Susan Gevirtz Interviews Ariel Goldberg | 11.27.10 @ SF MOMA
Susan Gevirtz: I just want to start our interview by taking a picture of you. [Pulls out her Motorola Razr cell phone.]
Ariel Goldberg: Oh, okay. I love to be photographed actually. Any contact with cameras is a way to study them.
SG: I wanted to say that no matter how much we talk I feel like there’s something we can’t talk about which is one of the things that keeps the piece for the chapbook really compelling. I was wondering if you feel that and whether it’s possible to articulate what that thing is.
AG: To me it’s that really irritating idiom that exists in our language, “a photograph is worth a thousand words.” It’s that exact intersection of trying to write on photography and how that’s self-defeating because a photograph is non-verbal and it’s anti-language. At the same time, it’s married so closely with language, especially in what I’d like to call “the time of urgent context” that we’re living in where context is overshadowing photographs in a lot of ways. We were once free from the idea that photographs needed words, but now we’re in a complete state of visual debilitation where we absolutely need the words. Yet then there’s still the undercurrent of photography’s secret superpower where we can’t talk about what’s happening, which is also because it’s happening too fast and always changing.
SG: So it’s like a picture is worth a thousand silences and those silences have lodged in them something dangerous and lots of other things, at least, impacting us?
AG: I think there’s something that is exciting about photography that promotes silence.
SG: I understand your work, The Photographer without a Camera, in the realm of what you were just saying, I understand The Photographer to not at all be writing about photos, but to be writing photos. Given what you were just saying it seems like an opportunity to make that distinction. It seems like one of many starting places.
AG: We need cameras now more than ever. I’m not anti-photography. I need to make that distinction clear, but we also need to photograph without cameras. And how can words be the tools of cameras now that we have so many cameras. How can they imitate them? How can they replace them? How can they watch them?
SG: Do you think our use of words has been impacted by the saturation in our world by cameras?
AG: Yes. Absolutely. I think our ability to create good search terms, our dependence on good search terms, makes me not fret for the degradation of language as a communication tool, but photographs are now the predominant communication tool, the preferred tool.
SG: It seems like this points to a shift in emphasis and weight of words in relation to image. I was interested in what you said in the piece about how words were going to become more and more important because they would be the vehicle of our search for images. It sounds like you’re suggesting the words would be in some way calling up or almost creating images.
AG: Yes, and I think also as a poetic form. The unpublished manuscript I spent a year writing before this was titled “Caption.” I’m really interested in how poetry can be used as a form of caption and how it just is. In the most crude sense one of the things poets do is describe their visual surroundings and our visual surroundings are almost all photographs. My full time job could be to walk out of my house, have nowhere to go, and just find photographs and write about them. I could spend eight hours a day doing that, no problem. In any city, anywhere in the world. So if somebody wants to pay me to do that…
SG: We should put a classified ad up. I’m curious about what you consider your lineage if that is even a relevant question. You were speaking for a minute there like you are a poet. Is it correct to see this work as part of a vast network of other work?
AG: Yes.
SG: So in that sense I don’t see it as only under the sign of poetry.
AG: Conceptual poetics was huge to me: Robert Fitterman was my first poetry teacher, and I’ll never forget Steve Benson coming to our class. A lot of influences were coming in at once. I was living in New York City when I started thinking about writing in terms of art and going to a lot of experimental downtown theater at PS 122, La mama, or standing up and reading my work in Hassidic Jewish Drag in a Burlesque show. So just dressing up, characters, that too was a huge influence for me. I came out to The Bay Area because I was lured by New Narrative styles and also by poets writing in sentences. Jenny Holzer is using language as an artist, but I like to argue with how. Marina Abramović was huge for me in terms of developing a commitment to performance. I just feel like my approach to reading and to finding people is that I have to just keep going. I have to just keep finding more.
SG: Well, the work is vast and I see The Photographer Without a Camera chapbook as only one artifact among many of this work. I am wondering whether you consider the page or the 3D to be the more performative of your enactments, or are these a kind of continuum.
AG: There’s this loop where the character performs for the text, like a draft is the performance. I’m going to have some bizarre conversation with a photographer who is hired through drink tickets to take pictures of people being gross on the dance floor. Overall, I feel like it’s all really scattered and I see my life like an installation that gets activated. I see that somebody reading this chapbook would be an activation of the performance. I would hope that if somebody reads this work they also will go and see some photographs of my performances online. It’s really difficult to be interdisciplinary because I never feel good at anything. I just feel like I’m on the edges of things. And that I have no identity.
SG: Oh, you have no identity? Well that can bring up the next question then: who is the, or are, the Photographer without a Camera? At one point it or they say, “Hi my name is ______.” – is this the poet as witness, what you call “memory keeper” or recorder / scribe, documentarian, gad fly, researcher, translator from other idioms into and out of poetry to make strange (visible) the too familiar? Who is it?
AG: Wow, that was a really beautiful description of what was going on. I think everybody is a photographer and therefore I had a lot of fun writing about types of photographers, almost as a satire on how photography has completely infiltrated our lives. I made that cast, the list of types of photographers, also to cope. This entire body of work is one big fat coping mechanism because the photographers are the public, and they are me as somebody. The very direct narrative that somebody could draw from this is that it’s a poet or a writer or an artist who used to be a photographer. I’m definitely writing and mining that experience of somebody who so seriously photographed, used top of the line equipment, developed their negatives at a professional lab, had pretensions that their photographs were art.
SG: I saw some people watching you on the Golden Gate Bridge video....When I read the first page, which is that list of all the different kinds of photographers, it reads to me like characters in a play.
AG: It is meant as that. Writers to me like Fiona Templeton and Thalia Field also, huge influences on my work, are writing plays. That’s the link between the page and the 3D. I see everything as a performance script. You know how poets are like, “I wrote a poem today.” I write performance scripts but I want people to read them like poems.
SG: The Photographer without Camera is of course like most appearances of the word “I” in poetry: it is both you and not you and a placeholder for many others. Your use of “it” makes me think that this photographer without camera is genderless, or changing genders, it’s everyone’s photographer, it’s everyone. Everyone is reduced to or turned into an “it” by this photo procedure, but also at the same time it raises questions about issues of responsibility. I know you’ve struggled with that in the past.
AG: I think the text is definitely committed to making the lack of responsibility and the inability to claim responsibility for photos a major theme. I’m fascinated by what is becoming citizen journalism especially among people in the military who just bring their cameras along. And also photojournalists, who have the most power right now in terms of shaping an idea of what these wars are to those Americans who never go to the wars. I think these photojournalists shape, not in a flattering way necessarily, just in an inevitable way, my national identity. I think that’s terrifying because I know how factless a photograph can be. Half the work tries to take on the first person and the uncomfortability of the first person. It’s trippy that I am writing in the voice of photojournalists who are taking photographs of war. It feels like I have motion sickness while I am doing it. And I force myself to do it and the pieces never feel right. Even when I am crafting them as pieces of language, it’s a horrible feeling, to even have to do that. It feels like I am in a mourning process, for how many photographs I look at of dead bodies, of bombed out places, of people that live in the United States who are doing all of the above, of just everything. Even really bucolic photographs that 22 year olds are taking of their friends naked in a field and calling it queer art because the people in the photographs are queer. I feel like I’m mourning something. A lot of this feels like a dirge. I think I’m obsessed with death and that’s why I’m into photography. It’s the death place.
SG: Maybe that’s the part that exceeds being able to be talked about.
AG: Yeah it’s like the moment of silence.
SG: On the radio.
AG: Or News Hour on PBS, it’s actually one of those strange radio shows that are rebroadcast, like Democracy Now, it’s originally a TV show, and I never think about how people are looking at Amy Goodman’s bad haircut. When News Hour does that moment of silence for the fallen they show a photograph of the person on the screen and if they don’t have a photograph there’s just a figure of a head.
SG: I guess there’s a possibility of thinking of mourning as a responsible act, like if we’re not in mourning we’re not seeing or looking, but that also can be sentimental. What I think saves your work from that possibility is that both in the video and the text in a very interesting way you posit a social without universalizing. What I mean by that is that there’s a very mixed up different--faced presence that you have in the video and in the text. It’s almost like the different masquerades of the different photographers tell us that we can’t universalize here, we’re talking about lots and lots of specific ones.
AG: It’s been a real struggle, performance wise, to put a representative of all of these photographers.
SG: The video on your website at the Golden Gate Bridge, of your performing listening and overhearing the language of how photographs are referred to or how taking pictures are referred to--does this feel at all like an archeological kind of activity, like you’re excavating?
AG: In my research for the Golden Gate Bridge performance, I actually felt like I was doing a really haphazard ethnography. From visiting the bridge, I tried to create a blank space for that language to sit. I tried to internalize all that people were saying next to photography and then rewrite it.
SG: When you say I would just stay alongside and listen, it reminds me of a caring or a tending.
AG: Well we do experience loss when we photograph, we experience a machine doing the remembering for us. I’m committed also to that feeling you have when you see a photograph you weren’t expecting and you can feel your body change.
SG: Thinking more in that vein, it seems like the most photographed subjects, places remaining invisible not even being the point, while the actions and the taxonomy of photography is being documented, this makes me think of the way Irigaray or Homi Bhabha speak of mimicry. They have different ideas of it but in both cases, mimicry works to use the taxonomies of mundane lexicons to highlight the workings of mechanisms impacts of the mundane on identity and truth making. So, is this similar to what you call clowning? How for example, in the press conference, on page 34 you say, “The clowning works with the insistence on a nonlinear and fragmented response. I rewrite information, the news, which is full of broken systems, as is my American identity, and so the forms of it in the writing and the performance play with more visible as opposed to judgmental forms of absurdity.”
AG: Bhanu Kapil was at the performance and Q&A where that was transcribed from and it was she who called the performance clowning. I want to talk about the mechanisms. I want to point them out. I want to put them on the spot. I think they are infuriating and yet I’m completely complacent and dependent on them.
SG: Throughout the chapbook you announce, “The following are all true stories…” Of course I don’t believe you when you say this, and or, I read you interrogating the common status of the photo and or the eyewitness account in words as truthful evidence. So are you, in other words writing photos into existence or translating photo to word or vice versa in order to draw our attention to the nature of the “true” documentation we are immersed in?
AG: I just despise how photography is talked about as a vehicle of truth. And besides the book Words Without Pictures, art criticism on photography usually writes about a picture and shows you that picture. I’m not going to show a photo of what I’m talking about. My tagline is I am writing a poetic criticism on photography for people who are in photographs and for the people who take photographs.
SG: Usually I find the methods of a poem couched in a poem, intentionally or not. Would you say that this describes your method? On page 8, you write “I continued my approach by reading the words on boxes in the mini city, not lost at all in talking to myself.” Would you say the work is a recitation, an inventory of what cannot be seen?
AG: Absolutely. That line was from performances I did in stores. I perform things then write about them.
SG: Is there nothing to write about otherwise? I’m trying to ask about you generating a situation or an experience.
AG: I’m committed to a writing of the moment, literally thinking of writing as about performances, so those are my methods. Or I choose a huge theme and anything in that theme I am compelled to write on. But perhaps I am tricking myself about the theme of photography and I’m just writing about my life. And I make theories about photography in order to survive my life.
SG: The whole issue of proximity--I think you have a character that has proximity in their name. I was interested in this intimate up closeness to the reader or with whatever is being written about or written into existence or this vast sort of Google earth distance on things. How do you negotiate that?
AG: Because I am only looking at so many photographs. I think we need to consider how photography is not just a fine art and it’s not a scientific tool. It’s collapsing on itself all the time.
SG: It seems like one thing that happens in this work is that it’s almost like we are constantly negotiating the nature of that collapse and that has to do with the possible conditions that the characters collapse into each other. And the collapse of the intimate and the distant. And that seems like the nature of being alive now. We can go such far distances and see far distances.
AG: A major motivation for this piece is to understand how it’s possible to look at a photograph of a street in Kabul from my computer, where no bombs are going off, no military is invading in the tens of thousands, and to negotiate the sheer fact of the distance that photographs are defying--that’s what gets me in the chair to write. I’m attracted to not understanding things.
SG: Is that also an ethical act. Of course you’re doing nothing sitting in your chair. But you’re tending. Is it like taking care of a baby screaming?
AG: To be writing in the first person, I’m making so many assumptions, I’m saying ethics are out the window. I write like Dennis Cooper does about smut. I was taking a class with Dodie Bellamy when I first started writing in the first person as photojournalists.
SG: Sometimes you write a photograph and I feel like I can almost see it. I’m fascinated by how I can almost see things, but not completely. But then I started thinking I never completely see a photo either. Do you think that “almost” is the condition of seeing all photos or the condition of seeing?
AG: I want to create a very accurate description but then not do that. To let description fail. To fall face first, in front of you. I want it to be a thinking about what is happening. There’s a little bit of the absurd, why are you describing a photograph that has been seen?