Ain Cocke talks to Colter Jacobsen

Colter Jacobsen is an artist based in San Fransisco whose work will be on view in a group Exhibition called Boomerang from January 6 to February 7. Ain Cocke is an artist based in Brooklyn.

Ain Cocke: Let’s just fuck the intellectual talk…. Let’s talk about sex. What was the first time you got laid like? Tell me if you want, but I’m just kidding. No tell me.

Colter Jacobsen: I was in Rome; his name was Angelo and he was just that, an angel. He was a French/Italian who taught Latin. We didn’t communicate well with words, just with pieces of what little I knew of Spanish. But we communicated a lot with our eyes. He had a ponytail and wore a large, bright red trench coat. We basically stared each other down on the street and he offered to take me on a drive. We ended up at the foot of a fountain fogging up the windows of his little car. Then he took me to his home where he played me Bruce Springstein. You?

AC: Let’s just say she was thirteen. Sounds more perverted then it really is.

I’ve always had a close attachment to ideas about memory. Usually, oddly enough, other people’s memories. They’re sometimes a little painful and always melancholy. But that may just be me bringing myself to the table. But still there is something a little sad about memories in the form of other people’s pictures, wouldn’t you agree? I’m very interested in the structure of memory, visual memory in particular. What is it that attracts you to other people’s pictures?

CJ: Other people’s pictures can be like the excitement of meeting a stranger for the first time. They are free of personal baggage. They can put me in a trance sometimes, and sadness is only one of many feelings when in that trance. It’s interesting that you should feel there is a sadness inherent in other people’s photographs—I see the opposite in your humorous and erotic sensitivity in handling them. Or maybe I should say the way in which you interpret them. Is this sadness more in association with old photographs? Like knowing the photographer and subjects are all dead? Or is it connected to the subject matter for you? All your men are wearing outdated uniforms from the Marines or the Airforce. They represent both their own identity and their country’s identity. The subject matter is surely sad given the context of ongoing war and more troops being sent to Iraq. Maybe it’s this sadness that is coupled with the elegance and eroticiscm that gives your work its charge?

AC: It’s interesting to me that we both see the photos we use in a different way emotionally. I too am excited by them…but in a melancholy way. That is to say I am attracted and excited by melancholy. How telling. There is a sadness in these photographs for me because one of the things I react to is mortality. These pictures are a slice of time out of someone’s life. I imagine the moments right after the photograph, like the pause button was released and this person or persons went on to live and experience things and are most likely dead now. The images are little indicators of the temporality of time and life. In the drawing or painting process I have a prolonged, intimate moment with this captured moment, with this anonymous person. I guess that makes me feel good while I am working on the piece, that I’m sharing a time with this other being and anything I bring to it is possible. But then there inevitably comes a time where I must leave it behind like so many other memories, like the original image was left behind by whomever had it last. My hope is that the memory I have invented will be more enduring…. I guess like immortality.

How long do pictures exist before they become anonymous? Before they become part of the large, anonymous archive of visual narrative that floats around out there forgotten then rediscovered, only to be forgotten again. How long do you or your family hold on to these images before they are meaningless to the inheritor and then released into the general archive? And what makes one image more special then any other, what makes one kind of image more sought after by other people who rediscover an image? I suspect it is the baggage we bring to the image when we gaze upon it. The selected image is like a series of triggers. By fetishizing said image the triggers can be manipulated to any desired or mysterious or transient ends.

I am an avid collector of small bits of cultural flotsam and jetsam, and I found myself attracted to photo booth pictures because of the anonymous nature of the thing. Not only was the sitter anonymous to me, but no one actually took the picture! I began narrowing my investigation down to pictures that resonated most with me. At first it was just two men in uniforms sharing a private moment behind a curtain. Then I began to see the charm of the solo portrait as well.

Mel Bochner once said something to me that I have been thinking about ever since. He said, I am paraphrasing of course, "WWII is the result of the collision of rationalism and individualism.” This led me to the thought that WWII was a result of the of fallout of the French Revolution—and in fact we are still in that fallout. I began to see the human narrative more clearly, and I began to notice how signs shifted over time, essentially what post-structuralism says. All the language aside, I decided that in one way the work I was making was a sort of collage or pastiche of these events. An investigation of the male version of the human narrative.

Another way to look at the work is how the definitions of masculinity change over time. By studying the visual narrative, I noticed what seemed like a change in the attitudes about male intimacy. Perhaps it was the invention of the tag "homosexual" and the stigma that is still attached to it. It seems that men used to be more intimate with each other. In fact there was a time, a very long time, in which emotional intimacy was shared exclusively by men. The work I’ve been making can be seen as a search for male intimacy, even down to the act of making the stuff; it is an intimate time I spend with the image making the work.

All this bullshit aside (these are just things I’ve collected like bits of junk), an interesting image is all that matters! I think on some level we all know that. Even Abstraction comes up with an interesting image every once in a while. Ooooo that’s so cruel!

CJ: Your focus on WWII is really astounding. When it comes to history I am much more irresponsible. Or maybe what I should say is that I am not focused on one particular part of history. I too work from a large cultural pool filled with flotsam and jetsam. And I’ve amassed my own collections of things; the street is probably my number one supplier of ephemera and debris. From these collections I start to make comparisons and associations. It’s like looking at a bunch of histories and seeing how they all relate to each other, hopefully to better inform the now. I’ve focused in on a few themes, waterfalls being one of them. I never thought I’d draw waterfalls. I kept coming across waterfalls represented in many ways, from old postcards to new tourist magazines to people’s personal photographs, on the internet or elsewhere. I was working as a caregiver with this guy that I had worked with for six years. In the last year he had cataract surgery on both eyes. He had to wear braces around his arms to keep him from rubbing his eyes. This gave me plenty of time to really think about cataracts and vision in general. I think that’s why I started to draw and be drawn to cataracts. It was purely a word association that in my mind became synonymous. His mother had recently been to Yosemite so I asked her if she had taken any photos of waterfalls. She gave me several and I chose one where she was looking at her boyfriend looking at a waterfall. It was really interesting drawing from her perspective, especially knowing that her eye had looked through the viewfinder. At the same time I couldn’t see exactly why I was drawing it. It seemed peripheral to what I really wanted to be doing with art; I kept thinking, “okay, I’ll do this drawing to bide the time until I really make some art.” I couldn’t look directly at the why. Maybe I still can’t. And maybe it’s the hypothetical cataracts in my own eyes. But now looking back, it seems like this was the work all along. It was about the peripheral. The more I try to figure it out the more befuddled I get.

As for abstract art, I often enjoy it. Sometimes I feel like representational work and making it is like being stuck in 4/4 time (it can be so tediously anal and Western, no?), and I become painfully aware of all the other possible time signatures out there. It’s like being trapped inside a pop song and hearing Alice Coltrane drift in from another room. But I guess abstraction is integral to representational drawing. The way I copy photographs is just by eyeballing it. I don’t grid the photo out (not that making a grid ensures exactness). I like how the distortions and imperfections begin immediately. And I’ve noticed that in the act of copying, even the movement of the eye from photograph to drawing paper is a lapse in time, albeit a very short lapse. From seeing to drawing is a memory already. I think it’s this lapse in time and just our being human that begins to abstract things.