[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumblr.com. A few months ago, I recorded a podcast with Zach Martin, a recently retired major at the U.S. Marine Corps. It was an interesting one, I thought, and a lot of people seemed to have dug it, but I knew Zach from the year I spent at Strathhaven High School down in Media, Pennsylvania for one of the few times I got away from New Jersey in my life. After we wrapped up recording, I asked Zach about some of our pals from that era, about 1989 or so, to see if any of them had changed in the past 20 to 25 years as much as Zach had. He mentioned that one of our mutual friends, Bean Gilsdorf, had become an artist. This wasn't that surprising from what I recall of our conversations in that era and who she was. I think people might be more surprised about what I became, and probably not in a good way, but that's neither here nor there. When I got home that afternoon, last November, looked Bean up and then dropped her a line, and we made plans to record next time she came out east from San Francisco, which I took as a good sign because it meant she didn't hate me for some reason that I couldn't recall. This weekend she was out from San Francisco. Bean was in Brooklyn for the debut of Dead Ringer, a three-person show at Fowler Project Space. Dead Ringer will run through March 5, 2014, and also features work from Seth Curcio and Julie Henson. Bean is a contemporary artist and a writer and curator and critic, and I, well, to put it mildly, I have an issue with contemporary arts, which I've written about and talked about kind of extensively. I had a little trepidation going into our conversation, but I was really gratified to find that Bean didn't spout jargon or theory or anything in our conversation. In fact, she's very thoughtful and plain-spoken about art and what she's trying to achieve. Even when there is some terminology outside the ordinary, it's not phrased in any sort of elitist way. She's also capable of coming up with some very engaging notions about art and its place in the world and the construction of history and things of that ilk. I think you'll enjoy this talk. And after my conversation with Bean, I went over to the Brooklyn Roasting Company to meet with Ed Champion, a writer who runs the wonderful literary podcast, The Batsagundo Show. Ed and I shot the breeze for like three hours. It had a lot of fun trading notes about guests and talking about microphones and equipment and in general, just comparing and contrasting our podcasts and what we're trying to do with them. Ed started out by talking about my strange mutant power to ask a pretty simple question and get my guest to deliver really revealing five-minute long soliloquies about themselves. Funnily enough, within ten minutes, Ed was engaged in one of those himself and realized it part way through. We had a good time and the talk really helped me better understand what I'm trying to do with the podcast. I'm not going to tell you what I came up with out of that because that would be like a magician revealing his illusions or something, but suffice to say, I had some sort of dialectic moment this Saturday. Anyway, between those two conversations, I am feeling pretty good right now, so I am going to leave you in peace and let you enjoy the new virtual memories show, featuring a conversation with Bean Gillstorf. So you mentioned the realm of the possible. Okay, let's go ahead and start with the hard one. Let's start there. We can also start with my other lead question. How did you get into this whole arts racket anyway? How did you... Oh, God. Yes. See, how do you become an artist? How do you become an artist? I think you own it. I think that's how you become an artist. I made art my whole life and never considered it as a professional career and never considered myself an artist per se, it's definitely not a capital A artist, and I was making so much art that I had no choice but to claim it, essentially, finally, and it was almost like a shameful thing at first. What do you do, and I'd be like an artist, because there's so many questions that follow on behind that and so many assumptions. Several of which we'll get to, I'm sure. I hope so, you know, because for, I think, a large part of the world, if you say you're an artist, that means you're a painter, because that, to them, that's what art is. That's Picasso, that's Van Gogh. They worked, you know, semi-representationally on canvas with paint, and so then the further questions, you know, like, "Oh, so you're a painter?" "No." "Oh, what do you make?" And then there's this moment where you have to try and classify what you're doing for someone in a way that they can understand it, so it's like being an artist and talking about being an artist is a lot about trying to suss out your audience and how much do they know about art, how much do they care? Is it a casual question, or are they really deeply invested in whatever your answer is? There's a lot of, kind of like social considerations that go into answering that question, like, you know, "How did you become an artist even?" Because the other thing is that the path is so different for everyone, and I think that, you know, most of the people that I know who are artists, they, some of them claimed it really early on, and you know, like, from childhood, they knew that this is what they were going to do. I wonder if that was partially due to, sort of like, the influences around their life. Like, you know, when you're good at drawing as a little kid, you know, your parents are like, "Oh, this is so great, you're so talented," and they'll push you in a particular direction, just as, you know, if you were good at math or science or something else, you know, like, you kind of get channeled into things. I was never channeled into art. I wouldn't not that I was channeled into anything in particular, but... Your parents support what you do now? Yeah, my mother is super supportive, but I think, to her, she, like, it doesn't matter what I do, as long as I'm happy and healthy. I have one of those really great, great moms who's, you know, she was never invested in seeing a particular outcome in my life other than that I was happy doing what I was doing, so, yeah. So, what sort of art were you making before you knew that this was your thing? I was a painter. I painted all through high school, and I painted into college, actually all through college. And again, like, you know, that has a lot to do with circumstance. I went to a liberal arts college. What'd you get? I went to Simon's Rock College. Oh, I knew that, you know, if that was a full four-year thing or... Yeah. Yeah. So, a full four-year thing, and, you know, the art department was two people. It was really, really small. There was the guy who would teach you painting and drawing, and there was the guy who did ceramics, you know, and those were the two professors. And I had less interest in ceramics, partially because the professor was a pothead. And it wasn't really into teaching so much as just sort of hanging out with the students and having a good time. And so, you know, like, my options were really limited. If there had been a giant art department, you know, with a big, like, new media department, things might have been very different in how I started out, but... You could have gone to Hampshire instead of Great Barrington. I know, exactly. And not that I didn't think about that later. Yeah. Because it's pretty easy to transfer, you know, once you kind of get into that up there into that little college system in Massachusetts, it's pretty easy to just, like, hop over to someplace else. But assuming you're not being kicked out for something really awful. Even then. Yeah, cool. Even then. But, yeah, so I started as a painter, and I really, you know, I still love painting, like, for itself. I think just the process of working with color, paint is a really luscious substance. I was an oil painter, oil paints are really buttery. They have a really distinctive odor. There's something, it's almost food-like, like, food prep, you know, like, there's something about using your hands and working with these really interesting textures. So for me, painting was not about necessarily the picture, but about the process. And I was a terrible, terrible painter. My paintings were awful. Yeah. I had a chance. The technique, content, everything. Technique, content, everything. Even the way that I, eventually, I unstretched all of them and rolled them up and stored them, you know, and they weren't meant to be stored like that, and they all, you know, cracked and things like that. And I actually had the opportunity, not too long ago, about two years ago, to get some really old paintings from my mother's house. And you know, it was one of those things like, "Get your damn paintings out of my house, please! Like, you have so much junk here." And I, you know, I took them back and I unrolled them and had this little trip down memory lane. And I appreciated them for what they were, but God, they were awful. They were so bad. See, I burned everything. My mom was moving in 1999, and I took everything she had in the basement of mine, all the writing and all that stuff. Wow. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, I bet it was. I haven't written anything since, outside of the one thing you read, or the one thing I sent you. But, yeah, no, it was still pretty cathartic to just not have to look at my early days. Well, you know, that's what the artist John Baldessari did. He was a painter, and he had made all these paintings, and he decided that he wanted to be more of a conceptual artist and work in a very different way. And he had that cathartic moment, he took everything, and he burnt it, and then he started fresh. Yes, I didn't do the starting fresh part. That was a step I missed. I got to get back to that. There's always something that you forget, right? Yeah, it was. So how did you progress from there to what you do now, which will eventually get around to classifying? Okay, and we will eventually classify it. We'll at least describe it. Yes, okay. Well, actually, I walked away from art for a little while. So I graduated from college, and I graduated with a degree in literature, because reading was always my first love. And of course, and I had read some really great books when I was a very impressionable teenager, and I thought I wanted to be the great American novelist. So I left Great Barrington with a degree in literature, and I had written my thesis, I wrote a collection of short stories, also terrible, also revisited not too long ago, and decidedly awful. And then I had this kind of left-hand turn where I thought, okay, I'm still interested in language and words, but creative writing is so, so unbelievably difficult. It is so incredibly horrifying to invent worlds and people and motivations and characterizations and put them into words and on the page, and then you look at it and you're like, I suck. This is so awful. And I got sick of doing that, and so I was like, you know what? I want to work with language. So I actually went and got a master's degree in linguistics, in theoretical linguistics, and a graduate certificate at the same time in cognitive science, because I thought I wanted to be a researcher. Now here is the fundamental difference between art and pretty much everything else. And when I say art, I include literature in that, which is try before you buy. You cannot try being a linguistics researcher before you go and buy the degree, right? So I got there, I spent two years at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and I was sort of in love with it at the same time that I hated it. I really liked the work, and I really liked the theory, and I liked a lot of the camaraderie that I experienced there, but at the same time I got a real serious taste for what it's like to be an academic, fighting for grants, and working off of grant money all the time. And how very political the ivory tower is, you know, coming from a very, very small school in my undergraduate experience, and then going to the University of Colorado where like, you know, I had to take basically a remedial statistics class because I hadn't gotten that training before. You know, I go to my first class, and it's a 200-person lecture hall. It was like, to me, that was like being in a movie theater. That's the size of your entire college. Yeah, I was, actually. And so, you know, I'd never had that kind of experience before, and it was very, very jarring. So there were a lot of things that didn't kind of match up for me and what I had thought the experience of the training would be like, and what it actually was. And the other thing about linguistics, of course, is that it's so hotly contested. Okay, so we're talking about how do children, how do babies acquire their first language? How do we store language in the brain? How do we access that storage? You know, how do we make all these connections between things? How do we learn a second language? How can we teach computers to model language so that we get a sense for what the brain might be doing? It's all these really interesting questions, right? Super interesting, fundamental even. And yet, the theories that we make about them are only theories, but you would think from the way that people have these intense, heated arguments that later, of course, lead to getting millions and millions of dollars in grant funding, you'd think that the things that we were actually coming up with were real, and they're no more real than that invented character in somebody's head that's coming from literature. We don't actually know what happens. We just have some nice ideas about it. Some of them may be partially correct, but the brain is so incredibly complex that it's, you kind of have to take a step back and be like, yeah, this is all conjecture. You know? Were you completely done with the degree when you had that realization? No, no, the thing is, I'm so stubborn, and I sort of second-guess myself, so I got there and I was like, yeah, this is cool, maybe it's not as cool as I thought, maybe this isn't actually what I want to be doing, because you have to go through and get the PhD, like the terminal master's is like, why bother? So I thought, okay, I'm going to stick this out, and I did, and I got the degree, even though then I was in debt, more than I really needed to be to find all that out, but so I got the degree, and then I moved to Portland, Oregon, and I had this sort of transition period where I started making art again, and what form did that take? I started working with textiles, actually. Part of that was because I am a fourth-generation seamstress, so my great-grandmother sewed clothes professionally. My grandmother and my mother made a lot of my clothes when I was a child. I grew up in a really just like sewing-rich environment. I was never taught to sew, and I want to say taught in air quotes, because it was just around all the time. So it was like learning the way that you learn to boil a pot of water, or you learn to turn a key in a lock, you just see it over and over again, so it just becomes part of your knowledge as well. So it kind of made sense, because that would be the medium of choice for me, partially because I knew it so well, so I didn't have to really think about it too much, but I also I find it incredibly comforting, it's a craft-based process, you get to use your hands, there's a lot of the processes in sewing are very meditative and repetitive. So here I was sort of in this weird, I don't want to say crisis, but I was kind of emotional and intellectual turmoil because I didn't know what I should do next. And there was this sort of feeling of like, well, you better decide, and I was trying to decide if I should apply to PhD programs in linguistics, if like, maybe I just didn't like the department, maybe I needed to go somewhere different, maybe this would turn out okay in the end, I'd already invested in it, time and money, and then I'm like making more and more artwork, and then finally I just had this moment where I was like, I'm already doing what I need to be doing, let that go. It's okay that it didn't work out, it's okay for you to call it like a failure and put it to the side and then do something different, and that was the moment, I think it still took me years later to say that I was an artist, but I think that was the moment that I became an artist, was when I was willing to just let other things go and acknowledge my own interest in pursuing something that had nothing to do with academic accolades or any kind of letters after my name, or any kind of outside validation of what the world might think that you ought to do with your life essentially, so that was a long answer. Although it's still a grant-based world in some respects, in a lot of respects. Yeah, okay, so we're gonna talk about money now. I don't have a career to, I'm doing this thing, and I don't care about the giant sale prices and in auction-y sort of world, but how do you make a living as an artist? I don't, strictly speaking, I don't make a living as an artist. My artwork, I rarely sell anything. I also don't make a lot of things that are for sale, and maybe we should sort of talk about that at some point, but- That's part of the describing what you actually do. Yeah, exactly. So for one thing that the degree in linguistics did for me was that I got a job teaching English as a second language to teenagers through a special program in Portland that was funded by Portland Public Schools but was administered through Portland Community College, and so I was there for almost 11 years, actually, and the great thing about that was that studio time is really alone and intense, and you're very much stuck in your own head, and it's great, but you're very isolated and cut off from the rest of the world in the studio. And so I would spend half the day in the studio, and then I would go teach my class, like I'd go to work at 4 o'clock in the afternoon because I always taught evening classes, and then I would be in these socially incredibly rich environments and it's teenagers, they just can't even contain their own energy. So I would go from basically being in an isolation tank to being in a room sometimes up to I think my biggest class was 37 students, so having these incredibly intense, rich experiences with these young people who were very, very super interesting from all over the world, so for a while it was this really nice balance, so I supported myself through teaching for a long time, and then I decided to go and get my MFA, and then I did, so that was two years, and then I did a year that was a graduate fellowship. And then since then I've been supporting myself, I write about art, and I'm the managing editor of Daily Serving, an online arts publication, and I do a lot of freelance editing, I've done some ghost writing, I mean I just, I'm living that weird freelance life now where, again, I'm diving into that at 43 right now, so, yeah, exactly, so, and you know it's, the freelance life is one of those things where, I don't know about you, but every other month, I think I can't do this anymore, this has got to stop, I have to find a real job. And sometimes- Don't don't ruin it for me, because it's about to start for me at the early end of February, and it'll be the first time since, well the first week of March it'll be the first time since 1995 that I won't have a paycheck. Oh my god. Yeah. You will have a paycheck, something will come. Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm building something and trying to get this whole shebang together, but there's that initial, yeah, I'm kind of stepping away from this sense of security into, you know, making something. Right. In my case, it's trying to make art out of business, but you know, that's a little different than other peoples. Right. It is what they're doing, but I have my own midlife crisis, that's fine, we'll talk about yours. Oh great. Well, it's real feast or famine, you know, I mean it's, people only ever want to work with you when you're already super busy, is what I'm finding. So yeah, but art doesn't make any money. There's art as actually, I think in a lot of ways, art is a microcosm of the economic system that's at play in the world at large right now. There are very, very few people who make a lot of money. There are very, there's a very narrow portion of people who sort of sustain themselves, but they do it through various ways that are related to art there. There are art teachers, there are writers, there are also artists. And then there's a large percentage of people who work sometimes more than one day job, you know, essentially, and they're an artist on the side, and they don't have any expectations from making money from their work. So. So she said to the guy who's doing an ad-free podcast. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, that's the thing, but you make a choice. There's a certain point in which you understand what's at stake and what's at play and sort of what's available, and you, you, you just make a choice about what it is that is important to you. I'm, I wonder, do you feel the same way? Because I feel like in order to get, so I'm not represented by a gallery, but in order to get gallery representation, one of the things that you have to do is you have to produce a product, essentially. It has to look the same. People have to be able to look at a piece on the wall and be like, "Oh, that's a bean gill store if I recognize that." And you have to commit to kind of making enough work to meet a clientele demand, hopefully you'd have one. There's a lot of strictures around that particular process, but that's the system for selling art. And if I make two of something, I'm boring myself. I have a really hard time doing anything that's repetitive. Do you feel any sense of continuity through your work? Oh, absolutely. But more of a conceptual one as opposed to a surface. How do you? Well, I think for me, I sort of bounce back and forth between a bunch of different modalities. So if I feel like working with my hands, then I might make a flag or a textile-based installation or something. And then that'll make my back hurt, and then I will eventually bore myself, so I'll switch to something. I might then make a video. There might be conceptual overlap in some of the ideas that are between those two pieces. But I don't know that you would necessarily recognize them as being by the same artist if they were side-by-side on the wall. But really, once I made that decision to be an artist, the decision that I made after that had to be, "Well, how do you want to frame this practice?" And then the decision after that was, "Okay, do you really care what anybody else thinks?" And they're sort of like corollaries of each other, you know? Do I care? That's a good question. Because one of the ongoing themes of this show, besides the curse of the mid-list, which uncharacterizes most of the writers I've interviewed, not really. That's a subtitle. If I ever reboot the show, it'll just be called the curse of the mid-list. Is that notion of building an audience or having an audience, or understanding what your audience is? You already talked about clientele in a separate idea of audience, but who is your audience? Or have you figured that out? That is the question that they ask you in your studio practice all the time when you're getting an MFA. Well, who do you think your audience is? And I always have a glib answer that changes. Glib away, please. And your audience is, whoever happens to stumble upon your work, essentially. But I think if I had to characterize the audience that I love to talk to, they're people who care very deeply about ideas, and they like to be surprised, and they don't necessarily have a very narrow set of assumptions about what art is or could be. And so they bring their own flexibility, their own mental flexibility to art viewing. And so they are curious, they're open. So I think that is who my audience is. My ideal audience is someone who doesn't say, "What's that? I don't know what that is, so therefore I don't care about it." They say, "What's that? I want to find out more." I don't want to say that the world can be divided into those two kinds of people. It's the curious and the curious. Yeah, well. But that's like the old joke. The world can be divided into two sets of people, the kind that divides the world into two sets of people, and those that don't. But yeah, and I think, too, my audience has changed enormously. So when I started out working in textiles, I had a very craft-based discussion all the time about my work. My audience was very interested in textiles specifically. And I actually, that was part of why I went back to school after all this time, was because I was only able to have a certain kind of conversation, and I got sick of that conversation. And I felt like I was put in this weird box. For a while, the box was really cozy, to be honest. I would go to these textile conferences, and you're wearing your little name badge, and somebody would say, "Oh, you're being Gilstorf. I've seen your work." And that's an amazing ego stroke, right? But there's a very, very fine line between cozy and confining, and that box started to feel really confining. And I felt like I, after a while, that I was making textile-based work because I knew how to make textile-based work. It was this weird tautology of process. And I just needed to get out of that. And I was having a lot of studio visits with curators, and one of them I had a really great conversation with. And at the end of it, I said, "God, I wish I could do this all the time. This is so great and helpful to me, and my whole practice, and she just looked at me." And it was a very offhand comment. And she said, "Oh, why don't you go back to school and get your MFA?" And I was like, "Yeah, why don't I go back to school and get my MFA?" And then about a year and a half later, I did, so... What did that do for you? Well, it changed my life entirely, actually. So I went down to San Francisco, to the California College of the Arts, and I looked at a lot of schools, and I was very, after my experience with the masters and linguistics, I really wanted to get it right. There was a lot of pressure internally to really figure out the place where I fit, because I was not going to repeat that experience. And I looked at a lot of schools, and I ended up settling in San Francisco. And I just had such an amazing, intense experience with a really... Part of your school experience also has to do with your classmates, because you see them all day, every day. And I was lucky enough to be in a really good cohort of people, and who were sympathetic, but challenging, and very, very intelligent. I just really, I lucked out. And grad school changed what I did enormously, but the way that it changed, it was very interesting, because... So I got there, and I was like, "Okay, this is it. I'm never going to make anything with textiles again." Like I had that Balda Sorry burn your work moment, you know? I was like, "I'm stepping away from everything that I've known, and I'm going to relearn what it is to be an artist." And I couldn't do it. I couldn't let the textiles go. So I started making work that was sort of... It was textile related, but visually, instead of materially. So I made a bunch of stop motion videos that are just crumpled balls of fabric moving around by themselves on the floor, like things like that, experiments, essentially. And what I learned was that it wasn't the material, it was my thinking. So it wasn't the medium of textiles that had put me in a box. It was a box that was already in my head that I put myself in. And that was fabulous. To come to that realization was really, you know, it changed the whole game for me because then once I could identify that box and I understood its parameters, then I could burn the box too. So it wasn't really about getting rid of textiles as a medium. It was about finding other ways to think about that. So I started to actually use textiles again in a totally different way than I had ever used before, and I started using different processes. So I used to paint an embroider on textiles and then make them into quilts or hangings or things like that. And now I do a lot of digital printing, which it's funny, actually. I did an interview with a quilters group that was like 2006 or something like that. And that was just when that technology was reaching consumer hands. And the woman asked me like, "Oh, would you ever use digital technology to produce your work?" And I was like never. I'm a purist. Yeah. I'm a purist. The work of the touch of the hand is so important and I went on and on about it. And it never fails. Like the more dogmatic my answer is about something, the more likely I am that that will be the thing that changes. It never fails. Now, when you were getting your MFA, was there a big age difference between you and most of that cohort you mentioned? Surprisingly not. I actually was a little worried about that because I was like, "Ugh, I'm wondering if that was an impact for people in their mid-twenties and you at that point?" Yeah, I was like, "I hope I'm not the old lady of the program." But actually my next door studio mate was, I mean he's, I don't want to insult him if he's listening somewhere, but he was at least in his early maybe mid-fifties. The youngest person in the program, I think she was 23 or 24, but actually most people were in their mid-late thirties. Had they gone through a similar process to you in terms of the kind of hitting a wall and… Some of them had, yeah. Some of them were, I think almost all of them actually went to art school for undergrad or they had gotten a degree in the fine arts, even from a liberal arts school. So I was not the only person there who had advanced degrees in another subject. So that was really interesting, and I think that was actually part of why it was such a good cohort for me was because you bring that thinking with you, you can't avoid it. Once you learn something, it's kind of hard to unlearn it, so the people who had trained to be scientists or my next door neighbor who was actually had spent maybe 25 years doing really, really intense activism and community organizing around both environmental movements and gay rights and AIDS in San Francisco, he brought all of that thinking with him. And so there was just such a crazy mix of perspectives from coming from these really intelligent people, so that was really great. You mentioned San Francisco, Portland, we're interviewing right now in Brooklyn. Do you have a sense of art in the boonies at all or pretty much centered around sort of urban arts-friendly territories? Well, it depends on what arts you're talking about. We really need to get to what your art is and what you're exhibiting. Let's talk about that first and then get back to, you know. Yeah, because I think that's a really interesting question though because, you know, there's this idea of everybody likes to talk about the art world, the singular. And that doesn't exist. There are millions of art worlds, there are so many people making art and they make art, make different kinds of art and they make it for different reasons and they have different cares and concerns about it. So yes, there's art in the boonies and there's art at the seashore and those plein air painters who are out there every Sunday, they care about it as much as I do. They have different goals. They have different interests. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, yes, there's art in the boonies. Is it the art that you want to look at? I don't know. Maybe. You know what I mean? I'm wondering more in terms of what you do as part of both the day job and the art. Do you have any sort of interaction with that world? Just because the exhibitions that you're putting on are in these, like I said, those few cities that are much more friendly towards art. Basically, have you gone out in the wilds of America at all in terms of what you do? No, I haven't really. I'm trying to think. Fly over country, I guess. Yeah. Some people call it. Well, I mean, yeah, but even in fly over country, you know, you have Kansas City and Missouri, which is actually a really energetic place for the arts, and there's a lot of money and support there for the arts in Kansas City so that you can go to places that are unexpected and like, you know, Chicago has a thriving art scene that people just don't pay attention to, but they ought to because a lot of good stuff is going on there. I actually know very little about art making and art related productions in the Southwest and Southeast. Those are the parts that I hear less about, but yeah, but of course, Kansas City is hardly the boonies. So let's talk about your art. Okay. What do I do? Oh, God. That's the worst question in the world. Let's talk about your current work that's being exhibited. Okay. You can start from the-- Yeah. Let's start from the concrete. Yeah. I got my Aristotelian thing here, you know, we'll start from that, we'll figure out from that how to say what you do, you know. Can you figure it out? Well, I read your piece on artist statements earlier and what to write. Oh. Maybe we could launch off of that into-- Okay. Right. I'm actually describing that. Yeah. That was actually, somebody asked me, so you give all this advice and this advice column. Do you take your own advice? And I was like, oh boy. Yeah. Well, I take my own advice when it applies to me, but you know, not all the stuff does, but yeah, the artist statement one is actually the one that's probably, it comes up all the time. Do you always ask question, or do you have others that you can probably ask? No. The most asked question actually is a sort of version of like, how do I get into a gallery? But actually I had this guy who would-- he used to write to me every other month from LA. This was back before. So now I have an anonymous submission system using a Google Doc, but I used to-- you used to just email me directly. And he would email me every other month with just a one sentence question, how do I get famous? And I actually-- And I know less. You'd think he would know. Absolutely. And I finally answered it because I just put the whole thing to bed. How do you get famous? It's obvious you sleep with a senator, you send a boy, you fake sending a boy up into the sky in a balloon, you do something outrageous and new tray, and you punch a rock star in the face. You know what I mean? You do-- you crash your car into somebody else's house who's famous. Or have eight kids. You have eight kids. You go on reality television. I mean, that's so easy. If that's your goal, if your goal is to get famous, by God, do not get into the arts. Go do something that will fast-track you to your-- to getting that goal reached because the arts are not the place. So back to your-- what you're currently exhibiting. What are you doing? What am I doing? So right now up in Portland at the Pacific Northwest College of the Art, there's a gallery space there called the Feldman Gallery. And when you walk in, you see a two-sided reading desk. And they're facing you are three eight-and-a-half by eleven sheets of paper with print on them. And if you walk up and you read it, you will see that it is an exhibition review for an exhibition that doesn't actually exist. So I, every day, I write a new exhibition review and put it in the gallery. And they will relight the gallery for me. So if you're reading the exhibition review and it says, you know, blah, blah, the triptych on the west wall, then if you turn and look at the west wall, you'll see that it's lit by three hot lights as though there were three pieces of artwork sitting there. And then every day when they change the review, they gather up those three pages and they put them in a stack on the back. So the back is a crewing, you know, these pages where you can read little snippets, you know, where they overlap each other. And you can read the first page of the last review that was up. And then, you know, they all have titles and dates and the artwork is named and described and analyzed just as I would write any other exhibition review. And that work was really about marrying the two sort of modalities of my life one, which is being an artist and making things for people to look at, and then the other is writing about art. And there's this idea that, you know, there's this like tacit way that we all conspire to pretend that those two things, that one person is an artist, but also an arts writer, that those are separate pursuits. But that's ridiculous because when I make art, I often think about how I might describe it or how I'm going to need to title it even, you know, like I have concerns about it that have to do with writing and language and public presentation. And when I go to look at art, to write about art, I never leave my artist's self at home. I look at the work and I think about the process and I think about how an artist might have made their work, how long it might have taken, did they make it themselves, was it made by an assistant, you know, what are the material concerns of it as well as the conceptual and intellectual concerns. And so this project was a way for me to put those two things together in like an as honest a way as I could. And it was also a way for me to, I mean, basically like I didn't have to pick one show, I didn't have to pick one body of work, I didn't have to enter in along fraught talks with the curator about, you know, how we might, this goes there and that goes there, no, we should put these other two things together because they play off each other, you know, like I didn't have to do any of that because I can change it every day. I don't have to be nailed down, it's super flexible. And I, I mean, this again, this goes back to the fiction, like I can invent worlds, but it's now, it's in a different way. I feel less like I'm not, I'm not actually calling it fiction because to me, when you stand there and you read it, you're manifesting it in a really kind of concrete way. So, sort of a difference between the fictional and the imaginary? Yes, I think so. Fiction is, is something that we, fiction is something closer to a lie and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but fiction is something that it, I mean, it's like dismissible in a weird way, you know, oh God, that's just a fiction, you know, whereas the imaginary, the imaginary changes worlds, I mean, remember how scared you were of the dark closet and the thing that was breathing under the bed and things like that, like the imaginary manifests itself, you know, so to me there is a big difference because the imaginary is less dismissible. And that, you know, I say that from a purely subjective realm and realize that like maybe not everybody else thinks about it that way, but for me that it also removes the pressure for these to be incredibly literary, you know, because, because an art review and exhibition review is a different kind of document. And even though it, it might be entirely made up, I get to think about it in a way that somehow is, is sort of less pressure than that idea of like, okay, now I have to write something that is not only brilliant, but also poetic and lovely to read where, you know, I mean, you read good prose and you're like, God, that's so luscious, you know, it's like eating something really delicious, you know, so. And how the reviews been, I mean, the outside reviews of your work of imaginary reviews. No one has reviewed it yet. Okay. And that's the thing about being an artist is that most of the time no one reviews your work, you know, you're lucky if you even get bad press. And so it will be interesting if anybody reviews this show of reviews. We'll see if anybody will take it on. But actually it's a really great gallery and they're, they, one of the things that they do is they have a writer come in and, you know, write, write about the work for brochure. And so the guy who they hired to write about my work is a man named Chaz Bowie who lives in Portland and, and he wrote a really, really lovely essay about thinking about writing and thinking about reviews and sort of what reviews are and this, this idea of speculative work and he wrote all kinds of really interesting things. And I thought that was really great that we could have that kind of conversation in print where he was, because that's basically, it's kind of a form of collaboration, like I'm presenting this thing and now he's going to present his ideas on top of it. You know what I mean? I love that kind of thing. So if somebody reviews that I hope they would be smart enough to not just review my work, but also maybe to take into account what he said and then we would get this like tertiary layer of writing and thinking about writing and thinking about writing and thinking about writing and thinking. And that would, to me, that would be the coolest thing in the world. What else are you exhibiting? I have a couple of textile pieces up at the Fowler Arts Collective, actually it's Fowler Project Space here in Brooklyn as part of a three person show that is about, it's sort of about the way that iconic images deal with disaster and trauma and the way that the image is trying to encapsulate a particular affective state, but maybe it gets there and maybe it doesn't, but I was working with two people who actually one of them I went to school with and we were offered the opportunity to have this show and we wanted to work on something together. So the works aren't collaborative, but the idea for the show was and we are all working a lot with images and sort of trying to explore what the image does and so this show came out of that. So I have these two large scale flags that are in that show. And you also have a bean gill store for living history museum? I was wondering if that was going to come up. Yeah, yeah, I'm fascinated. So if you've gotten that, sort of describe what it is, how it all came about and what's in the souvenir shop, that would be great. Okay. So I guess I should start by saying, do you know what living history is? Are you familiar with it? It means we'll tell the audience. Okay. So living history is basically the idea that you could dress up players or actors and put them in a setting that was historically accurate and have them do tasks that people did at that time at that point in history. Colonial Williamsburg. Exactly. Like Colonial Williamsburg. Exactly. Well, but okay, but let's come back to that because I think that that is actually a brilliant observation that you just made as a joke, but there's a lot there. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to portray this kind of historical accuracy. And when you go and you go to Colonial Williamsburg and you eat, let's say, peppermint ice cream that was like hand churned and you watch a guy make a cartwheel or you know, you watch someone bend staves for a barrel and you're supposed to be experiencing what life was like at that point in time, at that place for a person who lived through that. Obviously, there are so many problems with that. Even just starting from the moment of you know, this idea of accuracy, historical accuracy. But it's also really interesting and it's a really rich environment. And I was doing all these projects and I should say that you know, most of my work revolves around history in some kind of way. I'm really fascinated with the idea of, and I obviously this goes back to literature and my literary training, but like this idea of event description. Not only that we would be able to describe events such that we're characterizing them interestingly and accurately, but also the idea of picking the event and defining the parameters of where it started and stopped. That also, I mean that raises so many questions, just like the construction of history in its entirety. I'm really interested in that. So I'm working on all these historical projects and I work a lot with images from like mass market American history books. I find them really fascinating. There's a lot of tropes in the images that come up again and again. But there's always this thing where there's like this weird built in nostalgia. So I might take an image and I might try to like bring up some kind of parrotical element in it or emphasize my feelings of disgust or make a satire out of it or whatever. But there's always, you can't get away from it, this weird like nostalgic part of it. The fact that you're reproducing it is already, you're calling up the ghost of that, everything that comes behind that image, right? So I thought and I thought like how do I get away from this nostalgia? And I actually, I went to a residency where it was supposed to be about performance and object making, but actually it was about performance. And when I was finished with that, I had done so much performance work that I was like okay I want to push this forward, how do I incorporate this into my life? At the same time that I'm thinking, how do I get away from this built in nostalgia with these images? And I just sort of had that, you know, Eureka moment that everybody talks about where I was like, ah, living history. And then I was like, ah, what is history? Is it really, like in the time that we live in, in this super accelerated space of information glut, where the world changes so fast because of technological advancement, is the historical past really a hundred years ago anymore? Is it even 30 years ago? I mean, where were you a month ago? We were watching Wag Dog a couple of nights ago, which is 1997, 1998. It could have been 1970 for the technology and how things are done now versus then. Right, right. I mean, I mean, every new innovation changes your life in such a way, the tiniest thing, you know, you think about like your phone, which is basically a computer in your pocket. In fact, it's a better computer usually than it is a phone that sound quality sucks. But you know, so how far away do we have to be from a moment or an event to call it history? To think about it in a historical way. And also, you know, whose history gets recorded? You know, what is their race? What is their class? What is their gender? Like all of this, this questioning comes with it for me. And so I decided that first, that I wanted to explore living history, second, that I wanted to include a performative element, and third, that in order for me to close that nostalgia gap, it had to be not only very close to the moment that was happening now, but also that it had to be about my own life, that that was the only way to really eliminate that feeling for me. So I turned my apartment into a living history museum in San Francisco. I am open to the public three days a week by appointment, Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday. I greet visitors, and I should say that my apartment is about 450 square feet of space. I greet visitors downstairs in the lobby of my building, and I bring them upstairs, and I give them two things. One is a brochure about, with information about the museum. And the other one is a floor plan that has marked out on it the art objects that are up on the walls, because now everything, because I'm a museum, everything that I own is part of my permanent collection. So which not only includes the artwork that I've already made, so if you want to buy my work now, I have to deaccession it. But also the work, I know a lot of artists, like I've traded with artists, I've bought artwork, so that's part of the permanent collection, too. But also my toothbrush is the permanent collection, like my old socks, and the pillow that's on my couch, and all my books, like that's part of it, too. And so when people come in, I give them the floor plan, and I say, "It's a self-guided tour, mostly because it's too small for me to stand next to moving through the space." And I say anything that's not marked private is that you can open that door, or that drawer, that cabinet, whatever, because really it's about looking at a whole life. So what does it mean to be an artist in San Francisco in 2014, you know, who is a certain race and class and gender, who lives in a certain section of the city, like blah, blah, blah. It's basically representative of a very small group of people, probably, but still, it's a history of that, this might stand in for that group of people in a weird way. And it's funny, because you can open my desk drawer and see what a mess it is, the little jumble that everybody has of old post-it notes and business cards and paper clips and weird dust bunnies, and you can dig under there, and you can find my checkbook, and you can open it up, and you can look at my bank balance. So it's really exposing in this weird way that I've never dealt with before. And I offer visitors tea, and so what they do is they usually walk around for, you know, however long it takes them to look at the artwork and think about it and whatever else that they're doing, because I don't watch them either. And then they come into the kitchen and they sit down, and we end up having a conversation. And that's sort of the performative aspect of it, is, you know, I'm there to play being Guildstorf. So who does being Guildstorf need to be in relation to who the visitor is? And a lot of that is prompted by the remarks that the visitor inevitably makes, or questions that they have. So, you know, I had one of the very first visitors was this woman, and she, my cabinets are glass-fronted, and she said, "Oh, I like your dishes," and I said, "You can open the cabinet." And she said, "I couldn't do that," and I was like, "Why not? You've been invited to, you know, any, it's all fair game." And she said, "Oh, I was raised that, you know, if you went into someone else's house, you would never open a cabinet or a drawer or anything like that, like that." It's very rude, and I consider it taboo. And then we had this amazing discussion for like 45 minutes about what it was to form social taboos. If you could break them, if there's a way around them, do you need to? Do you want to? You know, so it's really, the whole, the performative part of it is really driven by the visitor in this really very interesting way. So like, I just let people guide the whole experience. Some people, the one person came and stayed for 15 minutes, didn't want tea, didn't really want to talk out the door. I had another person come, he stayed for two and a half hours, and I finally had to be like, "Look, you have to go." I have to get on with the rest of the day. But yeah, it's been a really interesting experience, and the funny thing is that most of the people who have come, so of course the first thing I did was extend the invitation to friends and acquaintances, and most of the people who have come have been strangers. I would think that'd be more likely. I'm not sure if I would be so inclined as a friend of someone to go in and see it as opposed to telling someone, "Oh, this is a really neat thing, you've got to try this." Yeah. What have you learned about yourself? Oh, God. Well, the first time someone came and opened cabinets and drawers, and in fact, he kind of made a point of opening every cabinet. He opened my fridge and my freezer. That seemed excessive to me. That tells you a lot about people, though. It tells you a lot about people, and it also tells you a lot about yourself because there was this weird moment where I felt judged by my condiments, that this guy is forming this impression of who I might be by what kind of mustard I have, and how old my pickles are, like the one pickle on the bottom of the jar that's been sitting there forever. But then I had to remind myself that's the whole point of this, is to let people form these weird impressions and make these assumptions, because they would do it anyway. Let's bring that to the fore. Let's say you are building a narrative right now. Let's go ahead and just put our finger right exactly on what that is. It's been really interesting for me. Every person is so different, so very, very different. They all do and say things that I don't expect. It's as interesting for me, if not more so, than it is for anybody else. I think that goes back to the decision-making about being an artist, what kind of artist do I want to be? Maybe the kind of artist who amuses myself. I don't make work for a particular market, I don't see myself becoming that famous guy from LA, or some kind of painting superstar millionaire, who's like, I don't know, partying with people down in Miami Basel or something, but I want to be the artist who, I'm sorry, I reserve the right to have the last laugh. That's the kind of artist that I want to be. That will probably change too. All of these things are super, super flexible in the way that they mutate. I once was an artist who said I would never use a digital printer, so look at me now. How do you reconcile who you were once upon a time with who you are now? Oh gosh. Or do you just consider that to be, again, this relative constant state of flux? Yeah, I would say relative constant state of flux. I might wake up tomorrow morning and be like, oh, you know what? You know what? The next performance is, let's be an investment banker. Pharmaceutical trade magazine editor, I'm opening the job up now in our leaving, so somebody else can do it. Yeah, I might wake up tomorrow morning and take you up on that. Because I don't know, it seems to me like one of the most interesting things that you can do with your life is to not let yourself get stuck in those boxes and not decide that there's a narrative that's set for you. And doing that has to mean that you're open to change. It has to mean that you follow your nose and that you let yourself be guided, sometimes by some pretty strange lights by other people's estimations. But really, in the absence of other goals, I don't want to be a millionaire. I actively don't want to be a millionaire. I don't want to raise a family, for example. In the face of those choices, you kind of have to say, okay, well, what do I want? And how will I be guided by what I want? And how will I let the rest of the world construct a certain pathway for me? Because I feel like I don't have any trouble reconciling these weird parts of my life. I think just because I think that people are, they're made by what's around them. And of course, I changed because they changed what was around me. So I moved a lot. I lived in Pennsylvania, I lived in western Massachusetts, I did a couple of months out in Hatteras, North Carolina, for the pre-season trade, for helping my friend's mother get her store ready for the summer trade. I lived in Boston for a couple of months. I moved around a lot for a while. I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I lived in Portland. And I love to move. And when you move, everything changes, everything changes. Your brand of milk is no longer at the store. You don't know your way around because all the street names are different. Those tiny day-to-day, really prosaic interactions with the world. When you change all of that, everything else changes, too. And then you meet other people, and you talk to them, and you have these really interesting conversations, and that affects you. And every little tiny, like, angstrom unit of change pushes you in some other different direction. And you don't even notice it happening. So it was always changing, do you know what I mean? Even when I was at Misfit, and then I wanted to not be a Misfit, it seems very conformist now to be like, "I want to be a researcher. I want to apply for these grants. I want to have my own lab. I want to torture my own PhD students." I'm not sure you can say monkeys, some of the PhD students, that's good. But somewhere in there, somewhere in all of that, there was a seed of what I am now. And I think, whatever I become when I'm 80, there's a seed of that now, and I'll look back and I'll say, "Ah, yes." There was this one little tiny breeze that blew, and the pressure of that pushed me a little further in this one direction, and instead of pushing back against it, I took that opportunity and I moved forward in that way. But I don't know, so it seems to me like, I don't know, I mean, we could get into this whole thing about the construction of the self and how that works, but it's always in reaction to all of the influences that are around you all the time, and to not take that into account, I think, is to miss the opportunity to think about your own interaction with the world, and also how you're affecting other people's, like maybe you're the little breeze that blows for somebody else, you know, who knows. It sounds like a good point to end, though. Yeah. Being Gailstore, thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show. Thank you for having me. It's been quite a pleasure to talk to you. And that was being Gailstore. If you're in New York City, you can check out some of her flags at Fowler Project Space through March 5th. If you're in Portland, the Portland Northwest College of Art has her exhibition that might exist running through February 28th. That's a pretty fascinating one. I got to read one of the reviews of a fake, well, reviews of an imaginary show. In fact, if with her permission, I'll post it on the chimeraobscura.com page for this episode. If you're in San Francisco, you can make an appointment to visit the Bean Gillsdorf Living History Museum through her website, BeanGillsdorf.com. While you're there, you can also find out about her past and upcoming exhibitions and her writing and her other projects. And her name, again, is Bean Gillsdorf, B-E-A-N-G-I-L-S-D-O-R-F. And that's it for this week's virtual memory show. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with somebody. Seriously, I have no idea who it'll be. I don't have any backlogged episodes, and there is no one scheduled for the coming week. So this might be the time you get subjected to that monologue for my England trip, or maybe I'll skip a week, much as it pains me. Or conceivably, I'll get my act together and record another great conversation sometime in the next six days or so. Regardless, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show and hit up our website, chimeraobscura.com/ V-M, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. I could use the affirmation, and, you know, the money wouldn't hurt either. If you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at Groth, G-R-O-T-H, at chimeraobscura.com, at VMSPod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, Facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
