Semblance of a Whole: The Sylvia Fractions
Ashik Zaman and Conny Karlsson Lundgren
Interview, C-Print Magazine, 2013
C-PRINT: Let’s dive right into The Sylvia Fractions, your solo exhibition at the Kalmar Museum of Art which recently ended its run. On the one hand, this is truly exciting getting to talk about, while on the other, it’s frustrating too. It personally feels like a nig loss not having seen.
I understand The Sylvia Fractions stems from your time as a resident at IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s international residency programme. What was your first lead-in or train of thought that was later to become the The Sylvia Fractions?
CONNY KARLSSON LUNDGREN: The Sylvia Fractions is a body of work that consist of three parts, Y’all Better Quiet Down!/Hallå, kan ni lugna ner er!, The Jane/Joan Dialogues and 87 Sylvia. They focus on the public speech that transgendered activist Sylvia Rivera made in NYC in the 70’s, a court case regarding an added scene in an early film version of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and the discovery of an asteroid which was named 87 Sylvia in the colonial settings of Madras, India in 1866.
Although I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as a teenager, my first lead-in would be an interest for Sylvia Rivera. She was a part of an earlier piece of mine, Limp Wrist: Becoming from 2012. Rivera was an American/Puerto Rican transgendered activist and Young Lords member who is said to have cast the first stone during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, the starting point for the contemporary American/European LGBT-movement. She is also one of the founders of S*T*A*R (Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries), an organization whose main goal was to keep homeless transgender and queer youth off the streets. I got interested in the almost mythological aspect of her persona and while I was living in New York I started to do more research.
During a seminar at the New Museum organized by Carlos Motta, the activist Reina Gossett introduced me to a Youtube clip showing one of Rivera’s public appearances. In connection with the 1973 Christopher Street Day Parade, she delivers a powerful and defining speech, accusing the then relatively new-formed Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual social movement of being white, neoconservative, excluding, racist and transphobic. I knew instantly that I wanted to do something with this crucial queer moment. It resulted in the short film Y’all Better Quiet Down!/Hallå, kan ni lugna ner er!, a performative reading with a Swedish queer feminist theatre group. The idea was to shift the focus from Rivera’s persona to her actual words and let them rest in the bodies of a collective, as if the revolution somehow stopped. As if nothing has happened.
C-P: It’s interesting, the way the exhibition is composed in three narratives with the name Sylvia lending unity to all three. Plath is a literary giant and great love for me, but admittedly I knew neither Rivera before but it certainly had me up all night reading up on Rivera’s story. That’s one of the things you really have to love about art; the few times it urges you to explore something on your own, based on what the artist gives you. How did the parts about the other two Sylvias come about?
CKL: Around the same time as I stumbled across the speech by Rivera, I was rereading the semibiographical novel The Bell Jar by Plath. I got fascinated because both of them were about the same age while active in NY, but during different periods in time, in different parts of the city and with different backgrounds. Both of them had a confrontational and critical approach. So this led me further in my research and I got interested in a court case connected to a film version of The Bell Jar made in the late 70’s.
In the film, a scene is added where the lesbian undertone regarding the Joan character is accentuated, where she approaches the main character Esther (Plath’s alter ego) with an idea of a suicide pact “as lovers”. The psychiatrist Jane V. Andersson, who was “outed” as the book’s character Joan, filed a civil libel suit in the beginning of the 80’s and it turned into a tedious, public and sometimes very emotional affair. With court documents, private letters, newspaper clips, objects and optical lenses spread over nine tables, The Jane/Joan Dialogues explores Plath’s interest in “in the double” and its consequences.
The final part, I came across by accident. What interested me was approaching the subjects almost like when you work with a novel, by constructing a story arc. In the middle of the 19th century, the British astronomer Norman R. Pogson was relocated to India, one of the British colonies. He starts working closely with his eldest daughter E. Isis Pogson, and with a recommendation from her father, she also becomes the first woman to apply for a membership to The Royal Astronomy Association. She is rejected, and their joint work is not recognized until much later. With material from the Madras observatory, I revise their work focusing on the discovery of an asteroid, given the name 87 Sylvia. Isis was then about the same age as Plath and Rivera were at their crucial moments.
C-P: What could be said about the objective of these three works?
CKL: My intention is to raise questions regarding privileges connected to class, gender and ethnicity, and about speaking from a place acknowledged as a centre or a periphery. I am drawn to the idea that human rights movements and groups that have fought for social or civil rights are said to derive from people who leave the confinement of their room and start to communicate, share stories and compare experiences with each other. Since we are all unique, yet have similar experiences, these must be connected to overarching structural conditions. Inspired by a feminist model of sharing stories I am attempting to do something similar, I want to find these specific structures. There is also an interest to emphasize the mythological aspect of the work and add something eternal. For this series I have been working closely with three, disparate archives as my main source material.
C-P: The name Sylvia at the center of the exhibition, aside from serving as an interlink, I believe brings to mind the notion and function of names and labels and their power to create position and context?
CKL: The act of naming in order to exist, or even to be in control of one’s self or someone else is something I’ve been interested in over the years. I Am Other (Candy & Me), a collaboration with author and activist Andy Candy is one of my the first pieces addressing this issue. A manifesto was made to claim the right to define and recreate yourself. My own birth name is a typical old-fashioned working class name, not that common in my generation, and might introduce preconceived notions about my background. I find this both problematic and intriguing.
C-P: I’d like to take a moment to focus on the site of your exhibition, Kalmar Museum of Art, which reopened in 2008 in a tall black rectangular box-shaped construction in the city park, creating a stark contrast to the nearby castle of Kalmar. It has since, consciously aimed at positioning itself towards conceptual art and also taken flack for financial hardships. I went to Kalmar once for a few hours and spent most of it at the museum and found it remarkable for a museum located in such a fairly small city to be so progressive.
The Sylvia Fractions was a site-specific work commissioned by the museum. It isn’t however the first time you do site-specific work for them. In 2010 you carried out The Lotte Series Pt. I—IV, a four-part installation presenting reinterpretations of works by German artist Lotte Laserstein. Tell us little bit about this work. I know as well you’re practically a local, since you grew up in Västervik. I’m thinking by now you must likely feel a kinship with this site?
CKL: I do admire the museum’s brave programming and how they strive to push the envelope of what is expected from a museum in this context. At the same the museum has an interest and a mission to be grounded in the region. I will follow the progress of the museum with great keenness.
The first exhibition the museum invited me to do was a commissioned piece where I was asked to address the collection. I had a vague memory of the quite well-known Lotte Laserstein. Because she’s not well represented in the collection, I knew I wanted to go further with her biography and through this create a critique on the conditions of how a collection is constructed. The main part of the series ended up with a focus on her long time friendship with Traute Rose and their intimate play with gender identities during the interwar years around the same time as “Die Neue Frau” as a new ideal emerges. The Sylvia Fractions wasn’t commissioned with that premise.
C-P: As in the case of these exhibitions, you work with research-based subjective storytelling which stem from facts and the accounts of real-life figures. I wonder a bit about the investment made in these characters that you’ve studied and worked so vicariously through. Did you ever have the feeling of sad departure after finishing a work?
CKL: In the text Ephemera as Evidence (1996), recently passed away José Esteban Munoz is early to acknowledge the importance of ephemera and temporary documents in the construction of alternative history writing. Munoz states that; “Ephemera includes traces of lived experience and performances of lived experience, maintaining experimental politics and urgencies long after these structures of feeling have been lived.” I love this quote and it’s been a model, an inspiration and a good description of my process. When a project comes to an end I do tend to enter into a state of feeling emptiness.
C-P: You’ve been known to work with people who have a queer activist approach. Your works have also been featured in queer-labeled group exhibitions at Kulturhuset in Stockholm and Kunsthal Nikolaj in Copenhagen. Labels of gay and queer come so easy I imagine with gay artists; they’re “marketable” so to speak. What are your thoughts on this sort of labeling? I imagine it can be both beneficial and detractive?
CKL: In the book Feeling Backward (2007), Heather Love argues the importance of reminiscing history and to take into account how a queer-related history marked by isolation, pain and shame continues to affect us in the present. I read somewhere that the only way of existing in a heteronormative art world if you’re not a straight white man is to work with an identity-based practice. It’s a depressing thought because it puts you in a rather pigeonholed position and I hope it’s changing. I am still surprised by how trend-oriented and opportunist the art world actually can be. The themes or perspectives I’ve been interested in since the art academy have been “current” for some time now, so at the moment it’s quite beneficial.
C-P: Your being a conceptual-oriented artist in a fairly small art scene that is Sweden, I figured maybe we could get a word in on your thoughts on commercial gallery representation.
CKL: While living in Berlin I started to work with a gallery, but I believe it’s a different context. The “scene” in Stockholm—as you mentioned—may be perceived as much smaller, biased and not as diverse. There are only a few that actually work with art practices that I could relate my own to. At the moment this is not something I’m really pursuing. I am also fairly new here in Stockholm.
C-P. There’s something very compelling with intimate art; the artist allowing the viewer very close to his own skin or that of his subject. Perhaps a degree of physicality first comes to mind for obvious reasons, but being shared the thoughts occurring inside someone’s mind can be so self-disclosing; intimate in essence. In that regard, the use of a voice-over can be so effective.
You’ve worked much with videos which have that very intimate quality, while also being visually aestheticized. There are particularly two works which come to mind. There’s Without a Cause (Tomas) (2010) which is inspired by Nicholas Ray’s film Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Aleksa & the Others (2013) which was specifically commissioned by the Gothenburg Art Museum for their series In Dialogue with the Collections.
CKL: The scripts used are written in collaboration with the protagonists in the films. Together with the intimate words, the intrusive camera functions as a deception. It presents an attempt on how to work with a political charged material in an aestheticized way. My aim is to make it almost too beautiful and to entice the viewer into a text. But the imagery has its origin. In Without a Cause we worked with the poses and costume from the original film and the sound is based on the actual soundtrack.
The script for Aleksa & the Others use private correspondence, found in different archives, between a group of Swedish female artists active in the late 1800’s. This group is only partially represented in the Gothenburg Art Museum’s collection, so the script addresses issues concerning work conditions and emancipation of women. With an attempt to highlight a suppressed anger that can be read between the lines within these various documents, the film is made as an open letter performed by transgendered actress Aleksa Lundberg. We introduce a contemporary voice by integrating fragments of her own experiences. The choreography of the film is based on the typical portraiture of women in paintings of this period. The voice-over has a bad reputation, held as a trick of the lacy filmmaker. I’m not considering myself a filmmaker as such, so I use it freely as a tool to find passages through, parallell narratives in time and space.
C-P: After The Sylvia Fractions and with 2014 being just around the corner, what’s coming up next for you?
CKL: The inability to separate the private from the political experience is something that has been present within my artistic practice for quite some time. I will continue processing the idea of speaking “with” rather than “for” someone . I am in continuous and go further in my search for historical moments or passages.
During spring I will start as a researcher/studio grant holder at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. I am also in the process of planning a new film project, the next chapter of my work about Sylvia Rivera.