Describe the major themes in your work, how you formalize those themes, and the concepts and artists that influence you.
Since 2010, I have worked within, against and without art's institutions and structures. This tends to escalate the stakes of my participation in them as much as it does tend to reduce it. For example, Martha Rosler changed my life once and only once. I was working on behalf of a cross-campus student organization in my very early 20s, a Marxist one, so-called. We invited Rosler to participate in a panel discussion held at Left Forum on the "Death of Art." So called. I was the only woman in the working group. When we met Rosler to discuss the panel, I couldn't get a word in edgewise and neither could she. The men spoke over both of us. It was embarassing.
Martha Rosler is an activist. That's not a theme in her practice this is her practice: she exists to cause something, or she doesn't exist at all. And, Martha's not going to burn herself out but being at liberty she will interrogate the d-girl (derogatory Hollywood slang term for non-influential, entry-level staff member). The D-girl does often appear to be the subject of her work, including but not limited to the one right in front of her, me.
The artist kept asking me what my job was. I didn't have one. I was just the d-girl. She would not let it rest. I think I was offended: I told her I didn't think her presence on the panel was appropriate because the only times like in ... uh, history, people seem to care about the death of art is when women start doing it. The men laughed, then passed over this in silence; it was pointed out that I was clever, or I was somehow, in that moment, reminded of my exception.
The semiotics say the quiet part out loud. So does Martha Rosler. To the exceptional woman, she plays the part that says: not like all the rest Including the words how do you make money? All the parts that slice into you and make you competent of laying the meaningful infrastructure bare. Since then, the dialectic of ideology and technology, the construction of self, the diabolical and sometimes embarassing dynamics of subjectivity and subjection, the history of computer science, the language of encryption, art history and the struggle between domestic and scholastic relationships are not themes that I have chosen but the ones that demand interrogation. And that I trade on.
Rosler got me to say that I was a photo model. In front of all of these institutionally sanctioned males. No, not like a fashion model. An online catalogue model. She said it was interesting. What's interesting is how she forced me to recognize my material conditions in an instant. Penelope Machine was a performance and a self portraiture that evolved through a negotiation with labor and identity in a way that used performance art practically: a way to escalate my consciousness around exploitation and representation. She existed to cause something. So did Campbell Carolan: two women, working under a single artistic identity.
There are two competing requirements for the Modernist project, yet unfinished: mathematical simplicity, drastically reducing the number of moving parts in a system; the number of kinds of parts, the orthonogality of concepts (like feminism, like day jobs) or cyclomatic complexity (like hormones, like a college application.) Then there are the problems you choose to have when you are free. Like art, feminism is one of them. My work exists to reproduce it and ideally minimize its necessity.