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Cam Slocum: I think that is a misconception of this work because I do not believe it is a puzzle necessarily. This work is about an attempt for a proposal of what I had seen and for me that is not setting up a puzzle. What is interesting about this work is the gap between how an artist perceives his work and the viewer perceives the work. For some reason I have a big gap in this work in terms of my intentions and my understanding of what this work should mean and how it is being responded to. I have to wonder whether it has to do with the viewer potentially not paying attention or whether I am not paying attention. (laughs)
V5 -Courtney Gregg: Do you think that is how you are obscuring it?
CS: There is nothing about obscuring anything in this work, it is absolutely declared. The thing that interests me about it and something I do not think the viewers get. The viewer tends to take this work as a set of instructions and it is not necessarily meant to be viewed that way. In terms of how something is visualized, it is meant to be an attempt to describe something and then the viewer has to contend with what aspects of that description are available to them or not and what they can derive from that. How they know what it is and what they know.
V5: Perhaps at this point you would like to physically describe the pieces and talk about what they actually are?
CS: Essentially what I do is transpose a photograph into language and up to this point it has been an inclusive process where I virtually everything I see in a photograph I transcribe into language. What you end up with basically is a weird picture or photograph. Lately some of the newer stuff has become a little bit more reduced, resulting from the fact that I feel that I am overwhelming my viewers with the amount of information. So I am now trying to cut back in terms of my total description.
V5: So these are plastic?
CS: Yes, but the new things are not plastic; they are paper and canvas. The plastic ones are what this audience will see.
V5:So they are words and shapes painted onto plastic or drawn onto paper, large and small.
CS: Yes and we should say the composition reflects the composition of the photograph of the scale of each thing within the format of the painting reflects the scale of that thing in the photograph as well.
V5: What you are saying is that there is a retranslation of the photograph?
CS: A translation of a photograph, not necessarily a retranslation.
V5: How long have you been working on this series?
CS: This body of work has been going on for two years.
V5: Did it evolve out of the calligraphy project that went before it for about two or three years?
CS: It did not necessarily evolve out of the calligraphy, but more out of some experimentation that I was doing with language on top of photographs. There was a real sense of play and altering of meanings with that work and it was not about being ultra serious.
V5: What do you accomplish by translating these photographs?
CS: What happens in my mind is a potential viewer, and this is how it is not about a puzzle, has to negotiate a kind of map of what someone is seeing. A person has to negotiate through this map to create an image. In the process, because of what is included and not included (not in a hugely selective way but just by virtue of how I am interpreting something) A viewer, if they are paying attention, then has to ask themselves a number of questions. I will use this as an example, "If I say a brown dog, you would then have to ask yourself, what kind of dog is that and is it a large or small dog and often times you could never make that distinction." As you negotiate yourself through the painting, if you are paying attention, you don?t take my descriptions literally or verbally you have to create your own images out of them. In creating your own images another gap starts to occur and that gap is about whether you are correct or not and how one thing might fit against another and all kinds of potential issues of delineation, where something is and what something looks like. Getting back to the example, you might ask what this dog is doing physically, is he running, walking or jumping up in the air? All these things have to occur in the viewing.
V5: So it is like reading a novel as opposed to seeing a movie.
CS: Absolutely.
V5: It is a modernist idea calling attention to the viewer as opposed to the maker, or the disparity between the two.
CS: Yes, if you consider that to be a sort of tenet of modernism.
V5: I am going to change course a little. Where do you think this work fits into the larger art with a capitol a context and it that interesting to you?
CS: It is funny that you ask that because I do not know where the fuck it fits into at all and really do not care. (laughs) The way I work is to try to pursue a set of ideas that interest me and then go with them. Often times I send off slides and transparencies of this work and wonder how or if it fits in at all and for some reason I just do not care. The longer I have done this series, the less I think it fits into anything, which is perfectly okay with me. (laughs)
V5: Along those lines I would like to talk about the idea of beauty. It seems to me that in this work beauty is not a number one priority, perhaps seduction, but not beauty. Would you like to talk about the idea of beauty?
CS: I do not think beauty really has much to do with this work and actually I am not sure that beauty is a goal.
V5: Have you worked to make these pieces, which I have to say are attractive with their extraordinary colors, not beautiful ?
CS: It is language-based work so it depends on whether you find words to look at beautiful. In some ways that can happen, but I will say that I am very, very conscious of being anti-compositional in this work. I did a series of drawings not long ago thatwere hard to look at. This is one of the big gaps that I am having and it is an issue that is difficult in this work. People want to be seduced by an image and I have not been doing that in this work and an issue I am attempting to work on more now. I realize that people have expectations about what they are looking at. There is not much you can do about it. That does not mean that I would start to undermine the content of the work.
V5: Maybe that is not a major idea in art right now, the idea of beauty.
CS: I really do not know what purpose it serves in art, to tell you the truth. The difficulty with beauty in art is that there is such a level of seduction that once you are seduced, where do you go from there. All artists today have a notion that there is a requirement to seduce and then take someone somewhere else. The problem is that the aesthetics of beauty can overwhelm the work and its longevity in a funny way. So often times you find that if you are building in a kind of notion of beauty into work, that is the first thing that needs to get chucked. Five or ten years down the road, it is the thing most off putting when you are looking at work.
V5: Do you think that in some way beauty is superficial?
CS: Yes, absolutely. It is as superficial as it is in any other aspect of life. You can always look at work where someone is trying to seduce and that forced aspect of seduction is something I would always try to get rid of if I have a choice.
V5: Along the same lines, we have had conversations before about fakeness, when something feels like art when it is somehow suspect and making work that walks a line where perhaps you are not sure it is art at all. Would you like to talk about that in regards to this work?
CS: I would go back to the thing that I was talking about before in the sense that I am not really sure where this work fits in necessarily. It seems to be very difficult work because for one thing it is not quick work; it is very slow to evolve. It does not necessarily provide a viewer with any big payoff other then what they are willing to have sort of picked up along the way in the process of discovering the work. In that sense it is kind of antithetical to even what people want to look at these days. I am requiring an attention span and a reinvestigation in this work, but people are really not very willing to do. Someone said to me recently about this work that I thought was very insightful, that this work is difficult and the work requires that and I just have to get over it. (laughs)
V5: Is it disappointing to you when people say this work is just really hard and do not get it.
CS: When I was in Cologne recently and I was watching people decide whether they were going to engage with the work or not, I was very disappointed when they would opt not to. For one thing, the work is very funny, more so than a lot of art that I have seen. To me it is really, really funny work and that is a rare quality in art these days. It is something that I have reinvestigated in terms of the way I make work in general. When I think that there is all this potential with a piece sitting in front of people and then I see them not go there because it is language based and they have to participate, read and wade through and make decisions and not want to, they want to be hit with some super graphic that speeds it up for them, I think that is a bit disappointing.
V5: Making something that is difficult is a political position. Do you feel we are unwilling to work hard to understand?
CS: Absolutely and on top of that what disappointments me about this work is that the issues that are available in this work are so right on in terms of how, at the risk of sounding boastful, how one looks at things, both figuratively and literally, and how one understands what they are seeing when they see it. That is a very big issue for me and when I see someone walk away from a piece being put off by language or having to work a little bit harder and not having something kiss their ass, it?s hard to take.
V5: Thank you Cam.
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