Monday, April 23, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Alex Martinis Roe
Alex Martinis Roe’s practice
involves bringing forth settings that allow viewers and participants to
encounter contemporary challenges embedded within feminist histories.
You are
quoted to have said ‘that it is more important to do feminism than be
feminist…’[1]
Can you expand on this?
When I said
that I was thinking about useful attitudes toward participation in feminism as
a collective politics. If feminism is collective through a culture of practices
rather than because of a common identification – i.e. she practices a range of feminisms, rather than she is feminist – it places an emphasis on the relevance of diverse
feminist projects to all sorts of people who need not have a common identity. I
am interested in feminism because it is concerned with the feminine, which is a
specific relationship to language, and the female sex, which is a specific
embodiment. I think that a collective politics concerned with the feminine and
the female can be a radical challenge to the violence of dominant language and
power structures, if relations between participants are formed as-with-through
an evolving language of difference among us.
 |
| Alex Martinis Roe, A Box for Vertical Relations, Acrylic glass, twenty-four borrowed library books by female authors who have had interpersonal and/or textual relations to the authors either side of her in the stack, 2012. Image are courtesy of the artist. |
Can you
talk about the background behind your work Free Associations (2010) in which
you had participants write with white chalk on white chalkboards,
guaranteeing privacy, for the duration of 20 minutes?
The title
of the work is the well-known psychoanalytic speech practice undertaken by the
analysand, who agrees and attempts to say whatever comes into her/his mind in
the psychoanalysis session. I have a desire to
know, acknowledge and engage ethically (an ethics of sexual difference—of
specificity) with each person who encounters my work. When I facilitated Free Associations I wanted to make art
objects that provided a space for the participants’ own languages in their
experience of my work. I also wanted to make some monochrome abstractions where
any aura around my authorship was utterly dissipated and the significance of
the marks on the surfaces were foregrounded as contingent upon my audience. These
encounters took place in a public gallery so that this kind of specific
engagement could itself be exhibited, but exhibited as a refusal to make a
spectacle of individuality. As each iteration of the work required that there
be five scheduled participants in order for the piece to go ahead, the
participants are only ever visible to other museum visitors as a group of five
people doing the same activity.
I can picture the experience for the
participants to be quite powerful because of the engagement between the private
and public. What kind of reaction did you get from the participants after their
20 minutes ended?
Most people commented on a kind of
oscillation in their experience between being aware of their role as a
performer for other gallery visitors and immersion in the task. Most
participants stayed and talked to one another about their experiences after the
20 minutes. I found this easy formation of a group very interesting. Most
people said they felt able to immerse themselves in the task because there were
others doing it too.
 |
| Alex Martinis Roe, A Genealogical Encounter Among Carla Cruz, Jodi Dean and ‘The Three Marias’, Video projection of a recorded online video conversation between one of the artist’s interlocutors, Portuguese artist Carla Cruz, and one of Cruz’s authorial influences, North American political theorist Jodi Dean. The video is edited in consultation with Cruz and Dean and is exhibited with their consent, 23:33, 2011-2012. Image are courtesy of the artist. |
You
recently completed a residency at Artspace in Sydney; can you tell us about your
time there?
I arrived during that very quiet
time in summer when everyone has left the city, so I spent the first part of my
residency doing some research in an art history library for the slideshow I
made for the exhibition. As the city came back to life, it was time to install
my exhibition, which was a large scale sound installation activated by
performance-narrations of the slideshow to visitors one at a time.
The slideshow is called Feminist and Feminine Appropriations of
Abstract Art and is made up of twenty-one abstractions of famous abstract
works. I erased all but the simple geometric outlines of works by artists who
had appropriated masculinist abstract aesthetics, and then the works they had
appropriated. I invited each visitor to the gallery to sit on a chair beside my
desk and then proceeded to narrate the name of the artist, the title of each
slide and its original date, all the while marking the time of the encounter
with Hanne Darboven’s non-writing
loops on a ream of computer paper. My desk was amplified using contact
microphones and the sound projected through a massive speaker stack at the
entrance to the space. Following the narration I asked the visitor for her/his
name and wrote it at the bottom of the sheet of paper I had been marking. At
the end of each day of performance-narrations, I pinned the still-connected
sheets of marked paper to the wall.
Around the opening of the exhibition
I met some very interesting Sydney artists and curators, with whom I feel we
now have an ongoing conversation and I also had some very enriching encounters
with colleagues from around Australia and New Zealand who came to visit.
 |
| Alex Martinis Roe, non-writing histories, installation view, Artspace, Sydney, 2012. Photo: Silversalt photography. Image are courtesy of the artist. |
You now live and work in Berlin,
what brought you and keeps you there?
I like
Berlin because it is a place I can do my work. My work is about conversation
and exchange. I find that Berlin is not a city that jumps out at me and steals
my attention away from my work – I can concentrate here – but it’s also a place
where I can see a lot of different kinds of artwork and encounter different
ideas. Here I am in conversation with other artists, creative practitioners,
thinkers and writers who are engaged in projects and questions that are
parallel and/or fascinating to my own. I just had an exhibition here that
closed on Monday at a space called Bibliothekswohnung and the way people
engaged with my exhibition is exactly what I hope for. The gallery, like many
in Berlin, is in an apartment and its format is very much modelled on the
Enlightenment salons. Most people who came spent time with the work and then
also stayed to talk about it and engage in conversation with others.
Who
inspires you?
Right now,
Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salonière in Berlin in the late 1700s and early
1800s. And the people who engage in my projects! I just edited a recording of a
conversation I set up between Portuguese artist Carla Cruz and North American
political theorist Jodi Dean and I just keep finding more in it.
What are
you looking forward to within the next 12 months?
This week
I’m going to Utrecht to do a masterclass with artist, psychoanalyst and
philosopher Bracha Ettinger, with whom I did a workshop in 2010. I’m really
looking forward to immersing myself in her ideas again and to spending time
with some people I am working with there.
 |
| Alex Martinis Roe, non-writing histories, installation detail, Artspace, Sydney, 2012. Photo: Silversalt photography. Image are courtesy of the artist. |
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