Interview with Liz Magor

The following interview was conducted over email in January 2009.

Jen Hutton: Like some of your past work, particularly works like Chee-to and Stores (both 2000), these new pieces1 merge food and other provisions with objects cast from gypsum. In your earlier work, you seemed to focus on hoarding or storing food as a means of survival, whereas your new work appears to address an inverse logic: bingeing and excess. To me, the selection and arrangement of objects -- what appear to be the debris of a sumptuous party -- recalls 17th century Dutch still life painting, with its focus on scenes from domestic life with a moralizing subtext. How do you account for this shift? And do you intend these new works to be allegorical, or as a 21st century vanitas?
Liz Magor: Sometimes I think of them as still life. Certainly, I often think of the relationship between the movement of life versus the stillness of death. Or what I assume is a stillness (I like the term “the quick and the dead”). But I also think of them as aesthetic arrangements of spent and discarded material existing parallel to the aesthetic arrangement of not yet consumed material. I’m not really thinking of excess. I’m not intending to be moralistic or censorious.
JH: Your artist statement that accompanies this new work refers to the cast bodies of animals as “…speak(ing) to a higher order of waste." Are you referring to their bodies as casualties in the aftermath of this party, or as their assumed position as domestic pests? Can you expand on that statement?
LM: Not casualties in a tragic sense. Waste is a better word for me, if I define waste as material that has moved from the desired to the undesired. Again, I’m not making a Suzuki statement here. I think I’m more interested in tracking the trajectory of attraction and desire, from the intensity of wanting to merge with compelling material versus the disinterest and impatience with the used or spent. Just as the shift from life to death is extremely simple and natural, but exceedingly mysterious, I see a similar profundity in the way some aspects of the material world will temporarily assume an irresistible allure. Temporary is the key word. In these aesthetic arrangements of spent material I try to find equivalence between things that have different status outside of the sculpture.
JH: Your cast objects are often the foil for other provisions, like real Chee-tos, chocolate bars, and cigarettes. It’s a paradox that runs throughout your sculptural work: how the food’s realness augments the cast object’s fakeness and vice versa. It’s interesting that the real foods you include are somewhat “fake” as well, as they temporarily fulfill a primal need with something void of nutritional value. Are your selections of edible vices a personal one, or emblematic of a culture at large? Similarly, do you perceive the forms you cast as iconic or being part of a personal vocabulary?
LM: Personal and personal. Not that it makes it special. I pay attention to my own waxes and wanes. And trust that I am entirely ordinary.
JH: Speaking for myself, I’m certain these choices are quite ordinary! Regardless of the persuasive power of chocolate and cigarettes, why do you think we are drawn to the uncanny? What is so powerful about mimetic objects?
LM: This is an amazing thing about perception. How much it determines our behaviour and beliefs while at the same time being so faulty and unreliable. Especially with regard to the ordinary. In my own looking habits, I can feel how disturbing and powerful is my drive to see something new, something different. All the time, every minute, making me look past the familiar to find the unfamiliar shape or colour. I realize that many things can be put in front of me in order to exploit or take advantage of this scopic drive. This drive makes me vulnerable. I make the works to please this drive. I produce so that I can consume. I use ordinary objects because in this stillness of sculpture they become extraordinary. They are not so subject to being overlooked. We look at them as though we have never seen them before. We look at them expecting them to “move”; to move into their simple, dismissible identities.
JH: It’s interesting how you speak of the act of looking at things, and how casting these objects gives us a heightened awareness of their existence. Inversely, Duchamp once said that the key to looking at his readymades was not to look at them at all.2 Does your work in photography operate in the same way for you, or are we merely looking at “readymades” there? In your research, do you use photography as a way of decoding these objects further (before or after casting)?
LM: There is no point contemplating the appearance of a readymade in order to come to some understanding about it. A readymade has not gone through a material transformation. It is an object that has been placed in a new category for no discernible reason other than by way of an intellectual act. It’s a language game, not influenced by looking. I love the material world and find no end of things to look at so generally I don’t use photographs to help me look at the world, or at objects, or at these sculptures. However I can find a photograph itself as being amenable to fetishization as an object.
JH: You primarily cast your forms in polymerized gypsum from real objects, a decidedly “industrial” method of fabrication. Other artists who use this method exclusively, like Allan McCollum, do so to create accurate copies that critique production (and subsequently, consumption) itself. Is that something you are also interested in critiquing?
LM: I’m thinking no. Unless you interpret my prior statements to constitute a critique.
JH: Truthfully, I think you do the opposite: employing a method that is traditionally used to make multiples to create a singular object. In a way, casting an object is more of an indexical process that captures its unique attributes, thus aiding us in looking past the familiar. But it is interesting how, parallel to the scopic drive you described, you manufacture that allure on two levels: the double whammy of this singular art object (a representation of something ordinary) slyly concealing or revealing a cache of desirable goods (also quite ordinary and exists in mass quantities). Despite the equivalence you seek between the objects in these arrangements, in the end, does one have more value?
LM: By the time the sculpture is finished, any values that the separate components may have enjoyed have been subsumed into the whole. In the end, the sculpture has the value and any opinions about whether the real or the cast is more valuable can only be personal.
JH: We are now at a time in artistic (particularly sculptural) dialogue where “deskilling” and “reskilling” are repeatedly supplanting themselves as standard modes of production. How do you feel about these two categories?
LM: I’m not sure. I do know that as I have gained facility and understanding of this method and material, I have at the same time gained an understanding of the subject I am interested in. It’s as though the ability to shape material and have many choices as to how it will be or look, has operated like an expansion in my vocabulary. So, I guess I’m for “skilling”. I also know that I can’t order these from another person who is skilled. As I work I find that my technical success operates as an ability to find things that would otherwise be hidden. I don’t “predict’ the outcome. I find it.

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1 These new works are currently on view in the solo exhibition The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities at Simon Fraser University Gallery from January 10 to February 21, 2009, and previously at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle from September 13 to December 14, 2008.
2 In an interview with the journalist Phillippe Colin in 1967, Duchamp said, “Through our eyes we get the notion that (the object) exists. But we don’t look at it the way we look at a painting. The idea of contemplation disappears completely.” Quoted in “Duchamp, By Hand Even” by Helen Molesworth, printed in Part Object, Part Sculpture, exh. cat., Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2006), 189.