CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF

Can you tell me why you have titled the interview as such ? 

Katerina Jebb : I like to make things up.

I see your images and your world as being both poetic and brutal, would you agree?

K J: How can I possibly see through your eyes .. You never look at me from the place I see you. 

Are you interested in psychology?

KJ: Yes, I study this kind of thing. 

Why?

KJ: It’s always interesting to read about human behaviour .

To answer your previous question, about my world being brutal and poetic, I think it is quite a true reflection of life in all it’s beauty and decline. 

But you seem to go from light to dark so easily, effortlessly confusing issues. Your use of paradox is a recurring theme. 

KJ: Isn’t it just the way a typical day passes? You walk down a street, anywhere and you are confronted with pleasure, discomfort, unattractive objects.  There will always be beauty and the shadow of it. 

I am interested in your seeming objectification of the body, both human and artificial.  Why did you make the series of the sex doll?

KJ. I like a cold aesthetic and the colour nude is very appealing to me. When I first saw photos of these silicone female impersonators I felt that as a subject it was very appropriate for me. There was a factory in San Diego where they are made and we just went there. I took my assistant with me who had just graduated from Oxford and we had the time of our lives playing with those dolls. 

What aspect of it was so thrilling to you?

KJ: Incredulous disbelief and I suppose the investigative approach. The possibility of a male actually wanting to interact and copulate with a simulacra of a female, made of silicon and steel all at once confused me whilst inciting a high level of curiosity. 

Was this a recent project?

KJ: No, 1999. 

The doll in these works, it is a functioning sex doll, yes?

KJ: Yes .They are usually presented with human hair, wearing make up and clothing; they are shipped as capable looking imposters. I chose to show them as fragmented objects . 

Do you think your undertaking of this was a form of study?

KJ: Of course, this kind of subject is a social phenomenon, which we need to look at, removed from the context for which it has been made .

This artificial sexuality, how did you respond to that?

KJ: Well, in the middle of nowhere in California, it’s like a pool party of paradoxes. 

And what about the physical nature of the doll?

KJ: Well it’s not very organic, is it? Placing your member in a re-enactment of a woman? Although my assistant did say he was on the precipice of wanting to…you know. The skin warms in your hands, which is undeniably the strangest detail. 

So what did your study reveal?

KJ: I made these very clinical life size images and Danny Moynihan who was curating a show called Psycho at Anne Faggionato Gallery came over and put the headless doll torso in the exhibition, placed next to a Francis Bacon masterpiece; so my work and the doll arrived on the scene. 

This was a good moment for you?

KJ: Oh yes, but contrarily so, I wasn’t so interested in making art, as I wanted to get married and have children. So I moved  back to California for a while then back to Paris, so as not to put my dog in quarantine and on the first night in Paris, I met the father of my children. Fate sealed. 

So what place was making images taking? 

KJ: Well none, making humans is far more interesting than anything you can ever fabricate or dream up. I can understand women who have thirteen children, it’s an uncontrollable  force. 

Did you enjoy this then?

KJ: Carrying babies is singularly the most fulfilling and at the same time, surreal act. A human being inside another, so physically potent, the body modifying itself to accommodate, house another, a fascinating physicality. And the intimacy is unsurpassable. There are things not easily described, bodily sensations, mental states, I think it’s called ineffability. Childbirth envelops all of this. 

Your work looks quite precise and technically fluent. Where did you study?

KJ: With myself. I have no formal art education. I bought art books in The City of Hope on Fairfax in LA and read. When I lived in California I was 21, I met a lot of interesting people who probably made an impression on me. We would go to parties at Robert Evans’ house and smoke cigarettes with Timothy Leary. I would always be putting my friends in the closet naked and dreaming up something. I discovered that I could make photomontages inside my camera by just taking the film out and putting it back in my camera. But because I had no formal instruction I intuitively found mediums, which suited my demands. 

Where are these works?

KJ: In a trunk somewhere in Hollywood. 

And did you work in Hollywood?

KJ: Oh no, we were penniless, always. That’s why we always went to parties to eat. 

Did you get any jobs?

KJ: Not really, my photos were not really like photos, they didn’t look contemporary. Everyone said, “Oh your work is too weird for here, you should live in Paris. .”

Where did you live in Paris?

KJ: At first I lived with a very tall black gentleman who a few days after being there, I discovered was a cross dresser. He would spend hours transforming himself, the most supernatural bodily transformation. When he had finished, he looked mind blowingly brilliant. Anyway we became firm friends and he would let me take photos of him, some of which are not suitable for publication. 

The apartment was the size of a shoebox and it had a balcony, which was twice the size, we used to have sleepovers there. Then I met a girl at a disco who was studying law and we became friends. She worked with Anatole Dauman. who was a producer of independent cinema and he founded Argos films, an amazing man who really knew how to live. He had an empty apartment, Art Nouveau, quite grand and he gave it to us to live in, and it became quite the place. 

What kind of life were you living?

KJ: Experimental . I was taking photos for Liberation as a kind of reportage photographer. 

Did you have success?

KJ: Well creatively yes. As the French could see I was contributing something. Not long after living there, I was in a serious car accident and spent a lot of time in hospital and two years in the Art Nouveau bed in the glossy walled apartment where friends would come in through the window. I found out that Andrei Tarkovsky had spent his final days living in the same apartment sleeping in the same bed. 

Does that have relevance to you?

KJ: Well yes, I was kind of held captive there whilst recovering from having my arm smashed to pieces. I would have two injections of morphine each day. Physically and mentally it was brutal ,moreover an expansive mind trip.  

How?

KJ: In this state I was able to visit other places that most people don’t know exist . 

How so? 

KJ: Drugs allow access to closed and secret parts of your psyche to open and function .

Can you tell me about the accident?

KJ: I have no recollection of the accident.

On regaining consciousness  I had an out of body experience.

How can you describe this?

KJ: It’s not unpleasant, a feeling of serenity, and then I felt a pleasurable warmth and then after some time saw that it was my own blood leaving. They cut my clothes off me. Strangely you are aware that there is an attractiveness attached to the procedure. 

How?

KJ: Well, the feeling of vulnerability is like drowning , you feel so vividly your own flesh and soul and matter. In this state everything is blurring in and out of focus, confused and flowing. 

A paradoxical sort of feeling? 

KJ: Yes

Ahhaaa
So do you think this event has significantly contributed to your work?

KJ: Of course, everything you see, do, feel, and are, contributes or informs your work. Who was it that said, “All work of an artist is a portrait of the artist”? We can only turn the mirror around on ourselves, they key player in the act of life. My body changed irreparably at that moment and in the adversity I grew stronger and fragile. 

What do you mean, fragile?

KJ: Well, in a good way. I love fragile people, more than loud, confident types with impenetrable self-belief. 

Do you think that you are fragile?

KJ: Yes, for a positive outcome. But isn’t that quality the very essence of being closer to something bigger?

Like what?

KJ: Oh, universal truth, liberty, interconnectedness. All learning and innovation would come from being open to receiving. 

Receiving what?

KJ .Ideas  

Can’t you see that it could possibly come from within you?

KJ: Sometimes yes, I think that we  also take  ideas out of  thin air .

Can I ask you about the human photocopies? These works are life size and they appear to be floating in a dark space, they also appear to be dead. Can you explain this work?

KJ: Not really, possibly we make things in order not to explain them.

What about these images of clothing, without the wearer?

KJ: Oh yes, I make high-resolution scans of things. 

Is there a reason that you work with machines?

KJ: It’s very practical, there is exactitude, which allows for poetry to enter sometimes. Within the clothing we can feel they had, one day a wearer, particularly the dress from Madame Gres. In the bleak mid winter we took my scanner to the museum archives a very cold environment ,which is necessary  to preserve the collection, which spans centuries. Section by section, for hours, I scanned the gown., and was aware of the eerie and phantasmagoric presence within this huge kind of municipal parking lot, lit by cold tungsten and housing long forgotten dreams: weddings, marriages, funerals and you suddenly remember how we are part of a fine thread which we hopelessly try to follow. Within all this, the human presence is still very much there. The dress never cleaned ,is full of DNA, the data of this woman who is buried somewhere, but her dress pervades. So even if I would like to not be, I am inextricably linked to the body even in its absence.

Would you say a metaphysical force motivates you?

KJ: Certainly. There is a book, “The Concept of Mind” by Gilbert Ryle, in which he says that our minds must be somehow hidden in our body like strange immaterial ghosts in the machine. 

Do you have unfulfilled dreams?

KJ: Oh yes, dreams are a prerequisite to continue. 

Can you tell me one of them?

KJ: I’d like to make a film about someone who sells her dreams, and in the process, slowly starts to disappear.

Is this an autobiographical work ? 

KJ: No, I think we all naturally disappear through living life. 

What do you mean?

KJ: Well life is constantly dissolving, you cannot recapture a moment, our bodies exist in space and time subject to the laws of physics. 

And what of the soul?

KJ: Well this seems very heavy all of a sudden  , and I feel uncomfortable speaking of my innermost feelings to a publication 

Yes , but are not these issues strictly bonded to the creative process? 

KJ: Undoubtedly so , but it should not necessitate that I share my very raison d’etre quite so liberally. 

But you do believe in the existence of the soul ? 

Long silence 

KJ: I may need to create a distraction  now ,deus ex machina, , Simone Weil , the French philosopher and Christian mystic wrote  “Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass directly to the soul.”