Ariel Goldberg: What cultural events have we been to?
Charity Coleman: We have been to many cultural events.
AG: I go to about three cultural events a week.
CC: I like going to cultural events. It’s not subsidized though. A month ago I went to the Whitney, to that show they put together every once in a while. It was hot in there, it was really crowded. When I was standing in line to buy my student ticket with my expired student ID I dropped a quarter and this man next to me he looked down at it and then stepped over so I could bend down pick up my quarter.
AG: So you thought it was his social responsibility to pick it up for you?
CC: OK all right, I’ll play this game. But I’m not happy about it. There was all this stuff. A lot of sculpture. The Obama Couch, this woman plastered with newspaper articles, reupholstered it, did the cushions, everything, it was from her childhood home. Then she placed awkward ceramic objects on it.
AG: Obama merch?
CC: No. Just these objects, like ceramic vases. Then there were two different photography rooms. Both of them contained disclaimers on a text introducing the piece. Some of this material may be disturbing to certain people. One of them was this American soldier who was severely disfigured while in Iraq. He looked like he had suffered a lot. He was burned. Then there was another room of Afghani women who had self-immolated due to familial abuse.
AG: What does that mean?
CC: Set themselves on fire. They were recuperating from severe burns. Why was this part of the Biennial? I don’t know. I’m not looking at how the photo captures something or the photographer’s technique, I’m just thinking about human suffering. Is that the point?
AG: This reminds me of Peter Galassi, the MOMA Photo curator at this symposium on photography said photographs can do fine without talking; they don’t need us to do all this talking. But I think that’s at times why we make photographs, to talk about them.
CC: I hope he got up and went home and made a sandwich and read the newspaper.
AG: No, he stayed.
CC: Why do people torment themselves?
AG: What was the wall text for those photographs of human suffering?
CC: So and so went in and visited a burn trauma unit and took pictures of these women braving their injuries. Stephanie Sinclair is her name. The Obama couch: Jessica Jackson Hitchins. Nina Berman did the disfigured soldier photos of him with his high school sweetheart— I hate that word— they were getting married and she looked absolutely terrified it was all over her face and the text said that they divorced about three months after their wedding. Kerry Tribe’s dual projection. All my notes on this show are women’s pieces. I think it’s a coincidence.
AG: I don’t think it’s a coincidence. What were your impressions of the Headlands open house?
CC: There was something very luxurious about it. This is what art could be for artists in this country if we were just a little bit more generous. Because there were kids there, people from all walks of life, wandering around. Artists had their space, they had their materials, they had their freedom, they had their time, they had all the allowances. There was something really utopian about it. Why does this have to be a utopia, why can’t it be a reality?
AG: I’ve been thinking about how quickly people walk through an art space. What happens if you make a text-based work, meaning the concepts and the script is based on a time commitment? How do you get people to remain?
CC: Lock the doors.
AG: An artist at Headlands, Stina Wirfelt, did a re-visitation of a John Baldassari piece where he photographed every truck that passed him in between Santa Barbara and LA. Hers are all pictures from Google. Satellite because she is based in Scotland but is visiting CA. She made a big grid of the pictures of trucks passing and is giving them away as posters like Felix Gonzalez Torres. They look pretty good for being Google images.
CC: Yeah, the perspective’s the same and the sky is blue.
AG: I’m thinking about how conceptual art requires a text, which is contrary to what people want to experience in an art space, like people are anti-literate or a title is just enough or the right amount. How do you keep people sustained in a space, especially when presenting them with language? Do you have to demarcate a performance?
CC: Sometimes it’s better to leave things unsaid.
AG: Where we left off earlier is the discrepancy or the extremities between the live, in-person poetry readings and what follows immediately after, the feedback people receive.
CC: All they want to do is get drunk.
AG: But on the “blogosphere” there happens to be a circulation of rather harsh criticism not even about people’s poetry but about their personalities.
CC: Some only say what they like over and over again. You don’t dislike anything? You don’t have questions? There’s all this talk of poets as critics, having the ability to write critically. There’s this collective interest in it. How can this exist if they can’t incorporate it into their intimate circle? When is thinking critically appropriate? It’s not value judgments; I’m not talking about if it’s good or bad. I’m talking about what’s working or not, what direction is something moving in.
AG: What about Non-Site Collective events?
CC: I went to Green Apple Books not too long ago and it’s pretty rare that you see much contemporary stuff in their used poetry section and then all of a sudden there was lots of contemporary poetry. There were Kenneth Goldsmith books, used. They had Day and Soliloquy. And I picked up Day and inside was a receipt from the original person. The name on the invoice said Bill Berkson. I took the invoice out of Day and brought it home and scanned it and sent it to Kenneth Goldsmith. And he said, “After all, it’s not really poetry, is it?”
AG: Have you seen the documentary on Kenneth Goldsmith? You can stream it on the Internet. It’s free.
CC: I don’t need to see a documentary on Kenneth Goldsmith, do I?
AG: No, you don’t. But it’s funny to watch. Robert Fitterman is talking about thinkerships replacing of readerships in one interview. Kenneth Goldsmith does these poetry readings just for the documentary— I don’t think they go to his actual poetry readings— they stage them in his house. So it looks like this amazing rehearsal or satire of a poetry reading. He gets really into it, he’s spitting with bookshelves in the background.
CC: Vito Acconci was spitting a lot in his talk. He was sort of slobbering.
AG: How old is he now? He didn’t call in the lecture?
CC: You would’ve been surprised. It was confounding. He just showed computer renderings of architectural plans for buildings and public spaces. You know how horrible those look, like late-90s cyber things.
AG: Did they hand out 3-d glasses?
CC: It wasn’t like that. The humanity of the presentation took precedence over the actual ideas he presented. I was looking at it as more of a performance instead of thinking, ‘oh that building could work’. Is he really seriously proposing these things? At the end he said, you know you can do something different than you’ve been doing your whole life. I can be a poet. I can be an architect, totally switch gears.
AG: I was at this talk at SFMOMA called Is Photography Over. I was surprised I got in, they presented it on the website and in the email I got after attempting to get in off a waitlist that it would be impossible.
CC: There were a thousand people on the waitlist. But you got in anyway.
AG: Well I got in to the simulcast on the first day. They had two simulcast rooms. You know if you get to the airport early and you’re flying first class?
CC: There was a VIP lounge.
AG: They put a picture of the VIP lounge up on the SFMOMA blog! I didn’t know about that. I was in a folding chair. On the second day I got into the real room and I could watch people’s uncomfortabilities sitting in these chairs on stage. At one point Phillip Lorca-DiCorcia, in response to this guy’s comment about being a successful artist, he said “I had galleries interested in me, and then I stopped and decided to become a war photographer and now I don’t fit into photojournalism and I don’t fit into art”. He was asking about the policing of art that museums do. And PL got the mic and said, you know what I’m thinking, my ass hurts sitting in this chair. Because the panel was three hours long and they didn’t have a break. They were in these wooden chairs all in a line and the people who worked at SFMOMA, two curators were sitting in higher chairs than the panelists. They had to make an announcement at the beginning of the symposium saying that they ran out of chairs that the panelists were in, and that’s why they were in these taller chairs, they just wanted to clarify it wasn’t intentional, that’s just all that was left in the stock room. It made me think a lot about seating arrangements and the passive audience. They had these two microphones set up where you could go up and ask a question and it was absolutely terrifying. Very confrontational.
CC: You had to, as an audience member, get up from your seat to ask a question?
AG: Yes, I had to walk through an entire row and say excuse me, excuse me, to every one.
CC: What question did you ask?
AG: I’ll read it some version or revision of it. What is the social impact or psychological impact of a break from responsibility in image making— this lack of agency that a photograph may contain? Because photographs have so much power, I’m interested in how the photograph of an event is more important than the photographer. And how is this going to be dealt with in museum spaces, is it similar to a daguerreotype, it being so old, and them not considering themselves artists, that we don’t know who took it? The unknown photographer label? How is that similar to a cell phone photo— of let’s say Oscar Grant. Or Reuters just puts their name sometimes. What about people not asking permission to photograph or photos of ourselves on the Internet or pictures we don’t know about from satellites circulating? So there’s this lack of ownership of a photograph and this lack of responsibility associated with photographs and how will that be dealt with when these photographs will start to be acquired by museums?
CC: Who answered?
AG: Joel Snyder, an art historian at University of Chicago literalized my question and started attacking me, I don’t understand what you mean, how is there no agency in a photograph? And I thought I shouldn’t have used that word agency and everyone from the audience was shouting at me, do you mean authorship, and I said forget it, what about responsibility. He said ‘I still don’t get it. You put the camera in front of your face, you press the button, you take the picture’. And I said well you don’t have to literally take a picture to even take it— you can just look at it. Who owns the pictures is up for debate, you can click and drag things from the Internet. My question was really about wall text, why isn’t citizen journalism entering the history of photography or will it? Charlotte Cotton said the label is going to say Citizen Photographer. I bought this book Words without Pictures that she was involved in. It used to be a blog. The blog is now a book. Meanwhile, the night before, at the bottom of the simulcast, you could see some iphones, or camera phones, you could see the screen that showed what people were taking a picture of— the stage, which is a boring picture, it’s just people sitting at chairs at a table. Then in the audience of the simulcast people were taking pictures of the simulcast with their cameras. And nobody was talking about that.
CC: You know what I was thinking about. There’s something about when people take photos of the non-visual, of people on the panel while they’re speaking. They want to capture the idea; that could have been a panel on household paint for all you know. I was at the Palace of the Legion of Honor a few months ago and there was an organ performance. The guy who plays the organ at the Castro Theater, he was there and he was playing all these hits, crowd pleasers, there were chairs set up in this gallery. But in the atrium when you walk in, the sound was better in atrium because they had hidden the organ pipes in the ceiling so the acoustics were better. My point is, people were taking photographs of the organ while the music was being played like they were trying to take pictures of the music.
AG: Synesthesia.
CC: Yeah. And this happened in Glasgow, almost a year ago exactly, I was at the Museum of Natural History. There was a pipe organ, the pipes weren’t hidden, they were visible, brass pipes, very imposing, emitting this very overwhelming sound, unmistakable, vast vaulted ceilings, people milling about. You couldn’t see who was playing so they were confused, what do I take a picture of? They take a picture of the pipes emitting the sound of what they were perceiving. That’s not going to be interesting. It was like, how can I capture this moment in my life. But it’s a different sense.
AG: It’s a form of diary. When you look at that picture the question is will you recall the other sense? The visual is replacing or we’re depending on it to replicate other senses.
CC: What about photographs of people reading poetry? The reader’s mouth is open, they’re in front of a podium, some crappy microphone, this is the worst, the plastic bottle of water, sitting right there, in the middle of the frame, it’s like does no one see this, what? We don’t think about composition? Now you have this ugly picture of them looking boring, their mouth is in a strange position, they’re looking down. The mic is in front of their nose. I hate when the plastic water bottle makes a crinkly sound. Can you just give this poor person a glass like a civilized creature?
AG: You know at a boardwalk, there are those games where you shoot water from a gun into a clown’s mouth. Someone in the front row would have to practice beforehand, high-powered. As if it’s hooked up to a soda fountain.
CC: It would almost have to have a military accuracy.
AG: Did you see the Tea Party rally in San Francisco?
CC: I wasn’t invited! I’m never invited to anything. I would have gone you know, I definitely would have. I would have gotten there and wanted to blend in. I’m white— I can blend in. I’ll go and wear something innocuous: a sweater set and jeans. Just go talking to people. They’re afraid, you know, they’re really fearful.
AG: About communism.
CC: Communism! Communism! These people, either they have amnesia or they’re living in the past. The two are at odds and that’s how they exist— in this weird state of contradiction. They’re ahistorical but they are stuck in the past. I don’t know how to make sense of it. It baffles me.
AG: I’m reading an international bestseller that’s now a major motion picture. Jarhead, an account of the first Gulf War.
CC: Have you seen Gunner Palace?
AG: Not yet.
CC: Let’s have a cheerful movie night watching 18-year-old boys blowing things up. What’s a Jarhead?
AG: It’s a disparaging nickname for a marine—you unscrew their head and dump in military, ‘go fight go kill go serve your country’ and this replaces their individuality.
CC: Did you hear about the military recruit who needed to lose weight and the recruiters put him in a ski suit and a plastic suit no it was scuba gear and a plastic thing and put him in—what are those places called where people go to work out?
AG: Gyms?
CC: They put him in a gym and made him exercise vigorously and he passed out his body temperature was 108 degrees he went into the hospital and had a kidney fail, was transferred to some hospital in CA, and died. And this guy, he was 22 years old, a basic run of the mill beefy dude. He got swept up in this crazy attempt to make him suitable for the military. He was 200 and something pounds, described as “moderately obese” in the medical record.
AG: Quick trivia question: What day is patriot day?
CC: Every day… is this a trick question?
AG: Not a trick question. Patriot day, what day? You know this!
CC: Maybe it’s in the index of this book Jarhead. What’s this, have you seen this?
AG: Yeah, that’s the bookmark I found in the book: Justin Cho went from Salt Lake City to Fresno. I didn’t even know there were airports in those places. Abysmal.
CC: The greatest moment I had in Salt Lake City was realizing I didn’t have to eat at this family pizza joint and there were all these Mormons and I had just come from seeing Spiral Jetty.
AG: Did you swim?
CC: The lakebed had dried out. I had on combat boots and the salt gets all over you. Have you been out there? There’s nothing out there. There are bugs encased in the salt crystals and I shot this ten second video with my camera my phone no my camera of an empty Budweiser can rolling along the ground, the rattle of the aluminum. It was a lonesome moment. There was an oilrig. Spiral Jetty seemed kind of quaint to me. It didn’t have the scale that I was expecting.
AG: I’ve seen the video documentation of it being built. That was interesting.
