|
Astria Suparak: You have a serious history in academia: You hold a Masters in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and are finishing your PhD in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, have written for various institutions and magazines, and teach a course on the evolution of technology at NYU. You also actively exhibit and perform, often to lighthearted, hilarious effect. Do you see your role as an academic as different from your role as an artist? Marisa Olson: Well, I often feel like an "absent-minded professor," if that’s what you mean? Academia and art-making are both really important to me. And the writing and curating go along with that. I just see it as a multi-pronged approach to asking certain questions about the world and trying to instigate certain conversations about power, technology, gender, desire, change, and the voice. |
|
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, curator, musician and performer based in Brooklyn and Astria Suparak is a curator who brought Olson and Rhizome’s traveling exhibition, Networked Nature, to Syracuse, New York in spring 2007.Astria Suparak: You have a serious history in academia: You hold a Masters in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and are finishing your PhD in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, have written for various institutions and magazines, and teach a course on the evolution of technology at NYU. You also actively exhibit and perform, often to lighthearted, hilarious effect. Do you see your role as an academic as different from your role as an artist?
Marisa Olson: Well, I often feel like an "absent-minded professor," if that’s what you mean? Academia and art-making are both really important to me. And the writing and curating go along with that. I just see it as a multi-pronged approach to asking certain questions about the world and trying to instigate certain conversations about power, technology, gender, desire, change, and the voice. I also think it’s really important to have fun in your work. I mean, I was also in a punk band for a while, but left because I wanted to do something "more punk than punk."
AS: You’ve had multiple blogs and websites, and hold Facebook, del.icio.us, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube accounts. Your work has celebrated the embarrassment of childhood with the slide lecture What My Telephones Knew About Me, the pain of heartbreak in Break Up Album (Demo), and other insecurities in Marisa’s American Idol Audition Training Blog. What parts of your life are not available for public consumption? Where do you delineate emotional responsibility towards others?
MO: Good question! I’ve gone on blind dates where the person nervously asked me if they were my art project. Ok, I’ll be honest: I’m a bit of a control freak. It’s often easier for me to bring up difficult stuff in the "controlled environment" of a performance in front of people I generalize as strangers (this includes blogging, irrationally), than it is to do it interpersonally. Of course certain things are off-limits. But things are also changing as my work is becoming less and less about my past and more about more about our future. I appear in my work now not in a diaristic way, but to sort out my own culpability.
AS: You create a striking figure in much of your work, with your long, golden locks and dance moves directed at the camera. We’ve previously talked at length about identity politics. What goes into the crafting of your image and identity, and how do you hope others perceive you?
MO: Well, I’ve always been very interested in the conscious, branded crafting of persona, at least ever since I discovered Michael Jackson and Madonna. Mine is a bit more like the idea of reducing myself to just a small handful of signs: headphones (my security blanket), long blonde hair, big red lips. It’s like… What would happen if one of Busby Berkeley’s dancers started a solo performance art career? Even when I "star" as myself, I mostly feel like I’m just a stand-in for some vague subject position—a fan, a voter, a consumer, or some other already-generic role related to media culture. But reducing things to a base iconography leads to an amplification of each element’s import.
AS: Right before your lecture at Syracuse, we were two miles apart and you chose to email me rather than call from the hotel lobby. Is this indicative of your preference for a more mediated social experience?
MO: Oops! Well, I’m kind of a geek. I’ve always related to computers, to say nothing of walkmen and boomboxes. Talk about mediated communication! Nowadays I hate the phone. Just hang up and email me, I say. Man, that’s really sad.
AS: What do you do during power outages?
MO: The same thing I’ve done almost every night since I was fifteen. Light candles and sing songs.
