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| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Jill Giegerich | . | |||||||||
M. So tell me some of your tricks of the trade.
Uhm, okay. I'll tell you some of mine if you tell me some of yours.
M. Okay. I'll try.
I'm not sure there are really good and bad ideas. In my experience, it's the process that you put them through. I mean if in doing these tricks and acquiring all this stuff, say there are six things that keep floating up, my feeling is that it's a completely arbitrary decision which of those six to pick. And that sometimes the stuff that seems the most hopeless is the stuff that is most freeing. Because I know better. I know that ultimately the ones that I hate the most, it's the ones that I fucked up the most, that are the most pathetic, that are ultimately the most liberating because I had such issues of success and failure that if I already identify that I've failed on something then I am liberated to do anything that I want with it, which is another game that I play. If I know I failed, then I feel all the pressure released on me to ever succeed at the piece and then I can play. So under those circumstances it doesn't matter to me really what I pick up to handle as art.
I guess the tricks that I've learned are exactly the ones that I teach. Speed and chaos are two tricks that I use that work very well on me. The way that I trick my mind into thinking that it doesn't care what anyone else thinks, is to shut it down. And the only way to shut it down is to overwhelm it. So I use speed and chaos games. The Dadaists were the masters at this. I use a lot of Dadaist and Surrealist games. So one of the things that I have always done is image flood. I'll go to the library and... the reference section works best. And actually this was taught to me by my husband, John Mandel. This was the first thing he taught me years ago when I was a student of his. I go to the library and I go to the reference section because it's the most generalized area because it's all about flooding. So you don't head to the art section. And I don't look at titles. I'll just reach out and start pulling books down. And then I start at the back of the book and I flip through it as fast as I can so that I get this like white noise. And wherever my brains goes "Uh", wherever it stops up because something has passed me that stopped it up, I take a xerox of that page. Or I make a little drawing of it. And I do that you know maybe every day for a week until I've got this huge amount of chaotic stuff and then I put it up on the wall and I start drawings. But again to trick my mind into not taking that and making a drawing in which I'm very concerned about who's looking at it, I have to image flood again and I have to use speed or chaos. So I give myself the task of making a hundred drawings in an hour. And I just look up and again wherever my brain trips over itself, I start a drawing based on that. And I go as fast as I can. And those are tricks. My mind can't function. So I do that, speed and chaos.
And then when I've gotten enough stuff, then I start to distill. And that's where I feel I have to will myself into another kind of consciousness, it's different from that consciousness, where whatever I attempted to shut off, I now let that come up again. And that starts to make conscious decisions - this works, this works, this works. So it's like it's drawing down things from a very chaotic position. But it's all based on a ridiculous amount of faith that no matter how chaotic things get, my basic impulse is to make meaning and that meaning will be arrived at somewhere down the line.
M. What is meaning?
Meaning, for me, is that moment of dissolution.
M. So it seems like the opposite of meaning in the sense of compartmentalizing.
Yeah. I don't mean 'meaning' like I arrive at something that conveys a linguistic message or a narrative like ...
M. Recently in teaching at Cal Arts I encountered the phrase the "production of meaning". A nice ambiguous yet officious sounding phrase. Meaning like what? I don't find that it's about a dissolution of categories. I think the work seems to be going very much where the phrase intends it to go.
You mean the work of the students you're talking about?
M. Yes. The work being produced under those kinds of conditions reflects those conditions.
Well I think that's probably because there is an absence of play. I mean there is a kind of work ethic implied in that that I think is very deadening. And I find that when I teach that is the hardest thing to teach, how to play. Which is a really frightening thing, I think, that we don't know how to play.
M. I guess what stopped me is when you said 'meaning'. I knew what you meant, dissolution, and yet the word in common use, and even art world use, runs in the other direction.
Yeah. Well I don't use it to mean that.
M. Yeah, I know that. But it's a kind of "striking discrepancy". (Both laugh) So how do you find the condition of teaching?
A lot like making art. And making art is a lot like doing anything else in this country. So teaching has all the same pains that art making does. I really like teaching a lot. I find it extremely satisfying. But to really teach someone adequately, you have to... it's like making art. It's the same dance that you have to enter into, only you are entering into it with someone else. And the problems that arise with trying to teach someone who has been educated by this system are the same problems that arise in looking out at the world, or looking out at the art world. Trying to teach someone to play, at the same time that that seems extremely worthwhile, it seems frightening that I have to do that. I mean, I find that students right now are in a state of terror and they don't even know it. That's what's even more frightening. They exhibit all the signs of panic and trauma and they don't even know that they are. So that's kind of a strange position to be in as a teacher.
M. What's the cause of that.
I think that it's the same thing that we were talking about earlier. We look out at a culture that is making all this noise about, this boosterism sort of noise, but we don't get it because it looks to us like the infrastructure is coming apart. Well it must be the same thing for these [people]... at least we've had some experience to somewhat settle ourselves with it. We've had some experience to understand what's going on. But these are young people who I think are getting such mixed signals that it's terrifying them. They are supposed to be preparing for something worthwhile, some meaning in the world, but there is clearly no meaning to be gotten, by the established venues anyway. I mean first of all, how are they going to eat? I would be terrified if I was in school right now, as a young person. How am I going to eat? So they are very consumed by things that don't lend themselves to play.
M. I don't know another way to ask it, but do you think it's... I can't ask it as a question, okay, so I'll just state it as an opinion. And it's an opinion that I can't live up to...
So you're a hypocrite! (laughs)
M. Abso-fucking-lutely. And the next chance I get, I'll try to regain my status. Do you think that it can be taught? That these schools should exist?
I think that's two separate questions. I think that it can be taught but I don't know that that means schools should exist as they function now. You can definitely teach someone to develop their critical mind and to play and to follow their intuition and to enter deeply into things. I know you can. I've done it... once (laughs).
But I've done it as a teacher so I know it can be done. But I've always felt in doing it that I'd have a better chance if I had this person alone, not in a school. And a lot of times it felt like the conditions of the institutional education had to be worked against. You know, like I'd have a better chance taking them out to lunch one time. But of course I wouldn't make very much money by doing that. But on the other hand, I was educated at Cal Arts and I thought that was a fabulous education and worth every penny of it. With all of the bullshit and headaches that went along with it...