BOMB Magazine | Interviewed by Frances Stark

In May, Frances Stark texted me from her studio in Los Angeles about how one “the hot selfie became a never-ending project involving all these different dudes. A team had assembled to put the finishing touches on a group of large paintings. An informal project coordinator assisted a master printmaker and an airbrush artist took a shirtless mirror selfie of the “Private Huerta” on canvas. Huerta is an artist and reservist whose potential romance with Stark was blown by the course of his sudden deployment.

Since the 1990s, Stark’s works in writing, drawing, painting, collage and video have been studies of desire and exchange that are also quiet thoughts of contact and translation. An exuberant bricolor, she folds literary and musical modes into networked compositions inlaid with sexts and theory. I met Stark for the first time‘her work in 2017 in the form of her animated, episodic video clip My best thing (2011). After seeing her Ian F. Svenony‘with “Censor now” (2017) for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, I started following @therealstarkiller on Instagram.

— Max Levin

Max Levin There‘sa passage by Samuel R. Delany‘magazines that resonate so much with your work: “The edited forms of the constant commentary I make on my life constitute my art. How presumptuous to think that anyone else might care about this comment. Yet editing is done strictly with this in mind. The poetry is called “concentrated” because by editing the commentary, the poet tries to suggest what has been omitted through the form of the resulting hole. Then he grabs the strings, pulls them, and lo and behold, the pieces are drawn into form: a poem.

FS yes I love this – what‘is omitted. Poetry is big in the current show. Huerta is a poet and an artist, and I think of my approach to art as a kind of poetry as well. Charles Ray was the first person to call me a poet, which is a more elegant way of thinking of me as a conceptual artist. A poet uses the most basic tools and elements that all share. Che‘s the material. My life is such a large part of the material of my work.

In a letter Huerta sent me, he said: “One of the things that amuses me all day is in the form of cryptograms that are published in Stars and stripes. It reminds me of the process of reading poetry and trying to understand the meaning encrypted beneath the surface text. It is like a student thinking that the meaning is locked in the back of the picture and the artist can provide the key to unlock it. I do nt believe this. But maybe what Huerta is saying is that he’s a mysterious bastard and I should read things carefully.

The puppetry is so beautiful in Delaney’s quote. It makes me think about control and gravity and getting to the point where the shape takes the right shape. Che‘it is a metaphor for the physics of intelligence. I was thinking about that with jazz and getting into Miles Davis. The audience‘It took intense attention to sense the lines drawn musically. Attention is the canvas on which music is painted, and there‘is a structural necessity for the receiver as part of the marking.

ML Receivers with multiple inputs. You give people a lot to read at once.

FS These new paintings are part of a book, so as a viewer you are a reader who is formally included in everything I do. The idea of ​​implementation is so critical: Huerta‘My deployment to a war zone and my deployment, my love and longing for intimacy with an understanding mind. This is something I apply to move my work forward. I deployed Huerta the way I deployed the dudes My best thing.

With this new job, I‘I try to draw attention to how my sexual energy or desire functions in creating things. My other works related to sex chats are completely clinical. No body or proof that I actually pulled. But the reality is that my body was the engine of thought production that unfolded. With that show, I had this sexual encounter that unleashed this crazy series of catalytic issues, ideas, and images.

ML I allow‘we are talking about the emission and distribution of mediated materials.

FS When I was in school in the beginning ‘90s, one of our great teachers, Patty Podesta, would say, “Art will end because of it America‘The funniest home videos.” This is pre-power, maybe twenty-five years too early. Now we‘all swimming in vast rapid rivers of content that completely erode the barriers of art with a capital A and all.

ML And then Instagram came along.

FS I used to have an idea that was like a seed in my mind. It can grow and germinate in the private darkness of my brain. Now, when you smell a germ, our impulse is to put it in your phone, where it can be sucked into the river of tits, propaganda, stupid ads and cat videos. The river of everything turns into a river of mud, and then into him‘has been sold back to us. So we are the food. My Instagram project was a way of saying: “We‘we are all letting go of our old way of developing ideas. I pulled my posts out of the shit river and released them back into the world as isolated ideas. They‘are super simple, but they‘I also track my own experience with user addiction, which I‘i was sucked in like everyone else. I can‘run away from him. It‘is something me‘I struggled with it for a long time.

ML Cat videos!

FS I used to make cat videos before YouTube. They‘nowhere near as funny and amazing as the nine hundred million cat videos roaming the earth now. I saw it more like a Chantal Ackerman – structuralist approach to making art with a personal component. Regarding the film, Akerman‘with News from home and Morgan Fisher‘with Standard gauge are the two most impactful things on me.

My original VHS cat videos were magical because of the diegetic sound. I followed my cat around the house with a camera and whatever was on the stereo became the soundtrack. The new cat videos started because I thought Huerta was sending me cryptic messages. I hadn’t attached songs to Instagram stories or reels because it felt cheap. But then he did it with the song “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and a video of him playing tug-of-war with a dog. I thought he was mocking me, but he was also talking about a lot of things. Indirect messaging is built into memes and platforms where you can communicate with one person while talking to everyone at once. I initiated the new cat videos as a kind of cryptic message.

ML Before that, they were unencrypted broadcasts. Here you switch to a different mode.

FS Instagram is where we met. Che‘is the stage where you know someone will be in the audience. You‘you wink at them or you don’t. In a weird way, cat memes on the internet can represent incels. Desperate, hesitant, hungry, fragile things are popular subjects for one to project oneself onto. I love cat memes that are like “kiss me” or “cause of death: left for reading.” c The Magic Flutethe librettist says: “I want to be kissed or I‘I will kill myself.” Che‘is the critical theme, the theme that never stops. The human experience of oral connection: breath, voice, kisses.

ML How has putting this show together changed your thinking on this topic?

FS The show is the full edition. The happy ending. A book of poems I made for Huerta ends with Dorothy Parker: “If I must labor in day and dark / Sanctify valiant earnest truth / Then on my world I may set my mark / And what if not‘t / so what if I do.” Che‘is the hope of doing something. You make a sign that someone else will look at. The fact that your consciousness forms a form that it transmits to someone else’s brain three hundred years or three days later is magic. This is the basis of all my faith in art. Magic transmission of consciousness.

Going back to Delaney and the taut strings, manipulating something so that it appears is the responsibility you place on yourself as an artist, and there‘it’s a contradiction between that and the fundamental need to have a partner or care for someone and have them care for you. Ultimately, the show is my love letter to the men in my life, but I don’t‘I don’t see it as a way to seduce them. Instead, the show—the art—is the consolation that we haven’t earned the love we crave.

Francis Stark: Serve the dominant ideology or stop being a dick is on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York until July 29.