wood-sculptures-by-cha-jong-rye
JEREMY SIGLER Joe, the Donelle Woolford project is pretty outrageous. It stages a situation where a body of your work—Kurt Schwitters-like abstractions in scrap wood—appear fictitiously as the studio practice of an emerging African American artist named Donelle Woolford, an actor you have hired to play the artist.
JOE SCANLAN Donelle Woolford began ten years ago when I first appropriated her name from a professional football player I admired. After the first collages happened in my studio, I liked them but they seemed like they would be more interesting if someone else made them, someone who could better exploit their historical and cultural references. So I studied the collages for a while and let them tell me who their author should be. From there the work has changed subtly—like the shift from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism—but the character of their maker, Donelle, has changed dramatically; she has become much more contradictory and complex.
JER When you bring up Cubism, it implies that you’re still involved in the debate about Cubism being derived from primitive African masks—and your gesture certainly adds a new twist to this narrative. Can you explain how Donelle has become, as you say, more complex? When I met her at her Wallspace opening last fall, she was, well, just standing there in the room a few feet away from you.
JOE There were in fact two actors playing the role of the artist simultaneously. Throughout the opening the two Donelles were doing a performance called Long Crosses, where each of them behaves like any artist would at her opening, but all the while maintaining eye contact and moving in relation to one another. At designated moments—and for dramatic effect—they would simultaneously cross the gallery, change places, and attempt to carry on whatever conversation the other was engaged in.
JER She too is an assemblage. The work may have a subtle complexity, but it still reads as a pretty in-your-face gesture. I guess that is why I brought up Schwitters, aside from the visual reference to Merz in the works themselves. Schwitters has always seemed serious and credible to me, while at the same time a lunatic who, as a Dadaist, had a nihilistic sense of humor and a desire to turn art on its head. I also think of Orson Welles, who took creative delight in masterminding pranks, like in F for Fake, his faux documentary about an infamous art forger. No matter how grounded your project is in art history, I still see Donelle as a trick. What led you to “cast” the work the way you did?
JOE I really like this idea of “casting” the work. In the show at Wallspace the paintings were very staged. Donelle not only made the paintings but devised scenes for the paintings (and herself) to inhabit as well: there was a “studio” scene, where the pictures hung on the wall casually and a few of them were resting on the floor; a “museum” scene, where two paintings performed the rubric of precise historical analysis; and of course a “gallery” scene.
Donelle Woolford, Studio Scene, installation view, Wallspace, 2010
I don’t recall ever having F for Fake in mind in relation to Donelle; I guess I don’t think of her as being fake. Donelle is fictional. Fake, to me, means bogus or deceptive. Fictional has more nuance; it alludes to the way characters in a story might get folded into daily life as familiar things we reference, argue about, and emulate. At a certain point they become mythic and even real.
JER And your fiction certainly is taking place in reality.
JOE There is a Patricia Highsmith novel, Ripley Under Water. One of the subplots revolves around an art dealer who represents a lucrative but very depressed painter—a real Mark Rothko type. The dealer anticipates that his star painter might one day commit suicide, so he begins to practice making credible copies of his work so that his cash flow can be sustained after the artist is gone. The inevitable happens—the artist kills himself. But the more paintings the dealer makes the more depressed he becomes, until one day he commits suicide too. I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist’s psyche; making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.
JER So you’re hypothesizing that there might be no real difference between the forged and the authentic paintings because they both had the power to create the same psyche and ultimately to produce the same suicide. I guess my poems give me my psyche too, and without their fictional “version of me” I could be a danger to myself—a Rothko. But the self-loathing cartoon character who plays me in my work has a sense of humor too, and I enjoy pushing the poems into absurd darkness just for kicks. If someone who forged my poems didn’t understand this, and were to miss the humor, I guess it’d be dangerous. The forger might get really depressed.
Donelle might be another synthetic element added to your tabula rasa (and she may be giving you your psyche and suicide as we speak), but she also represents a subtraction: that of a middle-aged white man. I see this as humorous and self-deprecating. It is as if you are making this apology for being a white guy, you know what I mean? It expresses a certain conflict about being Caucasian.
JOE I can see it as a conflict, but more one between the nature of the writer and that of the characters he creates, and to what extent they have to be “true” to each other in order to be believable. I’m learning about myself by developing a story about someone I’m not, and, in the process, I’m learning about that character, too. And the art world. I suppose one of the impulses that generated Donelle was my wanting to work against the tendency we have of understanding artworks through their maker’s biography.
There is value in the fact that, when it comes to Donelle, I don’t know what I am doing and the project has nothing to do with my own biography. Unlike her, I was not born in Detroit. I did not attend an Ivy League university. I am not black. I did not go on vacation to Europe when I was in grade school or have the confidence to put off college for a year. I did not have any of the experiences spelled out in Donelle’s biography, but that doesn’t disqualify me from making art about them.
JER Nonetheless, if the work is seen and discussed in terms of race, there are certainly a few red flags or taboos. In this way, I think it is a courageous and very sensitive experiment. Not so many artists would be comfortable enough about the volatility of black and white to make work where there is such a high risk and probability of being called racist.
JOE There is a long history of black characters created by white authors. In American literature there were contentious debates throughout the 20th century around black fictional characters. But the arguments posed by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were always about the quality and depth of black characters in the works of William Faulkner or Nelson Algren or Flannery O’Connor, not about whether white writers were allowed to create black characters at all. So, at this point in time, I don’t understand needing permission to do it.
JER I guess I am implying that some subjects feel as though they’re off limits, at least at the start.
JOE Yeah, for some reason the art world still clings to the idea that visual artists have an essential subjective authenticity that is made manifest in their work. It is a kind of security blanket — that, lacking anything else, two or three vital statistics will tell us what an artist’s work is about. I don’t find that to be true or even interesting. And I think artists of all stripes would agree with me. I’m not saying it’s not sometimes true, and useful, I’m saying it isn’t necessarily true. The premise just seems counter to invention, to taking license, not knowing — everything that being an artist entails. It can really make you crave the hypothetical scenario that Foucault once proposed: to have all artistic production carry on as usual for one year but without any identities attached to the work.
Donelle Woolford, Caballistic Sadism, 2010, scrap wood, enamel, and wood glue on canvas, 26.5 × 20.5 inches.
JER It’s hard work being on the receiving end of the artwork, so the “reader” of, say, Donelle’s Cabbalistic Sadism will often try to find a shortcut in an effort to get a handle on its title, its image, its maker. When I started in poetry, I realized that many poets had come out of the academic system and were already aligned with various schools, or as you call it, “profiles.” Another poet tried to size me up and I could tell he couldn’t figure me out. He couldn’t get a handle on my work because he wasn’t able to get a read on my background, and thus, he was unable to make assumptions based on my pedigree or college professors, etc. I realize now that this was an asset—that I hadn’t studied poetry anywhere.
But I don’t think it should be too easy to interpret or digest art. I enjoy the difficulty and resistance, the challenge of interpretation. And I like the sense of conflict, risk, friction, even trauma that comes between an artist and his audience, or from literally offending the tastemakers—as did, say, Lenny Bruce. Let’s face it, there’s never permission granted to an artist, even in this somewhat protected enclave we call the “art world,” to make transgressive work, or work that grabs onto the thing that we are all afraid of, and each individual artist who does so may ultimately have to pay the price. I guess I feel that somehow you should have to pay the price for your gall, Joe. Right now I really could imagine an uproar around Donelle Woolford, not unlike what happened to Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, when he blurted out that line about women not being cut out for the sciences. Shouldn’t we all be questioning your motives? This doesn’t seem like something to take lightly.
JOE Please, don’t compare me to Lawrence Summers. Whatever his intentions, those remarks were idiotic.
JER Maybe so. But, like art, sometimes ugly idiotic things just come out. You know? That’s kind of what art is, no?
JOE Not for me...
JER ...and then the artist or poet or whoever has to find a way to deal with it, to process it, or to stand behind it. Or even apologize. When I began to grapple with Donelle Woolford I heard this reactionary, ignorant, and totally racist Archie Bunker-ish, voice in my head grunting: “So that’s all there is to it—all you have to be is black to succeed in the art world.” Which wasn’t a very nice thought to have ricocheting around in my brain. And I then had to begin asking questions about how the work has impacted my thinking and visa versa. In other words, was I just hearing this voice in my head, or was your work planting this content—racist content maybe—in my head as perhaps a sophisticated form of satire.
JOE I would say you’re cynical, but that sounds beyond cynical. That sounds like the plot of Videodrome.
JER I am pretty jaded, I guess. But I somehow imagine Donelle as not just a fiction but also a marketing strategy that announces: “I know this otherwise innocuous work will be really sexy if it is perceived as the creation of a rising art star who has maybe just gotten her MFA from an Ivy League institution and has been included in a show at the Studio Museum in Harlem… and gotten the stamp of approval from an important curator like Thelma Golden.” It’s all very predictable in a way, right down to my reflexive instinct to image search the artist to see if she’s with Saatchi yet, or happens to be pictured on Artforum.com’s “Scene & Herd.” I wonder: would Thelma Golden include Donelle in a show of emerging black artists?
JOE I’m not against marketing strategy being an aspect of Donelle’s character. That may be the most common trait of successful young artists now.
I would be curious to know what Thelma Golden thinks, but no more than Donna De Salvo or Helen Molesworth or Bennett Simpson. Because I would hope that, as curators, one of their primary concerns would be how the construction of myths around art can be both reified and critiqued, and that’s what Donelle is about. De Salvo investigated both sides of the coin in Hand-Painted Pop by detailing the devolution of the authentic, expressive brushstroke into a premeditated banality; Helen did too in Work Ethic, an exhibition that looked at how attempts to demystify art in the 1960s by making it more workmanlike became quasi-spiritual rituals in themselves. And Bennett and Chrissie Iles’ Dan Graham show—and practically all of Dan’s work for that matter—is predicated on how and when we challenge our perceptions and how and when we give in to them. How we handle that balance, intellectually and psychically.
JER ...And like Dan Graham, who is known for blurting horrendously awkward lines out in public that automatically offend people, I have to say, this project feels like a shot fired into you own foot. But this doesn’t surprise me. If I think of past works by you, like the DIY Ikea coffin, or even your little artificial, Man Ray-ish teardrop, Catalyst (1999), that adheres to ones face creating the appearance that one is crying, I feel like you have spent plenty of time meditating your own somewhat vaudevillian demise and humiliation. So not only is a depleted Joe Scanlan replaced by an up-and-coming stylish woman with a fancy website (that depicts her making art in what I imagine to be her spacious Bushwick studio), and tons of marketability, but you get the chance to remove yourself from this whole aspiration climb, to experience your own symbolic death. Can you talk about death?
JOE Sure, I can talk about death, but let me talk about marketability first. I’m glad you mentioned them in the same breath.
There are other aspects of Donelle Woolford parallel to the narrative license the project allows. It has become integral for me to think of Donelle Woolford, in part, as the “business opposite” of myself in the most mundane, diversified portfolio kind of way. The risk entailed is: does her existence increase my exposure or over-extend my resources? Does she grow my reputation or cause it to collapse? This relates to the idea of Donelle as a manufactured myth but also as a critique of that myth—the “hot young artist”—and its roots in the cult of demographic authenticity. That is the risk she takes: she not only bears the brunt of whatever hostility her existence attracts, she also bears the brunt of her critique of artists like herself.
None of this is predicated on my wanting to be a businessman, or on how much money I can make. What is interesting is to introduce the corporate concept of diversification to contemporary art and allow them to mingle, get confused, see what happens.
Frankly I don’t understand why more artists don’t do it. One of the more admirable aspects of Gerhard Richter’s work, for example, is that it would be impossible to organize any history of painting, from the most conservative to the most radical, that did not include some facet of his oeuvre. He has it all covered, so no matter which way the wind blows he will be favored by it.
Donelle Woolford, Still Life With Chair Caning, 2010, scrap wood, enamel, and wood glue on canvas, 20.5 × 26.5 inches
http://www.thingsthatfall.com/diversification.php
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