| RB:
Your professional career has spanned twenty years now. And I’m
happy to say I was the one to write the first feature article in Artforum
about your work. So it seems like a good opportunity to look at your art
to date: changes in content, genres, context and so on. Our world in 2004
is radically different from the world in 1984, both globally and in our
daily lives. I wonder how that has affected not only the way you create
your art but also how your art is received? What issues were you dealing
with in your work at the beginning of your career, for example?
AL: In 1984 I was just trying to make work and I wasn’t
trying to do anything else. The works were always based on ideas, and
then I would produce the piece based on the idea.
RB: By the time you started showing your work, the New
Image or ‘Pictures’ artists like David Salle, Jack Goldstein,
Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine had already been firmly
entrenched since the end of the ‘70s as the hottest new trend. Appropriation
was the word of the moment and the merger of fine art and mass cultural
styles was already a given. But by the time you started to exhibit your
work you were part of a new, younger generation In fact you’d been
Goldstein’s assistant for a short time and he’d been one of
your teachers at Hartford. Then you were David Salle’s assistant
and he put you in a group show he curated in ’83, right? Though
there’s never really much homogeneity between artists that history
groups together, how do you think your own work differed from the previous
generation?
AL: The previous generation’s art was chiefly concerned
with media and media’s modes of presentation. And none of them claimed
much of an interest in the autobiographical, whereas my work didn’t
deal with issues of contemporary media and a lot of my work was sort of
autobiographical, but without telling a story. Aesthetically, my interests
probably had a lot to do with growing up in a house full of Victorian
antiques. My early shows were about a different way to present my ideas.
They were full of a young Annette and her exposure to the world thus far
in terms of the world being highly Romantic. This was often represented
through antiquities to some degree which always had to do with the patina
of time. I think the objects back then afforded me an opportunity to begin
to have a conversation with the viewer. My process was more like Rauschenberg’s
than it was Jack Goldstein’s.
RB: What about the content of your work? How has it changed
over the years?
AL: In the earlier work, people used to say that my solo
exhibitions looked like group shows because they were so diverse in their
use of mediums. But also the ideas came from everywhere. There wasn’t
a connect like I think there is now.
RB: Yes, when you’re young, everything seems significant
and thus legitimate. As we mature, I guess we narrow down what we find
important. But I’ve always thought that most of your work has always
explored a range of concepts like death, war, religion, politics?
AL: Yes, I think that’s still always there, even
in my current show. My most recent show doesn’t explore violence
but it gives you an alternative. It couldn’t exist without the violence.
Whereas in the past, there might not have been an organized war on terror
or outright violence in the outside world or outside the windows in Manhattan
like there was on 9/11, but for me the world has always been violent.
That’s always been a constant in my work.
It’s interesting because a lot of people say they are surprised
by the new show. I don’t think they should be, but they see it as
the most upbeat show I’ve ever made. But let’s face it; Hey
Joe is not an uplifting song!
RB: Let’s talk about your most recent show Vehicles
for Elevation. It’s a great title. How did you come up with it?
And can you give me a little background about your thought process behinds
some of the works?
AL: The show was primarily inspired by the idea of protest
and unrest. And for whatever reason, I immediately think of England rather
than America when thinking about social protest. In all my work, I set
up a distancing device, a way of creating a gap between the different
elements in my work. In this case, my starting point was Speaker’s
Corner in Hyde Park, London. I started off by building a little construction
in my studio that didn’t make it into the show. It consisted of
3 crates, the corners of which were painted out so that, when the 3 square
crates were piled up on one another, became visually a piece that could
fit into the corner. I had intended to construct the piece just like a
staircase that would fit in the corner. But in the end I decided against
it because it didn’t open up enough poetic space for me. My research
revealed to me that, for years the speakers at the Corner always stood
on soap boxes to get the crowd’s attention. Hence the soap box piece.
Continues...
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