Above: 'Door (Jessie Pierrot)' and 'The Tyger (Rachel Auguste)' film stills.
So, it’s kind of a coincidence that MoMA is showing it now.
It is a coincidence, but my show being timed with the opening isn’t a coincidence—that was important to me, to have Holy Fools up at the same time as Disappearing Acts, the Nauman retrospective, because I wanted to, one, give viewers the opportunity to compare and contrast the works; two, I thought it would be potentially good press for my show; and three, I didn’t want to look too derivative or as though his retrospective had inspired my idea, which might have been how it seemed had I gone with a gallery or a show date which would have been long after the retrospective ended.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, I looked at all of the DVDs, all of the interactions that they had access to with Nauman and his makeup artists, the reviews that had come out the first time ‘Clown Torture’ premiered, original installation layouts, negatives—basically everything that’s out there that’s not on the internet was there.
Something really resonated with me about the idea of self-inflicted torture, which is the premise of ‘Clown Torture’—it felt, in a way, like an analogy to the art-making process—very masochistic and tedious. I also felt, at that time, in my practice, I’d been over-complicating a lot of projects I was working on—none of them were going in the right direction and I felt like this provided me with a simple formula I could follow, but contextualize to fit my own narrative. Even though ‘Clown Torture’ is abrasive and chaotic, when you look all the individual pieces, it’s actually pretty simple. It felt like a nice guidebook to use in order to make something different, something that references the original, but doesn't regurgitate what Nauman already did.
I chose to make the main focus of my project childhood trauma. Thinking about this idea of self-inflicted torture, I wanted to go a little bit deeper and make it personal for my performers—I wanted it to be, in a way, real torture that the viewer was watching and in a way participating in. So, I gave my performers a writing exercise where I asked them to share painful or traumatic childhood memories with me, and those writing entries served as my jumping-off point for scene building. So, the actions they do in their scenes are abstracted versions of the stories that they shared with me. Some of them quite literally reflect that and others seem potentially unrelated, but it was personal for the performers. There were multiple reasons I chose to do this, but one of the most significant reasons was to experiment with this as a form of exposure therapy: to see if, by having them repeat this in a real-time loop—so, unlike Nauman’s, it’s not a 30-second segment that’s played on loop, I have them perform a real-time repetition for up to 32 minutes—the idea is that it potentially releases some of the pain they have associated with this memory, with this story.
I liked the use of things from history—classicism, the William Blake poem—I was immediately in love with that. It was cool how you pulled from all these different sources. How did you end up landing on William Blake?
Well, I will preface this by saying that I made a promise to my performers that I would never share the sources for these scenes, but I do think I can divulge some things without referencing what they shared with me explicitly. With something like ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake, at least in a lot of prep schools, that poem is something that you’re forced to memorize and recite for the class, recite for your peers, the teacher, and then thinking about the meaning of the poem, the tiger and the sheep, the predator and the prey—I just think that relates to the whole basis of the project—the childhood trauma, a child being forced into a situation of prey, and whatever happened to them, whoever did it being the predator, whether that is a relative, or a friend, or a chance encounter that, for whatever reason, scarred them.
You said that you wanted to experiment with the idea of exposure therapy—do you feel like it worked? Did they react?
Well, it’s hard for me to really speak for the other three performers’ experience.
Oh—did you perform in it?
One of them, yes. Mine is the one with ‘The Magic Flute’ music, the lip-syncing and then the watching tv, which is a scene from Bergman’s The Magic Flute. But I think just the act of writing about something that you might have suppressed, or something that bothers you, provides you with a kind of release, and then knowing that whatever you’re performing is directly related to that, and then still choosing to participate, can also provide you with a certain amount of strength or power over something that happened to you when you were in a position of no power, when you were a child, when you had no autonomy, no independence and you’re just stuck in whatever situation you were in. I think there’s something about that that aids in a certain reclaiming of what was lost.
But that's also just one element of the project. The other element is about the viewer—it wasn’t just about what was happening on the screen, I was also interested in who is watching it, and I was thinking a lot about rubber-necking or Schadenfreude.
Remind me, Schadenfreude is when you enjoy someone else’s pain?
Yeah, Schadenfreude and rubber-necking are a little different—rubber-necking is when you know something terrible is happening but you’re unable to look away, like the phenomenon of seeing a car crash and wanting to watch.