How does your understanding of each other’s work start?
Z: I think the piece that I was showing in Moscow isn’t so obviously based on negative imprints but it’s something I’ve been working on for ages. It’s always really fascinated me – working with objects then taking over the empty space that surrounds them as a point of departure. But also lots of physical traces of my fingers and my body, and sculptural tools being left in the material. And so I just really like Juliana’s piece a lot and it was my favorite in the show.
JCL: I looked up your work before we met. When I was google stalking all the participants in the show. I thought there was something about it that was really compelling and it definitely resonated with being interested in impressions and negative space and this quality of clay that it is absorptive and and also extremely good at retaining information so it has this kind of mnemonic function and I thought you were working with that too. There were also these themes of nature with what you were dong that I found really appealing – as someone who is also interested in the new informe (especially the female form which is so often correlated with nature and metaphoricized as nature). So, that seems really relevant and then this whole thing was really put together by you.
But there’s something really different about your work too. Juliana, your work captures movement (in many ways), or at least one side of the coin is all about this register of movement whereas I think there is something more static about the castings you are doing doing Zoe: Okay, a finger is inserted into a mold, but it’s complete in a moment in time...
Z: Well I think my work is further removed from the whole figure of the human body. It’s based on fragments [of it] that then turn into something else. Both in terms of scale, and a whole shape.
JCL: But I also think that there is a suggestion of animation in what’s you’re doing. For example, the snakes feel very animated – and a lot of people felt very threatened by them as these probing fingers that could really…
They’re symbolic gestures, but not the gesture as caught in motion by the medium.
Z: No, definitely not. Though I do think that a lot of it is prompted by this very different method of working. It would be completely inconceivable for me to make something out of clay that could both both spontaneously capture bodily movements and then be like a fully functional piece in itself – just based on the limits that ceramics have – how large you can work in, how you transport things around and fire them and glaze them and fire them again. It’s a direction I couldn’t even think in. It just wouldn’t be feasible.
So, they look kind of similar – both mediums are made out of powdered substances that you add water too. But one needs to be cooked, and the other cooks itself.
Z: Yes, it’s interesting how the plaster heats up on its own
JCL: Yes: cooks itself. It’s a chemical reaction.
Z: What I also like in our show is how we’re using the human body as a point of departure. Specifically, hands. They’re a part of our bodies that are also very much a tool. And plaster is also kind of tool in sculpture. You’re usually using it as a first step towards a final presentation in bronze, or some other material.
JCL: It’s usually a sketch material.
But not ceramics?
Z: And clay too. Very often it’s just something you have to have in your studio. If you’re casting things in metal, then you’re definitely using clay along the way.
So why are these materials have to be so primary in your work? Why not use metal?
JCL: You mean other than the expense?... I like plaster a lot. I think the idea of making art that someone can look at and think ‘I could have totally made that’ is good. It’s so simple. It’s just plaster, it probably cost a hundred dollars to make this massive piece of sculpture and then it diverts attention away from technical prowess or the expense or production o value of it into the ideas, in a way.
Z: It reminds you of the working methods. It keeps the labor more directly involved with the final product. This is also true of the Vaseline which we covered the windows with. Vaseline is also this really important and omnipresent and very cheap, and disposable important thing in the studio.
JCL: It’s also very bodily. It’s used in surgery to stop people bleeding. It’s used in tattoos to stop people bleeding, to keep your lips from chapping
Z: And it was used in old Hollywood movies and sixties and seventies soft porn videos to soften lenses.
JCL: That’s how we got to it. There’s this idea of doing something with the windows that would intervene. Maybe projecting light out of the windows. Then it worked into this idea of the windows as a lens into the space, and this idea of the soft porn, romantic, sensual eye that is created by this slight hazing of things. The Vaseline on the windows became this kind of way to do that.
The window is this kind of liminal surface to the room. It’s a surface but its…
JCL: …not really visible…
Z: It’s very much the eyes of the room. That was something we moved away from, but our initial ideas for the show was seeing the space as a body; a female body or a feminized body. That was also part of this light concept – with everything being cast in this embryonic rose. IT was funny seeing it in the daylight, taking the picture. The walls look exactly the same shade of pink as the floor is. We put light gels on the lights. They’re very feint.
The sculptures themselves aren’t transparent, but the wall hanging is…
JCL: There is a theme that came up with what we started the show on. This theme of permeability. In the works, with the snakes, probing… the sculptures that are bodies that seem not entirely defined, that are somehow melting or falling apart. There’s this idea of transparency and overlap within our collaboration too – fusing these works, you start to get a sense of a loss of authorship, or clarity as to where these ideas are coming from which was quite tied into this theme of masturbation that we started this idea of the show on.
Z: Yes, interpenetration on so many different levels
JCL: laughs
But none of your sculptures are very transparent...
Z: You’re basically seeing through a body into the space that surrounds the sculpture
So now we have to talk about bodies, and sex, I guess. Obviously it’s very sexy. We keep talking about masturbation and porn, but it’s not a given that bodies have to be thought of as sexy. Than can be just thought of as material, and obviously materiality looms large as a topic in the works. You’re sculptors, after all.
JCL: …what the fuck does that mean? Materiality.
I think that the process part of your sculptures and the accidents that happen are a function of how the material behaves, even without prompting.
JCL: Yeah, but I could say that the materiality of shirt: Your collar’s vertical because the materiality of your shirt.
Z: But there is this really heightened sense of processuality to it. Maybe it’s not so trendy any more, but for a while I was seeing so many cement sculptures that were all about erasing any trace of madeness, of it having been worked on or worked through. Everything was very machinic and perfect, with tight edges and absolutely no trace of a human body having worked on it.
So when did you decide that it was time to talk about masturbation?
JCL: Straight away!
Z: That was one of the first emails we ping ponged.
Who broached the subject and why?
Z: Well, it’s pretty funny that the space is called Landing Strip. And sweet Michael [X] didn’t realize that in English there is such a direct association…
JCL: …with a thin crotch wax
Z: And I had just recently discovered this list of synonyms for female masturbation that was hilarious online and I was really loving that and choosing a new word from it every day and trying to drop it into conversations I was having with people. And I thought that went really well with The Landing Strip
But masturbation is a solitary thing, and this is a dual show
JCL: Is it? I don’t know? Can’t you jerk someone else off?
I suppose if someone else is there you could all it mutual masturbation.
JCL: Like a hand job, as you call it in the US. It’s such a nasty name
You could have called the show hand job, actually.
JCL: No, Manual Override is so much cooler though, because not only is one of those terms of the list of masturbation expressions, but also this idea of things becoming so fetishized as being removed from human touch and human making, like what Zoe was saying, and then manual override is this forceful return to a more tactile and direct processual relationship to what you’re making as an artist. And including that- - saying we’re going to include our bodies. We’re not this disembodied thing, digitized suggestion that you can escape from your body. Also, the sexualized and the gendering is also super related to that. Because if you’re going to talk about something physical you’re already engaging with something that is sexed and that is gendered by culture.
Z: At least I’m working in this medium that is also very classically feminized.
JCL: That’s true. Ceramics and textiles, where all the women were thrown into.
Is plaster gendered and feminized in the same way?
JCL: Not really, it’s more macho.
Z: Think about its industrial uses, in dentistry.
JC: It’s very a gendered. Just for example. This normal quantity of plaster that comes in a bag is 25 kilos. That’s a pretty heavy bag. I guess clay also comes in big bags. These materials normally require big arms more than they do delicate hands.
So when did you decide to insert your piece into her piece?...
Z: It’s something that we had decided we would do in terms of creating these pieces that are very much tangible collaborations and not separate pieces in one show that are juxtaposed
Have you done that before?
Z: Yes. I did two shows this year with an artist called Lauren Galt, where we would brainstorm and make loads of things and show them together as very much joined interpenetrative pieces and installations that encompassed loads of input from both of us and weren’t distinguishable as individual pieces.
But not you, Juliana?
JCL: Well, you know, I had experimented in college…
laughs
Do tell… Did you like it?
JCL: Yeah, I liked it. But it confused some friendships
Was this experimentation something you, until now, thought you’d left behind? Something you got over?
JCL: Well, I feel like it was more related to the people than the actual materiality that we were dealing with
Just a phase…
JCL: No I think the extent of where I’ve worked really collaboratively has been more of a curatorial thing. Curating shows where it’s a real fusion of ideas. With making work itself it’s always been very much solitary. I’m usually working alone and making things. When I have collaborated it’s always been a collaboration in the sense that I’m dictating it. It hasn’t been a complete fusion of ideas, as much as inviting someone to do a very specific task – like a dancer to come up with a choreography.
Z: I’ve done a lot of that in the past, but I’ve always felt that it would kind of creep, and stream and bleed out into more than that. I feel like everything else that I work on – all the community projects that I do – and the political work that I do is all community and collaboration based. That’s something I often miss in art, in a solitary studio work.
Obviously there was not curator to this show…
Z: It was auto-curated.
JCL: Well, Zoe was invited by Michael, so to a certain extent she was curated into the show, or into the space, and then she brought me along. So she brought me into the show
Z: But he’s a classic artist curator in terms of ‘I’m giving you this opportunity, do what you want’ I don’t think he sees himself as a curator at all.
JCL: So, yeah, we got rid of the middle man.
So many puns spring to mind. So, why the floor?
Z: We wanted something that was really total. Totally transforming every aspect of the room. It made sense not just to do something with the windows, and with the light and then place things on the walls.
JCL: I think it works really well. I was very surprised when we laid it down. It looked really good.
Z: Did you notice that it was snake skin?
JCL: AS soon as we were at the fabric shop and looking at options it was so clear that it was going to be pink snakeskin pleather.
We talk a lot about the process of it all – not just physical, but the process of the collaboration, but it still has its symbolic implications. You can read a lot of symbolism into it. Did you discuss that? People have been talking about your finger sculptures as a resembling snakes. Did you discuss that reading, for example?
Z: It’s really funny because I haven’t been thinking of them as snakes. They don’t have tails and they don’t have heads but in a previous installation I was making lots of snakes that were actually snakes and there were one or two that did have heads. I did this finger casting workshop with people in Switzerland. I cast their fingers and then invited them to a show and they had to see where their finger was in the sculptures. It was a lot of fun. How do I make art in a place where people are not interested in it at all, where the project could evolve into something really fun?
Yes, but there’s not just gestural feelings in a way the plaster moves, but there is a piece that looks like a ‘come hither’ gesture. It’s got it’s codified meaning...
Z: Well, it’s maybe a ‘come hither’, but it’s also a ‘tap the G-spot’. You didn’t get that?
Well, I didn’t see a clit. Or a G-spot. But then again men can’t find the G-spot…
JCL: Some can….
Well, there’s my problem.
JCL: Well, for example, my friend Rose regularly attends this orgasmic meditation (OM) classes where basically it’s a meditation class where you go as a female participant, or someone with a vagina who wants to do this. You go and you lay down on a yoga mat and you open your legs and as a volunteer participant (you can be female or male). You attend and you finger the person. That’s the meditation. The job of the person who is laying on the floor is to not move. They can’t writhe. Their job is just to lay there and allow themselves to give themselves in to the feeling of it, and this total stranger is just fingering you. And this ‘come hither’ movement of the finger is really encouraged because the idea is to give someone a more than clitoral orgasm. And this idea is pretty elusive to some women and there are a lot of these weird feelings of you need to give something back, which are very coded in terms in terms of gender. When you’re born with a female body you have to be nurturing and giving. You can’t just sit there and receive pleasure. The idea of being able to relax into that situation where you can have pleasure and orgasm that is purely vaginal (which is really difficult for a lot of women), so this movement has been popularized in some ways.
So it’s a very concrete image for the show, at least the way you’re describing it.
Z: It’s funny, this overlap between gesture and meaning being culturally coded – and really internationally show.
JCL: ‘Come Here’. I will ‘cum here’ laughs
So we’re back to word play…
Z: You’re going to have a hard time trying to spell come [cum?] in this interview.
JCL: One that that has struck me is that you [Zoe] do translation, and that requires a sense or a relationship to language that is elusive to me. That is quite sophisticated as to how meaning relates to words, and I think there is an element in some of your work that has a language quality to it. The way you’re dealing with certain things like the ‘come hither’ gesture – or the intentionally of the figures, in the ways they are moving, that has something to do with words.
Z: That’s funny, because I enjoy reading so much and language is some important to me on so many different levels but I feel like I lost the joy in writing a long time ago. I feel like when I started doing a lot of grant writing I can’t see the true beauty. I can’t see the pure soul of what I want to write through this. But maybe also growing up bilingually has something to do it. For me it’s really important for my works to be readable and coded in lots of different ways, to have a lot of ambiguity. I want people who don’t get any possible references, to also be able to appreciate my art.
JCL: That’s important for me too. That resonates a lot
Z: Yes, our children’s corner [with aqua pearls] too.
JCL: I loved it. Little kids went straight there and started playing with the aqua pearls.
Z: I caught my two friends who had stayed up all night before, and who had been huddled on a bench for most of the opening also leaving with handfuls of them...
JCL: They’re so attractive
They’re also pearls…
JCL: Well, ‘twirl the pearl’ was on the masturbation synonym list
Z: Diving for pearls…
Which you always find in clams, obviously.
Z: That was one of the harsher ones – ‘slapping the wet clam’ or something like that.
Shucking the oyster?
JCL: yep, that’s a classic.
So, you’re involving a man in the exhibition – in the person of Paul Arambula – who you’re collaborating with on a performance.
Z: Yes, but he’s being billed as Paula.
JCL: It was a total accident...
Z: No, actually it was on purpose!
JCL: Really? Did you do that? laughs
Why can’t Paul be Paul?
JCL: …laughs… I love it that you Paula Arambula sounds so much like Paula Abdul.
Z: Why not?
Well, you didn’t ask him.
Z: Yes, I did.
Tell me about Hanne’s contribution, in the form of the exhibition text. Why have someone else speak for you two?
Z: I love the way that she writes and verbalizes ideas. IT made a lot of sense to have a step removed, describing one’s own intensions. It makes things more interesting to have a different perspective on them. I’m really sick of super concert
Press releases, that describe things before you even see them (in an invite).
JCL: It’s a cool opportunity for it to be an artwork, as opposed to having it be just a blurb about a show.
But then it’s a three-way show?
Z: What I saw in the text was this struggle to capture things that can be so many different things. Just to see how someone puzzles together these different fragments. But the collaboration with her is a very different level of collaboration than the one that we (JCL and I) had together, and what we’re going to do with Paul. All of that was so much more intimate – really hashing out ideas, going back and forth.
Zoe, your ceramic pieces were made in advance. Juliana, your work was made onsite. There are different moments of production. Were you there when the piece was made (Zoe)? Were you appropriating just a given sculpture (of Zoe’s, Juliana?). Did you discuss where the sculptural ensemble would go – in its exhibited moment?
JCL: Even though a lot of the work was realized in separate spaces and times, it was very much discussed beforehand. The ideas of what was going to be in the show were discussed, and then there were moments when I wasn’t a part of the glazes that Zoe was going to use, but she sent me images of a wide selection of glazes before she did, and then we narrowed down to final options through discussion. Zoe wasn’t necessarily there when I developed some of the ideas for these sculptures, but we worked in the same way – I sent her ideas, and we narrowed down. There was a collaboration throughout.
Z: We decided on all the aspects of the show before we started installing (except the floor). A lot of the placement of works in the show were decided on together, in the space.
What does this show mean in Berlin? As opposed to anywhere else? Is it worth asking the question?
JCL: I think we’ll both have different perspectives, since I live in New York and Zoe is based here in Berlin.
Z: I think within the program of the gallery [The Landing Strip], it was important to have some female and feminist positions.
JCL: It definitely looks very different than what has happened in the gallery before, which is cool
Do You see yourself in dialogue or reaction to any specific artists in Berlin? Any other agendas?
Z: I always feel that there is a lot of synchronized thinking that ties into this relationship with trendy ideas. But I feel that a lot of female artists that I know are interested in this corporeal, tactile substances that have human markings in them and specific palletes. I’m thinking of Katharina fengler that are made out of doughs, and these very squeezable, malleable substances that are super colorful. I feel that is a similar wavelength. We’re thinking in a similar visual way
JCL: There’s an interesting moment as a female artist right now, because you have a legacy to look back on. For a lot of female artists where were operating in the 50s and 60s, they didn’t really have anything to look back on and have a sense of ‘what is the conversation with people who have had a similar life experience, that I can express with’. For us we can look back at Linda Benglis, at Eva Hesse, and all these female artists that were really exploring this territory of the informe, the formless… for whatever reason, we came to a certain degree to a territory – as female sculptors. This notion of something disintegrating, something falling apart, something that is not exactly defined according to specific geometries that have been more associated or coded as a male territory.
Z: That ties in with all this ‘of the moment’ thought – of posthumanism, and biomorphism, and of course Donna Haraway, whose writing I really love. That’s always been very inspiring for my work – of thinking of the human in relation to other animals and other lifeforms.
Is there anything else we haven’t mentioned that were important to discuss?
JCL: For me this show is more directly sexual than anything I’ve ever made in the past. I feel like using nudity in art, I’ve been a really strong advocate for nudity being perceived as not sexual, necessarily. I can be naked and I’m not sexed, just naked. But doing something that is a show that goes very specifically to the theme of ‘I am sexed, as a body’ feels really risky, interesting because it starts to move this conversation of figuration as not just a formalist trope but starts to bring it much more into the present and the political that the body actually inhabits.
It took you a long while to get there.
JCL: Yeah!
Z: For me, this political moment in time is really relevant for me to want to go there. It does really feel like, on the one hand, the female body in art has always been so gendered and sexualized. This risk of of bad feminist art, so much messy body stuff, is something people really hate. There’s a taboo feeling to it. But for me when I think about peaches relationship with the body