| Cecilia Muhlstein: Mary Kelly, whose infamous book, Post-Partum Document, is a seminal work of conceptual art, which addresses the role of science, feminism and how the various significations of the body become re-imagined as performance. It seems that in your pieces like The Reliquarium, Mean Body and Rest there is a certain relationship to these politically charged issue.s Nichola Feldman-Kiss: While I was at art school, I was fortunate to have several encounters with Mary Kelly—she was actually at the Whitney Independent, but she had a visiting artist commitment to Cal Arts… |  |
Laboratory: Controlled, Clean, Pristine – Cecilia Muhlstein
"In generating the multiple from the singular, the possibilities for variation of the self are presented as potentially infinite."
—Kim Sawchuk, Uncanny Figures and mean body
Cecilia Muhlstein recently interviewed Nichola Feldman-Kiss, a Canadian visual artist whose work intersects photography, performance, sculpture, video and various forms of new media technology including 3D whole body laser scanning and rapid prototyping.
Cecilia Muhlstein: Mary Kelly, whose infamous book, Post-Partum Document, is a seminal work of conceptual art, which addresses the role of science, feminism and how the various significations of the body become re-imagined as performance. It seems that in your pieces like The Reliquarium, Mean Body and Rest there is a certain relationship to these politically charged issues.
Nichola Feldman-Kiss: While I was at art school, I was fortunate to have several encounters with Mary Kelly—she was actually at the Whitney Independent, but she had a visiting artist commitment to Cal Arts so, while I studied Mary Kelly and with Mary Kelly, I was not really her student nor she my professor. I am engaged with the late 60s and early 70s—a very fertile period in art, theory, social evolution and technology development. These years coincide with my formative years—the bliss years—awake and innocent.
With Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, I relate to its use of science method as a device to universalize issues of feminist concern. Its aesthetics slip into the grey zone between the time’s representational orders of feminism/minimalism—the body absent—unlike Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Cindy Sherman and Carolee Schneeman, for example.
CM: Who are some other artists important to you?
NFK: The works of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Rebecca Horn and Kiki Smith have hugely influenced me as well, while Kelly’s work gave me a kind of permission to address the issues and knowledge that grew out of my autobiographical and child-rearing context—an analytical eye cast upon my daily ebbs and flows serves as the research—explicitly assuming the self as a universal example. The laboratory space is clean, controlled and pristine—a set apart space. In the laboratory, the subjective may become objective. In the laboratory one can perform objective subjectivity—where the self and the other can be simultaneously inside and outside of the self. Mean body performed this experiment.
CM: How did you apply these aesthetics to a work in particular?
NFK: Mean Body is an expanded performance of self-portraiture. I started this project in 2001 with eight months of rigorous body training towards my idealized body shape. Using technologies for three-dimensional shape-capture and highly subjective determinations for pose and posture (36 hours of continuous scanning—a performance of sleep deprivation to undo the propensity to perform with body—in search of my unpose). The Mean Body database includes 82 variations of my shape from which I have been making works about observing the self-embodied—frozen in time. Mean Body includes works of installation, sculpture, video, print and text. These works fall into the fissures between photography and other forms such as and sculpture—A Crowd of One Self, 12 photorealistic, bronze, Barbie-scaled figures performing under their own subjective gaze; video—The Imperceptible Movie, a 28-minute video loop showing a figure imperceptibly turning 360 degrees; text and sculpture—Classically Bound, a 7,662-page, pig skin-bound book of source code indicating one body. I made Mean Body in a science context among scientists who develop tools for the study of the human body’s shape. I am mostly curious about how we are constructed socially; how we require the comparison with another to be identified; how a whole science has grown from our efforts to harness our identities to our bodies so that the world might create an accurate description of us. How we perform the self; how we seek our perfection in the mind’s mirror; how, under our own gaze, we can become other to our own selves. How utopias are created with technology.
With Post-Partum Document, Mary Kelly played the role of the observer within her deeply personal circumstances as they unfolded in front of her. I thought she would need to be remarkably self-possessed and totally detached at the same time in order to cast an objective analysis onto her own Mothering. In a fanciful way, I related to her position and was deeply fascinated by it—as well as her long-time commitment to her hairdo. For me, she was the simultaneous occupation of Jeremy Bentham’s prisoner and guard casting a watchful eye on the other. As high up as we might rise through interpretations of theory, analysis and activism, Kelly’s works continue to be radically local—grounded in the everyday materiality of dirty diapers and dryer lint.
I am currently working on The Chimaera Set, also from the Mean Body database, to further the notion of an ideal body. A body that is other only to itself. These works of digital sculpture (rapid prototypes and backlit digital images) endeavor to describe bodies in light of their similarities as opposed to conventions of difference. The abstracted body shapes of The Chimaera Set were derived by combining the common data of two or more Mean Body data sets. Eliminating difference—seeking recognition—the uncanny—looking for the otherworldly. Beauty. Monstrosity. Abject sensuality. The shapes in The Chimaera Set have been reduced to the most minimal bodily attributes so that, while recognizable, they have no specific referent. What would happen if another were not necessary for the self to be brought into being? What ethics drive the science and discourse that underline technologies for (re)producing the body?
CM: Your work negotiates a power between the spectator and the work. What have been some of the most compelling responses to your work?
NFK: Some people call my work pristine or cold or clean or forensic. I like things that are clean enough to be inside the body, but things that are real so that there will never not be some dirt. I appreciate material things and do not so much believe virtual things exist, really, because touch is so important. Because touch is what brings us into being. I build my narratives around that little bit of dirt. The disturbing element—the pearl—the abscess—in the realm of the uncanny. Desire—beauty—monstrosity. One in the same.
CM: Technology and photography are essential to your work. In The Reliquarium, your e-mail performance piece, it was this combined symmetry of visual and textual pieces that encompassed almost an entire year of daily entries. Some are detailed statistics or research, or even a note apologizing for not vacuuming. In other moments, a crucifixion, a pigeon fetus, an address of a rest stop, kid gloves, notes on fertility and HIV, are rendered on the screen. I noticed how you labeled each piece. Some seem to match the image or written text, but some were not so obvious, like the words “insanity,” “herstory,” etc. What was the process for you in doing this intimate work?
NFK: The Reliquarium is a randomized digital slide loop of 254 text/image pairs as well as an installation of digital prints and relics entitled Systems of Belief—Objects of Penetration. The Reliquarium was an anonymous Y2K e-mail diary performance for which I created and distributed a daily text and image pair. I delivered The Reliquarium to its recipient community via a listserv to which the e-mail audience could subscribe and unsubscribe. In the days of spam—The Reliquarium was equally about unsubscribing as subscribing. Objects were found, bought, begged, borrowed, stolen and scanned on my flatbed scanner. Texts were self authored, found, appropriated, stolen, quoted and contributed by the listserv participants. It was passive-aggressive. Like several internet projects of the time, it took advantage of anonymity and decontextualization characteristic of the web. In The Reliquarium’s short life-span, it accumulated over 1700 subscribers.
The Reliquarium is about memory—those narratives that are written into the body over time—relationships—threads of love, loss, desire and fear—a distributed body. The Reliquarium was written into the moment—each entry representing an idea of that day—it was the requirement that I set—to be in the moment and contained within a form. Each entry was my last task of the day on which it was created (with the exception of two occasions when I prepared the pairs in advance of travel). The pairings—the narrative content and the object selection—are stream of consciousness. Each is remarkable only in that they presented themselves to be noticed—a trigger to a past. I wanted to see if I could release myself from self-censorship—create a controlled space to relinquish control. To be totally raw without conceptual justification—you can do that on e-mail. Reveal the most intimate secrets of your life—gasp—press send—a message in a bottle. For me it was a year of much turmoil and life change. It was a time to purposefully disentangle the restraints—follow the work rather that direct it. Document the bracketed time of extreme emotion as it unfolded in front of me to become an object of scrutiny. The Reliquarium exploited the extremely impersonal medium of the internet to reveal many very intimate truths. Ultimately, as a performance I felt that I had given everything and nothing away—it is disembodied.
Objective conclusions can be drawn when there is a lot of something—when the trees become the forest—254 ideas created within repeatable conditions. No matter the content of the statistical sample—the subject can be drawn toward the object.
I think I use science method—constraints—analysis—to give myself away. I think that is the role of the artist—to give one’s self up for scrutiny—to perform both the subject and object of the gaze—for critical interpretation.
Absent and present.
CM: Rest, reveals a fascination with alienation from the body through the act of folding clothes. It’s quite a moving transition; one of mourning. Can you describe why the body is a viable site of sculptural relevance in art today?
NFK: The garments in Rest are remnants of the late 60s and early 70s bliss years. Rest is an effort to understand “Thelma”—a woman who came to me disembodied—rather, embodied by her residue. A reflection of my growing interest in the body detached from the self, the rituals we perform to mark the transition from embodied to body—as in cadaver. The garments in Rest are more naked than the naked bodies in Mean Body. Each dress crafted, named, worn, soiled, torn and bequeathed—each interface a concentrated narrative seeking to be imagined. Thelma was empty—she left me few props, this absent woman-become-mother. I imaged her into being, then put her away in neat packets. Her garments, her sweat, her blood, the tears, the unraveled hems, the cigarette burns were all a kind of making sense of childhood—my bliss years.
I often wonder what might happen if we were able to undo our socialization. Untangle the nurture from the nature. Reverse our colonization. Go home.
The body is common. Our bodies link us to others in time, place and history. Thelma’s body was literally larger and smaller than my own—a reflection of evolving sociality. Economies, freedoms, choice. Social hierarchies written into the body—hers —mine.
We shared her interface—became intimate—I held her blood stains between my legs, her skin dust locked in the weave mixing with my own—I have low tolerance for Thelma’s coarse wools.
In history we have gathered, measured, represented, penetrated, defied, modified, controlled, revered, abused, studied, commodified, technologised, created bodies imagined, fantastical, multiplied and replicated. The body is coming into ever-sharper focus. Yet still so little is known about the immaterial aspect of the self—but that no matter what—we need to enter it through the body.
CM: Can you comment on some of your current projects?
NFK: The Chimaera Set will soon be part of an international group show entitled “ALTERAZIONI” (Alterations: the materials of photography between analog and digital) at the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milano, Italy. With Art Metropole, Toronto, Canada, I will launch Classically Bound and Uncanny Figures and Mean Body (a catalogue produced in conjunction with a solo exhibition of the works from the Mean Body database at the Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Canada). From my new body of work entitled “Childish Objects,” which muses on artistic actions and objects conceived during my formative years, I will perform The Public Sleeping Performance. For this work, I will sleep in a custom vitrine for an eight hour period in high traffic public spaces. This performance will be presented in Ottawa, Canada within Saw Gallery’s international performance program, “Ephemeral Objects” and in Toronto, Canada by La Nuit Blanche.
The Public Sleeping Performance addresses the vulnerable space between pretending and being—performing the self. As a small child, I often sought refuge in sleep—I especially liked the small nooks and crannies in and around the furniture and the cubbyholes of my grandmother’s dog kennels in and among her 40 plus dogs, for example.
Other works in progress from the “Childish Objects” body of work include My First Hair Cut—a child-sized wig fabricated from the hair of my first haircut; The Camera Eye—a kinetic left eye prosthesis investigating my childhood fantasy vision; The Scotch Tape Tea Set—a remake of a four-year-old hospital boredom project and other boredom projects including The Glue Cocoon and Sewing Fingers videos.
