twi-ny talks

TWI-NY TALK: YVONNE RAINER

Yvonne Rainer’s ASSISTED LIVING will get its New York premiere March 16-19 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
March 16-19, $25, 8:00
212-366-5700
www.performa-arts.org

Legendary choreographer and experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer looks back while moving ahead at the Baryshnikov Arts Center next week, reprising 2009’s Spiraling Down and presenting the New York premiere of Assisted Living: Good Sports 2. Drawing on principles developed in her seminal work, Trio A, and other pieces from the 1960s, Rainer’s most recent dances incorporate sports, primarily soccer, as well as old and new pop-culture references. For Assisted Living, Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuelle Phuon, Keith Sabado, and Sally Silvers were each given photos from the New York Times sports section to inspire their movement; lighting designer Les Dickert, set designer Joel Reynolds, and Rainer herself also appear onstage, involved in set changes and various cues. The work is sponsored by Performa; since 2007, Rainer has been working with the nonprofit arts organization, which “is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.” Rainer, who will turn seventy-seven in November, has been choreographing dances for more than fifty years, having trained with such giants as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Anna Halprin, in addition to making such influential films as The Man Who Envied Women and Privilege, earning the right to choreograph the questions in our latest, albeit brief, twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: Both works you are presenting at BAC deal with sports and sports photography, among other things. Are you a big sports fan, and what was it from those images that inspired you?

Yvonne Rainer: I am a tennis fan, but do not play myself. As a kid I loved street games, and in high school played softball. But as a choreographer it is not competitive sports that interest me so much as all the incidental movements that do not contribute directly to the rules and organization of play. For example, the languid movements of soccer players when they are waiting to be engaged and the stillness of photos that record the interactions of individual bodies.

twi-ny: How is it different performing at Judson Church back in the 1960s versus performing today in New York City?

Yvonne Rainer: At Judson Church we were a community with shared interests and enthusiasms and objectives. Today in NYC the choreographer is on her own, an autonomous molecule struggling to find a place.

twi-ny: What has it been like collaborating with Performa over the years?

Yvonne Rainer: Performa has been my life saver, a buffer in the cultural maelstrom. Their support has been essential to the continuity of my work.

TWI-NY TALK: JANET BIGGS

BRIGHTNESS ALL AROUND is one of three stunning videos by Janet Biggs set in the Arctic (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

JANET BIGGS: THE ARCTIC TRILOGY
Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 12
212-643-3152
www.winkleman.com
www.jbiggs.com

New York–based video artist Janet Biggs has traveled around the world capturing remarkable images she pairs with eclectic music, melding physical, often ritualistic movement with investigations into gender identity and the natural environment. Vanishing Point features motorcycle speed-record holder Leslie Porterfield on the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah and the Harlem Addicts Rehabilitation Center Gospel Choir, Enemy of the Good explores Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, with concert pianist José Luis Hernández-Estrada, and Duet combines a NASCAR pit crew in Charlotte and an aria from the Léo Delibes opera Lakmé. For her current solo show, continuing at Chelsea’s Winkleman Gallery through Saturday, the former equestrian, who has an undergraduate degree in painting and sculpture and a master’s in glassblowing, has installed “The Arctic Trilogy,” three gorgeous short films that were shot in the vast, isolated Svalbard archipelago: Fade to White cuts between a kayaker and a mournful, operatic song by performance artist John Kelly, Brightness All Around follows the exploits of woman coal miner Linda Norberg along with an original, propulsive dance-floor incantation by Bill Coleman about actual near-death experiences, and In the Cold Edge traces the path of a spelunker emerging from an ice cave. After writing a grant for her next secretive project, Biggs generously answered a series of questions about her creative process for twi-ny.

twi-ny: At Winkleman, Brightness All Around and Fade to White are shown in succession, one after the other, at opposite sides of the main space, creating a sharp contrast between them and a fascinating dialogue that involves performers Bill Coleman and John Kelly as well as a male kayaker and a female engineer. How did that installation choice come about?

Janet Biggs: Brightness All Around and Fade to White are polar opposites in their representations of the Arctic landscape, gender, race, awe and terror, loss and change. I wanted the audience to experience the two videos as counterpoints in their extremes. My decision to project them back-to-back on opposite walls allowed me to place the audience in one immersive, physical space while still emphasizing contrasts. The audience had to physically turn around to view the successive videos, creating both a physical and psychological shift.

In each of these two pieces, I alternate footage of individuals struggling in extreme environments to define their identity with shots of singers performing the music that is heard in the soundtrack. By incorporating performance artist John Kelly and music guru Bill Coleman as both visual and audio elements into my videos, I explore the way these performers’ physical intensity can be interwoven into a narrative to create new meaning.

In Brightness All Around, singer/dancer Bill Coleman, dressed in black leather against a black backdrop, presents a fetishized, macho image as he delivers a demonic chant of near-death experiences. In Fade to White, I integrated the Arctic imagery with countertenor John Kelly, clad in all white, whose age, androgyny, and mournful voice parallel the vanishing Arctic landscape and signal the erasure of male dominance.

I intend to invert the traditional gendered dynamics of heroic exploration by portraying a male explorer as a passive, vulnerable figure, in the white-on-white landscape, while a female Arctic miner aggressively drills, violates, and transforms the black depths of the earth below. The musical performances in the two pieces as well as the juxtaposition of a pristine landscape and the dark, gritty mine interior complicate the power dynamics.

By presenting the two videos back to back I hope to expand the narrative, prompting questions about power hierarchies, social structures, and individual relationships to desire within existential themes.

twi-ny: In many of your videos, including the three in the current exhibition as well as Vanishing Point, Sollipsism Syndrome, and Enemy of the Good, you seem drawn to big, wide-open spaces, usually very bright, with solitary figures primarily in natural environments. Would you consider that a motif of your work, or is it just a coincidence? Like Werner Herzog, would you consider yourself an adventurer as well as a filmmaker?

JB: I tend to revisit elemental and extreme landscapes, from the icy fjord in Glacier Approach, to the broiling hot salt flats of Bonneville in Vanishing Point, to my most recent videos that were filmed in the High Arctic. I am interested in using the landscape as a surrogate character or equal subject to the individuals who struggle to maintain a sense of self within it.

Janet Biggs makes her first on-screen appearance in IN THE COLD EDGE (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

I am drawn to the ends of the earth. Locations that represent empty lands and blank spaces are ripe for interpretation. Even though these once unknown places have been mapped and surveyed, increased knowledge has not replaced my endless fantasies of discovery in these regions. I am interested in individuals who dedicate themselves to a search for perfection often through athletic pursuits. In their willingness to take risks and endure isolation, they strive to attain an extreme state of being. By filming solitary figures within vast natural environments I am able to focus on both their vulnerable fragility as well as their manifest strength.

I use grand stories and heroic efforts as my point of departure, then slide sideways into small gestures or esoteric tasks as seen from deeply personal perspectives. I am interested in how repetitive or ritualized movements, the incidental, small movements, are as wondrous as the stupefying wild and beautiful landscapes where many of these actions occur.

twi-ny: Seeing humans deep underground in a cave or a mine, the viewer is always aware of your presence as cinematographer, and you get to experience much of what your subjects are experiencing, but in In the Cold Edge, you make a critical appearance at the end. What made you decide to come out from behind the camera at that point?

JB: I’ve hung off the back of trucks in specially made chairs that ride inches above the ground at more than one hundred miles per hour. I’ve paddled kayaks in Arctic weather where water temperatures are so cold you would die of hypothermia in fifteen minutes if you capsized. I have paddled under huge glacial walls, hoping that they wouldn’t calve, and in waters with polar bears swimming nearby. I have squeezed through glacial ice caves so tight that I couldn’t get my head up to see with my headlamp, and I have descended into Arctic coal mines where methane fires ignite with terrifying regularity.

There is clearly a performative side to my work that has to do with me physically and psychologically pushing myself or assuming some kind of risk in order to capture the images and action needed for a piece. I didn’t realize I was such a thrill seeker until I set out to make this kind of work. This part of my process is compelling enough that I often find myself looking for new challenges, although my exploration of the addictive nature of risky behavior is primarily as a witness to someone else’s action and off-camera.

By taking risks and challenging myself in the production of my work, I strive to understand my subjects’ choices and motivations, and also experience some of the thrills that are part of what they do. I hope that this process will translate to the viewer, allowing them a vicarious experience that will become an element in the final reception of the work.

I made my first on-camera appearance at the end of In the Cold Edge. I am seen shooting a flare into an archetypal image of the frozen north. This personal appearance was necessitated by practical considerations (I was the only one of my crew who was certified to shoot a firearm) but also by a personal need to represent my relationship to this haunting location. On my first trip to the Arctic, the landscape kept me in a state of romantic awe. By the second trip, my relationship to the region had changed to include a degree of terror as well as awe. I had a profound sense of displacement in a region that neither needed nor desired human presence. The act of shooting a flare was both an aggressive assertion of self and also a cry for help in a landscape where assumptions about self and reality are radically altered.

TWI-NY TALK: EIKO & KOMA

Eiko & Koma will be in New York City this month presenting three very different projects

Tuesday, March 8, Art Work: An Evening with Eiko Otake, the New School, Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th St., free, 6:00
Tuesday, March 15, and Wednesday, March 16, Delicious Movement Workshop, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th St., $65 with preregistration, 7:00
March 29 – April 9, Baryshnikov Arts Center, free with advance RSVP, Tuesday – Friday 6:00 – 10:00 pm, Saturday 3:00 – 9:00 pm
www.eikoandkoma.org

Shortly after meeting as students in Japan in 1971 at the Tatsumi Hijikata dance studio, Eiko Otake and Takashi Koma Otake formed a partnership that is now in its fifth decade. Based in New York City since 1976, Eiko & Koma have presented experimental modern dance and installation indoors and outdoors all over the world, including such highly praised works as White Dance (1976), Grain (1983), Memory (1989), River (1995), The Caravan Project (1999), and Hunger (2008). Having studied with such innovative choreographers as Kazuo Ohno, Lucas Hoving, and Anna Halprin, their own pieces, for which they generally design all elements, including sets, sound scores, and costumes, have earned them NEA, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, two Bessies, and other prestigious awards.

On March 8, Eiko & Koma will give a free illustrated lecture at the New School on their Retrospective Project (2009-12), in which they are looking back over the course of their storied career. On March 15-16, they’ll be holding two Delicious Movement Workshops at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, inviting participants to “move/dance to actively forget the clutter of our lives so to fully ‘taste’ body and mind.” And from March 29 through April 9 they will present the two-week performance piece Naked at BAC, a movement/visual art installation that explores time, desire, and nakedness that was created during a three-month residency at the Park Avenue Armory and first presented at the Walker Art Center last year. Part of Carnegie Hall’s JapanNYC Festival, Naked is free with advance tickets that allow the audience to come and go as they please during specific time periods, watching Eiko & Koma in an organic environment that will be accompanied by a video retrospective. As they prepare for their New York blitz, Eiko discussed the audience-performer dynamic, nakedness, and more in our latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: You will be giving an Art Work talk at the New School on March 8, focusing on the Retrospective Project. What has the experience been like looking back at your long career while you’re still creating fascinating works for the future?

Eiko: We can remember what we were thinking of, about and how. We are sometimes surprised to find so much of what we do now has started long ago. We did not become wiser or better with age. That is a sort of myth. Instead we see more continuity in what we have done and what we are doing now.

twi-ny: That will be followed March 15-16 with your Delicious Movement Workshop at BAC, targeted not at professional dancers but everyone and anyone. What would you tell someone who knows very little, if anything, about dance about the program? Essentially, why should a dance novice not be scared of taking part in the workshop?

Eiko: Of course they should not be scared, because we have developed a way to make the workshop very inclusive and tasty. It is not so much about dance. it is more about moving in a way that is not too difficult and find a pleasure in it.

Eiko & Koma will perform NAKED at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (photo by Anna Lee Campbell)

twi-ny: Your living installation, Naked, will be presented March 29 – April 9 at BAC, where audiences will come and go as they please. You previously performed the piece at the Walker Art Center. How did the unusual staging affect the performer-audience dynamic?

Eiko: We were very close to people, which created the sense of intimacy. There was no beginning or end but purely entries and exits of people, which audience decided themselves. So there was more of an individual act of seeing and feeling on their own accord.

twi-ny: How did the audience react to the piece, which was not staged like a regular dance performance?

Eiko: Unlike a theater event, people in the museum did not know who we are or what we do. So there was a lot of surprise in seeing human naked bodies moving in a gallery. Some people, of course, did not get into it but surprisingly many people stayed longer than we or they expected. Many people also came back to see it again or bring friends. Some people cried. Some people said it was hard for them to leave us since we did not end anything but we just went on.

twi-ny: What was it like performing to an ever-changing, moving audience, with you and Koma on view as maybe more of a spectacle?

Eiko: I did not feel it was a spectacle. We really enjoyed performing for just a few people since we feel their emotions. It was a special experience for both sides. But when there was no one in the room, it was hard to continue with the same intensity. At the same time we could not stop or rest since at any time people might come in.

twi-ny: You’ve appeared naked in previous productions, but this one you even title Naked. What is it that draws you to the nakedness you reveal in your work?

Eiko: Nakedness is a bottom line . . . nothing to lose, nothing to protect us, where we become both more human and more like any other creatures.

TWI-NY TALK: KENNY WHITE

Kenny White will be playing a Saturday-night residency at the Café Carlyle

Café Carlyle
35 East 76th St. at Madison Ave.
Saturdays, February 19 – March 12, general seating $40, bar $30, 10:45
212-744-1600
www.myspace.com/kennywhitemusic
www.thecarlyle.com

In the liner notes to his fourth full-length solo album, 2010’s COMFORT IN THE STATIC, Kenny White explains, “There are days when you play the lead character in your life, but as an observer.” Although he was referring specifically to “Out of My Element,” the first song written but last recorded for the disc, he could have been talking about his professional career. He started writing songs when he was eight and has spent much of his life as a writer and producer of pop tunes and commercials for other artists, ranging from Gladys Knight, Linda Ronstadt, and Dwight Yoakam to Shawn Colvin, Marc Cohn, and Peter Wolf. He released his first solo album, UNINVITED GUEST, in 2001, and followed that up with 2005’s SYMPHONY IN 16 BARS and 2006’s NEVER LIKE THIS. On February 19, he’ll begin a four-week Saturday-night residency at the Café Carlyle, where he’ll play his ironic, cynical, highly engaging songs at a venue where performers such as Barbara Cook, Barbara Carroll, the late Bobby Short, and Woody Allen & the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band usually rely on familiar standards. But White will be in good company on those nights, following Judy Collins, who will be at the Carlyle February 15 – March 12, playing Tuesdays through Saturdays with musical director Russell Walden; Collins is the founder of Wildfllower Records, White’s label since 2005. White discussed Collins, the Carlyle, playing out of his element, and Palookaville in our latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: Last summer you played one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Rambles. What was that experience like?

Kenny White: Any time you can get to share a stage with one of the architects of rock & roll, it’s a memorable occasion. The event itself shows that the magnetic pull of intimate, organic soul music is still plenty powerful, despite obituaries to the contrary. And to be a part of that experience . . . that’s just icing on the cake. Right down to singing the first verse of “The Weight” directly in front of the man who gave the song its heart. Then the added bonus of having Donald Fagen on the other side of the stage. A deeply fulfilling evening for me and my band.

twi-ny: The Café Carlyle on the Upper East Side is very different from the Midnight Ramble in Woodstock. How do you think your unique brand of ironic, cynical songwriting, particularly on COMFORT IN THE STATIC, will go over in a venue used to more traditional cabaret and jazz?

Kenny White will be featuring songs from his latest album, 2010's COMFORT IN THE STATIC, at the Carlyle

Kenny White: I guess we’re going to find out! My songs, even though not widely known, seem to resonate with folks who are looking for lyrics to which they can relate. People who have been around the block once or twice can be satisfied with “unrequited love” or “poor me” songs for just so long. The Café Carlyle has long been a watering hole for the worldly and discerning. And I believe what they’re looking for does not need to be defined by musical genre. If it’s good, they’ll like it. If it’s not . . . Palookaville!

twi-ny: Since 2005, you’ve been part of the Judy Collins Wildflower family, which also includes such artists as Amy Speace, Wes Charlton, and Ralston Bowles. What has that meant to your career?

Kenny White: It means a support system for what could otherwise be a very isolated line of work. Wildflower Records was established by an artist, which, right away, gives it a head start. All the above artists are in touch with each other and are always mutually encouraging and inspiring. And Judy, along with [label president] Katherine DePaul, has an innate understanding of the temperament of the artist. Especially one that started out a couple of minutes past what might be considered the “video friendly” hour.

TWI-NY TALK: KYLE THOMAS SMITH

Kyle Thomas Smith will read from his well-received debut novel, 85A, on Wednesday night at Cake Shop

Cake Shop
152 Ludlow St. between Stanton & Rivington Sts.
Wednesday, February 16, free, 7:00
212-253-0036
www.85anovel.com
www.cake-shop.com

“Every detention, every chip of glass piercing my forearm from the inside, every minute the 85A is late drives me that much closer to London.” So begins Kyle Thomas Smith’s harrowing debut novel, 85A (Bascom Hill, August 2010, $14.95), the brutally honest story of Chicago teenager Seamus O’Grady, who is desperate to get out of a city, school, and family that relentlessly beats him down both mentally and physically. Although the plot of the book is not based on Smith’s real life — he was born and raised in Chicago and moved to Brooklyn in 2003, where he currently lives with his partner and cats — the setting is, and he does a marvelous job capturing the heart and soul of the dark underbelly of his hometown over the course of one long day in January 1989. Smith, a passionate, engaging young man with an infectious joie de vivre, has written for websites and magazines including Sentient City: The Art of Urban Dharma, Boston’s Edge, and The Brooklyn Rail, is an ardent Buddhist practitioner and meditator, and is a multidimensional, enthusiastic individual who feels right at home whether at a punk-rock show or a classical music concert, at experimental theater or an opera at the Met. Smith will be participating in the latest free monthly Mixer event at Cake Shop on February 16 hosted by Melissa Febos and Rebecca Keith, with fellow writers Jami Attenberg (The Melting Season), Deenah Vollmer (The New Yorker, The Rumpus), and Rohin Guha (Relief Work) and a live performance by the Scamps. Smith discussed his first New York City reading of 85A and more in our latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: Seamus is a fascinating character who doesn’t quite understand that with actions come consequences, at least not always the desired kind. How much did you play with Seamus’s lack of/dawning self-awareness?

Kyle Thomas Smith: I was always careful to keep Seamus’s naïveté front-and-center. On the one hand, he’s a city kid who coolly assesses every environment he enters. On the other hand, he’s a misfit and a dreamer. He’s in a bad situation at home, he doesn’t have many friends, he’s not learning in school, so he copes by escaping into fantasy. He projects these fantasies on to the wrong people and builds all sorts of castles in the air. I have always been preoccupied with the notion that there are different types of intelligence. Seamus is hopeless when it comes to academics but his imaginative capacities are off the charts. Yet it’s his imaginative intelligence that could also plunge him headlong into an abyss. In order to illustrate that conflict, I had to constantly ground Seamus’s character in “ungroundedness.”

twi-ny: Music plays a key role in 85A, but you have said that the music that inspires Seamus is not the music that inspires you. What music inspired you when you were Seamus’s age, and what music inspires you today?

KTS: Well, when I was Seamus’s age, the music I listened to and the music that inspired me were two different things. In early high school, I let the scene dictate my tastes. So I listened to a lot of Skinny Puppy and Ministry and a lot of their industrial-goth side projects, but inside I was much more drawn to Bauhaus and Joy Division and even softer stuff like the Smiths, Cocteau Twins, and Robyn Hitchcock. But things changed for me when the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking surfaced. That was incredible shit and it inspired me to abandon what I was supposed to be listening to and go straight for what I wanted. I went way, way, way back to basics at that point and steeped myself in the Stones (pardon my orgasm), Bowie, Lou Reed, John Cale, and Dylan (especially) — my soul was much more in alignment with all of them. I still love them and I still love the Pixies, but I’m more hooked on Miles Davis and Nina Simone these days. My partner is an opera and classical music aficionado, so my ear has become trained on the Brahms and Chopin that he’s always playing. I keep going back in time. I’m afraid I don’t know much about what’s going on in music anymore, though I do like Gnarls Barkley and Danger Mouse a lot. That’s some deep, inventive stuff right there.

twi-ny: You’ve had readings in your native Chicago, where the book is set, and now will be having your first major event in New York City, your adopted hometown. Has reaction to the book been different in each city? Based on your personal experience, what are some of the major differences between the two cities?

KTS: 85A has been well received in New York. Maybe it’s because there’s been too much written about New York already and New Yorkers are sick of always reading about themselves; they want to read about another dynamic American city for a change. And a lot of nostalgic, homesick Chicago transplants in New York tell me how much the book brings them back.

As for Chicago itself, I can’t tell you how over the moon I was when the Chicago Tribune gave 85A a great review. It was one of those hometown-boy-makes-good experiences. But Chicago is another kettle of fish. It’s an extremely proud city, and people in its music, lit, and art scenes can be incredibly territorial. I recently saw a spot-on documentary about Chicago’s 80s punk scene called You Weren’t There. The title perfectly sums up that chest-thumping, I-was-there-you-weren’t attitude that some people still cop to this day. And that attitude was on flagrant display on this one major Chicago website that posted a poorly written review of 85A that bashes Seamus and completely misrepresents the book. It set off a shit-storm of parochial, internecine comments from people who admitted that they’d never even read 85A. The day it was posted, I had just come to town and was supposed to do a reading at Quimby’s Books the following night. I had no idea how I was going to get through it. But when I got up in front of the audience, a more confident spirit overtook me and people couldn’t have been more receptive to what I was reading. So . . . Chicago can be a tough crowd but it can give a lot of love too.

The difference between the two cities — that’s a damned good question. Chicago winters are never easy, but I never knew why they got such a bad rap until I first moved to New York and then went home for a visit. Holy witch’s tit in a steel bra! How I got through daily life for so many years in that town I have no idea. I like Chicago’s modern architecture better, but New York and Chicago are both world-class cities with some of the best cultural offerings on the planet. Many New Yorkers who have moved to Chicago say they don’t miss New York at all. They say they have just as good a time in Chicago and it’s much cheaper and more manageable. I would probably see Chicago the same way if I wasn’t from there, but there just seems to be more here and you never know what you’re going to stumble upon next when you explore New York neighborhoods, no matter how long you’ve lived in its boroughs.

TWI-NY TALK: WALLY CARDONA

Wally Cardona will hold INTERVENTION #5 on February 12 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (photo by Peggy Kaplan / artwork by Adam Shecter)

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th St.
Saturday, February 12, $15, 8:30
www.bacnyc.org
www.wcvismorphing.org

On January 8, Brooklyn-based dancer and choreographer Wally Cardona held the first of three New York City “Interventions” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, intimate, experimental performances created over a whirlwind five-day collaboration with a specially selected expert from outside of the traditional dance community. Working with sound artist and activist Robert Sember, Cardona developed a complex piece involving verbal and nonverbal communication and movement over the course of a series of repeated scenes, each with unique and challenging variations. On February 12, Cardona will stage INTERVENTION #5 with Martin Kapell, a design partner and architect at WASA/Studio A who specializes in designing spaces for the performing and visual arts, including the Baryshnikov Arts Center itself. “My commitment to architecture springs from the principle that everyone is entitled to the benefits of intelligent design,” Kapell notes in his online bio, “and that architecture, when approached from this belief, can directly enhance and improve the way we live, work, learn, and play.” Cardona and Kapell are just beginning their collaboration, which will be presented Saturday night at BAC; Cardona discussed that and more in a twi-ny talk held shortly after the fourth Intervention.

twi-ny: In the past you’ve collaborated with such sound, visual, and movement artists as Phil Kline, Rahel Vonmoos, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Maya Ciarrocchi, ETHEL, Douglas Fanning, and now Robert Sember. What is the anticipation like waiting to hear which collaborator has been selected for you? Do you have any inklings yet on who your collaborators will be for #5 and #6?

Wally Cardona: I now know Intervention #5 will be with Martin Kapell, and that his profession is in architecture and design. Anticipation: I suppose that begins to show up — and take on various emotional states, depending on my frame of mind — on the day of our first meeting. For me, a powerful thing in each Intervention is not just the fact that I’m meeting a person from a very different discipline or field of inquiry but that I’m meeting a complete stranger. And with the agreement that we’ll spend a week together. The first thing that happens is I perform my “empty solo” for them, and I have to confess that with each Intervention, I begin the second day wondering if the person will show up again.

twi-ny: In New York City, you’ve performed at BAM, the Joyce and Joyce SoHo, Danspace Project, the Duke, and DTW. You’re currently working at BAC. How is the space there informing the new work?

Wally Cardona: I’m glad you brought up BAC! They’ve been incredibly generous in supporting and presenting three Interventions. Each time, you never know what you’re gonna get. With a working period radically condensed to five days and an agreement to make the resources usually available to me as a choreographer also available to each “expert,” all questions re: lights, sound, audience set-up, running time, etc., are usually unknown until the last day. So, all our methods and coping mechanisms are challenged — presenter, tech crew, artist, expert, and perhaps audience.

Robert Sember, Wally Cardona, and Francis Stansky perform the challenging and inventive INTERVENTION #4 on January 8 at BAC

twi-ny: What was it like to have Misha witness INTERVENTION #4?

Wally Cardona: Misha’s got soooo much information in his body. Something wonderful happens when being watched by a person with that amount of knowledge. I’m not sure I can explain it. It’s like I see more of myself. And one thing I find incredibly inspiring about Misha is how he is able to use a minimal amount of force to maximal effect. I feel like a bull in a china shop in comparison.

twi-ny: You have given yourself a mere five days to work with each collaborator at each venue. Why do that to yourself?

Wally Cardona: The entire construct of the collaboration is not like any I’ve experienced before. The point really is to initiate — rather than find mutual agreement or choreograph a “new work by Wally Cardona.” If an expert’s desire or request puts me in an uncomfortable position that feels at odds with my own preference, patterns, likes, or dislikes . . . I’m happy. So it’s kind of like a self-imposed intervention and they are aggressive, in their own bizarre way. Each puts me on shaky ground, demands my constant attention and works best when my generosity overrides my fear.

twi-ny: The word “intervention” works on several levels but immediately conjures up an action taken against one person or event. Why did you choose it as the title of this series of collaborations, since the word “collaboration” can be interpreted to be in direct conflict with “intervention”?

Wally Cardona: People often wonder how an Intervention actually works. This is part of a paragraph given to each “expert” before we meet: “We begin as strangers and get acquainted through a weeklong working process. On Day One, I perform my ‘empty solo’ for each collaborator as a starting point and form of introduction. I present each expert with the same solo, which is designed to bend to his/her interpretation, desire, or aesthetics. What I am most interested in is what each expert might want to see even though he/she might not yet know how to make it manifest; how to do this is to be discovered, together, in the studio. Each expert is asked to think of me as a tool to be utilized and exercised, and I, in turn, call upon my own expertise to realize his/her vision. There is no system to the week and how it unfolds; it is unique to each expert. What we know is that a public performance is the final result, which the expert cannot make without me, and for which I am reliant on the expert’s opinion.”

INTERVENTION #5 takes place February 12 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. INTERVENTION #6 is scheduled for March 26.

TWI-NY TALK: BUTT JOHNSON

Butt Johnson, “Starchitects,” ballpoint pen on 2ply Bristol, 2009-10

BUTT JOHNSON: THE NAME OF THE ROSE
CRG Gallery
548 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 19, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-229-2766
www.crggallery.com
www.buttjohnson.com

As we made our way last Saturday through Butt Johnson’s exquisite display of remarkably detailed drawings at CRG Gallery in Chelsea, an older couple was marveling at the show, using the gallery-supplied magnifying glasses to peer deeply into such enchanting and engaging ballpoint-pen-on-paper works as “Starchitects,” “Various Controllers, Maps, and a Robotic Accessory,” “The Ambassadors,” and a series of roses. The woman then wondered aloud, “What kind of name is Butt Johnson?” Indeed, what kind of name is Butt Johnson? The title of the RISD graduate’s first solo show, “The Name of the Rose,” was inspired by the last line of Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel: “Yesterday’s rose endures in its name; we hold empty names,” which Eco explains in the postscript means that “in this imperfect world, the only imperishable things are ideas.” The pseudonymous artist, who is also a graphic designer, gallery owner, and recipient of a 2010 Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, agreed to talk to twi-ny about his name and his imperishable ideas under one condition — that we keep his real name a mystery, at least for now.

twi-ny: Your first solo show features stunning works that mix historical motifs and pop-culture references, evoking old master drawings, obsessive outsider art, and modern technology. What specifically attracts you to to the ballpoint-pen-on-paper format? Would you consider yourself an obsessive artist, given the amount of detail that appears in your work, which takes years to complete?

Butt Johnson: I’ve been drawing with ballpoint pens since I was a kid, mostly in the margins of school notebooks . . . but in my last year in college I reached a kind of threshold with the material where I realized if I handled the ink right I could actually mimic the language of old master drawings/engravings. Since then I have been honing the craft and learning how to draw from some of my favorite old (and new) masters. I think I’m getting better, but every time I see a Dürer or a Piranesi engraving I know I have a lifetime more of learning ahead of me. I have tried ballpoint on other surfaces besides paper, such as Mylar and Formica; it does interesting things and warrants further exploration, I think, but paper contextualizes the work within a tradition, which is nice.

As for obsessiveness, I actually don’t consider myself obsessive and may take issue with the term. While the drawings do take a good amount of time to complete, I think they are very focused on specific themes and arrangements. For me the term obsessive connotes a kind of naïveté (and not necessarily in a negative way), but I think if I compare my drawings to the kind of language that I am aping, it doesn’t even hold a candle to the amount of skill and concentration that existed in previous eras. Maybe in our lightning-speed contemporary culture it may seem like it would take obsession to make this kind of work, but honestly I spend much of my day dicking around on the internet just like everyone else.

Butt Johnson could have called his show “A Rose by Any Other Name…”

twi-ny: On the CRG website, your face is blurred out, and your name is clearly a pseudonym. Why have you decided to keep your identity in the dark? And why choose such a humorous name for such ostensibly serious work?

BJ: My identity is kind of only half in the dark. . . . I don’t try to keep it absolutely hidden, but at the same time I enjoy the anonymity that both the pseudonym and the blurred-out face afford. The name Butt Johnson was a joke I pulled out of the air back in undergrad, but I found it useful in terms of how I see both the idea of authorship and the branding of works of art, so I decided to keep it.

twi-ny: In another part of your life, you run a New York City gallery. What are some of the main differences in how you approach art from those two varying perspectives?

BJ: Ha! I do indeed run an art gallery (with two wonderful partners), and approach it in a very different manner than the ways in which I produce my own work. I love doing studio visits with other artists, and the gallery helps me leave behind my drawings as a filter through which to view other works of art. In this way I can keep my mind open and curious and engage in a very direct level with artists whom I support and can work towards furthering their careers. And as a bonus, it gets me out of the house.

“The Name of the Rose” continues at the CRG Gallery through February 19. Johnson is also part of the group show “Cover Version LP” at BAM through March 20, a collection of reimagined album covers by more than two dozen artists, including Johnson’s take on Terry Snyder and the All Stars’ 1960 smash, PERSUASIVE PERCUSSION VOLUME 2.