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Thomas Edwards: Hi and welcome to ARTiculated. I'm Thomas Edwards, Executive Assistant here at the Archives of American Art. This podcast receives support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Since 1958, the Archives of American Art has been building the largest collection of oral histories related to the visual arts in the world. These more than 2500 long-form interviews give witness to history as it unfolded through the voices of the figures who shaped and reimagined it.
This episode is the fourth in a series of six, each curated by a contemporary artist in response to and in conversation with past speakers from the Archives' oral history program.
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Our guest is Dionne Lee, an artist based in Columbus, Ohio who uses video, collage, and documentary to explore the relation between bodies and the landscape. In this episode, Lee turns to the 2015 oral history of Michelle Stuart, an artist who confronts the fragility of our world in conversation with Annette Leddy, and the 1995 oral history of Jerome Caja, a San Francisco-based artist who examined the brittle resilience of human life in conversation with Paul Karlstrom. Listen to history through Dionne Lee’s headphones:
Dionne Lee: My name is Dionne Lee and I am an artist working in photography, collage, and video to explore power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape.
I lived in the Bay Area for a little over six years [though I am now based in the land-locked Midwest]. I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time only when I moved to California. Having grown up in New York City, I wasn’t unfamiliar to the vastness and overwhelm of an ocean. However, I had never stood above the ocean.
I’d only seen it from sea level where this unfathomable amount of space–both in horizontal and vertical depth–becomes a flattened plane that stops with the hard edge of horizon. In northern California, you first see the ocean from above, from the edge of rough cliffs and softer, but just as unsettling, bluffs.
You get to see the surface of the ocean where its ripples and waves have larger context. This change in eye contact–peering from above–allows me to feel less like the ocean will swallow me but more like maybe I can decide to jump in instead. This, of course, would be fatal, but the invitation pulls like a magnet.
Instead, you find a trail that winds you down the cliff and then you can choose to stand face-to-face with the ocean.
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Annette Leddy: So, it's called “Ring of Fire,” then—
Michelle Stuart: Yes, which is the Pacific.
Annette Leddy: —was the Pacific with the earthquake and the, you know—
Michelle Stuart: Mm-hmm .
Annette Leddy: I'm aware that Ring of Fire as a concept, but so, it's a story of the Pacific.
Michelle Stuart: You don't read it that way. You just roam around in it.
Annette Leddy: I know, I don't read it.
Michelle Stuart: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, one might think there is a tendency to do that.
Annette Leddy: No, you realize that you don't—well, I do—I have say, here's what I tend to do; I tend to look at it. I get an impression, and then I try to break it down or I look at that way or I look at this way, and then I give up. I mean, I always try all these different strategies for reading it.
Michelle Stuart: Well, that's good. I'm glad you try.
[They laugh.]
You know, that's excellent. That's better than people just walking by. You know, because they're meant to really be looked at and thought about and then, you know, put together and how—the story you get from them.
Annette Leddy: But the intensity of this—
Michelle Stuart: See, these were letters that my parents wrote to one another when they were separated.
Annette Leddy: Oh, I see. So, it's like—it's really like a history, but breaking out of narrative—linear narrative—and working, in a sense, associatively. And you're working associatively and historically and personally all at the same time.
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Michelle Stuart: Actually, you put it better than I would have done. And that's well put.
Annette Leddy: And there are then these kind of geological forms that repeat, but they mean different things. You know, it's like kind of connections in nature that are unknowable or unreadable. They're all kind of about—to me, all your work is about how you can't read. In other words, I continually come up against this feeling. You can't read or there's no point in reading or writing. It's meaningless, or narrative—there's this—only this one other—this other narrative that you're giving us, right. And that's—
Michelle Stuart: Absolutely.
Annette Leddy: —that's what it's about.
Michelle Stuart: Yeah, yeah.
Annette Leddy: Okay. I—
Michelle Stuart: Maybe you should write about my work.
Dionne Lee: I’m interested in Michelle Stuart because of her interest in what’s unreadable. Most of the world, especially the “natural world” feels impenetrable as a contemporary person. Of course, this is rooted in our intellectual and emotional distancing from believing that we are also part of the natural world.
Alicia Longwell, Chief Curator at the Parrish Museum, calls Stuart's “Ring of Fire” the artist's “own creation myth.” “Ring of Fire” includes a grid of photographs made along the South Pacific Basin; they include images of the night sky filled with stars, people, large rocks sitting still on a beach, plants, and a photograph of letters sent between her parents.
In front stands a table that performs as an altar, with stones, Tonga tapa cloth, seeds, a woven leather basket and a vintage wood container. The title of the piece seems to be in opposition with what a viewer might see. The ring of fire, geologically speaking, is a network of volcanic eruptions. Not quite a ring but instead it takes the shape of a crooked horseshoe sitting beneath the rim of the Pacific Ocean.
Looking at the image collection in Stuart's “Ring of Fire” it is hard to see the destructive forces that live below where these images were made. It’s the difference, perhaps, in viewing a space from sea level or cliff-height.
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Jerome Caja: I've always been a frail, sick man. I've always been thin and delicate and weak, so I've always had a sense that life was fragile and that is especially clear in my work. The sickness now, whether it's
AIDS or whatever it is, I happen to have AIDS. All illnesses have the same kind of demoralizing and crippling effect. Like now I have a-- I don't know if I'm so much dying from AIDS as I am dying from the medicines they're giving me to keep something alive. I don't know.
I have CMV retinitis, so I'm going blind, and the treatment for that is foscarnet. Now the foscarnet has given me pancreatitis and I have wasting syndrome, and wasting syndrome means that I need to eat as much as I can and the treatment for pancreatitis is not to eat at all. So I don't have a problem of losing sight; that kind of thing doesn't traumatize me.
The problem I have is with the physical discomfort and pain when it's constant. If I was in pain once in a while I can handle that, but when you're in pain all the time, you become very irritable, and that's what I don't like. I think that going blind, I can still paint because I still can create what I want to see.
And I'm not sure, but I think it's interesting to
look through drawings I've done from when I was in good health to when my eyesight has gone, to see how that change is. Now I've gone and done that with some of my friends, but they haven't noticed any change. [laughs] So I don't know how to work that theory out, because it doesn't seem to be working. But I figured that I probably don't have a problem because I'm creating, and of course, I'm going to create what I can see, so my work will lend itself to being seen, where as opposed to taking something that was already created
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and trying to see that like I'm looking at a photograph or a writing or something.
When you're looking at that you don't have that control, so you have to conform, and if you can't see it clearly, well then, it's not so easy to conform. I know I'm adjusting, I'm learning how to live without sight. So there are certain things people take for granted, or that I used to take for granted, that I can no longer do, like I have to look at the steps when I go down the steps.
I have to do things like rely on my memory. If I can see the shape of a person, OK, I know it's a person. I don't need to see the detail.
Dionne Lee: Jerome Caja was born in Cleveland, OH, just a couple of hours from where I now reside in Columbus, OH. Caja worked in painting, mixed media, sculpture, and performance within the queer scene of 1980s San Francisco where he moved to pursue his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. The scholar Rudi Bleys describes Caja’s performances as [quote] ‘“post-apocalyptic’ deconstructive drag” [unquote]
Any performative work relies on the body making anything perhaps relies on the body. Caja described his body as always being thin and weak, and this becomes true for him through his diagnosis of HIV and later passing away from complications related to AIDS.
Caja’s sculpture Earthquake detector presents the body as a site for prediction, a bravery to scan the future for potential destruction.
Outside of the Smithsonian Archives, it is very difficult to find information on this specific sculpture. In fact, the physical description reads: “1 photographic print: black and white; 25 x 20 cm.”
It does not list clay as a material [which I assume the sculpture to be ceramic], it does not include the height of the actual form, though from the black and white tiled floor it rests on I can believe it is relatively the height of an average adult. If I had to apply a fantasized material description of the piece I would say: “a tall, cylindrical, armless figure, sculpted of clay with ridges that resemble columns in relief, almost as if the figure itself is an uncovered ancient tower, hollow at the base, but still standing and enduring.”
There are windows cut into the torso and a crack at the shoulder, perhaps formed from one of its “detections.” The head leans forward, slightly in front of the body, leaning towards the future, there are windows for eyes and a zig-zagged hole for its teeth and mouth, a crown of pinched clay at the head.
Jerome Caja: I had someone come and photograph the entire house.
Paul J. Karlstrom: Good, good. Will copies come with your papers, I hope?
Jerome Caja: Yes. That's why I had them do it. [laughs]
Paul J. Karlstrom: But it's really one of the most extraordinary settings with your work, and sometimes it's actually difficult to tell what are things that intrigue you or delight you and you then set around and which things are the works. But you're sitting in here on a sofa, and earlier you had your feet up and you reminded me very much of Odalisque which, I suppose, you wouldn't mind that. And we're sitting doing this tape and I'm about, probably about six feet or eight feet from you.
Jerome Caja: Oh, you're not that far.
Paul J. Karlstrom: About five feet, if I lean back it's six. But would you recognize me from this distance?
Jerome Caja: It's hard to say because I already know your voice.
Paul J. Karlstrom: My voice is a giveaway?
Jerome Caja: Yes, the voice is a giveaway and even though I can't really see the detail, if I have the slightest clue I will probably guess. That doesn't mean I can see it though. It just means that I'm taking the other factors and allowing them to dictate to me.
Paul J. Karlstrom: It sounds to me as if what you said earlier that memory is playing more and more a role in how you see—
Jerome Caja: Yes, I must say.
Paul J. Karlstrom: And I think that's a very interesting observation because that is quite different than just responding optically—
Jerome Caja: Yes.
Paul J. Karlstrom: —to a surface, to shapes and forms and then it's filtered through memory. One would expect that it would open different doors, let's say, into perception. And it's for you to say, not for me, but this is what struck me as very much possibility in what sounds like, in some respect, as a new relationship to your work, through this process. It's a side product of a symptom of your disease, which if you want to get philosophical about it,
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in some respects, you could say, this is a positive result.
Jerome Caja: Oh, yes. I believe that from any situation you can derive positive things. I don't think that, even though somethings you can derive positive things from, are necessarily worthwhile to go through. You can be beat and raped and from that you can get a lot of positive things, but I think you can get those positive things in little less traumatic of a way, [laughs] or maybe not. Maybe only through trauma can you get certain sensitivities, and certain, you know, things.
Paul J. Karlstrom: Well, if seeing the details of your own work of art is
becoming more difficult, there isn't the same kind of clarity.
Jerome Caja: Right, I have to look at other things within that work.
Paul J. Karlstrom: So, I'm wondering if one of them isn't the content of the subject, the symbolism, what these things represent, not exactly the way they're realized or drawn in or painted. You work, I should mention, you generally work very small.
Jerome Caja: Yes. [laughs]
Paul J. Karlstrom: This should be known because we're talking about vision, and one would think it would be absolutely requisite, because you work so tiny.
Jerome Caja: Bottle caps.
Paul J. Karlstrom: But given a decreased power in clearly seeing, there being perhaps, to work quite as minutely as you did before, does your attention or concern turn more to the "meaning" of these works?
Jerome Caja: No, because when I work, I have a working behavior and it's even less intellectual thought; it's more habitual. It's something that I just do. I just go into it and just do it. Usually, I'm telling a story and playing and chatting with myself. 'Cause, that's what my painting is, it's me talking to myself, telling jokes, or making a statement, or losing my temper, or whatever. Usually, that's what I'm doing, when I'm painting, I'm talking to myself, I'm having a private conversation.
Paul J. Karlstrom: So these works really are a rather direct expression or state of mind, your temper, your concerns, your interests, maybe being interrupted and having your thinking shifted a different way and that would show up in the —
Jerome Caja: Oh, yes. Well, the thing with working on the small things that is beneficial is that if my emotional state changes I can easily work on something else. I'm not wed to a piece that I have to finish it before I start something new. So if I lose interest in it, I can simply put it aside and pick something else up. Usually, I start, just lately, because lately, I've been working in this room here. Now I have paint in another room, and when I feel well enough, I work in there. I have a much bigger range of color and paint in there. Here I'm limited; I have black, white and a few color things.
Dionne Lee: It feels safe to say that when Caja speaks of his commitment to his own vulnerability, that he's talking about both his work and his body. This recording occurred just a few months before his death in November of 1995. He acknowledged fragility as a complicated state of being. It is both a sign of strength and holding its own sense of danger.
This makes sense when considering that culturally we align fragility with a sense of weakness, a deficiency that leaves us open to the threat of vulnerability and requires our own willingness to break or be broken. The memory shared between Caja and his friend Anna van der Meulen highlights this academy of vulnerability being built as a gift which can be taken literally in the sense of Caja's sharp vessel.
But also as a dare asking, can you learn how to maneuver around its jagged edge?
The willingness to break or be broken feels like an apt takeaway from Caja's, Earthquake Detector and Stuart's Ring of Fire. These works together bring into focus the potential of breakage as a pathway to vulnerability and how to reckon with our own states of fragility. As Caja states, it is easy to hurt someone and therefore, perhaps it is harder to put ourselves on the fault line .
Jerome Caja: Well, part of my esthetic is fragility. I've always been a very fragile person in certain respects. 'Cause I'm small and little.
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So fragility is part of my personality and I'm fascinated by fragility. I think it's a beautiful thing.
Anna van der Meulen: And also by fragile things that can actually hurt you, you know. You made sets of sadomasochistic dinnerware that was really fragile, really sharp, really thin and I had a coffee cup that could cut your lips off.
Jerome Caja: [laughs]
Paul J. Karlstrom: Oh man, did you ...?
Anna van der Meulen: I used it for years; I knew where to put my mouth. It was frightening.
Jerome Caja: [coughs]
Paul J. Karlstrom: This is fabulous. I want to know about this. What are you trying to do? Giving her such a cup.
Jerome Caja: You know, such dichotomy. Something frail but can kill you.
Anna van der Meulen: But can really hurt you.
Paul J. Karlstrom: Well, now tell me, describe this cup.
Anna van der Meulen: I still have it at home. Like I said, it's thin and it had a pattern pressed into it.
Jerome Caja: I made whole dinner sets.
Anna van der Meulen: Yeah, and on the edge, the lip was the just the clay and was basically bent outward and torn, so it had just jagged edges. After he went to graduate school, I would see slides of his work and ceramics became the big thing for the most part, although some the things I see here, I haven't seen before, but they just turned into a flat wall, like these images, right?
Jerome Caja: Yes.
Anna van der Meulen: They look more and more like drawings, and he started coloring them more and more like you were doing his drawings.
Jerome Caja: Yes.
Anna van der Meulen: And eventually you weren't doing ceramics at all and you started doing the drawings and the drawings became thicker with the nail polish.
Jerome Caja: Yes, with the aspect of layering.
Anna van der Meulen: Some of your drawings look like your ceramics. You couldn't touch them or have them pretty much ... you might have a hard time. Oh, you could see they were great ...
Paul J. Karlstrom: Do you agree with Anna's report there?
Jerome Caja: Yes, Yes.
Paul J. Karlstrom: OK.
Jerome Caja: Of course, I don't think the paintings were so fragile, but some of them are. There's a whole, entire— I love to play and experiment. I took paint remover and put it on a couple paintings and let it dry, then paint on top of that. So I have some things, that every time you touch it, it just falls apart. A lot of that, too, is life. Life is fragile. People are in a sense fragile.
Paul J. Karlstrom: Now, this is what I was going to ask, is there an emotional connection to this or a psychological as well as the obvious?
Jerome Caja: Life is fragile, fragility is all around. People all have a fragility. It's easy to hurt someone.
Paul J. Karlstrom: Is this where your own experience, frequently, have you found in general, and many people use this same kind of fragility?
Jerome Caja: I think because I feel fragile myself, and that in my work it's the natural thing to come out.
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Dionne Lee: Caja’s Earthquake Detector and Stuart's Ring of Fire address what cannot be seen but always felt. As someone who works in photography, particularly around land, the environment, and our bodies' relationships to it, I am always struggling with the picture's ability to represent the wholeness of an experience of a place.
It should be enough to replicate exactly what you see…but the photograph can easily fail at replicating what one might have felt. And that is because the felt is rarely visible. It is inside the body: the human body, ocean body, earth body. And yet still, a black and white photograph of Jerome Caja’s Earthquake Detector gives me the feeling of endurance through fragility and a determination to lean towards the future despite the risk of toppling over, but you must be chasing the future to detect it, even if it means chasing an earthquake, even if means your body becomes the earthquake.
Jerome Caja: I really do love fragility, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Paul J. Karlstrom: Do you identify then with fragility? We started this interview you said that you were a fragile child.
Jerome Caja: I most certainly do.
Paul J. Karlstrom: And so it has for you an esthetic, as well as a physical descriptive quality?
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Jerome Caja: And a personality trait. I can be, not that I can't break and still go on, but I have a fragility, although I think, I don't really have a fragile personality. My personality is pretty strong, but my body is fragile. I am a hard-driven person, but my body is just not able to keep up. That's what's fragile to me. It's always been fragile, so I've always had this sense of gloomy, doomy, you know, even before I was sick. And we knew, my friends and I knew, that when I was sick they were going to try and associate my artwork with the disease. It was kind of irritating because before I had the disease I was doing the same type of thing. It's not that I'm ashamed of the disease, it's just that I think the suffering and pain that I'm portraying in my work is more than just my pain. It's the pain everyone goes through when they reach a certain point in their life that it becomes overwhelming, 'cause everyone has to go through that crap. You don't have to have a special disease. The only way you can avoid it is an accident. If you get run over by a car, you can probably avoid a lot of the hassle.
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Dionne Lee: We cannot actually see the Ring of Fire, but it’s been felt by the earth’s surface and those who walk it. Stuart places an altar in front of at the ring's edge and from her view, this ever-moving rim holds flowers, people in recline, ships on still water, and the cosmos frozen in a photograph.
Michelle Stuart: Well, you know, the force of nature when you grow up in California—I don't know whether you—did you grow up in California?
Annette Leddy: Yeah, I did.
Michelle Stuart: All right. So, I remember, one of the first things I remember is a big earthquake.
Annette Leddy: The earthquake thing is so terrifying. That's one thing I kind of—I have to remind myself a lot in New York; just say, "Annette, you don't have to worry about earthquakes." I have to tell myself that.
Michelle Stuart: We are on a fault here. Canal Street is on a fault.
Annette Leddy: Yeah, but have you ever had an earthquake?
Michelle Stuart: You know, I think the building moves.
[Outro music plays through end]
Thomas Edwards: This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman at the Archives of American Art. It was edited by the team at Better Lemon Creative Audio
Our music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting.
For show notes, work cited, and additional resources, visit aaa.si.edu/articulated.
The Archives is grateful to Dionne Lee for her light, focus, and energy.
This guest-curated episode received support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.
If you enjoy ARTiculated, please consider rating and sharing it.
The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like ARTiculated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.
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