Amy Jenkins, Pocket, 1997, rear view projection on miniature shirt, hardware: Fujix Mini Video Projector, VCR, 17 × 18½ inches (object size only), running time: 2½ minutes. Courtesy Anna Kustera Gallery.
Fascination with mysteries of the flesh is an ageless phenomenon. As a kid I faked my first period in hopes of kickstarting the reoccurring ritual. I picked red berries from the yard, smeared them in my underpants, sat on the toilet and moaned, calling my baby-sitter to the bathroom as witness. I figured if I made it real to her, it would become real.
Amy Jenkins, Ebb, 1997, top view, video projection on ceramic bathtub and tiled pedestal, hardware: Sony LCD Projector, VCR, 14 × 20½ x 26½ inches (object including pedestal), running time: 4 minutes. Courtesy Anna Kustera Gallery.
What better way to learn about something than by playing pretend. We all have the desire to know certain secrets. How is it, to enter another’s body, to explore a person’s insides? What would it be like to lose one’s virginity again, to open one-self up like a door to a hidden room, or to be the first one entering that room?
Video installation is like alchemy. By combining video projection, sculpture, and audio, I can turn miniature replicas of a tub, a toilet, a shirt, or a bed into three dimensional environments where video personas animate the objects and enact metaphorical and psychological dramas. I have always wished for magical powers. This is the closest I’ve ever come to making “let’s pretend” loop endlessly.
Amy Jenkins, Ebb, 1997, side view, video projection on ceramic bathtub and tiled pedestal, hardware: Sony LCD Projector, VCR, 14 × 20½ x 26½ inches (object including pedestal, running time: 4 minutes. Courtesy Anna Kustera Gallery.
If one believed in nominal determinism, one would say that Nadja Bournonville was destined to work on the subject of hysteria.
“History has shown that universalism is a step away from totalitarianism—a deadly kind of erasure that I find horrifying. The fear of fascism undermines my sensuous relationship to those things. I often wonder, are there any other alternative aesthetics?”
The first thing of Mary Gaitskill’s I ever read was a short statement she made at the back of The Best American Short Stories, 1993 about her story “The Girl on the Plane,” in which a man tells a woman in the airplane seat next to his that he once participated in a gang rape.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Gregory Crewdson, Lorna Simpson, Allan Gurganus, Louis Auchincloss, Marie Howe, Rilla Askew, Rupert Graves, Andrew Blanco, and Paula Vogel.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
