What was your process for creating the photographs in your exhibition?
My practice is about the experience of making art rather than a process of making art. A process-based practice is more concerned with the cultivation of a style than the content and context of a work of art. Beauty is about style, but beauty is never enough and it means nothing in a work of art.
How did you choose the images for this exhibition?
“Peripatetic” is a project in four parts: “Photographs with an Audience: San Antonio,” a suite of thirteen color photographs, a suite of works on paper, and “A Salon for Performance Art.”
I edited hundreds of medium-format, film photographs into a suite of thirteen images that I made between July 2017 and July 2018. A photograph is a text. The photographs installed at Artpace are a discursive text authored by a peripatetic artist. I made roughly forty works on paper in my studio at Artpace, of which fourteen are included in the exhibition (I destroyed the other works).
For the images from Photographs with an Audience: San Antonio, do you want people to know the story behind each image?
No. I’m not interested in the viewer knowing the narrative behind each photograph. The titles of the photographs may offer the viewer some sense of context, but I think it’s important for artists to withhold explaining every detail of their practice. The tension in “Photographs with an Audience: San Antonio” is between the experience of the audience that was present for and engaged with the live performance and photographic representations of that experience as discreet art objects for passive contemplation in a gallery/museum context.
Tell us about the works on paper and how they relate to the other pieces in the exhibition. Why choose drawing instead of photographs?
The works on paper and the photographs are distinct bodies of work that don’t overlap with or relate to each other. Photographs are “original copies” and drawings are singular, unique forms of expression.
You frequently attach the names of places where performances took place to a body of work. What’s important for you about specifying the location?
“Photographs with an Audience: San Antonio” is the eighth iteration of the project in the past decade. It’s important to distinguish each iteration by location because it imparts a particular context for the content of the photographs. For example, “Photographs with an Audience: San Antonio (Ted Cruz)” is more pertinent to Texans than “Photographs with an Audience: Manchester (Tories).” In both instances there is no audience present is the photographs, which perhaps signifies the global intolerance for far-right racist, xenophobic, misogynist politicians who intend to annihilate democracy and oppress women and people of color.
