| Catherine Y. Hsieh: Can you tell me a little more about how you came up with the idea for Maximum Security? Liza Lou: Well, for the last couple of years I’ve been really making a body of work that’s been focused on the Middle East, just what’s been going on politically and kind of inspired to make work around ideas about confinement, containment for a long time. My first piece I ever made was a kitchen. In a lot of ways that kitchen was an image of confinement. It was obviously a domestic sphere, but it was one that women have spent their lives inside, this kind of architecture of confinement, in a sense. |
|
Liza Lou, interviewed by Catherine Y. Hsieh
Liza Lou, Security Fence (detail), 2005-2007. Steel, glass beads, 108 x 120 inches. Courtesy of L & M Arts.Catherine Y. Hsieh: Can you tell me a little more about how you came up with the idea for Maximum Security?
Liza Lou: Well, for the last couple of years I’ve been really making a body of work that’s been focused on the Middle East, just what’s been going on politically and kind of inspired to make work around ideas about confinement, containment for a long time. My first piece I ever made was a kitchen. In a lot of ways that kitchen was an image of confinement. It was obviously a domestic sphere, but it was one that women have spent their lives inside, this kind of architecture of confinement, in a sense. It was kind of a way of honoring my grandmother and women who have come before, who spent their lives maybe doing menial work and didn’t get to follow their dreams. Maybe it wasn’t a literal place; some people weren’t in kitchens that looked like that; that’s a Western kitchen. Nonetheless, for me it was about confinement. Now it’s about five years ago, so my work has evolved to thinking outward from the domestic sphere into maybe even more masculine types of architecture. For me that became making a security fence. The Security Fence that’s at L & M is about the same dimensions as The Kitchen. So again, it’s a cube; it’s a dimension; it’s an architecture of confinement. It’s thinking about the Middle East. You can’t get in and you can’t get out, this kind of no escape. That piece I ended up making in South Africa, which also has other resonance just thinking about life and history of apartheid and working with Zulu people who are very familiar with barbed wire. So, that image, working together as a team on that piece became more and more meaningful, more and more powerful to me, personally. It had much more than the Middle East. It ends up being America if you think about two million people in America living in prison. So, that’s kind of a theme that’s run through my work for a long time. It’s the issues of confinement. Then a couple years ago I made a piece that was a prison cell. It was based on a death row prison cell.
CH: It was a fence?
LL: No, it was actually a cell. It was called Cell, and it was in a show in London. So, I’ve kind of been thinking about these issues for a long time. Maximum Security evolved out of all those things. Again, it’s the architecture of confinement. It’s an “X” shape, but every single unit of that “X” is basically the dimension of a death row prison cell. Aside from thinking about confinement and also thinking about minimalism is something that a lot of artists have dealt into in terms of chain links and closures of things. I’m really interested in, beyond all that, the idea of wonder. When you look through the many, many layers of meshed chain link, there’s this real sense of wonder, and that to me is a super interesting place. That kind of dread and wonder put together, where you look at something and you think, this is a really ominous theme, yet you can’t take your eyes off it. I think that attraction/repulsion kind of thing is really interesting to me. That’s kind of how it evolved. I start with one piece and it ends up being something that I wanted to explore more. That’s how Maximum Security came into being. Also, living in South Africa I think a lot about issues of confinement, danger, protection. It’s kind of all around you. Barbed wire and chain link is everywhere; so, it’s kind of crept its way into my work.
CH: So, I know that you’ve done Security Fence, which was in 2005, and three years later you presented Maximum Security. I feel like there’s always a sort of link that connects your works, and you have a tendency to do works with similar themes, which appear to be in series, but they’re presented individually. Why do you think that is?
LL: Oh, I’d love to show it all at once. That would be really great, but it ends up being, you get offered a show and then you work within that space. One of the things I would love to see happen is Security Fence side by side with The Kitchen, see Backyard side by side with Maximum Security, that kind of really interesting juxtaposition. As you develop and grow as an artist, you can see that actually a lot of artists are hacking away at the similar themes. You definitely get to see that as artists get old. It’s fun in a way because I’ve always thought, “Gosh it seems like I’m all over the map.” But as I get a little older in my work and I look at it I think, “God I guess I’ve always been really interested in similar themes.” There’s these things that fascinate you and continue to fascinate you so you keep kind of working away at these ideas. Especially for my material, I work in a material that’s super, super slow and has this aspect to it that’s very confining. It’s not like I pick large brushstrokes and just dance around and throw paint. It’s very, very, very, very meticulous work, almost like a lab. My studio is a lot like a lab where we just sit there with our little toothpicks and tweezers picking way at these tiny, tiny, tiny things. That also has influenced the kind of works that I make and the kind of themes that I get interested in, just because of the process itself. A lot of people mention prison art. Truly we’re kind of using our time as a part of our material. So actually, it’s a hard question to answer because I do think that these pieces are individual sculptures, but you could put them together and start to see this continuity, maybe.
CH: Is it true that during the making of Security Fence, you allowed no talking among your assistants?
LL: No, that isn’t true. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I work in South Africa and we sing the whole time. I have a studio where singing is very big. I kind of think that the singing brings the work to life. There’s something about breathing into work through singing and dancing and a lot of talking. But I did do a piece called Sow, and Sow is a piece that I worked on in my studio in L.A. It’s not that there was no talking allowed, but I kind of have a Buddhist philosophy about work, which is that the process is really, really something very meaningful. This is not like a quilting, sewing bee. We’re not getting together to gossip and chat. Especially when I’m working with art students and people who are getting master’s degrees, you can have these really interesting conversations about, you know, “What are we doing?” “What is this process we’re working on?” That’s kind of been misunderstood that I have some kind of crazy ethic where people don’t talk, but it’s not so. Usually I have everybody who’s ever worked for me, they’re still around, still in my life. But I do think that whole thing about talking, sometimes people would say, when I have assistants who go, “It’s like a quilting bee.” I really reject that, because it’s really more like a quiet, contemplative work. It’s not obsessive. It’s quiet practice. If you’re doing quiet practice, like whatever it is you’re doing, if you’re into sewing or anything that’s sort of repetitive and it allows your mind to travel, you can really use it as a tool to watch your mind, to learn about yourself, to learn about the world. When you get involved in making something and trying to make something beautiful, there’s real dignity to that. What I do ask is no gossip or idle chatter. It’s destructive stuff. When you’re doing work that’s time-consuming, people can go down a really negative path, and I’m not into it. But we do sing and dance, so I guess you can draw your own conclusions from that.
CH: What’s the difference between your performance piece and your sculptural work?
LL: Have you seen that piece?
CH: Actually I haven’t, but I wish I could have.
LL: Well, for one thing, it’s film. It’s actually the very opposite in many ways to my work because it’s very, very raw. It’s very, very simple. It’s just me. There’s a line in the film, which is, “This is the raw bone of who I am.” It’s, rather than presenting these large, elaborate sculptures that I make, I’m presenting myself. I’m telling my story. Emily Dickinson has a poem. She says, “Tell all truth but tell it slant.” So I just look in the camera’s eye and I tell the truth. I tell my story. The difference is really that it’s dark. It’s anything but, when you use the word, “decorative.” It’s just me. But obviously my work is made by that same person, so, in a way, if you watch that, you kind of understand something about where the work is coming from, who the person is that makes the work, what their concerns are, what their history is. It helps inform the work.
CH: I know that it’s about a traumatized 6-year-old girl and her father and an unspeakable experience they had in a basement. I realize this might be a personal question, how much of Born Again was based on your real life experience?
LL: I have to tell you, the problem with the question you’re asking isn’t that it’s personal or anything like that, it’s that, unfortunately, you haven’t seen the film and it isn’t being reviewed. Which is a bummer because it’s actually an art piece. So, it’s not really meant to be, like, a literal, you know, “how much of that is true?” The only big drag about doing a performance, doing this really, very carefully made film, is that people aren’t seeing it. There’s only like 100 people who have ever seen it, and then it gets reviewed as my autobiography. Actually, the answer to that is that’s an art piece. It’s a performance piece. It’s not meant to be used as actual fact. It’s not meant to describe my story. So, people who never see this film they just think, “Oh, there’s this person who went through all that.” You gotta see it. I hope that you’ll see it. And I hope that it will someday be shown in a public place where people can decide for themselves whether it’s true or not. Like all artwork, it asks the questions. It leaves it to the audience to decide: is she telling the truth? Is that true? Or, did that really happen? That’s what art does. So, for me to answer in a literal way, that’s not what that piece was meant to do. It’s not a literal piece that you’re then meant to draw and go, “And those things happened. And then that happened.” No, it’s an art piece. You gotta watch it. Like everything, it asks questions of the audience. That’s my long answer to that question. You gotta see it and then decide for yourself whether it’s true or not.
CH: It’s not showing anywhere, is it?
LL: No, but L & M is trying to see if they can get it screened somewhere. Maybe by the time you’re running this, they might be having it screened somewhere. It was shown at the SCA in London, and people who have seen it have, kind of, been moved by it, one way or another. It’s a powerful thing. But it’s not meant to be literal. It’s not my biography. It’s an art piece.
CH: How much therapeutic value was there, if at all, in Born Again?
LL: None. It’s an art piece, so I do things out of a sense of necessity. Hopefully the idea is bigger than my initial impetus. For example, I was telling you Security Fence began with this initial idea about the Middle East; it ended up having to do with so much more than the Middle East. It’s the world opening out into bigger issues. Same thing with Born Again. I had an initial impetus about confinement, again, and transcendence to things that I’m really interested in, but then it opens out into bigger stories. A lot of people who have had their own stories just sit in the dark. My whole thing is to take things out into the light, and hopefully have them turn into something beautiful, transcendent, more than the thing that it is. But therapy, no.
CH: What is your artistic direction for 2009?
LL: Gosh, I have no idea. I think that if you knew, then you’d be a hack, and I think artists want to explore what they don’t know, and live in that place of wonder, astonishment, mystery, terror. You know, just, “What am I doing? I have no idea.” “What is this work? It’s terrible. No, it’s wonderful. No, it’s great.” This back and forth. If artists do think that way, they should get into another field. The not-knowing place is where you have to live if you’re making art, so I have no idea. That’s exciting.
