left: video still from Democracy’s Body – Dance Dance Revolution 2001 4 channel video installation right: Detail of Diabloblockade, Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, Abalone Alliance, 1981 2003 Graphite on paper

Cara Baldwin: Can you discuss the different ways in which human bodies, interaction, technology, and control are addressed in your approach to recent work?

Andrea Bowers: Technology and control are not primarily addressed in the most recent work. Recently though, I've been interested in finding under-recognized historical precedents that have significance upon current events. In earlier works like Democracy's Body-Dance Dance Revolution and Box with Dance of It's Own Making, I was investigating the limitations and controls of digital space upon the user and the potential for the viewer to become inventive with those controls. Along with that investigation, I was also interested in the psychological and emotional effects of digital space upon the formation of identity. Now I'm much more focused on the Internet as a way to activate and inform political activity as well as an impermanent historical archive.

CB: Where else have you dealt with digital space in your work?

AB: Currently I'm working on a large drawing series in two parts that again addresses digital space. I don't know the final size yet. It's a work in process, but each set will be compromised of at least twenty sheets of paper at 30" x 22 1/4". This work is simply a collection of texts downloaded from the Internet. The words are left white, the white of the paper while the entire background is shaded a medium grey. 

All the texts are personal letters and eulogies for a 28-year-old American woman named Marla Ruzicka who died this past April from a car bomb in Iraq. She founded an organization called CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict) that was counting the innocent victims of the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars as well as trying to raise money from the American government for the victims' families. Along with Marla Ruzicka, her Iraqi co-worker, Faiz Ali Salim was killed in the car with her. 

The first set of drawings contains a comprehensive group of eulogies I have collected from the Internet. The second set of drawings contains the exact same texts; however, only those sections that mention Salim are listed. In most of the texts he is mentioned only once or twice, if at all. Therefore the paper is almost entirely filled with gray graphite.

CB: Who do these texts come from?

AB: The collection of authors ranges from journalists, politicians, military, war historians, Iraqis, and NGO workers (just to name a few). It gives a very interesting depiction of who is involved in a war. The writers range for the far left to the far right.  These texts are amazingly personal and emotive, which is not something you might expect from most of the authors.  

CB: What's at stake in relation to language, imitation, trace, and time in your current work?

AB: I spent quite awhile reading about the trajectory of the gesture in the 20^th century. I felt a responsibility to the knowledge of an historical lineage in order to necessitate the growth of my own work. In the process of looking for influences and role models, I began to experience a historical gender imbalance. It seems a very paternal tradition of privilege and within that tradition, one generation criticizes the next.  Didn't Mike Kelly write an essay about Douglas Huebler called, "Let's Kill Daddy"? I saw the portrayal of art history as a dysfunctional family as a position of privilege, and not one I wanted to follow. There were so few women artists to access as influences, I didn't feel like "killing mommy." I started to work on a more positive model of influence, acknowledgement and homage.

I began to think of art making processes that could come from imitation- so I started using techniques like photo-realism and photocopying. Also I tried to find forms that would serve as historical documentation- so I began making scrapbooks. I often copy images or text as a type of homage. In these copying processes, there are always mistakes or failures in accuracy no matter how attentive I am to detail. 

Those mistakes become sites of invention.  I see this model in opposition to the modernist goal of always making it new.  

CB: Both Letters to an Army of Three and your Proposal for Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice register in multiple time signatures. Can you talk about the history of this subject and the ways in which you explore a relationship to bodies and time through composition and representation?

AB: Both projects, Letters to an Army of Three, and Proposal for Wall of Letters are based on letters sent to abortion rights activists prior to the passage of Roe v. Wade from people who were desperate to receive safe abortions for themselves or loved ones. The activists were a group of three women working together from 1964-73 in the San Francisco Bay area and were called "The Army of Three." These three women crusaded for legal abortions and women's health rights and were a major force behind the nation's biggest underground pro-choice movement.  They started a list of doctors who would provide safe abortion outside the United States, primarily in Mexico and Japan. The Army of Three received letters from all over the country requesting the list.

The fifty-five minute video, An Army of Three records thirty men and women each reading one of these letters. The words from the past come through the voices of those in the present contextualizing historical events in our current situation. The setting of the video emulates 18^th and 19^th century portrait painting of women with flowers. Each actor is shot with a different flower arrangement and colored fabric background. In the history of this genre women are always part of the decoration and synonymous with the flowers.  With this project I tried reverse the effect of this tradition and use the flowers to emphasize the voices of the actors and the content of the letters.

The actors are dressed in their own clothing and no attempt was made at period attire. I wanted the viewer to imagine people now in the situation these people were facing in the 1960's. Too few people remember the conditions in the United States prior to the legalization of abortion. Freedoms are taken for granted when you haven't lived without them. This work has a political agenda and is definitely not neutral.

I'm also in the process of making a group of drawings of the letters; so far there are twenty-two drawings in the series. The first group of 15 was made for a show that Ralph Rugoff curated called "Monuments to the USA." The drawings made with graphite on paper and I attempt to faithfully duplicate the original letter in terms of gesture, scale and pressure. The members of the Army of Three scratched out the names and addresses of all the people who wrote the letters to protect their privacy. These markings are included in the letters as well.

There are a couple of different kinds of identification that occur with these works that don't occur with the video. Seeing the actual gestures and handwriting of the original authors of the letters is a very moving and effective image that personalizes them. It's a form of identification that doesn't happen in the video. Another type of engagement occurs with my facture of the letters. The physical act of copying each word of each letter is a phenomenological process. It is a way of learning and understanding that goes beyond just reading or listening and I think is very powerful.

CB: In 2002, Katy Siegel described your subject as "the mutual exchange between performers and audiences" and further, the "exchange between self-expression and imitation." Siegel concluded that work such as Democracy's Body-Dance Dance Revolution represents cultural sites "where commodity culture has produced its own version of what once looked like a utopian social ideal" and provides "multiple answers to the old question of how human bodies interact with technology, both controlled and controlling." How have these slippery subjects, and your orientation to them, shifted over the last five years? Remained the same?

AB: In the earlier works, I was starting from a more cynical position and searching for instances of transformation.  Moments of independent behavior in the early work have become fully empowered in the newer work. My orientation has shifted over the last 5 years from a subject matter of human activity to activism. 

Now I have a lot more faith in individual power and voice.  I believe in political agency.