it longer and longer there is that sort of next tier of things, the ?oh, this is our country?s history seen through one particular filter? and how well do I know it, and where are my blank spots and why, and what else could have happened and what kind of country are we? What does it say about us? Because here is how it has gone so far. What might happen next? Of course, we are going to be at a moment where we are thinking a lot about what might happen next. It is a piece that I hope is an opportunity for viewer?s projections in a number of different ways. It?s like an elaborate rorschach blot test, you know?

WPA: Is there one thing that you are hoping will happen by mounting this piece? Or perhaps one thing you really want to examine more closely or observe as it goes up at The Washington Post building?

Nina: I hope there are people who bring their specialized knowledge to the piece in a way that amplifies something about the work or adds some extra layer of resonance to it, I am excited about that.

WPA: Now that the piece has found a home in Washington, DC during a presidential election year, do you consider it fulfilling its goal, or see this as full circle?

Nina: I thought about this for the last four years. When the piece was exhibited last time I thought to myself, ?I really want to show this again before the next election.? And it would be amazing to show it in the country?s capital, symbolically it?s so obvious! You know? It should travel to DC! I would love to show this piece on an ongoing basis, my graphic designer friend Evan joked about this the other day saying, ?Maybe, you know, this is one of those pieces where you take it out every four years and a new sign is added every time. And I would love to see that happen, I would love for it become a strange tradition to show it somewhere before each election. And if that happened, going back to your question of what I hope will happen this time, over time that might become a kind of interesting barometer of politics in this country, how people respond to the piece. It becomes a measuring stick of something perhaps. That has become a new goal, where am I to go next time with this work. I am so happy that this has worked out, and it has been great to work for WPA. We considered a number of different sites but I?m really happy with this one. I think we?re going to learn something now about it being linked to this place that is so established as an important source of news.

I really enjoy the opportunity to put art into a place where people don?t necessarily know that is what they have just found so the mindset of the viewer when they walk into a museum is already all around, art making. But somebody downtown when they are passing the Washington Post is probably going to be thinking about all kinds of stuff, or news, or those things that we talked about earlier.

WPA: And it seems to be such a natural transition. Your source material and inspiration come from this place that is public and communal, so to present it back in that kind of environment, or in a way that is public, makes perfect sense.

Nina: It does. And I like situations where art making activities do not announce themselves as such. So, when I?m on the plane with my cell phone taking pictures of small constructions that I?ve made [for Seat Assignment] on my tray table, which really is my studio now, I just probably look like a bored person and probably a bit of a weird lady. But the last thing I want that to look like is me making art. The reason I use my phone is I just need that as a ? I need the ?bored person? as an alibi. (laughs) Although in fact what I?m trying to do is be anything but a bored unengaged person, I?m trying to do exactly the opposite. So the signs kind of masquerade as what inspired their creation but in the end, are something different.

For more information on Nina and her work, visit her website here. She will present a talk in?conjunction?with the opening of her installation at The Washington Post on September 10, 2012. For detail and for more information on Monument to the Unelected click here.?

Source: http://wpadc.org/wpa-talks-elections-and-art-with-artist-nina-katchadourian/

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